Читать книгу Queen Victoria: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 17

‘It has become his province to educate, instruct and form the most interesting mind and character in the world.’

AS THE DAYS PASSED people spoke of the new Queen with mounting enthusiasm. A large crowd stood in the courtyard of St James’s Palace and cheered her loudly as she stood by an open window to hear the heralds proclaim her Queen and it was ‘most touching’ to see the colour drain from her cheeks and the tears well up in her eyes. She was cheered again quite as vociferously when she drove to the House of Lords for the dissolution of Parliament for the first time on 17 July 1837 and, later, when she went to the Lord Mayor’s dinner in Guildhall. It really was ‘most gratifying’, she told Princess Feodora, ‘to have met with such a reception in the greatest capital in the World and from thousands and thousands of people. I really do not deserve all this kindness for what I have yet done.’¹

Charles Greville said that at her second Privy Council meeting she presided ‘with as much ease as if She had been doing nothing else all her life.’ ‘She looked very well, and though so small in stature, and without any pretension to beauty, the gracefulness of her manner and the good expression of her countenance give her on the whole a very agreeable appearance, and with her youth inspire an excessive interest in all who approach her.’²

Princess Lieven, not the most indulgent of critics, was much impressed by the contrast between her childish face and sometimes rather diffident smile and the dignity of her queenly manner. Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, said that ‘any Ministers who had to deal with her would soon find that she was no ordinary person’.

Many of those who saw her now for the first time were surprised to see how very small she was, surely no more than five feet in height if that. She herself told Lord Melbourne that the ‘worry and torment’ of the ‘Kensington System’ had stunted her growth. She said as much to King Leopold whose letters frequently referred to her diminutive size and who wrote to her teasingly as though she could do something about it if she put her mind to it: in one letter he told her that he had heard reports that she was growing at last and expressed the hope that she would ‘persist in so laudable a measure’. He had, however, he later regretted, ‘not been able to ascertain that she had really grown taller lately’; he felt he ‘must recommend it strongly’. In a subsequent letter, thanking her for sending him a portrait of her, he commented that ‘she shone more by her virtues than by her tallness’.

It was generally agreed that, as well as being very short, she was a little too plump and really, it had to be admitted, rather plain with the protuberant blue eyes and receding chin of her Hanoverian grandfather, George III. Within a few weeks of Victoria’s accession, the wife of Andrew Stevenson, the American Minister in London, watched her at a dinner. ‘Her bust, like most English women’s is very good,’ Mrs Stevenson wrote, ‘hands and feet are small and very pretty…Her eyes are blue, large and full; her mouth, which is her worst feature, is generally a little open; her teeth small and short, and she shows her gums when she laughs, which is rather disfiguring.’³ The laugh itself, however, Mrs Stevenson decided on a later occasion, was ‘particularly delightful’, ‘so full of girlish glee and gladness’. Others also spoke of this pleasing, uninhibited laugh and a voice which was, and remained, exceptionally clear and melodious. Her smile, too, was described as enchanting, and her deportment at once graceful and impressive.

Thomas Creevey, who was invited to dine at Brighton Pavilion in October, said that ‘a more homely little being you never beheld, when she is at her ease, and she is evidently dying to be always more so. She laughs in real earnest, opening her mouth as wide as it can go, showing not very pretty gums…She eats quite as heartily as she laughs, I think I may say she gobbles…She blushes and laughs every instant in so natural a way as to disarm anybody. Her voice is perfect, and so is the expression of her face, when she means to say or do a pretty thing.’⁴

After a conversation with her, Lord Holland, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, came away ‘quite a courtier’ and ‘a bit of a lover’. ‘Like the rest of the world’, he later decided, he was both ‘captivated and surprised’.^*5

Although shy and often uncertain of herself in the presence of people whom she took to be intellectually superior to herself, she was already capable of assuming an alarming hauteur and fixing those who had offended her in a glare of disapproval from faintly hooded eyes, the disconcerting gaze of the basilisk. She had not been Queen for long when her Mistress of the Robes, the grand, young and beautiful Duchess of Sutherland, was half an hour late for dinner. She did not hesitate to give her ‘a very proper snub’, telling her she ‘hoped it might not happen another time’. She had occasion to reprimand her Maids-of-Honour also. She did not like doing this, she told Lord Melbourne; but, he said, she must start as she meant to go on, otherwise they would take advantage of her. She was determined not to let them do that.

As Charles Greville observed, the young Queen had already begun to exhibit ‘signs of a peremptory disposition, and it is impossible not to suspect that, as she gains confidence, and as her character begins to develop, she will evince a strong will of her own’.

She could also be self-centred, apparently quite unaware of the difficulties and discomforts she was imposing upon others. In September that year she was riding in her carriage at Windsor when, feeling the cold, she had got out to walk. ‘Of course, all her ladies had to do the same,’ Lady Tavistock told Thomas Creevey, ‘and the group being very wet, their feet soon got into the same state. Poor dear Lady Tavistock, when she got back to the Castle, could get no dry stockings, her maid being out and her cloathes all locked up…I am sure [she] thinks the Queen a resolute little tit.’⁶

So did some of her other ladies who were inconsiderately required to stand in the drawing room until the gentlemen came up after dinner, which they were required to do soon after the ladies had withdrawn. ‘I hear the Duchess of Kent first remonstrated and has since retired from the drawing-room for half an hour every evening to repose herself in her own room, till she can return and sit by her daughter or at the Whist table in the Evening,’ Lord Holland related. ‘It was droll enough to see the Ladies, young and old, married or unmarried with all their rumps to the wall when we came from the dining room and eagerly availing themselves of their release when the Queen took her seat on the sofa.’⁷

Nor did most guests find the evenings very lively thereafter. Charles Greville, invited to dine one day in March 1838, described a characteristic large dinner party attended by, amongst others, Lord Rosebery and his wife, Lord and Lady Grey, Lord Ossulston and the Hanoverian Minister, Baron Münchhausen. Just before dinner was announced the Queen entered the room with the Duchess of Kent, preceded by the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Conyngham, and followed by her six ladies.^*

She shook hands with the women, and made a sweeping bow to the men, and directly went in to dinner, conducted by Münchhausen, who sat next to her, and Conyngham on the other side…After the eating was over the Queen’s health was given by [her Chief Equerry] who sat at one end of the table: a vile, vulgar custom, and, however proper it may be to drink her health elsewhere, it is bad taste to have it given by her Officer at her own table…However it has been customary in the last two reigns…⁸

When we went into the drawing-room, and huddled about the door in the sort of half-shy, half-awkward way people do, the Queen advanced, and spoke to everybody in succession…As the words of Kings and Queens are precious, and as a fair sample of a royal after-dinner colloquy, I shall record my dialogue with accurate fidelity.

Q. ‘Have you been riding to-day Mr Greville?’

G. ‘No, Madam, I have not.’

Q. ‘It was a fine day.’

G. ‘Yes, Ma’am, a very fine day.’

Q. ‘It was rather cold though.’

G. (like Polonius). ‘It was rather cold, Madam.’

Q. ‘Your sister, Ly. Francis Egerton, rides I think, does not She?’

G. ‘She does ride sometimes, Madam.’ (A pause, when I took the lead through adhering to the same topic.)

G. ‘Has your Majesty been riding to-day?’

Q. (with animation). ‘O yes, a very long ride.’

G. ‘Has your Majesty got a nice horse?’

Q. ‘O, a very nice horse.’

– gracious smile and inclination of head on part of Queen, profound bow on mine, and then She turned again to Lord Grey. Directly after I was deposited at the whist table to make up the Duchess of Kent’s party, and all the rest of the company were arranged about a large round table (the Queen on the sofa by it), where they passed about an hour and a half in what was probably the smallest possible talk, interrupted and enlivened, however, by some songs which Ossulston sang. We had plenty of instrumental music during and after dinner.

Nobody expects from her any clever, amusing, or interesting talk, above all no stranger can expect it. She is very civil to everybody, and there is more of frankness, cordiality, and good-humour in her manner than of dignity. She looks and speaks cheerfully: there was nothing to criticise, nothing particularly to admire. The whole thing seemed to be dull, perhaps unavoidably so, but still so dull that it is a marvel how anybody can like such a life. This was an unusually large party, and therefore more than usually dull and formal; but it is much the same sort of thing every day. Melbourne was not there, which I regretted, as I had some curiosity to see Her Majesty and her Minister together.⁹

Had Melbourne been of the company that evening, Greville would have seen the Queen in a far more lively mood.

The Queen’s relationship with Melbourne was of the closest and most trusting kind. He was fifty-eight when she came to the throne, still attractive though rather portly now, sophisticated and urbane. She delighted in his conversation, rejoiced in his celebrated epigrams, aphorisms and paradoxes, his well-told reminiscences, his brilliant table-talk and anecdotes which were full of irreverent, heterodoxical and sometimes flippant asides but usually contained information ‘of the most interesting kind’. It became ‘a source of great amusement’ to her to ‘collect his “sayings”’. ‘He has such stores of knowledge,’ she wrote; ‘such a wonderful memory; he knows about everybody and everything; who they were and what they did.’ He remembered things ‘from thirteen months old!’ and his days at Eton in great detail.¹⁰ She delighted in the stories he told her about Napoleon and Byron, Pitt and Charles James Fox, her wicked uncles, and was very pleased that he did not include their brother, her father, as being of their naughty company. ‘From all what I heard,’ she wrote, ‘my father was the best of all.’¹¹

His conversation was not only unfailingly interesting, it made her laugh. He would plead, for example, that he rarely went to church ‘for fear of hearing something very extraordinary’. Besides, his ‘father and mother never went. People didn’t use to go so much formerly; it wasn’t the fashion.’ Or he would protest that it was almost worthwhile for a woman to be beaten by her husband, ‘considering the exceeding pity she excites’. In the world of Whiggery, in which Whigs were ‘all cousins’, people used never to change their lives when they married: ‘they were very fond of their wives, but did not take care of them, and left them to themselves’. Chastity was not prized and there was ‘great licence’. In any case, the wife was ‘always in the wrong’.

Whig families like his also emphasized their separateness from the rest of society by bestowing nicknames which were recognized only by the cognoscenti and they pronounced words in a peculiarly Whiggish way. When Queen Victoria was once asked if Lord Melbourne had been a proper Whig she replied that he must have been because he spoke in a recognizably Whiggish manner, pronouncing Rome as ‘room’ and gold as ‘goold’.^*12

Talking of children he said that ‘almost everybody’s character was formed by their mother and that if children did not turn out well, their mothers should be punished for it’. Talking of doctors he would say that the English variety killed you while the French merely let you die; and commenting on horse racing he would express the opinion that the Derby was ‘not perfect without somebody killing himself’. Yet at heart he was ‘such a good man’, ‘excellent and moral with such a strong feeling against immorality and wickedness’. One day when she remarked that there were so few good preachers in the Church, he agreed with her and added, ‘But there are not many very good anything.’ That was very true, the Queen thought. She was equally sure, though, that he was one of the ‘very good’.¹³

Having so high an opinion of Melbourne’s talents and virtues, she basked in his skilful flattery. Her shyness, he assured her, was not only appealing, it was indicative of a sensitive and susceptible temperament; her smallness, of which she was continually conscious, was a positive advantage in a queen; her inexperience was all to the good: she came to her duties fresh and unprejudiced. Upon her complaining of the great difficulty she had in keeping her temper when she was ‘very much irritated and plagued’ and how ‘very sorry’ she was when she ‘let it out’ towards her servants, he comforted her by observing that a person who had rather a choleric disposition might control it, never wholly got over it and could not help letting it out at times.

He endeavoured to curb her tendency to intolerance and to a truthful directness which verged on tactlessness; but the advice was given in such a ‘kind and fatherly’ way she never resented it. Nor did she mind when he warned her that, having inherited the Hanoverian tendency to plumpness, she was liable to grow ‘very fat’.

The Queen was well aware of Melbourne’s past amours, of the divorce cases in which he had been involved, of his late, unbalanced wife, Lady Caroline Ponsonby, who had been so much in love with Byron, and of his pathetic, infantile son, also dead. These misfortunes made him all the more fascinating in her eyes, all the more to be pitied, loved and indulged. She soon concluded ‘that he was, in fact, the best-hearted, kindest and most feeling man in the world…straightforward, clever and good’, a ‘most truly honest and noble-minded man’. She esteemed herself ‘most fortunate to have such a man at the head of the government’, a man in whom she could ‘safely place confidence’. There were ‘not many like him in this world of deceit’.^*14

Drawn to Melbourne by their common experience of loneliness, the Queen spoke to him of her past life, as well as the problems and business of politics, talking to him for three or four hours a day and writing to him on the occasions when they could not meet. These occasions were rare enough since he now virtually lived at Court where their intimacy was plain for all to see. ‘I have seen the Queen with her Prime Minister,’ wrote Princess Lieven. ‘When he is with her he looks loving, contented, a little pleased with himself; respectful, at his ease, as if accustomed to take first place in the circle, and dreamy and gay – all mixed up together.’¹⁵

Charles Greville, who suspected that the Queen’s feelings for him were ‘sexual though she [did] not know it’, thought that no man was more formed to ingratiate himself with her than Lord Melbourne.

He treats her with unbounded confidence and respect, he consults her tastes and her wishes, and he puts her at her ease by his frank and natural manners, while he amuses her by the quaint, queer, epigrammatic turn of his mind, and his varied knowledge upon all subjects…[He is] so parental and anxious, but always so respectful and deferential…She is continually talking to him. Let who will be there, he always sits next to her at dinner, and by arrangement, because he always takes in the Lady-in-Waiting which necessarily places him next to her, the etiquette being that the Lady-in-Waiting sits next but one to the Queen. It is not unnatural, and to him it is peculiarly interesting. I have no doubt he is passionately fond of her as he might be of his daughter if he had one, and the more because he is a man with capacity for loving without having anything in the world to love. It is become his province to educate, instruct, and form the most interesting mind and character in the world…Melbourne thinks highly of her sense, discretion, and good feeling.¹⁶

Content as she was to listen to his advice, to be instructed in such simple matters of propriety as the inadvisability of receiving divorced women at Court, of allowing maids-of-honour to walk unchaperoned on the terraces at Windsor Castle and of accepting the dedication of novels until he had read them to ensure that they contained nothing ‘objectionable’, the Queen was always ready, having formed her own views, to express her own opinions.¹⁷

While the Queen’s feelings for Melbourne may have been subconsciously sexual, as Charles Greville suggested, she herself said that she loved him like ‘a father’. She forgave him when he fell asleep after dinner and when he snored, as he did even in chapel, or became ‘very absent’ and began talking to himself, ‘loud enough to be heard but never loud enough to be understood’. ‘I am now, from habit,’ she wrote, ‘quite accustomed to it; but at first I turned round, thinking he was talking to me.’ By way of apology, and then with welcome regularity, bouquets of flowers would arrive at the Palace from Brocket Hall, Melbourne’s house in Hertfordshire.

Although he was conscientious in instructing the young and, in many respects, naive Queen about the political problems of the day, the workings of Parliament and the Cabinet, and the mysteries of the Constitution – leaving Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, to acquaint her with international relations – Lord Melbourne cannot be said to have aroused the Queen’s social conscience, or to have made her more aware of the pitiable conditions in which so many of her people lived and which she had briefly glimpsed in her travels in the Midlands and in the North before her accession to the throne. Melbourne was far from being an idle man. That acute observer, the Revd Sydney Smith, commented: ‘Our Viscount is somewhat of an impostor…I am sorry to hurt any man’s feelings and to brush away the magnificent fabric of levity and gaiety he has reared, but I accuse our Minister of honesty and diligence.’¹⁸ Yet Melbourne’s suspicion of reform and of the motives of reformers, his not altogether flippant suggestion that one should ‘try to do no good’ and then one wouldn’t ‘get into any scrapes’, undoubtedly had their effect on the still developing sensibilities of the young Queen Victoria. He maintained that Sir Walter Scott was quite right to suggest that it was not worthwhile bothering with the poor; it was better to ‘leave them alone’. Melbourne was quite convinced that the attempts by his niece’s husband, Lord Ashley, later Lord Shaftesbury, to improve the conditions of children working in mines and factories were quite unnecessary and doomed to failure: since education of such children would never ‘do any good’; parents should be free ‘to send them under a certain age to work’.

One day the Queen mentioned that she had just read Oliver Twist and had been much affected by its ‘accounts of starvation in the Workhouses’. But Melbourne dismissed the book as one of Dickens’s own blinkered characters might well have done: ‘It’s all among Workhouses, and Coffin Makers, and Pickpockets…It’s all slang; just like the Beggar’s Opera…I don’t like these things; I wish to avoid them; I don’t like them in reality and therefore I don’t wish to see them represented.’¹⁹ As for railways, which were built by Irishmen – ‘who mind neither lord nor laws’ – and which he refused to have within fifteen miles of his house at Brocket, he didn’t ‘care about them’. ‘None of these modern inventions,’ he told the Queen, ‘consider human life.’²⁰