Aronson - Queen Victoria and the Bonapartes

Queen Victoria
and the Bonapartes

Theo Aronson

All Rights Reserved

This edition published in 2014 by:

Thistle Publishing
36 Great Smith Street
London
SW1P 3BU

www.thistlepublishing.co.uk

To the memory of

JOHN MCINTOSH

Contents

Illustrations

Queen Victoria aged thirty-five

Louis Napoleon, Emperor of the French

The Empress Eugenie

Queen Victoria welcomes Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie

The royal box at Covent Garden

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1855

Queen Victoria invests Napoleon III

Princess Mathilde Bonaparte

Prince Napoleon

The State Visit to Paris

Queen Victoria in widowhood

The Empress Eugenie at the zenith of her career

The exiled Emperor Napoleon III

Bertie, Prince of Wales

Louis, the Prince Imperial

The scouting party before the Zulu attack

The cross erected by Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria and Princess Beatrice before the Prince Imperial's coffin

The Empress Eugenie in later years

Acknowledgements

I must thank Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II by whose gracious permission certain extracts from the Journals of Queen Victoria are here published for the first time. For arranging this, I am indebted to Sir Michael Adeane, Her Majesty the Queen's Private Secretary and Keeper of the Archives, and Mr Robert Mackworth-Young, Librarian at Windsor Castle.

For help, advice and information I must thank also the Countess of Longford, Miss E. H. Berridge, Miss A. T. Hadley, Mlle Louise Duval, Major D. Barr, Mr Anthony Dennison, M. Pierre Blanchard and Mr L. A. Short. I am grateful for all the help that I have received from the Bibliothque Nationale, Paris; the Library of Congress, Washington; the British Museum, London; and the many libraries and newspaper libraries in London and Paris. Three recently published books which have proved especially valuable are Victoria R.I. by Elizabeth Longford, The Empress Eugenie by Harold Kurtz and Napoleon III in England by Ivor Guest.

My chief debt is to Mr Brian Roberts for his unfailing interest and expert advice during every stage of the writing of this book.

For permission to quote copyright material I am indebted to the publishers of the following books: The Letters of Queen Victoria, Second Series, edited by George Earle Buckle (John Murray, 1926); and Leaves from a Journal, edited by Nicolas Bentley (Andr Deutsch, 1961).

Part One
'These great meetings of Sovereigns'

CHAPTER ONE

'Such an extraordinary man'

'I must write a line to ask what you say to the wonderful proceedings at Paris, which really seem like a story in a book or a play!' wrote Queen Victoria to her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, on 4 December 1851. 'What is to be the result of it all?'

The 'wonderful proceedings' to which the thirty-two-year-old Queen was referring with such schoolgirlish enthusiasm was the coup d'tat by which Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, President of the French Republic, had made himself dictator of France two days before.

The Prince President's seizure of power had come as a complete surprise to Queen Victoria. On the very day of his coup d'tat she had been urging her Uncle Leopold to visit her at Osborne; the Belgian King's fears of some sort of upheaval in France had seemed to her exaggerated. 'I feel ashamed,' she now admitted, 'to have written so positively a few hours before that nothing would happen.'

The Queen should have known better. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had always been one for the unexpected. And if there was one thing about which he had never left anyone in doubt, it was his determination to make himself master of France. Reticent in most things, he had never been reticent about his ambitions. These Victoria understood well enough. It was simply that she was not yet accustomed to the deviousness of his methods. In fact, Queen Victoria did not really know a great deal about Prince Louis Napoleon.

They had met only once. This had been in the days of Louis Napoleon's exile in England, when the Queen had attended an official breakfast in Fulham in aid of a somewhat unromantic cause: the erection of baths and wash-houses in the East End of London. Other than on this one public occasion, she had never set eyes on him. She was aware that he had been born during the halcyon days of the Great Napoleon's Empire; that his father had been the Emperor's disgruntled brother Louis and his mother the Empress Josephine's daughter by her first marriagethe seductively mannered Hortense de Beauharnais. She knew, too, that since the death of Napoleon's only son in 1832, Louis Napoleon had been a very active pretender to the throne of France. However, thus far, his attempts to re-establish his uncle's Empire had been not only unsuccessful, but faintly comic.

The first attempt, made in the year before Victoria's own accession to the British throne, had taken place at Strasbourg. At dawn on 30 October 1836, the twenty-eight-year-old Prince, heading a handful of loyal Bonapartists, had presented himself to the somewhat startled French garrison and exhorted them to march behind him to Paris. The garrison had refused to do any such thing. Most of the soldiers had not even believed that this unheroic-looking young man was the Great Napoleon's nephew. Prince Louis Napoleon had been arrested and sent to Paris, where King Louis Philippe, the current French sovereign, had decided to play down the incident by having the impetuous pretender shipped off to New York.

Within four months the Prince was back in Europe and within four years had made yet another attempt on the throne. In August 1840 (it had been the year of Queen Victoria's marriage) he had assembled a band of fellow conspirators and set off from England in a hired steamer, bound for Boulogne. To lend the expedition the right Napoleonic touch, a tame and somewhat bedraggled-looking eagle had been bought from a boy at the Gravesend docks and chained to the mast. This second attempt had proved no less disastrous than the first. Louis Napoleon had again failed to rouse the garrison to his cause and again he had been arrested. This time Louis Philippe's government had been determined to take no chances. Prince Louis Napoleon had been sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in the fortress of Ham, in northern France.

'How long,' the pretender had remarked dryly, 'does perpetuity last in France?'

For him, it had lasted six years. He had escaped from Ham, disguised as a workman, in 1846, and had once more taken up residence in England. From here, with somewhat more circumspection but no less determination, he had continued his imperialist intrigues.

Throughout these years of Bonapartist activity, Victoria's sympathies had been with King Louis Philippe. In this she had been backed up, to the hilt, by her husband, Prince Albert. Louis Napoleon might have cut the more romantic figure, but the stolid Orleans King, besides being France's chosen sovereign, was a friend of the English Queen. The two of them had exchanged visits and the term entente cordiale, signifying an understanding between Britain and France, was first bandied about during Louis Philippe's time; not until late in his reign did a coolness develop between the two sovereigns. Then, in addition to being friends, Victoria and Louis Philippe were related through the Coburgs. Amongst other connections, Victoria's adored Uncle Leopold was married to one of King Louis Philippe's daughters. Already the fact that England was so willing to harbour a conspirator such as Louis Napoleon was a source of amazement to the Queen's Continental relatives. Was he not, besides being an irresponsible trouble-maker, the nephew of England's greatest enemythe dreaded Napoleon? Was not his aim to revive the military glories of the Napoleonic Empire; to upset the balance of Europe, so carefully restored by the victors after Waterloo?