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Summary
Summary
"[A] shimmering and rather wonderful biography." -- The Guardian
When Queen Victoria died in 1901, she had ruled for nearly sixty-four years. She was the mother of nine and grandmother of forty-two and the matriarch of royal Europe through her children's marriages. To many, Queen Victoria is a ruler shrouded in myth and mystique, an aging, stiff widow paraded as the figurehead to an all-male imperial enterprise. But in truth, Britain's longest-reigning monarch was one of the most passionate, expressive, humorous, and unconventional women who ever lived, and the story of her life continues to fascinate.
A. N. Wilson's exhaustively researched and definitive biography includes a wealth of new material from previously unseen sources to show us Queen Victoria as she's never been seen before. Wilson explores the curious set of circumstances that led to Victoria's coronation, her strange and isolated childhood, her passionate marriage to Prince Albert and his pivotal influence even after death, and her widowhood and subsequent intimate friendship with her Highland servant John Brown, all set against the backdrop of this momentous epoch in Britain's history--and the world's.
Born at the very moment of the expansion of British political and commercial power across the globe, Victoria went on to chart a unique course for her country even as she became the matriarch of nearly every great dynasty of Europe. Her destiny was thus interwoven with those of millions of people--not just in Europe but in the ever-expanding empire that Britain was becoming throughout the nineteenth century. The famed queen had a face that adorned postage stamps, banners, statues, and busts all over the known world.
Wilson's Victoria is a towering achievement, a masterpiece of biography by a writer at the height of his powers.
Author Notes
A. N. Wilson is the author of biographies on Jesus, Milton, Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis, and Dante. His acclaimed histories The Victorians and God's Funeral have made him an authority on Victorian-era Great Britain. A contributor to a number of British newspapers, he lives in London.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Wilson (The Elizabethans) chronicles the life of Victoria, England's longest-reigning monarch, in all its personal and political complexities. The product of a race to produce an heir after the premature death of Princess Charlotte, the future King George IV's only heir, in 1817, Victoria grows up caught between her German mother's influence and that of the British royal family. Ascending the throne at 18 and "at the mercy of the major political interest groups,"¿ her wedding to Prince Albert follows, with their progeny marrying into positions of conflicting interest across Europe. Wilson exhibits a knack for description, his subject in turns "instinctively indiscreet,"¿ "an impenitent imperialist,"¿ and most notably, "a difficult woman to like, but an easy woman to love"¿-Victoria referred to her eldest daughter's pregnancy as "horrid news,"¿ and told her son upon his sister's death, "The good are always taken and the bad remain."¿ Wilson captures the quirks of Victoria's various prime ministers and the "drunken, loud-mouthed Highlander"¿ John Brown, the queen's "constant companion"¿ and object of endless scandalous conjecture. Victorian era politics receive meticulous attention bordering on tedium, including suffrage for a growing middle class; increasing public questions about the utility of monarchy; and the trials of colonialism in India, Ireland, and South Africa. More than a Victoria biography, Wilson skillfully weaves the vast narrative of the Victorian landscape, despite being laden with bureaucratic minutiae. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It's not that the longest-reigning monarch in British history has not been written about before in fact, Queen Victoria has been written about abundantly it's just that few if any previous biographers have viewed her as incisively and absorbingly as Wilson does in his lengthy but smoothly flowing treatment of the queen's long life. The considerable detail he brings to his greatly balanced portrait not only strengthens his estimation of the significance of the queen in British governmental history but also successfully conveys for the general reader all the nuances of character that Wilson so carefully shares. Certain important points arise, including the author's agreement with previous biographers that the queen was desolated by the premature death of her husband, Prince Albert. But he also avers, in contrast to many who have written before him, that despite her mental upset without the prince consort's steady hand, she never lost interest in the affairs of state. Wilson sees Victoria as a woman who battled demons and emerged from her various darknesses victorious as a functioning woman and monarch. As for the prince consort, a controversial figure, he maintains that Albert was the only member of the Royal Family in recent history, or perhaps ever, who deserves the name of genius. --Hooper, Brad Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN 1819, when the future Queen Victoria was born, few observers could have predicted that she would become the subject of several hundred biographies. A. N. Wilson's addition to this library, "Victoria: A life," is a story of success against what looked at first like overwhelming odds. His Cinderella-like heroine grew up fatherless, a poor relation surrounded by warring court factions. Still a teenager when the death of successive relatives left her to inherit her uncle's throne, Victoria was faced with a series of fragile coalition governments, labor unrest at home, a famine in Ireland, revolutions on the other side of the Channel, a spectacularly mismanaged war in the Crimea - and that's just in the first two decades. "A be-er more than a do-er," Wilson's Victoria sometimes dwindles to a Zelig-like witness to one world-historical event after another, a woman whose greatest asset was sheer longevity. The first queen to give birth under anesthetic was as unscathed by nine childbirths as she was by eight assassination attempts. Born before railways, she lived to see automobiles. Prime minister after prime minister predeceased her, as did some of her children. The same age as her husband, she survived him by 40 years and, in Wilson's encyclopedic telling, more than 300 pages. That didn't stop Prince Albert from leaving a lasting mark on Victoria and, through her, on British society. In retrospect, he looks more Victorian than Victoria. She enjoyed late-night dancing; he kept early hours. Attacked in the press as a German interloper, Albert nonetheless embodied what Margaret Thatcher would later call "Victorian values": earnestness, hard work and respect for the practical industrial applications of scientific progress. Albert's death in 1861 sent Victoria into a decade of mourning. She withdrew from public appearances, barricading herself behind widowed ladies-in-waiting and choosing to work remotely (as we'd say today) from her country retreats in Scotland and the Isle of Wight. The press attacked her refusal to perform a sovereign's duties while continuing to collect taxpayer support for herself and her children. Only after 1874, when her favorite, Disraeli, became prime minister for a second time, did Victoria gain a political second wind, emerging from seclusion to woo the newly enfranchised lower-middle class to his Tory party. A novelist with a shrewd eye for symbolism, Disraeli came up with the idea of naming her Empress of India, creating a figurehead to represent Britain's growing commercial and military reach. His public relations triumph was marred only later, when Victoria courted scandal by importing a handsome young Indian waiter to teach her Hindustani and cook her curry. Sometimes gracefully, sometimes begrudgingly, Victoria presided over the emergence of a modern parliamentary democracy. As the role of the Crown became more and more ceremonial, the demographics of the electorate were changing too. After the 1867 reform act doubled the population that was eligible to vote, politicians had "at least to give the impression that they cared about public opinion" - more precisely male public opinion, since a nation ruled by a woman continued to bar her female subjects from voting. Victoria's "aversion for the so-called and most erroneous 'Rights of Women'" caused her to recoil from the thought of women studying medicine, not to mention "the awful idea of allowing young girls and young men to enter the dissecting room together." Her own personal physicians were never allowed to see her naked, or even to touch her with a stethoscope. Only after her death did her doctor first notice that she'd been suffering for years from a ventral hernia and a prolapse of the uterus. Victoria knew how paradoxical it was for a queen to preach feminine submission. She declared herself "convinced that we women, if we are to be good women, feminine and amiable, and domestic, are not fitted to reign." The besotted wife and inconsolable widow acknowledged that "all marriage is such a lottery - the happiness is always an exchange - though it may be a very happy one - still the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband's slave. That always sticks in my throat." In 1858 she wrote to her pregnant daughter Vicky: "What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, my dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments." Wilson's portrait of this contradictory personality revels in such paradoxes. We take "Victorian" to mean prudish, but Victoria herself flaunted her closeness to men, whether prime ministers or servants. Long before the Indian waiter, a Highland gillie named John Brown was rumored to be suspiciously close to the queen. While acknowledging that no king's love life would have aroused as much speculation, Wilson leaves readers to draw their own conclusions about Victoria's request to be buried wearing Brown's mother's wedding ring. Just as paradoxically, at a time when the U.K. Independence Party is fanning Euroskepticism along with xenophobia, it's refreshing to be reminded that Victoria's German mother needed a phonetic cheat-sheet in order to pronounce the English words at her own wedding. Determined for a potential heir to be born in England - was Victoria the first anchor baby? - her parents nonetheless waited to head there until the due date was a month away. Victoria's voluminous correspondence continued to tack back and forth between her two languages: of her hemophiliac son, for example, she wrote that "Er wird für die Zukunft mein first object in life sein." In portraying their queen as prudent, levelheaded, practical and rich, the Victorians defined their own national character. Yet Wilson diagnoses Victoria's tightfistedness not as a British virtue but, on the contrary, as a sign of "classic immigrant insecurity." ONE MORE FORAY into a well-thumbed archive inevitably risks diminishing returns. In the absence of some new trove of documents, Wilson's narrative holds few factual surprises. Rather, its novelty lies in psychological analysis, making his a Victoria for the age of reality TV. A celebrity who craves a private life but also courts popularity through new media technologies, Wilson's heroine is above all a writer. By one historian's calculation, her letters and diaries add up to 60 million words. Her autobiographical "Leaves From the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands," published in 1868, sold 100,000 copies in the first year. Although the book was edited by her private secretary, Victoria (unlike some of her descendants) needed no ghostwriter, oversharing the details of her family life as strategically as any of today's bloggers. like the novels of Victoria's time, which Henry James dismissed as "loose, baggy monsters," Wilson's ream of paper occasionally sags under the weight of capsule biographies of every politician the queen encountered, and slapdash asides like his reference to the "air of camp which can be wrongly mistaken for homosexuality." (As opposed to rightly mistaken?) Wilson's narrative channels the structure of a Victorian novel as well, cutting abruptly between public and private subplots. "During Vicky's first year in Prussia, in which she became pregnant, her native land underwent a change of Government," he writes. "While these troubling events unfolded in Asia, the Queen and the Prince Consort, young as they were, witnessed the ending of their elder children's childhood." To survey the political history of the world's most powerful empire while also doing justice to the inner life of a short, stout mother and grandmother is a tall order. That Wilson succeeds testifies to an ability he shares with Victorian writers like Dickens and George Eliot: to make readers sympathize with the heroine despite, or even because of, her very human foibles. LEAH PRICE teaches English at Harvard. Her most recent book is "How to Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain."
Guardian Review
Towards the end of this subtle, thoughtful biography of Queen Victoria AN Wilson presents his defining argument. Victoria, he suggests, was an artist. He isn't talking here about her rather good watercolours, but something more profound. The queen, he claims, lived an entirely inward life, filled with characters and narratives of her own making: saintly Albert, bad Bertie, twinkly Disraeli and the wicked, wicked Boers. Just like that other epic storyteller Marcel Proust, Victoria stayed home (although, unlike the Frenchman, she never allowed herself to lie in bed) and conjured up a world that unfurled over the decades as larger-than-life characters bloomed, hovered and faded, leaving behind their own particular perfume. It is the queen's inwardness, Wilson says, which makes her such an excellent subject for a biographer. There's no requirement to go puffing after her on endless banal state visits, bridge openings, or troopings the colour - because she didn't do them, or at least not much. Anyway, Wilson covered all that in The Victorians, his bestseller of 10 years ago that dealt with the 19th-century's outerworld of iron, brick and cotton bales. In this new book he prefers to stay indoors with Victoria in one of her freezing residences as she pours out millions of words into her daily journal and letters, sifting external events through what Wilson calls "the rich comedy" of her consciousness. Like any artist whose vision was both protean - she was perfectly capable of believing six contradictory things before breakfast - and particular, Victoria has been a magnet for biographical rereadings in the 11 decades since her death. The best include Lytton Strachey's surprisingly tender Queen Victoria of 1921 and Elizabeth Longford's still highly readable Victoria RI of 1964. Then, in the 1990s, academic scholars got hold of the queen and the result was a poststructuralist Victoria - all fragments, gaps and jagged edges. Now, 20 years since that last serious flurry of biographical interest, Wilson picks up the pieces and puts the jigsaw back together again, creating in the process a Victoria for our own times. And what those times require, it turns out, is a passionate pan-Europeanist. It has long been a given of Victorian scholarship that Prince Albert spent his short, strenuous life trying to graft German liberalism on to the British constitution to create a template of moderate monarchism that could withstand the challenge of revolution and nationalism alike. His grand idea was to export this model back to Protestant Europe as a gift-with-purchase whenever someone married one of his and Victoria's nine-strong nursery tribe. By this means every Duchy, Palatinate and hyphenated micro-kingdom would be given the tools it needed to stay safe in an uncertain world. They would also, in time, join up to form a central European hub that was rock-solid liberal. The assumption has always been that by the time of Albert's early death in 1861 this project had stalled under pressures of working class democracy at home and Prussian militarism abroad. Wilson, though, has been back to the archives in Coburg and reconnected with the tap-root of Victoria and Albert's plan for a united, moderate Germany. He shows convincingly that, despite being poleaxed by grief at losing her "Angel", Victoria remained passionately engaged in what might be described as "the Coburg project". When the Schleswig-Holstein crisis blew up in the early 1860s she understood, in a way that her prime minister, Palmerston, did not, that buried in this parochial squabble between Prussia and Denmark were the first signs of the Bismarckian aggression that would eventually rip Europe apart. It was only thanks to the wise queen, suggests Wilson, that Britain did not blunder into a war with Germany at this point, 50 years before it was capable of winning. Wilson pays proper attention to the Hanoverian side of Victoria's inheritance too. She was the granddaughter of King George III, which meant that whenever she behaved oddly courtiers began to wonder if she might be mad. Wilson believes that there were times, especially in the late 1860s, when Victoria was properly "out of her mind". Her letters to Gladstone, sometimes scrawled in blue crayon and barely stretching to two lines, read like dispatches from an interior world to which the drawbridge has been pulled temporarily shut. In the end, though, Wilson doesn't put the queen's strange episodes down to porphyria, the heritable disease that is assumed to have caused her grandfather to clatter off into his own imaginary kingdom. Instead, he blames grief, the menopause and too much whisky: Victoria picked up the tippling habit from John Brown and never shook it off. And as to whether or not she actually slept with the man in the tartan skirt, Wilson thinks it doesn't really matter, although it's pretty clear he thinks she did. What interests him, rather, is the way that "Mrs Brown's" spectacular bad behaviour makes her the obvious, if unlikely, role model for her scoundrel heir, the hapless Bertie. Mother and son both did exactly as they damn well pleased, embarrassing their families and imperilling the monarchy as they acted on the prompts of their own emotional and erotic inner worlds. This makes Victoria's constant criticism of Bertie as well as his siblings - arrogant Affie, wild Louise, selfish Leopold - seem hypocritical. But, Wilson insists, for Victoria, the political always remained intensely personal. She was critiquing her children not so much as real people but as characters in an imaginary dynastic drama, as vivid to her as the Guermantes were to Proust. As Prussia began to dominate Germany, the ageing queen continued to fret over the marriages of her grandchildren - all those oyster-eyed Victorias, Alices, Arthurs and Alfreds - who were to be sent out in a second wave to the four corners of Europe, carrying their fateful cargo of haemophilia, porphyria and sound constitutional principles. Of course, anyone who gathered in the streets in 1897 to wave a flag as the queen passed by on her way to celebrate her diamond jubilee with a Te Deum on the steps of St Paul's was probably not thinking much about the Coburg project. Decades earlier she had thrown in her lot with Disraeli, that other great storymaker, who had turned her into the Empress of India, a suitably gaudy figurehead for the new age of popular, jingoistic Toryism. All the same, Wilson suggests in this shimmering and rather wonderful biography, as the elderly queen smiled and inclined her head to the ecstatic crowd, it was still possible to discern in that dumpling form traces of all the earlier versions of herself still buried deep inside. She had become nothing less than a symbol of Time itself, a reminder of the good intentions of the past and a warning about what might happen once she was gone and, with her, the dream of a united Europe. To order Victoria: A Life for pounds 18.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Kathryn Hughes The assumption has always been that by the time of [Albert]'s early death in 1861 this project had stalled under pressures of working class democracy at home and Prussian militarism abroad. [Wilson], though, has been back to the archives in Coburg and reconnected with the tap-root of Victoria and Albert's plan for a united, moderate Germany. He shows convincingly that, despite being poleaxed by grief at losing her "Angel", Victoria remained passionately engaged in what might be described as "the Coburg project". When the Schleswig-Holstein crisis blew up in the early 1860s she understood, in a way that her prime minister, Palmerston, did not, that buried in this parochial squabble between Prussia and Denmark were the first signs of the Bismarckian aggression that would eventually rip Europe apart. It was only thanks to the wise queen, suggests Wilson, that Britain did not blunder into a war with Germany at this point, 50 years before it was capable of winning. In the end, though, Wilson doesn't put the queen's strange episodes down to porphyria, the heritable disease that is assumed to have caused her grandfather to clatter off into his own imaginary kingdom. Instead, he blames grief, the menopause and too much whisky: Victoria picked up the tippling habit from John Brown and never shook it off. And as to whether or not she actually slept with the man in the tartan skirt, Wilson thinks it doesn't really matter, although it's pretty clear he thinks she did. What interests him, rather, is the way that "Mrs Brown's" spectacular bad behaviour makes her the obvious, if unlikely, role model for her scoundrel heir, the hapless [Bertie]. Mother and son both did exactly as they damn well pleased, embarrassing their families and imperilling the monarchy as they acted on the prompts of their own emotional and erotic inner worlds. - Kathryn Hughes.
Kirkus Review
A shimmering portrait of a tempestuous monarch. British novelist and biographer Wilson (The Potter's Hand, 2012, etc.) has written on a wide variety of major historical figures, from John Milton to Leo Tolstoy to C.S Lewis to Adolph Hitler. Here, he lends a lively expertise to his portrayal of the forthright, formidable, still-enigmatic sovereign. In 1837, 18-year-old Victoria, a rather "ignorant little child," acceded to the throne, delighted to be independent of her overbearing mother but hardly schooled in political and constitutional matters. Wilson gradually reveals the unfolding of her true self apart from her marriage to the beloved Albert, prince consort. The author examines her platonic yet significant relationships with succeeding prime ministers and her mysterious Scottish manservant, John Brown. Aside from didactic correspondence from her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, Victoria was first taught about the affairs of a head of state by Lord Melbourne, who was also her first crush, until her marriage to Albert of Coburg, her German-speaking cousin whose solid Protestant intellectual ideals helped "establish monarchy as a workable modern political institution" in England. Their family of nine children, all of whom survived childhood and were used to cement familial ties to the neighboring monarchies, created a bulwark against the forces of revolution overtaking Europe. Yet Wilson also notes how the marriage caused Victoria to surrender "her own freedom and personality." She was not a happy mother, always scolding her children, and she was immensely volatile, especially after Albert's death, when she largely retired from court to her estates in Scotland or the Isle of Wight. In the company of Brown, she resisted her official public duties, preferring instead to write in her journals. During her long reign, Victoria had come to embody the experience of an entire age, overseeing great reform and the strengthening of ties between India and the British Empire. A robust, immensely entertaining portrait from a master biographer. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Wilson (The Elizabethans) is convinced of the greatness of Queen Victoria (1819-1901), and his admiration for the long-reigning female monarch is evident in this comprehensive, highly accessible work. Although rooted in the complex political and international details of the era, the biography's focus remains squarely on Victoria, who, Wilson argues is fascinating because of her intricate inner life. Victoria escaped a melancholy and solitary childhood by writing and journaling, a practice she continued throughout her life and some of which she had the temerity to publish. Hence Wilson asserts she was, in certain ways, a modern royal who wanted the public to "feel her pain," most notably after the passing of her beloved consort Albert. Readers will revel in the details of her relationships with her children, grandchildren, private secretaries, successive prime ministers, and servants John Brown and Abdul Karim. While the author admits that the precise nature of her affairs, especially that with Brown, remain uncertain, he concludes that Victoria needed people who were solely special to her. Wilson is most successful in identifying and highlighting the monarch's paradoxes: the contrasts between the "little woman in a bonnet" and the queen who proudly controlled the British empire. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers fascinated by the lives of notable individuals and British royalty. [See Prepub Alert, 6/2/14.]-Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2014 A.N. Wilson Part One 1 Authors One gusty April day in 1838, Thomas Carlyle was walking in Green Park, near Buckingham Palace in London. Forty-two years old, the Scotsman had been living in the English capital for a little over three years, and he had lately soared to literary fame. His study of The French Revolution had been published in the previous year - the year in which Victoria was crowned the Queen of England - and the popularity of the two events were not disconnected. Carlyle had made what his first biographer, Froude, called a "vast phantasmagoria"[1] culminating in the French people getting rid of their monarchy. The English were not minded, in any very organized sense, to do the same, but Victoria became Queen in hungry times. The monarchy had not been popular in the first decades of the nineteenth century. J.A.Froude noted that "the hungry and injured millions will rise up and bring to justice their guilty rulers, themselves little better than those whom they throw down"[2]. Britain in those days was very far from being a democracy. It was governed by an oligarchy of aristocratic, landowning families. Its stability, as a state depended upon the functioning of the Law, the workings of two Houses of Parliament, the efficiency of the army and navy, the balance of trade. Parliament was representative, not democratic. That is, the members of the Commons were not elected by the People, but by a small number of men of property. In the reign previous to Victoria's, that of her uncle William IV, the Reform Bill of 1832 had done a little to extend the franchise, and to abolish the more grotesque of the electoral anomalies - the so-called Rotten Boroughs, in which there were only a handful of electors. But the members of the Commons were not elected by more than a tiny handful of those whom they represented. Checking and approving the deliberations of the Commons was the function of the Upper House, the Lords, some hundred or so rich men who owned most of the land, and exercised most of the power, in Britain. There had, as yet, been no French-style Revolution to overthrow these arrangements. And it was to be the care and concern of the British Governing classes to make sure that no such revolution occurred. The previous old King, William IV, having had a dissolute life, and fathered ten children out of wedlock, died legitimately married and reconciled to God, murmuring the words, "The Church, the Church". The twin institutions, of the Church of England, and the Monarchy, clearly played a vital role in the delicate balance of the British Constitution. The Victorians liked to tell one another that the monarch was simply a figurehead, kept in place by the Whig landowners, a figure who signed state papers and gave the nod to the deliberations of the House of Lords. This was not really the case. The monarch still occupied a position of real power in Britain, and if that power were to be exercised recklessly, or if the monarchy were hated by a hungry populace, there was no knowing what anarchy would ensue. The monarch depended upon the peerage; the peerage depended upon economic prosperity, and upon the rising commercial classes who could provide it; the shared powers of Trade, Land, the Law and the Church were all delicately, and not always obviously, interwoven in the destinies of that young woman glimpsed in the park by the historian. It was essential for her future that the other institutions should continue to support her; it was essential for all of them, that she should maintain the status quo, that she should not fail. Victoria's grandfather, King George III, a monarch who was politically active, and who had played a pivotal role in the shaping of British political history, was blind for the last ten years of his life, and at sporadic intervals in the last twenty years of his long reign (1760-1820) he had been raving mad. The fear that the royal madness was hereditary was ever-present in the British governing class, and the young Queen's ministers watched every one of her tantrums, each emotional display, every instance of irrational behaviour, with anxiety. George III's son, who ruled as Regent during the times of blindness and madness, had been extremely unpopular, not least because of the sordid and cruel way in which he had divorced his queen, Caroline of Brunswick. By the time he was succeeded by his brother the Duke of Clarence (William IV) in 1830, it had looked very much as if the supply of possible heirs to the throne had all but dwindled. It was mere luck that William had not, in turn, been succeeded by his extremely unpopular brother Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, a scar-faced brute who was widely believed to have murdered his valet and married a woman who had killed her previous two husbands, and whose extreme Toryism made him hated by the masses[3]. Had the young Victoria not existed, Ernest would have been the King of England, and Britain might well have made a second decision to become a Republic. Carlyle himself, the historian who saw Victoria in her carriage on that April day, was by way of being a republican, certainly one deeply read in the era of the first Republic in the seventeenth century, and a hero-worshipping biographer of Oliver Cromwell. Carlyle was a sardonic and amusing man, whose stock in trade was a refusal to be impressed - by the English, who to his Scottish soul were ever alien, by the Establishment, which he found laughable, by the class hierarchy, very near the bottom of which he had been born. His hero was the German poet Goethe, and Carlyle sought, in the confused state of modern England, with its great social injustices, its teeming poor, its disease-ridden industrial cities, its Philistinism, some means of returning, with that poet, a positive attitude, to life, an Everlasting Yea. Carlyle on that breezy April day, was passed by a carriage: the Queen, taking, as he said in his Scottish way, "her bit departure for Windsor. I had seen her another day at Hyde Park Corner, coming in from the daily ride. She is decidedly a pretty-looking little creature: health, clearness, graceful timidity, looking out from her young face....One could not help some interest in her, situated as mortal seldom was..."[4] Carlyle, who went on to write one of the most magisterial royal biographies in the literature of the world - the Life of Frederick the Great - was peculiarly well-placed to see the strangeness of Victoria's position as she swept past him in the carriage. (They would not meet until years later, when, both widowed and old, they exchanged small talk at the Deanery of Westminster Abbey). She was indeed situated as mortal seldom was. This makes her story of abiding fascination. Her father and mother might so easily not have had a child at all. Once born, Victoria's often solitary childhood was the strangest of preparations for what she was to become: not merely the mother of nine and the grandmother of forty-two children, but the matriarch of Royal Europe. She was either the actual ancestor of, or she was connected by marriage to, nearly all the great dynasties of Europe, and in almost each of those crowned or coroneted figureheads, there was bound up a political story. Her destiny was thus interwoven with that of millions of peoples - not just in Europe, but in the ever-expanding Empire which Britain was becoming throughout the nineteenth century. One day to be named the Empress of India, the "pretty-looking little creature" had a face which would adorn postage-stamps, banners, statues and busts all over the known world. And this came about, as the Germanophile Thomas Carlyle would have been the first to recognize, because of the combination of two peculiar factors: first, that Victoria was born at the very moment of the expansion of British political and commercial power throughout the world; and secondly that she was born from that stock of (nearly all German) families who tended to supply the crowned heads for the monarchies of the post-Napoleonic world. The moment in the park, when two stars in the Victorian galaxy passed one another, is one of those little conjunctions which happen in capital cities. This was the era when Britain rose, for a few decades, to be supremely the most powerful nation on earth: richer and more powerful than any of its European rivals, even than Russia. Thereafter, another power would emerge, formed from the coalescence of the German states, the development of German heavy industry, the building up of German military and naval power. Carlyle and Queen Victoria, like so many figures who shape a new and vibrant civilization, were outsiders, who had seemingly come from nowhere. One of the things which marked them out was an acute consciousness of Germany, and its importance in the scheme of things. Mr Casaubon, the inadequate scholar married to the heroine of George Eliot's Middlemarch, wrote worthlessly because he had not absorbed developments in German scholarship, and this was a period when it was said that only three of the dons at Oxford could so much as speak German. (It was said that the whole story if religion in the nineteenth century would have been different if the future Cardinal Newman had known German). Yet the story of Germany, and the story of Britain, and their tragic failure to understand one another, lay at the heart of nineteenth century history, being destined to explode on the battlefields of the First World War. There was something else about the young Queen which, had he known it, would have made Carlyle - historian, journalist, biographer - all the more interested in her. Whether or not Benjamin Disraeli, novelist and Prime Minister, really buttered up his Queen by using the phrase, "we authors,Ma'am"[5], it would not have been flattery alone. Disraeli's words are always quoted as a joke, but she really was an author. Disraeli's alleged flannel referred to her published work, Leaves from the Journal of my Life in the Highlands, published in 1868. But this publication and its sequel were but a tiny fragment of her pen's outpouring. Her often solitary childhood made it natural for her to express her feelings in writing. There was often no one but herself to talk to. She kept journals from infancy to old age. She was one of the most prolific letter-writers of the nineteenth century, that letter-writing age, and, whether she was conducting State business, or emoting about family crises, or worrying about her health, or noting the passing season, it was her custom to put her feelings and thoughts into writing. She must have written literally millions of letters. Her diaries were those of a compulsive recorder, and she sometimes would write as many as 2,500 words of her journal in one day. When she died, she left many volumes of Journals, an historical record of political events, conversations, impressions, of the entire cast-list of nineteenth century public life. There was scarcely a Head of State, or a Bishop, or an aristocrat, or a famous writer or composer or painter whom she had not either met (reclusive as she was for much of the time) or of whom she had not formed some impression. Her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, took it upon herself to decide that the journals were unsuitable for public perusal, and she destroyed nearly all of them. Princess Beatrice was not alone in wishing to obliterate her mother's writings. Victoria's eldest son, King Edward VII, left instructions in his will that all his private and personal correspondence, especially those letters between himself and his wife, and himself and his mother, should be destroyed. He also gathered up as much as possible of Queen Victoria's extensive correspondence with Disraeli and consigned that to oblivion. The compulsion felt by Victoria's children to expunge her writings from our view leads immediately to the thought that she must have had something to hide. The reader of any modern biography of Queen Victoria is instinctively hopeful that some of the indiscretions, so diligently veiled by Princess Beatrice, can be finally unmasked. Here a word of caution must be sounded. Queen Victoria was an instinctively indiscreet person. Much as she would have hated our contemporary habits of prurience, and dismissive as she would have been of a modern writer picking over the details of her private life, she was nevertheless almost compulsive in her need to share that private life with a wider public. To this extent, though she was not an "author" in the sense that Disraeli might have half-mockingly implied; she was much more like Dickens and Ruskin and Proust than she was like the majority of royal personages who have a quite simple desire for privacy. Victoria was much more complex. On the one hand, she considered any intrusion into the Royal Family by the press to be an abominable impertinence. On the other hand, she was only prevented with the greatest difficulty by courtiers and by her children, from publishing her version of her relationship with her Highland servant John Brown. In our lifetime, the whole convention of discretion about the lives of royal personages has been blown apart by a succession of factors - including the willingness of some members of the royal family to tell all, or nearly all, to newspaper and television journalists. Clearly such behaviour would have been unimaginable, indeed horrifying, to Queen Victoria. In December 1890, for example, she erupted with anger at The Times printing a mild story (as it happened, it turned out to be untrue) about a proposed visit to England by the Duke and Duchess of Sparta [6]. [i.e the Crown Prince of the Hellenes, Constantine, and his wife Princess Sophie of Prussia]. All the newspaper had said was that the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, rather than accompanying the Queen and Court to Osborne the previous day, would wait behind in London for the Duke and Duchess of Sparta. An indignant Victoria instructed her Prime Minister to remonstrate with that newspaper's editor for "the exuberant fancy of his fashionable correspondent, who makes announcements about the Queen and Royal Family at variance with the plain unvarnished Court Circular". Her Private Secretary, General Ponsonby "told the Queen the newspapers put in the Royal news because they thought it pleased the Royal Family and they knew it pleased the public. Her Majesty replied with some asperity that these notes were most interfering and annoying to the Royal Personages who wish to be left in peace and do not desire their movements to be announced, and that the public were informed of all particulars in the Court Circular & could not be pleased at being misled by erroneous notices".[7] So, there could be no doubt that the Queen would have deplored anything in the nature of an intrusive journalism, or history, which pried upon her. And yet - for with interesting personalities there is always an "and yet", and Queen Victoria was among the most fascinating and self-contradictory of all English monarchs - she also had a desire to write about her life for publication. Her children might cringe, but she was unselfconscious about describing the pleasures of her Highland picnics, her watercolouring expeditions, and her love of the Highlanders themselves. Of course, her published books were not confessional or revelatory in the manner of modern journalism, but her own freedom of expression and lack of caution was closer to the "modern" approach than were the instincts of her children. When, in the 1920s the ex- Prime Minister's wife, Margot Asquith began to publish indiscreet volumes of autobiography, a step had been taken in the direction of modern "kiss and tell" conventions. Queen Victoria's daughter Princess Louise (Duchess of Argyll) expressed amazement that her friend Lady Battersea was also going to publish some completely anodyne reminiscences. "I have been rather taken aback, for your letter says, what you assured me would not be the case, that you would publish your reminiscences. I confess I thought them charming and entertaining, for just your personal belongings and friends, but not the public. This Margo [sic] fever to me is such a pitty [sic]!"[8] In another letter to the same friend, Louise wrote, "This letter need[sic] the flames after you have read it as I do so dislike any letters being kept these days, you will not wonder?"[9] It is easy to understand the reluctance of King Edward VII to have all the details of his private life recorded. He had only narrowly avoided being cited in divorce courts as a correspondent on more than one occasion, and the king who was nicknamed Edward the Caresser was a by-word for raffish behaviour. Princess Louise, herself trapped in an unhappy marriage to a homosexual, her name "linked", as journalists say, to several men not her husband, and desperately lonely in her widowhood, was understandably touchy about vulgar publicity. But it would be a mistake to attribute her views to a fear of scandal. There was a sense, in the pre-1914 world, which extended in most English circles until the Second World War, of two sets of information: things which everyone "knew" but which were not written down; and matters which were printable. It was not so much that the laws of libel prevented newspapers from printing stories. It was more a matter of what was and was not "done". Strong conventions prevented the British public from being told, until a few days before it happened, that their King was on the verge of abdication in 1936. This atmosphere of discretion which surrounds the Royal Family has done Queen Victoria a disservice. By destroying nearly all her journals, Princess Beatrice makes us suspicious that she was covering up details which would satisfy the eyes of the salacious. Certainly, it is hard to see why King Edward VII would have been so anxious to buy letters from a blackmailer, "some of them most compromising" about his mother's relationship with John Brown had he not himself believed that they would be scandalous. These matters will be discussed in their due chronological place. They are mentioned here at the outset, however, to alert the reader to the fact that there is a certain amount of the story which has been systematically censored by the Queen's children. At the same time, it is necessary at the outset to realize that just because a letter or a diary has been burned does not mean it was either sinister or even especially interesting. On the contrary, as Princess Louise's reaction to her old friend's memoirs showed, the habits of discretion, the desire to burn perfectly harmless letters in order to cover their traces, might not conceal the garish secrets which the imaginations of a later generation wish to supply. The modern biographer, or the reader of modern biographies, might be so anxious to find the few hidden, or irrecoverably lost "secrets" of Queen Victoria's life that they miss the one very obvious reason why her children would have wanted to destroy as much of her archive as possible. To judge from the surviving letters, one feature of Queen Victoria's written life which must have been especially painful to her family is the free and ungoverned manner in which she criticized her children - both to them directly and behind their backs. Their physical appearance, their dress sense, their capacity to procreate, the frequency with which they did so, the names they gave their children, the manner in which they brought them up were all subjected to a ceaseless and frequently far from complimentary commentary. For her son the Prince of Wales she reserved especially uncompromising vilificiations, and it was hardly surprising, when he had the power to do so, that Bertie, having become Edward VII, took matters into his own destructive hands. The fact that Princess Beatrice destroyed so large a proportion of her mother's journals is not, therefore, a fact which demands only one interpretation: namely, a cover-up of scandals. The Queen expressed herself so forcefully, so freely, so often, that it could be this fact alone, and not any particular "secret" which Princess Beatrice wished to obliterate from the history books. Luckily for us, an abundance of the Queen's letters still survive, as do the reminiscences, diaries and correspondence of those who knew her. And it is from this primary material in general that the following pages will, wherever possible, derive, as we revisit the story of that "pretty looking little creature" glimpsed by Carlyle in the Park; for we would echo his instinctual judgement, "one could not help some interest in her".... [1] J.A.Froude (1885) Vol 1, p. 90 [2] J.A.Froude (1885) Vol 1., p. 90 [3] Roger Fulford, Royal Dukes, pp. 226 ff. [4] J.A.Froude (1885) Vol. I., p.135 [5] "Did he really say, 'We authors,Ma'am?' The story has never been authenticated, but it deserves to be true".Robert Blake, Disraeli,n p. 493 [6] The Times, December 19th, 1890 [7] Hatfield, Sir Henry Ponsony to Lord Salisbury, December 22, 1890 [8] BL Additional MS 47,909 - Battersea Papers, April 24th, 1922 [9] Ibid., February 29, 1931 Excerpted from Victoria: A Life by Wilson by A. N. Wilson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.