Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert
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Название: Queen Victoria: A Personal History
Автор: Christopher Hibbert
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007372010
isbn:
The Queen felt no remorse, she told Lord Melbourne defiantly. She had ‘done nothing to kill her’. However, much of the Press, led by the Morning Post, and many of the public at large considered that she should have felt remorse. At Ascot that summer, as her open carriage was driven up the course, two ladies in a private stand, one of them a duchess (two ‘foolish, vulgar women’ in the Queen’s opinion, who ought to be flogged), hissed her loudly. Other voices could be heard shouting, ‘Mrs Melbourne’. She was hissed and booed also in the streets of London, as she had been at the opera in Lady Flora’s lifetime; and insults such as ‘Whose belly up now?’ were hurled at her as she rode by. Few men troubled to raise their hats at sight of her as they had done in the recent past. In fact, as Greville commented, it seemed that nobody cared for the Queen any more; loyalty was a dead letter; the scandal had played the devil with her popularity.
The Morning Post continued to upbraid her, attacking The Times for the excuses it offered for her behaviour. Pamphlets, assailing the ‘evil counsellors’ by whom she was surrounded, the ‘stranger harboured in our country’ (Baroness Lehzen) and the ‘court physician with his cringing back’ (Sir James Clark), were hawked about the streets. At a dinner in Nottingham, so General Sir Charles Napier said, his was the only voice to respond to the royal toast. Lord Ilchester believed the Queen would be well advised to leave London for a time to avoid further insult. Lord Melbourne suggested that a body of police should be made available on the day of Lady Flora’s funeral in case the Queen’s mourning carriage, which he thought should be sent as a token of respect, was stoned by demonstrators.
The family disdainfully returned the £50 which the Queen had sent to Lady Flora’s maid; and for many years thereafter the blinds of Loudon Castle were drawn whenever Queen Victoria went to Scotland.
Not long after the funeral which, in fact, was conducted without serious interruption though, as Melbourne feared, a few stones and jeers were directed at the Queen’s coach, Her Majesty was riding in Hyde Park where, although the crowd was ‘very great’, there was ‘not one hiss’. In fact a few people cheered her as she rode through the gate into St James’s Park. This, she wrote with complacent satisfaction, ‘is a good answer to those fools who say that the public feeling – a few paid Wretches – was displayed on Thursday by hooting at Ministers’.24
She was, however, far from as content and relieved as her protestations suggested. The Lady Flora Hastings affair had upset her deeply, and induced in her that malaise and inappetence so often consequent upon her emotional distress. She was ‘disgusted with everything’ and would have left the country immediately had she been a private individual. She was even, so she told Lord Melbourne, ‘tired of riding’. As for Melbourne himself, he was conscious of not having guided the young Queen in the way he should have done: he certainly should not have shuffled the blame on to her ladies during his interview with Lord Hastings. He felt penitent. So did the Queen at last. When she got a stone in her shoe while walking with him, he told her it was a penance. She did not contradict him.25
‘If Melbourne ever left the room her eyes followed him, and…she sighed when he was gone.’
FOR ALL VICTORIA’S occasional withering disapproval and what Lady Paget called her ‘commanding look’, and for all the criticism levelled at her in the immediate aftermath of the Lady Flora Hastings affair, it was generally conceded that the Queen was a young woman of charm and character, self-willed and pertinacious admittedly but determined, as she confided to her journal, to do her utmost to fulfil her duty to her country. ‘I am very young,’ she wrote with unconscious pietism, ‘and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure, that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.’
Certainly she was relishing her new role as Queen and was scarcely in need of the sympathy expressed for the ‘poor little Queen’ by Thomas Carlyle who said that she could hardly be expected to choose a bonnet for herself let alone undertake a task ‘from which an archangel might shrink’.1 She said that sometimes when she woke up in the morning she was ‘quite afraid that it should all be a dream’. It was such ‘a pleasant life’, she said. ‘Everybody says that I am quite another person since I came to the throne,’ she told Princess Feodora. ‘I look and am so very well…I [lead] just the sort of life I like. I have a good deal of business to do, and all that does me a world of good.’2
She had left Kensington Palace with mixed feelings: she had had days of great unhappiness there; but she had pleasing memories of it too, most particularly of the earlier days of her childhood. But she had been anxious to move into Buckingham Palace as soon as possible, even though it was scarcely habitable yet, builders still having much work to complete at the time of King William IV’s death. She had insisted on moving within three weeks of her accession; and so she had done. She was delighted with it. Thomas Creevey thought it a dreadful building which really ought to be called The Brunswick Hotel: it displayed ‘every species of infirmity’, its costly ornamentations exceeding ‘all belief in their bad taste’, its raspberry-coloured pillars enough to ‘quite turn you sick to look at’.3 The Queen, however, having no pretensions to taste in the design and decoration of rooms, was delighted with the Palace, its ‘high, pleasant and cheerful’ interiors, and its garden of forty-five acres laid out by the botanist, W. J. Aiton. It was just the place for parties, she thought, for balls and for concerts given by her own band.
Her first state ball had been given in the Palace in May 1838. She had ‘felt a little shy in going in’ but had soon been caught up in the excitement of the music, the galops and quadrilles. She ‘had not danced for so long & was so glad to do so again’. She felt ‘so happy and so merry’. Her cousin, Prince George of Cambridge, ‘thought she danced really very nicely and seemed to be very much amused’.4 She did not leave the ballroom until ten minutes to four and by the time she climbed into bed the sun was up.5 She had shocked some of her guests, including old Lady Ilchester, by eating her supper standing up in the ballroom, breaking with the custom of King William IV who, as Mary Frampton said, was ‘quite Citizen King enough’ but who ‘always supped with the Queen in his private apartments with a select party’.6 Charles Greville, however, was much struck by Queen Victoria’s ‘exceedingly graceful manners’, blended with ‘dignity and cordiality, a simplicity and good humour, when She talks to people, which are mighty captivating. When supper was announced She moved from her seat, all her officers going before her – She, first, alone, and the Royal Family following; her exceeding youth strikingly contrasted with their mature ages, but She did it well.’7
She was not so taken with the Marine Pavilion at Brighton, that remarkably exotic structure which John Nash had created for her uncle, George IV, ‘a strange, odd, Chinese-looking thing, both СКАЧАТЬ