Albert had so much to do, as always on occasions of any ceremony and all was bustle and excitement. The ceremony is indeed a holy and most important one, – an ‘outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’ and may God bless our dear little Child. . . . Wore my Tiara of Turkish diamonds and Albert’s beautiful sapphire brooch, a dress of white watered silk, with my wedding flowers . . . We took up our places, near the altar. . . The Service began with saying of dearest Albert’s Chorale, set to English words which was beautiful.67
But when the time for the actual baptism came, all was confusion, just as it had been with the coronation. The baby was handed to the Archbishop who was so confused that he was about to baptise her without any name until the Bishop of London intervened and whispered the names to him. The Archbishop, Victoria recalled, was also ‘going to forget to sign the cross on the forehead, when the Bishop again reminded him . . . Another clerical misfortune arose, when the leaves of the Prayer Book stuck together, neither the Archbishop or Bishop being able to turn them over, and there was a dead stop! The good little Baby was fast asleep and never moved.’68 The two older children, Vicky and Bertie, were present. Queen Victoria thought they looked so pretty, all in white. They behaved so
very well, and we felt quite proud of them. It was a great trial for the poor little things to be stared at such by such a number of people, and they clung to us for support, but did not cry. Albert led them round. Little ‘Puss’ was very serious, but she has such a gentle little manner, when she is shy, and she was much admired.69
Just over a year later, when Alfred (Affie) was christened, the pride that Victoria took in her children was evident:
How thankful do I feel to be so well, exactly a month after I was confined. . . . I was full of agitation at the approaching ceremony. – at ½ past 5, I began to dress; I wore a white satin dress trimmed with flowers of the wedding lace, in short, just as I wore it on my dear wedding day, now only 4 and ½ years ago, and I reappear in it for the Christening of our 4th Child!70
Victoria thought her ‘dear Chicks’ looked very sweet, the two little girls dressed in white satin with lace, and Bertie, ‘looking very handsome too in a white “efingle” velvet blouse, with silver braid, white trousers, trimmed with lace and satin shoes’. As a mother, the Queen naturally believed that her children were
universally admired and we were very proud of them. . . . The Children behaved quite admirably, never once opening their lips the whole time. . . . The Baby looked magnificent, in the same robe and cap worn successively by his sisters and brother at their Christenings, and more like 3 months old, than 1 month. . . . The 2 eldest remained till ½ past 9, enjoying everything. Bertie asked the Archbishop, pointing to his wig: ‘What’s that you got on?’ and said to me ‘You are Queen; got a Crown on.’71
Buoyed up by her governess Baroness Lehzen, Victoria was initially the dominant figure in the marriage but gradually, and almost imperceptibly, Albert gained more control, directing the upbringing of their ever-increasing family, acting as her private secretary and even her political advisor. Victoria, at first, held tightly on to her monarchical power. Perhaps fearing marital discord, she refused to allow Albert access to state papers, would not allow him in the room when she was talking to Melbourne and avoided discussing politics with him. Gradually, encouraged by Melbourne, the Queen confided in Albert, he was given the keys to the state boxes, read despatches, attended ministerial meetings and discussed politics. Soon, after Victoria became a mother and especially when Robert Peel became prime minister, Albert’s authority and domination expanded.
Notes
1 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) April 28th 1837.
2 Greville, Greville Memoirs, March 11th 1838.
3 Ibid. December 15th 1838.
4 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) March 20th 1838.
5 Ibid. June 19th 1838.
6 Ibid. January 26th 1838.
7 Ibid. February 5th 1838.
8 Ibid. March 9th 1838.
9 Ibid. April 5th 1838.
10 Ibid. August 8th 1837.
11 Ibid. July 28th 1837.
12 Ibid. November 24th 1837.
13 Ibid. March 7th 1838.
14 Ibid. March 12th 1838.
15 Ibid. January 10th 1839.
16 Ibid. November 9th 1837.
17 Blackburn Standard, November 22nd 1837, p. 5.
18 Caledonian Mercury, November 23rd, 1837.
19 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) November 20th 1837.
20 Ibid. April 18th 1839.
21 Victoria to Leopold, April 4th 1838.
22 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) October 11th 1839.
23 Ibid. October 14th 1839.
24 Ibid. October 15th 1839.
25 Greville, Greville Memoirs, November 23rd 1839.
26 J. W. Croker to Lady Hardwicke, November 24th 1839.
27 Greville, Greville Memoirs, November 26th 1839.
28 Quoted in Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, p. 200.
29 The Morning Post, February 11th 1840, p. 1.
30 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) February 10th 1840.
31 See Thompson, Queen Victoria: Gender and Power, for an in-depth discussion of this.
32 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1983.
33 See David Cannadine, ‘The British Monarchy, 1820–1977’, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, pp. 101–64 for a stimulating discussion on the role of monarchy.
34 William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Churchill, 1862, p. 102.
35 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) February 10th 1840.
36 Ibid. February 11th 1840.
37 Ibid. February 12th 1840.
38 Ibid. February 13th 1840.
39 This was Florinda by F. X. Winterhalter, 1852.
40 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) June 14th 1841.
41 Ibid. July 25th 1842.
42 Ibid. May 1st 1841.
43 Victoria to the Princess Royal, March 16th 1859, quoted in Fulford, Dearest Child, p. 167.
44 Quoted in Arnstein, Queen Victoria, p. 58.
45 Victoria to the Princess Royal, June 15th 1858, quoted in Fulford, Dearest Child, p. 114.
46 Ibid. p. 196.
47 See Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception, Blackwell, 1992 for a full discussion of sexual lives.
48 Lord Erroll married one of the illegitimate daughters of William IV. She became one of Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting. David Cameron is a great grandson.
49 Quoted in Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, p. 216.
50 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) December 1st 1840.
51 Ibid. April 25th 1843.
52 Ibid. May 12th 1843.
53 Ibid. August 25th 1844.
54 Ibid. April 22nd 1853.
55 Ibid. April 29th 1857.
56 Ibid. October 29th 1857.
57 Ibid. December 2nd 1841.
58 Ibid. May 30th 1843.
59 Ibid. May 28th 1843.
60 Ibid. May 31st 1843.
61 Ibid. April 29th 1857.
62 See Yvonne M. Ward, ‘Queen Victoria’s Early Motherhood’, Women’s History Review, 8(2), 1999 and Adrienne Munich, ‘Queen Victoria, Empire and Excess’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Autumn, 1987 for a fuller discussion.
63 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) December 1st 1840.
64 Ibid. June 13th 1854.
65 Natalie Watson, Introducing Feminist Ecclesiology, Continuum, 2002.
66 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) May 19th 1843.
67 Ibid. June 2nd 1843.
68 Ibid. June 2nd 1843.
69 Ibid. June 2nd 1843.
70 Ibid. September 6th 1844.
71 Ibid. September 6th 1844.
4 Revolutionary times: 1840–1851
On New Year’s Day 1840, Victoria felt ‘most grateful for all the blessings I have received in the past year. . . . May I only implore Providence to protect me and those who are most dear to me in this and many su
cceeding years . . . under the guidance of my kind Lord Melbourne. With truth do I say, “From the Tories, good Lord deliver us.”'1 But the Queen’s prayers were not answered: by early 1841 Melbourne’s government was under threat and he was soon to be defeated on a vote of no confidence. Victoria’s next prime minister was to be the Tory Robert Peel, followed by the Whig Lord Russell.
At the end of the 1830s, the United Kingdom seemed blessed: the country was economically secure and politically calm. This equanimity was not to last. By 1850 Victoria, now a budding matron with seven children and increasingly heavy hips, had witnessed an economic collapse, the social catastrophes of the Irish potato famine, contentious reforms such as the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the political unrest of Chartism. In addition, a wave of revolutions broke across Europe affecting the British royal family personally and politically. The period between 1840 and 1850 is sometimes seen as marking a decline in the Queen’s power. In each succeeding pregnancy, Victoria relied more and more on her husband to meet with ministers, prepare memos, précis documents and draft replies to her government. In effect, it is argued, Albert became uncrowned king as Britain metamorphosed into a dual monarchy.
The Queen’s wish for a tranquil and harmonious period was rudely shattered in summer 1841 when Melbourne and the Whigs were defeated in a general election. They were replaced by Robert Peel and the Tories. Victoria, now four months pregnant, found it ‘very upsetting’, writing that the ‘reality of what has happened, affect and distress me very much. It is so sad to have to part with kind friends and to have to take against my private feelings, people I have not much confidence in.’2 Nevertheless, the loss of Melbourne was not as painful as it had been two years earlier. The Queen, guided by Albert, had grown up a bit. ‘I shall never forget’, she wrote, ‘what I suffered in ’39, though I suffer much now, but it makes all the difference Albert being at my side.’3 Now, as she admitted in her journal, ‘I have my happy home life, and my beloved Husband at my side to share all my difficulties with me.’4 Moreover any potential difficulties relating to the ladies of the bedchamber had been resolved because Albert’s personal secretary, George Anson, ‘had seen Peel (which I had no idea of, but which of course Albert must have known) . . . and that the Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Normanby and the Duchess of Bedford, would probably resign’. Peel confided to Albert that he would not allow his party ‘to humiliate me; that the best way would be, when the Ladies had resigned, that I should announce it to him, and that he should be quite satisfied’.5 Both the Queen and Peel agreed to keep the discussion secret.
Sir Robert Peel and domestic policy: 1841–1846
Sir Robert Peel, Victoria’s prime minister between August 1841 and June 1846, was a very different character from the lighthearted, worldly and aristocratic Melbourne. Unlike Melbourne he was a reticent man who shunned social life and court gossip. The son of a wealthy cotton manufacturer, he typified the earnest, middle-class, diligent person whose ancestry was new money rather than land-owning aristocracy. Victoria thought Peel difficult until the hard-working, serious-minded Albert, who had found an ally in the equally earnest Peel, gradually convinced his wife of her new prime minister’s ability. Victoria later confessed that:
the more I see of him, the more I am pleased and satisfied. He is a noble minded, very fair, very liberal, straightforward, and very able man. I do not hesitate in saying this, for when I first took him, I was strongly prejudiced against him, but on getting to know him I have formed quite a different opinion, which entirely coincides with Albert’s.6
In turn, Albert’s authority grew, largely because of Peel’s confidence in him: the two men liked each other and were like each other. Meanwhile, the Queen continued to write to Melbourne every day, asking for advice, a correspondence which might have damaged the Queen if the letters had been leaked. But the Queen was incapable of separating friendship and personal feelings from politics, and the letters continued until Melbourne was pressurised to stop writing to his sovereign.
Gradually, spurred on by Victoria’s pregnancies, Albert’s influence grew. When the two were first married, Victoria deliberately excluded her new husband from affairs of state but soon she needed help, particularly when she was pregnant, about to give birth or recovering from the exhaustion of having a baby. Albert was introduced to the Privy Council, began to accompany Victoria when she met with her ministers, and discussed affairs privately with members of the Cabinet. Victoria began to use ‘We’ rather than ‘I’ when she expressed an opinion.
Victoria’s second prime minister was appointed during an economic recession: there was large-scale unemployment, weak international trade and a budget deficit of £7.5 million. Peel re-introduced an income tax of between 2 and 5 per cent of income, drawn largely from the middle-class and upper echelons of households, to reduce the government debt. The Queen, now financially secure, very reluctantly agreed to pay the new tax. Earlier, Robert Peel had informed his sovereign that one Radical MP insisted:
that none, not the highest (meaning me) would be exempt from this new Income Tax. This, Sir Robert Peel said, he had no right to do, nor had anyone the right of doing, but that George IV had wished not to be exempt and had paid 10 percent. Sir Robert thought I should also do so (but only 3 per cent, which however, is rather hard) and wished to know whether he might announce this in the House this evening, so that it might appear as a gracious act on my part, without any legislation about it. This of course I at once consented to do. It is very hard for my poor dear Albert, who will have to pay £900.7
Peel also steadied the economy by the 1844 Bank Charter Act, which helped stabilise the banking system by restricting the issue of bank notes.
Queen Victoria, who viewed herself as a Whig, nevertheless found Tory governments congenial. When Robert Peel, a Tory with a few Whig sympathies, planned some groundbreaking legislation, the Queen endorsed it. The Mines Act 1842, which prohibited women and children from working in the mines, was one such measure. Queen Victoria approved of the fact that ‘all the women have now been removed from the coal pits. . . The Act seems to have done great good.’8 In 1844 Peel put forward a Factory Bill which restricted the time women and children could work in factories to ten hours a day, only to have it blocked by his own party. Peel discussed the Bill with the Queen, confiding that he was ‘much annoyed’ at the conduct of his friends ‘who had not only voted against him but whose tone had been very offensive’. Peel offered to resign over the issue but the Queen pointed out ‘the impossibility (apart from the extreme annoyance it would be to me personally) of his resigning on this question’.9 The Queen offered her advice, suggesting a limit of 11 hours in order to carry the Bill. Peel refused to compromise. In the end, children between 9 and 13 years of age were limited to working nine hours a day and women for no more than 12 hours. The Ten Hour Bill was passed in 1847, when the Whigs regained power.
In 1830 Britain opened the world’s first intercity railway – the Liverpool to Manchester Railway. Further railway expansion followed. Companies built or offered to build thousands of kilometres of railway lines and asked for people to invest. It was seen as a foolproof way of making money and attracted investors who sank all their savings into the railway boom. The Queen, who loved travelling by rail, agreed to accompany the ‘great Railway King, Mr Hudson’ on a train journey, with the result that investment in railways became even more attractive.10 The price of railway shares went up, more and more money was invested and the unregulated railway companies promised even further expansion. In 1846 railway mania reached its high point when 272 new railways companies were formed promising to build 15,300 kilometres of track. But the railway companies were built on precarious foundations. In 1847 interest rates were raised and it became apparent to investors that the railway companies could not build the railway tracks they had promised. A financial panic emerged. The collapse of the ‘Railway Mania’, an example of an early speculative boom, caused misery far beyond that of its investors.
Th
e ‘hungry Forties’ were tough times for the majority of the British population: food prices were high, wages were low. As ever, diets were inadequate, houses were overcrowded, sanitation was poor and there was a general lack of clean water. The Queen might enjoy cod in oyster sauce, ballotine of duck, roast lamb and a chocolate pudding; the poor made do with bread and potatoes.11 In 1842 Chadwick published The Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population, which revealed a direct link between poor living conditions and life expectancy. For example, the average age of death in Manchester was 38 years for ‘gentlemen’ and professional people but only 17 for the working class.
Not surprisingly, there were protests. In May 1842 a new Chartist petition, signed by over three million people, was submitted – and rejected – by parliament. A wave of strikes, starting in the potteries of Staffordshire and spreading to Cheshire and Lancashire and even up to Scotland, erupted across Britain by workers whose living standards had been eroded by low wages. Queen Victoria, who wanted to hold fast to her monarchical power, had little sympathy for these protesters, commenting in her journal that the ‘accounts from Manchester are dreadful, – such disturbances, as also in some other parts, near Sheffield etc.’12 Peel was worried. Referring to Peterloo, the Reform meeting in 1819, he wrote to his sovereign, ‘that something should be done before the 16th, the anniversary of a great mob fight, which took place there in 1819’ because ‘some great explosion is dreaded for that day’.13 Victoria feared that what she called ‘the evil’ had spread into the West Riding of Yorkshire. She heard that ‘Huddersfield has been attacked by a mob, and Wakefield threatened. The Yeomanry have been called out. . . . In Warwickshire, also, some disturbances have occurred and in the Pottery districts houses have been burnt and plundered, in open day, with circumstances of aggravated violence.’14 Meanwhile, the Queen carried on organising her medieval ball, naively insisting that it would give employment to the Spitalfields weavers. When newspapers printed details of the Queen’s gem-studded dress, gold-embroidered jacket, ermine-trimmed velvet skirt and red silk shoes studded with diamonds, there was a public outcry at her gross insensitivity and extravagant excess. The monarchy became unpopular: large numbers of British people were hungry and their sovereign did not seem to care very much.
Queen Victoria Page 12