Victoria: A Life Read online

  By 1848, Chartism was already running out of steam. Partly this was because of the popularity of Corn Law Reform, and the mainstream parliamentary radicals, as opposed to O’Connor’s ideas of land purchase. Partly this was because in some areas, the working classes had a measure of prosperity which inclined them to hope for reform via conventional parliamentary means. Partly, however, it was the overwhelming brute force of the Establishment which overwhelmed the Chartists, only a few of whom believed in an armed struggle, and many of whom were all-but-pacifist in attitude.

  When they assembled in Trafalgar Square – ‘the foolish meeting’36, as the Queen called it in her journal – there was panic in Buckingham Palace, ‘which alarmed poor Clém very much’, the Queen recorded. The next day, 7 March, Prince Albert came into the Queen as she woke and told her that her mother’s windows had been broken the previous evening by the mob. A picket had been stationed outside Buckingham Palace with sixty constables posted there. ‘After the horrors of Paris, one cannot help being more anxious.’37 The next day there came news of ‘events’ in Germany.

  Summoning her diminutive Prime Minister, her only premier not to be noticeably taller than herself, the Queen was reassured to discover that plans were in place to defend London against insurgency. It would be truer to say that Russell had placed the capital on a war footing, than that he had merely arranged to defend it by police. This liberal-minded Whig, when it came to the possibility of life and property being threatened, reverted to type: the Russells had held sway in England since the Wars of the Roses and were not going to surrender it to a mob of idealists.

  He placed the operation under the ruthless direction of the Duke of Wellington. The victor of Waterloo brought in the Horse Guards (the ‘Blues’) from Windsor, the 12th Lancers from Hounslow, the Grenadier Guards, the Coldstreams, the 17th Foot from Colchester, Windsor and Dover, and the 62nd and 63rd Foot from Winchester and Chatham. These troops were put on standby, but they were almost all kept in concealment. Strict orders were given that the troops were not to fire on the crowds when the planned Chartist march went forward.38

  Meanwhile, huge numbers of special constables had been enlisted. The numbers have never accurately been assessed. Certainly there were more than 80,000; The Times reported that there were 170,000: and the important thing about this was that it was believed by the Chartists themselves. O’Connor visited the Deputy Chief of Police with the assurance that none of the Chartists would be armed. Their aim was to assemble from various parts of London on Kennington Common, and then to march on the House of Commons to present their petition, their Charter, demanding universal suffrage. The Special Constables were, on the whole, middle class. They included the chef at the Reform Club, Alexis Soyer, and the head cook at the Athenæum, a Frenchman who shared his beat with Napoleon’s nephew – Prince Louis Napoleon, who was following events in Paris with more than a passing interest. Another figure who stood by with his truncheon was none other than William Ewart Gladstone, the Peelite politician; no longer, perhaps, ‘a stern unbending Tory’, as he had been in his youth, but not yet, evidently, ‘the People’s William’.

  Lord John Russell decided that the Royal Family should not be in London on the day of the march. They were all put on a train at Waterloo on 8 April and reached ‘dear Osborne’ that afternoon.

  When the day dawned, 10 April, the Chartists were met not merely by tens of thousands of special constables, but by a deluge of driving rain. The expected crowds of hundreds of thousands simply did not materialize. Some 20,000 people reached Kennington Common and heard O’Connor address them in the dreadful weather. Five million signatures had been promised. An impressive 1,975,496 was all they mustered, and it was discovered, to the Chartists’ profound embarrassment, that when O’Connor had presented his petition, and the signatures were surveyed, some of them were appended by ‘Mr Punch’, ‘No Cheese’, ‘The Duke of Wellington’, ‘Sir Robert Peel’, and so forth.

  ‘We had our revolution yesterday,’ Albert wrote to Stockmar, ‘and it ended in smoke.’39 The relief, if not the smugness, was understandable. The Year of Revolutions had a long way to run on the Continent, but for the Royal Family at home, there were chances to enjoy the private pleasures of peace. Safe in her island home, the Queen, now mother of six children, and monarch of a nation at peace, attended a weekday celebration of Holy Communion at Whippingham Parish Church. As she took the Sacrament, she ‘prayed for peace for all the world, for the maintenance of quiet in this country & for our preservation; also for that of our own great domestic [happiness], which is the one bright spot’.40

  Only a few days before the Chartist procession, the Queen had admired the pictures which Landseer intended to hang in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. In common with most of her subjects, she found them ‘beautiful’.41 Alexander and Diogenes represented an exquisitely rendered white bulldog visiting a miserable cur in its kennel (Diogenes). Another canvas represented a doe shot on a snowy hillside, A Random Shot. Two young men who attended the exhibition, which opened in May, were, however, less impressed. William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, who had been witnesses of and sympathizers with the Chartist demonstration, thought the stuffiness of the Academy exhibition so insufferable that they founded their Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that very summer.

  The old order was passing away. In February, the old Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, had died. ‘He was so mild and gentle. There was no important event in my life in which he was not interested & did not officiate. He was one of those who examined me when I was 12 years old. He confirmed me, came to me, the morning of the late King’s death, crowned me, married me, & christened our 5 children, besides churching me 3 times!’42 On the very day of Howley’s death, the Queen and her Prime Minister had both agreed that his obvious successor was the Bishop of Chester – Sumner, the boy Lord M. remembered as an Eton contemporary nicknamed ‘Crumpet’.

  In May another link with the past was severed when the Queen Dowager came to tell Victoria that her Aunt Sophia was sinking. She ‘passed away almost imperceptibly with her hand in Aunt Cambridge’s’.43 Victoria recollected the period of her childhood when she saw ‘poor dear Aunt Sophia’ every day, when they were neighbours in Kensington Palace. She was too charitable to dwell in her journal on the money which Sir John Conroy extracted from the princess to buy his Welsh estate.

  The summer was spent pleasantly. As often as they could, they attended the opera, hearing the sublime Jenny Lind twice – in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore and in Bellini’s I Puritani. The fact that Lord Palmerston was causing her acute embarrassment by his loud espousal of the Italian nationalist cause could not blight the domestic happiness she felt.

  In September, the royal yacht took them all the way up to Aberdeen, a choppy nine-hour voyage. Not only did Victoria not get a wink of sleep, but ‘I was dreadfully ill.’44

  But this was a life-changing summer, for Lord Aberdeen was offering her and the prince the chance to acquire a castle which had belonged to his late brother. The long journey from Aberdeen was painstakingly described in the journal – changing horses after eighteen miles at Banchory, and then again, after another thirteen miles, at Aboyne (where they ‘gave the children something to eat’45). ‘We crossed the Dee about 4 miles before getting to the Castle, & the scenery became prettier and prettier, & there is much agriculture & cultivation which gives a flourishing look to the country. There are very few cottages between Abergeldie & Balmoral, which we reached at 1/4 p. 3. It is a pretty little Castle, in the old Scotch style.’46

  It was surely one of the most momentous days of their lives together. On 18 September, ‘another beautiful day’, they took a post-chaise, with Bertie, and drove beyond the keeper’s house in the Balloch Buie. Here they got out and mounted ponies, and rode on, accompanied by the keepers – Grant and Macdonald – and by the gillies. One of the gillies who also worked in the stables at this time was a young man
called John Brown.

  In the evening Lord John Russell had arrived, and the next morning the Queen had anxious conversations with him about Ireland, and about the peace of Europe. She told him how little confidence she had in Palmerston, and how little she liked Pam’s attitude to Austria. ‘Lord John replied he was aware of it & felt the truth of all I had said.’47

  Balmoral had already become an extension of the Court. Lord John had come as a guest – he must have stayed there before as the guest of the Aberdeens – but he had also come as the Prime Minister to do business. And as if to emphasize that Balmoral was now a place of semi-official royal status, the Queen received the eminent geologist Charles Lyell that evening. After dinner she knighted him, ‘with Albert’s Claymore’.48 Albert’s veneration for science was bold. Far more than Charles Darwin, Lyell had undermined religious certainties by demonstrating the age of the planet and disturbing some of the simplicities of the Bible faith. Led by Albert’s example, Victoria continued to honour science throughout her reign. Darwin himself was given a funeral in Westminster Abbey and his fellow evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace was awarded an Order of Merit.

  As the autumn progressed, they went south and she took the children to Osborne. On the day that an insurrection broke out in Frankfurt, Lord George Bentinck, the Leader of the Conservative Party who had delivered such a withering attack on Prince Albert during the Corn Law debates in the Commons, died of apoplexy. That ‘dreadful Disraeli’, as the Queen had called him,49 was nearer the top of his ‘greasy pole’.

  For the Queen, a much sadder piece of news came in November, but perhaps the saddest thing about it was that she accepted it so calmly. So completely preoccupied by the children at Osborne was she, and by the routines of when they ‘came down’ to have lessons with their mother in the evenings, that this passing belonged to another time, another sphere. ‘The children come down now at 6 little girls, at 1/2 past 6 Affie, 1/4 to 7 Alice & at 20 minutes past 7 Vicky and Bertie.’50 It was while the lessons were in progress on the Isle of Wight that, far away in Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, Lord M. died, lonely and sad. The news reached the island the next day, and the mature Queen Victoria, who had left her giggling teenage self so far behind, almost had to address her journal as if it were a public meeting to convey the gravity of the intelligence. ‘Truly & seriously do I deplore the loss of one who was a most kind & disinterested friend . . . We took another walk again, after Albert had been planting.’51

  Lord M. had long been dead to her. So had the old world, to which he, and Aunt Sophie and Archbishop Howley had all belonged. After the Year of Revolutions it remained to be seen whether Europe would hurtle towards a republican progress, or draw back into a cautious reaction. Britain, with its Free Trade, its expanding economy, its unsettled Ireland and its burgeoning Royal Family, would do neither, but whatever happened, it could not but be involved.

  EIGHT

  HALLELUJAH CHORUS

  THE QUEEN AND the prince paid an eight-day visit to Ireland in the royal yacht in August 1849. Victoria was the first English monarch to visit the city of Cork. She was feeling pretty seasick by the time the yacht pulled into Cork harbour. She renamed the Cove of Cork Queenstown, a nomenclature which was changed back after the Irish gained independence. She remarked in the Irish pages appended to Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands that ‘Cork is not at all like an English town, and looks rather foreign. The crowd is a noisy, excitable, but very good-humoured one, running and pushing about, and laughing and talking and shrieking. The beauty of the women is very remarkable, and struck us much; such beautiful dark eyes and hair, and such fine teeth; almost every third woman was pretty, and some remarkably so. They wear no bonnets.’1

  It is very similar to her first glimpse of the Scots. As in Scotland, she noted beautiful human beings and scenery. The Celtic women, unbonneted, and probably uncorseted and unknickered, represented a prelapsarian species of humanity to Victoria. But Ireland was not like Scotland, and, as they made their progress from Cork to Waterford to Dublin, even in the bland narrative of the Leaves, we sense the tension in the muggy summer air (‘“muggy”, which is the character of the Irish climate’2). She emphasized on almost every page that the people were ‘well-behaved’, acutely conscious as she was that a million hungry Irish men, women and children had emigrated in the previous two years, and that they still had every reason not to be ‘well-behaved’ given their desperate plight. When the royal party reached Belfast it was with that air of slight surprise and timidity – which has been so evident in English visitors ever since – that she noted the Catholic Bishop Denvir was ‘an excellent and modest man’.3 There was great unfairness in calling her ‘the Famine Queen’, as the Irish did, since she was one of the greatest single contributors to famine relief, and she was criticized in the rest of Britain for encouraging others to do the same.4 The royal visit happened only a month after one of the most violent sectarian clashes of the nineteenth century, in County Down – as so often since, the violence flared when the authorities tried to re-route an Orange parade on the Twelfth of July, to prevent the Protestants provocatively marching through a Catholic village, Dolly’s Brae. It was in the wake of this outbreak that the Queen made such an effort to meet Catholic dignitaries and to declare her abhorrence of sectarianism.5 But you sense the relief in the diarist when the royal yacht steamed eastwards to the rain-spattered, Protestant Clyde.

  To his brother Ernst, Albert wrote in April 1849, ‘At present the democratic and social evils are forcing themselves on the people. The unequal division of property, and the dangers of poverty and envy arising therefrom, is the principal evil. Means must necessarily be found, not for diminishing riches (as the communists want) but to make facilities for the poor. But there’s the rub. I believe this question will first be solved here, in England.’6

  ‘England’ was, for the Victorians, a word used where modern writers would say ‘Britain’. It included troubled Ireland; Wales, in which neither the Queen nor the prince ever displayed much interest; and Scotland, which was, for Victoria at least, chiefly a playground, a tartan kingdom of fantasy, more than a place where men and women earned their living. While Albert, when in Scotland, visited institutes, inspected local industry and studied economics – as well as enjoying the deer-stalking and the shooting – the Queen spent most days with her sketchbook and colour-box open. She became an ever-better watercolourist, far above average amateur level, delighting in the picturesque views which opened up on every side, and enjoying the earthy humour of the Highlanders, their whisky and their dancing.7 (She was never happier than when dancing.)

  Prince Albert’s sense that the social and economic injustices of the industrial towns of ‘England’ would lead to communism, meanwhile, were shared by two young German exiles who arrived in England during the same year – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Perhaps the three Germans – Albert, Marx and Engels – were in a better position to get a perspective on the British Isles than some of its longer-standing inhabitants. Certainly they could see more clearly than the Whig aristocrats who were entrenched in their own positions and many of whom were constitutionally unable to see beyond the need to defend their position in narrow party terms.

  But one of the paradoxes of the 1850s, as the political consequences of 1846 began to become clear, was that, in the short term at least, the monarchy was more, not less, important to the Constitution. The Corn Laws had been abolished. The British political classes, like the new Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson, had ‘dipt into the future, far as human eye could see’, and now found themselves in a different universe

  In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.8

  The era, and the politics, bristle with paradox. Peel’s conversion to Free Trade broke the Conservative Party into two broad factions: Peelites and Protectionists. Neither mustered enough support in Parliament to form a Government on their own: the Tories would not govern out
right for decades. This did not, however, give a free hand to their opponents, since the ‘left’, if it could be so named, was a strange alliance of the Whigs such as Palmerston and the new radicals, ranging from Chartists to Free Traders, from economically aggressive Manchester Liberals to the mildest type of Whiggish squire. The consequence of all this political confusion was that, from the fall of Peel to the late 1860s, Britain was governed by more or less creaky coalitions. The monarchy, in such circumstances, was far from being a mere bit of pageantry or decoration. The letters and journals of Victoria and Albert throughout the 1850s show how closely they were involved with the appointments of ambassadors and Cabinet ministers and in attempting to put into practice the ‘good’ doctrines of Stockmar – an ever-constant presence, sometimes in person, sometimes writing letters from Germany – King Leopold and Sir Robert Peel.