The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

All these things bubbled beneath the surface when Lord Melbourne, in 1839, found himself faced with an intransigent Jamaica Assembly. Eight hundred thousand negroes on the island became fully and unconditionally free on 1 August 1838.12 The planters were offered £15 million in compensation. The British government tried to take things further and insist upon an improvement in the conditions in Jamaican prisons. This the assembly in Kingston, Jamaica (overwhelmingly made up of white planters but containing some ‘coloureds’),13 refused to do. It became, in effect, an issue of confidence. Melbourne put it to the vote in Parliament and the Tory Party defeated the Whigs by five votes. Melbourne resigned.

  Historians of the period tend, as did newspapers of the time, to turn with some relief from the trivial fate of 800,000 emancipated men and women in the Caribbean – how they should work, eat, earn their livings, how their former owners could be expected to make a living in an increasingly competitive world market – and to concentrate on the high drama of the Bedchamber Crisis. Jamaica, as far as history is concerned, can be forgotten for another quarter-century before it awakens anyone’s attention when Governor Eyre (1815–1901) split British opinion by the severity with which he suppressed a negro rebellion.

  Queen Victoria, in 1839, was far more troubled by the thought of being deprived of her hours of playing draughts with Lord Melbourne. Sir Robert Peel was a very different sort of man. The Queen failed to understand that it was perfectly normal for incoming prime ministers to propose new members of the royal household. As a mark of confidence, Peel asked her to replace some of the Whig ladies of the bedchamber with the wives of Tory noblemen. She refused, and Peel declined to take office. The Melbourne administration therefore hobbled on towards a disastrous election defeat in 1841 – by which time the young Queen had further demeaned the monarchy in the public eye by falsely accusing one of her ladies-in-waiting, Lady Flora Hastings, of being pregnant. (Her swollen appearance was owing to cancer.) Small wonder that the House of Commons, particularly on the Tory side, enjoyed baiting the Queen when she chose as her husband Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg. The wedding was fixed for 10 February 1840, and Victoria clearly hoped that Parliament would admit him to the peerage, and grant him a handsome allowance as a token of their esteem.

  Although, or because, it is true that Prince Albert’s virtue ‘was, indeed, appalling; not a single vice redeemed it’,14 his arrival in England brought qualities of seriousness and intelligence to public life which are almost without parallel. Partly to embarrass Lord Melbourne and the Whigs, partly for reasons of stupid xenophobia, the Tories opposed the idea of the Queen marrying him at all. In their favour must be admitted that previous dealings with the Duchy of Coburg had been less than happy. Leopold of Saxe-Coburg had married Princess Charlotte when she was Princess of Wales, who had then died in 1817. Turning down the dangers of becoming king of Greece, he had accepted the gentler option of becoming king of the Belgians, but continued to draw a Civil List pension from the British taxpayer of £50,000. Colonel Sibthorp reminded the House of Commons that one of the conditions for receiving this handsome sinecure was that Leopold should remain a Protestant – on remarriage to Marie-Louise of Orleans he had become a Catholic. Another was that he should pay for the upkeep of Claremont House. Not a penny had Leopold paid, though by 1840 he had received over £1 million from Britain. Leopold’s sister, the Duchess of Kent, Victoria’s mother, was hardly a popular figure, though she was not as dissolute as their brother Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg, syphilitic, promiscuous and unintelligent. His wife Louise, who had married him aged sixteen, was dead – some said of uterine cancer, others of haemorrhaging as a result of a miscarriage – by the time her son Albert was twelve. By then Albert’s parents had separated and Louise – who was eighteen when he was born – had had many affairs.

  The genetic statistics, as we have seen, make it unlikely that Queen Victoria was really the daughter of the Duke of Kent. Likewise, doubt hovered over the paternity of her Coburg cousin, Prince Albert. It was persistently alleged, back home in Germany, that he was actually the son of Baron von Mayern, a Jewish chamberlain at the Coburg court. Certainly, unlike his elder brother Ernst, Albert does not seem to have inherited syphilitic symptoms from his supposed father, Duke Ernest I of Saxe-Coburg. Nor did he look anything like his brother. The rumours about Albert’s parentage were fuelled by his mother’s disgrace, in his boyhood, when she had a very flagrant affair with another courtier. If the suspicions about both Victoria and Albert are well-grounded, this means that many of the crowned heads of Europe are descended jointly from an unscrupulous Irish soldier and a German Jew. Given this, it is surprising that these families manifested so few of the talents stereotypically attributed to the Irish and the Jews: such as wit or good looks. Albert was, however, dreamily good-looking, though not tall. His qualities of domestic loyalty, his love of family, his insatiable intellectual interest, his musicality, are all in the most astounding contrast to his own Coburg supposed relations or to his bride’s sybaritic, and on the whole, stupid family.15 With forebears and relations like Leopold, Ernst and the Duchess of Kent, Albert could not hope to endear himself to an England that did not know him. Lord Ashley, a personal friend of Queen Victoria, and stepson-in-law of Lord Palmerston, was among those who joined Sibthorp in the Commons and voted against an allowance of £50,000 p.a. for Albert. They reduced it to £30,000.

  As hindsight now teaches though, the Queen was making an ideal marriage. She was furious with the Tories – and cut Ashley for years afterwards.16 Had he but known it, Ashley’s criticism of the Queen’s character encapsulated the reason why Albert was such a remarkable and welcome import. Victoria, Ashley said, had a ‘small and girlish mind, wholly unequal to the business of government or even of common life’. She was marginally better educated than Queen Elizabeth II, but not much, and the responsibilities she bore were much greater.

  Albert, only six months short of his twenty-first birthday when he married, was a highly cultivated person, of well above average intelligence, with an impressive range of gifts and interests. Baron Stockmar’s approving comment was: ‘He shows not the slightest interest in politics … while declaring that the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung is the only paper one wants or that is worth reading, he does not even read it.’17 Such indifference to politics made Albert an ideal consort in a constitutional monarchy. In a broader sense however, he was highly aware of politics, intelligently conscious of the enormous changes which had come about in modern society as a result of the French Revolution and its aftermath, and of industrialization. He and his brother had studied at Bonn University. Old Beethoven had not long since walked its streets – Albert was an impressive musician whose Lieder stand comparison with many minor composers. (He’s certainly better than Parry or Vaughan Williams.) He was taught literature by A.W. von Schlegel and attended Fichte’s philosophy classes, absorbing perhaps that Idealism (in the philosophical sense) which was to be a marked feature of the English intellectual scene a generation later. He was well-travelled and well-tutored in art history, and while a student he had started to buy pictures on his very slender means. (Trawling the art dealers of the Rhine towns he had found a Dürer drawing and a Van Dyck portrait.)18 You could imagine George IV being impressed by this – though he would have been too lazy to go in quest of artworks himself. Victoria and her other obese and ungifted uncles would not have recognized a Dürer drawing if it was held under their noses.

  The English, then, and their royal family were receiving a quite extraordinary bargain for their £30,000 – a consort for their monarch who, if not exactly a genius, was so impressive a product of the German educational system that by English standards he was the next best thing. He was also – thanks to the dreadful emotional chaos in which he had grown up – deeply committed to the notion of loyal family life. He was energetic. He was ardently desirous to do good. No wonder it took him some time to settle in.

  Monuments to Albert’s range of abilities remain visible to this day: first of whi
ch was the glorious Italianate palazzo on the Isle of Wight – Osborne, with its impressive sculpture-gallery and its collection of Winterhalter masterpieces. (The interiors were much cluttered and spoilt in the long years of Victoria’s widowhood.) Then there was the Gothic baronial of Balmoral, an allusion to the beloved Schloss Rosenau where Albert had grown up. Both these residences, fascinating in themselves as tributes to the eclecticism and intelligence of Albert’s taste, are also embodiments of his wise attitude to modern constitutional monarchy. He saw that as well as having official residences where they were always on display, always at the mercy of politicking, they should cultivate private lives and private virtues.

  Albert’s improvements at Windsor, his reordering and management of the estates and the farms, his building of a beautiful and efficient dairy, still operative to this day, are further tributes to his good taste. His model housing in Kennington, built on the very site of the last Chartist demonstration, and the huge museum complex in Kensington which some call the Albertopolis, are further reminders of the depth and range of his contribution to English public life.

  His first two gifts to the British people were more personal. Primarily and most importantly, he made Victoria a happy woman. She was highly sexed and she worshipped her husband. From the first ‘gratifying and bewildering night’ as she described it to Lord Melbourne, the Queen was crazy about Albert. ‘YOU CANNOT IMAGINE HOW DELIGHTFUL IT IS TO BE MARRIED. I COULD NOT HAVE DREAMED THAT ANYONE COULD BE SO HAPPY IN THIS WORLD AS I AM,’ she wrote in her childish capitals to her cousin Victo (Victoria Augusta Antoinetta).19

  Albert made her value private life. Although she did take an interfering interest in political affairs, he ensured that for most of the century she was at home, a private individual – until his death she was at the centre of family life, after it she retreated into the shadows for decades. Constitutional monarchy thrives on this low-key approach.

  In so far as she did take a political interest in her early married life, Albert – and this was his second great early gift to the nation – persuaded her to drop her girlish tendresse for the Whigs and to see that by far the most important and intelligent political figure of the age was not Lord M. with his charming drawing-room manners, but Sir Robert Peel.

  5

  The Age of Peel

  SIR ROBERT PEEL was the last prime minister of whom no photograph was ever taken.1 Even the Duke of Wellington sat to a daguerreotypist. Though the art of photography, in common with so many other modern phenomena, developed rapidly during the five years of his premiership, Sir Robert Peel remains discreetly in the shadows of the past. It seems characteristic. He was unshowy, sensible, brilliant. He was, in what he did and in his own person, a transitional figure of crucial importance. At the beginning of his premiership England, for all the changes which had been taking place since the battle of Waterloo, was still of the old world. By the time he left office, after his dramatic volte-face over the Corn Laws, the new world had come into being. Britain had become an out-and-out free-trading nation. Partly because the tariffs were lifted, and capitalism was given a free rein, partly because the economic cycle was in any event moving into a phase of quite unprecedented and extraordinary stability, fifty or sixty years of sound money were about to be ushered in. Private investors placed their money with the disciples of expanding industry and reaped not merely unparalleled riches but unprecedented leisure. As Keynes said in a classic definition of nineteenth-century civilization:

  The system worked, throughout Europe, with an extraordinary success and facilitated the growth of wealth on an unprecedented scale. To save and to invest became at once the duty and the delight of a large class. The savings were seldom drawn on, and accumulating at compound interest, made possible the material triumphs which we now all take for granted. The morals, the politics, the literature and the religion of the age joined in a grand conspiracy for the promotion of saving. God and Mammon were reconciled. Peace on earth to men of good means. A rich man could, after all, enter into the Kingdom of Heaven – if only he saved.2

  Peel is a Janus figure at this crucial and exciting pivot of time. On the one hand, what could be more ancien régime than his parliamentary career, seen solely from the position of representation? From 1830 he sat for his small home borough of Tamworth, which his father had earlier represented. The electorate stood at only 528 in 1832. Twenty years later, Peel himself was dead and the electorate had fallen to 307. Yet many of the innovations which we should most associate with the political progress of the nineteenth century – Catholic Emancipation for example in 1829, Free Trade in 1846 – came about because of Peel’s own distinctive vision of things. The paradox of English political history is that the most radical changes are often introduced by Conservatives. Janus Peel, a very rich baronet who led a party which was in effect a coalition – one destined most dramatically to split asunder over the question of Free Trade – was the heir to fortunes made not from generations of landowning, but from capitalism. It was a cotton fortune. Peel belonged to the thriving, thrusting, Darwinian new class. His grandfather had pioneered calico-printing in Blackburn; and with the money made in this great Northern industrial enterprise Peel’s father, the first Baronet, had acquired the estate of Drayton Manor in Staffordshire, near Tamworth.

  Peel always poot a question and to the last said ‘woonderful’ and ‘woonderfully’. He guarded his aspirates with immense care. I have known him slip. The correctness was not spontaneous. He had managed his elocution like his temper: neither was originally good.3

  Thus the thorn in Peel’s side, Benjamin Disraeli. But such snobbery about the vestiges of a Lancashire accent in Peel are themselves something new, rather than old. The class system, which many people nowadays associate with the aristocratic hierarchy, was in reality something distinct from it. When his father made a fortune as a calico-printer in Lancashire, England was a political triangle – it was what Peel himself called a ‘mixed monarchy’, or we should perhaps call it a constitutional monarchy – controlled by an aristocratic oligarchy. It was the genius of the Victorian politicians that, with any amount of change, reform, upheaval and jiggery-pokery, they kept it an oligarchy, right down to the twentieth century. The class system – in which an upper class was merely one storey in a big bourgeois building – was an innovation. Those who hated and hate the class system saw and see it as an instrument of oppression to those at the bottom, encouraging those in its upper ranks to despise those beneath them; and those beneath to hate those above. The Victorians might have seen things differently. The new economic climate gave the chance for the meanest artisan to rise, through energy or enterprise, through the ranks. The calico-printer and cotton-master becomes within two generations the baronet and the bigwig.

  Hence their gradations in a new class structure marked by such shibboleths as accent. Jane Austen was no less a lady for speaking with a strong Hampshire accent, but had she lived fifty years later her rustic burr would have been carefully eradicated by elocution lessons and ‘genteel’ governesses. All Wellington’s officers at Waterloo were gentlemen or aristocrats – all spoke with regional accents. Disraeli’s vulgar snobbery about Peel’s accent is itself the innovation, not the accent itself. (If he had fun waiting for Peel to drop his aitches, what would Dizzy have made of Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister, who spoke with the strong accents of the Norfolk farmer he was?)

  Lord Ashley, the Christian Tory philanthropist who did so much to campaign for the improvement of working conditions for the poor, hated the competitive atmosphere of factories. Visiting his ancestral seat, St Giles in the county of Dorset, he noted in his diary on 29 June 1841, ‘What a picture contrasted with a factory district, a people known and cared for, a people born and trained on the estate, exhibiting towards its hereditary possessors both deference and sympathy, affectionate respect and a species of allegiance demanding protection and repaying it in duty.’ To the Northern factory-owners such patronizing attitudes led only to stultific
ation. There was no movement, no struggle, in Ashley’s view of society. Cobden, the Corn Law reformer par excellence, hated Ashley’s attempts to set limits on an employer’s powers – the length of hours he could make factory hands work, or the limiting of the age of his employees. ‘Mine is that masculine species of charity which would lead me to inculcate in the minds of the labouring classes the love of independence, the privilege of self respect, the disdain of being patronised or petted, the desire to accumulate and the ambition to rise.’

  Henry Ashworth, a Quaker mill-owner from Rochdale in Lancashire, took a comparable anti-aristocratic view. He offered all his factory hands the chance to be educated in schools built and financed by himself – to inculcate ‘a desire to enlarge their views and to teach them not to be satisfied with the condition in which they were born, but to induce them to be uneasy under it and to make them feel uncomfortable if they do not improve upon the example their parents have set before them’.

  Highly Darwinian sentiments, and it would be hard to think of a greater contrast between the Tory aristocratic views of Ashley and the Liberal Radicalism, based on economic laissez-faire, of Cobden and Ashworth. It was the combined good fortune and genius of the Victorians, though, that these two elements of British life, far from tearing at one another, actually learned, like the triumphant genes in a Darwinian evolutionary progress, to live together; even to integrate. Sir Robert Peel can be seen as one of the chief architects of the new order. The very fact that his adherence to a point of principle split his party and put it out of office, effectively, for twenty years, established his legacy and influence. There is a deep paradox here which hindsight does not diminish, but it is true – more than if he had caved in to the ‘Ultras’, the right wing of his party, and allowed Free Trade to be the policy exclusively of the Liberals. Peel died four years after the repeal of the Corn Laws and the collapse of his party. But the England of Victoria, both free-trading and aristocratic, was the England of Peel.