The letters above quoted show how deeply the Queen felt hurt by the
severe remarks of many of the journals as to her seclusion and
disappearance from the ceremonials of public life for some years after
the death of the Prince Consort. Her Majesty must also have been aware
that comments to the same effect were current in general society, where
the accustomed gaieties of the Court remained at a standstill. Indeed
one sometimes hears them still urged in reproach to her otherwise
faultless life as a Sovereign, as though her duty to the State had been
sacrificed to a morbid indulgence in the sorrows of her personal
bereavement. At one time there might have been some excuse for such an
impression, but there is none now. People did not then know, as they
know now, how heavy a weight of labour and anxiety had been thrown upon
the Queen by the death of the Prince. During his life her labours as
Sovereign had been lightened by the constant presence at her side of a
counsellor to whom the welfare of the Empire was as dear as to herself,
whose life was merged in hers, on whose strong brain and constant
devotion she had, for over twenty years, been accustomed to lean for
support and guidance. While he lived, the cares of Royalty pressed
comparatively lightly upon the Queen. But when he died the full burden
of them fell upon her; and from that moment she became the most lonely
of women--for who is so lonely as the survivor of two beings whose
mutual devotion has been so all-sufficing that they have never looked
elsewhere for mental companionship or support? How much more so if the
survivor be a woman!
With no one to whom she could turn for the same sympathy and guidance,
the Queen had henceforth to look solely to her own resources for
fulfilling the duties and responsibilities of the great position which,
with the Prince's assistance, she had built up for herself before the
world. Together it had been their rule to keep themselves advised from
day to day of every detail of public affairs by the officials of every
department, and to make themselves a living chronicle of everything that
passed in the administration of the Empire. This tradition the Queen had
now to carry on by herself. But for her great powers of work, her quick
perception, and a memory of singular tenacity, this would have been
impossible; and it requires no effort of imagination to understand how
great to her must have been the resulting exhaustion of both body and
mind, and how natural the occasional fear, to use her own words, that
some day "she might quite break down." She was not singular in this
fear, for it was shared by those who knew her best, and especially by
her uncle, the King of the Belgians--and no one knew her better than
he, both in her strength and in her weakness. When spoken to about her
seclusion and the prevailing desire that she could come more into public
life, his advice was to leave her alone. "Pauvre Victoire," M. Van de
Weyer told me were his words, "ne la tourmentez pas!"
The outside world, of course, did not then know how great was the
additional burden that had been thrown upon Her Majesty. Only the Queen
herself could enlighten her subjects upon this point, unless some of Her
Majesty's Ministers had taken occasion to do so, which they might well
have done, but none of them did. This I had to explain to the Queen when
she asked me, by her note, above cited, of the 19th of January 1868, and
again personally at Osborne, to take means to let the public know the
truth. At the same time, I ventured to offer my opinion, that it was
neither necessary nor desirable to make any public declaration on the
subject. Whatever might be said by some, her people, I was sure, had
entire trust in her doing what was best, and that she would appear in
public whenever the necessity for doing so arose. My views prevailed,
and the enthusiastic reception given within the next few days to the
_Leaves from a Journal_, and the warm expressions of loyal devotion
stimulated by the insight there given into the Queen's character, came,
happily, to confirm my opinion. It was still further confirmed by the
reception given to the Queen on her visiting the City to open the new
Blackfriars Bridge and the Holborn Bridge and Viaduct on the 6th of
November 1869, of which she wrote to me (11th November): "Nothing could
be more successful than the progress and ceremony of Saturday. The
greatest enthusiasm prevailed, and the reception by countless thousands
of all classes, especially in the City, was most loyal and
gratifying--not a word, not a cry, that could offend any one." The
subject of a public statement was not again mooted. Her Majesty was
content to wait until the story I should have to tell in the Prince's
Life should fully open the eyes of her people to the truth.
Complaints ceased for a time, but during the year 1870 they were renewed
in some of the leading journals, and again the Queen felt deeply
wounded--how deeply will presently appear. In the autumn of 1871 she had
a serious illness, which occasioned general alarm, and the journals
teemed with expressions of the devotion and the sympathetic interest
which lay at the heart of all Her Majesty's subjects. To this change is
due the following letter:--
"BALMORAL, _Septr. 17, 1871_.
"Long, long has the Queen wished to write to Mr Martin, but her
_very severe_ illness has prevented her from doing so. She is now,
however, going on so satisfactorily, _though very slowly_, that she
is glad to be able to thank him for his kind inquiries and letters.
"The Queen cannot help referring to the articles in Thursday's
_Times_, and in Friday's _Daily News_, which are very gratifying, as
these go the length of expressing _remorse_ at the heartless, cruel
way in which they had attacked the Queen. Mr Martin wrote rightly,
that the words were not spoken which were needed to make the public
understand that the Queen could not do more than human strength
could bear.[5] Mr Martin will recollect the Queen's distress for
some years past, and how little she was _believed_. The unjust
attacks this year, the great worry and anxiety and hard work for ten
years, alone, unaided, with increasing age and never very strong
health, broke the Queen down, and almost drove her to despair. The
result has been the very, very serious illness--the severest, except
one (a typhoid fever in 1835), she ever had--and more suffering than
she has ever endured in her life. Now that people are frightened and
kind, the Queen will be kindly treated in future; but it is very
hard that it was necessary she should have the severe illness and
great suffering, which has left her very weak, to make people feel
for and understand her.... The sympathy in dear Scotland has been
great, and their press was the first to raise their voice in defence
of a cruelly misunderstood woman. She will never forget this."
After this time Her Majesty had no reason, so far as I know, to complain
that she was "cruelly misunderstood" by any section of her people. They
learned to understand and to sympathise with her, for they saw day by
day how close a watch she kept upon all public affairs, how full her
thoughts were of them and their wellbeing, and how tender were her
sympathies with all of them who were "in danger, necessity, or
tribulation."
No one could be much in communication with the Queen without being
struck by her power of saying concisely what she had to say in the
plainest and clearest language. The swiftness of her thought was
apparent in her beautiful, firm, rapid writing. Its clearness was
equally shown in her happy choice of the simplest words. She had so much
ground to get over daily that she had no time to waste in elaborate
expression. For her the one thing important was, that no room should be
left for any misapprehension of her meaning--in short, that she should
make what was plain to her own mind as plain to the minds of others as
it was to herself. If a simple, everyday word or phrase would serve her
purpose, she preferred it to anything more ornate. In the course of
editing the _Leaves from a Journal_, Mr Helps had many struggles with
Her Majesty about what he thought her too homely style, which she
defended, because she could not bear it to be thought that what she
wrote was written "for style and effect." "It was," she wrote to me
(20th October 1868), "the simplicity of the style, and the absence of
all appearance of writing for effect, which had given her book such
immense and undeserved success. Besides, how could Mr Helps expect pains
to be taken when she wrote late at night, suffering from headache and
exhaustion, and in dreadful haste, and not for publication?"
This artless skill in rendering a fresh, unstudied transcript of her
impressions--a power eagerly sought for, but very often unattained by
men of letters--undoubtedly gave to these jottings in Her Majesty's
Journal their special charm. But its value was apparent in all she
wrote. The habit of getting as near in words as possible to what was in
her own mind gave great vividness and graphic force upon occasion to her
style, especially where matters of importance had to be dealt with. When
an authoritative Life of Her Majesty is written, proofs of this will be
abundant. But, to speak only of what is already before the world, what
could be more happy or to the purpose than the Addresses and Messages
which she issued upon occasion to her people, and which in point merely
of style, apart from the governing thought and feeling, were always
masterly? The same characteristic was conspicuous in her conversation.
Her words were few and well chosen. You were never puzzled to know what
she meant, and she expected you, in what you said, to be equally concise
and clear--exact in the expression of opinion, and rigidly accurate as
to fact. Her aim always was to get at the truth. Herself the most
truthful of women, she resented any shortcoming in truthfulness in
others. "Oh!" she once said to me, "nobody can tell of what value it is
to me to hear the truth."
The Queen's intolerance of affectation, verbosity, or obscurity of
language affected her judgment not only of men, but also of much of the
contemporary literature which found favour with others. She loved and
appreciated, and indeed delighted in poetry, but it must be poetry as
the vehicle of genuine feeling or wholesome and instructive thought,
clothed in the musical language which ingratiates it to the memory,
without the inversions or obscurity of phrase or the exaggerations of
metaphor or sentiment, which are so often mistaken for originality and
strength. In my experience, Her Majesty was not prone to offer critical
opinions upon books, but when she did so, her judgments were to the
point. Thus, in speaking to me about George Eliot's _Middlemarch_, she
remarked, after saying much about the subtle delineation of the various
characters, "After all, fine as it is, it is a disappointing book; all
the people are failures"--meaning not in the way they were drawn, but in
the issues of their lives, as in truth they are.
The Queen knew, I should say, quite as much of literature, music, and
the arts as most of the people who think themselves entitled to speak
with authority upon all these topics; but she knew the limitations of
her own knowledge, and was much too sincere and too modest to affect
authority to dilate upon them. This she left to those who had made them
their special study, and was
"Contented if she might enjoy
The things which others understand,"
or think they understand. She had no leisure for abstruse studies. She
had one great book always before her, which commanded and absorbed her
supreme attention--the book of human life, of human good and ill within
her kingdom, and of all that was going on in Europe and throughout her
vast dominions. The study of that book left little leisure for great
attainments in literature, science, or the arts.
To music she had been devoted from her youth. She had grown up in the
love of the chief Italian composers, ancient and modern, of Mozart,
Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Verdi in the modern
school--in short, all the great masters of melody who wrote from and to
the heart. It was not, then, surprising that she cared comparatively
little for the writers of the latest school, Wagner, Brahms, Grieg, and
others, who write much less from the heart than from the head, building
up elaborately scientific tonic structures, the symmetry of which it is
difficult to trace, and weaving complicated harmonies that tax and
exhaust the attention, and savour more of the science than of the soul
of music. However indifferent the Queen might be to productions of this
class, she was keenly alive to every piece of pure melodic and
harmonious inspiration.
Of Her Majesty's executive power as an artist I cannot speak, as what I
know of her work is confined to a few slight sketches, and the etchings
which she made, when Prince Albert and herself were for a time
fascinated by that attractive but difficult process. Of these I owe to
the Queen's kindness a complete series.[6] Of them it is enough to say
that the drawing is not remarkable, and that, as etchings, the
difficulties of the art have not been overcome. But I had frequent
occasion to observe that Her Majesty's studies had resulted in a power
of judging good artistic work beyond that of even the tolerably
accomplished amateur. She was in the constant habit of having engravings
made of the portraits of her family and friends, for private
circulation, and for several years I acted, by her desire, as the medium
of communication between her and the brothers Francis and William Holl,
the eminent engravers, by whom the work was done. The engravers' proofs
of these, always carefully scrutinised by the Queen, were never returned
to me without some pertinent comment, sometimes illustrated by a drawing
by the Queen upon the margin. "None but an artist could have made that
suggestion" was a not uncommon remark of the engraver. It showed him how
to correct something which he himself had not seen the way to amend.
With so much to do and think of, Her Majesty was entitled to expect from
her Ministers that all important matters submitted for her consideration
should be explained in language at once lucid and concise. This, no
doubt, was generally done. But a very remarkable instance to the
contrary came under my notice while I was lying ill at Osborne. The
Irish Church Disestablishment question, which in 1867 had been much
agitated, took the shape, in January 1868, of a bill, the printed draft
of which, together with a letter explanatory of the measure, was sent by
Mr Gladstone to the Queen. Her Private Secretary, General Grey, must
have been absent from Osborne at the time, otherwise the Queen would
have turned to him for aid in clearing up any difficulty she found in
mastering these documents. I was therefore surprised to receive a note
from Her Majesty, sending them to me, requesting me to read and return
them with a _precis_ of their contents, as she had read and re-read Mr
Gladstone's very long letter, and found herself more and more lost in
the clouds of his explanations the more she toiled through them. My
opinion of the measure, of course, was not asked for--it never was upon
any subject where her Ministers were properly her advisers--and Her
Majesty knew she could rely on my secrecy in regard to its terms as
implicitly as if I had been sworn of her Privy Council. My task was
simply to analyse and state as clearly as I could the scope of the
measure as I might gather it from the documents sent. That the Queen
should have been lost in the fog of the long and far from lucid
sentences of her Minister, running, as they did, through upwards of a
dozen closely written quarto pages, seemed only natural. I therefore
turned from them to the draft bill, and long professional experience in
the study of similar documents made it easy for me to furnish Her
Majesty with the information desired, for which I presently received a
gracious acknowledgment, with the happy assurance that she now saw her
way clearly to deal with the measure proposed.
This incident, long forgotten, was recalled to my mind on reading the
statement made with an air of assured knowledge,[7] that the Queen's
"prejudice" against Mr Gladstone began from her "suspecting him of
trying to overwork her." I have the best reason to know the
groundlessness of this imputation. The Queen's distrust of Mr
Gladstone--not her "prejudice" against him--was of a much earlier date
than his first Premiership. It was deeply seated, and for reasons that
grew more and more serious as the years rolled on. But this is a matter
with which the future chronicler of the Queen's Life may be left to
deal. Instead of complaining that she was overtasked by Mr Gladstone,
Her Majesty's complaint more probably was, that she was not kept fully
and timeously informed by him of important matters to which she
conceived her attention should have been called. However this may be,
the Queen was too fair-minded to allow "prejudice" to warp her judgment
as to any of her Ministers; but her intuitively searching glance, her
unfailing memory and long experience, would instinctively lead her to
make of their characters a penetrating and conscientiously careful
study.
It seems like egotism to quote the following letter, but it shows better
than anything I could write the position in relation to Her Majesty
which, I scarcely know how, I had very early come to occupy.
"BALMORAL, _5th June 1869_.
"The Queen has received Mr Martin's _most_ kind letter of the
3rd.... She really is at a loss to say how much she feels his
constant and invariable kindness to her, and how deeply grateful she
is for it. In the Queen's position, though it might sound strange,
as she has so many to serve her, she feels the assistance rendered
her by others in private matters, in which her official servants,
from one cause or another, seem to feel little interest and to be
very helpless, is of immense value; and she considers it _most
fortunate_, to say the least, to have found so kind a friend as Mr
Martin. The Queen likewise feels that in him she has found an
impartial friend, who can tell her many important things which her
own unbiassed servants cannot hear or tell her. This the Queen
mentioned to Mr Martin the other day when she saw him at Windsor,
when she alluded to the loss of Baron Stockmar."
It puzzled me to think what the many little, by me "unremembered acts of
kindness," could be which prompted such a recognition. It was always not
merely an honour but a delight to be serviceable in any way to a lady so
courteous, so unexacting, so full herself of thoughtful kindness. Being
in no way under the restraint which inevitably keeps official servants
in a great measure aloof from a sovereign mistress, I could speak on all
unofficial subjects on which my opinion was invited with a frank
unreserve that was impossible to them. I had nothing to fear, nothing to
gain, nothing to conceal. More deeply attached, more truly loyal to
their Royal mistress it was impossible to be than were the able and
accomplished officials by whom she was surrounded, and to whom her
wishes were a law which it was their pride to obey. Still, she was their
Royal mistress, and could not have the same feeling of unreserve with
them as with one like myself, who was wholly independent. In my
observation of Court life, I was often reminded of the words of the
Queen in Browning's _In a Balcony_, isolated as she was, although
surrounded by a loyal Court, and shut away from that frank communion
with others, without which life must drag so heavily along:--
"Oh, to live with a thousand beating hearts
Around you, swift eyes, serviceable hands,
Professing they've no care but for your care,
Thought but to help you, love but for yourself,--
And you the marble statue all the time
They praise and point at!"
And yet, no marble statue, but human to the core, and craving for the
homely sympathies of simple, healthy, human life. Such was our Queen.
Early in my attendances upon Her Majesty, the name of Baron Stockmar was
frequently on her lips, and it was always coupled with expressions of
the deepest respect and affection. How well these were justified I soon
learned from his letters and memoranda, addressed to the Queen and
Prince, which were placed in my hands. It was obvious that they would be
of the greatest value for my Life of the Prince, and I told Her Majesty
that I intended to make copious use of them there. On this she wrote to
me:--
"BALMORAL, _Sept. 30, 1869_.
"The Queen rejoices to think that the great character of her dear
old Baron will be known now as it ought to be. Indeed, the greatest
worth is often not known.[8] No one feels this so strongly as the
Queen has done and does. What worth, what talent, what real
greatness exist, unknown and unimagined, though not by the Great
Judge of all men!"
I had made my selection of Stockmar's letters and memoranda for my
purpose, when a volume by his son, the Baron Ernest von Stockmar, was
published in the autumn of 1872, of _Memorabilia_ from his father's
papers, which threw not a little additional light upon the life and
character of this remarkable man.[9] As he was to form a prominent
figure in my book, and, though little known to the general public, had
been frequently misrepresented as a dangerous influence at the Queen's
Court, I made his son's book the text for a careful monograph of the
Baron for the _Quarterly Review_.[10] I was the more impelled to do so,
as the Queen, the Princess Royal (Empress Frederic), and others of the
Baron's friends thought the book had failed to do justice to the lovable
and more attractive features of the Baron's character. His wisdom and
great political sagacity spoke for themselves in the extracts from the
published documents, but the finer qualities were not brought out which
endeared him to his friends. His son had not, perhaps, had so many
opportunities as his English friends for judging the Baron, for a large
part of Stockmar's life had been spent away from his home in Coburg,
first in attendance on Prince Leopold (King of the Belgians), and
afterwards in long visits at the English Court. This might well have
been, seeing that "Stockmar," as M. Van de Weyer, who had known him long
and intimately, wrote to me, "concealed the tenderness of his heart, his
loving nature, his sweet temper, his devotion to his friends, under a
stoical appearance which deceived none of those who knew him well; and
to know him was to love him." His son had, somehow, failed to appreciate
this side of his character, and his book, therefore, left an impression
of hardness and austerity which did injustice to his father, and which
it was my endeavour to remove.
That his influence upon the Queen and Prince was all for good, they were
the first and always most eager to acknowledge. No one knew England and
its people--what they would bear and what they would not bear in their
sovereigns--better than he. Sir Robert Peel, Lords Aberdeen, Derby,
Clarendon, John Russell, and Palmerston all deferred to his judgment as
that of the wisest and most far-seeing politician of the day. Having
very fully expressed my opinion of him from this point of view
elsewhere, it only concerns me to say here, that the Queen considered
that she owed much of the success of her reign to the sound
constitutional principles which he had impressed upon her, and to the
warnings, almost prophetic, as to how the changes of circumstance and of
opinion were to be dealt with, which his statesmanlike sagacity foresaw
were likely to arise in the epoch of transition into which England and
Europe were, in his view, rapidly advancing.
Stockmar, who had watched the Queen from childhood, wrote of her in
1847: "The Queen improves greatly. She makes daily advances in
discernment and experience; the candour, the love of truth, the
fairness, the considerateness with which she judges men and things are
truly delightful, and the ingenuous self-knowledge with which she speaks
about herself is amiable to a degree." Of that rare quality of
ingenuousness I saw many illustrations. Thus, for example, how few would
be ready to make so frank a confession as to any portion of their past
lives as this, in a letter to me (February 18, 1869), which Her Majesty
gave as a reason why she could not send, for the purpose of the Prince's
biography, her letters during the first years after her accession:--
"OSBORNE, _Feb. 18, 1869_.
"The Queen's own letters between 1837 and 1840 are not pleasing, and
are, indeed, rather painful to herself. It was the least sensible
and satisfactory time in her whole life, and she must therefore
destroy a great many. That life of constant amusement, flattery,
excitement, and mere politics had a bad effect (as it must have upon
any one) on her naturally simple and serious nature. But all
changed in 1840 [with her marriage]."
The Queen's candour and love of truth, too, made her impatient at being
praised where praise was not due, especially where praise should have
been given to the Prince Consort. Thus she writes to Lord John Russell
(November 18, 1860), on reading in a Cape journal a speech of Sir George
Grey's extolling the nature of the education given to her eldest sons:
"She feels, she must say, _pained_ at such constant praise of _her_
education of our sons, when it is _all_ due to the Prince, and when his
untiring and indefatigable exertions for our children's good is the
chief, indeed sole, cause of the success which till now has attended our
efforts.... The praise so constantly given to the Queen, and the
popularity she enjoys, she knows and feels are due, in a great measure,
to the guidance and assistance of the Prince, to be whose wife she
considers so great a privilege, and she feels it almost wrong when
praise is given to _her_ for what she knows _he_ deserves."
Every inch a Queen as she was, and careful that the Royal authority
which she inherited should suffer no detriment in her hands, there ran
through Her Majesty's nature a vein of modest humility as to her own
knowledge and powers in things of common life, a seeking for guidance
and help, which was infinitely touching. She made no secret to herself
of her own faults and shortcomings. One does not expect queens to make
acknowledgments of these, but even these were made upon occasion. Thus
in her anxiety to throw light for me upon the Prince's character, she
sent me a copy of a letter (July 13, 1848) in which he rebuked her,
tenderly but firmly, for writing to him when he had gone from home on a
public occasion, in what she calls "a very discreditable fit of
pettishness, which she was humiliated to have to own," to the effect
that he could do without her, and did not take her miniature with him.
In her letter to me she says, that she would not have written as she
did had she not been spoilt by his never really leaving her. The
Prince's reply is too sacred to quote in full; but what wife's heart
would not leap with joy to read the concluding words? "Dein liebes Bild
trage Ich in mir; und die Miniaturen bleiben stets weit hinter diesen
zurueck; eine solche auf meinem Tisch zu stellen um mich _Deiner_ zu
_erinnern_ bedarf es nicht."[11]