Elizabeth II.
The Royal Family at Osborne in 1857. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II/Caldesi.
Queen Victoria and Princess Alice with a bust of Prince Albert. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II/Prince Alfred.
The Blue Room at Windsor Castle, with a bust of the Prince Consort by William Theed. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II/Hills & Saunders.
The Prince and Princess of Wales with Prince Albert Victor in 1864. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II/Prince Alfred.
Queen Victoria on the throne in 1876. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II/W & D Downey.
Queen Victoria bestowing an earldom on Disraeli. © Punch.
Prince Leopold with Sir William Jenner and the Hon. Alec Yorke. © Hulton Getty.
Princess Louise in 1865. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II/Bingham.
Princesss Beatrice in 1885. © Hulton Getty.
Attempt to shoot the Queen at Windsor in 1882. © The Illustrated London News Picture Library.
Queen Victoria smiling. A photograph by Charles Knight in c. 1887. By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Sir James Reid. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II.
Queen Victoria and the Empress Frederick in 1889. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II.
Queen Victoria in the garden at Osborne in 1889, surrounded by members of her family. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II/Mullins.
Queen Victoria in a carriage at Grasse in 1891. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II/F Busin.
Queen Victoria and the Munshi, Abdul Karim, at Balmoral in 1894. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II.
Queen Victoria with Prince and Princess Henry of Battenberg at breakfast in the Oak Room at Windsor in 1895. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II.
Queen Victoria wearing spectacles and reading a letter. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II.
Queen Victoria’s funeral procession. © Hulton Getty.
The Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore with marble effigies of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The Royal Archives 2000. © HM Queen Elizabeth II.
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In an essay read to fellows and members of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972, Giles St Aubyn said that on average Queen Victoria wrote about 2,500 words every day of her adult life, achieving a total of some sixty million in the course of her long reign. If she had been a novelist her complete works would have run to seven hundred volumes, published at the rate of one a month. To her eldest daughter alone she wrote at least twice a week, and sometimes twice a day, for over forty years. Much of this material has been published in the various books mentioned in the preliminary note to the References on page 503. There remain at Windsor, however, many letters both to and from Queen Victoria which have never before been printed; and in 1983 the late John Murray and I were kindly allowed to consult these papers and to reproduce parts of them in a selection published under the title Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals. I have to acknowledge the gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen for their publication as I do for the publication of all the other material of which she holds the copyright. I have been deeply indebted for their help to Sir Robin Mackworth-Young and Miss Jane Langton, Her Majesty’s former Librarian and her Registrar of the Royal Archives, and to Mr Oliver Everett, the Queen’s present Librarian at Windsor.
For their help in a variety of other ways I also want to thank Marian Reid, who edited the book, Juliet Davis, who helped me choose the pictures, Richard Johnson of HarperCollins, Bruce Hunter of David Higham Associates, John Kemmeer and Don Fehr of the Perseus Books Group, Dr Francis Sheppard, Captain Gordon Fergusson, John Paton, Margaret Lewendon, Richard Way, Diana Cook and the staffs of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the London Library and the Ravenscroft Library, Henley-on-Thames. Hamish Francis and Ursula Hibbert have been good enough to read the proofs, and my wife has made the comprehensive index.
Finally I must say how grateful I am to Professor Paul Smith for having read the book in typescript and for having given me much useful advice for its improvement.
CHRISTOPHER HIBBERT
QUEEN VICTORIA’S PRIME MINISTERS
A note on money:
According to figures recently compiled by the Bank of England, £41.03 would have been required in March 1999 for a person to have the same purchasing power as £1 in the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign. That is to say, for instance, today’s equivalent of the £45 10s a year paid to a maidservant at Windsor Castle in 1867 would be about £2,000 a year. The Lord Chamberlain received the equivalent of nearly £90,000 a year; and the President of Russia would now require over £1,000,000 to match the cost of the presents and gratuities given to the staff of the Royal Household by Tsar Nicholas I on his departure from the castle in 1844.
‘God damme! D’ye know what his sisters call him? By God! They call him Joseph Surface!’
SITTING AT HIS BREAKFAST TABLE in his rented house in Brussels in December 1817, Edward, Duke of Kent, fourth son of King George III, carelessly threw across the Morning Chronicle to his attractive mistress, Julie de St Laurent, and began to open his letters. ‘I had not done so but a very short time,’ he told Thomas Creevey, the witty, gossipy politician who was then also living in Brussels for reasons of economy, ‘when my attention was called to an extraordinary noise and a strong convulsive movement in Madame St Laurent’s throat. For a short time I entertained serious apprehensions for her safety; and when, upon her recovery, I enquired into the occasion of this attack, she pointed to [an] article in the Morning Chronicle.’1
This article – adverting to the death in childbirth of Princess Charlotte, the only legitimate child of his eldest brother, the Prince Regent – called upon the Duke of Kent and the other bachelor royal dukes to marry for the sake of the family succession. For, although it was later calculated that King George III had no fewer than fifty-six grandchildren, at this time not one of these grandchildren was legitimate.
The Prince Regent, who was to become King George IV on his father’s death in 1820, was now fifty-five years old, separated from a detested wife and living languorously in sumptuous