Victoria through the eyes of her favourite child
Northern Ballet’s dance version of the life of Queen Victoria puts her relationship with her daughter Beatrice centre stage. Matthew Dennison explains why
‘Iwanted to find an unreliable witness through whom to view her.” Choreographer Cathy Marston is explaining her decision to tell the story of Queen Victoria, the subject of her latest commission for Northern Ballet, which premieres in Leeds on March 9, from the viewpoint of Victoria’s youngest daughter Beatrice.
Beatrice was the ninth and last of the children of Victoria and Albert. Born just four years before Albert’s death in 1861, she would spend virtually her entire life muffled in Victoria’s black bombazine – her hagiographic mourning for a man Beatrice herself was unable to remember. Even Victoria’s death in 1901, when Beatrice was months short of her 44th birthday, brought no escape. Claiming that she had her “dear Mother’s written instructions”, she devoted the next three decades to “editing” the 43,000 pages of the journal Victoria had begun at the age of 13 and maintained until her death at 81.
It is the act for which history chiefly remembers Beatrice. Her “editorship” took the form of bowdlerisation and rewriting, hence Marston’s “unreliable witness”. Beatrice attempted to guarantee that Victoria survived for posterity, as Queen Mary’s lady-inwaiting Cynthia Colville explained, with her “good qualities not ... hidden by ... her sillinesses”. The bulk of Beatrice’s excisions appear to have targeted Victoria’s peppery vehemence – especially in relation to family members, politicians and the clergy – and her insatiable, well-meant curiosity about the minutiae of her servants’ lives. Since Beatrice destroyed the originals as she worked, transcribing the new diary into 111 blue hardback volumes supplied by the court stationers Parkins & Gotto, we will almost certainly never know the truth. All we can be sure of is that she and Victoria had discussed the plan before Victoria’s death.
Beatrice’s rewriting of her mother’s diaries frames Marston’s new ballet. In this her fourth commission for Northern Ballet – at the invitation of artistic director David Nixon, who wanted a retelling of Victoria’s life to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the queen’s birth this year – she worked alongside writer and dramaturge Uzma Hameed to develop a narrative in which all the events included are either those Beatrice remembers or those she discovers in Victoria’s journals prior to destroying them. The ballet’s set resembles an archives room or library. It is lined with shelves full of Victoria’s journals. By the end of the piece, the red volumes used by Victoria have been replaced by Beatrice’s blue-bound transcriptions.
Marston did not set out to create a ballet about royal censorship. Instead a richly macabre incident from Beatrice’s childhood stopped her in her tracks. “You think you know something about who Victoria is, but you don’t at all” is how she remembers that moment.
I can fully sympathise. More than a decade ago, the same incident took my breath away while I was researching my biography of Beatrice,
The Last Princess, which became a key resource for Victoria. The anecdote originates with the late David Duff, doyen of postwar royal biographers. Duff ’s source is likely to have been one of Beatrice’s surviving children, Queen Ena of Spain or the Marquess of Carisbrooke, and is supported by other (though not all) first-hand accounts. The night Prince Albert died, Duff related, Victoria fled from her husband’s deathbed to Beatrice’s nursery. There she lifted the sleeping four-year-old from her cot and took her to her own bed, where she wrapped Beatrice in Albert’s nightclothes and hugged her close to her as she struggled for respite from her agony.
This story may or may not be true. Certainly Victoria justified her decision to have Beatrice in her bed with her in the days after Albert’s death as “I long so to cling to and clasp a living being”, while the couple’s eldest daughter recorded that Victoria slept with Albert’s “dear red dressing gown beside her and some of his clothes in the bed”. For Marston, who has two young children, “it felt like a moment that I could really connect to: I understood it as an impulse. If my husband died, it would probably be exactly what I’d do”. It captured her imagination as it had mine. The vignette of a small child forced to don the mantle of a dead parent and take on, for his widow, elements of the physical comfort he formerly provided is a ghoulish metaphor. “Beatrice’s struck me as such an interesting perspective from which to tell Victoria’s story.”
The result is a ballet in which the overlapping stories of Victoria’s life and that of the youngest daughter who was her favourite child are interleaved, as in my biography of Beatrice. The ballet begins with Victoria’s deathbed. After completing her final journal entry, the fading Queen entrusts Beatrice with her archive. It is a symbolic rendering of a process that in life happened less dramatically, but it captures aspects of the women’s relationship: Victoria’s trust of the daughter who was devoted to her wholeheartedly and Beatrice’s recognition of that trust, which she understood as an all but sacred commission and pursued doggedly. The remainder of the ballet consists of a series of flashbacks, relating not only Victoria’s story but the less wellknown tale of Beatrice’s, including her thraldom to the domineering but claustrophobically affectionate mother from whom – even after Beatrice’s marriage, to which Victoria agreed with the utmost reluctance – she was never separated. The effect is to show that, despite the loneliness of sovereignty, Victoria’s life was not one of isolation. A widow in her early 40s, she nevertheless retained at least one emotional focus lifelong. Meanwhile Beatrice emerges as a sort of support act for her mother – as indeed she was. Without recrimination she described Victoria as “the centre of everything”.
For Marston it was essential that the ballet pivoted on “a central figure for whom I could feel some sympathy” and she found her linchpin in Beatrice. In exploring Victoria’s history from this alternative perspective, she hoped to uncover something of “who Victoria might have been”, as well as to show audiences “what it was to be next to this woman who was both mighty mother and mighty queen”.
Victoria is a ballet not historical narrative. Its statements are visual, sometimes abstract. A tea party of Victoria, Beatrice, Disraeli and John Brown is imaginary. If it resembles Lewis Carroll’s Madhatter’s tea party more closely than any incident from the Court Circular, it also accurately represents the triple support system from which Victoria benefited for several years in the 1870s. A scene in which the older Beatrice, looking back, expresses her fury at Victoria hijacking her life is also invented. There is no evidence that Beatrice ever expressed resentment at her treatment by her mother, who deliberately kept her at her side, treating her as companion, lady’s maid, secretary, amanuensis, always prepared to rank the Queen’s wishes above her own. In one of the ballet’s happier vignettes, three dance together: the young Beatrice, her handsome husband Henry of Battenberg, known as “Liko”, and an older Beatrice, remembering, dancing alongside the woman she once was and the husband who died of malaria 10 years into their marriage, aged only 37.
There is a theory that biographers ought to retain a distance from their subjects. It’s not always easy. Twelve years after first publication of The Last Princess, I still admire Beatrice and regard her with considerable affection. Her “editorship” of her mother’s journals was not – as detractors claim – merely an act of historical vandalism. It offers us a valuable alternative approach to Victoria: Victoria as her closest child believed she wanted to be remembered. “I think I’m less disturbed by her rewriting history than I was at the beginning,” Marston explains. “I understand her motivation.”
Victoria is neither revisionism nor whitewash. Instead it presents audiences with two heroines for the price of one… both of them also with their villainous sides.
On the night Albert died, Victoria wrapped the four-yearold Beatrice in his nightclothes