This background is vital in itself because it illustrates the vagaries of history. Victoria was only born because a bounty was offered, in effect, to bring her into being. She only became Queen because of a Ruritanian law drafted decades previously and because another princess had died in childbirth the year before Victoria herself was born.
How the destiny of an age, and of a country and of an empire, can turn on chance.
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Victoria’s childhood bears all the hallmarks of an overwritten novel. A suffocatingly over-protective mother, a Rasputin-like minder and a swirl of bitter enmity fringed the edges of her cloistered palace life. None of this ought to bode well for a happy future. In later life, with a fine instinct for understatement, the Queen described her childhood as ‘rather melancholy’. She was reared under the elaborate and forbidding ‘Kensington System’, a maze of rules and regulations which involved her isolation from other children and other outside influences, including other members of the Royal Family, the better to render her dependent on her mother and on her mother’s ambitious aide John Conroy.
This Conroy was a man for whom the word ‘cad’ was invented. A long list of other insults was levelled at him by contemporaries and it may safely be assumed that the insults were well founded. The relationship between Conroy and the Duchess of Kent has fascinated Royal historians for generations. Whether he was, within the walls of Kensington Palace, more to his Royal mistress than a domineering servant is not known but he was in control of the young princess’s upbringing and watched her every move. The Kensington System facilitated this surveillance. Victoria, until her accession, slept in her mother’s room and played with no one other than those permitted by Conroy. These tended to be his own children, who were instructed to join in the spying on the princess and whom Victoria came to hate as heartily as she did Conroy himself.
It is important to emphasise just how complete and appalling this state of isolation for the young princess was and how little the monarch and his court saw of the precious, much-sought-after heiress who after 1830 was heir presumptive. George IV invited Victoria and her mother to dine once. Conroy successfully intrigued so as to prevent mother and daughter from attending William IV’s coronation. In fairness to Victoria’s mother she was in return scandalised at the rakishness and parading immorality of the late Georgian Court and wished to preserve her child from their contaminating influence. Yet the effect of such isolation and loneliness could only be negative for her daughter. This was a girl in training for the role of Sovereign, who was nevertheless barred from socialising in Royal circles.
Any measure of sense in Victoria’s early life came only from Leopold and at some point even his wisdom had to be delivered by letter. The popular prince had first turned down the insecure Greek throne, before accepting that of the new Kingdom of Belgium in 1831, and following his departure for Europe Conroy’s pretensions grew further. He tried to force Victoria to sign a document confirming him as her adviser, should she, as seemed entirely likely, accede before she was of age. He constantly intrigued against her uncle the Duke of Cumberland, even going so far as to claim that this uncle plotted to murder his niece in order to obtain the throne for himself, and he pushed for the status of the Duchess of Kent to be raised. He failed to have her made ‘Dowager Princess of Wales’ but he did succeed in having her confirmed by Parliament as regent-elect, in the event of a minority. In her own household, Victoria’s only true friend, at this point in her unhappy childhood, was Baroness Lehzen, an erstwhile governess to the older, now adult children of the Duchess. Even she was not the easiest person in the world to handle but she was dutiful to her charge. Amid this world of dysfunction, the wonder is that Victoria emerged from her childhood as a stable and thoughtful young woman.
It is certainly the case that Lehzen, together with the male tutors assigned to the princess, did a fine job educating Victoria. The two Anglican bishops whom the Duchess invited in 1830 to assess her eleven-year-old daughter were delighted with the child’s progress. Victoria, they reported, ‘displayed an accurate knowledge of the most important features of Scripture History and of the leading truths and precepts of the Christian Religion as taught by the Church of England, as well as an acquaintance with the Chronology and principal facts of English History’.
Conroy made much of his Royal possession. A capable man if an incurable schemer, he organised carriage tours round much of southern England, in the course of which Victoria was displayed to the crowds as though she were a prize beast. She hated these engagements. They made her ill and tired, and the Court liked them no better, accurately reading Conroy’s intention to set Victoria as an opposite pole of interest and power to that of the King. Those who took the trouble to look to the future could see all too clearly the role Conroy was preparing for himself and it was an open secret that the Duchess was comfortable with this state of affairs.
There was a fly in this ointment. Victoria herself, wholly unworldly and inexperienced though she was, was not comfortable with Conroy’s plans and strategies and she was never, then or at any time, prepared to concede one inch more than her youth and relative powerlessness obliged her to do. She displayed as a teenager a touch of that steel that later her ministers would come to recognise only too well. No stratagem Conroy could pursue would lead the iron-willed princess ever to sign over any future rights to him.
While the Court saw next to nothing of the heir presumptive, there was a final sense of satisfaction felt by William IV, who had come to despise the weak-willed Duchess and her unpleasant sidekick, when he realised his ambition of living long enough to see his niece come of age. He passed the line with just over a month to spare. The King lived until 20 June 1837 which allowed him to pass Victoria’s 18th birthday on 24 May and enjoy a final Waterloo Day on the 18th. As eighteen is the age of majority for monarchs there was no reason for a regency, so scheming relations and their friends were irrelevant.
Victoria could now order her own Court, her own Household, her own advisers and counsellors and break free of her mother and of Conroy. Victoria’s first act as monarch was to move out of her mother’s bedroom and to have the Duchess’s suite placed far away from her own. While she could not expel Conroy from her mother’s household, she could, in effect, now remove her mother from hers.
At her first Privy Council, the Accession Council, two of her Royal uncles, the Dukes of Cumberland and Sussex, were the first to do homage to the new Sovereign. From the start, this petite, near child-sized monarch behaved as if born to the role. She ‘not merely filled her chair’, the great Duke of Wellington observed, ‘she filled the room’. William IV’s last Parliament dissolved on his death. It was only in the course of Victoria’s own reign that the practice ceased of dissolving Parliament upon the demise of the Crown. The Queen vowed: ‘It will be my care to strengthen our institutions, civil and ecclesiastical, by discreet improvement, wherever improvement is required.’
This was all very well but Victoria was a woman and this indisputable fact meant that the first significant event of her reign was the loss of the principality of Hanover. The kingdom from which the dynasty derived its name slipped from its grasp, because in Hanover the succession was determined by the Salic Law, which forbade female succession. Hence Ernest Augustus, Victoria’s unpopular uncle the Duke of Cumberland, who had coveted the British throne himself, became a king in Germany instead. The personal union with the British Crown ended.
The reputation of the new Hanoverian monarch has suffered and been blackened by history, explicitly because of his family connection to Victoria herself. This is, as far as it goes, a shame, because he had had an illustrious military career, serving Britain with distinction against revolutionary France. Yet it was an easy matter to set him beside the virtuous eighteen-year-old Victoria and compare the two to instantly unfavourable effect. Plainly the new Queen could not stand accused of having done all that her uncle was suspected of having done. She could not have murdered her valet or fathered
a child with his own sister or have been one of the principal opponents in the House of Lords of Catholic Emancipation. Only the last of these was actually true.
Ernest was in fact infatuated by the House of Lords in general. So tender was his devotion to the institution that even after becoming King of Hanover he found occasion to visit London and sit with them. Alas, he did not love his own German institutions so much. One of his first acts on becoming King was to suspend the constitution of Hanover, an act which did nothing for his reputation. No wonder the reputation of Victoria should be so burnished, for it is the easiest thing in the world to compare a beautiful young woman with a rakish, autocratic and allegedly murderous and incestuous older man and find the older man sadly wanting. Certainly one thing is true. Victoria never tried to suspend the British Constitution.
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Prince Albert, the ‘good’ German to balance Ernest Augustus’s ‘bad’ German, was famously the man in Victoria’s life. He was not, however, the first man to play a pivotal role in her evolution as a queen. The credit for this success belongs to her first Prime Minister, the agreeably cynical Whig politician and noted dandy Lord Melbourne. He was a widower when Victoria came to the throne. There was, therefore, no other woman waiting to monopolise his time and the youthful monarch instantly discovered a rapport with him. Agreeable, solicitous of her comfort and gallant, Melbourne was the opposite of the chilling Conroy in every possible way. The monarch and premier spent hours together, walking, talking and cantering together in Windsor Great Park, as shown in Francis Grant’s evocative painting Queen Victoria Riding Out with Lord Melbourne. The Prime Minister acted in these critical early years as a combination of counsellor and confidant, affectionate uncle and private secretary. His support, though watched intently by his political critics and the factions within her Court, was vital in assisting the Queen’s development of a role and a style. Melbourne became something of a paragon but unfortunately for his many successors, other possibly than Disraeli, nobody in the eyes of the Queen could ever quite match up to her great and dear Lord Melbourne.
She was, in this impressionable phase, under his tutelage, though she was still capable of making errors. Looking back decades later, Victoria, who was never fond of admitting to her own mistakes, nevertheless publicly regretted some early missteps. One was the so-called ‘Bedchamber Crisis’, the details as mentioned earlier and which had the effect of causing the Queen to become entangled in a potentially dangerous political spat. Another was even more painful, not to say profoundly diminishing to Victoria’s standing. This was the Lady Flora Hastings affair, when the Queen took against one of her mother’s ladies-in-waiting. She had long disliked Lady Flora, suspecting that she was yet another spy in the service of Conroy and when in 1839 she saw that Lady Flora’s belly was swelling suspiciously, she jumped to the conclusion that the unfortunate woman had become pregnant by the dastardly Conroy and dismissed her from her service.
In fact, Lady Flora’s swelling was caused by the liver cancer which was to kill her. Soon it became all too apparent that she was dying. Conroy took the opportunity to broadcast the story, not exactly false, that the Queen and her Prime Minister had been blackening Lady Flora’s name and the lady herself felt obliged to publish a piece in the weekly Examiner defending her honour and blaming Victoria’s tutor Baroness Lehzen for slandering her. This was, in other words, a truly appalling incident and few of the principals emerged from it with any honour except for Lady Flora, who died in July. Victoria visited her shortly before her death and years later the Queen continued to report the nightmares that assailed her as a result of her role in this episode.
In the Whiggish account of Victorian constitutional progress, these early outbursts of personal rule were an aberration and one which the Queen cured by taking wise advice, from her Prime Minister, from her uncle and ultimately from Prince Albert. Marriage meant further evolution for the Queen. Victoria could free herself further, in the most respectable way possible, from the mother with whom she continued to have a complex and not entirely unaffectionate relationship. It also led to the displacement of Lehzen. She and Victoria had always been close and their relationship had been all the more critical when set against the context of Conroy’s presence and role as architect of the Kensington System. Yet Lehzen’s past service would always count for less once a husband appeared on the scene, especially a husband who would assist in producing the heirs that would bar Ernest Augustus once and for all from the British throne.
Prince Albert, who has his own chapter, had a great impact upon Victoria’s style and concept of governance. She was strong-willed and apt to do as she pleased and these characteristics never truly disappeared. Albert brought with him from Germany precisely the form of prudence needed at this time by the British monarchy and its head. Each of the German Royals, focused as they were on their own tiny principalities and duchies, grew up aware of the delicacy and fragility of their situation as rulers and Albert passed on this awareness to his wife. Even though the British monarchy had roots sunk deep into the national psyche, this did not mean that these same roots could not be dug up if the context changed. Victoria’s strong will never diminished in the course of her long reign but her awareness of this potential delicacy of governance, bestowed by Albert, caused her to rein herself in and to play her part in developing the constitutional monarchy that survives to this day. A sound monarchy that knows its role, its place, its duty, that instinctively steers clear of any political spats.
The wedding of Victoria and Albert in 1840 was the first sign that ‘Victorian values’, as they have become known, were more truly Albert’s values. The Prince wanted only bridesmaids whose mothers were themselves also of impeccable virtue while Victoria maintained a late Regency toleration of human foible. ‘One ought always to be indulgent toward other people,’ the Queen ruled, ‘[if] we had not been well brought up … we might also have gone astray.’ The rigour that came to accompany Victorian morality and that is widely believed to have flowed from Victoria herself fortunately came to the Queen via the good offices of her consort.
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In religion, Victoria and Albert were as constant in their doctrines as they were in one another. Both shared a Protestant faith that was relatively uncomplicated. Neither was tempted by Tractarianism, that form of doctrine that emerged in Oxford in the 1830s and that manifested as a more ritualistic High Anglicanism, or by any form of evangelicalism. For the Queen, her values were simply those taught her by the Bible. She regarded the Tractarian debate coldly. She named it ‘ritualism’ and pressed for its advocates to receive no preferment within the Church of England. She was, after all, Supreme Governor of the Church so her words must be listened to. She also had significant power and patronage within the Church hierarchy and she was not afraid to exert her influence.
Her opinions showed themselves most clearly in 1868, when she championed the appointment of a solid anti-Tractarian, Archibald Tait, as Archbishop of Canterbury, or rather, as her Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1874, she signalled her approval of the Public Worship Regulation Act, which Tait introduced as a private members’ bill to Parliament and which sought to stamp out ‘ritualist’ practices in England. The bill passed, much to the pleasure of Victoria, but it was by no means without its critics. A number of clergymen were prosecuted for what were regarded as excessively ‘Tractarian’ practices and the law was not repealed until 1965. To involve herself with such a bill was arguably not the cleverest move the Queen made but her conscience drove her. She saw her Church as being the very opposite of High Anglican. Indeed, it was often observed that she and Albert were arguably at their most religiously comfortable in the unyielding Presbyterian pews of Crathie Kirk, the small church adjoining Balmoral.
Importantly, Victoria had no tint of sectarian enthusiasm. She vocally decried mistreatment of her Catholic, Hindu, Muslim and Jewish subjects alike. This was because they were her subjects. On her own religion, she was privately sure. When in 1874, a member of
Gladstone’s first administration became the first minister to convert to Catholicism, the Queen’s reaction was: ‘How dreadful this perversion of Lord Ripon’s … I knew him so well and thought him so sensible.’ Yet time after time she would come to the defence of those being persecuted for holding to their faith, whether in Ireland, India or even Germany. She was appalled, for example, at Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s cynical and dishonest Kulturkampf against the Catholic Hierarchy in Germany and entirely sympathised with her daughter Vicky, by then the German Crown Princess, in her doomed, liberal opposition to it.
As for Victoria’s attitude to the Catholic Church in general, this is inevitably coloured by historical enmities. Hence the Queen is often presented as being a good deal better disposed towards Pope Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 until his death in 1903, and with whom she shared a taste for Vin Mariani tonic wine than she was towards his formidable predecessor, the Blessed Pope Pius IX, who reigned from 1846 to 1878. Pius IX was frowned upon by liberal Protestants for formalising the doctrine of Papal Infallibility and for reconstituting the English Hierarchy in the aftermath of Emancipation. It was under Pius’s direction that England witnessed the enthronement of the first Archbishop of Westminster and such examples of the growing confidence of the Catholic Church in England and Wales led to a sharp reaction and the last bout of widespread anti-Catholic violence witnessed in England. It also led to the ludicrous Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851, which permitted only the Church of England to use formal episcopal titles. This was a law of such surpassing foolishness that it was repealed a mere twenty years later but, in its day, it had the natural effect of placing the Catholic Church very much on the defensive.
The Victorians Page 36