Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria/Chapter 10

by Millicent Garrett Fawcett

Chapter X.

Home Life.—Osborne and Balmoral.

It has already been remarked that the Queen throughout her reign has shown herself a thorough woman in being a good domestic economist. It was quite in accordance with this trait in her character that she and the Prince very early in their married life set themselves the almost Herculean task of the reform of the Royal Household. They found it in thorough disorganization, replete with confusion, discomfort, and extravagance. Various branches of the domestic service in the palaces were under the Heads of Government Departments; no one was responsible for the order and good administration of the whole. To give some idea of the prevailing confusion, Stockmar's memorandum on the subject may be quoted where he points out that the Lord Chamberlain cleans the inside of the windows, and the Wood and Forests the outside. The degree of light admitted to the palace therefore depended on a good understanding between the two. Again, "The Lord Steward finds the fuel and lays the fire, the Lord Chamberlain lights it. … In the same manner the Lord Chamberlain provides all the lamps, and the Lord Steward must clean, trim, and light them." If a pane of glass in the scullery had to be replaced, or a broken lock mended, a requisition had to be signed and countersigned by no fewer than five different officials before the expenditure was finally sanctioned by the Woods and Forests, or the Lord Steward, as the case might be. Some of the servants were under the Lord Chamberlain, some under the Master of the Horse, some under the Lord Steward; as neither the first nor second of these State officials had any permanent representative in the palace, more than two-thirds of the male and female servants were left without any master or mistress at all. They came and went as they pleased, and sometimes remained absent for hours, or were guilty of various irregularities, and there was no one whose duty it was to control them. There was no one official responsible for the cleanliness, order, and security of the palace; and if the dormitories where the footmen slept, ten and twelve in a room, were turned into scenes of riot and drunkenness, no one could help it. So little watch was kept over the various entrances to the palaces, that there was nothing to prevent people from walking in unobserved, and, as a matter of fact, shortly after the birth of the Princess Royal, a boy did walk into Buckingham Palace in this way, and was accidentally discovered at one o'clock in the morning under a sofa in the room adjoining the Queen's bedroom. The stupidity, disorganization, and wastefulness of the whole thing were boundless; the only redeeming point was that there appeared to be no corruption. Her Majesty might find it impossible to get her dining-room warmed because of a coolness between the Lord Chamberlain's and the Lord Steward's departments; but she was not called upon to pay for fuel she had never received, or for services that had been discontinued since the death of Queen Anne. Some idea of the scale in which the housekeeping at Windsor is conducted may be gathered from the fact that in one year (1842), which does not appear to have been in any way exceptional, as many as 113,000 people dined there, so that there was a magnificent scope either for waste or economy. The reform of the Household was carried out on lines suggested by Stockmar, but in a manner thoroughly congenial with English precedent. The three great State officers between whom the control of the Household was shared, were retained, but their duties were delegated to one official, the Master of the Household, who was always to be resident at Court, and who was made responsible for the good government of the Royal establishments. It is easy to mention in three lines that the thing was done, but its actual accomplishment was by no means easy. A good deal of opposition was encountered from the heads of both political parties, as well as from those more directly interested in the abuses of the old system, and the efforts of the Queen and her husband to introduce internal economy and order into their home were not crowned with success short of three years' continuous effort, between 1841 and 1844.

The advantages of these reforms in household management could not but commend themselves to so good an economist as Sir Robert Peel. In 1844 the Queen had entertained at Windsor, on a scale of becoming magnificence, the Sovereigns of Russia and France; and Peel had the satisfaction of announcing in the House that the Royal visits had not added one farthing to the burdens on the taxpayer. In former times, during the visit, for instance, of the Allied Sovereigns in 1814, the country had to pay for the entertainment of the Royal guests; but this was now changed, and the Queen provided for her Royal and Imperial guests out of the Civil List.

The little glimpse that has been given of life in a palace, where the head of the house finds her housemaids under the Lord Steward, and her pages under the Master of the Horse, enables us to understand some of the satisfaction which the Queen enjoyed when she became possessed of country homes, one in the Isle of Wight, and the other in Scotland, that were entirely her own. When the purchase of Osborne was just accomplished, the Queen wrote (March 25th, 1845) to her uncle at Brussels, "It sounds so pleasant to have a place of one's own, quiet and retired, and free from all Woods and Forests and other charming departments, which really are the plague of one's life."

The purchase of the estate and the building of the house, costing something like £200,000, were met by the Queen without difficulty out of her income, so greatly had her resources been practically increased by good management and wise economy in the administration of the household. In the same spirit the estates of the Duchy of Cornwall, the property of the Prince of Wales, were carefully managed for his benefit, so that a very large property from them awaited him as soon as he attained his majority. The Prince Consort's love for landscape gardening found ample scope both at Osborne and Balmoral. The work was for several years a constant source of recreation and delight to him. Of Osborne in particular, he felt that he could say that the gardens were his creation; there was hardly a tree in the grounds that had not been placed there by him. Lady Canning wrote from Osborne in 1846, in one of her private letters, "You will be pleased to hear of this rural retreat. … Whatever it is, it perfectly enchants the Queen and Prince, and you never saw anything so happy as they are with the five babies playing round about them." The Royal children had at Osborne a place that was especially their own, a thing that all children love; thousands of country homes all over England have some Noah's Ark or Pigs' Paradise, where the boys and girls are masters of the situation, and may carpenter, paint, cook, and cut their hands and burn their fingers without let or hindrance from nurses or governesses. The Royal children at Osborne had their Swiss Cottage. Here the boys had a forge and a carpenter's bench, or learnt the art of war by making fortifications, and the girls had little gardens and kitchens and rooms for their special games and pastimes; there was also a Natural History museum which was a source of much interest and delight.

There is another feature of the gardens at Osborne which should be mentioned, an immense myrtle-tree which was struck from a sprig of myrtle from the wedding bouquet of the Princess Royal; every Royal bride in the Queen's family carries a piece of this myrtle with her to the altar on her marriage-day. The Queen has twice sent sprays of this myrtle as far as St. Petersburg, once in 1874, for the bridal bouquet of her daughter-in-law, the Archduchess Marie, now Duchess of Coburg, and once in 1894, for the bouquet of her granddaugher, the Princess Alix of Hesse, now the wife of the Czar of Russia. On the former occasion the myrtle was intrusted to the care of Lady Augusta Stanley, and the Queen gave her special instructions how to revive it in tepid water.

Osborne was a harbor of refuge to which the Queen and Prince could run for a few days' rest at any time when they felt their strength almost exhausted from the constant pressure of political work and responsibility; but they had an even more dearly loved holiday resort in their home in the Highlands at Balmoral. The Prince was always extremely sensitive to good air, and the smoky atmosphere of towns was peculiarly oppressive to him; he used to exclaim on reaching the pure country air, "Now I can breathe! Now I am happy!" The fine air of Dee-side was life and breath to him. In addition to the benefit to their health, the Royal couple delighted in Scotland for other reasons, the chief of which was that they could enjoy there a degree of freedom to which they were strangers elsewhere. Highland loyalty is compatible with perfectly good manners, and the poor people round Balmoral did not demonstrate their affection for their Sovereign by staring at her as if she were a waxwork show, or dogging her carriage or her footsteps whenever she went beyond her own gates. The Highland servants combined perfect respect with independence of character. The Queen delighted in them, and found real friends in several of them. The Royal family could make little incognito expeditions in Scotland, and stay at small country inns as Lord and Lady Churchill and party, without any danger of being found out; or if they were found out, the people who made the discovery were too well bred to proclaim it, and showed their loyalty by respecting the wishes of their Sovereign to enjoy privacy. In the years before the Prince Consort's death the Queen's Ladies-in-Waiting, writing from Scotland, frequently speak of Her Majesty's high spirits, her love of dancing, and her enjoyment of rapid driving.

Lady Canning wrote in the autumn of 1848 from Balmoral:—

"The Queen has been up a really high mountain to-day, and has come down quite fresh after many hours. … The Queen is more and more delighted with Balmoral. She makes long expeditions alone with the Prince and gamekeepers, and has never been so independent before. … She went up Loch-na-gar, … and the same evening entertained all the neighbors at dinner, and was as fresh and merry as if she had done nothing."

Four years later, Lady Canning wrote again from Balmoral:—

"The Queen is fonder than ever of this place, and the prince's shooting imrpoves. The children are as merry as grigs, and I hear the Prince of Wales and Prince Alfred, who live under me, singing away out of lesson-time as loud as ever they can."

Greville gives a description of the Royal Family at Balmoral, which deserves notice, especially as he had seen so much of Kings and Queens, and had no great affection for them; he was summoned to Balmoral for a Council meeting in 1849, before the present house, which is on a larger scale than the old one, was built; he writes:—

"Much as I dislike Courts and all that appertains to them, I am glad to have made this expedition, and to have seen the Queen and Prince in their Highland retreat, where they certainly appear to great advantage. The place is very pretty, the house very small. They live not merely like private gentlefolks, but like very small gentlefolks,—small house, small rooms, small establishment.^[1] There are no soldiers. … They live with the greatest simplicity and ease. The Prince shoots every morning, returns to luncheon, and then they walk and drive. The Queen is running in and out of the house all day long, and often goes about alone, walks into the cottages, and sits down and chats with the old women. I never before was in the society of the Prince, or had any conversation with him. … I was greatly struck with him. I saw at once (what I had always heard) that he is very intelligent and highly cultivated, and, moreover, that he has a thoughtful mind, and thinks of subjects worth thinking about. He seemed very much at his ease, very gay, pleasant, and without the least stiffness of air or dignity."

He then mentions an excursion in the afternoon in two pony carriages to the Highland gathering at Braemar, and that the evening wound up with a visit from a Highland dancing-master, who gave all the party, except himself and Lord John Russell, lessons in reels.

The Queen's half-brother, Prince Charles of Leiningen, had been their companion on one of the very early visits of the Royal Family to Scotland. He died in 1856, and this loss was the first heart grief that the Queen had been called upon to endure. She was very tenderly attached to her half-brother and sister. The letters from the latter^[2] in the "Prince Consort's Life" indicate that hers was a noble soul, one of those beautiful natures, strong in love and spiritual insight, who, whether born in the palace or the cottage, are as a sheet-anchor to those who are baffled by the waves of sorrow and suffering.

A rather curious incident in the Queen's private life may here be mentioned. A perfect stranger to her, Mr. Neale, died in 1852, and left her a legacy of £200,000. Her Majesty, on hearing of this, at once declared that if he had any relatives she would not accept the money but it appeared that he had none.

The various attacks that have been made on the Queen's life belong more, perhaps, to her private than to her public life, for they have been the work of half-witted scoundrels rather than of political desperadoes. In Ireland, when a murder is neither political nor agrarian, it is sometimes described as "merely a friendly affair;" and there is an undoubted satisfaction in the fact that the shots fired at the Queen have had no political aim. The first attempt on her life has been already recorded. On the second occasion the Queen again displayed a very remarkable degree of courage, because she drove out alone with the Prince when she knew that very probably she would be the aim of an assassin's bullet. It was in 1842, on Sunday, May 29, the Queen and Prince were returning from the Chapel Royal, St. James's, in a carriage along the Mall, when the Prince distinctly saw a man step out from the crowd, present a pistol full at them, and pull the trigger. He was only two paces distant, and the Prince heard the trigger snap, so there was no mistake about it. Fortunately, the weapon missed fire, and at first the Prince thought that no one but himself had seen what had happened. However, the attempt had been seen by two persons in the crowd, a boy and an old gentleman; the old gentleman did nothing, but the boy came the next day, and reported what he had seen at the Palace. The Home Office and the police were communicated with, and there was naturally a good deal of excitement on the part of the Queen and Prince. They at once determined not to shut themselves up, but to take their drive as usual, although they knew that the would-be assassin was at large. "The only difference they made in her usual habits was that they went alone, without either a Lady-in-Waiting or a Maid of Honor in the carriage. They took the precaution of giving orders to drive faster than usual, and the Queen always drove fast, and two equerries on horseback accompanied the carriage. Nearly at the end of their drive, between the Green Park and the garden wall of Buckingham Palace, they were shot at again by the same man who had made the attempt the day before. When he fired he was only about five paces off. The shot, the Prince wrote, must have passed under the carriage. The fellow (John Francis) was immediately seized. He was not crazy, but just a thorough scamp, "a little swarthy, ill-looking rascal." The same evening at dinner the Queen turned to one of her Maids of Honor, who had been rather put out at not being required to attend the Queen on her drive, and said, "I dare say, Georgy, you were surprised at not driving with me this afternoon, but the fact was that as we returned from church yesterday a man presented a pistol at the carriage window, which flashed in the pan, and we were so taken by surprise he had time to escape, so I knew what was hanging over me, and was determined to expose no life but my own." The Queen's uncle. Count Mensdorff, was very proud of his niece's courage, and called her sehr müthig, which pleased her very much, coming, as the compliment did, from a soldier who had seen much service. Greville's comment on the Queen's conduct is: "Very brave, but very imprudent." A couple of months later, in July, 1842, another of these dastardly attempts was made on Her Majesty's life, this time by a hunchback named Bean. Oxford had been treated as a lunatic, and sent to an asylum; Francis had been found guilty of high treason, and sentenced to death; but, at the Queen's strongly expressed wish, the sentence had been commuted to transportation for life. This leniency had been made public only the day before Bean's attempt, and the circumstance strengthened Her Majesty's conviction that an alteration in the law was desirable. Up to this time it was only possible to deal with these outrages either as lunacy or as high treason, for which the penalty was death. After Bean's attempt a Bill was immediately introduced, and carried, making such offences punishable, as misdemeanors, by transportation, imprisonment, or whipping. The substitution of an unromantic, but certain, punishment, for a dignified, but uncertain one, had the desired effect, and these scoundrelly attacks upon the Queen ceased to be fashionable in the criminal world. Feints at attempted assassination were made in 1849 by an Irish bricklayer, and in 1872 by a lad named O'Connor, who appears to have been a Fenian; but the weapons used by these worthies were not charged except with powder. In 1882 a man named Maclean fired at the Queen as she was entering her carriage at Windsor Station. He was found on trial to be insane. In June, 1850, she was struck on the face with a cane by a man named Pate, who had been a lieutenant in the army. The Prince Consort said this man was "manifestly deranged." The chivalrous nature of Peel was strongly moved by the attacks of Francis and Bean, which took place while he was Prime Minister. After Bean's attempt he hurried up to town to see the Prince, and consult with him on what ought to be done. While he was in conversation with the Prince the Queen entered the room, and Peel's emotion was so great that his habitual self-control left him, and he burst into tears. When it is remembered that only a few months earlier Greville had said, "Peel is so shy he makes the Queen shy," it is impossible not to surmise that this touch of nature may have brought about the final breaking down of reserve and coldness between the Queen and her Prime Minister.

In various memoirs of the time, little pictures are given of "the Queen at Sea." She is a good sailor, and thoroughly enjoys the element over which Britannia rules. She likes sailors, and understands them. Greville tells that nothing could be more easy and agreeable than her demeanor on board her Royal yacht, "conversing all the time with perfect ease and good humor, and on all subjects, taking great interest, and very curious about everything in the ship, dining on deck in the midst of the sailors, making them dance, talking to the boatswain, and, in short, doing everything that was popular and ingratiating." He complains, however, that she was impatient, and always wanted to be going ahead, and to do everything quickly; whereas the genuine sailor has an unfathomable capacity for loafing. Lady Bloomfield, when Miss Georgina Liddell, attended the Queen as one of her Maids of Honor on a yachting cruise in 1843. She narrates how the Queen and her ladies settled themselves for reading and work in a very comfortable and sheltered place on deck, when they became aware that the position they had taken up was the subject of something like consternation to the captain and crew. The Queen laughingly inquired if there was about to be a mutiny? The captain in the same spirit replied that he could be answerable for nothing unless Her Majesty would be graciously pleased to change her seat. The chairs of the ladies were blockading the grog cupboard! As soon as the Queen was informed of this, she consented to move her chair, on condition that she was to share the sailors' grog. On tasting it she said, "I am afraid I can only make the same remark I did once before, that I think it would be very good if it were stronger!" The hint was taken, and the sailors were of course delighted by the Queen's good-nature.

One more little home touch must conclude this chapter. Reference has already been made to the Queen's reluctance to part from the Prince even for a few days. When it was necessary for him to leave her, he kept her constantly supplied with diary-letters, showing that his thoughts and heart were ever with her. On one of these absences, occasioned by the death of his father, the Duke of Coburg, in 1844, Prince Albert was away a fortnight. His own entry in his journal thus records his return: "Crossed on the 11th. I arrived at six o'clock in the evening at Windsor. Great joy."

1. The new house at Balmoral was not finished till 1855.
2. The Princess Feodore of Hohenlohe.