Queen Victoria and the Bonapartes

237 Pages·2015·5.58 MB·English

by  Aronson

Queen Victoria
and the Bonapartes
Theo Aronson
All Rights Reserved
This edition published in 2014 by:
Thistle Publishing
36 Great Smith Street
London
SW1P 3BU
www.thistlepublishing.co.uk
To the memory of
JOHN MCINTOSH
Contents
PART ONE—'THESE GREAT MEETINGS OF SOVEREIGNS'
Chapter One: 'Such an extraordinary man'
Chapter Two: Spring at Windsor
Chapter Three: 'Vive le Hemperor!'
Chapter Four: Summer at Saint Cloud
Chapter Five: 'The gayest of cities'
Chapter Six: 'Poor, dear, modest, unpretentious Osborne'
PART TWO—'THE SINISTER DESIGNS OF OUR NEIGHBOUR'
Chapter Seven: The Disenchantment
Chapter Eight: 'Grief and anxiety'
Chapter Nine: Separate Ways
Chapter Ten: Decline and Fall
PART THREE—'THIS TIME OF TERRIBLE TRIAL'
Chapter Eleven: Camden Place
Chapter Twelve: 'That same pleasing, gentle and gracious manner'
Chapter Thirteen: The Prince Imperial
Chapter Fourteen: Sorrow's Crown of Sorrow
Chapter Fifteen: 'In affectionate remembrance . . .'
PART FOUR—'MY DEAR SISTER, THE EMPRESS'
Chapter Sixteen: Victoria and Eugenie
Chapter Seventeen: Osborne, Balmoral and the Côte d'Azur
Chapter Eighteen: Entente Cordiale
Epilogue
Notes on Sources
Bibliography
Illustrations
Queen Victoria aged thirty-five Louis Napoleon, Emperor of the French The
Empress Eugenie
Queen Victoria welcomes Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie The royal box
at Covent Garden Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1855
Queen Victoria invests Napoleon III Princess Mathilde Bonaparte Prince
Napoleon
The State Visit to Paris
Queen Victoria in widowhood The Empress Eugenie at the zenith of her career
The exiled Emperor Napoleon III Bertie, Prince of Wales
Louis, the Prince Imperial The scouting party before the Zulu attack The cross
erected by Queen Victoria Queen Victoria and Princess Beatrice before
the Prince Imperial's coffin The Empress Eugenie in later years
Acknowledgements
I must thank Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II by whose gracious permission
certain extracts from the Journals of Queen Victoria are here published for the
first time. For arranging this, I am indebted to Sir Michael Adeane, Her Majesty
the Queen's Private Secretary and Keeper of the Archives, and Mr Robert
Mackworth-Young, Librarian at Windsor Castle.
For help, advice and information I must thank also the Countess of
Longford, Miss E. H. Berridge, Miss A. T. Hadley, Mlle Louise Duval, Major D.
Barr, Mr Anthony Dennison, M. Pierre Blanchard and Mr L. A. Short. I am
grateful for all the help that I have received from the Bibliothèque Nationale,
Paris; the Library of Congress, Washington; the British Museum, London; and
the many libraries and newspaper libraries in London and Paris. Three recently
published books which have proved especially valuable are Victoria R.I. by
Elizabeth Longford, The Empress Eugenie by Harold Kurtz and Napoleon III in
England by Ivor Guest.
My chief debt is to Mr Brian Roberts for his unfailing interest and expert
advice during every stage of the writing of this book.
For permission to quote copyright material I am indebted to the publishers of
the following books: The Letters of Queen Victoria, Second Series, edited by
George Earle Buckle (John Murray, 1926); and Leaves from a Journal, edited by
Nicolas Bentley (André Deutsch, 1961).
Part One
'These great meetings of Sovereigns'
CHAPTER ONE
'Such an extraordinary man'
1
'I must write a line to ask what you say to the wonderful proceedings at Paris,
which really seem like a story in a book or a play!' wrote Queen Victoria to her
uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, on 4 December 1851. 'What is to be the
result of it all?'
The 'wonderful proceedings' to which the thirty-two-year-old Queen was
referring with such schoolgirlish enthusiasm was the coup d'état by which Prince
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, President of the French Republic, had made himself
dictator of France two days before.
The Prince President's seizure of power had come as a complete surprise to
Queen Victoria. On the very day of his coup d'état she had been urging her
Uncle Leopold to visit her at Osborne; the Belgian King's fears of some sort of
upheaval in France had seemed to her exaggerated. 'I feel ashamed,' she now
admitted, 'to have written so positively a few hours before that nothing would
happen.'
The Queen should have known better. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had
always been one for the unexpected. And if there was one thing about which he
had never left anyone in doubt, it was his determination to make himself master
of France. Reticent in most things, he had never been reticent about his
ambitions. These Victoria understood well enough. It was simply that she was
not yet accustomed to the deviousness of his methods. In fact, Queen Victoria
did not really know a great deal about Prince Louis Napoleon.
They had met only once. This had been in the days of Louis Napoleon's exile
in England, when the Queen had attended an official breakfast in Fulham in aid
of a somewhat unromantic cause: the erection of baths and wash-houses in the
East End of London. Other than on this one public occasion, she had never set
eyes on him. She was aware that he had been born during the halcyon days of
the Great Napoleon's Empire; that his father had been the Emperor's disgruntled
brother Louis and his mother the Empress Josephine's daughter by her first
marriage—the seductively mannered Hortense de Beauharnais. She knew, too,
that since the death of Napoleon's only son in 1832, Louis Napoleon had been a
very active pretender to the throne of France. However, thus far, his attempts to
re-establish his uncle's Empire had been not only unsuccessful, but faintly
comic.
The first attempt, made in the year before Victoria's own accession to the
British throne, had taken place at Strasbourg. At dawn on 30 October 1836, the
twenty-eight-year-old Prince, heading a handful of loyal Bonapartists, had
presented himself to the somewhat startled French garrison and exhorted them to
march behind him to Paris. The garrison had refused to do any such thing. Most
of the soldiers had not even believed that this unheroic-looking young man was
the Great Napoleon's nephew. Prince Louis Napoleon had been arrested and sent
to Paris, where King Louis Philippe, the current French sovereign, had decided
to play down the incident by having the impetuous pretender shipped off to New
York.
Within four months the Prince was back in Europe and within four years had
made yet another attempt on the throne. In August 1840 (it had been the year of
Queen Victoria's marriage) he had assembled a band of fellow conspirators and
set off from England in a hired steamer, bound for Boulogne. To lend the
expedition the right Napoleonic touch, a tame and somewhat bedraggled-looking
eagle had been bought from a boy at the Gravesend docks and chained to the
mast. This second attempt had proved no less disastrous than the first. Louis
Napoleon had again failed to rouse the garrison to his cause and again he had
been arrested. This time Louis Philippe's government had been determined to
take no chances. Prince Louis Napoleon had been sentenced to perpetual
imprisonment in the fortress of Ham, in northern France.
'How long,' the pretender had remarked dryly, 'does perpetuity last in
France?'
For him, it had lasted six years. He had escaped from Ham, disguised as a
workman, in 1846, and had once more taken up residence in England. From
here, with somewhat more circumspection but no less determination, he had
continued his imperialist intrigues.
Throughout these years of Bonapartist activity, Victoria's sympathies had
been with King Louis Philippe. In this she had been backed up, to the hilt, by her
husband, Prince Albert. Louis Napoleon might have cut the more romantic
figure, but the stolid Orleans King, besides being France's chosen sovereign, was