by A. N. Wilson
To the end, she could indulge her love of clutter. The little body would now begin its stately journey to Windsor where – in accordance with her wishes – it was given a military funeral. Keir Hardie complained about this, and asked why the nation should have been obliged to take leave of its sovereign with guns and martial music and uniforms. This was to overlook the fact, which she never forgot, that underlying the consensus of constitutional monarchy there was relentless force. It had been prepared – though not used – early in her reign when she and her family were spirited out of London and sent to Osborne until the police and the military had subdued the Chartists. It had been used with ruthless efficacy late in the reign on ‘Bloody Sunday’. The war in South Africa, still in progress as the Queen’s military funeral took place, and as the cortège went to Paddington Station for its journey to the Mausoleum at Frogmore (where at last she would be reunited with the Prince Consort), reinforced the point that the genial power of the Victorian aristocracy, transforming itself slowly into parliamentary democracy, was underpinned by force. Ask – given the sickness and poverty of hundreds of thousands of Londoners on that cold February day, as the gun carriage bore the coffin through the silent streets – ask why they did not rebel, why they did not riot, why they did not behave like the Paris Commune of 1870 or the Bolsheviks of 1917. They had as much provocation, but part of the answer to the mystery of their submissiveness is supplied in those troops and those guns, following the procession. No one could doubt for a single second that at the first sign of trouble from the populace, pious old Salisbury and dear ‘Old Bobs’ – now an earl and KG – would turn the guns on the crowd, with all the confidence shown by the Chinese authorities eighty-eight years later in Tiananmen Square.
The other fact about the Victorians, however, which explains why the reign of the Queen ended in reverence and (domestically at least) peacefulness is more benign. From the first, the Victorians possessed the capacity for constructive self-criticism. Those who opposed the Boer War, or who had their doubts about this phase of the Imperial adventure, were not, as they would have been in a truly autocratic system, moved underground, silenced or imprisoned. The mercurial figure of Lloyd George made his career out of opposition to the war. ‘The man who tries to make the flag an object of a single party is a greater traitor to that flag than any man who fires at it,’14 said the great Welshman, replying to Tory accusations of treachery. All allowance should be made for Lloyd George’s opportunism – not to say, in his later years at least, his downright dishonesty and corruption – but a country which enabled a man who grew up in a small shoemaker’s cottage to rise in less than fifty years to be chancellor of the Exchequer was not a country which was entirely repressive. Against all the cruelty and the blunders – the workhouses, the oppression of Ireland, the blatant racism and butchery of the colonial wars – must be set a vast social (as well as technological) resourcefulness, a willingness to regroup and reorganize on behalf of the governing classes, which was guided by enlightened self-interest.
It is easy for those who come in after time to say what is wrong with a society, or a country, not their own. Those who have lived through a twentieth century whose wars slew and displaced tens of millions can easily, for some reason, turn a blind eye to the faults of their own generation and excoriate the Victorians, whose wars killed thousands. By the same token, life for a working-class Irish family in the slums of Liverpool in, let us say, 1880 may have been terrible; but it is only fair to add, terrible compared with what, and with whom? The nineteenth century was by many modern standards a cruel age. Those refugees, from Karl Marx to the Emperor Napoleon III, who fled to London from Europe suggest to us that with all its faults, Victorian England was more genial and tolerant than many other places at the same date. While we weep for Oscar Wilde developing an ear infection in Reading Gaol, we might pause to imagine how long he would have survived in a jail in Naples at the same date. The Victorian Age saw floggings of sailors and soldiers, it saw children working down the mines; it also saw these abuses, and hundreds like them, reformed and abolished.
At the beginning of the age, Dickens had likened Britannia to the old woman in the children’s story who summoned the aid of all manner of farmyard creatures and characters to encourage her pig to leap over a stile. ‘The national pig is not nearly over the stile yet; and the little old woman, Britannia hasn’t got home tonight.’ He spoke those words in 1855 ‘in this old country, with its seething hard-worked millions, its heavy taxes, its crowds of ignorant, its crowds of poor, its crowds of wicked’. Had he lived until 1901, would Dickens have thought the pig had got over the stile for the ‘loyal, patient, willing-hearted English people’,15 or for their royal mistress of whom he spoke so loyally on that occasion?
The gun carriage making its way to Paddington Station across Hyde Park was followed by King Edward VII, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King George I of the Hellenes and King Carlos of Portugal. In the procession were Crown Princes of Romania, Greece, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Siam. The Duke of Aosta represented the King of Italy, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovitch the Tsar of Russia, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand the Emperor of Austria. Almost all these characters, in their uniforms and feathered hats, presided over countries where the poor were even more miserable than in Victorian England, where political dissent was vigorously denied, and where technological and social change had been slower than in England. Almost all of them (not the Scandinavians) oppressed minorities within their own borders and were cruel colonial masters to those in Africa and Asia whom they had subdued. The huge proportion of them would, during or after the First World War, be toppled by republican movements which were even less humanitarian, and even less efficient.
‘Oh! Dearest George,’ wrote the Queen’s cousin, Princess Augusta of Strelitz, to the Duke of Cambridge, ‘what a calamity! … anxiety terrible as to what poor England will have to go through now! God have mercy on us all.’16 There were indeed terrible decades ahead – a First World War, decades of poverty and unrest, another war killing millions of Europeans, in addition to all the post-colonial problems visited upon the former dominions of the British Empire. Even so, one notices that through all these years of horror, the refugees were streaming towards London from Russia, Germany, Africa and Asia and not in the opposite direction. In fact, though dreadful mistakes were made by the Victorians, the comparative stability, comparative strength (military and political) and comparative benignity of England in the half-century after her death owed much to the Victorians. They even owed something to the tiny, round-faced woman trundling towards her last resting place with her coffin-load of mementoes.
‘Vale desideratissime,’ she had had inscribed over the doors of the Frogmore Mausoleum: ‘Farewell, most beloved. Here at length I shall rest with thee, with thee in Christ I shall rise again.’ That journey was hers, hers alone. Fascinating as it is to visit the mausoleum on open days, one always feels there something of an intruder. Let us, rather, take leave of ‘the little old woman’ before she leaves her island home for the great public funeral.
The gun carriage was drawn from Osborne House down York Avenue, East Cowes; the occupants of these villas, whose grandparents would not have had the vote, possessed not merely a share in parliamentary democracy but, in all probability, a savings account and a bicycle. The coffin was carried aboard the Alberta at Trinity Pier opposite the post office as a dull roll of forty drums rumbled. The royal family with their attendants boarded the royal yacht Victoria and Albert and set out, through the clear blue wintry air of the Solent, on the short sea-voyage to Portsmouth harbour. They sailed through an eight-mile-long alleé of steel, in which the British fleet was joined by foreign warships, spaced at two and a half cable lengths, about 1,500 feet apart. They glided past Australia, between the Camperdown and the Majestic, the Trafalgar, the Nile, and the Benbow, the names of the ships recalling a vanished naval era, much at variance with the massy walls of gun-metal grey which they adorned. And here, still at peace with one a
nother for another ominous thirteen years, were the Dupuy de Lorne, representing France, the Dom Carlo I from Portugal, the Japanese battleship Hatsuse, and four huge grey-masted ironclads flying the red, white and black German ensign, vastly overshadowing the others in strength and size.17
Notes
Unprinted sources are given in full, including the number of the manuscript and the folio number – e.g. Gladstone Papers, BL Add. MS 44790 f.177.
Notes on printed sources refer to the Bibliography. E.g. Litten (1991), p. 170 refers to Julian Litten’s The English Way of Death. The Common Funeral since 1450. In cases where more than work by one author appears in the Bibliography, the reader should be guided by the date. E.g. Gash (1976) would refer to Norman Gash’s Peel, published in 1976. Gash (1977) refers to Politics in the Age of Peel, 2nd edition, 1977.
In any case which could conceivably be confusing, the full title is cited. References to periodicals are self-explanatory. E.g. The Law journal, 1884, can be found in any good reference library. References to signed articles in periodicals will, in general, be made to the author by name.
Thomas Curson Hansard was the printer of the Parliamentary Debates. This voluminous monument began as Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England from the Norman Conquest to the Year 1803, and was first published in October 1806 in thirty-one volumes. It continued as a record of Parliamentary Debates from 1812 onwards, The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, published under the Superintendence of T.C. Hansard in 1812. Thereafter the volumes are always popularly known simply as ‘Hansard’. This series of forty-one volumes continues until February 1820. The next series, from 21 April 1820 to 23 July 1830, covers a further thirty-five volumes. Most of our period is covered in the Third Series, which extends to 5 August 1891. Reference in the notes is simply to Hansard, the number of a volume in Roman numerals and a column number in Arabic numerals. So ‘Hansard, XXVI.3’ would refer to Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, volume XXVI, column 3. The date will only be added if it is considered of especial significance.
The Annual Register, now published by Keesing’s Worldwide, began in 1759 (registering the year 1758) and was printed by R. and J. Dodsley in Pall Mall. For most of our period, it was published by Rivingtons (taken over by Longmans, Green and Co., that great Victorian publisher, for the 1890 volume, published 1891). This invaluable survey has been consulted by me far more often than would be guessed at from the reference notes. It gave me my sense of pace, seeing the different events of each year so clearly spelled out side by side. References to it appear as The Annual Register followed by a year and a page number.
In referring to the works of the Victorians themselves, I have been conscious of the multiplicity of editions available to different readers. Sometimes a modern edition of a poet – most notably that of Tennyson by Christopher Ricks – is so good that it seems almost a necessity to consult that rather than an earlier version. Sometimes I refer to first editions, but more often simply to a volume which happens to be to hand. I try to guide the reader as carefully as I can by reference to chapter or section-numbers of books, as well as to the page numbers of the works cited. This is especially necessary in the case of the two giants. I refer to thirty-nine volumes of The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, because it is the standard edition to which all Ruskin scholars refer, and to the thirty volumes of the Edinburgh Edition of The Complete Works of Thomas Carlyle, published in New York in 1903 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, because it happens to be the edition on my own shelves. (How we British visitors miss Scribner’s beautiful shop in Fifth Avenue!)
1 The Little Old Woman Britannia
1 Cocks, p. 13.
2 Dickens, Speeches, ed. Fielding, p. 205.
3 Dorothy Thompson, p. 27.
4 Clapham, p. 53.
5 Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb takes the pessimistic Malthusian view; compare Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource. Quoted Malthus, ed. Gilbert, 1993.
6 Quoted Anstruther (1984), p. 35.
7 Charles Shaw, p. 4.
8 Hansard, XXVI, p. 3.
9 Ruskin, Modern Painters, part vi, chapter 2, Works, vol. p. 215.
10 Jack Lindsay (1985), p. 124; James Hilton, Turner A Life, p. 269.
11 The Times, 17 October 1834.
12 Cocks, p. 16.
13 See Hastings, p. 77.
14 Clapham, p. 425.
15 Janet Browne, p. 398.
16 Froude (1882), I, p. 9.
2 Victoria’s Inheritance
1 Potts & Potts, passim.
2 Woodham-Smith (1972), p. 139.
3 David Cecil, p. 391.
4 Woodham-Smith (1972), p. 140.
5 Ibid., p. 141.
6 Greville, IV, p. 32.
7 David Cecil, p. 271.
8 Ibid., p. 405.
9 Woodham-Smith (1972), p. 146.
10 Victoria (1912), II, p. 144.
11 Anstruther (1984), p. 35.
12 David Roberts, pp. 97–107.
13 Andrew Roberts, pp. 10–11.
14 Dunn(1961), pp. 31, 39.
15 Clapham, pp. 388ff. The promotion of new railroad companies added over 1,000 miles to the potential railways of England in the year 1836/7.
16 Clapham, pp. 9, 19.
17 Ibid., p. 67.
18 Ibid., p. 28.
19 Ibid., p. 454.
20 Ibid., p. 456.
3 The Charter
1 The Lancet, 7 November 1837.
2 Durey, p. 7.
3 Quarterly Review, November 1831.
4 The Lancet, 23 December 1837, p. 459.
5 Durey, p. 210.
6 Douglas Browne, p. 83.
7 Finer, p. 30.
8 Halévy, p. 510.
9 Philip Thurmond Smith, p. 18.
10 Ibid., p. 85.
11 Ibid., p. 44.
12 Ascoli, p. 83.
13 Woodward, p. 79.
14 Hansard, XCV, p. 988.
15 Hansard, XXXIX, pp. 68–71.
16 Gash (1927), p. 214.
17 Thomas Carlyle, Chartism 1839 (Critical & Miscellaneous Essays, vol. IV, Works, vol. XXIX, p. 153).
18 McDonall, Chartist and Republican Journal, quoted in Slosson, p. 59.
19 Carlyle, op. cit., p. 159.
20 Dorothy Thompson, p. 58.
21 Woodward, p. 127.
22 Ibid., p. 130.
23 Quoted in Dorothy Thompson, p. 78.
24 Northern Star, 15 June 1839, quoted in Stedman Jones, p. 168.
25 Stedman Jones, p. 171.
26 Clapham, p. 191.
27 Ibid., p. 73.
28 Dorothy Thompson, p. 338.
29 Quoted in Stedman Jones, p. 104.
30 Slosson, p. 27.
31 Dorothy Thompson, p. 31.
32 Ibid., p. 17.
4 Typhoon Coming On
1 Hansard, XVII, p. 1341.
2 Ibid., p. 1345.
3 Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, p. 221.
4 Morley (1912), I, p. 78.
5 Alastair Hennessy, p. 40.
6 Darwin (1905), p. 512.
7 Woodward, p. 357.
8 Bethell, p. 329.
9 Quoted in Bethell, p. 345.
10 Ridley, p. 259.
11 See Hewison et al., p. 71.
12 A.J. Newman, p. 102.
13 See Heuman, Between Black and White. Race, Politics and the Free Coloureds in Jamaica, 1792–1865.
14 Weintraub (1997), p. 65.
15 Netzer, p. 153.
16 Battiscombe (1974), p. 125.
17 Fulford (1949), p. 106.
18 Weintraub (1997), p. 60.
19 Ibid., p. 99.
5 The Age of Peel
1 Read, p. 61.
2 Keynes (1923), p. 7.
3 Quoted in Blake (1985), p. 18.
4 See ibid., p. 23, which quotes the view of Harold Perkin (1969).
5 Blake (1985), p. 13.
6 There are three superb historian
s of this for which I largely rely for what follows. Robert Blake (1985), Donald Read and Norman Gash (1976 & 1977).
7 Hastings, p. 104.
8 A.C. Benson (1899), I, p. 47.
9 Dunn (1961), p. 420.
10 For all previous see Anstruther (1963).
11 Disraeli (1980), p. 96.
12 Sheila M. Smith, Introduction to Disraeli (1982), p. xiii.
13 ‘A Letter to Sir Culling E. Smith, Bart., and J. Low, Esq., in Reply to Their Address and Letter from the Anti-Maynooth Committee by a Clergyman of the Church of England and Ireland’, quoted Blake (1985), p. 81.
14 Read, p. 138.
15 Ibid., p. 139.
16 The Duke of Manchester, Part of a Speech in the House of Lords.
17 Quoted in Blake (1985), p. 52.
18 Gash (1977), p. 248.
19 See Macaulay, ed. Young, p. 636.
20 Ibid., p. 637.
21 Blake (1985), p. 59.
22 Woodward, p. 120.
23 Blake (1966), p. 191.
24 Clapham, p. 454.
25 Blake (1985), p. 67.
6 Famine in Ireland
1 See Col. Jas E. McGee, ‘Thumping English Lies’: Froude’s Slanders on Ireland and Irishmen (New York, 1872).
2 Froude (1872–4), p. 571.
3 Hoppen, p. 64.
4 Quoted in Gray, p. 76.
5 Quoted in Woodham-Smith (1962), p. 119.
6 Clapham, p. 391.
7 Quoted in Gray, p. 24.
8 Hoppen, p. 570.
9 Mokyr, p. 64.
10 Saville (1987), p. 46.
11 Dunn (1961), p. 69.
12 De Beaumont, quoted in Saville, p. 31.
13 Hoppen, p. 63.
14 Woodham-Smith (1962), p. 21.
15 Saville (1987), p. 6.
16 Percival, pp. 72–3.
17 Woodham-Smith (1962), p. 226.