It is important to glance at this context, for it places Victoria’s own relatively expansive attitudes in sharp relief. For all that she was personally disapproving of other religious observance, she was also perfectly aware as Sovereign that Victorian Britain contained many mansions and they all ought to be respected. Her own religious faith was impregnable and this confidence flowed into her relaxed attitudes to the religious worlds she saw all around her. She deserves a good deal of credit for her leadership on this potentially fraught issue.
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It would go too far to say that Victoria engaged in a form of Albertolatry in the lifetime of her husband but no one could ever doubt the Queen’s devotion to him. As we have seen, however, this love did not extend to allowing Albert to play the role for which he yearned. It was a year before the Queen allowed her husband a key to her government boxes and his emergence as chief counsellor and practical intermediary with the government was gradual. For the truth was that, in the matter of power and authority, Victoria was deeply territorial and this was a habit that, like many of her habits, took time to dissipate. Her attitudes could be contradictory nonetheless. While she kept her new husband at arm’s length from her power, she was delighted when, following an attempt to assassinate her and coupled with her recent pregnancy, Parliament agreed to designate Albert regent in the event of her death.
The Queen’s jealousy and sense of territoriality also figured in her relationships with others. Specifically, she luxuriated in the time she was able to spend exclusively with Albert, exclusive of the nine children the Royal couple had together. Victoria was, as we have seen, the first Queen Regnant to have her all of her children live to adulthood but her famously large brood was for her a mixed blessing and she made little attempt to hide this opinion. While Albert was positively au courant in his attitude to parenting – he played, taught and cared for them personally as much as he could – Victoria could be peevish if forced to spend too much time with her offspring. When they were adults, she told them quite freely that they had got in the way of her doing the thing she really liked, which was time alone with their now-deceased father.
‘What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul’, she said to Vicky of a new grandchild, ‘is very fine, dear, but I own [that] I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments.’ Though breastfed herself, Victoria abhorred the practice, much preferring the institution of the wet nurse. Indeed, the Queen, though having the advantage of being a woman, had decidedly Victorian attitudes about her sex in general. Nonetheless she and Albert, the Court and government all conspired in promulgating a most potent and useful story of the Royal Family as being as near an image of family perfection as could be imagined.
Together, in the eyes of the public, Victoria, Albert and their children indeed constituted the model family. In much the same way that model farms had been the effort of the upper classes to show others how things could be done, Victoria’s family showed the British people that Hanoverian dissolution did not have to be life à la mode. It succeeded so much so as to justify entirely Victoria’s boast that ‘England is the country of family life’. In terms of symbolism, this was very powerful.
In the course of her long reign, Victoria mastered the art of symbolism. From statues to stamps, young Victoria and old Victoria were symbolically represented in every corner of the globe and in every fashion conceivable. Daughter, woman, wife, mother, grandmother, ruler, Queen and Empress, all these roles she demonstrated on a greater stage than any other personality enjoyed in her lifetime. For Victoria, for example, to compile some memories of her family’s time in the Highlands was to write an instant bestseller. There was nothing the Queen did which was not interesting and little which was not held to be in some way exemplary. Yet this was also someone who freely observed, and not merely for effect, that ‘we women … are not fitted to reign’. Is there a paradox here or is it necessary to try to understand Victorians in their own terms?
The changing sense of womanhood was one of the many revolutions witnessed in the course of the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria was intellectually explicit about her response to the ideological clamour which arose during her lifetime, as she put it, ‘this mad wicked folly of “Women’s rights” with all its attendant horrors’. There was much that was cut off from Victoria simply because she was Queen and not King. ‘My whole heart is in the Crimea,’ she wrote of the war with Russia. ‘I regret exceedingly not to be a man & to be able to fight in the war.’
It is worth reflecting on what it meant to have a queen on the throne at this time rather than a king. In all European monarchies, whether liberal and constitutional or backward and unconstrained, direct exercise of the prerogative was everywhere clung most tightly to in military affairs. It followed that Victoria’s reign saw the Crown rise above military politics just as much as it rose above party ones, simply because the Sovereign was a woman. This inadvertent change, this evolution, truly is worth noting as a highly significant moment. It certainly did not happen everywhere else. Royal rule over vast armies was very much a later, twentieth-century European concern, not least with William of Prussia, the Queen’s eldest grandson.
Victoria, though never greatly bound by the desires of others after she became Queen, chafed at what womanhood meant for her. Although she looked with horror at the prospect of female emancipation, she was not unaware of what the Victorians called the Woman Question and was well able to connect the issue with herself and her own experiences. Marriage, and, more to the point, if you asked Victoria, childbirth, meant that ‘the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat.’ It was the human or physical condition to which Victoria was imperiously objecting, and not the relationship between the sexes. Of this she approved thoroughly.
If there were an alternative history of Britain, what difference would a King Victor have made to the world over which he ruled? Perhaps he would have been tempted to become embroiled in the military and strategic squabbles in which Britain, as the world’s most powerful state, found herself occasionally entangled. After all, the monarchs of far lesser states all involved themselves intimately in their armies and navies. Without doubt this fantasy Victor, even if displaying exactly the same personality traits as Victoria, would have been spared the criticisms she has since suffered, from all manner of otherwise respectable opinion.
Take just this one recent view of the Queen as the end of her reign approached. A most distinguished British historian remarked that:
the Queen had become very fat, rather ugly, semi-invalid and half-blind … In general she was callous, insensitive, obstinate, outspoken, capricious and bigoted and quite extraordinarily selfish … A long unchecked habit of self-indulgence effectively transformed the monarch into a monster and her courtiers into sycophantic cyphers … The result was a court regimen at once tyrannical and tedious, unbearable and unreal.
All of these things might have been true too of the notional King Victor. Indeed, some of them might even have been said by historians a century on from his death. Yet they would not have carried quite the same bite or been said to the same ends as the words above. Victoria inevitably was abused because she was a woman and because she had transgressed in terms of appearance and temper, aspects that no man would have been taken to task about in the same terms.
The best example of Queen Victoria being excoriated in a way unimaginable if applied to King Victor comes with Albert and the loving family life the Royal couple created for themselves. At the time there existed a phenomenon known as the ‘Coburg conspiracy’, a contemporary paranoia in which various princelings of this obscure eponymous Royal house conspired in a cabal to run Europe, with Victoria herself being Albert’s cat’s paw. Nowadays, there are other criticisms, in this case broadly feminist in nature. Victoria is chided for supposedly having let Prince Albert rule in her stead. That far from being her de facto private secretary he became a kind of shadow king, while she retreat
ed, happily, most proponents of this theory at least concede, to the pleasures of mere domesticity.
In truth, Queen Victoria became no less of a woman when she learned to rely upon Albert as a partner and to trust him. In his sphere, Albert performed the roles his age allocated to him but these did not include somehow supplanting Victoria as the ‘real’ monarch, whatever that was meant to mean. The services he performed for his wife were those he did out of duty and love and which she had him do out of desire and need. Victoria wanted him to help her, to help manage the vast burdens of monarchy, which would otherwise continue almost entirely unsupported. We must not forget that Victoria in the first part of her reign lacked even a rudimentary private office. Albert should be applauded by history for having loyally and devotedly served his wife the way he did, while Victoria should be acknowledged for facing her own limitations and having the courage to design her role afresh.
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At the age of eleven, Albert decided to ‘train myself to become a good and useful man’. No one who looks back on the Prince Consort’s still-manifest contribution to British public life can doubt that he succeeded. Part of his success came in weaning the Queen off her addiction to the Whigs, embodied so charmingly as they were in the figure of Melbourne, and encouraging her to see the likes of Sir Robert Peel as a figure no less useful and loyal. It can be hardly stated strongly enough that Albert’s achievement, in dissuading the Queen from the kind of party allegiance in which all her Hanoverian forebears indulged constantly, was crucial in moulding the constitutional monarchy that is enjoyed today. He left another tremendous legacy to Victoria as monarch. He opted not to follow Wellington as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and this further insulated the Royal Family from active involvement in a potentially divisive political question.
His loss, when it came, was overwhelming. Infamously, Victoria blamed her eldest son for Albert’s death in December 1861. The Prince Consort died of typhoid fever or stomach cancer but his demise was attributed by Victoria to the weakening of his spirit brought about by Bertie’s near mésalliance, or so his parents thought, with an actress in the course of a visit to Ireland. Appalled by the story he had heard, a gravely ill Albert travelled to Cambridge to confront his son. Albert died a fortnight later and Victoria never forgave Bertie for what she took to be his malignant role in precipitating her husband’s death. ‘I never can, or shall,’ she hissed in a letter to Vicky, ‘look at him without a shudder.’ This reaction is of a piece with the entirety of her response to the tragedy. It is worth noting at this point that the Queen, very untypically by nineteenth-century standards, had had scarcely any experience of bereavement up to this moment of crisis in her life. She had been devastated by her mother’s death earlier in the year, for this very reason. She had never known her father, had no siblings and her own children had all survived into adulthood. Death had been remote to her and now first her mother and then her husband had been, as she saw it, snatched away.
Her response was understandably extreme. The stark details of this response stand out as only Victorian ones still can. Albert’s watch was wound daily, his clothes were laid out each day, the jug of hot water and fresh towels were brought daily into a room that remained unchanged for twenty years. Victoria slept every night in the company of a cast of Albert’s right arm and his nightshirt. All these, plus the infamous ‘withdrawal from public life’, conspire to paint the picture of a Queen who had abandoned her duties, first under the weight of unbearable grief and then out of something akin to self-indulgent wallowing in the life of the unmerry widow.
Certainly Victoria-the-irresponsible is the spiteful image Lytton Strachey sought to paint. He was very successful in this and the staying power of his jibes is astonishing. The century of sneering at the Victorians is not simply the handiwork of one Bloomsburyite, for Strachey was preaching to a secular choir. There has rarely been a century more resented for its success than the nineteenth. The problem with Strachey’s portrayal of Victoria is well put by Matthew Dennison, one of her more sympathetic and acute biographers. What Eminent Victorians does to all its victims is simply to doubt their sincerity. This was Strachey’s horrible and selfish genius. Thus in Victoria’s case, readers are encouraged to watch ironically and coldly as she parades her emotions in a paroxysm of self-indulgence. This is certainly what Strachey did and ‘in doing so [Strachey] strips her writing of its power and denies the possibility of her pain’.
Victoria’s grief was criticised in her own time. There is, for example, the response to ‘Mourning the Prince Consort’, a photograph commissioned by the Queen which showed her posed alongside three of her children in a state of what Dennison describes as ‘emotional collapse’ alongside a garlanded bust of Albert. The feelings were real but the commission was questionable and was duly questioned, on grounds of its over-publicised intimacy. Just as the Queen had been the model wife, now, perhaps too ostentatiously even for an age in which black crepe was sold by the furlong, she was to be the model widow, whether her people wished it or not.
Her grief was in the foreground even at highly inappropriate moments. At Bertie’s wedding to Alexandra (Alix) of Denmark at Windsor, the Queen cloistered herself in Catherine of Aragon’s closet, perched high above St George’s Chapel. This was in 1863, almost a year and half after Albert’s death. Seldom would the Queen again open Parliament during the forty years remaining of her reign. Yet Strachey’s picture must not be allowed to overwhelm the truth. Desolate as Victoria was, she never stopped doing her boxes. Society went on without her, Bertie and Alix soon became its focus in Marlborough House, but the business of government did not. The Queen continued to work and exercise her prerogative.
What ended instead, and this is why Victoria’s ‘withdrawal’ from public life has such hold on our collective imagination, was a certain way of ‘doing’ monarchy. To put Victoria’s time on the throne in its proper, very different context, after the purchase of Balmoral and Osborne in the 1840s and 50s, the Royal Family intentionally spent easily up to half the year away from view at one or other residence. Simply put, being Sovereign in 1869 did not mean what it does today. It has been well said that after Albert’s death Victoria opened more hospitals than she did parliaments but the point is that she did open them. She did not become a hermit in one of her many residences. Life went on, only now in a different way. Victoria simply progressed, without the support on which she had once been able to count. Her sorrow continued and this is understandable, being a true and proper tribute to the love she and Albert had enjoyed.
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As for the work that also went on, a good proportion of it was entirely supernumerary to that laid down for any British Sovereign. Its particular quality is best captured by what Frank Prochaska has brilliantly called the ‘welfare monarchy’. This was a monarchy that presided over, and honoured, the Victorian age of philanthropy. Victoria and Albert were ardent champions of voluntary endeavour, which in her reign encompassed many forms of welfare, including hospitals and schools. The Times, with a flush of entirely deserved patriotic pride, noted in 1885 that London charities alone collected funds worth more than the budgets of several European states. In other words, doing good was serious business.
Between people and Sovereign, the real connection was not the impersonal state headed by Victoria but rather the good works she directly encouraged and indirectly inspired. Interestingly, while the idea of a ‘welfare monarchy’ was intimately tied up with good works, it was not some kind of John the Baptist for the coming of the welfare state. It was instead an end in itself. It was that most Victorian of ends, doing the right thing for its own sake.
The philanthropy stemmed from sincere religious conviction but it also helped ameliorate class divisions. In form, it was often an endeavour led by women, who were denied a range of other outlets. Victoria, as focal point and inspiration, was Royal patron of many more worthy causes than any Hanoverian before her. Moreover, she inspired, or required, if the native inspiration was lack
ing, as was sometimes the case, her children to discharge the same level of moral leadership in their own activities. This in turn moved others to work harder too and this was the good that social ambition could do. A desire to be noticed by a member of the Royal Family while doing good was not ignoble.
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However, the poor Prince of Wales was fingered for his father’s death, viewed coldly by his mother, regarded by history and again, by his mother, as an unfortunate and regrettable dilettante. He was the heir, as his mother had been before him, but there the resemblance between them, in the eyes of many, ended. Playing cards for money, enjoying the company of more mistresses than any of his great-uncles, named in actual divorce proceedings, Bertie trailed impish scandal and disappointment forever in his wake. Yet, there were strong resemblances between son and mother. He was the open-hearted and passionate son of an open-hearted and passionate mother and not the copy of his father she sought him to be. He shared her loathing of racial prejudice, in such marked contrast to the ideologues of the age, yet it took many years for Bertie and Victoria to reach a detente.
In fact, it took a near tragedy to reconcile the nation and Queen to the Prince of Wales. In December 1871, on the anniversary of his father’s death, Bertie contracted typhoid during a visit to Yorkshire. Years later, the writer E. F. Benson, who was yet another professional mocker of the Victorians, popularised an anonymous parody of Alfred Austin, the poet laureate of the day:
The Victorians Page 37