Victoria: A Life - Couverture souple

Wilson, A. N.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 184887958X ISBN 13 : 9781848879584

Editeur : Atlantic Books, 2015

A propos du livre

Extrait :

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2014 A.N. Wilson

Part One

1

 

Authors

 

 

One gusty April day in 1838, Thomas Carlyle was walking in Green Park, near Buckingham Palace in London. Forty-two years old, the Scotsman had been living in the English capital for a little over three years, and he had lately soared to literary fame. His study of The French Revolution had been published in the previous year – the year in which Victoria was crowned the Queen of England – and the popularity of the two events were not disconnected. Carlyle had made what his first biographer, Froude, called a “vast phantasmagoria”[1] culminating in the French people getting rid of their monarchy.

The English were not minded, in any very organized sense, to do the same, but Victoria became Queen in hungry times. The monarchy had not been popular in the first decades of the nineteenth century. J.A.Froude noted that “the hungry and injured millions will rise up and bring to justice their guilty rulers, themselves little better than those whom they throw down”[2].

Britain in those days was very far from being a democracy. It was governed by an oligarchy of aristocratic, landowning families. Its stability, as a state depended upon the functioning of the Law, the workings of two Houses of Parliament, the efficiency of the army and navy, the balance of trade. Parliament was representative, not democratic. That is, the members of the Commons were not elected by the People, but by a small number of men of property. In the reign previous to Victoria’s, that of her uncle William IV, the Reform Bill of 1832 had done a little to extend the franchise, and to abolish the more grotesque of the electoral anomalies – the so-called Rotten Boroughs, in which there were only a handful of electors. But the members of the Commons were not elected by more than a tiny handful of those whom they represented. Checking and approving the deliberations of the Commons was the function of the Upper House, the Lords, some hundred or so rich men who owned most of the land, and exercised most of the power, in Britain.

There had, as yet, been no French-style Revolution to overthrow these arrangements. And it was to be the care and concern of the British Governing classes to make sure that no such revolution occurred. The previous old King, William IV, having had a dissolute life, and fathered ten children out of wedlock, died legitimately married and reconciled to God, murmuring the words, “The Church, the Church”.

The twin institutions, of the Church of England, and the Monarchy, clearly played a vital role in the delicate balance of the British Constitution. The Victorians liked to tell one another that the monarch was simply a figurehead, kept in place by the Whig landowners, a figure who signed state papers and gave the nod to the deliberations of the House of Lords. This was not really the case. The monarch still occupied a position of real power in Britain, and if that power were to be exercised recklessly, or if the monarchy were hated by a hungry populace, there was no knowing what anarchy would ensue. The monarch depended upon the peerage; the peerage depended upon economic prosperity, and upon the rising commercial classes who could provide it; the shared powers of Trade, Land, the Law and the Church were all delicately, and not always obviously, interwoven in the destinies of that young woman glimpsed in the park by the historian. It was essential for her future that the other institutions should continue to support her; it was essential for all of them, that she should maintain the status quo, that she should not fail. 

Victoria’s grandfather, King George III, a monarch who was politically active, and who had played a pivotal role in the shaping of British political history, was blind for the last ten years of his life, and at sporadic intervals in the last twenty years of his long reign (1760-1820) he had been raving mad. The fear that the royal madness was hereditary was ever-present in the British governing class, and the young Queen’s ministers watched every one of her tantrums, each emotional display, every instance of irrational behaviour, with anxiety.

George III’s son, who ruled as Regent during the times of blindness and madness, had been extremely unpopular, not least because of the sordid and cruel way in which he had divorced his queen, Caroline of Brunswick. By the time he was succeeded by his brother the Duke of Clarence (William IV) in 1830, it had looked very much as if the supply of possible heirs to the throne had all but dwindled. It was mere luck that William had not, in turn, been succeeded by his extremely unpopular brother Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, a scar-faced brute who was widely believed to have murdered his valet and married a woman who had killed her previous two husbands, and whose extreme Toryism made him hated by the masses[3]. Had the young Victoria not existed, Ernest would have been the King of England, and Britain might well have made a second decision to become a Republic.

 Carlyle himself, the historian who saw Victoria in her carriage on that April day, was by way of being a republican, certainly one deeply read in the era of the first Republic in the seventeenth century, and a hero-worshipping biographer of Oliver Cromwell. Carlyle was a sardonic and amusing man, whose stock in trade was a refusal to be impressed – by the English, who to his Scottish soul were ever alien, by the Establishment, which he found laughable, by the class hierarchy, very near the bottom of which he had been born. His hero was the German poet Goethe, and Carlyle sought, in the confused state of modern England, with its great social injustices, its teeming poor, its disease-ridden industrial cities, its Philistinism, some means of returning, with that poet, a positive attitude, to life, an Everlasting Yea. Carlyle on that breezy April day, was passed by a carriage: the Queen, taking, as he said in his Scottish way, “her bit departure for Windsor. I had seen her another day at Hyde Park Corner, coming in from the daily ride. She is decidedly a pretty-looking little creature: health, clearness, graceful timidity, looking out from her young face....One could not help some interest in her, situated as mortal seldom was...”[4]

Carlyle, who went on to write one of the most magisterial royal biographies in the literature of the world – the Life of Frederick the Great – was peculiarly well-placed to see the strangeness of Victoria’s position as she swept past him in the carriage. (They would not meet until years later, when, both widowed and old, they exchanged small talk at the Deanery of Westminster Abbey).

She was indeed situated as mortal seldom was. This makes her story of abiding fascination. Her father and mother might so easily not have had a child at all. Once born, Victoria’s often solitary childhood was the strangest of preparations for what she was to become: not merely the mother of nine and the grandmother of forty-two children, but the matriarch of Royal Europe. She was either the actual ancestor of, or she was connected by marriage to, nearly all the great dynasties of Europe, and in almost each of those crowned or coroneted figureheads, there was bound up a political story. Her destiny was thus interwoven with that of millions of peoples – not just in Europe, but in the ever-expanding Empire which Britain was becoming throughout the nineteenth century. One day to be named the Empress of India, the “pretty-looking little creature” had a face which would adorn postage-stamps, banners, statues and busts all over the known world. And this came about, as the Germanophile Thomas Carlyle would have been the first to recognize, because of the combination of two peculiar factors: first, that Victoria was born at the very moment of the expansion of British political and commercial power throughout the world; and secondly that she was born from that stock of (nearly all German) families who tended to supply the crowned heads for the monarchies of the post-Napoleonic world.

        

The moment in the park, when two stars in the Victorian galaxy passed one another, is one of those little conjunctions which happen in capital cities. This was the era when Britain rose, for a few decades, to be supremely the most powerful nation on earth: richer and more powerful than any of its European rivals, even than Russia. Thereafter, another power would emerge, formed from the coalescence of the German states, the development of German heavy industry, the building up of German military and naval power. Carlyle and Queen Victoria, like so many figures who shape a new and vibrant civilization, were outsiders, who had seemingly come from nowhere. One of the things which marked them out was an acute consciousness of Germany, and its importance in the scheme of things. Mr Casaubon, the inadequate scholar married to the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, wrote worthlessly because he had not absorbed developments in German scholarship, and this was a period when it was said that only three of the dons at Oxford could so much as speak German. (It was said that the whole story if religion in the nineteenth century would have been different if the future Cardinal Newman had known German). Yet the story of Germany, and the story of Britain, and their tragic failure to understand one another, lay at the heart of nineteenth century history, being destined to explode on the battlefields of the First World War.

There was something else about the young Queen which, had he known it, would have made Carlyle – historian, journalist, biographer – all the more interested in her. Whether or not Benjamin Disraeli, novelist and Prime Minister, really buttered up his Queen by using the phrase, “we authors,Ma’am”[5], it would not have been flattery alone. Disraeli’s words are always quoted as a joke, but she really was an author. Disraeli’s alleged flannel referred to her published work, Leaves from the Journal of my Life in the Highlands, published in 1868. But this publication and its sequel were but a tiny fragment of her pen’s outpouring. Her often solitary childhood made it natural for her to express her feelings in writing. There was often no one but herself to talk to. She kept journals from infancy to old age. She was one of the most prolific letter-writers of the nineteenth century, that letter-writing age, and, whether she was conducting State business, or emoting about family crises, or worrying about her health, or noting the passing season, it was her custom to put her feelings and thoughts into writing. She must have written literally millions of letters. Her diaries were those of a compulsive recorder, and she sometimes would write as many as 2,500 words of her journal in one day.

When she died, she left many volumes of Journals, an historical record of political events, conversations, impressions, of the entire cast-list of nineteenth century public life. There was scarcely a Head of State, or a Bishop, or an aristocrat, or a famous writer or composer or painter whom she had not either met (reclusive as she was for much of the time) or of whom she had not formed some impression. Her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, took it upon herself to decide that the journals were unsuitable for public perusal, and she destroyed nearly all of them.

Princess Beatrice was not alone in wishing to obliterate her mother’s writings. Victoria’s eldest son, King Edward VII, left instructions in his will that all his private and personal correspondence, especially those letters between himself and his wife, and himself and his mother, should be destroyed. He also gathered up as much as possible of Queen Victoria’s extensive correspondence with Disraeli and consigned that to oblivion.

The compulsion felt by Victoria’s children to expunge her writings from our view leads immediately to the thought that she must have had something to hide. The reader of any modern biography of Queen Victoria is instinctively hopeful that some of the indiscretions, so diligently veiled by Princess Beatrice, can be finally unmasked. Here a word of caution must be sounded. Queen Victoria was an instinctively indiscreet person. Much as she would have hated our contemporary habits of prurience, and dismissive as she would have been of a modern writer picking over the details of her private life, she was nevertheless almost compulsive in her need to share that private life with a wider public. To this extent, though she was not an “author” in the sense that Disraeli might have half-mockingly implied; she was much more like Dickens and Ruskin and Proust than she was like the majority of royal personages who have a quite simple desire for privacy. Victoria was much more complex. On the one hand, she considered any intrusion into the Royal Family by the press to be an abominable impertinence. On the other hand, she was only prevented with the greatest difficulty by courtiers and by her children, from publishing her version of her relationship with her Highland servant John Brown.

In our lifetime, the whole convention of discretion about the lives of royal personages has been blown apart by a succession of factors – including the willingness of some members of the royal family to tell all, or nearly all, to newspaper and television journalists. Clearly such behaviour would have been unimaginable, indeed horrifying, to Queen Victoria.

In December 1890, for example, she erupted with anger at The Times printing a mild story (as it happened, it turned out to be untrue) about a proposed visit to England by the Duke and Duchess of Sparta [6]. [i.e the Crown Prince of the Hellenes, Constantine, and his wife Princess Sophie of Prussia]. All the newspaper had said was that the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, rather than accompanying the Queen and Court to Osborne the previous day, would wait behind in London for the Duke and Duchess of Sparta. An indignant Victoria instructed her Prime Minister to remonstrate with that newspaper’s editor for “the exuberant fancy of his fashionable correspondent, who makes announcements about the Queen and Royal Family at variance with the plain unvarnished Court Circular”. Her Private Secretary, General Ponsonby “told the Queen the newspapers put in the Royal news because they thought it pleased the Royal Family and they knew it pleased the public. Her Majesty replied with some asperity that these notes were most interfering and annoying to the Royal Personages who wish to be left in peace and do not desire their movements to be announced, and that the public were informed of all particulars in the Court Circular & could not be pleased at being misled by erroneous notices”.[7]

So, there could be no doubt that the Queen would have deplored anything in the nature of an intrusive journalism, or history, which pried upon her. And yet – for with interesting personalities there is always an “and yet”, and Queen Victoria was among the most fascinating and self-contradictory of all English monarchs – she also had a desire to write about her life for publication. Her children might cringe, but she was unselfconscious about describing the pleas...

Revue de presse :

[A] splendid biography - this book is a gem: thoughtful, witty, insightful, striking a balance between political commentary and personal gossip... As this terrific biography shows, there really was a human being behind the gloomy portraits. --Dominic Sandbrook, Evening Standard
Subtle, thoughtful ... a shimmering and rather wonderful biography --Kathryn Hughes, Guardian
Wilson is affectionately alert to the rich contradictions of his subject's personality, and his deliciously readable biography becomes increasingly fascinating as Victoria's reign unfolds. - Jane Shilling, Daily Mail --Book of the Week
This superb revisionist biography is the book that he was born to write. Wilson clearly loves and admires his subject, but this is a critical biography - funny, insightful, original and authoritative. At last Victoria has been rescued from her widow's weeds. --Jane Ridley, Spectator
A. N. Wilson brings his novelist's perception and immense knowledge of the era to his effervescent biography of the tiny woman (4ft 11in) who ruled Britain for 61 years... This won't be the last biography of Victoria but it is certainly the most interesting and original in a long time. --Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times
Ninety-five years ago, the standard was set by Lytton Strachey's lucid and moving Queen Victoria but A. N. Wilson has now raised the bar... And what a pity she never met A. N. Wilson: she shines in his company ... [this] expansive and victorious book. --Frances Wilson, Daily Telegraph
A. N. Wilson has written a sympathetic but by no means hagiographic biography of her that will probably overturn many people's prejudiced conception of her... Wilson's picture of her is a rounded one, with her vices and virtues. --Theodore Dalrymple, The Times
A biographer of Queen Victoria also needs to be a good historian, with a confident grasp of the personalities and issues of 19th-century public life. Mr Wilson is at his best here... This is a bracing biography of a bracing woman ... it undeniably achieves its central aim to make us take Queen Victoria more seriously. --Michael Hall, Country Life
Wilson is an excellent history teacher. He orders and narrates the hugely complex socio-political events and party infighting of the 19th century with a rare clarity... His own achievement, sustained by a lifetime's scholarly fascination with the Victorian era, is also in its way, awesome. --John Sutherland, Financial Times
Few if any previous biographers have viewed her as incisively and absorbingly as Wilson does in his... smoothly flowing treatment of the queen's long life. The considerable detail he brings to his greatly balanced portrait not only strengthens his estimation of the significance of the queen in British governmental history but also successfully conveys for the general reader all the nuances of character that Wilson so carefully shares. --Brad Hooper, Booklist, starred review

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Atlantic Books
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 184887958X
• ISBN 13: 9781848879584
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 656