Queen Victoria Read online

  1863 Prince of Wales married Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Birth of granddaughter Victoria. London Underground opened. Football Association formed. Schleswig-Holstein question. Polish revolted against Russia. Maori war. First Ashanti war.

  1864 Grandson Albert Edward, first son of Bertie, born. Birth of granddaughter Elizabeth. First Contagious Diseases Act. First Geneva Convention signed. Schleswig-Holstein invaded.

  1865 Birth of grandson Prince George, later George V. John Brown appointed Queen's highland servant. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson qualified as first English doctor. Russell PM. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland published. Death of Palmerston. Lister established antiseptic surgery. Abraham Lincoln assassinated. Jamaica revolt.

  1866 Prince Alfred created Duke of Edinburgh. Princess Helena married Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. Birth of granddaughters Victoria and Irene. Derby PM. Sanitary Act. Austro-Prussian War.

  1867 Birth of granddaugher Louise and grandson Christian. Dynamite patented in Britain. Second Reform Act. Bagehot's English Constitution published. Canada became British Dominion. Abyssinian war.

  1868 Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands published. Attempt on life of Prince Alfred. Birth of granddaughter Victoria. Disraeli PM (February). Last public hanging in England. Gladstone PM (December). National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies founded. Māori war in New Zealand.

  1869 Birth of granddaughter Maud, later Queen of Norway. Birth of grandson Albert. Disestablishment of Irish Church Act. Girton College founded. Dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy created. Suez Canal opened.

  1870 Birth of granddaughters Sophie and Helena. Education Act. Death of Charles Dickens. Irish Land Act. Married Women's Property Act. Cardwell's Army Reforms begin. Civil Service Reforms. Franco-Prussian War. Napoleon defeated. Siege of Paris Commune. Napoleon III given asylum in Britain.

  1871 Princess Louise married Marquis of Lorne. Prince of Wales contracted typhoid. Edward Lear's 'The Owl and the Pussy-cat' published. First Rugby Union international. Royal Albert Hall opened. University Test Act. Trade Union Act. Abolition of the purchase of Commissions. Republican Clubs founded. German union proclaimed. Paris Commune.

  1872 Thanksgiving for Prince of Wales' recovery. Fifth assassination attempt on Victoria. Albert Memorial unveiled. Granddaughter Margaret born. Birth of granddaughters Marie and Alix, who would marry Nicolas, Tsar. Secret ballot. First Football Association Cup Final. Licensing Act. Public Health Act.

  1873 Victoria gave audience to Shah of Persia. Judicature Act. Second Ashanti War.

  1874 Prince Alfred married Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna of Russia. Birth of grandson Alfred and granddaughter Mary. Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd serialised. Disraeli PM. Licensing Act. Public Worship Regulation Act.

  1875 Prince of Wales toured India. Birth of granddaughter Marie, who later married the King of Romania. Climbing Boys Act. Artisans Dwelling Act. Peaceful picketing allowed. Public Health Act. Sale of Food and Drugs Act. First man swam English Channel. Disraeli purchased shares in Suez Canal. Bosnia-Herzegovina rebelled against Ottoman Empire.

  1876 Victoria awarded title of Empress of India. Birth of granddaughter Victoria. Education Act. Merchant Shipping Act. Disraeli created Earl of Beaconsfield. Alexander Graham Bell patented telephone. Bulgarian massacres.

  1877 First Wimbledon tournament. Anna Sewell's Black Beauty published. Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh published pamphlet on birth control. Russia declared war on Ottoman Empire. Transvaal annexed.

  1878 Death of Princess Alice. Gilbert and Sullivan's opera HMS Pinafore opened. Factory and Workshop Act. Thomas Edison patented the phonograph. Congress of Berlin. Treaty of San Stefano. Afghan

  1879 Prince Arthur married Princess Louise of Prussia. Electric light bulb patented. Irish Land League formed. Zulu War.

  1880 Princess Alice died of diptheria. Gladstone PM. Employers' Liability Act. First Eisteddfod Association. Henry James's Portrait of a Lady published. First Boer War.

  1881 Death of Disraeli. Natural History Museum opened. Irish Land Act. Education Act made school compulsory up to ten. Assassination of Tsar Alexander III. Anti-foreign riots in Egypt. Boers attacked British army.

  1882 Sixth assassination attempt. Prince Leopold married Princess Helen of Waldeck-Pyrmont. Prince Arthur awarded medal for gallantry. Birth of granddaughter Margaret, who later married the Crown Prince of Sweden. The Ashes Cricket began. Married Women's Property Act. Phoenix Park murders. Coercion Act. Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture performed. Egyptian rebellion defeated.

  1883 John Brown died. Birth of grandson Arthur and granddaughter Alice. Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island published. Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act.

  1884 Death of Leopold. Birth of grandson Charles. More Leaves from a Journal published. First part of Oxford English Dictionary published. Third Reform Act. General Gordon and army sent to Khartoum. Siege of Khartoum. Convention of London returned independence to Boers.

  1885 Princess Beatrice married Prince Henry of Battenburg. Modern bicycle invented. Salisbury PM. Redistribution Act. Gladstone converted to Home Rule. Death of General Gordon.

  1886 Birth of granddaughter Victoria and grandson Alexander. First motor car patented. Liberal Party split. Liberal Unionists founded. Gladstone PM (February). First Irish Home Rule Bill. Salisbury PM (July). Berlin conference. Gold discovered in Transvaal.

  1887 Golden Jubilee. Arrival of Abdul Karim. Birth of granddaughter Victoria, later Queen of Spain. Redistribution Act. Independent Labour Party founded. Criminal Law Act.

  1888 Contagious Diseases Acts repealed. Match-girls' strike. County Councils Act. Prince Frederick crowned German Emperor. Death of Frederick, Wilhelm II crowned. First Kodak camera patented.

  1889 Victoria became patron of newly created National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Birth of grandson Leopold. Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act. London Dock Strike.

  1890 Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray published. Bismarck resigned as German Chancellor.

  1891 Death of Prince Albert Victor, Bertie's eldest son. Birth of grandson Maurice. Fee Grant Act made education free. Death of Charles Parnell. Revolt in Manipur, India.

  1892 Death of son-in-law Prince Louis. Gladstone PM.

  1893 Prince George, son of Prince of Wales, married Mary of Teck. Prince Alfred appointed Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Elementary Education Act for blind and deaf children. Defeat of second Irish Home Rule Bill. Third Ashanti war.

  1894 Birth of Prince Edward, eldest son of Prince George, the heir to the throne. Alexandra, Victoria's granddaughter, married Prince Nicolas of Russia. Rosebery PM. Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book published. Local Government Act. Death duties introduced. Olympic Games re-established. Nicolas appointed Tsar.

  1895 Prince Albert George, second son of Prince of Wales, born. H. G. Wells's Time Machine published. Salisbury PM. First car journey in Britain. Renewed tensions in the Balkans. Ashanti war. Jameson raid; rebellion in Transvaal.

  1896 Nicolas and Alexandra crowned tsar and tsarina. First modern Olympic Games held in Athens. Anglo- Zanzibar War.

  1897 Diamond Jubilee. First wireless message sent. Bram Stoker's Dracula published. National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies founded. Workmen's Compensation Act. Fashoda incident. War between Ottoman Empire and Greece.

  1898 Death of Gladstone. Battle of Omdurman. George Curzon appointed Viceroy of India.

  1899 Second Anglo-Boer War.

  1900 Death of Prince Alfred. Victoria visited Ireland. Kimberley, Ladysmith and Mafeking relieved. Boxer Rebellion.

  1901 Death of Queen Victoria.

  Introduction

  On 28 March 1819, a seven-months-pregnant German princess left her home in Amorbach, Bavaria, for a 427-mile horse-drawn coach journey to England. She travelled with her husband, her daughter from a previous marriage, a lady-in-waiting, a midwife, a doctor, a governess, cooks, servants, two lapdogs and a cage of birds. The group
trekked across the bumpy pot-holed roads of Europe in an assorted caravan of post-chaises, barouches and baggage carts and arrived in Calais on 18 April. Here they waited until the weather was fair enough for them to cross the Channel. A month later, safely installed in Kensington Palace, the Princess gave birth to a baby daughter, a ‘pretty little Princess, as plump as a partridge’. The baby was delivered by a female obstetrician, was breastfed by her mother and vaccinated against smallpox. Eighteen years later, in 1837, this daughter was crowned Victoria, Queen of Great Britain.

  Britain in 1819

  Victoria was born into a Britain where most people still lived and worked in the country. But it was a countryside in flux. The Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth century had broken up most of the old open fields and shared commons, land which was then hedged, ditched and fenced. Most small farmers could not afford the costs of these transformations so were forced to sell, sometimes becoming landless labourers, sometimes moving to the new towns. Life may have been harsh for the newly dispossessed smallholders but the enclosures allowed wealthier farmers to buy more land, and to introduce new methods of farming, new machinery and new ways of breeding pedigree herds. As a result, food production increased substantially, which led in turn to a dramatic growth in population. Families in 1819 were large: giving birth to nine children, as Queen Victoria would later do, was not unusual.

  In other respects, too, Britain was undergoing momentous change as technological developments transformed the way in which people lived and worked. Cotton replaced wool as the material of choice. It was cheaper to produce, easier to keep clean and comfortable to wear. More and more workshops, factories, mills and mines used water and steam power rather than human muscle to make cotton cloth. This resulted in factories increasing in size as the installation of large, heavy and expensive machinery made it necessary to employ more than just a few people. Soon these new towns and cities became densely populated and exceedingly dirty as the coal-fired steam factories polluted the air people breathed and turned buildings black. These new factory workers needed to live somewhere, so houses were quickly – and often shoddily – built to accommodate them. Back-to-back houses were the norm in industrial cities. Most people did not have an inside lavatory let alone a bathroom: they used earth closets outside. Many families shared one earth closet – in one factory town about 7,000 people shared 33 such closets – which frequently overflowed into the street. Not surprisingly, health problems such as cholera, typhoid and other related diseases were the results, all caused by poor sanitation. These types of illnesses affected all classes: Queen Victoria and her eldest son, Bertie, the Prince of Wales, became seriously ill from typhoid; many believe Prince Albert died from it.

  In 1819 the Factory Act forbade children to work under the age of nine but the Act was unenforceable and owners generally ignored it. Conditions in the factories were often harsh. Every textile factory was damp, dusty and noisy: many workers stood in their bare feet in puddles of water; fluff and cotton dust was everywhere; and the noise of the weaving and spinning machines was deafening. In addition, factory workers were regimented and subjected to petty rules; many employers fined their workers to make sure they behaved themselves and worked hard. Finable offences at Strutts Mill in Belper included ‘idleness and looking thro’ window; noisy behaviour; being off with a pretence of being ill; and riding on each other’s back’. Children worked as ‘scavengers’ picking up the bits of thread and cotton underneath the machines or as ‘piecers’, joining together the ends of broken thread. The textile industry depended on slave-grown cotton to provide the raw materials to make its cloth. In 1807 the British government abolished the slave trade but slavery remained widespread at the time of Victoria’s birth.

  Textile factories relied on coal to power the new machines. In 1819, coal mines employed men, women and children: the male collier hewed the coal; women, harnessed like animals, carried it to the pit-brow; and children worked as trappers, opening and shutting the underground doors for ventilation. Hours were long and the work was arduous and dangerous. Explosions, roof falls and accidents were common. When she was 13 years old, Princess Victoria wrote of having just ‘passed through a town where all coal mines are . . . The men, women and children . . . are all black. But I can not. . . give an idea of its strange and extraordinary appearance. The country is very desolate every where.’1

  Britain had changed spectacularly in the period just before Victoria’s birth but it was to experience more unprecedented technological, political, economic and social change throughout the nineteenth century. Such dramatic changes posed challenges to government as it sought to ameliorate or contain the social dislocation which ensued. When she became queen, Victoria would need high levels of political skill to handle the changing needs and demands of her subjects brought on by this progressively accelerating industrialisation.

  Government and politics

  When Victoria was born, a small elite ruled Britain. At the top of the hierarchy was the Crown, represented by ‘mad’ George III, but because of the King’s incapacity his disreputable and profligate son, George, became the Prince Regent, governing in place of his father. The Prince Regent created a world of such unbridled extravagance and luxury for himself that he was nicknamed Falstaff after the notoriously dissipated – yet attractive – character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. In 1820 King George III died and his son replaced him as King George IV. British sovereigns were not absolute rulers; they were constitutional monarchs empowered to rule according to an unwritten constitution, not by divine right.

  The United Kingdom, unlike the United States and many other countries, has no single written constitution. Instead, the British constitution is a matter of custom, expectation and usage. It is uncodified, incremental and embodied in Parliamentary laws, court judgements and treaties, all of which have been pieced together over time. The real beginning of constitutional monarchy dates back to the Magna Carta 1215 when King John, under pressure from his barons, agreed that sovereigns must rule by law, not by personal inclination. In 1689 these principles were reinforced and developed when the British parliament invited William of Orange and Mary to become joint sovereigns after King James II fled the country. William and Mary’s claim to the throne was therefore not directly hereditary since it depended on an Act of Parliament for its legitimacy. This Act established the principle that monarchs owed their position to parliament as much as to inherited right. In addition, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ confirmed parliament as the chief law-making body; from then on the supreme power in Britain was parliament not the sovereign. The coronation oath, where the king or queen promises to govern according to the law, reinforces this principle. As queen, Victoria would object to any further strengthening of the parliamentary system, particularly if it affected her constitutional rights.

  In 1819 parliament was composed of an unelected House of Lords and an elected House of Commons. The main political parties, the Whigs (Liberals) and the Tories (Conservatives), consisted largely of male Anglican aristocrats: Catholics, Quakers and Jews could not become MPs.2 Whigs had helped engineer the 1689 Revolution and were strong supporters of the Hanoverians when that dynasty succeeded to the British throne. Princess Victoria’s parents were both Whigs: she was surrounded by Whigs in her youth and throughout her life maintained that she held to Whig principles. Whigs believed that monarchs must govern with the consent of the nation and that ultimately sovereignty rested with the people, principles that Queen Victoria would often find hard to respect. Naturally, the Whigs sought to extend the franchise in order to strengthen parliament, and their own influence, even more. They were also committed to the defence of liberties and religious toleration. In contrast, the ideological hallmarks of the Tories were the principles of divine monarchical right, hereditary succession and commitment to the Anglican Church. Not surprisingly, a large number of Tories opposed the 1689 Revolution, were against any extension of democracy and tended to squash radicalism wherever and whenever th
ey could.3

  At the time, the state was small with the government mainly focusing on defence, the control of trade through customs and excise, and the maintenance of law and order. Britain was a country under pressure. The triple challenges of a population explosion, industrialisation and urbanisation had created multilayered tensions, particularly in vulnerable areas. In 1815, after Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, the demobilisation of hundreds of thousands of soldiers – who had no pension or government support – led to increased unemployment and deepening distress for the very poor. And when the government passed the Corn Law Act 1815, which banned the import of foreign corn until the price of British corn had reached £4 a quarter, the poorer section of society which relied on bread as their staple diet suffered. Victoria’s birth coincided with a time of significant poverty and suffering for the working class; in contrast, there appeared to be a marked escalation of privilege and prosperity for the upper classes.

  In August 1819, just a few months after the birth of Princess Victoria, a meeting was held in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester to call for parliamentary reform. At the time only a small minority of men – and no women – were allowed to vote. The meeting was broken up by a voluntary cavalry force, the Manchester Yeomanry, and at least 11 people were killed and 400 injured in the mêlée. It was soon called the Peterloo Massacre. The English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote England in 1819 in response to this event. The poem is politically radical: it encapsulates the anger of people against their royal family and what was considered to be a perfidious government. It talks of an ‘old, mad blind, despised and dying king, . . . Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, but leech-like to their fainting country cling. . . . A people starved and stabbed.’ In the same year Shelley also wrote ‘The Mask of Anarchy ’, a poem which has been described as the greatest political poem ever written in English and one often quoted by Gandhi in his campaigns against the British in India. ‘The Mask of Anarchy ’ is an anthem to freedom, liberty and equality, and ends with an exhortation to the people to ‘Rise Like Lions after slumber’ against injustice, as ‘ye are many – they are few’. Many people agreed with Shelley and did indeed ‘rise like lions’. As queen, Victoria would face periods of social and political unrest and be forced to accept the reforms brought in by her government in response to this turbulence.