Queen Victoria's Mysterious Daughter Read online

  Princess Louise was only five when war broke out, but the conflict was something no royal child was unaware of. Having enjoyed a brief couple of years of acceptance, Prince Albert found that his heritage was causing trouble. Newspapers published articles claiming Albert was ‘intriguing’ on the side of Russia. The royal family, with its relations in so many different royal houses all over Europe, were constantly entreated and harassed by supporters of both sides. In February 1854, Queen Victoria wrote to her beloved uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, that she feared war was ‘quite inevitable’. Within a couple of weeks, Louise and her siblings were standing with their parents on the balcony of Buckingham Palace watching a parade of soldiers shortly to depart for the Crimea. The royal children spent the next two years, alongside their lessons, knitting for the troops. They made scarves and socks, stockings and gloves – anything that might be of benefit to the troops living and dying in the cold and harsh surroundings of a Crimean winter.

  The Crimean War changed the way people in Britain viewed foreign conflicts. Thanks to innovations in communications and transport, news reports were sent home with much greater rapidity than in the past. This was the beginning of true war correspondence. The most celebrated journalist of the time, William Howard Russell, sent eyewitness reports to London from the Crimea. Russell’s stories from the front line transformed how people viewed the military, commanders and war in general. ‘The commonest accessories of a hospital are wanting,’ reported Russell from the Crimea: ‘there is not the least attention paid to decency or cleanliness … For all I can observe, these men die without the least effort being made to save them … The sick appear to be tended by the sick, and the dying by the dying.’ It was this new style of groundbreaking journalism that inspired Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole.

  Thanks to Russell’s pioneering work, the British public was aware that war was not a glorious thing that happened in far-off lands, that bred heroes and could be forgotten about in everyday life. Through the medium of the newspapers, it was now known to be terrifying, cruel and often inglorious. Those with sons, lovers, brothers and husbands away fighting had to live with the knowledge of what really happened on the battlefields. Russell’s report from Balaclava inspired one of the most iconic of Victorian poems, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Russell’s report included the words:

  They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war. We could scarcely believe the evidence of our senses! Surely that handful of men were not going to charge an army in position? Alas, it was but too true – their desperate valour knew no bounds, and far indeed was it removed from its so-called better part – discretion.

  It was not only literature that took up the cause of the soldier fallen in the Crimea, artists were also inspired. Suddenly galleries were full of scenes if not of the fighting, then of families devastated by the death or injury of loved ones. James Collinson, perhaps the least well known of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, exhibited the poignant Home Again in 1856.3 On first glance, it appears to be a joyous reunion of a soldier returning to his family. The large family is depicted in a poor but cosy home lit by a glowing fire. There are young children, a work-worn wife and elderly parents – all of whom are supported by his salary. On closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the soldier is not leaning forward to embrace his wife – he is stumbling forward with his arms outstretched trying to find her. The war has left him blind. Victorian viewers would have understood that he would be pensioned off at a fraction of the salary he earned when able-bodied. Now, instead of being the breadwinner, the soldier will not only be unable to earn, but he will also need someone else, someone of useful working age, to help care for him. The family’s future looks frighteningly bleak.

  Many artists focused on the royal family and their visits to the wounded. The queen, Albert and their children were frequently depicted visiting hospitals and talking to returned soldiers. In 1856, a popular painting showed the queen, the prince consort and their two eldest sons visiting disabled soldiers at the Brompton Hospital in Chatham, Kent, a visit which had taken place in March 1855. Queen Victoria’s First Visit to her Wounded Soldiers by Jerry Barrett depicts the two young princes listening to the tales told by a disabled soldier. His clothing is worn and his beard unkempt, but he commands the full attention of the royal family by his bravery.4

  Once the shock of going to war had subsided, Queen Victoria’s letters suggest that she found the war exhilarating. By the autumn of 1854, she thrilled with the idea of her handsome young troops fighting bravely and expressed the wish that she could have been a man and fought with them. She busied herself with plans for a creating a Crimea medal and, when it became apparent many more troops were needed, the queen offered the royal yacht as transport, estimating it could easily house 1,000 soldiers. As the war continued, the royal family became increasingly aware this was not a simple skirmish from which they could soon retire in glory. The monarch also began to realise what it would mean for the many wounded soldiers who would be unable to work; she started asking what schemes could be put in place to enable disabled servicemen to find jobs on their return home.

  Royal family life continued, however, much as before. In 1855, the family travelled to the Isle of Wight for a summer at Osborne House and the Belgian royal family came to stay – although it was an unfortunate time to visit, as the nurseries had to be quarantined due to scarlet fever. The first to succumb were Louise, Arthur and Leopold. Soon afterwards, Prince Albert was writing that Alice had caught the illness from Louise. While the four invalids were recuperating, Victoria, Albert and their older children travelled to Paris. It was the year in which the city was hosting its response to the Great Exhibition, the Exposition Universelle, on the Champs-Elysées. Among the British exhibits was the much-celebrated painting Ophelia, by an artist who would become one of Queen Victoria’s favourite painters, John Everett Millais. Along with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, he was a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the rebellious art movement that had been established in the year of Louise’s birth. Millais came from a wealthy family, so he was in the enviable – and rare – position of being an artist who did not need to worry about money. Within a couple of decades, Millais would be a member of Princess Louise’s circle of friends.

  In early September the reunited family journeyed to Scotland, and their new home, Balmoral. The queen recorded in her journal that as they entered the hallway ‘an old shoe was thrown after us … for good luck’. The queen adored Balmoral, but many of her children were less enthusiastic. As adults, both Vicky and Alice would live overseas and the idea of Balmoral became to them a kind of talisman with which they could hold on to the past; both had rose-tinted memories of their Scottish home. For the younger royal children still living with their mother, the castle held fewer charms. Louise and Leopold particularly grew to dislike Balmoral as cold and unfriendly and for the bad memories they gained there – especially, after Prince Albert’s death, of its association with the queen’s adored Highland ghillie, John Brown (a bullying man who might have been loved by the monarch but who was despised by her children). As Louise grew into her teens and then adulthood, the family visits to the Highlands began to feel more like incarceration than relaxation and she longed for visitors to alleviate the boredom. During her early childhood years, however, the children were still captivated by their mother’s enthusiasm for the Scottish Highlands. The family was at Balmoral in 1856 when they heard the news of an allied victory: the fall of Sebastopol. Albert led a party of revellers to the top of a nearby hill where they lit an enormous bonfire as a beacon of good news to all the villages around.

  For the princesses, as for many girls and women of the age, one of the most exciting figures to emerge from the Crimean War was a young woman known as ‘The Lady with the Lamp’. Florence Nightingale had become a legendary figure for Louise and her sisters. Queen Victoria was immensely impressed
with the work carried out by the nursing pioneer and sent her a brooch and an invitation to visit the royal family on her return to Britain. At the end of September, Florence Nightingale arrived at Balmoral. Lady Augusta Bruce (later Lady Augusta Stanley), one of the queen’s mother’s ladies-in-waiting,5 wrote on 23 September 1856:

  Last night we did not return from Balmoral till 7.30 as there was a neighbour Ball to inaugurate the new Ballroom … The room lovely and the little Princesses exquisite. By the way, the most important addition was Miss Nightingale!… [who] spent a long time with the Queen on Sunday. – She is much less altered than expected – her beautiful countenance looks to me more beautiful than ever. – Her hair is short and she wears a little plain morning cap – her black gown high, open in front. The Queen and children delighted with her … She is so modest and retiring and fearful of notice … It is most touching to look on that slight delicate frame and think what it has been enabled to go through.

  The queen noted in her journal on 4 October 1856: ‘Had some long conversation with excellent Miss Nightingale, whose affection for my poor good soldiers is most touching, & whose philanthropy & truly Christ-like spirit of true charity are beautiful.’

  For Louise, this meeting was thrilling. Throughout her life, she was intrigued by women who broke the rules. Florence Nightingale had been born into a wealthy family and was expected to follow the established journey of a well-born, middle-class Victorian woman. She had been born in Italy on her parents’ extended honeymoon (and was named after the city of her birth) but grew up in rural England, where she felt stifled by the smallness of her world. One of her earliest battles was in persuading her parents to let her learn mathematics, a subject considered too masculine for a girl. It was a hard-fought battle, but she won. She would continue to fight for the right to make her own choices about life, often at the expense of family happiness. At a young age Florence had experienced what she described as a calling from God; her vocation was nursing. Her family was appalled, but eventually Florence achieved her dream. She not only learnt the craft of nursing but went on to fight for the right of other women to do the same and she changed the profession dramatically, making it regulated, respectable and far more efficient.

  When she met Nightingale, a woman of forceful personality and charisma, Louise was in awe of her. This was a woman who, before she found fame, had been shunned by many of her own social class for her ‘unnatural’ desire to work in such a lowly and unsavoury job, yet by the end of the Crimean War Florence Nightingale was universally hailed as a heroine. It had taken courage, stamina and determination. The opportunity to meet this legendary woman made a very deep impression. Princess Louise would always identify with, and want to associate with, women who did unusual or brave things. As she grew older, she made an effort to meet those whom society had shunned or who challenged the status quo, such as the novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), and the campaigners Harriet Martineau and Josephine Butler. She wanted to become one of those celebrated and controversial women herself.

  CHAPTER 3

  In the shadow of her siblings

  Louise is very naughty and backward, though improved and very pretty, and affectionate.

  Queen Victoria, letter to Vicky, 1858

  The Crimean War ended in February 1856, shortly before Louise’s eighth birthday (for which occasion a Mr Tanner brought his performing dogs to the Orangerie at Windsor Castle). Within a few weeks, the royal family had a secret reason to celebrate. Vicky had become engaged. Her fiancé was the Crown Prince of Prussia, Frederick, known as Fritz. Vicky was not yet sixteen so her mother requested that the news be kept secret for as long as possible and the couple wait a couple of years before marrying. By the middle of 1856, the secret was more generally known amongst friends and relations, yet Princess Louise and six-year-old Prince Arthur were kept in ignorance. Queen Victoria had decided that, although Louise was eight years old, she would ‘not understand’, so she insisted that no one tell her. By the date of Vicky’s engagement, Louise usually appears in her mother’s journal coupled with Arthur, with whom, by dint of age, she was most closely linked. The queen’s standard formula when she wrote about her two children was ‘Louise and dear little Arthur’ or ‘Dear little Arthur came in with Louise’. By the end of 1856, the news was such public knowledge that the engaged couple were honoured with waxworks at Madame Tussaud’s, yet Louise was still expected not to know.

  In the summer of 1857, a few weeks after Beatrice’s birth, Louise was given the opportunity to go abroad for the first time. She was part of the family party when the royal yacht arrived in Cherbourg, and then Alderney, in the Channel Islands. The yachting holiday was only part of the great excitement of the final months of the year. At last Louise had been told about her sister’s engagement and she knew she would be a bridesmaid.

  Vicky and Fritz’s wedding took place at the Chapel Royal at St James’s on Monday 25 February 1858. The queen’s dress was so magnificent that many of the newspapers wrote more about the bride’s mother than the bride; particular notice was taken of the fact that the queen wore the world’s biggest known diamond, the Koh-i-noor. Alice, Helena and Louise wore dresses of pink satin and white lace, with headdresses of cornflowers and daisies. Vicky’s brothers all wore Highland dress and Prince Albert was resplendent in military uniform. This was one of the most exciting events in Louise’s life so far and it fired her romantic imagination. The wedding cake towered over all the royal family (none of whom were particularly tall) at ‘between six and seven feet in height’, decorated with pillars, statues in ornamental niches and festoons of jasmine flowers. The decorations included profile drawings of the bride and groom and the English and Prussian royal families’ coats of arms. Each slice of cake was decorated with a medallion bearing an image of the bridal couple.

  Following the excitement of the wedding, the younger children soon lost the company not only of their eldest sister, but also of their two eldest brothers. Alfred joined the navy in 1858 and Bertie was finally permitted to start living independently at White Lodge in Richmond Park (albeit under such close guard by servants who reported back to his parents on his every mood that it was a spurious brand of ‘independence’). When Bertie moved away, his relationship with his mother improved, but her words in a letter to Vicky are still damning: ‘His natural turn and taste is very trifling, and I think him a very dull companion. But he has been quite altered, for the last few months (in short since he lived at the White Lodge) as to manner, and he is no longer difficile à vivre. Handsome I cannot think him, with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin.’

  In the year that Bertie, Vicky and Affie left home, Louise celebrated her tenth birthday. Despite her parents’ continued belief that Louise was mentally deficient, comments from others suggest that she was a very artistic, sensitive and intuitive child, who misbehaved because of boredom and unhappiness, not stupidity. Louise had to contend with her parents’ favouring of Beatrice, just as Bertie had had to contend both with the brilliance of Vicky (who he had assumed, until enlightened by his tutor, would inherit his mother’s throne) and with his parents’ very obvious preference first for Alfred, and then for Arthur. In 1858, the queen wrote to her husband of Arthur, ‘This Child is dearer than any of the others put together.’ (Beatrice being considered still a baby, not a child, did not fall into the same category as the others.) In the same year, she sent Vicky a report of her younger siblings:

  … As for Leopold he still bruises as much as ever, but has (unberufen) not had accidents of late. He is tall, but holds himself worse than ever, and is a very common looking child, very plain in face, clever but an oddity – and not an engaging child though amusing. I hope the new governess will be able to make him more like other children … Arthur is a precious love. Really the best child I ever saw. Louise is very naughty and backward, though improved and very pretty, and affectionate.

  Louise and Bertie would often feel themselves all
ies. Both lacked self-confidence and were, as a consequence, often overlooked in favour of their happier, more confident siblings. When the family performed in plays or acted tableaux, the young Louise and Bertie were often placed together, in the less demanding (and less interesting) roles. Yet as an adult, Louise’s acting ability was remarked upon favourably (although her lack of interest in learning lines made her a less than ideal thespian). A comment from Lady Augusta Bruce, the queen’s lady-in-waiting, sums up Louise’s childhood. Lady Augusta noticed that Louise blossomed when people were kind to her and paid her attention, something that happened rarely. While the family were at Balmoral in September 1861, Lady Augusta noted, ‘Dear P.L. is very darling at present. She is so happy to be made a little of.’

  That throwaway comment is a sad indictment of a childhood and adolescence in which Louise was often made to feel as though she were the least special person in the family. An indication of this can be found in the Royal Collection. The queen was very proud of two gold and enamel bracelets composed of miniature portraits of her children. Each child was painted (usually by Winterhalter) as a toddler. The resulting portrait was then turned into a tiny but perfect miniature and added to one of the bracelets. Although Louise was born in 1848 and her portrait was painted by Winterhalter in 1851, her image was not added to the first of her mother’s bracelets, the one dedicated to the six oldest children, until a decade later: 24 May 1861. All the other children’s portraits had been added in shortly after they had been painted, while they were still toddlers. I wrote to the Royal Collection to enquire why this had happened; I wondered if an earlier portrait had been lost or damaged and needed to be replaced. The response was that there are no records of Princess Louise’s portrait having been added at any time before 1861 or of any earlier miniature having been painted. For some reason, the queen chose to wear images of every one of her children except Louise. At Christmas 1850, one of Prince Albert’s presents to his wife had been a bracelet whose clasp was made up of a miniature of Louise, but by the time Louise had begun to develop into her own person, she was no longer perceived as being quite so dear to her mother as she had been at that early Christmas, aged two.