Tony Rennell - The Last Days of Glory: The Death of Queen Victoria

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Contents

For Tony Bambridge

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks go:

To Mark Lucas, my agent and friend, who took me on, sat me down, and talked me through a period when it all looked hopeless. He has never once allowed me to doubt myself; I hope I have not let him down. To Juliet Annan at Viking Penguin, who caught the idea in an instant and then, with her breathless and breathtaking enthusiasm, made it happen. To Stuart Profitt, who provided inspiration at a crucial time.

To my daughter, Becky, for taking time off from the archaeological studies she loves to do a different sort of digging into memoirs and diaries for contemporary accounts and to my son, Tom, for all his encouragement. To Laura Sandys for helping get the idea off the ground. To Amanda Platell for the strength of real friendship when I most needed it. To Susan Clark and Declan OMahoney for giving me a home from home. To Sarah Foot for being all that she is and, not least, for her invaluable help and advice in checking sources and the revising of the manuscript.

To Barry Turner, Brian MacArthur and Maureen Waller for reading the manuscript and helping me make it better. To Mickey and Sandy Reid, two of the most gracious people I have ever met, for sharing their knowledge and their thoughts. To Kate Barker at Penguin for her meticulous care and attention and thoughtful advice.

To friends for their encouragement and moral support, among them Anthony Barnett, Georgina Capel, Simon Freeman, Barbara Hadley, Peter Hennessy, Jane Mays, John Nichol, Cristina Odone, Audrey Pasternak, Harry Ritchie, William Shawcross, Christine Walker, Rosie Waterhouse and Lesley White.

To Her Majesty the Queen for permission to quote from the letters and journals of Queen Victoria and other members of the royal family. To Sir Alexander Reid for permission to quote from the diaries and papers of his grandfather, Sir James Reid, and to reproduce photographs and memorabilia from Sir Jamess scrapbooks. To his wife, Michaela Reid for permission to quote from her book Ask Sir James. To Lord Esher for permission to quote from his grandfathers correspondence. To Philip Mallet for permission to quote from the letters of his grandmother, Marie Mallet. To the family of Lord Sysonby for permission to quote from the memoirs of Frederick Ponsonby. To Lady Longford for permission to quote from her unsurpassed biography of Queen Victoria. To the newspapers of a century ago, endlessly fascinating in ther detail and diligence. To their reporters, anonymous and long dead but whose words have come to life again.

None of this book could have been written without access to the British Library in St Pancras and its newspaper section at Colindale, the London Library and Lambeth Palace library. Most of all, I owe a huge debt to Lady de Bellaigue and the staff at the Royal Archives in Windsor.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright owners, but if any have been overlooked the author will be pleased to rectify the omission at the earliest opportunity.

Preface

The supreme woman of the world, best of the highest, greatest of the good

The Daily Telegraph on Queen Victoria

To be born British was to win first prize in the lottery of life, according to that African adventurer of the nineteenth century Cecil Rhodes. And never did that seem more obvious than in the summer of 1897, when the sun shone brightly on the centre of the Empire for the celebrations in London of Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee. She waved and smiled from her carriage, and wept with thanks at her peoples loyal tributes, shouted from streets overflowing with patriotic well-wishers. Sixty years a queen but what an empire she now ruled, what a swath of red, white and blue across the globe! Happy and glorious, they sang. Long to reign over us. Rhodes was right. Under Victoria, Britain had spread and prospered. Sitting beside her, the Princess of Wales, her daughter-in-law, read out the messages hung from buildings, strung across her path. Our Hearts Thy Throne! declared the biggest, The Queen of Earthly Queens.

But the society she reigned over was one where change seethed beneath the surface. A new world was waiting to emerge an uncertain world, in which old values, accepted ways, would no longer count. The government was still run by aristocrats, old land, old money, but socialism was the new fashion for intellectuals and the two million working men who were members of trade unions. The streets were clogged with horses, but the motor car was accelerating into the lives of the rich. Britains industrial and commercial might, forged in the middle years of the nineteenth century, was losing its competitive edge to Germany and the United States. The first warnings were issued that Britains education system was failing to deliver the right skills this country will have to apply itself more assiduously to the work of true elementary education if we do not wish to take a back seat in trade, commerce and prosperity, barked an anti-Tory newspaper in industrial South Wales. Control of the seas was being challenged by an aggressive and expansionist Germany. The New Woman was making her presence felt in smart society. She smoked, she argued, she might even want the right to vote one day.

As the century neared its end, none of this troubled the popular imagination. The passage from the 1800s to the 1900s was welcomed on a wave of optimism and patriotism: Britannia was mighty and surely destined to be mightier yet. As one newspaper triumphantly announced in January 1900, The Empire, stretching round the globe, has one heart, one head, one language, one policy.

For more thoughtful minds, however, fin de sicle felt more like fin du monde. The times are strange and evil, declared the classical scholar J. W. Mackail in a famous lecture in 1900:

To those who hope for human progress, the outward aspect of the time is full of profound discouragement. Compared with 50 years ago, there is a general loss of high spirits, of laughter and the enjoyment of life. We see all around us how vainly people try to drown in increasing luxury and excitement the sense that joy and beauty are dwindling out of life; with what pitiful eagerness they dress themselves up in pretended enthusiasms which seem to bring little joy to the maker or the user. The uneasy feeling is abroad that the nineteenth century, which has done such wonderful things, and from which things so much more wonderful were hoped, has been on the whole a failure. Fifty years ago, mens minds were full of ideals. Now cinder heaps smoulder where there once were beacon fires

In all this uncertainty, the Queen was the symbol, the embodiment, the guarantee, of stability and continuity. While she sat on the throne, the future held no fears. Family and Empire, duty and decorum the widow of Windsor knew what was right. Victoria had become a living legend. No monarch, before or since, has surpassed the mass affection, verging on love, that she inspired in her old age. She had not always been popular, however, but she had survived the criticisms and come through her self-inflicted semi-exile in the years after the death of her husband Prince Albert times when she was so little seen by her subjects that they almost forgot her and allowed republican feelings to become common chatter. In the last two decades of her life, all such talk had disappeared, replaced by veneration.