Boiled Beef and Icy Bedrooms

In her long reign, stretching across eight decades, Queen Victoria had the support of a number of able and devoted courtiers. They helped her both to adapt to the alterations and accelerations during an era of great change and to serve as a centrepiece and anchor, preserving continuity and dispensing security. They had also, it must be said, to fall in with her demanding, often selfish style of living with its rigidly imposed and often tedious routines. And they had to find ways of softening and adjusting her more irrational or intemperate commands, reprimands and refusals. One must hope that a few of the courtiers who have come and gone during her great-great-granddaughter’s even longer reign also wrote letters or kept diaries. Then one day we may be as entertained and enlightened by them as by those that follow.

We turn first to Sarah, Lady Lyttelton. Recently widowed, she came to Windsor as a lady-in-waiting in 1838, when she was 50 and Victoria was 19, and one year into her reign. She soon realized that the Queen’s memory, as well as her ‘eyes, nose and ears, nothing escapes ever’. Her particular duties were to look after the maids of honour, ‘and to do the honours of the Castle to strangers, according to their dignity’. She was surprised by the royal ‘walk-about’ after church on Sunday, the people pressing upon the Queen until ‘her courtiers just tap them back and make way for her’. She had to learn to cope with the clutter with which the Queen surrounded herself, going to a play with ‘four different wraps, a bouquet, and a bag and an opera glass’. But this was nothing compared to the trials of a state occasion, the prorogation of Parliament, when she had to unpin a diamond diadem and pin in its place on the Queen’s head a 12-lb crown, and then do all that in reverse. In 1842 Lady Lyttelton took on a new role, as governess to Victoria and Albert’s children: Vicky, future Empress of Germany, arrived in 1840, Edward, Prince of Wales in 1841, followed by five more by 1850, the year when she retired. Her duties were to keep the French, German and English governesses under her up to the mark, as well as what she called ‘my professional business – accounts, tradesmen’s letters, maids’ quarrels, bad fitting of frocks, desirableness of rhubarb and magnesia, and by way of intellectual pursuits, false French genders and elements of the multiplication table’. One bitter December day she asked Prince Albert to check her accounts and he replied, ‘Yes, certainly, if you will consent to my doing reel steps all the time to warm myself.’ The Prince of Wales she considered ‘most promising for kindness and nobleness of mind’, a judgement which does not say anything for how he was handled by his parents in later years. Vicky had all the intellect of her father but was wilful to a degree. In 1846 ‘she was most tender and touching in her regrets at leaving me and if at the last minute she had not quarrelled with her bonnet and tried to bite my hand in her rage, I should have taken it for steady affection.’ A year later, in September, Lady Lyttelton remarked, ‘formidably satirical her turn is – no ridicule or foible escapes her’; then in October, ‘If not seen but only overheard, she might pass for a young lady of 17 in whichever of her three languages she chose to entertain the company.’ She was regularly punished by being confined to her room, and then her brother would come and cheer her up through the door. Much time was spent at the new royal residence of Osborne on the Isle of Wight where one afternoon Lady Lyttelton saw ‘patches of children each attended by their scarlet footmen . . . the Prince very busy with the builders, the equerries charging about’. The annual fête there was less appealing: ‘in the middle of the interminable country dance on the green, nothing but footmen and housemaids pounding away their ale, and the yachts’ crews running in sacks and dancing hornpipes’. Occasionally she was required to ‘dine down’ and eat with the royal couple, once ‘to help work off the old Duke of Cambridge [a son of George III]. Tends to ask questions like, “How do you get on here? Rather dull, hey?” within two chairs of the Queen’s, at a small table.’ Aristocratic intermarriage, particularly among Whig families, means we should not be surprised that the next figure, Sir Henry Ponsonby (b. 1825), was related to Lady Lyttelton: her aunt Lady Bessborough was Ponsonby’s grandmother. He served in the Grenadier Guards, but also as secretary to several lord-lieutenants in Ireland, and in 1857 he became an equerry to Prince Albert. His first royal dinner at Windsor was an ordeal, sitting next to a lady in black: he knew she was a foreign princess but no more than that. By the fish course she still had not uttered so he tried a sentence in English, ending in ‘mum’. ‘It succeeded and we got on very well . . . After dinner is very awful. We all stand jammed against a wall and our observations are necessarily few.’ In 1861 he became equerry to the Queen and married Mary Bulteel, one of her maids of honour, who was also a granddaughter of Lord Grey of the Great Reform Bill. In 1870 it was his wife’s uncle, General Grey, whom he succeeded as the Queen’s Private Secretary, and this he remained until 1895. It was as well that this wise and temperate man, endowed with both a sense of proportion and a sense of humour as well as great diplomatic skill, came when he did. Grey had become increasingly rattled by the Queen’s infatuation with her Highland servant, John Brown, imagining the worst and fearing it would lead to the end of the monarchy. The Queen, for her part, was becoming increasingly irrational and unbiddable, refusing to carry out public duties, battened down in Balmoral or Osborne, perhaps in the grip of the menopause. She was testing the loyalty of her subjects at a time when the atmosphere was full of demands for reform. Ponsonby made clear his technique for dealing with the Queen in two passages. ‘Of course if I had been a brave able clever man, I might have read her a lecture on her duties. But of course I did nothing of the sort. Had I done so, I suppose I should never have the subject approached again.’ Then: ‘When she insists that 2 and 2 make 5 I say I cannot help thinking they make 4. She replies there may be some truth in what I say, but she knows they make 5. Thereupon I drop the discussion. It is of no consequence and I leave it there, knowing the fact.’ As his son Arthur commented in his life of his father, ‘Ponsonby trusted in fact to her good sense, of which he had quite a high opinion, eventually straightening things out. But she must not be bullied into a confession of error.’ In 1880 his father gave a typical example of just this:

The Queen asked me who should represent her [at the funeral of the Empress of Russia]. I said the Duke of Edinburgh [the Queen’s second son, Alfred]. The Queen said, ‘No, of course he couldn’t.’ I said, ‘Of course he couldn’t.’ But as I did not know why, I got back to him in the course of conversation and said it was a pity he couldn’t. So she telegraphed to ask him if he could and he said he would.

Like everyone else in attendance at Balmoral, Ponsonby had to submit to the strict regime, for instance not being allowed to go out in the morning before the Queen. He had to endure the freezing dining- and drawing-rooms – only the passages had heating. The Queen’s circulation was unlike others’, and she positively enjoyed the cold – ‘I always feel so brisk,’ she said. The boredom was often stultifying and sometimes he was reduced to starting an argument just to get a discussion going. The ghillies’ balls, where the Queen danced with John Brown, were too rough-and-tumble, with too much hooting and shouting, for his taste. Brown made many enemies through his coarseness and brusque manner, but Ponsonby knew he had to work with him for the Queen’s sake. Our third courtier, Marie Mallet, became a maid of honour in 1887 and later a lady-in-waiting and secretary, following her mother, who had been a woman of the bedchamber, and joining her waggish uncle Alick Yorke, organizer of the theatricals so enjoyed by the Queen. At Balmoral she only ever felt warm in bed, resented the regular bouts of mourning insisted on – ‘relapsing into jet, the crêpe pall descending’ – but enjoyed her walks alongside the Queen’s pony chair because ‘One can talk so much more easily.’ Once, to her ‘intense astonishment, the Queen ascended a huge ladder in order to mount a horse twenty-six years old’. She recorded a particular instance of the Queen’s preoccupation with the trappings of death, even when on holiday at Grasse in the South of France in 1891. A trip was made to the cemetery ‘to visit the tombs of various friends. The gentlemen went in a separate carriage full to overflowing with wreaths for the favoured tombs.’ She also observed the Queen’s eating habits closely: ‘Her favourite fruits were oranges, pears and monster indigestible apples which would have daunted most people half her age but she enjoyed them, sometimes sharing a mammoth specimen with Princess Beatrice . . . The service was so rapid that a slow eater like myself or Mr Gladstone never had time to finish even a most moderate helping.’ After dinner,

At eleven p.m. the Queen leaves the drawing-room and I wait in my bedroom until I am summoned and go to the Queen in her sitting-room where I talk and read and take orders until about half-past-twelve, then ‘good night’ . . . This routine never varies by a hair’s-breadth; as soon a revolution as to drive in the morning and walk after lunch, and boiled beef on Thursday and mehlspeise mit ananas [pudding with pineapple] on Friday recur with unfailing regularity.

Marie had things to say about the Queen’s daughters: Beatrice, the youngest, was ‘unsympathetic and self-absorbed’; Christian (Helena), ‘indiscreet but the greatest comfort’; Louise, ‘Never have I come across a more dangerous woman. To gain her end she would stick at nothing.’ Vicky, the Empress Frederick, was ‘tactless but very intelligent’. When she argued with her mother, ‘It was most amusing to see two people who are never contradicted, playing the game with each other.’ And of the Queen herself? ‘What an angel she is and how little she knows of the world we poor mortals inhabit.’ The last figure is Lady Lytton, an impoverished former Vicereine of India (and a cousin of Marie Mallet). She was on duty when the new Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his wife Alix came to visit Balmoral in 1896. Nicholas resented being forced to go shooting in bad weather by his uncle, the Prince of Wales, especially since he only got two grouse and no stags, but he left £1,000 as a tip and said the Queen ‘was kinder and more amiable than ever’. Lady Lytton found that the Queen walked up a plank to get into her carriage for her long afternoon drives, which were testing, even if broken by a lavish tea in a keeper’s cottage; on them the Queen gave out gifts of dress material to the deserving poor. When the Queen finally died at Osborne in 1901, it is claimed the Kaiser measured her for her coffin, and the London prostitutes wore black. What is true is that Lady Lytton found herself discharging her last duty alone, except for another lady-in-waiting ‘and five admirals’, with the coffin on board ship steaming to the mainland.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 79 © Roger Hudson 2023