I
Lord Palmerston's laugh--a queer metallic "Ha! ha! ha!" with
reverberations in it from the days of Pitt and the Congress of
Vienna--was heard no more in Piccadilly; Lord John Russell dwindled into
senility; Lord Derby tottered from the stage. A new scene opened; and
new protagonists--Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli--struggled together
in the limelight. Victoria, from her post of vantage, watched these
developments with that passionate and personal interest which she
invariably imported into politics. Her prepossessions were of an
unexpected kind. Mr. Gladstone had been the disciple of her revered
Peel, and had won the approval of Albert; Mr. Disraeli had hounded Sir
Robert to his fall with hideous virulence, and the Prince had pronounced
that he "had not one single element of a gentleman in his composition."
Yet she regarded Mr. Gladstone with a distrust and dislike which
steadily deepened, while upon his rival she lavished an abundance of
confidence, esteem, and affection such as Lord Melbourne himself had
hardly known.
Her attitude towards the Tory Minister had suddenly changed when
she found that he alone among public men had divined her feelings at
Albert's death. Of the others she might have said "they pity me and not
my grief;" but Mr. Disraeli had understood; and all his condolences
had taken the form of reverential eulogies of the departed. The Queen
declared that he was "the only person who appreciated the Prince."
She began to show him special favour; gave him and his wife two of the
coveted seats in St. George's Chapel at the Prince of Wales's wedding,
and invited him to stay a night at Windsor. When the grant for the
Albert Memorial came before the House of Commons, Disraeli, as leader of
the Opposition, eloquently supported the project. He was rewarded by
a copy of the Prince's speeches, bound in white morocco, with an
inscription in the royal hand. In his letter of thanks he "ventured
to touch upon a sacred theme," and, in a strain which re-echoed with
masterly fidelity the sentiments of his correspondent, dwelt at length
upon the absolute perfection of Albert. "The Prince," he said, "is the
only person whom Mr. Disraeli has ever known who realised the Ideal.
None with whom he is acquainted have ever approached it. There was in
him a union of the manly grace and sublime simplicity, of chivalry with
the intellectual splendour of the Attic Academe. The only character in
English history that would, in some respects, draw near to him is Sir
Philip Sidney: the same high tone, the same universal accomplishments,
the same blended tenderness and vigour, the same rare combination of
romantic energy and classic repose." As for his own acquaintance
with the Prince, it had been, he said, "one of the most satisfactory
incidents of his life: full of refined and beautiful memories, and
exercising, as he hopes, over his remaining existence, a soothing
and exalting influence." Victoria was much affected by "the depth and
delicacy of these touches," and henceforward Disraeli's place in her
affections was assured. When, in 1866, the Conservatives came into
office, Disraeli's position as Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader
of the House necessarily brought him into a closer relation with the
Sovereign. Two years later Lord Derby resigned, and Victoria, with
intense delight and peculiar graciousness, welcomed Disraeli as her
First Minister.
But only for nine agitated months did he remain in power. The Ministry,
in a minority in the Commons, was swept out of existence by a general
election. Yet by the end of that short period the ties which bound
together the Queen and her Premier had grown far stronger than ever
before; the relationship between them was now no longer merely that
between a grateful mistress and a devoted servant: they were friends.
His official letters, in which the personal element had always been
perceptible, developed into racy records of political news and social
gossip, written, as Lord Clarendon said, "in his best novel style."
Victoria was delighted; she had never, she declared, had such letters
in her life, and had never before known EVERYTHING. In return, she sent
him, when the spring came, several bunches of flowers, picked by her own
hands. He despatched to her a set of his novels, for which, she said,
she was "most grateful, and which she values much." She herself had
lately published her "Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the
Highlands," and it was observed that the Prime Minister, in conversing
with Her Majesty at this period, constantly used the words "we authors,
ma'am." Upon political questions, she was his staunch supporter. "Really
there never was such conduct as that of the Opposition," she wrote. And
when the Government was defeated in the House she was "really shocked at
the way in which the House of Commons go on; they really bring discredit
on Constitutional Government." She dreaded the prospect of a change;
she feared that if the Liberals insisted upon disestablishing the Irish
Church, her Coronation Oath might stand in the way. But a change there
had to be, and Victoria vainly tried to console herself for the loss of
her favourite Minister by bestowing a peerage upon Mrs. Disraeli.
Mr. Gladstone was in his shirt-sleeves at Hawarden, cutting down a
tree, when the royal message was brought to him. "Very significant,"
he remarked, when he had read the letter, and went on cutting down his
tree. His secret thoughts on the occasion were more explicit, and were
committed to his diary. "The Almighty," he wrote, "seems to sustain and
spare me for some purpose of His own, deeply unworthy as I know myself
to be. Glory be to His name."
The Queen, however, did not share her new Minister's view of the
Almighty's intentions. She could not believe that there was any divine
purpose to be detected in the programme of sweeping changes which
Mr. Gladstone was determined to carry out. But what could she do? Mr.
Gladstone, with his daemonic energy and his powerful majority in
the House of Commons, was irresistible; and for five years (1869-74)
Victoria found herself condemned to live in an agitating atmosphere
of interminable reform--reform in the Irish Church and the Irish land
system, reform in education, reform in parliamentary elections,
reform in the organisation of the Army and the Navy, reform in the
administration of justice. She disapproved, she struggled, she grew very
angry; she felt that if Albert had been living things would never have
happened so; but her protests and her complaints were alike unavailing.
The mere effort of grappling with the mass of documents which poured
in upon her in an ever-growing flood was terribly exhausting. When the
draft of the lengthy and intricate Irish Church Bill came before her,
accompanied by an explanatory letter from Mr. Gladstone covering a dozen
closely-written quarto pages, she almost despaired. She turned from
the Bill to the explanation, and from the explanation back again to the
Bill, and she could not decide which was the most confusing. But she had
to do her duty: she had not only to read, but to make notes. At last
she handed the whole heap of papers to Mr. Martin, who happened to be
staying at Osborne, and requested him to make a precis of them. When
he had done so, her disapproval of the measure became more marked than
ever; but, such was the strength of the Government, she actually found
herself obliged to urge moderation upon the Opposition, lest worse
should ensue.
In the midst of this crisis, when the future of the Irish Church was
hanging in the balance, Victoria's attention was drawn to another
proposed reform. It was suggested that the sailors in the Navy should
henceforward be allowed to wear beards. "Has Mr. Childers ascertained
anything on the subject of the beards?" the Queen wrote anxiously to the
First Lord of the Admiralty. On the whole, Her Majesty was in favour
of the change. "Her own personal feeling," she wrote, "would be for the
beards without the moustaches, as the latter have rather a soldierlike
appearance; but then the object in view would not be obtained, viz.
to prevent the necessity of shaving. Therefore it had better be as
proposed, the entire beard, only it should be kept short and very
clean." After thinking over the question for another week, the Queen
wrote a final letter. She wished, she said, "to make one additional
observation respecting the beards, viz. that on no account should
moustaches be allowed without beards. That must be clearly understood."
Changes in the Navy might be tolerated; to lay hands upon the Army was a
more serious matter. From time immemorial there had been a particularly
close connection between the Army and the Crown; and Albert had devoted
even more time and attention to the details of military business than
to the processes of fresco-painting or the planning of sanitary cottages
for the deserving poor. But now there was to be a great alteration: Mr.
Gladstone's fiat had gone forth, and the Commander-in-Chief was to
be removed from his direct dependence upon the Sovereign, and made
subordinate to Parliament and the Secretary of State for War. Of all the
liberal reforms this was the one which aroused the bitterest resentment
in Victoria. She considered that the change was an attack upon her
personal position--almost an attack upon the personal position of
Albert. But she was helpless, and the Prime Minister had his way.
When she heard that the dreadful man had yet another reform in
contemplation--that he was about to abolish the purchase of military
commissions--she could only feel that it was just what might have been
expected. For a moment she hoped that the House of Lords would come to
the rescue; the Peers opposed the change with unexpected vigour; but Mr.
Gladstone, more conscious than ever of the support of the Almighty, was
ready with an ingenious device. The purchase of commissions had been
originally allowed by Royal Warrant; it should now be disallowed by the
same agency. Victoria was faced by a curious dilemma: she abominated the
abolition of purchase; but she was asked to abolish it by an exercise of
sovereign power which was very much to her taste. She did not hesitate
for long; and when the Cabinet, in a formal minute, advised her to sign
the Warrant, she did so with a good grace.
Unacceptable as Mr. Gladstone's policy was, there was something else
about him which was even more displeasing to Victoria. She disliked his
personal demeanour towards herself. It was not that Mr. Gladstone,
in his intercourse with her, was in any degree lacking in courtesy or
respect. On the contrary, an extraordinary reverence impregnated
his manner, both in his conversation and his correspondence with the
Sovereign. Indeed, with that deep and passionate conservatism which, to
the very end of his incredible career, gave such an unexpected colouring
to his inexplicable character, Mr. Gladstone viewed Victoria through a
haze of awe which was almost religious--as a sacrosanct embodiment of
venerable traditions--a vital element in the British Constitution--a
Queen by Act of Parliament. But unfortunately the lady did not
appreciate the compliment. The well-known complaint--"He speaks to me
as if I were a public meeting-" whether authentic or no--and the turn
of the sentence is surely a little too epigrammatic to be genuinely
Victorian--undoubtedly expresses the essential element of her antipathy.
She had no objection to being considered as an institution; she was one,
and she knew it. But she was a woman too, and to be considered ONLY as
an institution--that was unbearable. And thus all Mr. Gladstone's zeal
and devotion, his ceremonious phrases, his low bows, his punctilious
correctitudes, were utterly wasted; and when, in the excess of his
loyalty, he went further, and imputed to the object of his veneration,
with obsequious blindness, the subtlety of intellect, the wide reading,
the grave enthusiasm, which he himself possessed, the misunderstanding
became complete. The discordance between the actual Victoria and this
strange Divinity made in Mr. Gladstone's image produced disastrous
results. Her discomfort and dislike turned at last into positive
animosity, and, though her manners continued to be perfect, she
never for a moment unbent; while he on his side was overcome with
disappointment, perplexity, and mortification.
Yet his fidelity remained unshaken. When the Cabinet met, the Prime
Minister, filled with his beatific vision, would open the proceedings by
reading aloud the letters which he had received from the Queen upon the
questions of the hour. The assembly sat in absolute silence while,
one after another, the royal missives, with their emphases, their
ejaculations, and their grammatical peculiarities, boomed forth in all
the deep solemnity of Mr. Gladstone's utterance. Not a single comment,
of any kind, was ever hazarded; and, after a fitting pause, the Cabinet
proceeded with the business of the day.
II
Little as Victoria appreciated her Prime Minister's attitude towards
her, she found that it had its uses. The popular discontent at her
uninterrupted seclusion had been gathering force for many years, and
now burst out in a new and alarming shape. Republicanism was in the air.
Radical opinion in England, stimulated by the fall of Napoleon III and
the establishment of a republican government in France, suddenly grew
more extreme than it ever had been since 1848. It also became for the
first time almost respectable. Chartism had been entirely an affair of
the lower classes; but now Members of Parliament, learned professors,
and ladies of title openly avowed the most subversive views. The
monarchy was attacked both in theory and in practice. And it was
attacked at a vital point: it was declared to be too expensive. What
benefits, it was asked, did the nation reap to counterbalance the
enormous sums which were expended upon the Sovereign? Victoria's
retirement gave an unpleasant handle to the argument. It was pointed out
that the ceremonial functions of the Crown had virtually lapsed; and the
awkward question remained whether any of the other functions which it
did continue to perform were really worth L385,000 per annum. The royal
balance-sheet was curiously examined. An anonymous pamphlet entitled
"What does she do with it?" appeared, setting forth the financial
position with malicious clarity. The Queen, it stated, was granted by
the Civil List L60,000 a year for her private use; but the rest of her
vast annuity was given, as the Act declared, to enable her "to defray
the expenses of her royal household and to support the honour and
dignity of the Crown." Now it was obvious that, since the death of the
Prince, the expenditure for both these purposes must have been very
considerably diminished, and it was difficult to resist the conclusion
that a large sum of money was diverted annually from the uses for which
it had been designed by Parliament, to swell the private fortune of
Victoria. The precise amount of that private fortune it was impossible
to discover; but there was reason to suppose that it was gigantic;
perhaps it reached a total of five million pounds. The pamphlet
protested against such a state of affairs, and its protests were
repeated vigorously in newspapers and at public meetings. Though it is
certain that the estimate of Victoria's riches was much exaggerated,
it is equally certain that she was an exceedingly wealthy woman. She
probably saved L20,000 a year from the Civil List, the revenues of
the Duchy of Lancaster were steadily increasing, she had inherited a
considerable property from the Prince Consort, and she had been left, in
1852, an estate of half a million by Mr. John Neild, an eccentric
miser. In these circumstances it was not surprising that when, in 1871,
Parliament was asked to vote a dowry of L30,000 to the Princess Louise
on her marriage with the eldest son of the Duke of Argyle, together with
an annuity of L6,000, there should have been a serious outcry(*).
(*) In 1889 it was officially stated that the Queen's total
savings from the Civil List amounted to L824,025, but that
out of this sum much had been spent on special
entertainments to foreign visitors. Taking into
consideration the proceeds from the Duchy of Lancaster,
which were more than L60,000 a year, the savings of the
Prince Consort, and Mr. Neild's legacy, it seems probable
that, at the time of her death, Victoria's private fortune
approached two million pounds.
In order to conciliate public opinion, the Queen opened Parliament in
person, and the vote was passed almost unanimously. But a few months
later another demand was made: the Prince Arthur had come of age, and
the nation was asked to grant him an annuity of L15,000. The outcry was
redoubled. The newspapers were filled with angry articles; Bradlaugh
thundered against "princely paupers" to one of the largest crowds that
had ever been seen in Trafalgar Square; and Sir Charles Dilke expounded
the case for a republic in a speech to his constituents at Newcastle.
The Prince's annuity was ultimately sanctioned in the House of Commons
by a large majority; but a minority of fifty members voted in favour of
reducing the sum to L10,000.
Towards every aspect of this distasteful question, Mr. Gladstone
presented an iron front. He absolutely discountenanced the extreme
section of his followers. He declared that the whole of the Queen's
income was justly at her personal disposal, argued that to complain
of royal savings was merely to encourage royal extravagance, and
successfully convoyed through Parliament the unpopular annuities, which,
he pointed out, were strictly in accordance with precedent. When, in
1872, Sir Charles Dilke once more returned to the charge in the House
of Commons, introducing a motion for a full enquiry into the Queen's
expenditure with a view to a root and branch reform of the Civil
List, the Prime Minister brought all the resources of his powerful
and ingenious eloquence to the support of the Crown. He was completely
successful; and amid a scene of great disorder the motion was
ignominiously dismissed. Victoria was relieved; but she grew no fonder
of Mr. Gladstone.
It was perhaps the most miserable moment of her life. The Ministers,
the press, the public, all conspired to vex her, to blame her, to
misinterpret her actions, to be unsympathetic and disrespectful in
every way. She was "a cruelly misunderstood woman," she told Mr. Martin,
complaining to him bitterly of the unjust attacks which were made upon
her, and declaring that "the great worry and anxiety and hard work for
ten years, alone, unaided, with increasing age and never very strong
health" were breaking her down, and "almost drove her to despair." The
situation was indeed deplorable. It seemed as if her whole existence
had gone awry; as if an irremediable antagonism had grown up between the
Queen and the nation. If Victoria had died in the early seventies, there
can be little doubt that the voice of the world would have pronounced
her a failure.
III
But she was reserved for a very different fate. The outburst of
republicanism had been in fact the last flicker of an expiring cause.
The liberal tide, which had been flowing steadily ever since the Reform
Bill, reached its height with Mr. Gladstone's first administration; and
towards the end of that administration the inevitable ebb began. The
reaction, when it came, was sudden and complete. The General Election of
1874 changed the whole face of politics. Mr. Gladstone and the Liberals
were routed; and the Tory party, for the first time for over forty
years, attained an unquestioned supremacy in England. It was obvious
that their surprising triumph was pre-eminently due to the skill
and vigour of Disraeli. He returned to office, no longer the dubious
commander of an insufficient host, but with drums beating and flags
flying, a conquering hero. And as a conquering hero Victoria welcomed
her new Prime Minister.
Then there followed six years of excitement, of enchantment, of
felicity, of glory, of romance. The amazing being, who now at last, at
the age of seventy, after a lifetime of extraordinary struggles, had
turned into reality the absurdest of his boyhood's dreams, knew well
enough how to make his own, with absolute completeness, the heart of the
Sovereign Lady whose servant, and whose master, he had so miraculously
become. In women's hearts he had always read as in an open book. His
whole career had turned upon those curious entities; and the more
curious they were, the more intimately at home with them he seemed
to be. But Lady Beaconsfield, with her cracked idolatry, and Mrs.
Brydges-Williams, with her clogs, her corpulence, and her legacy,
were gone: an even more remarkable phenomenon stood in their place. He
surveyed what was before him with the eye of a past-master; and he was
not for a moment at a loss. He realised everything--the interacting
complexities of circumstance and character, the pride of place mingled
so inextricably with personal arrogance, the superabundant emotionalism,
the ingenuousness of outlook, the solid, the laborious respectability,
shot through so incongruously by temperamental cravings for the
coloured and the strange, the singular intellectual limitations, and the
mysteriously essential female elements impregnating every particle of
the whole. A smile hovered over his impassive features, and he
dubbed Victoria "the Faery." The name delighted him, for, with that
epigrammatic ambiguity so dear to his heart, it precisely expressed
his vision of the Queen. The Spenserian allusion was very pleasant--the
elegant evocations of Gloriana; but there was more in it than that:
there was the suggestion of a diminutive creature, endowed with
magical--and mythical--properties, and a portentousness almost
ridiculously out of keeping with the rest of her make-up. The Faery, he
determined, should henceforward wave her wand for him alone. Detachment
is always a rare quality, and rarest of all, perhaps, among politicians;
but that veteran egotist possessed it in a supreme degree. Not only did
he know what he had to do, not only did he do it; he was in the audience
as well as on the stage; and he took in with the rich relish of a
connoisseur every feature of the entertaining situation, every phase of
the delicate drama, and every detail of his own consummate performance.
The smile hovered and vanished, and, bowing low with Oriental gravity
and Oriental submissiveness, he set himself to his task. He had
understood from the first that in dealing with the Faery the appropriate
method of approach was the very antithesis of the Gladstonian; and such
a method was naturally his. It was not his habit to harangue and exhort
and expatiate in official conscientiousness; he liked to scatter flowers
along the path of business, to compress a weighty argument into a happy
phrase, to insinuate what was in his mind with an air of friendship
and confidential courtesy. He was nothing if not personal; and he had
perceived that personality was the key that opened the Faery's heart.
Accordingly, he never for a moment allowed his intercourse with her to
lose the personal tone; he invested all the transactions of State with
the charms of familiar conversation; she was always the royal lady, the
adored and revered mistress, he the devoted and respectful friend. When
once the personal relation was firmly established, every difficulty
disappeared. But to maintain that relation uninterruptedly in a smooth
and even course a particular care was necessary: the bearings had to be
most assiduously oiled. Nor was Disraeli in any doubt as to the nature
of the lubricant. "You have heard me called a flatterer," he said to
Matthew Arnold, "and it is true. Everyone likes flattery, and when you
come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel." He practiced what
he preached. His adulation was incessant, and he applied it in the very
thickest slabs. "There is no honor and no reward," he declared, "that
with him can ever equal the possession of your Majesty's kind thoughts.
All his own thoughts and feelings and duties and affections are now
concentrated in your Majesty, and he desires nothing more for his
remaining years than to serve your Majesty, or, if that service
ceases, to live still on its memory as a period of his existence most
interesting and fascinating." "In life," he told her, "one must have for
one's thoughts a sacred depository, and Lord Beaconsfield ever presumes
to seek that in his Sovereign Mistress." She was not only his own
solitary support; she was the one prop of the State. "If your Majesty
is ill," he wrote during a grave political crisis, "he is sure he will
himself break down. All, really, depends upon your Majesty." "He lives
only for Her," he asseverated, "and works only for Her, and without Her
all is lost." When her birthday came he produced an elaborate confection
of hyperbolic compliment. "To-day Lord Beaconsfield ought fitly,
perhaps, to congratulate a powerful Sovereign on her imperial sway, the
vastness of her Empire, and the success and strength of her fleets and
armies. But he cannot, his mind is in another mood. He can only think of
the strangeness of his destiny that it has come to pass that he should
be the servant of one so great, and whose infinite kindness, the
brightness of whose intelligence and the firmness of whose will, have
enabled him to undertake labours to which he otherwise would be quite
unequal, and supported him in all things by a condescending sympathy,
which in the hour of difficulty alike charms and inspires. Upon the
Sovereign of many lands and many hearts may an omnipotent Providence
shed every blessing that the wise can desire and the virtuous deserve!"
In those expert hands the trowel seemed to assume the qualities of
some lofty masonic symbol--to be the ornate and glittering vehicle of
verities unrealised by the profane.
Such tributes were delightful, but they remained in the nebulous region
of words, and Disraeli had determined to give his blandishments a more
significant solidity. He deliberately encouraged those high views of
her own position which had always been native to Victoria's mind and
had been reinforced by the principles of Albert and the doctrines of
Stockmar. He professed to a belief in a theory of the Constitution which
gave the Sovereign a leading place in the councils of government;
but his pronouncements upon the subject were indistinct; and when he
emphatically declared that there ought to be "a real Throne," it was
probably with the mental addition that that throne would be a very
unreal one indeed whose occupant was unamenable to his cajoleries.
But the vagueness of his language was in itself an added stimulant to
Victoria. Skilfully confusing the woman and the Queen, he threw, with a
grandiose gesture, the government of England at her feet, as if in doing
so he were performing an act of personal homage. In his first audience
after returning to power, he assured her that "whatever she wished
should be done." When the intricate Public Worship Regulation Bill was
being discussed by the Cabinet, he told the Faery that his "only object"
was "to further your Majesty's wishes in this matter." When he brought
off his great coup over the Suez Canal, he used expressions which
implied that the only gainer by the transaction was Victoria. "It is
just settled," he wrote in triumph; "you have it, Madam... Four millions
sterling! and almost immediately. There was only one firm that could
do it--Rothschilds. They behaved admirably; advanced the money at a low
rate, and the entire interest of the Khedive is now yours, Madam." Nor
did he limit himself to highly-spiced insinuations. Writing with all
the authority of his office, he advised the Queen that she had the
constitutional right to dismiss a Ministry which was supported by a
large majority in the House of Commons, he even urged her to do so, if,
in her opinion, "your Majesty's Government have from wilfulness, or even
from weakness, deceived your Majesty." To the horror of Mr. Gladstone,
he not only kept the Queen informed as to the general course of business
in the Cabinet, but revealed to her the part taken in its discussions by
individual members of it. Lord Derby, the son of the late Prime Minister
and Disraeli's Foreign Secretary, viewed these developments with grave
mistrust. "Is there not," he ventured to write to his Chief, "just a
risk of encouraging her in too large ideas of her personal power, and
too great indifference to what the public expects? I only ask; it is for
you to judge."
As for Victoria, she accepted everything--compliments, flatteries,
Elizabethan prerogatives--without a single qualm. After the long gloom
of her bereavement, after the chill of the Gladstonian discipline, she
expanded to the rays of Disraeli's devotion like a flower in the sun.
The change in her situation was indeed miraculous. No longer was she
obliged to puzzle for hours over the complicated details of business,
for now she had only to ask Mr. Disraeli for an explanation, and he
would give it her in the most concise, in the most amusing, way. No
longer was she worried by alarming novelties; no longer was she put out
at finding herself treated, by a reverential gentleman in high collars,
as if she were some embodied precedent, with a recondite knowledge of
Greek. And her deliverer was surely the most fascinating of men. The
strain of charlatanism, which had unconsciously captivated her in
Napoleon III, exercised the same enchanting effect in the case of
Disraeli. Like a dram-drinker, whose ordinary life is passed in dull
sobriety, her unsophisticated intelligence gulped down his rococo
allurements with peculiar zest. She became intoxicated, entranced.
Believing all that he told her of herself, she completely regained the
self-confidence which had been slipping away from her throughout
the dark period that followed Albert's death. She swelled with a new
elation, while he, conjuring up before her wonderful Oriental visions,
dazzled her eyes with an imperial grandeur of which she had only dimly
dreamed. Under the compelling influence, her very demeanour altered.
Her short, stout figure, with its folds of black velvet, its muslin
streamers, its heavy pearls at the heavy neck, assumed an almost
menacing air. In her countenance, from which the charm of youth had long
since vanished, and which had not yet been softened by age, the traces
of grief, of disappointment, and of displeasure were still visible, but
they were overlaid by looks of arrogance and sharp lines of peremptory
hauteur. Only, when Mr. Disraeli appeared, the expression changed in an
instant, and the forbidding visage became charged with smiles. For him
she would do anything. Yielding to his encouragements, she began to
emerge from her seclusion; she appeared in London in semi-state, at
hospitals and concerts; she opened Parliament; she reviewed troops and
distributed medals at Aldershot. But such public signs of favour were
trivial in comparison with her private attentions. During his flours of
audience, she could hardly restrain her excitement and delight. "I can
only describe my reception," he wrote to a friend on one occasion, "by
telling you that I really thought she was going to embrace me. She was
wreathed with smiles, and, as she tattled, glided about the room like
a bird." In his absence, she talked of him perpetually, and there was
a note of unusual vehemence in her solicitude for his health. "John
Manners," Disraeli told Lady Bradford, "who has just come from Osborne,
says that the Faery only talked of one subject, and that was her Primo.
According to him, it was her gracious opinion that the Government should
make my health a Cabinet question. Dear John seemed quite surprised at
what she said; but you are used to these ebullitions." She often sent
him presents; an illustrated album arrived for him regularly from
Windsor on Christmas Day. But her most valued gifts were the bunches of
spring flowers which, gathered by herself and her ladies in the woods at
Osborne, marked in an especial manner the warmth and tenderness of her
sentiments. Among these it was, he declared, the primroses that he loved
the best. They were, he said, "the ambassadors of Spring, the gems and
jewels of Nature." He liked them, he assured her, "so much better for
their being wild; they seem an offering from the Fauns and Dryads of
Osborne." "They show," he told her, "that your Majesty's sceptre has
touched the enchanted Isle." He sat at dinner with heaped-up bowls of
them on every side, and told his guests that "they were all sent to me
this morning by the Queen from Osborne, as she knows it is my favorite
flower."
As time went on, and as it became clearer and clearer that the
Faery's thraldom was complete, his protestations grew steadily more
highly--coloured and more unabashed. At last he ventured to import
into his blandishments a strain of adoration that was almost avowedly
romantic. In phrases of baroque convolution, he conveyed the message
of his heart. "The pressure of business," he wrote, had "so absorbed and
exhausted him, that towards the hour of post he has not had clearness
of mind, and vigour of pen, adequate to convey his thoughts and facts to
the most loved and illustrious being, who deigns to consider them." She
sent him some primroses, and he replied that he could "truly say they
are 'more precious than rubies,' coming, as they do, and at such a
moment, from a Sovereign whom he adores." She sent him snowdrops, and
his sentiment overflowed into poetry. "Yesterday eve," he wrote, "there
appeared, in Whitehall Gardens, a delicate-looking case, with a royal
superscription, which, when he opened, he thought, at first, that your
Majesty had graciously bestowed upon him the stars of your Majesty's
principal orders." And, indeed, he was so impressed with this graceful
illusion, that, having a banquet, where there were many stars and
ribbons, he could not resist the temptation, by placing some snowdrops
on his heart, of showing that, he, too, was decorated by a gracious
Sovereign.
Then, in the middle of the night, it occurred to him, that it might all
be an enchantment, and that, perhaps, it was a Faery gift and came from
another monarch: Queen Titania, gathering flowers, with her Court, in
a soft and sea-girt isle, and sending magic blossoms, which, they say,
turn the heads of those who receive them.
A Faery gift! Did he smile as he wrote the words? Perhaps; and yet
it would be rash to conclude that his perfervid declarations were
altogether without sincerity. Actor and spectator both, the two
characters were so intimately blended together in that odd composition
that they formed an inseparable unity, and it was impossible to say that
one of them was less genuine than the other. With one element, he
could coldly appraise the Faery's intellectual capacity, note with some
surprise that she could be on occasion "most interesting and amusing,"
and then continue his use of the trowel with an ironical solemnity;
while, with the other, he could be overwhelmed by the immemorial panoply
of royalty, and, thrilling with the sense of his own strange elevation,
dream himself into a gorgeous phantasy of crowns and powers and
chivalric love. When he told Victoria that "during a somewhat romantic
and imaginative life, nothing has ever occurred to him so interesting as
this confidential correspondence with one so exalted and so inspiring,"
was he not in earnest after all? When he wrote to a lady about the
Court, "I love the Queen--perhaps the only person in this world left to
me that I do love," was he not creating for himself an enchanted palace
out of the Arabian Nights, full of melancholy and spangles, in which
he actually believed? Victoria's state of mind was far more simple;
untroubled by imaginative yearnings, she never lost herself in that
nebulous region of the spirit where feeling and fancy grow confused. Her
emotions, with all their intensity and all their exaggeration, retained
the plain prosaic texture of everyday life. And it was fitting that her
expression of them should be equally commonplace. She was, she told her
Prime Minister, at the end of an official letter, "yours aff'ly V. R.
and I." In such a phrase the deep reality of her feeling is instantly
manifest. The Faery's feet were on the solid earth; it was the ruse
cynic who was in the air.
He had taught her, however, a lesson, which she had learnt with alarming
rapidity. A second Gloriana, did he call her? Very well, then, she would
show that she deserved the compliment. Disquieting symptoms followed
fast. In May, 1874, the Tsar, whose daughter had just been married to
Victoria's second son, the Duke of Edinburgh, was in London, and, by an
unfortunate error, it had been arranged that his departure should not
take place until two days after the date on which his royal hostess had
previously decided to go to Balmoral. Her Majesty refused to modify
her plans. It was pointed out to her that the Tsar would certainly be
offended, that the most serious consequences might follow; Lord Derby
protested; Lord Salisbury, the Secretary of State for India, was much
perturbed. But the Faery was unconcerned; she had settled to go to
Balmoral on the 18th, and on the 18th she would go. At last Disraeli,
exercising all his influence, induced her to agree to stay in London
for two days more. "My head is still on my shoulders," he told Lady
Bradford. "The great lady has absolutely postponed her departure!
Everybody had failed, even the Prince of Wales... and I have no doubt I
am not in favour. I can't help it. Salisbury says I have saved an Afghan
War, and Derby compliments me on my unrivalled triumph." But before very
long, on another issue, the triumph was the Faery's. Disraeli, who had
suddenly veered towards a new Imperialism, had thrown out the suggestion
that the Queen of England ought to become the Empress of India. Victoria
seized upon the idea with avidity, and, in season and out of season,
pressed upon her Prime Minister the desirability of putting his proposal
into practice. He demurred; but she was not to be baulked; and in 1876,
in spite of his own unwillingness and that of his entire Cabinet, he
found himself obliged to add to the troubles of a stormy session
by introducing a bill for the alteration of the Royal Title. His
compliance, however, finally conquered the Faery's heart. The measure
was angrily attacked in both Houses, and Victoria was deeply touched by
the untiring energy with which Disraeli defended it. She was, she said,
much grieved by "the worry and annoyance" to which he was subjected; she
feared she was the cause of it; and she would never forget what she owed
to "her kind, good, and considerate friend." At the same time, her wrath
fell on the Opposition. Their conduct, she declared, was "extraordinary,
incomprehensible, and mistaken," and, in an emphatic sentence which
seemed to contradict both itself and all her former proceedings, she
protested that she "would be glad if it were more generally known that
it was HER wish, as people WILL have it, that it has been FORCED UPON
HER!" When the affair was successfully over, the imperial triumph was
celebrated in a suitable manner. On the day of the Delhi Proclamation,
the new Earl of Beaconsfield went to Windsor to dine with the new
Empress of India. That night the Faery, usually so homely in her attire,
appeared in a glittering panoply of enormous uncut jewels, which had
been presented to her by the reigning Princes of her Raj. At the end of
the meal the Prime Minister, breaking through the rules of
etiquette, arose, and in a flowery oration proposed the health of
the Queen-Empress. His audacity was well received, and his speech was
rewarded by a smiling curtsey.
These were significant episodes; but a still more serious manifestation
of Victoria's temper occurred in the following year, during the crowning
crisis of Beaconsfield's life. His growing imperialism, his desire
to magnify the power and prestige of England, his insistence upon a
"spirited foreign policy," had brought him into collision with Russia;
the terrible Eastern Question loomed up; and when war broke out between
Russia and Turkey, the gravity of the situation became extreme.
The Prime Minister's policy was fraught with difficulty and danger.
Realising perfectly the appalling implications of an Anglo-Russian war,
he was yet prepared to face even that eventuality if he could obtain
his ends by no other method; but he believed that Russia in reality was
still less desirous of a rupture, and that, if he played his game with
sufficient boldness and adroitness, she would yield, when it came to the
point, all that he required without a blow. It was clear that the
course he had marked out for himself was full of hazard, and demanded
an extraordinary nerve; a single false step, and either himself, or
England, might be plunged in disaster. But nerve he had never lacked;
he began his diplomatic egg-dance with high assurance; and then he
discovered that, besides the Russian Government, besides the Liberals
and Mr. Gladstone, there were two additional sources of perilous
embarrassment with which he would have to reckon. In the first place
there was a strong party in the Cabinet, headed by Lord Derby, the
Foreign Secretary, which was unwilling to take the risk of war; but his
culminating anxiety was the Faery.
From the first, her attitude was uncompromising. The old hatred of
Russia, which had been engendered by the Crimean War, surged up again
within her; she remembered Albert's prolonged animosity; she felt the
prickings of her own greatness; and she flung herself into the turmoil
with passionate heat. Her indignation with the Opposition--with anyone
who ventured to sympathise with the Russians in their quarrel with the
Turks--was unbounded. When anti-Turkish meetings were held in London,
presided over by the Duke of Westminster and Lord Shaftesbury, and
attended by Mr. Gladstone and other prominent Radicals, she considered
that "the Attorney-General ought to be set at these men;" "it can't,"
she exclaimed, "be constitutional." Never in her life, not even in the
crisis over the Ladies of the Bedchamber, did she show herself a more
furious partisan. But her displeasure was not reserved for the Radicals;
the backsliding Conservatives equally felt its force. She was even
discontented with Lord Beaconsfield himself. Failing entirely to
appreciate the delicate complexity of his policy, she constantly
assailed him with demands for vigorous action, interpreted each finesse
as a sign of weakness, and was ready at every juncture to let slip the
dogs of war. As the situation developed, her anxiety grew feverish. "The
Queen," she wrote, "is feeling terribly anxious lest delay should cause
us to be too late and lose our prestige for ever! It worries her night
and day." "The Faery," Beaconsfield told Lady Bradford, "writes every
day and telegraphs every hour; this is almost literally the case." She
raged loudly against the Russians. "And the language," she cried,
"the insulting language--used by the Russians against us! It makes the
Queen's blood boil!" "Oh," she wrote a little later, "if the Queen were
a man, she would like to go and give those Russians, whose word one
cannot believe, such a beating! We shall never be friends again till we
have it out. This the Queen feels sure of."
The unfortunate Prime Minister, urged on to violence by Victoria on
one side, had to deal, on the other, with a Foreign Secretary who was
fundamentally opposed to any policy of active interference at all.
Between the Queen and Lord Derby he held a harassed course. He gained,
indeed, some slight satisfaction in playing on the one against the
other--in stimulating Lord Derby with the Queen's missives, and in
appeasing the Queen by repudiating Lord Derby's opinions; on one
occasion he actually went so far as to compose, at Victoria's request,
a letter bitterly attacking his colleague, which Her Majesty forthwith
signed, and sent, without alteration, to the Foreign Secretary. But such
devices only gave a temporary relief; and it soon became evident that
Victoria's martial ardour was not to be sidetracked by hostilities
against Lord Derby; hostilities against Russia were what she wanted,
what she would, what she must, have. For now, casting aside the last
relics of moderation, she began to attack her friend with a series of
extraordinary threats. Not once, not twice, but many times she held over
his head the formidable menace of her imminent abdication. "If England,"
she wrote to Beaconsfield, "is to kiss Russia's feet, she will not be a
party to the humiliation of England and would lay down her crown," and
she added that the Prime Minister might, if he thought fit, repeat her
words to the Cabinet. "This delay," she ejaculated, "this uncertainty by
which, abroad, we are losing our prestige and our position, while Russia
is advancing and will be before Constantinople in no time! Then the
Government will be fearfully blamed and the Queen so humiliated that
she thinks she would abdicate at once. Be bold!" "She feels," she
reiterated, "she cannot, as she before said, remain the Sovereign of
a country that is letting itself down to kiss the feet of the great
barbarians, the retarders of all liberty and civilisation that exists."
When the Russians advanced to the outskirts of Constantinople she fired
off three letters in a day demanding war; and when she learnt that the
Cabinet had only decided to send the Fleet to Gallipoli she declared
that "her first impulse" was "to lay down the thorny crown, which she
feels little satisfaction in retaining if the position of this country
is to remain as it is now." It is easy to imagine the agitating effect
of such a correspondence upon Beaconsfield. This was no longer the
Faery; it was a genie whom he had rashly called out of her bottle, and
who was now intent upon showing her supernal power. More than once,
perplexed, dispirited, shattered by illness, he had thoughts of
withdrawing altogether from the game. One thing alone, he told Lady
Bradford, with a wry smile, prevented him. "If I could only," he wrote,
"face the scene which would occur at headquarters if I resigned, I would
do so at once."
He held on, however, to emerge victorious at last. The Queen was
pacified; Lord Derby was replaced by Lord Salisbury; and at the Congress
of Berlin der alte Jude carried all before him. He returned to England
in triumph, and assured the delighted Victoria that she would very soon
be, if she was not already, the "Dictatress of Europe."
But soon there was an unexpected reverse. At the General Election
of 1880 the country, mistrustful of the forward policy of the
Conservatives, and carried away by Mr. Gladstone's oratory, returned the
Liberals to power. Victoria was horrified, but within a year she was to
be yet more nearly hit. The grand romance had come to its conclusion.
Lord Beaconsfield, worn out with age and maladies, but moving still, an
assiduous mummy, from dinner-party to dinner-party, suddenly moved no
longer. When she knew that the end was inevitable, she seemed, by a
pathetic instinct, to divest herself of her royalty, and to shrink, with
hushed gentleness, beside him, a woman and nothing more. "I send some
Osborne primroses," she wrote to him with touching simplicity, "and I
meant to pay you a little visit this week, but I thought it better you
should be quite quiet and not speak. And I beg you will be very good and
obey the doctors." She would see him, she said, "when we, come back from
Osborne, which won't be long." "Everyone is so distressed at your not
being well," she added; and she was, "Ever yours very aff'ly V.R.I."
When the royal letter was given him, the strange old comedian, stretched
on his bed of death, poised it in his hand, appeared to consider deeply,
and then whispered to those about him, "This ought to be read to me by a
Privy Councillor."