A Domestic Tyrant Queen Victoria's Children

Queen Victoria, the great matriarch, reigned over a quarter of the world.

To her subjects, she was revered as Queen.

To her family, she was often feared as a domestic tyrant.

Queen Victoria's desire to control her children, I think,

was pathological.

She ruled the roost domestically and she was just jolly well determined

that her children were going to behave like subjects.

As they grew into manhood,

her sons could break free from Victoria's clutches,

but the daughters were always kept on a far tighter rein

by their demanding mother.

Everything with Victoria was about me -

my needs, my need for love, my need for care, my need for company.

It was never, ever really a case of, "What can I do for them?"

In danger of being suffocated, the daughters hit back.

Louise is not prepared just to do what her mother says,

but always comes out fighting.

In a great untold family saga,

the headstrong princesses fought to escape their mother.

They shocked the Queen by forging their own independent lives,

and there was more.

A marriage to an alleged homosexual, a career risking disease and death.

A scandal with a renowned artist, a passion for revolutionary ideas.

And, in daring to tear up the Queen's rule book,

they became unlikely champions of the independence of women.

Her daughters, they really wanted to see the position of women changing,

and they were all slowly and gradually

working in their own societies

to try and bring about a change in women's lives.

But Queen Victoria was not going to let her daughters go

without a fight.

Osborne House, Queen Victoria's holiday home on the Isle of Wight

where she and her husband Prince Albert came to find peace

and seclusion from the world.

Here, the Royal children could roam freely.

Little did they know

they were at the heart of Victoria and Albert's master plan -

to mould the perfect Royal dynasty, role models for the nation

and marriage partners for European royalty.

Victoria and Albert had quite well-worked ideas

about what the future of their children should be,

even down to selecting who else among the royal houses of Europe

might be suitable for marriage partners.

The five Royal princesses were not meant to have independent lives.

Their destinies were to be controlled by the Queen.

She let them know at all times

that she wasn't just their mother, she was their Queen,

and they had no chance to disobey her, they weren't allowed to by law.

Victoria was to find that she couldn't always have it her own way.

In a drama of conflict and determination,

as the daughters grew up,

they were to challenge their set roles as princesses and women.

Clever Vicky, the Princess Royal,

would outrage the Queen with her radical ideas.

Alice, devoted as a child, so disobeyed her mother

that Victoria once called her the real devil in the family.

Beautiful Louise was to shock with her rebellious spirit

and controversial causes.

And loyal Beatrice, who lived chained to her mother's side,

would bid for freedom through marriage to the love of her life.

But in the 1850s

the young princesses were living in an idyllic regal bubble.

Privilege was their life.

Louise, for example, grew up, as a toddler,

she would put her hand out if she met anyone in the corridor.

Little tiny, chubby little legs, wandering around,

saw somebody, out would go her hand.

They were expected to kiss it, which indeed they did.

They were taught never to forget their position as princesses.

Their governess told them...

"Go, my dear, put yourself in the best place, before everybody."

In 1861, the settled world of the princesses came crashing down.

Their father, Prince Albert, died at the young age of 42.

The daughters didn't just have to deal with their own bereavement,

but also the overwhelming grief of their needy mother.

A governess predicted catastrophe...

"The worst, far the worst, is yet to come."

And no-one bore the brunt of their mother's grief

more than the four-year-old Beatrice.

Victoria clung to Beatrice,

absolutely clung to her almost from the moment Albert died.

In fact, one of the first things she did when Albert died

was rush out to the nursery and grasp the sleeping child to her bosom

and took Beatrice into her bed with her.

"Sweet little Beatrice comes to lie in my bed every morning,

"which is a great comfort.

"I so long to cling to and clasp a living being."

Beatrice became a sort of mourning toy for Victoria.

She cuddled Beatrice to her and the image that always comes up

is of her sort of almost like sucking the life out of her,

it's almost vampiric.

Trying to extract something from her

that really no four-year-old child can possibly give.

Looking back on this,

we could say that the way Victoria behaves towards Beatrice

almost amounts to a sort of child abuse.

Er, it has a very profound effect on Beatrice's psyche, on her outlook,

on her whole personality and it's hard not to see that as cruel.

Beatrice was not alone.

Albert's death seemed to intensify Victoria's darker side.

All of the princesses were to be dominated

by their self-obsessed, controlling mother.

She really just felt that all she'd ever wanted was her and Albert

and she really makes the children feel dreadful about it.

I mean, she seemed to have blamed the children very much.

She would, I think, much rather have lost her children than her husband.

Where once the Royal homes, Windsor and Osborne,

were places for fun and play, they were now mausoleums of grief.

The oldest princess, Vicky, remarked...

"Everything is so different, the old life, the old customs have gone."

Victoria seemed more interested in her past than the children's future.

She had her late husband's clothes laid out daily in his dressing room,

hot water for his shaving was delivered each morning.

She preserved his apartments exactly as they had always been.

There are ways in which Albert's death is never quite acknowledged.

There's something about the coming of the next generation

that she finds very difficult

because, I suppose, there's a sense in which

Albert's death and Albert himself are receding back into history,

and she's doing absolutely everything she can to stop that from happening.

At the time of Albert's death,

Victoria's five daughters ranged from 4 to 21 years old.

The princesses had a problem -

how to cope with their unmanageable mother.

Vicky had found independence by marrying a German prince

and moving to Berlin.

It fell to the 18-year-old Princess Alice

to take on the burden of the grieving Queen.

In a sense, Alice almost took the place of Albert after he died.

She comforted Victoria, you know, she tried to be a stable presence,

a rock that Albert had been, she didn't cry in her mother's presence,

she held back her tears, she'd cry only alone in her room.

She really threw herself wholeheartedly

into making Victoria's life bearable.

Alice didn't only give emotional support to her widowed mother,

she also took charge of the Queen's official business.

Alice, effectively,

was the only person having close access to the Queen,

the whole world was shut out.

There were very few people allowed to have any contact with her

in those first few months,

so Alice would be the one

to steer essential papers in her direction that needed signing.

It was very difficult for the business of government

after Albert died.

And Alice really was effectively the only intermediary.

The demanding role took its toll on the young princess.

Apparently, physically it was hard on her

because a nice podgy girl turns into an anorexic wreck

and her fiance was totally flabbergasted when he saw her again.

Albert's plan had been to draw Germany and Britain together

through royal inter-marriage. Before he died,

he had arranged Alice's engagement to a German prince, Louis of Hesse.

Victoria was in a quandary.

She could not bear to lose her daughter,

but her late husband's wishes had to be respected.

Six months after his death, the marriage went ahead.

But there was to be no grand wedding,

just a small service in the Yellow Drawing Room at Osborne House.

For the grieving Queen,

her daughter's joy was no cause for celebration.

"Poor Alice's wedding - more like a funeral than a wedding -

"is over and she is a wife!

"I say God bless her,

"though a dagger is plunged in my bleeding, desolate heart

"when I hear from her this morning

"that she is proud and happy to be Louis' wife!"

It's not, "I'm so happy for you, you have a husband who loves you."

It's, "I'm so sorry for me because I haven't got anyone any more."

And she was like that with all her children.

And Alice was allowed out of deep mourning for about a day

to wear white and went away with an entire trousseau of black.

It was very grim.

By marrying, Alice escaped her mother's suffocating grief.

Her new life was to be a minor royal in provincial Germany.

She was following in the footsteps of her elder sister Vicky.

Three years before, the Princess Royal had been married off

to a much grander prince, Frederick of Prussia,

and she had been enduring life in the stiff Prussian court ever since.

Being a princess in the 19th century sounds absolutely miserable.

Vicky, particularly, er, off in Prussia, and very, very isolated,

very, very suspicious of some of the people around her,

living a fairly kind of unfulfilled existence.

To be propelled off into the world like that

and to be planted in an alien environment,

I think, must have been pretty unsettling.

Seeking solace from her family at home,

Vicky regularly wrote to her mother,

but the letters she received back were not always ones of comfort.

On hearing that Vicky was newly pregnant, the Queen wrote to her.

"The horrid news has upset us dreadfully."

The princess valiantly replied...

"You know I love little children so much

"and I own one must feel rather proud

"to think one has given life to an immortal soul."

"Very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that.

"I think much more of us being like a cow or dog at such moments,

"when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic."

Vicky may have been 700 miles from Windsor,

but that was no escape from her indomitable mother.

The pair exchanged 8,000 letters

in what would be a life-long correspondence

that showed both mutual love,

and the Queen's obsessive and demanding manner.

With Vicky, she has the possibility of being her true self

and she is remarkably unguarded.

Victoria is one of the great letter writers of the 19th century,

she pours out what's on her mind, which is often a stream of anxieties.

"Your answers yesterday by telegram are not quite satisfactory

"and you don't say whether your cold is better or not.

"Were you feverishly unwell with it or not?

"I get terribly fidgeted at not knowing what is really the matter."

"I really hope you are not getting fat again.

"Do avoid eating soft, pappy things or drinking much -

"you know how that fattens."

They would fire these things off to each other all the time,

and the ones that are coming from Victoria are trying to exert,

from hundreds of miles away, the kind of control that she tried

to exert over her children, you know, when they were small.

And so there were these directives,

telling Vicky about how to micromanage her life.

"I wish you for the future to adopt the plan of beginning your letters

"with the following sort of headings - yesterday, or day before,

"we did so and so, dined here or there

"and then where you spent the evening."

She ruled the roost domestically, and that, I think,

was the key thing, she was just jolly well determined

that her children were going to behave like subjects.

Queen Victoria's...desire to control her children, I think,

was...pathological

and I think was that of a domestic dictator.

The Queen wasn't just a domestic tyrant,

she could seem shockingly unsympathetic.

When a pregnant Vicky fell down the stairs

and badly sprained her ankle, her mother wrote...

"I fear you exaggerate as you so often used to do.

"Others who do not know your disposition

"think you are really ill, which you are not."

Vicky seemed to be cowed by her mother

and often begged for forgiveness.

"Don't be angry, dear Mama.

"It is very painful to think I have annoyed you or displeased you."

The courtier Baron Stockmar was horrified by the correspondence.

BARON STOCKMAR: "Her mother is behaving abominably to her.

"The Queen wishes to exercise the same authority and control

"over her that she did before her marriage

"and she writes constant letters full of anger and reproaches."

One issue above all brought Victoria into fierce conflict

with both Vicky and Alice in Germany.

Breastfeeding.

The Queen detested babies. She called them froglike.

Victoria absolutely refused to breastfeed her children,

which is kind of surprising

because it was becoming very, very acceptable for women,

even fashionable for women to breastfeed their babies,

upper-class women were doing it as well.

The Queen commanded her daughters not to breastfeed their own babies.

But Vicky and Alice would later disobey their mother,

asserting a woman's right to breastfeed, whatever her status.

Victoria was disgusted and outraged at her daughters' disobedience...

"It does make my hair stand on end

"to think that my two daughters should turn into cows."

The Queen took her revenge on her daughter,

naming a cow in one of her dairies Princess Alice.

For years after Albert's death,

Victoria's remaining unmarried daughters -

Helena, Louise and Beatrice -

were prisoners in the vaults of grief that were the Royal palaces.

No-one found life more claustrophobic

than the second youngest daughter, Princess Louise.

She constantly chafed against her mother's unyielding grip.

Louise was a bit of a rebel

and her mother described her as rather backward

and rather difficult,

ie, she was a bit more trouble.

She was a teenager - just - when her father died,

just at the age when she thought her world, her horizons would widen,

and they narrowed considerably.

And she was watched and protected all the time and it was stifling.

Victoria would unleash her power at random.

Louise once arranged to have tea with a friend at court

only to be forced to cancel when, on a whim,

the Queen stopped her from going.

Louise's note of apology to the courtier

seemed to be a thinly disguised attack on her mother.

"The Queen seems not to wish me to leave her,

"therefore I have to ask to be excused,

"but not without me expressing my great disappointment

"at not being able to come."

Victoria very jealously guarded her children's affections.

She really disliked it when they formed close companionships

with each other, let alone with people outside the family.

She seemed to believe

that she had to be the kind of flame around which they all revolved.

"Never make friendships.

"Girl friendships and intimacies are very bad

"and often lead to great mischief."

Victoria not only prevented Louise from having friendships,

she also forbade the entertainments

that were usually part of a princess's upbringing.

When she was 17, she should have had her coming out dance

as every other girl of her age was having.

And the Queen refused.

She said that she had not opened the ballroom at Buckingham Palace

since Albert had been alive

and she wasn't going to do it for any dance for Louise.

Queen Victoria's efforts to limit her daughters' social lives

may have had its roots in her own isolated and loveless childhood.

She recalled her loneliness.

"I was not on comfortable

"or at all intimate or confidential footing with my mother."

It comes from being this very cloistered only child

and I think she was very hungry for proper human love and attention.

And as soon as they knew she was heir to the throne,

she was made to feel the centre of attention,

she was the most important person

because she was going to be Queen of England.

As a mother herself,

Victoria found it difficult to show her children affection,

even when they were very young.

"Only very exceptionally do I find

"the rather intimate intercourse with them either agreeable or easy."

She had very ambivalent feelings about all her daughters,

and she's one of those people with a very small heart, Queen Victoria,

so if she's liking, say, two or three of the children at once,

it means that the other six are out of it and she detests them.

Victoria's disapproval

could demolish her daughters' self-confidence.

As a girl, Louise had once said...

"I am so stupid and useless."

The Queen seemed to judge her children by their looks,

always prizing beauty.

"You are wrong in thinking that I am not fond of children.

"I am. I admire pretty ones immensely."

Victoria was particularly unimpressed with Helena,

the middle child nicknamed Lenchen, whom she criticised

for being the least good-looking of the five princesses.

"Dear poor Lenchen has great difficulties with her figure.

"Her features are so very large and long

"that it quite spoils her looks."

Helena was the plainest of the Queen's children

and she also wrestled with her weight.

This is not unusual in Victoria's family.

Victoria herself frequently weighed almost 12 stone,

despite being only 4 feet 11.

But it was Helena who was blamed for not getting a grip on her weight.

By contrast, the pretty Louise had gained the confidence

to stand up to her over-bearing mother.

Desperate to break away,

Victoria's daughter had an artistic bent which she followed.

She took up sculpture

and had her own studio to which she could escape.

The Queen tried to stop her,

believing the art form was not ladylike,

calling it "unnatural" for a girl, and especially a princess.

But that didn't stop Louise.

Once Princess Louise set her mind to something, she was a powerhouse,

she wasn't going to stop, that was her purpose,

and, as with all things with Louise,

one track, "I have to get this to happen."

In choosing sculpture, Louise was probably pushing the boundaries,

trying to see what her mother would take and what she wouldn't.

As strong willed as her mother, Louise's determination paid off.

Victoria gave in

and let her be the first princess to attend a public school.

In 1868, Louise went to the National Art Training School,

joining the pioneering generation of women who were learning sculpture.

But the Queen was horrified by what her daughter would be exposed to.

One of the real worries about women enrolling in art class

was this problem of what they would do in the life class.

The life class is where you draw or look or sculpt from a nude model.

It would be much better if she stuck to painting.

You paint the spaniels, you paint the ladies in waiting,

but it doesn't require you, as it were,

to get to grips with the human form.

Victoria would not stand for such unladylike activity.

She limited Louise's attendance at the school

by demanding that she stay at home

to help with the Queen's large private correspondence.

The other students were astonished at how hard a princess worked.

They couldn't believe that she was constantly having to miss lessons

because she was working.

They'd all assumed she'd be some spoilt brat

and there she was working harder than any other woman - and men -

of their acquaintance.

Not one to be stopped, Louise persevered

and went on to become the first female sculptor

to have a statue erected in a public place.

The statue, appropriately enough of her mother,

still stands outside Kensington Palace, in London.

I think that Louise was pushing the boundaries

of the behaviour of women in the mid-19th century

and also in the moulding, if you like,

of what we consider the monarchy today.

Louise's 25-year-old sister Vicky, living in Germany,

was less fulfilled.

Able and clever, she had been groomed by Albert

to be a force for change in hidebound Prussia,

but the reality was that she didn't have the influence she had expected.

Without a role, Vicky set herself up as a matchmaker for her siblings.

Vicky threw herself into this,

partly, one suspects, because it gave her something to do,

it gave her a sense of empowerment

in an environment where she so often felt disempowered.

The Princess set her sights on her sister Helena.

Aged 19, this unremarkable young woman was ready to be married off

to an appropriate suitor.

Vicky found a match

that surprisingly delighted the demanding Queen -

her German friend Prince Christian.

He was 15 years older than Helena,

but appeared considerably older than that.

He is of moderate height, er, stooping, bald-headed.

Later on, things go from bad to worse.

In 1891, Helena's brother Arthur shoots Prince Christian in the eye,

a shooting accident.

Christian rather takes this on the chin

and indeed embraces it as an opportunity for fun

and acquires an enormous collection of glass eyes

which, at dull moments during banquets or dinner parties,

he would summon a footman to bring to the table

for the edification of fellow guests.

He might have been penniless and homeless,

but Victoria was thrilled with her un-prepossessing new son-in-law.

For her, there was an advantage to his poverty.

The Queen knew that, by marrying Helena,

Prince Christian would have to settle in Britain

and live at Windsor with her.

She won't allow them to marry anybody who will take them away,

so she has to find these rather sort of tame, neutered -

well, not physically -

politically neutered princes who will agree -

have no money by princely standards -

and will agree to come and live in Victoria's court,

because she doesn't want to lose her daughters. So she clings possessively.

"It makes me shudder..."

..the Queen had told Vicky when she left home...

"..when I look round at all your sweet, happy, unconscious sisters,

"and think I must give them up too one by one."

Helena and Prince Christian

remained tied to Windsor for the rest of their lives.

Poor old Christian, who ended up

in this rather absurd role living on the estate at Windsor,

managing Frogmore, managing the park,

and it was his job to do things like

make sure there weren't too many frogs hopping around at Frogmore.

His plan to solve this problem was to import ducks into the estate.

The ducks ate the frogspawn, the numbers of frogs were reduced.

But this was the kind of thing he had to deal with, you know,

he wasn't kind of managing the reunification of Germany,

he was worrying about vermin on the estate at Windsor.

The marriage may have pleased the Queen, but it angered Princess Alice,

who saw it for what it was - a cynical ploy to keep Helena at home.

To Victoria's fury, Alice openly objected to the match.

The Queen was to call her...

"A mischief-maker and untruth teller,

"the real devil in the family."

This was the beginning of a rift between Alice and her mother

that would never heal.

Victoria didn't support her daughter

when, a year later, she was in trouble.

Alice was marooned with her young family

in the war-torn German state of Hesse-Darmstadt where they lived.

In the decade after she married, they suffered through two wars

in which Prussian forces tore Europe apart.

Alice wrote to her mother...

"How I pray some end may soon come to this horrid bloodshed!

"Ah! The misery around us you can't imagine."

But in England,

Victoria, still seething from her earlier row with Alice,

sent a flurry of vitriolic letters criticising her daughter.

"She has become so sharp and bitter,

"and no-one wishes to have her in their house."

In her exasperation, Victoria became careless.

She wrote a letter to Vicky

telling Vicky everything she thought wrong about Alice

but, unfortunately, she put the letter for Vicky

in an envelope addressed to Alice and vice versa.

So Alice got the letter saying to Vicky

all the dreadful things she'd done.

And when Victoria hears this, she's a bit vexed,

but her comment is to say, well, it's actually jolly good for Alice

to know what her mother thinks about her.

The Queen was unrepentant.

"First of all to say how greatly annoyed and vexed I am

"at the mistake about the letter,

"which is shocking and, to me, unaccountable.

"But I think, as it is, no harm is done, but good will come out of it."

That's one of the wonderful things about Victoria,

she never dissembles, she always just says what she thinks

and I think that's rather splendid

because so much of courtly etiquette is about keeping your mouth shut

and being sort of discreet and quiet, not at all Victoria.

Alice continued to defy the Queen.

She found liberation in nursing and medicine,

which she knew would shock her mother.

Surrounded by injured soldiers in her war-torn German state,

she asked Victoria to send help from England.

ALICE: "Illness and wounds will be dreadful in this heat.

"Coarse linen and rags are the things of which one can't have enough,

"and I am working, collecting shirts, sheets,

"and now I come to ask if you could send me some old linen for rags."

Alice doesn't want to just be one of these show nurses

who just put on an apron and don't do anything,

she really wants to be hands-on.

This kind of nursing was dangerous.

The soldiers were suffering

from contagious diseases such as smallpox.

Undaunted by the risks,

Alice was driven to finding a practical role for herself

in the world of medicine, saying,

"Life was made for work and not pleasure."

Alice's nursing upset the Queen.

Though she had praised nurses in the past,

Victoria was appalled that a princess of the Royal blood

should work so closely with the human body

and should be so fascinated by its workings.

She objected to Alice being interested in obstetrics,

in gynaecology, and particularly in Alice quizzing

her married sisters and sisters-in-law

on such matters as what their childbirth had been like,

what their pregnancies had been like.

When Louise is going to visit Alice,

Queen Victoria writes to Louise, "Don't be pumped by Alice.

"Be cautious and silent about your interior."

And what Victoria meant by that was

don't talk about anything to do with sex or anatomy

because this is not a subject

that you should be allowing Alice to be involved in.

In the face of her mother's disapproval,

Alice stubbornly persisted in her work.

Advised by Florence Nightingale,

the Princess established organisations

which revolutionised nursing in Germany.

In 1871, she set up beds for the wounded in palace gardens.

Alice's actions suggest a way forward for monarchy.

It is, if you like, a precursor to the welfare monarchy we enjoy today,

that this is hands-on philanthropy

and it's moving away from a white-glove detachment.

The Queen would get her own back on her defiant daughter.

Impoverished by the wars,

Alice wrote regularly to Victoria

begging for money to fund her Royal lifestyle,

but most requests were simply ignored.

When Alice returned home for a visit, a courtier described how...

"Princess Alice at Osborne

"had talked very loudly at dinner about a horse she wanted,

"quiet enough for herself and strong enough for Louis.

"But the Queen changed the discourse pretty smartly

"to the beef and cutlets."

Conflict between the Queen and her second daughter

had pushed them into near estrangement.

But another princess was also causing trouble.

Unmarried sculptress Louise was rebellious

and her looks and charm were wreaking havoc.

She had lovely wide-apart blue eyes, this fair hair, curly,

she liked to wear blue ribbons in it.

She had the best figure of all Queen Victoria's daughters,

slender, she was very fit,

she was actually a very well-rounded, delightful person.

I think that people enjoyed sitting next to her,

she wasn't at all stuffy.

One artist said of Louise...

"If I were a young man,

"I should not rest until that lovely girl had promised to marry me."

But for Victoria, having a beautiful daughter had its problems.

In 1869, when Princess Louise was 21,

the dashing sculptor Sir Edgar Boehm was invited to stay at Balmoral.

He was to teach the Princess while sculpting a bust

of Victoria's Highland servant and confidant John Brown.

Joseph Edgar Boehm was extremely charismatic and good-looking

and right from the beginning there was a wonderful rapport

between him and Louise.

Queen Victoria had asked John Brown to keep an eye on Louise and Boehm,

and Louise found him incredibly intrusive.

All of the Royal children did, they felt he was a spy for their mother.

Brown reported to Victoria on the flirtatious couple.

He and the Queen were then said to have burst in on the pair

as they enjoyed an intimate moment.

Louise realised that Brown had been spying.

Louise says, "John Brown, this is your doing,"

shakes him by the shoulders and says, "Either you go, or I go."

And after this stormy event, the only solution

is that somebody must quickly find a husband for Louise.

While the Princess was not going to be pushed

into an arranged marriage to a chinless German royal,

the Queen had precise ideas for her dynasty.

A husband should above all be royal and come from the right stock.

The way Queen Victoria described the marriage partners reminds us

of genetic engineering or something.

I mean, she was really precise. At one point, she said she wants

some dark-haired males, she wants some dark blood in there.

They do talk about marriage partners

like horse breeding or dog breeding.

With a desperate shortage of acceptable princes for Louise,

the whole family became involved,

each favouring a different candidate.

"I recommend you to take my advice and not forget Albert of Prussia..."

"I know the violence of your feelings against him

"but I have not refrained from again repeating in the interest..."

"Lord Camperdown is poor but he will be rich at his mother's death.

"She is the daughter..."

"A remarkably nice young man with such good manners and good-looking."

Louise despaired.

"Everyone is speaking, either for or against this

"and it is most uncommonly unpleasant,

"and I am to decide without a proper chance of knowing anyone."

Louise was a modern woman.

She did not want to marry anyone of their choice.

She did not want to marry a foreign prince,

she was particularly put off Prussian men,

she allegedly said they smelt bad and had an appalling sense of humour.

The Queen herself had to admit there were no suitable princes.

"Times have much changed. Great foreign alliances are looked on

"as causes of trouble and anxiety, and are no good."

With much of Europe at war, she was forced to give up

the plan of marrying all her children to European royalty.

Victoria reluctantly turned to a reference book

that listed not royals, but aristocrats -

Burke's guide to the peerage.

For once, Louise and Queen Victoria were of like minds,

that Louise would marry someone British, home born.

Now, this was completely revolutionary.

Eventually, Louise accepted the proposal of an approved candidate -

John, Marquess of Lorne, the heir to the Dukedom of Argyll.

He was a romantic-looking figure.

He had this lovely, thick, luxuriant fair, fair hair,

he had Campbell piercing blue eyes and was considered cultured.

He was politically astute, he had travelled, he had gone to America,

he wrote articles, he dabbled in writing poetry.

In 1871, Louise and her British aristocrat were married.

It was the first time in centuries

that a princess had been allowed to marry outside royalty.

The public were thrilled,

they were really fed up with all this foreign royalty

stealing their Royal princes and princesses, and they were so pleased.

It was the best PR move that Louise could have done.

The public at large might have been pleased,

but the marriage was an unhappy one.

Rumours about Lorne may offer an explanation.

When you try to research the Marquess of Lorne here,

you come up against a lot of allegedlys, possiblys, maybes,

about the fact that he was gay.

There's a great deal of shrouding it all in mystery.

There's an interesting story that Princess Louise,

when she and her husband were living in Kensington Palace,

had the French windows in their apartments bricked up

so that she could stop her husband getting out at night

and cruising soldiers in the park.

The Queen, in a rare show of sympathy,

came to appreciate how unhappy the marriage was.

She was very much on her daughter's side,

and she was never normally on her daughters' side.

So perhaps she had finally been made aware

of the true nature of Lorne's sexuality.

Scandal would not die down.

Much to Victoria's horror, years later, other rumours surfaced,

this time over Louise

and her relationship with her former teacher, Sir Edgar Boehm.

She was visiting him one day in his studio and he collapsed and died.

The gossips all said

that he died in her arms, in flagrante,

but it could be that he just died.

The Princess could not deny

that she was at the studio at the time of the sculptor's death.

She claimed that she had been chaperoned by a lady-in-waiting.

Louise described how, during the visit...

"Sir Edgar carried a bust to show me.

"When I entreated him not to,

"he also pushed some heavy things and must have overexerted himself."

The Queen was terrified of any damage to the Royal reputation.

When scandal threatened, she always publicly supported her family.

But in private

Victoria continued to fight her never-ending battle for control.

By 1872, Beatrice -

the baby Victoria had clung to for comfort when Albert died -

was her only unmarried daughter.

The Queen was determined it should stay that way.

"She is my constant companion

"and I hope and trust will never leave me while I live."

Her youngest daughter,

always known as Baby, er...

occupied a central position in Victoria's emotional life.

The consequence for poor Beatrice

was that she was babified virtually for life.

It was a tragic existence.

She was sent off to bed early, she wasn't allowed to become an adult.

Beatrice was totally cowed by Victoria.

Beatrice hardly dared open her mouth at lunch, um,

except to put food in it in case she said something her mother jumped on.

However much she wanted to,

Victoria couldn't keep Beatrice infantilised forever.

The opposite happened.

Under the stifling control of her mother,

she seemed to age prematurely.

There is a sense in which

Beatrice and Victoria almost become the same age.

She appears to take on

a number of the characteristics of a much older person.

She begins to suffer from really quite extreme rheumatism,

her figure fills out, she becomes rather portly.

Desperate to keep her by her side,

the ageing Victoria did her utmost to put Beatrice off marriage.

Dinner guests were reprimanded by the Queen

for mentioning the words engagement or wedding

in the Princess's presence.

At one point, there's a German prince

that Beatrice may have taken a bit of a shine to.

And so Victoria arranges for this young man, who is very good-looking,

to sit beside Beatrice all through a formal dinner

and she instructs Beatrice

that she is not to direct a single word to this young man.

This poor young man doesn't know what he's done,

he's absolutely baffled, leaves the table

and thinks, "Well, that's it, obviously I misread the signs,

"obviously Princess Beatrice is not interested in me at all."

Despite Victoria's scheming, in 1884,

Beatrice, the most obedient of daughters, made a bid for freedom.

Aged 27, she fell in love with Henry Prince of Battenberg

and announced she wanted to marry.

This is the great moment of Beatrice flexing her muscles,

this is the one really significant independent action of her life,

the only time when she puts up a stand against the Queen

on a matter of any importance.

She was desperate at that moment to escape

and to attain this sort of adulthood.

Victoria flatly refused even to discuss

the possibility of Beatrice marrying.

She's furious at what she almost regards as Beatrice's treachery

and I think that Queen Victoria's response

is the cruellest thing that she does in her life.

For about six months, Victoria would not talk to her.

She communicated to her with little notes.

They were sitting at breakfast together

and she would pass her a note with her eyes averted

because this was such an outrage,

she was going against what her mother needed.

Everything with Victoria was about me, my needs, my need for love,

my need for care, my need for company.

It was never, ever really a case of, "What can I do for them?"

Eventually, the Queen gave way to her tenacious daughter.

Victoria allowed the marriage to go ahead on the condition, once again,

that Beatrice and Prince Henry

should always remain with her at Windsor.

Victoria was uncomfortable

with the physical side of her daughter's relationship.

She hoped and prayed there would be "no results" for some time.

During the engagement, the Queen had been thankful there was...

"No kissing, et cetera, which Beatrice dislikes."

One of the strangest things about Victoria's attitudes

is the way that she seems to resent

the sexual and the romantic lives of her children,

they become an area of difficulty for her.

Victoria did not only need to have power

over every aspect of her daughters' lives,

she wanted precedence over them too.

In 1871, Vicky's father-in-law had been named German Emperor,

making her the future German Empress.

The Queen was put out by this potential new title.

Queen Victoria is rank conscious and, in her own mind,

she is the topmost reigning monarch in the world,

she is quite clear about that.

She is therefore troubled by the fact that her eldest daughter

is going to become an empress and that she herself is not an empress.

Not to be outdone, Victoria had the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli,

proclaim her Empress of India first.

Disraeli was clear about her motives, he is recorded as saying...

"Her daughter will have imperial rank,

"and she cannot bear to be in a lower position."

The Queen also felt threatened by Vicky's intellect.

Her daughter was interested in scientific progress

and modern thought, ideas which challenged her mother's world-view.

Vicky was highly intellectual, she was enlightened,

she was radical. Queen Victoria said, "Really, you're so radical,

"I could almost believe that you are a republican."

So she was very forward-looking,

very intellectual, very intelligent, very sympathetic,

and really quite un-royal in a strange kind of way.

Vicky was that ultimate paradox - the intelligent royal.

Vicky shocked her mother by reading Charles Darwin's radical new book

The Origin Of The Species, which put forward the theory of evolution.

The Queen feared that Vicky was turning into a modern sceptic,

as she warned one of her daughters...

"Don't you listen to her, don't you let your firm faith ever be shaken.

"Don't you read those books,

"don't follow her advice in many things. Pray, pray don't."

There could be nothing more profane than the work of Karl Marx.

Vicky read the revolutionary's Das Kapital

and was eager to hear more of his ideas.

Careful to avoid enraging the Queen,

she asked her friend, the MP Sir Grant Duff,

to go and discreetly meet the communist on her behalf.

Grant Duff, having expected to be disgusted and repelled

by this firebrand, in fact wrote back

that he seemed a very genial and rather clever man.

Marx was obviously at his most charming

and asked for his compliments to be passed to the Princess Royal

and her Prussian husband.

But it was her daughter Louise's interest in a new movement

that made the deeply conservative Victoria's blood boil.

The Queen would be a symbol of female strength

and independence for generations to come.

Despite this, she was horrified by the rise of the women's movement.

"The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write

"to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of Women's Rights.

"It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious

"that she cannot contain herself."

It's hard to imagine anybody on this planet

has ever been less of a feminist than Queen Victoria.

She thought it was positively wicked.

She thought women belonged in the home.

Although she was living at a time

when there were lots of people who were beginning to ask -

intellectual middle-class women and upper-class women -

why they shouldn't have the vote, why they shouldn't go to university,

why they shouldn't be educated in the same way that boys were educated.

For Princess Louise,

female emancipation became a burning commitment.

The flame had been lit when she went to see Elizabeth Garrett,

the first woman in Britain to qualify as a surgeon

and an ardent supporter of women's rights.

When the Princess arrived,

the pioneering doctor was up a ladder hanging wallpaper.

Elizabeth Garret was amazed to see this delightful young lady

who was interested in meeting her

and wanted to learn all about her training and her education.

As she was leaving, she said to Elizabeth Garrett,

"Please don't tell the Queen about my visit."

Unfortunately, word got out and the Queen was furious

when she discovered what Louise had done.

It's psychologically interesting

that somebody who had been made to really bow down to her mother

had managed to reach a point

when she was strong enough and feisty enough and independent enough

to go against her mother's wishes

and to do what she wanted to do in terms of meeting this woman

who was single-handedly changing female history in Britain.

In 1866, Garrett and other prominent women

had signed one of the first petitions demanding votes for women.

Louise supported the controversial movement, but she didn't sign.

As a Royal, she wasn't allowed to take a political position.

As Victoria reached old age, the daughters became more daring

but still had to work hard to avoid their mother's wrath.

Although Victoria had an amazing kind of surveillance system

and kept tabs on absolutely everybody,

I think the daughters were very, very good

at sort of going under the radar and getting involved in activities

that they knew Victoria would not necessarily be approving of.

But they did it nonetheless.

Victoria had always encouraged giving to charity,

but her daughters took the idea of philanthropy one step further.

In later years, Princess Louise became known

for her work with hospitals, tirelessly visiting wounded soldiers

and encouraging nurses.

She devoted much of her life to helping women find new roles

at a time when they were expected to stay at home.

She herself worked vociferously in female education

and in getting women into work.

It was very touching, actually, that she wanted to work so hard

in an area which she very much felt, together with her sisters,

that their mother was neglecting.

Other sisters also developed a deep interest in the position of women.

Helena was one of the founders of the British Red Cross,

helping women get into medicine.

In Germany, Vicky and Alice broke new ground,

setting up organisations for women

that encouraged them to earn an independent living.

As the 20th century dawned,

women started to join the workforce in greater numbers than ever before.

By sheer determination,

the daughters had not only escaped their mother's clutches

to carve new paths for princesses,

but had helped to re-define the female role.

Victoria's daughters open up a whole set of possibilities

for middle-class and working-class women

towards the end of the 20th century.

Things like nursing, social work, local government work, teaching even,

become professionalised.

They grow out of that philanthropic moment

and become career possibilities for ordinary middle-class women.

The daughters may have been quiet revolutionaries,

but they were always conscious of protecting the Royal image.

After Victoria's death,

Princess Beatrice edited and transcribed

all of the late Queen's letters and journals.

She burnt most of the originals.

The Princess tried to ensure

that posterity would only see the best side of Victoria.

But, try as she might, she couldn't hide the fact

that her mother had been headstrong, emotional and controlling -

characteristics that her daughters also inherited.

Queen Victoria found her daughters difficult a lot of the time

and yet, of course, when you look at these strong personalities

and their radical interests and their great desire to bring about change,

it stems from them being the daughters

of this very strong-willed woman who was running the Empire.

She'd wanted them to have that strength in many other ways,

she just didn't like it when it came up against her.

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