Cover story / Queen of spies
back from the frontline when Russia declared
war on the Ottoman empire.
Russia moved troops into the Balkans,
leaving Victoria convinced that it had
Constantinople firmly in its sights. Prime
Minister Benjamin Disraeli, more trusting of
the tsar, took Russia at its word – that it would
stop short of the Ottoman capital. Armed
with royal intelligence, Victoria thought she
knew better. This time her secret source was
Arthur Balfour Haig, equerry to her son
Alfred. She passed the intelligence on to
Disraeli – while keeping the source secret –
and melodramatically warned that if the
Russians reached Constantinople, she “would
be so humiliated that she thinks she would
have to abdicate at once”.
Throughout the Turko-Russian conflict,
the queen was fiercely bellicose towards
Russia. Shamelessly, she scoured her intelli-
gence to cherry-pick information, which she
then used to manipulate her government into
remonstrating with the Russians. On one
occasion she quoted a vague report indicating
that some source had supposedly heard that
Russian artillery had fired on ambulances.
This was hardly a slam-dunk, and neither the
prime minister nor the foreign secretary was
aware of it. So their subsequent admonition of
the Russians was, according to her private
secretary, “entirely the queen’s doing”.
Demanding ever more intelligence, the
queen put constant pressure on the govern-
ment. The wife of one minister complained
that Victoria had “lost control of herself,
badgers her ministers and pushes them
towards war”. The queen even accused the
foreign secretary’s wife of leaking secrets to
the Russians, and urged Disraeli to “be bold”,
but the cabinet was split. In particular, the
foreign secretary was reluctant to get involved.
So Victoria turned to her own covert
diplomacy. She sent an unofficial message to
the tsar, warning that Britain would intervene
militarily if Russia attacked Constantinople.
She had not consulted the foreign secretary, so
the message deliberately exaggerated Britain’s
position – it was a royal bluff. The tsar ulti-
mately backed down, but not until his armies
were just days from Constantinople.
“No punishment is bad enough”
By 1881, assassination was back on the
intelligence agenda. Victoria was getting older
and approaching her golden jubilee when
news reached her of the assassination of Tsar
Alexander II by revolutionaries. “No punish-
ment is bad enough for the murderers,” she
wrote in her diary. “Hanging is too good.”
Though the conspirators had no connec-
tion to Britain, the assassination resurrected
the thorny issue of London’s disinclination to
spy on political discontents. Sympathising
Rise of republicanism
Frédéric Sorrieu’s 1848 work
The Universal Democratic and
Social Republic lauded the wave of
political upheavals across Europe
that Victoria fearedStrategic union
The queen’s second son,
Prince Alfred, with Grand
Duchess Maria Alexandrovna
of Russia. Despite their
marriage in 1874, he obtained
little useful information