Victoria The Queen: An Intimate Biography Of The Woman Who Ruled An Empire
Julia Baird
Random House
696 pages; $35
You can learn a lot about a queen from the contents of her coffin. In her frisky, adventurous new biography of Queen Victoria, Julia Baird offers not only an inventory of the items with which the queen wished to be buried but also the exact placement she specified for them. Of course her treasured husband, Prince Albert, would be represented; Victoria had spent much of her life draped in black, showily mourning his death. So Albert’s framed photograph and a cast of his hand were duly buried with her.
But John Brown, a Scotsman who became both Victoria’s employee and constant companion, took pride of place. A leather case holding photographs of Brown and a lock of his hair was to be placed right in the queen’s hand. Brown’s handkerchief was to be laid atop her, while Albert’s was merely to be included in the large collection of burial accouterments. She also wanted photographs of all her children and grandchildren, and to be adorned with 10 rings, including five from Albert, and one that had belonged to Brown’s mother.
As Ms Baird notes, this information isn’t new. But she was nonetheless asked to remove it from the book by the senior archivist of the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Those archives hold extremely rare material to which Ms Baird was privy. And in exchange for access she agreed to remove any Royal Archives material she was asked to from her finished book. But when asked to remove the results of her independent research, she refused. “It was the object of this book to hack through myths, not hew to them,” she writes.
When Ms Baird goes after those myths, her alternative versions are exhilarating. She describes how and why young Victoria, born in 1819, had to be a fighter from the start: “Not long after she pulled the first fistfuls of air into her lungs, there were rumours that her wicked uncles were planning to kill her.” She details the wretched behaviour of those uncles, all sons of the famously mad King George III, who gradually cleared a path for her. And she shows why Victoria needed to develop a strong backbone long before she ever dreamed of being queen, thanks to the ways in which her father’s death and mother’s treachery shaped her.
This book shows how Victoria’s girlish naughtiness turned into a regal, willful, complex nature that other biographers have tended to simplify. It’s also very astute about the way the man she deemed pure perfection, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (her cousin), would undermine that nature during their years together. Ms Baird brings a strong feminist awareness to the ways in which Victoria’s letters, edited by two men, have been censored to excise the full range of her personality, and also to the subordinate role any wife was expected to assume when Victoria was a young bride. Victoria’s willingness to let this happen is contrasted with the life and work of her contemporary, Florence Nightingale, who fought to fulfil her ambitions.
Queen or no queen, Victoria took up the non-stop business of childbearing (she had six children from 1840 to 1846, and then three others at more widely spaced intervals) and let Albert assume some of her royal role. She accepted being addressed by her husband as “Dear Child”. And she was extremely happy during these early days of marriage, another aspect of her life that sometimes gets short shrift. Though she was not partial to infants, both she and Albert could be unusually doting parents. And they relished private time with their children on the Isle of Wight, where they built a home instead of inheriting one. Ms Baird’s book provides the contrast of Buckingham Palace, rat-infested and smelling strongly of sewage, to make this seaside retreat all the more alluring.
But “Victoria the Queen” describes the 20 years of Victoria’s marriage to Albert as the weakest period of her reign. It presents her as working tirelessly but too deferentially to sustain her authority. It was only after Albert’s death — and the years of numbing grief that had the English wondering whether their queen was still able to fulfil her responsibilities — that she could recover her grip, return to politics, deal with prime ministers she either liked (Disraeli) or detested (Gladstone) and win back her subjects’ loyalty.
It helped that she fell happily in love with John Brown, the Scottish servant who doted on her, teased her and never dreamed of treating her with condescension. If there’s one thing missing from the book, it’s Ms Baird’s thoughts on why Victoria let herself become submissive to Albert for so long, but perhaps the answers to that are too obviously linked to the loss of a father so early in life. In any case, she adored being coddled, and Ms Baird says she got that from Brown. Victoria was lucky enough to reign over Britain during 63 mostly peaceful years, from June 20, 1837, to January 22, 1901. She had limited knowledge of both the Crimean and Boer Wars but was sheltered from much of the bad news.
The horrors that loomed largest in her life were much more personal. She lived through the deaths of many close relatives, including children and grandchildren. Haemophilia ran in her family (and passed, through one daughter, to Spanish royalty). And she spent much of her life in physical pain, thanks to the ravages of childbirth. She was so delighted to be given chloroform for the birth of her eighth, that baby Leopold was nicknamed Anesthesia.
© 2016 The New York Times News Service
