Queen Victoria Read online

  Queen Victoria is generally remembered as a ruler who, once widowed, withdrew from public life. Albert’s death, as is well known, devastated Victoria: her court never went out of mourning. This phase of political seclusion – the Queen only opened parliament seven times in this period – meant that the rise of a popular republican movement grew apace. It is said that a Scottish servant, John Brown, rescued her from her doleful self. Rumours of their relationship were rife and historians differ as to whether an affair actually took place.

  Apart from a brief spell when Prince Albert died, Queen Victoria took a great interest in politics: she interfered in ministerial decisions, made her views known about reforming legislation and kept demanding that Britain maintain its role as a strong imperial power. Indeed from 1861, as Chapter 7 will demonstrate, it is possible to chart more accurately the political influence of the Queen upon government policy and her changing relationships with her ministers, particularly those of Palmerston, Russell and the two diametrically opposed characters, Gladstone and Disraeli. Queen Victoria will chart how and why the Queen’s view of Disraeli shifted from one of animosity to one of friendship: in 1844 Queen Victoria referred to ‘obnoxious Mr Disraeli’,33 accusing him of being ‘very troublesome’ and with a ‘bad character’,34 yet she later thought him a good friend.

  In December 1868, William Gladstone became Queen Victoria’s eighth prime minister. It is well known that the Queen disliked her precise and exacting prime minister, complaining that he spoke to her as if he were addressing a public meeting. However, Chapter 8 will argue that Gladstone was perhaps the first prime minister to treat his sovereign as a competent and intelligent head of state. He never charmed or flattered, much preferring to speak to the Queen as an intellectual equal. In striking contrast, Disraeli sweet-talked his sovereign, famously maintaining that ‘everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel’. Gladstone would have considered such a comment much too disrespectful. However, Disraeli found favour with the Queen precisely because he treated her as a gentleman might treat a lady in the nineteenth century: too intellectually inconsequential and frivolous to be taken seriously. Marie Louise, one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters, spoke about the differences between Gladstone and Disraeli: ‘After sitting next to Mr Gladstone I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr Disraeli I felt I was the cleverest woman in England.’

  Queen Victoria disliked Gladstone and disapproved of most of his parliamentary programmes, particularly his emerging views on the Irish question and his attitude towards the Ottoman Empire. During the 1870s Victoria’s popularity dipped to its lowest point while Republicanism reached its peak. Gradually Queen Victoria’s reputation improved under Gladstone’s guiding hand but it took Disraeli’s interventions to salvage it completely. In 1877 Disraeli – reluctantly and under duress – proclaimed Victoria Empress of India, a popular move which helped reverse the negative feelings which had been growing about monarchy. Disraeli’s indulgence towards the Queen increased her political confidence and she became more and more prepared to insist that her demands be met.

  In 1887 Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, often considered one of the high points of monarchical popularity. Here, Queen Victoria was forced to conquer her reclusive tendencies because of the public desire for royal pageantry and ostentatiously grand ceremonies. Since the death of Albert, Victoria had craved a quiet isolated life, well away from the public gaze even if this meant growing unpopularity. This did not mean that she had no wish to govern. Far from it. As she grew older and more assertive, the Queen interfered more and more, often trying to undermine constitutional changes, particularly whenever Gladstone was prime minister. The years between 1880 and 1892, as Chapter 9 will demonstrate, were marked by the continuing crisis of Ireland, franchise reform, problems in the Middle East and the collapse of the Liberal Party. Queen Victoria had opinions on all these and was prepared to voice them to her governments. More significantly, when her views were not listened to by the Liberal government, she expressed them to the Conservative opposition, whether or not it was constitutionally proper to do so.

  In July 1892 Victoria reluctantly appointed Gladstone as prime minister. Chapter 10 introduces his fourth, and last, premiership. Predictably, the two protagonists clashed once more, particularly over Irish Home Rule. Gladstone wanted to repeal the Act of Union with Ireland and establish a parliament in Dublin responsible for domestic affairs, whereas Victoria abhorred the idea. The Queen even wrote to the leader of the opposition asking him to contest it. In her letter the Queen included copies of correspondence between Gladstone and herself, arguably a serious breach of the constitution.

  In March 1894, Rosebery replaced Gladstone as Liberal prime minister. Queen Victoria initially welcomed his appointment, particularly when he jettisoned Home Rule, but soon the two disagreed. Rosebery was after all a Liberal, and he held many Liberal beliefs which the Queen disliked. Tensions grew when Rosebery pressed for reform of the House of Lords, a policy which the Queen tried to undermine by consulting with the Conservative leadership and thus – yet again – testing monarchical constitutional boundaries.

  In June 1895 Queen Victoria appointed her last prime minister, Lord Salisbury. By now she had reigned longer than any other British sovereign. Her Diamond Jubilee confirmed her status as a ‘national treasure’; Republicanism had been emphatically vanquished. The ageing queen continued to be attentive to foreign affairs, and when her life ended she was worrying about the Boer War. She was 81 years old.

  Notes

  1 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) August 2nd 1832.

  2 Catholics were allowed to sit as MPs in 1829; Quakers in 1832 and Jews in 1858.

  3 See Frank O’Gorman and Peter Fraser, ‘Party Politics in the Early Nineteenth Century, 1812–32’, English Historical Review, January 1987.

  4 ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ was not published until 1832 because of censorship.

  5 See Michael Eugene Fassiotto, Finding Victorias/Reading Biographies, PhD, University of Hawaii, 1992.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Chatto and Windus, 1921.

  8 Abacus, 1965.

  9 Giles St Aubyn, Queen Victoria, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991, p. 623.

  10 Hamish Hamilton, 1972.

  11 Unwin, 1986.

  12 Harper Collins, 2000.

  13 Atlantic, 2014.

  14 Frank Cass, 1935.

  15 Virago, 1990.

  16 Columbia University Press, 1996.

  17 OUP, 2003.

  18 Yale University Press, 2001.

  19 Arrow, 2009.

  20 Macmillan, 1996.

  21 Windmill Books, 2012.

  22 Sutton, 2006.

  23 The History Press, 2011.

  24 Amberley, 2012.

  25 Pegasus Books, 2012.

  26 Viking, 2001.

  27 Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

  28 Yale University Press, 2010.

  29 Macmillan, 1936.

  30 Arthur Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria’s Private Secretary, His Life from his Letters, Macmillan and Co, 1943; Sir John Ponsonby, The Ponsonby Family, The Medici Society, 2009.

  31 Hamish Hamilton, 1983.

  32 Continuum, 2006.

  33 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) June 17th 1844.

  34 Ibid. June 18th 1844.

  1 Becoming Victoria: 1819–1837

  Victoria was not born to be queen; at birth she was only fifth in line of succession to the throne. Her father, Edward, and his elder brothers – George, Frederick and William – all took precedence over her. However, a series of childless marriages and premature deaths brought the young Victoria closer and closer to the crown. The reigning monarch in 1819, King George III, had 15 children – nine sons and six daughters – enough offspring one might suppose to provide several potential heirs to be sovereign. But extraordinary as it may seem, only his eldest son, Prince George, had ever produced a legitimate child: Princess Charlotte. In 1817, Charlot
te died unexpectedly in childbirth and her death precipitated a succession crisis. Who was to inherit the British throne? King George had 12 surviving children but no officially authorised grandchildren. Quite a few of his sons were fertile: between them they had fathered 56 children, but there was one major problem – not one was legitimate.

  Her ‘wicked uncles’, as Queen Victoria was later to term them, were mostly notorious adulterers, spendthrifts, heavy drinkers, gluttons and selfish individuals with a fondness for excessive pleasure. Not one of them benefitted from a stable marital relationship. At the time of Charlotte’s death in 1817, the King’s two eldest sons – Prince George and Prince Frederick – were both separated from their wives and had no living legitimate children. The third in line to the throne, Prince William, had ten children but was still unmarried; the fourth in line, Prince Edward, was single too. The remaining princes – Ernest, Augustus and Adolphus – were either unmarried or had not yet fathered a child. Suddenly, the royal succession looked insecure. Consequently, all the unmarried dukes, realising that they might well father the heir to the throne, all rushed to get married.

  Prince William cast off his long - term mistress and mother of his illegitimate children to marry a bride 25 years his junior in the hope that he could father a legally eligible child. The youngest son, Prince Adolphus, copied his older brother and got wed. The 50-year-old Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, also recognised the possibility of begetting an heir to the British throne and quickly set about getting married. His wife, Princess Victoire, was an impecunious 31-year-old widow with a 14-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter, but she was well connected, being the daughter of Francis, Duke of Saxe Coburg-Saalfeld, and sister of Prince Leopold who had married Princess Charlotte, the late heir to the British throne. More importantly, Victoire was fertile.

  Shortly after their marriage, Prince Edward and Princess Victoire – the Duke and Duchess of Kent – left England for Germany where they settled in a rambling old house in Amorbach with his wife’s children, Charles and Feodora. Soon Victoire became pregnant. The Duke, concerned that the British might challenge the legitimacy of his future offspring, returned to England with his very pregnant wife, his step-children and his servants to take up residence in Kensington Palace.

  Prince George, who had been Prince Regent since 1811, disliked the idea of his younger brother’s daughter becoming the next British monarch and made life uncomfortable for the new baby and her parents. When the date for the still unnamed baby’s christening was set for 24 June 1819, George acted petulantly. He refused to permit a large christening ceremony and insisted that the child be christened in a small private service at Kensington Palace. No foreign dignitaries were invited and only eight guests allowed. Court regalia and evening dress was banned: the Prince Regent insisted on a low-key ceremony more suited for a minor royal than a likely heir to the throne. The Prince Regent’s behaviour worsened. The night before the christening George objected to the proposed names of the infant and informed the frustrated parents that he would let them know which names to call their young baby the next day. Prince Edward and Victoire wanted to name their daughter Victoire Georgiana Alexandrina Charlotte Augusta after her mother and the four people – the Prince Regent, the Tsar of Russia, the Queen of Wurttemberg and the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg Saalfeld – who were godparents. The Prince Regent procrastinated. The parents brought the baby girl into the chapel; the Archbishop of Canterbury held the infant over the baptismal font – and waited patiently for a name. Eventually the Regent, after a sadistically measured waiting time, agreed that the baby could be called Alexandrina, after the Tsar, and only after protests from the father and tears of the mother did he allow the name Victoria to be added. The upshot of this humiliation and other such indignities resulted in the Duchess loathing the royal court. She would in future make every effort to keep her young daughter from it, with the unintended consequence of Victoria not being fully prepared for life as a queen.

  In December 1819 the impoverished Duke and Duchess of Kent, struggling to remain solvent, left the Palace with their baby daughter to move to a damp farmhouse in Sidmouth, Devon. They arrived on Christmas Day. The Duke went out for a walk, got wet and caught a cold which developed into pneumonia. His doctors bled him, cupped him and put leeches on his body, but the Duke, weakened by losing more than six pints of blood by these invasive procedures, grew more feverish. He died on 23 January 1820, leaving a 32-year-old widow who spoke little English, an 8-month-old daughter and a mountain of debts. However, it left little Vickelchen, as her mother called her, fourth in line to the throne.

  Six days later, on 29 January 1820, the ailing King, the mentally unstable George III, died. Victoria’s uncle, the Prince Regent, was crowned King George IV and the young Princess moved up another notch in the monarchical tree to third place. King George IV reigned for ten years, but on 26 June 1830 he too died, leaving no heir. Meanwhile, in 1827 the next in line, Prince Frederick, had died of dropsy and cardio-vascular disease, leaving Prince William as future heir. In 1830 William IV was crowned king. He had no legitimate children, so Victoria, now aged 11, became heir to the British throne. Her rise in the accession, so like the stuff of comedy, had been one of those unexpected and accidental acts of fate.

  Bringing up Drina

  For someone who was to become queen of the United Kingdom and its colonies, Victoria was not brought up in luxurious surroundings. When the Duke of Kent died, the Duchess moved her family back to Kensington Palace. The Palace contained a number of spacious and opulent apartments, yet the baby Princess, her mother and step-sister were allocated gloomy, barely furnished, cockroach-infested rooms. The Duchess and her daughter were forced to live frugally: Queen Victoria’s later parsimony can be attributed to these earlier straightened circumstances, especially when she was taught not to spend over the limit of her meagre pocket money. The family were only saved from penury because Victoria’s Uncle Leopold gave his sister Victoire an allowance of £3,000 a year from the £50,000 he received from the British tax-payer as husband of the late Princess Charlotte. He also became a surrogate father to Victoria. Historians tend to agree that because Victoria’s father died when she was a baby, she sought a father-figure for most of her younger life. Victoria thought Uncle Leopold was ‘so clever, so mild, and so prudent, he alone can give me good advice on everything. His advice is perfect. He is indeed. . . “solo padre”! for he is indeed like my real father, as I have none.’1 The two wrote to each other regularly. Victoria, soon nicknamed Drina, a diminutive of Alexandrina, lived a secluded life with her mother, her half-sister Feodora, her half-brother Charles and a largely German-speaking household. This Germanic influence shaped young Victoria, causing problems in later life when the need for political objectivity clashed with her deep-seated sentiments.

  Princess Victoria was an only child with both the negative and the positive traits associated with this. Only children are often thought to be ‘spoiled, selfish brats’ and perhaps Victoria was no exception. Certainly, this rather plump toddler with big blue eyes and a sloping Hanoverian chin received a lot of attention. Her mother, with no other small child or husband to cherish, focused on her daughter so exclusively that Victoria got used to being the centre of the world. Maybe as a result, she became bossy: she would be uncompromisingly autocratic, over-confident, self-opinionated and arrogant. Most importantly, Victoria was neither encouraged nor taught to be submissive as most girls were; on the contrary, her assertive traits were encouraged as they were thought to be essential qualities of monarchy.

  It is sometimes alleged that Victoria had an unhappy childhood, experiencing little joy or fun in her life. Such an upbringing, it is thought, led to a seriously minded, no-fun queen who was never amused. Yet as a child, the Princess enjoyed playing with her dolls, doing jig-saws, playing billiards and playing shuttlecock. Like most young children, she loved blowing soap bubbles. She adored her pet dog, Dash, saying that ‘Dear little Dashy is quite my playfellow, fo
r he is so fond of playing at ball, and of barking and jumping.’2 When she was in her early teens, Victoria took delight in dressing up after dinner, sometimes appearing as a nun, an Italian brigand’s wife, a Turkish lady, or an old Turkish lawyer, ‘to amuse Mamma’. Once the young princess spoke of dressing ‘myself as a Turkish lady. A red scarf and a white shawl made the turban with a dark blue one and a bright red one for the dress and large hanging white sleeves. I remained so for the rest of the evening.’3 She played other games with the ladies after dinner; the gentlemen never returned until the young Princess had gone to bed. Victoria loved to play Hen and her Chickens, Puss in the Corner, Blind Man’s Bluff and Forfeits. On one occasion, the penalty or Forfeit was for two people to dance a minuet blindfold: Victoria spoke of how she and one of the ladies did so with ‘great enjoyment’.

  Victoria, like many upper-class girls, was introduced to high culture early on in her life. Many of Victoria’s diary entries as a young teenager record her many visits to the theatre and the opera. There was no way Victoria would have been able to watch football, see cock-fighting or dog-, bear- or bull-baiting,4 a boxing match or engage in other low brow entertainments. At an early age, Victoria’s likes and dislikes were unambiguous, unmistakeable and instantly recognisable. When she enjoyed an event, she recorded in her journal that she was ‘amused’: but her amusement ranged from a plain ‘I was amused’, through to ‘I was much amused’, ‘I was very much amused’ to the highest praise of the triple underlined, ‘I was very much amused indeed’. On New Year’s Eve 1833 she went to see the Barber of Seville ‘so well known that I need not describe it. . . . I was very much amused.’5 Victoria’s favourite opera singer was not much older than she was: Giulia Grisi, a beautiful 19-year-old Italian singer whose brilliant dramatic voice established her as the leading soprano for over 30 years. The Princess’s journal was full of comments that Signora Giulietta Grisi ‘sung and acted quite beautifully ! And looked lovely. . . . I was very much amused indeed.’6 Victoria adored the ballet too. She delighted in seeing the Maid of Cashmere, saying of the lead dancer, Duvemay, ‘who danced and acted quite beautifully, with so much grace and feeling; she looked likewise quite lovely. . . . I was very much amused.’7 Victoria did not enjoy every performance. When she visited Drury Lane to see The Chevy Chase she thought it a ‘stupid affair. . . Really the vulgarity of Mrs Humby was quite atrocious. The plot which to my astonishment. . . was the most stupid and vulgar nonsense that can be imagined. . . . I was not much amused.’8