I, Victoria Read online

  My journal! I was thirteen when Mamma gave me a blank book for my very first journal – very handsome it was, too, fine cream-laid paper, leather binding and marbled endpapers. We were just about to depart on the first of our tours of England (what my uncle William, who was King by then, called ‘royal progresses’ – how angry he was with Mamma for not asking his permission for them! And how mad it made him that she allowed our party to be greeted all round the country with gun salutes as though I were already Queen – ‘That infernal pop-popping!’ he would bellow. ‘It must stop!’). Mamma gave me the blank book to keep a record of every day’s happenings, as a discipline of mind and as an exercise in composition. A very useful discipline it was, too; and I have kept a journal ever since, missing only a very few days in my long life – those terrible, black days in 1861.

  Of course, that journal was intended for Mamma to read, so I could only write what I knew she would approve of. And so, in a way, I have been writing it ever since for her approval, though I never let her read it after I became Queen, and she has been dead almost these forty years. But all my life I have written for other people: for Mamma, for my children and grandchildren, and for my wider family, the people of these islands and beyond, my subjects who are also my children. And what one writes for other people is never quite, entirely, the truth. My writing has always been trimmed to suit them, cabin’d, cribb’d and confin’d so as not to offend – not even, I fear, very much to surprise!

  I am very old now, and though I do not feel an imminent dissolution, I cannot suppose God will keep me here very much longer; so I feel it would be a good time for me to tell my story. When my beloved Albert died, Sir Theodore Martin wrote a very careful Life, making sure I approved and agreed with everything, mentioning nothing which he could not praise; and when I die I suppose there will be a polite public biography of me, over which Bertie will hover with his censor’s pen in case of any indiscretion. Between the two, many truths, I dare say, will fall like the sparrow.

  Poor Bertie was so very much shocked when I proposed to write a Life of my dear John Brown! (There was so much opposition to the idea that in the end, realising how the drawing-room tabbies would chew up my faithful friend and spit him out, I decided to give it up.) If I were to write my own Life now, and tell the whole truth, it would contain many things that would never get past Bertie’s pen; or Beatrice’s for that matter – the younger generation is so much more censorious than we were. One or other of them would be sure to burn up anything I wrote that came near the truth. Well, they will have to live in the world when I am gone, and I have no wish to make things more difficult for them than they will be in any case. I will do the job for them.

  But even if I destroy it before anyone reads it, I should still like to tell my own story. It will be a large undertaking (it has been a very long life!) and perhaps I shall not see the end of it; but I shall make a start, at least. It will be something to do in those restless hours at night when I am alone in my room and cannot sleep. I was always such a good sleeper, it is quite dreadful to wake after an hour or two and know I shall not be able to get off again. And when one has been asleep, the world takes on an odd, disquieting unfamiliarity, a sort of emptiness that has no right to be there – like feeling hungry immediately after a meal. Sometimes I ring as soon as I wake, but a person who has been roused unwillingly from a satisfying slumber is not a sympathetic companion for someone who cannot enjoy the same blessing. Those warm, flushed faces and sleepy eyes bring out the worst in me, I’m afraid, and at my proximity to Judgement. I really ought to avoid the occasions of sin when I can!

  So I shall take, instead, to the pen, in those haunted hours – and whenever I have a moment through the day. I shall have the rare satisfaction of writing for my own pleasure, something which no-one else will read or criticise, something that is for me and for me alone – for the Victoria who lives inside the Queen Empress; and who, despite the stout, black-clad, old-woman exterior known to half the world’s people from a multitude of lithographed reproductions, remains a young girl – painfully shy, embattled, and very much alone.

  The inside does not match the outside – never did, but does so much less now than ever. I sit at the centre of a crowded world, the focal point of it; my every whim is consulted, my every word recorded for posterity; I am surrounded by children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, faithful servants, respectful ministers, adoring subjects; and I am lonely. When one has been denied love as a child, no amount of love given later on is ever, quite, enough. And they all left me, one by one, all those I depended upon, all those who loved me and whom I loved. Dear, dearest Beatrice sits opposite me, keeping me company and waiting to do my bidding – my companion and amanuensis – my Benjamina, as I call her – and I am truly grateful, and know how lucky I am in her. But the love and companionship of women and children can never replace that special intimacy, with the one person who is all things – father, brother, friend and lover, the other half of one’s soul. When you have once known it, nothing else will really do; and even with a glorious fat great-grandchild chuckling on one’s knee, one is still, stubbornly, alone.

  31st January 1900 – one o’clock in the morning

  I DREAMT that I was back in the old bedroom in Kensington Palace, which I shared with Mamma when I was a child. I was in my little white bed, and the reading-candle was lit, and I could hear the ticking of Papa’s silver and tortoise-shell repeater, which Mamma kept on her bedside table – the sound I went to sleep with every night of my life until I was eighteen. Lehzen was sitting on the hard chair beside my bed reading, as she always did until Mamma came up, because I was never allowed to be alone for a single instant, day or night, until I became Queen. Lehzen always sat very upright – she said that no part of a lady’s back should touch the chair she sat in – holding her book up to catch the light; but sometimes she dozed a little, and then the book would gradually subside into her lap, her long chin would sink on to her chest, and the ribbons on her cap would fall forward over her cheeks, and flutter in the little puffing breaths from her lips.

  But in my dream it was not Lehzen sitting there beside my bed. I knew it was not my good, kind governess, even though I could not turn my head to see who it was. No, it was Someone Else; and in the dream it seemed terribly important that I should make them aware that I knew they were there, that I knew who they were – that I was not, actually, asleep. But all the time I was sinking into sleep, struggle how I might, and I felt such a sense of despair and sorrow, knowing that if I slept, I would wake to a different world and a different person, and that the chance would be gone for ever.

  What did it mean, I wonder? It was so vivid I feel it must be significant – but then, I have always had such vivid dreams. When I was first married I used to tell them to Albert in the morning, as I always told him everything that happened to me; but he hated it so, I had to learn to keep my dreams to myself. Poor darling, for a man who believed in logic and order and rationality he was quite dreadfully superstitious. He was a child of the Enlightenment, and a Protestant too, and he always held that belief in signs and omens and portents was wrong – pagan and idolatrous. Yet they worried him far more than they did me. I found such things interesting, and really rather cheering. I liked the thought that there was an unseen world all around us, lapping over the edge of ours like the sea lapping over the shore. I shouldn’t have minded at all if I had seen a ghost – in fact I hoped quite hard for it when I was younger, especially when I first went to live at Windsor, where surely there ought to have been ghosts if there were to be any anywhere. (When I discussed ghosts with my dear Lord Melbourne, he said he often saw them, but had never met one whose conversation was worth a dam!) But Albert found even the hint of a portent unsettling, the more so since he could not admit to it. My poor darling had so much more ethereal a nature than mine, more sensitive to spiritual things. What little sleep he was able to get was probably so much troubled by dreams, it is no wonder he did not want to hea
r about mine. He was all of the spirit, while I was of the earth. Now I come to think of it, he probably had to live with ghosts all the time, poor man.

  Now, I wonder if the Person in my dream could have been my papa? I sometimes think that I remember him, though he died when I was eight months old. When I told Mamma once that I had a memory of him, she shook her head and said it was impossible. But I do remember being lifted up by someone and held above his head, up near the ceiling, and I remember the rushing, disturbing sensation of soaring upwards and dangling helpless, combined with the feeling of being absolutely safe. There was something strangely delicious about the contrast between my precarious position and the strong, male hands holding me so securely. As long as he held me, I knew nothing bad could ever happen to me.

  I remember it so vividly that I don’t think it can have been a dream. I am sure it must have been my father. I can’t remember his face (though I’ve seen portraits of him, of course) but I have thought about him, I believe, every day of my life. When I was a child I used to lie in bed waiting to fall asleep, and listen to the light, swift tick of his repeater, and think how it sounded like hurrying feet. Oh, how he hurried away from me, my papa! – gone before I could even learn his face; yet the spirit of him has been always, always with me. How different my life would have been if he had not died – abandoning me, who was so little and helpless and needed his protection so much! I felt the lack of a father every day of my childhood, and things that happened in those years, which he would have prevented, have moulded me (or marred me, perhaps) in ways that I still feel and cannot control, even here at the far end of my life. My character was altered by those years in which I had to struggle to stand alone, and I have spent the rest of my life searching for the strong arm and wise heart of which I was deprived so very young.

  It is very certain that my fate would have been different if Papa had not died when he did. For one thing, it is most likely that he and Mamma would have gone on to have more children, the son that she hoped for and had promised him. If they had given me a brother, I should not have become Queen of England – and how would I have liked that, I wonder? How wonderful it would have been to have lived out of the spotlight’s glare, without this constant burden of cares and the mountain of work which never gets any smaller no matter how long and hard one ‘pegs away’ at it. To have lived retired, far away from the prying eyes and critical tongues; to have spent my life as a private person, an ordinary wife and mother – ah, to have been Albert’s wife and not Queen, how delicious that would have been!

  Well, yes. But as I am to tell the truth in this account, and there is to be no-one but Victoria to read it, I may as well say that the thought of not being Queen fills me with horror! How could I ever have endured to be someone else’s subject, to come second – or worse – instead of first in everything? And how could I ever have trusted anyone else to do the job properly? (As it is, the idea of leaving my kingdom to Bertie fills me with foreboding.) And as to Albert, if we had married at all (which is unlikely, for if Papa had lived he would have chosen my husband for me, and I doubt if his choice would have been the same as Mamma’s) my darling would have carried me off to Germany to live, and there he would have been master in his own house, there is no doubt about that. His will was always to rule, my own dear, beloved domestic tyrant! I adored him, and it pleased me to yield to him, but it is a very different thing to be obliged to yield rather than to choose to. If I had not had the unassailable power of my sovereignty to hold up against him, I think it would have gone ill with me. As it was we had mighty quarrels, but if I had really been nothing but his kleines Frauchen he would have won them all; for he had intellect, while I had only temper, and as his wife in his house in his land, I would have had no right to be heard. No, Victoria would not have had much of her own way – and I suspect, too, that Albert would not have been half so patient with her many shortcomings, as he was obliged to be with those of the Queen of England.

  No, no, I think it is a very good thing indeed that I became Queen. However heavy the burden – and it is heavy, no-one can know how much so – I would not wish to change that fact, at least. God knew what He was doing; I only wish there could have been some other way to do it. One should not question God’s will – so Albert always told me – but there is that in me which always will question things, and struggle against fate, and rail at it. Well, perhaps that is no bad trait in a Queen. When I am dead, that will be time enough to ‘lie still and slumber’. And if my darling had had a little more of my stubbornness, perhaps he might have been here still, and we could have been old together, as he promised me we should. I believe one should always keep promises, however small or lightly made. One should always keep one’s word.

  1st February 1900

  TO RESUME: that I became Queen at all takes a little explaining from the historical point of view, for Papa was only the fourth son of King George III, and in his youth he could not possibly have thought a child of his could ever succeed to the Throne. He went into the Army, as younger sons do, and made his career there. (I have always liked to boast that I am a soldier’s daughter, and I think our brave Men have always appreciated my special interest in and understanding of them.) Papa was a fine soldier, brave and honourable, and he served with distinction, particularly in the West Indies and Canada. He brought to his commands a painstaking attention to detail and the same unbending discipline that he applied to his own behaviour. He detested slovenliness, unpunctuality, drunkenness, untruthfulness, and punished them severely – which did not, of course, make him popular with the culprits. Also his openly expressed disapproval of gambling, drinking and fornication set his own family against him – at least, the male half – and sadly he was much hated by his brothers and a large part of society. The gentle side of his character I think he revealed only to women: with them he could be charming, witty, attentive, affectionate, a great talker and a gifted mimic. Mrs Fitzherbert (my uncle the Regent’s unofficial wife) was Papa’s devoted friend, and Princess Charlotte called him her ‘favourite and beloved uncle’; and since no-one has ever denied they were both intelligent women, I think their opinion may be trusted.

  I am glad to have inherited some of his qualities: he loved music, and had a band of wind instruments which he took everywhere with him; he loved horses, and detested cruelty to them, or indeed to any animal; he was utterly truthful, and scorned ever to tell a lie; he loved order, and never shrank from hard work; and he was faithful and loyal to those he loved. In the latter context I have now to mention Madame de St Laurent – Julie – a French lady whom Papa met in Gibraltar in 1790, and took with him when he was sent to Canada. Mamma always thought I did not know about Madame Julie. She never spoke of her to me, partly from propriety, but mostly, I think, because she loved Papa so much and she thought I might disapprove and cease to revere his memory if I knew he had had a mistress. But I knew, of course I did! Servants’ talk, I suppose – and dear Lord Melbourne told me all the details of Papa’s history when I first became Queen. Really, I don’t think Madame Julie was anything to be ashamed of. She was charming and witty and honest, and she and Papa lived together in love and trust, in all climates and all adversities, for twenty-seven years. If she had been a princess, or if he had not been a prince, I am quite sure they would have been married: but then, of course, I would not have been born, for Madame never had a child.

  Papa’s real failing was his extravagance. He liked to live in royal style, but his pension from Parliament was not sufficient for his tastes, and instead of curtailing his spending, he borrowed money and ran up debts. He was no gamester, and he ate and drank sparingly, but he loved fine art and furniture and high-bred horses, and he collected books. Furthermore, he had a particular love of architecture, and liked nothing better than to be building or refurbishing houses. It pains me to have to admit it, but he had no scruples at all about ordering things he had no means of paying for, and his debts mounted and followed him wherever he went. Then in 1803 disaster ov
ertook him. He was sent to Gibraltar to restore order to the garrison, which had got out of hand; and this he did with such severity that there was almost a mutiny. One man was flogged to death, another severely crippled by the lash, and such was the outcry against him that he was removed from command and told he would be given no more active duty.

  So Papa was forced to return to England, and was left on a reduced income with nothing to do but spend money (he bought a country house in Ealing, and extensively altered it, besides decorating and furnishing it and filling the stables), evade his creditors, and try to work out ingenious schemes for borrowing enough money to clear his debts and set himself up comfortably. But by 1816, without either career or prospects, he had got so far into debt the situation was hopeless, and his only resort seemed to be to take Madame Julie and go into exile, to live in Brussels (where living was cheap) until a committee of trustees, appointed by his creditors to handle his income and make him an allowance, had paid off his debts by instalments. This he expected to take years; he was forty-eight years old, and for this restless, energetic, ingenious prince it must have seemed like a sentence of doom.

  Papa left England in August 1816; but before he departed he was able to rejoice at the marriage of his beloved niece, Princess Charlotte of Wales, to the handsome Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, with whom she had been in love for two years. She had met him in London at the peace festivities in 1814, which he had attended as a member of the suite of the Tsar of Russia; but Charlotte’s father, the Prince Regent, had opposed the match (he called Leopold a ‘penniless princeling’ and a ‘dam’d counter-jumper’, amongst other things) and had forbidden them any correspondence. Papa, keenly interested in Princess Charlotte’s happiness, had acted as go-between for the lovers and passed their letters to each other, and they now regarded him with profound gratitude as the chief promoter of the marriage.