Twilight of Splendor: The Court of Queen Victoria During Her Diamond Jubilee Year - Hardcover

King, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 047004439X ISBN 13: 9780470044391

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2007

Synopsis

Power, pageantry, and pride
Queen Victoria ruled the most powerful empire the world has ever seen, covering one fourth of the earth's land surface, reigning over subjects on every continent, and exercising undisputed mastery of the oceans in between. She was the "Grandmother of Europe," with descendants occupying the thrones of half a dozen nations, and more to come. The very era in which she lived already bore her name. In June 1897, her proud and prosperous nation marked her sixtieth year on the throne of England with the most lavish display of pomp, circumstance, wealth, and affection in its history.
Twilight of Splendor presents a breathtaking portrait of a sovereign and her empire at the height of their global power. Focusing on the spectacle of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, it combines a thrilling account of that massive celebration with an intimate exploration of Victoria's world-her splendid palaces and possessions, the grand banquets and balls she hosted, her immense wealth, the politicians and courtiers who did her bidding, her confidence and assertiveness as a ruler, her surprising personal humility, and her perpetual state of mourning for her beloved husband, Prince Albert.
Based on hundreds of published and unpublished sources from the period, including Queen Victoria's private correspondence and personal journals, Twilight of Splendor is must reading for Anglophiles, Victorian-history buffs, and anyone interested in the golden age of monarchy.

• The first book to portray the queen and her court in the last years of her reign
• Contrasts the queen's private and public images in her efforts to solidify the monarchy
• Exposes the queen's difficult relations with her children
• Explores the queen's relationship with her extended European royal relatives
• Draws together for the first time hundreds of disparate sources
• Includes a number of rare photographs complementing the text

About this title

About the Author

GREG KING is the author of the UK bestseller The Duchess of Windsor: The Uncommon Life of Wallis Simpson, as well as several books on Russia's Romanov era, including The Court of the Last Tsar and The Fate of the Romanovs (with Penny Wilson). A frequent on-screen commentator for royal television productions, he has worked with the BBC and ITV in the UK, the CBC in Canada, and with National Geographic, the Learning Channel, the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and A&E in the United States.

From the Back Cover

Queen Victoria wore a somber gown of black silk, enlivened with delicate embroidery of sparkling jet and offset by layers of contrasting white lace. On her gray head a veil of Honiton lace, carefully arranged in cascades to frame her wrinkled face and sagging shoulders, was held in place by a small crown of 1,300 diamonds. The faint hint of her favorite orange-scented perfume hovered in the air as her lady in waiting adorned her widow's weeds with the blue silk moiré sash and diamond star of the Order of the Garter; large diamond drop earrings and a matching collet necklace of twenty-eight immense, gleaming stones; and a diamond-fringe brooch. Her pudgy wrists and fingers glistened with gold and diamond bracelets and an array of precious rings.

On the eve of her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the tiny, rotund, seventy-eight-year-old queen was a study in contrasts. And, much like the immense realm that was her domain, she was at the pinnacle of her authority and nearing the end of her days. Twilight of Splendor leads you on an extravagant tour into the heart of history's last and greatest royal empire: the court of Victoria Regina et Imperatrix--Queen of England and Empress of India. You'll meet the people, witness the pageantry, and feel the power that circled the globe.

Author Greg King takes you exploring through the queen's elegant residences at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, cruising the English Channel aboard the royal yacht Victoria and Albert II, and tramping the Scottish highlands at her beloved retreat, Balmoral. You'll also attend the spectacular ceremony in honor of Victoria's sixtieth year on the throne and marvel at the Empire's splendid diversity, as represented by her parading armies--scarlet-coated Canadians and turbaned Sikhs, Egyptians in red fezzes, khaki-clad Australians, and galloping Bengal Lancers, their deadly pikes glittering in the sun like the queen's own jewels.

Most compelling of all is Victoria herself. Groomed from infancy to assume the crown and adhere to a strict moral code, she was a proud, forceful, and imperious sovereign who remained personally humble, good-humored, and keenly intelligent. King reveals that Victoria's dislike of the British nobility led her to market herself quite purposefully to the middle class, even as she suppressed news of scandals involving her children and embarked on enigmatic relationships with the notorious John Brown and her personal servant Abdul Karim.

From the Inside Flap

Queen Victoria wore a somber gown of black silk, enlivened with delicate embroidery of sparkling jet and offset by layers of contrasting white lace. On her gray head a veil of Honiton lace, carefully arranged in cascades to frame her wrinkled face and sagging shoulders, was held in place by a small crown of 1,300 diamonds. The faint hint of her favorite orange-scented perfume hovered in the air as her lady in waiting adorned her widow's weeds with the blue silk moire sash and diamond star of the Order of the Garter; large diamond drop earrings and a matching collet necklace of twenty-eight immense, gleaming stones; and a diamond-fringe brooch. Her pudgy wrists and fingers glistened with gold and diamond bracelets and an array of precious rings.

On the eve of her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the tiny, rotund, seventy-eight-year-old queen was a study in contrasts. And, much like the immense realm that was her domain, she was at the pinnacle of her authority and nearing the end of her days. Twilight of Splendor leads you on an extravagant tour into the heart of history's last and greatest royal empire: the court of Victoria Regina et Imperatrix--Queen of England and Empress of India. You'll meet the people, witness the pageantry, and feel the power that circled the globe.

Author Greg King takes you exploring through the queen's elegant residences at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, cruising the English Channel aboard the royal yacht Victoria and Albert II, and tramping the Scottish highlands at her beloved retreat, Balmoral. You'll also attend the spectacular ceremony in honor of Victoria's sixtieth year on the throne and marvel at the Empire's splendid diversity, as represented by her parading armies--scarlet-coated Canadians and turbaned Sikhs, Egyptians in red fezzes, khaki-clad Australians, and galloping Bengal Lancers, their deadly pikes glittering in the sun like the queen's own jewels.

Most compelling of all is Victoria herself. Groomed from infancy to assume the crown and adhere to a strict moral code, she was a proud, forceful, and imperious sovereign who remained personally humble, good-humored, and keenly intelligent. King reveals that Victoria's dislike of the British nobility led her to market herself quite purposefully to the middle class, even as she suppressed news of scandals involving her children and embarked on enigmatic relationships with the notorious John Brown and her personal servant Abdul Karim.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Twilight of Splendor

The Court of Queen Victoria During Her Diamond Jubilee YearBy Gregory King

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-04439-1

Chapter One

THE WIDOW OF WINDSOR

Queen Victoria came to the British throne through a series of tragedies and a conflux of familial dereliction. She was born in 1819, in the last full year of the tumultuous reign of her grandfather King George III; his illness had placed his son George at the center of power when the latter assumed the title prince regent for his father in 1811. In 1785 Prince George, a man of insatiable appetites and thoroughly disagreeable reputation, had married his mistress, the Catholic Marie Fitzherbert, in a morganatic union; the marriage was also illegal under the Act of Settlement, which forbade any heir to the throne to enter into a union with a Roman Catholic. Perpetually in debt as a result of his extravagant building schemes, George eventually-and bigamously-married Princess Caroline of Brunswick in hopes of gaining a large monetary settlement from Parliament. Their union was a disaster from the very beginning: George complained that he found his wife ugly and common, and spent his wedding night passed out on the floor; Caroline, in turn, was scarcely enraptured with the licentious, grossly overweight prince, who flaunted his continued affair with Lady Jersey before the eyes of the court and his spouse, and both husband and wife proved wildly unfaithful.

As time dragged on and relations grew worse, George increasingly humiliated his wife in a series of deliberate acts that won her much sympathy; Caroline, in turn, carried on her own affairs, although the public continued to side with her, even through her husband's unsuccessful attempts to divorce her. She reached the height of this humiliating martyrdom when she was turned away from the door of Westminster Abbey at her husband's coronation as King George IV; much to his relief, his hated consort died in August 1821. The couple's only child, Princess Charlotte, born in 1786, married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and was an immensely popular figure as the heiress presumptive to the throne. Her death in childbirth in 1817 left the succession to the throne in a tangled, dynastic mess.

With Princess Charlotte's death, the court suddenly realized that George IV had no direct heir: in the event of his death, the throne would pass to his brothers in order of primogeniture, yet none of these men had any legitimate children who might inherit after them. The Duke of Wellington once described these princes as "the damnedest millstone around the necks of any government that can be imagined." Corrupt, dissolute, and perpetually broke, they caused scandal after scandal, tainting the image of the British monarchy in the eyes of the public.

In 1791 Prince Frederick, Duke of York, the next in line to the throne, had married his cousin Princess Frederica, daughter of King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, who found her new husband so disagreeable that she promptly retired to a house in the country, leaving her husband free to carry on with his numerous mistresses. One of these women attempted to ruin the duke when their affair ended by claiming that she had influenced military appointments; although an inquiry conducted by Parliament found the prince innocent, his reputation was irreparably damaged, and he died in 1827 with no legal issue.

For George III's other sons, however, Charlotte's death meant a mad marital dash to provide legitimate heirs to the throne. Prince William, Duke of Clarence, had lived with his mistress, the actress Dorothy Jordan, for more than two decades, and she bore him ten children; these royal bastards, christened with the surname of Fitzclarence, were ineligible for the throne, and William, in exchange for a large grant from Parliament to pay off his debts, agreed to marry a suitable bride, Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Coburg and Meiningen, twenty-seven years his junior. The couple's hopes to provide an heir to the throne were dashed, however; both of their daughters died in infancy.

Prince Ernst August, the Duke of Cumberland, was a thoroughly disreputable man, called "the Hanoverian Ogre," with no living children by his equally disagreeable wife, Princess Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who was popularly believed to have murdered both of her previous husbands. Society whispered that the duke himself had murdered his own valet in a fit of rage after a homosexual affair, and that he had fathered his own sister Sophia's bastard child.

In 1793, another brother, Prince Augustus, had married Lady Augusta Murray, daughter of the fourth Earl of Dunmore, while on holiday in Rome, in direct contravention of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which decreed that those in the line of succession had to obtain the prior consent of the sovereign and of the Privy Council before entering into any union. Although two children were born of the marriage, George III had it annulled when he learned that Augustus was amenable to abandoning his wife and offspring in exchange for the title Duke of Sussex and an increased allowance from Parliament. Thus styled, the prince promptly fathered an illegitimate daughter with a young woman whose parents owned an inn near Windsor Castle; in 1831, Sussex again contracted a morganatic marriage, this time with the daughter of the second Earl of Arran. Only George III's youngest son, Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, had contracted an equal marriage, with Princess Augusta of Hesse-Kassel, but no children had as yet been born of the union.

This left George III's third son, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. A military man of no great distinction, he was a martinet whose love for corporal punishment and even executions earned him the animosity of his men. For three decades he had lived with his mistress, Thrse-Bernadine Mongenet of Besanon, a woman seven years older than he, who went by the name of Julie de St. Laurent. On learning of Princess Charlotte's death, the Duke of Kent reluctantly abandoned his mistress and sought out a suitable wife who would provide him with a legitimate heir. At forty-nine years of age, corpulent and balding, the duke was no longer a prize catch, and his opportunities were thus considerably reduced. Eventually he settled on Victoire, Dowager Princess of Leiningen, whose husband, Duke Emich Karl, had died in 1814 after eleven years of marriage. At thirty-one the widowed Victoire had two young children, Karl and Feodora, to raise; she spoke no English and was something less than an ideal consort, but she was of equal rank and had produced healthy children, the two factors seemingly most important to the Duke of Kent. She was also the sister of the late Princess Charlotte's husband, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, a tenuous tie that seemed redolent of fate, and the Duke of Kent married her in May 1818.

A year later, on May 24, the new Duchess of Kent gave birth to a girl at Kensington Palace in London. "Look at her well," her father presciently commented, "for she will be Queen of England." Christened Alexandrina Victoria, the baby knew nothing of her father, who died of pneumonia seven months after her birth and just six days before his father, King George III. With the accession of the prince regent as George IV, the infant Alexandrina Victoria was suddenly second in line to the throne.

This marked a sharp downturn in the fortunes of the Duchess of Kent. Her husband's death had left her saddled with debts, and she was forced to rely on George IV for her future welfare. The king allowed her to live at Kensington Palace, but it was money from her brother Leopold that helped finance the lives of the duchess and her children. George IV refused his sister-in-law's continual requests for a suitable allowance, and eventually Parliament had to step in and offer the duchess an annual income from the Civil List.

The young Victoria lived a stifled existence at Kensington Palace. The duchess refused to allow her daughter her own room, and Victoria slept on a cot near her mother's bed. Despite her extraordinary possessiveness, the duchess found her daughter's nervous and contradictory temperament a burden to which she was unequal. Once, when her music teacher told her that she must practice, Victoria responded by slamming the lid of the piano, saying, "There! You see there is no must about it!" Such outbursts were common: Victoria could behave with startling willfulness, accompanied by bursts of temper, screams, and floods of hysterical tears.

The young Victoria also lived an isolated existence at Kensington Palace. Although her half brother, Karl, occasionally came to England on holiday, as the future ruling prince of Leiningen, he was expected to remain in Germany and continue his education. His relationship with Victoria was always tenuous at best, and they only occasionally saw each other during their youths. Victoria's only real companion was her half sister, Feodora, although, with a twelve-year age difference, the two girls initially had little in common except their mother. The widowed Duchess of Kent kept her daughter secluded at Kensington Palace, away from members of her late husband's family and from the public at large. The duchess, with her censorious tales of Victoria's "wicked" uncles, did all within her power to inculcate in her daughter a horror of the king and the royal family, with their numerous bastards, flaunted mistresses, and constant scandals; she was particularly offended that the Duke of Clarence's illegitimate children, endowed with the surname of Fitzclarence, were seen openly at court, and she harbored an abiding hatred of the Duke of Cumberland; the young Victoria heard all manner of stories about him, including warnings that he was not above assassinating her so that he could himself take the throne. As the heiress presumptive to the throne, her mother warned, Victoria must do all in her power to distance herself from her Hanoverian relatives.

Relations with her mother worsened as the Duchess of Kent relied more and more upon her husband's former equerry John Conroy, who attempted to control the duchess and, through her, the presumptive queen. For solace, Victoria turned to her governess, the German Louise Lehzen, who, though devoted to her young charge, proved a rather disastrous influence on her impressionable character. The Duchess of Kent had never got on well with the imperious Lehzen, who in turn did all in her power to undermine the mother in the daughter's eyes. Lehzen also encouraged in her young charge an almost preternatural sense of her own superiority and future position.

Conroy was responsible for the Kensington System, an education program he designed to help train Victoria for her role as future queen; at the same time, it carefully secluded her from any outside influences. Victoria was a good student, intelligent and generally diligent in her studies. Her favorite subjects were history and geography; she did well in German and French, and despite her dislike of music lessons could play competently. She took an early interest in art, making delightful sketches and watercolors, and had a fine soprano voice when she sang.

King George IV died on June 26, 1830, and the Duke of Clarence took the throne as William IV, but the Duchess of Kent's relations with the new king were scarcely better than those with his predecessor, and a number of petty quarrels over money, titles, and precedence soured any lingering vestiges of familial affection. When the king refused to give Victoria precedence at his coronation over his brothers, the duchess refused to allow her to attend. The duchess objected to the fact that the king had moved his illegitimate children into Windsor. "I never did, neither will I ever, associate Victoria in any way with the illegitimate members of the Royal Family," the duchess declared. "Did I not keep this line, how would it be possible to teach Victoria the difference between virtue and vice?" Victoria herself later recalled: "It was dreadful ... always on pins and needles, with the whole family hardly on speaking terms. I (a mere child) between two fires-trying to be civil then scolded at home."

The worst incident took place in August 1836. Victoria and her mother were at Windsor Castle to celebrate the king's birthday, but William IV was in a foul mood, having learned that, contrary to his instructions, the Duchess of Kent had commandeered an additional suite of apartments at Kensington Palace for her own use. At the birthday luncheon, with seventeen-year-old Victoria opposite him and her mother seated next to the king, William loudly declared, as the guests listened in shocked silence, "I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer, after which period, in the event of my death, no regency would take place. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that young lady, the heiress presumptive of the crown, and not in the hands of a person now near me, who is surrounded by evil advisors and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed. I have no hesitation in saying that I have been insulted-grossly and continually insulted-by that person, but I am determined to endure no longer a course of behavior so disrespectful to me." Victoria burst into tears, while her mother, embarrassed at so public a rebuke, was shocked into uncharacteristic silence.

William IV was genuinely fond of his niece, and she of him. In the spring of 1837, in anticipation of her eighteenth birthday, the king wrote to Victoria, suggesting an increase in her allowance and the right to appoint her own household. Conroy intercepted the letter and took it to the duchess, who, acting on his instructions, ordered Victoria to write a reply dictated to her: "I wish to remain in every respect as I am now in the care of my mother. Upon the subject of money I should wish that whatever may be necessary to add may be given to my dear mother for my use, who always does everything I want in pecuniary matters."

The king was not fooled, and guessed that his niece had been forced to write this reply; indeed, Victoria had at first refused to do so, and only gave in after repeated scenes with both her mother and Conroy. Concerned about this growingly distasteful turn of events, the Duchess of Kent's brother Leopold, who in 1830 had accepted the offer of the Belgian throne, dispatched his personal physician, Baron Christian Stockmar, to Kensington Palace to report on what was taking place. Stockmar found Victoria angry and alienated from her mother, and blaming Conroy for her untenable position.

Within days, the situation at Kensington Palace took another, unforeseen turn. William IV had been ill for some time though, as he had hoped, he lived to see Victoria's eighteenth birthday, on May 24, 1837. Just after two on the morning of June 20, he died. The Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham, the lord chamberlain, arrived at Kensington Palace soon after the sun had risen, and demanded to see the princess, who was asleep, at once. She appeared before them in her dressing gown and listened as they told her of her uncle's death. That night, the new, eighteen-year-old queen had her bed moved from her mother's room and dined alone in triumph.

Queen Victoria had always been a woman of immense contradiction. She could be charming and unassuming, yet she was also stubborn, impulsive, and capable of violent emotions when challenged. "Mama," her son Arthur once complained, "will always look at everything in her own light, and will not allow anybody else to have any views of their own." Victoria was somewhat plain, not unattractive but certainly no great beauty, with the wide face, weak chin, and protuberant eyes of her Hanoverian ancestors framed by a head of luxuriant golden hair. She stood just four feet, ten inches tall-a perpetual source of worry to the royal family-and even at eighteen she was plump, a tendency that only increased with the passage of time; by the 1880s she weighed 170 pounds, and her short stature only increased the impression of ever-expanding girth. "I noticed when she left her bath chair," remembered one visitor of the elderly queen, "that she was no taller standing than she was sitting down."

Though somewhat dour in her later years, Victoria could also be quite entrancing. She delighted in humorous anecdotes, and possessed a strong liking for stories that revealed human foibles. Her laughter was frequent: "I have seen the Queen's lips quivering with suppressed laughter," recorded Frances, Countess of Warwick, "and, if it were not an un-courtier-like thing to say, I might go so far as to state that I have seen Her Most Gracious Majesty shaking like an agitated jelly." To the end, her voice was enchanting, "like a silver stream flowing over golden stones."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Twilight of Splendorby Gregory King Copyright © 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Ltd
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 047004439X
• ISBN 13: 9780470044391
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352