The old Duke of Wellington was dear to Victoria and Albert both. Completely gone was all the animosity that Victoria had felt for him during her fiercely partisan days as a Whig, or rather as a Melbournian, when, to her, Wellington, Peel, and the Tories seemed put on this earth to thwart all her desires. Albert, who quickly developed a strong affinity for the old man, had done much to reconcile him to the Queen. The old Duke, muscular and upright, had retained much of his iron, in spite of the series of strokes he had suffered, and the deafness that had come with age. While he now played a lesser role in the House of Lords, he still served as Commander-in-Chief of the army and still kept up a spirited social life. He, at least, would cheat death a little longer.
One more death during the past year had devastated Victoria and even more so Albert. On 8 October 1849, Albert’s secretary, George Anson, thirty-seven years old and apparently completely healthy, complained to his wife of a pain over his eye and immediately collapsed; he died within three hours. When news reached the royal couple at Osborne the next day, they both broke down and were, according to Lady Lyttelton, “in floods of tears, and quite shut up … so warm a friend they can hardly expect to find again.” She was absolutely correct, as far as Albert was concerned: he had lost one of his true friends. Their relationship had begun on the worst of footings, with Victoria and Melbourne foisting Anson, then Melbourne’s private secretary, upon the Prince in spite of his protests. But Albert quickly found Anson to be an ideal servant, devoted and loyal, just the sort of man he needed in his battle with Lehzen, and in acting behind the scenes to avoid a second bedchamber crisis when Peel came to power in 1841. Trust led to respect, which led to a true friendship, something rare for the Prince, who was still seen as a foreigner, who was still often awkward and aloof in public, and who rarely opened himself up completely to others.
With Anson gone, there were only two men remaining whom Albert could honestly call his friends. There was, first of all, the indispensible Stockmar, still deeply committed to shaping the British monarchy according to his own ideals. Stockmar was, however, back in Germany, where he spent most of his time: liberal enough with advice spooned out in missives and memoranda, but not there to listen, to confide in, to respond to the growing cares of the moment. That left Robert Peel.
Robert Peel was in character and interests much more like the Prince Consort than Albert’s father had ever been: he, too, never quite overcame his shyness in public, but was a man of genuine warmth in private life. Moreover, like Albert, he was a man of intellect and wide-ranging cultural interests. Those interests, and a shared political outlook, brought the two together; with Peel, Albert was able to express himself intellectually in a way that he simply could not with Victoria. And Peel was a mentor to the young Prince, providing him with much-appreciated connection to British intellectual figures. Even after Peel’s fall from power, Albert turned to him frequently for advice, as he had during his election to the Chancellorship of Cambridge.
Peel lived, thank goodness, for Albert—and Victoria—had much need of his counsel in June 1850; for at that time, for Victoria—and even more so for her husband—things seemed to be falling apart.
For one thing, the political situation was a mess. Their long-troubled relationship with one of the Queen’s ministers had suddenly reached a crisis point. Victoria had of course deeply regretted the fall of Peel after the conservatives split in the wake of the repeal of the Corn Laws. But under Albert’s influence she had welcomed John Russell’s Whig ministry with good grace. Russell quickly proved himself to be a completely different Prime Minister than Peel. Whereas Prime Minister Peel was the government, keeping “all in his own hands,” as Victoria put it, Russell held the reins with a far weaker hand. Toleration was one of his greatest virtues, and one of his greatest flaws: he generally took a laissez-faire approach to the doings of his various ministers. Cartoonists in Punch and elsewhere depicted Russell as Master Johnny, an errant little boy, both because of the Prime Minister’s diminutive stature, and because he never seemed quite up to the task.
In particular, he was completely unable to control his strong-willed Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston. Palmerston had been giving the Queen and her Consort fits for years. He ruled the foreign office as his fiefdom, invariably acting pragmatically and often neglecting or refusing to consult with the Queen or the rest of her government. While he was loyal to the idea of constitutional monarchy, and personally liked the Queen, he had little time for the intervention of a woman who was born a dozen years after he was first elected to Parliament, or to her husband, a German and thus, he once told Albert to his face, unable to understand British interests. He regularly neglected to send the Queen dispatches until after he had issued them. He glibly agreed to changes that Victoria—or rather, Albert—made on dispatches, and then ignored them. When Victoria remonstrated with him, he would apologize, and then behave exactly as before.
Making everything worse was the fact that Palmerston and the royal couple disagreed utterly on matters of foreign policy. In the ongoing dispute between Prussia and Denmark, they favored Prussia, and Palmerston Denmark. When the states of Italy rose up against their Austrian rulers, they favored Austria, and Palmerston Italy: he had actually helped arm Garibaldi the year before, without consulting the Queen or even his Cabinet colleagues. To the royal couple, the revolutions of 1848 were a chaotic nightmare, threatening to destroy the ruling families of Europe—among them, of course, their own extended family. Palmerston, on the other hand, had no sympathy with the despots of Europe, and welcomed the revolutions as harbingers of an enlightened and liberal new age. He was a chauvinist and a populist; his promotion of Britain above all angered the courts of Europe (and thus, often, his own), but played well in the British press: he was by far the most beloved member of the present government.
Victoria had complained about Palmerston’s cavalier and insensitive political style since the last days of Melbourne’s ministry, and little changed in the four years since the coming of the Russell government. Tension built; in September 1848 she told Russell “I felt really I could hardly go on with him, that I had no confidence in him, and that it made me seriously anxious and uneasy for the welfare of the country and the peace of Europe in general, and that I felt very uneasy from one day to another as to what might happen.” Lord John increasingly found himself in the role of umpire between the Queen and Palmerston, repeatedly playing up the man’s strengths to the Queen and conveying her complaints to Palmerston.
In February 1850, a political firestorm broke out that seemed to make Palmerston’s removal inevitable. All of Europe was inflamed by the news of Palmerston’s heavy-handed intrusion into the affairs of Greece. Two and a half years before, during Easter 1847, a Greek rabble had seized the occasion of annual anti-Semitic demonstrations to ransack the home of the Jewish Don David Pacifico, terrorize his family, and burn the house to the ground. Pacifico claimed that he had lost the enormous sum of £32,000 in the conflagration: £5,000 in property, as well as papers that proved he was owed £27,000. Don Pacifico’s parents were—and perhaps he was—born in Gibraltar, making him a British citizen. When the Greek government failed to recompense him, he turned to the British consul, who brought the matter to Palmerston. Palmerston agreed that Greece owed Pacifico the full amount—plus another £500 for his suffering. There matters stood for two years, when in mid-January 1850, the British Mediterranean fleet stormed into Athens’s waters with more ships than Nelson had commanded at the Battle of the Nile. The fleet’s admiral had instructions to seize Greek shipping and blockade the harbor until Pacifico’s claims and some other British demands were met.
It was Palmerston’s quintessential act of gunboat diplomacy. Opinion in Britain was divided as to whether Don Pacifico or Greece was the true victim, and as to whether Britain or Greece was the true bully; the Queen and Albert, as well as the conservatives—both the Protectionists and the Peelites—were decidedly opposed to Palmerston’s militant intervention. Elsewh
ere in Europe there was little dispute: foreign governments were enraged. The French proposed arbitration in London overseen by themselves, while in Athens simultaneous negotiations took place between the British ambassador and the government. In London, a settlement was reached, but that news had not reached Athens when the Greek government capitulated to every British demand. The French considered that their deal took precedence. Palmerston disagreed. The French ambassador promptly returned to France for consultations; the Russians contemplated recalling their own ambassador, and the Queen celebrated her thirty-first birthday amidst serious talk of a European war.
In the House of Lords on 17 June, Lord Stanley, the leader of the Protectionist wing of the Conservatives, moved a censure in the House of Lords on the government for their actions in Greece. That motion carried by thirty-seven votes. Before this debate, Victoria and Albert had insisted that Palmerston leave the Foreign Office, Albert writing to Russell “one conviction grows stronger and stronger with the Queen and myself (if it is possible), viz. that Lord Palmerston is bringing the whole of the hatred which is borne to him … by all the Governments of Europe upon England, and that country runs serious danger of having to pay for the consequences.” And they had nearly succeeded; as early as March they had negotiated with Russell for his removal. Russell made clear to them that given Palmerston’s enormous popularity, dropping him completely from the government was out of the question: if they tried to do that, the government would fall. But Russell was willing to relegate Palmerston to a post in which he could not antagonize the Queen so deeply. He proposed reshuffling the Cabinet completely, moving Palmerston to the Home Office and offering him leadership in the House of Commons. Russell would remain Prime Minister but move to the House of Lords. Albert objected to this, fearing that the strong-willed Palmerston could parlay leadership in Commons into the Prime Ministership. Russell—a poor soothsayer—was sure this would not happen because Palmerston was too old to be Prime Minister. Palmerston, Russell told the royal couple, had agreed to the move—but to avoid any debate, nothing could happen until the end of the current parliamentary session.
Two months later, just as Victoria returned to public life after the birth of Arthur, the royal couple met again with Russell and modified their plans. Russell now agreed with Albert that Palmerston should not be given leadership in Commons. Palmerston would move to the Colonial Office, Lord John would go to the House of Lords, and Sir George Grey—the present Home Secretary—was to become Leader of the House of Commons.
It was the best Victoria and Albert could hope for. But the censure motion in the House of Lords scuttled their plans completely. The government was forced to respond in the House of Commons, or resign. And their response could not simply be about the business in Greece, for the Lords had thrown their entire foreign policy into question. They would have to defend Palmerston’s policy—and that amounted to a vote of confidence in Russell’s ministry. If the government won, Palmerston would be vindicated, his position stronger than ever: there could be no further talk about shifting him to another office. If the government lost, Russell would be forced to resign, and chaos would likely ensue. What sort of government could be assembled from the hopelessly split Conservatives and the minority Whigs was anybody’s guess. “It is impossible to say at this moment what will be the result,” Lord John wrote to the Queen days before the debate. He feared the worst, noting that both wings of the Conservative party had united on this issue: “Lord Stanley, Lord Aberdeen, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Disraeli appear to be in close concert.” (This was surely one of the very last times anyone made such a claim about the last two men.) “We are in a crisis,” Victoria wrote to uncle Leopold. “It is most unfortunate, for whatever way it ends, it must do great harm.”
The stage was set for one of the most spectacular debates in British parliamentary history. Palmerston himself later claimed he could hardly remember such a “display of intellect, oratory and high and dignified feeling.” For four long nights the fate of the government hung in the balance as the leading political lights of Britain—including no fewer than seven once, present, and future Prime Ministers*—passionately assailed or defended the Foreign Secretary.
On this very day that the Queen visited her dying uncle Adolphus, the debate had reached its midpoint and was the talk of the nation. The previous Monday, radical (and highly nationalist) M.P. John Arthur Roebuck had introduced the motion “that the principles on which the foreign policy of Her Majesty’s government has been regulated have been such as were calculated to maintain the honour and dignity of this country.” On that night and the next, members dissected into the early hours of the morning Palmer-ston’s role in the Greek affair. His opponents called attention to the unfounded or exaggerated claims of that man of dubious character, Don Pacifico, and decried the loss of British prestige that resulted from the incident; his proponents waxed indignant about iniquitous Greece and its atrocities against Don Pacifico and others: Britain had had no choice but to intervene. One supporter raged about the vast right-wing conspiracy combining English conservatives and European despots, bent on bringing Palmerston and liberalism down: a vote against Palmerston was a vote for “Cossack domination.” The last speaker on the first night, James Graham—once Home Secretary in Peel’s government—analyzed every major Foreign Office decision of the last four years and concluded that Palmerston’s heavy-handed tactics had resulted in fiasco throughout Europe; Palmerston’s actions had toppled Louis-Philippe from his throne, led to the failed uprisings of 1848, and were responsible for the current tide of reaction across the continent.
At 9:45 on the second night of the debate, Palmerston rose to defend himself. He gave the speech of his life. Speaking for four and a half hours with few notes and no pause for the water or oranges set beside him, he covered himself rhetorically with the British flag, responding to Graham’s attacks country by country, demonstrating that he had spread the light of liberal reform throughout Europe. In doing this, he had simply enforced the will of the British people, and attacking him personally made no sense: “It is like shooting a policeman,” Palmerston claimed. “As long as England is England, as long as the English people are animated by the feelings and spirit and opinions which they possess, you may knock down twenty Foreign Ministers one after another, but depend upon it, none will keep the place who does not act upon the same principles.” His policy had bettered mankind: advancing civilization, promoting peace, and augmenting prosperity. In his peroration, he whipped up the chamber by appealing to the unparalleled power and greatness of the British empire: “… as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum*; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.”
He finished to thunderous cheers at 2:20 in the morning. Victoria, reading the speech the next day, could not help but be impressed: “a most brilliant speech,” she admitted in her journal. Russell was ecstatic about it—“one of the most masterly ever delivered,” he wrote—and was now optimistic that the government would win the vote. He was, however, not sure that his ministry would survive, informing the Queen that they needed a sizeable majority—forty votes—if they were to remain in office. After Palmerston spoke, the debate had adjourned, to recommence this evening; indeed, as Victoria prepared to return to Buckingham Palace from Cambridge House, the House of Commons had already been in session for two hours. The Stranger’s Gallery was packed more tightly than ever, would-be spectators spilling out of the chamber. Lord John was still to speak, as were Gladstone, Disraeli, and Peel. The Queen was in the eye of the political storm, and her feelings about her own government were decidedly mixed.
Prince Albert, meanwhile, was in the midst of his own tempest, suddenly locked in a battle to keep the most important project of his life alive and to keep his reputation intact. His and Henry Cole’s idea a year before of a truly international
exhibition had now taken on life, largely thanks to Albert, who was now chair of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition. (This afternoon he had chaired a meeting until six, leaving the Queen to set out to the Cambridges without him.) The project had become to him something of far greater magnitude to him than a simple display of manufactures. Last March he had inspired 136 British mayors and 18 foreign ambassadors with his speech at an elaborate dinner at the Lord Mayor’s mansion with his elevated vision of the Exhibition. “We are living at a period of the most wonderful transition,” he told them, “which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which indeed all history points; the realization of the Unity of mankind!” The Exhibition was to be nothing less than the manifestation of this millennial moment: “a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.”
Albert acted as if he carried the world upon his shoulders, devoting an immense amount of time and energy overseeing every aspect of the planning. He “appears to be almost the only person who has considered the subject both as a whole and in its details,” wrote Lord Granville, the vice-chair of the Royal Committee. “The whole thing would fall to pieces, if he left it to itself.” The strain upon him showed. In January, Victoria wrote to Stockmar “The Prince’s sleep is again as bad as ever, and he looks very ill of an evening.” And now, at the end of June 1850, opposition had grown to the point that failure seemed imminent.
Nothing about the project seemed to please the public. Funding, for one thing, was not forthcoming: the Exhibition was supposed to be supported by public subscription, and while Albert had given £500 and Victoria £1,000, no one had come along with the truly substantial donation needed to attract others, and the fear arose that the Treasury would have to take up the burden. And then there was the site. Albert had from the first fixed upon Hyde Park for the Exhibition; he had studied the alternatives and was now absolutely committed to that choice: it would be held there or not be held at all. The residents of Knightsbridge adjoining the site raised a stink about the noise, the inevitable invasion of riffraff, the damage to the Park, and the decline in the value of their property. Dismay about the project spread to the rest of the West End, the upper crust bemoaning the certain loss of their favorite airing ground, Rotten Row. When, earlier in the month, the plans of the Exhibition building became public, however, the complainings of the few transformed into a full-throated, universal outcry.
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