Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria reigned longer than any British monarch before her, and considering her vigilance in keeping him politically and socially impotent while she lived, her longevity was perhaps her final and greatest disservice to her eldest son and heir, Edward VII.
The rigid, repressed Victoria was never a particularly cozy mum, candidly acknowledging early on that she derived “no especial pleasure or compensation” from her children. Early on, she displayed a particular enmity toward Edward. “The hereditary and unfailing antipathy of our Sovereigns to their Heirs Apparent seems thus early to be taking root,” noted one member of the court.
The young prince was gregarious and fun-loving. And with his mother’s driving fear that he would grow up to be like her debauched Hanoverian uncles, the queen prescribed a torturously rigid upbringing that stifled the boy’s natural inclinations. His rebellion did little to endear him to his mama, who bombarded him with criticism and rarely missed an opportunity to register her disappointment in him.
The chasm between mother and son widened considerably upon the death of Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, to whom she was fanatically devoted and for whose death she loudly blamed Edward. The prince had been caught up in a youthful indiscretion with an actress, and the morally sensitive Albert, who was devastated by the scandal surrounding his son, coincidentally died a short time later. Victoria could not be convinced that it was typhoid, not grief, that carried her beloved away.
During her morbid, self-imposed seclusion that would last for decades, the crepe-draped queen remained determined to keep the Prince of Wales away from anything remotely resembling responsibility. She was convinced of Edward’s inherent unworthiness. All important state papers were kept from him, providing zero training for his future role. Removing a key from his pocket, Edward’s little brother Leopold once remarked: “It is the Queen’s Cabinet key which opens all the secret despatch boxes. … The Prince of Wales is not allowed to have one.”
After he inherited the throne in 1901, at age 59, King Edward would reign with distinction for nine years, becoming known as Edward the Peacemaker, proving his mother’s mistrust of him unfounded.
Myra ‘Belle’ Shirley
Myra “Belle” Shirley was one of the great heroines of the Wild West, a Robin Hood-esque character of bewitching beauty and charm, an accomplished piano player who could tame a roomful of roughnecks with her haunting melodies, a buxom bandit in lace petticoats with a heart of gold and a beloved mare named Venus. That was the myth of Belle Starr, as presented in the pulp paperbacks of the era..
Revisionist historians say she actually was a foulmouthed, horse-faced, horse-thieving outlaw who never in her life played it straight and certainly never played a piano. She indeed rode a mare named Venus, whom she would flog to near death for the sport of it. But Belle Starr did far worse to her own son.
By the time he was 18, Eddie Reed was a sullen and confused young man. From his childhood, Belle Starr had disciplined him hard and often with a bullwhip, and when he got old enough, she coerced him into her bed. Eddie not surprisingly grew to hate his mother, and once publicly threatened to kill her. This did not exactly fill Belle with remorse for her many acts of cruelty toward him; she had him arrested.
Belle Starr died on Venus, just before sunset on Feb. 3, 1889, shotgunned from the back by a sniper who had hated her enough to lie in wait for hours. As she fell, she glimpsed her assailant in flight. According to one legend, her final words, croaked to her daughter Pearl, were: “Baby, your brother Eddie shot me.”
Mary Ball Washington
George Washington’s mother’s tombstone reads, with understated dignity: “Mary, the Mother of Washington.” A more fitting epitaph might have been “Mary, the Bother of Washington.” The Grandma of Our Country proved more aggravating to son George than his false teeth.
Mary Ball Washington spent her life in a struggle to keep her son, and his fat purse, at her disposal, and she begrudged him his successes because they kept him away from home and spending his money elsewhere. According to historian James Thomas Flexner, “she never budged from her house to take part in any triumphant moment of his career.” And she lived into his second term as president!
Her denigration of his accomplishments led to speculation during the American Revolution that Mrs. Washington was actually a closet royalist trying to undermine the cause of independence. Though there is ample evidence that Washington was generous to his mother and that she lived quite comfortably, she never ceased digging deeper into his pockets while loudly complaining of his financial neglect. She also seemed to delight in humiliating him as publicly as possible. In 1781, Washington was mortified when he received a letter from Benjamin Harrison, the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, advising him of a movement in the House — in response to Mary Washington’s cries of poverty — to have the state come to her financial rescue. The Revolutionary commander was forced to make an excruciating public defense of his treatment of his mother.
“Before I left Virginia, I answered all her calls for money, and, since that period, have directed my steward to do the same,” he wrote back. “Whence her distress can arise, therefore, I know not, never having received any complaint. … Confident I am that she has not a child that would not divide the last sixpence to relieve her from real distress. This she has been repeatedly assured of by me; and all of us, I am certain, would feel much hurt at having our mother a pensioner.”
Frances Grey
Perhaps the most tragic figure in English history was Lady Jane Grey, “The Nine Days Queen.” This abused pawn of Tudor-era intrigue owed her misery almost entirely to her grasping and malicious mother, Frances Grey, Henry VIII’s niece. Even at a time when children of the aristocracy knew little of parental love, Jane had an especially brutal mother bent on using her to the best advantage.
The quiet, studious girl, raised at a time when the failure to honor and obey one’s parents was considered a sure path to damnation, did once allow herself the luxury of revealing her horrendous situation to her tutor: “I will tell you, and tell you a truth which, perchance, you will marvel at … whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing or doing anything else, I must do it, as it were, in such weigh, measure and number, even as perfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presented sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs, and other ways (which I will not name for the honor I bear them) so without measure misordered, that I think myself in Hell.” Yet her mother’s greed consigned her to an end worse still.
Henry VIII’s successor, the boy king Edward VI, was dying and with him the hopes of one John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, the Lord Protector of England. As a sort of regent, Dudley had set England on a course of extreme Protestantism. He and his plans would be doomed, however, if Edward was succeeded by his half sister, the staunchly Catholic Mary Tudor. Desperate, Dudley conspired with Frances Grey to have his son Guildford marry her daughter in 1553. He then persuaded the dying king to exclude both his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, from succession and name his Protestant cousin, Jane, the king’s heir.
The self-effacing girl, all of 15, was horrified at the prospect, fainted and was gleefully slapped awake by her mother. Eventually, Frances bullied the terrified teen into the marriage. She was queen of England for nine days before “Bloody” Mary Tudor claimed her rightful throne. Jane was banished to the Tower of London, completely abandoned by her mother, who was absorbed with saving her own skin.
Frances did find time to plead successfully with her cousin the queen to pardon her husband, the Duke of Suffolk, for his part in the usurpation plot, but didn’t bother putting in a good word for her daughter Jane. On her way to the chopping block, Jane first was forced to observe the body of its previous victim: her 19-year-old newlywed husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, whose body lay on a stretcher, his severed head ensconced between his thighs. Lady Jane was decapitated without ever hearing from her mother.
Hetty Green
Henrietta “Hetty” Green’s moneymaking skills made her one of the richest women in the world during the Gilded Age. Her maternal instincts, however, were poor.
Hetty’s thrift was legendary — her life was devoted entirely to acquiring more and more money while jealously refusing to spend it. She lived in a dingy cold-water flat in Hoboken, N.J. She rendered her own soap from animal fat. She used wrapped newspapers as leg warmers and ate nothing but cold oatmeal at her desk at the New York Stock Exchange. She was the bane of shopkeepers everywhere, haggling over pennies while soiling the merchandise with her filthy hands. One time, when her hands were particularly grimy, Hetty explained that she had been examining an old sled and had found “some perfectly good nails” that she had pulled out by hand.
Hetty’s son, Ned, had been plagued since birth with a lame leg, and on one occasion he injured it so severely it briefly distracted his mother from the stock market. Hetty was determined to find the best possible medical care for her son, so long as it didn’t cost anything. Dressed in her customarily shabby clothes, Hetty marched the limping boy to all the free clinics in Manhattan and Brooklyn. She was, alas, recognized everywhere, and unceremoniously shooed away.
Having exhausted all possibilities for medical charity, Hetty was forced to call the neighborhood doctor, who advised immediate amputation of the now-gangrenous leg. Hetty wasn’t buying it. “Mamma,” Ned recalled later, “still felt there was a chance to save my leg. We both wanted this, of course. We didn’t have much faith in doctors and believed, given time, the limb would heal itself.” But Hetty’s remedies of “oil of squills” and Carter’s Little Liver Pills didn’t do the trick, and the leg came off. The doctor determined that the limb could have been saved had the injuries been addressed sooner.
It was Hetty’s bankrupt ex-husband, by the way, who paid for the operation.