Queen Victoria may just be one of the most recognizable figures in world history, a ruler who lent her name to an entire age. But Julia Baird writes persuasively in a new biography that the “real” Victoria “remains buried under a mountain of myths, created by observers, sycophants, monarchists, republicans and herself, and bolstered by the royal family ever since.”
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Baird thoroughly and engagingly strives to restore a truer perspective of both woman and sovereign in her fine work, “Victoria: The Queen.” The Australia-based author, broadcaster and journalist not only tells the story of Victoria’s life but places her in the context of her 19th-century world, a time of breathtaking technological advances set amid the polluted muck of unrelieved poverty and suffering, an era of empire-building and bloody oppression, an age where women began to fight for their rights while their queen looked askance at women’s suffrage.
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“What we have truly forgotten today is that Victoria is a woman under whose auspices the modern world was made,” Baird writes.
Queen Victoria was only human, but she also was smart, patriotic, and intent on doing what she thought was right for her country and her people. Baird’s biography successfully presents the queen in all of her roles, some of which were contradictory, to show how Victoria did indeed have a mind of her own — despite her husband and prime ministers — and lived and ruled the way she thought best.
The idea for this book was sparked, Baird writes, by the 2008 presidential election in the United States, when Hillary Clinton tried to win the Democratic nomination and Sarah Palin served as the Republican vice presidential candidate. Baird was working for Newsweek then, and “our editorial team had vigorously debated the way we talk about women in positions of power,” Baird wrote. “One of the more robust arguments we had was about how we are still seemingly unable to reconcile women and power; too often it seems an awkward, surprising, unlikely and troubling pairing.” Her editor then suggested that Queen Victoria could use a fresh look, and after a few months reading an “unvarying repetition of the same views about Victoria, with rare fresh interrogation of new material,” Baird found she agreed.
A new biography of Queen Victoria seems so right for right now. For while she lived a life of almost unimagined privilege and wealth set in various palaces and castles, hers is a story that will seem all too familiar to today’s readers, particularly women struggling, like Victoria, to balance it all.
Born fifth in line to the throne in the final year of the reign of her grandfather, King George III, Victoria was 18 when she became queen after the death of her uncle, King William IV. Forced from an early age to juggle personal desire and public policy, she struggled to be both woman and queen, wife and monarch. She fought for decades to protect her royal prerogatives, to influence ministers and policy, and to generally be heard and heeded — even by her dear husband, Prince Albert.
“At the time of her wedding, she was as contradictory and complicated as she would be throughout her life: publicly vowing to obey her husband at precisely the same time she privately overruled his wishes,” Baird wrote.
While Albert was Victoria’s great love, Baird tells of how he methodically undermined Victoria’s confidence in herself as he sought to “better” her as queen, wife and mother. It was only when Albert died in 1861, a wrenching loss that Victoria held onto vividly for the rest of her life, that she found her footing again.
Widowhood is what Victoria is most remembered for today. Even by the overwrought standards of the day, the queen’s mourning was deemed excessive. Yet she rarely, if ever, yielded to that so-public sorrow. Victoria dressed all in black and tossed her corsets, swapped a crown for a black bonnet (albeit one trimmed with diamonds on occasion) and withdrew from public view as much as possible to await the death she confidently thought was coming. Even her effigy on the tomb she built to share with Albert portrays her as she looked at the time of her husband’s death.
“Victoria did not want to die. Perhaps the greatest contradiction of her character was her belief that she yearned for death; in truth, she clung tenaciously to life,” Baird wrote, adding a few paragraphs later, “There was always more. Victoria believed that her greatest work — to improve herself, as Albert had bidden her — was not yet complete.”
Victoria died in January 1901 at the age of 81. She had spent 63 years and seven months on the throne — a record of longevity eclipsed only on Sept. 9, 2015, by her great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II.
“The world shuddered at the news of the queen’s death,” Baird wrote. And, indeed, as she noted in the book, Victoria personified — first as queen of England and, from 1876 onward, empress of India — British imperialism in every land over which the Union Jack was flown. She also represented continuity as the United Kingdom and the rest of the world underwent unimaginable modernization.
Baird’s book also emphasizes Victoria’s role as a woman who ruled. The queen “had, in a way she did not anticipate, changed everything for women,” Baird wrote. “She stirred something that was difficult to name, a longing, or a stiffening of the spine; she was a visible sign of a woman who adored her family, yet had full rights and an independent income. H.G. Wells believed that at the moment the crown was placed on her head, there was a ‘stir of emancipation.'”
“Victoria’s heart beat strongly to her last breath,” Baird wrote, adding that this was something her doctor made a point of noting. “This is the greatest clue to understanding the woman who helped shape the modern world, and dispelling myths about her supposed passivity, her reliance on men and distaste for power. She may have complained often, but she persisted. She grieved for decades, but as generations of statesmen witnessed, she also fought without flinching. Her unbending, steadfast presence shaped a century as she grasped the mantle of power when other women had none. To fly over the London today and see her magisterial marble figure looking above the streets is to marvel at how a reclusive, widowed mother of nine achieved unparalleled greatness. The answer is simple: Victoria endured.”
But Victoria did not endure unedited or uncensored. Her eldest son, Bertie, now King Edward VII, and her youngest child, Princess Beatrice, were both keenly aware of what Victoria described as her “many faults.” And they took steps to erase them — historical record be damned. Beatrice spent years censoring and rewriting passages of her mother’s diaries — burning the originals when done. The new king worked to eliminate any vestiges of the queen’s staff he felt held undue influence, notably John Brown.
Brown, the “Queen’s Highland Servant,” had such an unusually close and intense relationship with the widowed queen that it provoked considerable discussion then and now. While Baird wrote that the “extent or nature of their physical relationship” is unknown, there “was a level of intimacy between them that would have scandalized society.”
How Victoria’s story is told is still, apparently, a sensitive topic some 115 years after her death. In an author’s note at the end of the book, Baird writes of being denied access to the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle because this was her first biography and she hadn’t written about the royal family before. She later gained permission thanks to the intercession of the then-governor general of Australia. Like other researchers, Baird signed a contract promising to submit prior to publication “all intended quotations from records in the Royal Archives, and all intended passages based on information based on those records.” Baird wrote that she submitted the entire manuscript as she had “used a great deal of archival material.”
What Baird got back was a letter from the senior archivist in which she was reportedly asked to “remove large sections of my book based on material I had found not inside but outside the archives.” (Emphasis added by Baird.) That material came from the papers of Sir James Reid, who was the queen’s doctor and was present at her death. The letter cited “documents in which the Queen issued instructions as to who should tend her in her final illness, arrangements for her funeral and what items she wanted placed in her coffin.” Those items included, as Baird noted in the book, not only family photographs and mementos but personal items that had belonged to Brown.
Baird decided not to remove the material.
“It is my hope that those who read this book will understand how intently and thoroughly I have researched the life of Queen Victoria, and how inconsistent with that approach it would have been to delete large sections of the book for no clearly articulated reason,” Baird wrote. “It was the object of this book to hack through myths, not hew to them.”
I’m sure Baird’s brave decision not to honor the request means she will likely never be welcome at the Royal Archives again. That’s a pity as this fine work, with its family tree, maps, detailed notes and extensive bibliography, shows she has considerable talent for royal biographies. Unfortunately, royal bios usually need access to royal archives.
At least Baird can have the considerable satisfaction of a job extremely well done, of doing her utmost to bring the true Queen Victoria back into the light.
Bill Daley is a Tribune reporter.
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‘Victoria: The Queen’
By Julia Baird, Random House, 697 pages, $35