Shooting Victoria (60 page)

For her subjects, life without Victoria was unthinkable. Victoria had given their era its name: they were all Victorians. Every part of their lives—the great scientific discoveries and technological innovations, the abundance of objects with which they surrounded themselves and cluttered their homes, the great and growing cities in which they lived, and the constantly expanding empire over which they had domain: all of it was Victorian, all of it was connected with her, embodied by her. Victoria had become a living monument to her age, and in Victoria Britons saw their own greatness. Even her appearance was monumental. She had with age exchanged her earlier defining characteristic—her diminutive stature—with another: stoutness. She used her weight to her advantage in public appearances, in photographs, and in portraits, always presenting herself with solidity and calmness, as the central, placid, and unshakeable image of Britain. Her public face, too—recreated through lithographic and photographic mass production and hung on millions of walls, public and private, across the nation—radiated zen-like calmness, with a quiet pride and forward-looking confidence. Hers was the face of Empire.

Much of the credit for Victoria's immense popularity was due to the man who literally made her an Empress, and more than this had made her fit that role, by making her
feel
every inch an Empress: Benjamin Disraeli, or the Earl of Beaconsfield, as she elevated him soon after he elevated her. From the moment Disraeli kissed her hand upon taking office in 1874, dropping to one knee and declaring “I plight my troth to the kindest of
Mistresses
,” the tenor of their relationship was clear: he would be her zealous devotee, best serving his country by serving his Queen. His merits as a prime minister might be open to debate, but he was without doubt the best courtier Victoria ever had. And in the style of a master courtier, he flattered the Queen ceaselessly and shamelessly, laying it on, as he famously observed, “with a trowel.” Victoria, no fool, was well aware of his hyperbole, though she preferred to see him as “full of poetry, romance and chivalry,” commodities which her previous and
present Prime Minister, William Gladstone, completely lacked. And Disraeli backed up his honeyed words with genuine service. He was a master at converting policy triumphs into personal gifts to his monarch. When the government succeeded in buying up a substantial number of shares in the Suez Canal, he presented the news to the Queen as if he were Sir Francis Drake presenting Spanish gold to Elizabeth the First: “You have it, Madam,” he declared to her. More than once he favored and sponsored legislation that she wanted and that his Cabinet did not. In a thousand ways he succeeded in rendering himself the paragon of prime ministers in Victoria's eyes—and in reminding her by contrast that his predecessor and successor, Gladstone, was the worst of them. He was assisted greatly in this project because the Queen was politically on his side from the start, for by the 1870s and in complete disregard of the beloved Albert's prime directive that the monarch must remain above party politics, Victoria had become a diehard conservative. Disraeli, according to Victoria, had “right feelings,” and “
very large ideas
, and
very lofty views
of the position this country should hold.” The two agreed that the endless turbulence in Ireland should be met by coercion, not concession. And they believed in the inherent glory of their ever-expanding empire. With Melbourne, Victoria had been a Melbournian; with Peel, she had been a Peelite; with Disraeli she was, and afterwards forever would be, a Disraelite. And with Disraeli's encouragement, Victoria developed the confident sense that her interests were the interests of the nation. She for once experienced the exhilarating sensation of being a ruler who actually ruled, with the assistance of a government that actually served her.

That dream had to have an end, of course; William Gladstone killed it. Victoria's loathing for Gladstone—a sentiment Disraeli did his best to encourage—grew in tandem with her attachment for Disraeli. Disraeli touched on that truth when he noted that Victoria's concern for his own health was dictated “not so much from love of me as dread of somebody else.” Victoria had thought
when Disraeli became Prime Minister that she had gotten rid of Gladstone for good. After the Liberals were defeated soundly in the 1874 general election, Gladstone retired, ceding leadership to Lord Hartington and retiring to his study of the classics and theology at Hawarden. In two years, however, he was back: a righteous rage against Turkish atrocities in the Balkans reanimated him, forcing him once again into the political spotlight. Disraeli, more concerned with the threat of Russian hegemony over eastern Europe than with the excesses of the weak Ottoman empire, played down the atrocities, and Gladstone's fervent campaign grew into a crusade against “Beaconsfieldism”—against Disraeli, in other words, and all that his government stood for. And in a dramatic departure from tradition, Gladstone made his case against Disraeli not to Parliament, but to the people directly, in rousing orations at mass meetings. Once re-engaged, Gladstone never relented. Fighting for a new Parliamentary seat in Midlothian, he brought unprecedented fire to his campaign, stumping the district in a “pilgrimage of Passion”: appearing in his popular appeal to be conducting an American campaign, not a British one. Victoria was disgusted by his attacks on her beloved Prime Minister, and disgusted by Gladstone's destructively democratic behavior: “like an American stumping orator, making most violent speeches.” Her anger was mixed with more than a hint of jealousy, for Gladstone gained an immense national popularity by his appeal to the masses, his procession resembling a royal progress: everywhere he went, he was welcomed with addresses and found fireworks, triumphal arches, and eager crowds. He had stolen a play from the Queen's own book.

And worst of all, he won: he converted the election for his own seat into a national campaign, thanks to full newspaper coverage, and the “People's William” sparked a Liberal surge in the polls; he and his party trounced Disraeli and the Conservatives in the 1880 general election. Victoria at first refused outright to have Gladstone back as her prime minister. She would rather abdicate, she wrote her private secretary, “rather than send for or have any
communication
with that
half-mad
firebrand who wd soon ruin everything & be a
Dictator
. Others but herself
may submit
to his democratic rule, but
not the Queen.
” Disraeli recommended that she attempt to form a government under the nominal leader of the Liberals, Lord Hartington. But Hartington could only give Victoria a painful reminder of the constitutional limits of her power: Gladstone, he told her, would refuse to serve under anyone else, and a Liberal government without him would be impossible. With a reluctance that amounted to abhorrence, she called on Gladstone to form a ministry.

And so now in 1882, that horrible Mr. Gladstone was her Prime Minister, and she could only look back wistfully to the days of Disraeli's poetry, romance, and chivalry. Her nostalgia was rendered that much more poignant by the fact that Disraeli had died a year before, on 19 April 1881. Now Victoria could not help but feel both a prisoner and an enemy of her own government. Gladstone was no longer a liberal, as far as she was concerned; he had embraced a democratic radicalism that she was certain would bring ruin upon her nation. She kept him, as he noted, at “arm's length,” preferring when possible to work with the other ministers in his Cabinet. And Gladstone, in spite of his immense personal respect for the Queen and the institution of monarchy, generally assumed she would be opposed to his policies and would need to be dealt with as a necessary evil, someone to be handled, not served. He spoke to her, she said, as if she were a public meeting. Victoria had feared that the coming Liberal government would be a “calamity for the country and the peace of Europe,” and Gladstone had done little to change her mind. Of all her governments, she told Vicky two years later, this one was “the worst I have ever had to do with.” Her political life had become largely a matter of bracing herself: waiting for her own government to mess up, and ready to pounce when they did.

The Queen's insecurity with her own government only heightened the general insecurity she felt in 1882. Life in the 1880s, it seemed, had become that much more difficult for rulers. Not one,
but two dramatic assassinations that had occurred a year before had forced her to wonder whether she might be next.

Alexander II, Tsar of the Russians—and incidentally her son Alfred's father-in-law—had been the first to die, the victim of an implacable and highly organized band of Nihilists who called themselves the People's Will and who had dedicated themselves exclusively to killing their Tsar. But even before People's Will, Alexander's life had been threatened—three times, always by men with pistols. The first two attempts—the first in a park in St. Petersburg in 1866, and the second on a state visit to Paris in 1867—were thwarted when bystanders jostled the would-be assassins' arms. Alexander himself thwarted the third would-be assassin, a man named Alexander Soloviev, when in 1879 he got within arm's length of the Tsar and drew on him a high-caliber American pistol nicknamed the “Bear Hunter.” Alexander saw the pistol, dodged the first shot, and then turned and fled, serpentining to avoid four more, before Soloviev was captured.

Soon after Soloviev's attempt, People's Will formed, holding as its central belief that destroying the autocrat Alexander would spark a national uprising and thus destroy the Russian autocracy. Their weapon of choice was dynamite—a relatively new technology, more easily transportable, more versatile, and much more powerful than gunpowder. And while People's Will targeted only the Tsar, they were not over-particular about injuring or killing the innocent to achieve their goal. They attempted three times in 1879 to blow up the Tsar's train, succeeding, on the third try, of blowing up the wrong train altogether—the one holding Alexander's baggage and entourage. In 1880, using an agent who had infiltrated the Palace as a servant, they tried to kill the royal family as they ate, secreting a good three hundred pounds of dynamite in a trunk below the dining room of the Winter Palace. The explosion destroyed the room and killed or wounded fifty of the palace guard, but the Tsar and his family arrived at dinner late and were unharmed.

A fourth attempt, to mine a bridge over which the Tsar crossed, failed when the conspirators who were to set off the explosion arrived after the Tsar had come and gone.

Finally, People's Will planned an apocalypse from which Alexander would never escape. Sundays in St. Petersburg, Alexander would usually drive a mile from the Winter Palace and back in order to review his troops, and the group plotted to kill him as he traveled the usual route. They rented out a shop, dug a mine under the road, and filled it with explosives. If this did not kill the Tsar, they equipped five agents to finish the job—four with hand-held dynamite and kerosene bombs, and one with a knife. (In the event, the knife-wielder was arrested before the attempt, and one cold-footed bomber did not show up). On Sunday 1 March 1881,
*
Alexander unknowingly avoided the mine by choosing to return to the Palace by another route, via the Catherine Canal. Learning of this, the three waiting bombers rushed to the canal. There, the first threw his bomb under the Tsar's carriage, and the street erupted in a deafening explosion. The Tsar was unhurt, but one of his Cossacks as well as a passing boy were killed. Alexander stepped out of his carriage to confront the captured bomber, wagging a finger in his face and berating him: “A fine one!” His aide twice pleaded with Alexander to get back into his carriage and move on, but the Tsar wished to survey the damage at the scene. There, a man suddenly turned, raised his arms, and threw his bomb at the Tsar's feet. When the smoke cleared, twenty people lay wounded on the street. The bomber was dead. And Alexander was a mass of wounds from the head down, his legs virtually blown away. He was carried to an open sleigh. The third bomber realized that the Tsar was dying and his bomb was unnecessary, and so with one arm he helped carry Alexander's body while with the other he held the briefcase containing the explosive.

“Feel quite shaken and stunned by this awful news,” Victoria wrote in her journal on the day Alexander died. Soon afterwards, she sent her private secretary, Henry Ponsonby, to the Home Office to discuss increased security for Buckingham Palace. On the face of it, it seemed absurd that the Queen would see in the danger to the Tsar any danger to herself; Alexander was an autocrat who despite liberating the serfs in 1861 met dissent with repression. The nation was a police state where expectations for reform had been raised and crushed, ensuring widespread social discontent. Russia's jails and cities were full of men and women dedicated to killing the Tsar. Surely nothing like People's Will could exist in Britain?

Surely, Victoria knew, something like People's Will
did
exist in Britain. There was only one other country on earth in which a disciplined organization, using dynamite as its weapon of choice, had in the early 1880s committed itself to terror-bombing, targeting centers of power to effect revolutionary change. And that country was Victoria's own.

The very first true terror-bombing in the modern world—in other words, the first bombing intended to effect political change by destroying for the sake of destruction, thereby spreading terror through the population, rather than a bombing intended to serve another purpose, such as freeing a prisoner or even killing another human being—had taken place the year before, at 5:20
P.M.
on 14 January 1881, when a bomb erupted at the army barracks at Salford near Manchester.
*
The bombers had obviously chosen the site for its symbolic value: Salford was where the Manchester Martyrs had been hanged fourteen years before. While the explosion was intended to destroy property and not people, it nevertheless drew
blood: a butcher's shop was destroyed; three adults were injured, and a seven-year-old boy was killed.