She heard of scandals-stories of his relations with women; she regarded him as leicht-lebend-loose, if not dissolute, and there was no weakness she condemned so bitterly. She would never have a divorced woman at her court, and if she received anyone and they afterwards got mixed up in any scandal, she cut out their name relentlessly, even though she had liked them.
Looseness of morals was to her the sin that could never be forgiven.
Queen Victoria had all the intolerance of perfect virtue. People she knew and liked and esteemed tried to get her to forgive Colonel Valentine Baker; pointed out to her how nobly he had acted in not defending himself against the woman who accused him; how he had redeemed his fault, too, by years of high endeavor; how he had shed his blood for the English in Egypt. Nothing could move her. A man should be as pure as a woman, was her creed, and she would tolerate no infringement of it. Her eldest son's lax moral code was a perpetual offense to her.
Up to the very last Queen Victoria was Queen and would brook no interference or advice. Her relations with her ministers for the last thirty years of her life were always on a peculiar footing. She had not only grown more imperious with the years, but wiser. Again and again she had matched her brains with her ministers, and a woman learns rapidly through intercourse with able men; but it was her German husband who had taught her broad- mindedness and given her faith in herself.
This self-confidence grew in the nineties to absurd heights. She wrote several messages to her people which were plain translations from the German.
At a big reception one evening I followed Arthur Balfour up the Starrs and a lady, I think the then Duchess of Sutherland, was chaffing him about the latest Royal message. 'Your English,' said the lady, 'is not so pure as it used to be, my dear Arthur.'
'I had nothing to do with it,' replied the Prime Minister. 'The dear old lady never even showed me the message! I wish she would, but it is difficult now even to hint criticism to her. So I keep quiet; after all it doesn't matter much-'
'Would you like the practice to cease?' I asked him a little later.
'Indeed I should,' he answered. 'It might lead to an awkward position at almost any time: her ministers are supposed to do these things.'
The next week I wrote an article in the Saturday Review, entitled 'The Queen's English,' in which I set forth how this expression came into vogue as expressing how careful her various ministers had been to put only good English into any document which the Queen was supposed to sign. I went on to say that the good custom was being neglected, and I took certain phrases from the latest messages and showed that the bad English of them was due to the fact that they were literal translations from the German.
Yet Arthur Balfour knew no German and was besides a master of good English: it was evident that the Queen herself had written these messages, a custom which, if persisted in, would soon ruin her reputation as a writer of English. 'In fact,' I summed up, 'the Queen's English is now plainly made in Germany.'
The exposure put an end to the practice: always afterwards the Queen used to call her ministers to counsel.
Queen Victoria grew to dislike radicalism through her dislike for Gladstone.
'He speaks at me,' she said, 'as if I were a public meeting.'
She loved Disraeli's deference and courtesy, and when he made her Empress of India he won her heart of hearts.
In the South African War she took the English official point of view very strongly while deploring the necessity, as she regarded it, of war; and when her nephew, the German Emperor, sent his famous telegram to Krueger, she wrote to him with her own hand, declaring that he had acted unjustifiably; rated him, indeed, as if he had been a peccant schoolboy. And when he pleaded that he thought her Majesty's ministers had directed the Jameson raid, the old lady replied by declaring that none of her ministers knew anything about it and scolded him sharply for the assumption.
'You have weakened the principle of royalty,' she wrote.
It says a good deal for the Kaiser that he apologized humbly and promised never to offend again in the same way.
From this it will be seen that towards the end of her life Queen Victoria's personal influence in the courts of Europe was extraordinary. She was the oldest reigning sovereign, save the Emperor of Austria, and the most secure.
Everyone outside of England saw that she had immense power, and yet she was supposed to be a constitutional ruler.
Men of the first capacity as English politicians were astonished at her ability.
No two men could have been more unlike than Lord Randolph Churchill and Sir Charles Dilke; yet both spoke of Victoria as the ablest woman they had ever known. Still, her influence was injurious. She strengthened English conservatism and it was already far too strong; she did more than any other person to block the wheels of progress. All her influence during the last twenty years of her life was thrown against reform; she loved the established order and the traditional rule of conduct.
Her foreign policy was bounded by the idea of working in perfect harmony with Germany. She distrusted and disliked France and despised the French.
After Fashoda she still passed a couple of months on the French Riviera in the winter, but her relations with the French had been so slight and formal that the difference of feeling between the two races made hardly any impression on her. It was the South African war which got the English thoroughly disliked in France. And the high- handed, not to say, rude way the English acted about Fashoda humiliated French pride and brought the two peoples to the verge of war. I have already told how Rochefort, the greatest of French journalists, wrote in the Intransigeant the bitterest attack on Queen Victoria; he even called her 'Cette vieille caleche qui s'obstine a s'appeler Victoria,' (That old stage coach which persists in calling itself Victoria.) Prince Edward used to say that he never knew his position till his mother died, and at her death-bed Lord Salisbury spoke to him.
'He had always been cold to me,' he said, complainingly, 'but when the doctors said, 'The Queen is dead,' Lord Salisbury suddenly altered his tone, his manner, everything. He came to me respectfully; stooped to kiss my hand and hoped that I would believe he would serve me as faithfully as he had tried to serve my mother. I was really touched. Then, for the first time, I realized through his deference what it was to be King of England.'
When Edward came to the throne, he brought a new policy into power: so long as Victoria lived, England favored Germany and cold-shouldered France, and the outward visible sign of England's good will was the cession of Heligoland to Germany.
Of course, Lord Salisbury knew nothing of the value of that island; never dreamed that it could be an outpost of attack on England by airships and a fortress to protect the German navy. He was blissfully ignorant of geography and gasped with astonishment when told once that Zanzibar was an island.
But he had served Victoria loyally, and up to the very end of her reign it looked as if the understanding between the two Teutonic peoples was certain to endure for at least another century.
In 1889, when I first knew him, Prince Edward was a typical German in appearance, about five feet eight in height, very heavily built, with dark brown hair and full whiskers, beard and moustache. He was already very stout; but instead of trying to get rid of his fat, or to keep it within bounds, he was much more concerned to conceal it. The trait is characteristic. He dressed with extreme care, and always with the idea that he had a figure.
Consequently, his clothes were always a little too tight, and thus drew attention to his rotundity. As is usually the case, his vanity did him harm.
His love of good living and childish self-esteem were his most obvious qualities; they went hand in hand with good humor and a certain bonhomie which everyone noticed in him. When threatened by old age, he tried from time to time to diminish his drinking, believing that too much liquid was the cause of his obesity: but he could never be persuaded to cut down his eating.
Foolish proverbs, enshrining the stupidity of the past, governed him, or were used by him as justification: 'Bread is the staff of life… good food never hurt any one,' commonplaces appealing to him irresistibly.
The Prince had had every advantage of both German and English training.
He spoke English however, with a strong German accent, and continually used bad English through translating literally from the German. In the same way, his French was fairly fluent so long as he kept to the commonplaces of conversation; but as soon as he had to express some unfamiliar thought he was hopelessly at sea, and then his baragouinage was that of a South German. Curiously enough, his accent in French and in English
