Queen Victoria

by Matthew Dennison

  Albert could not conquer the queen who was also a king, but he could and did conquer the woman. Within months of her wedding, Victoria had discovered that she was pregnant, the very outcome she had dreaded. ‘I have always hated the idea,’ she wrote. She referred to it as ‘die Schattenseite’, ‘the shadow-side of marriage’, as if the linguistic shift from English into German pushed it away more firmly. Her emotions were curiously unmixed, fury uppermost, a sense of her own powerlessness hot on its heels. She took pleasure at any rate in Albert’s nomination as Regent in June 1840 in the event that childbirth killed her, acquired for him a key to the red boxes of Cabinet papers, but offered no further indications at that point of any transference of power, nominal or otherwise. That would happen in time without Victoria’s premeditation. It arose through nine pregnancies and the inevitable withdrawal from the daily business of monarchy which those eighteen years of childbearing enforced.

  ‘He is perfection; perfection in every way – in beauty – in everything!’ Victoria had written the night of her proposal. ‘I told him I was quite unworthy of him … I really felt it was the happiest brightest moment of my life, which made up for all I had suffered and endured. Oh! how I adore and love him, I cannot say!!’

  In time her feelings towards her husband would expand and embrace new spheres of devotion: materially they did not change. Albert remained perfect, Victoria unworthy of him. Loyal in her discipleship to the stories of Edgeworth and Trimmer, she labelled him her reward for the unhappy Kensington years which had not corrupted her. Though she felt herself inadequate to the task, she would apply much of the remainder of her life to enumerating the ways and the extent of her adoration and her love.

  As the year drew to a close, Victoria buried a token of her past, with the death of her spaniel Dash. The dog’s tombstone claimed that ‘his attachment was without selfishness’. Although Victoria cannot have intended it, that simple laudation represented a challenge for both husband and wife.

  5

  ‘The cares of Royalty pressed comparatively lightly’

  IN THE 1840S the Irish starved. In rural Scotland, the country’s poorest grappled with the continuing misery of the Highland Clearances. In England and Wales, in coal-black industrial heartlands, the new urban working classes existed in conditions frequently of abject want: that Stygian cauldron imagined separately by William Blake and Gustave Doré. Unemployment had risen since 1837. Discontent and sporadic rioting greeted the enforcement of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The solidarity of working men was on the increase. They banded together in pursuit of further constitutional reform: their economic needs keen and biting, their anger targeted their exclusion from the Parliamentary process and government by those untouched by their plight. The movement was called Chartism. Across Europe, similar grievances fomented. In 1848, in Continental capitals large and small, revolution erupted with explosive fury, toppling thrones and princes. ‘Old things are falling,’ Stockmar wrote, ‘times are changing and a new life will come from the ruins.’1 Not in England. On Kennington Common in April 1848, Chartism proved a damp squib: 100,000 Special Constables swamped the peaceful meeting.

  It was a decade of growing divisions. Novelists, including a future Conservative prime minister of ‘very flowery’ language, highlighted two nations: in Disraeli’s Sybil, they were identified as ‘the rich and the poor’, ‘as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were … inhabitants of different planets’. Artists reconstructed in appropriately tertiary shades the wretchedness of those for whom industrialisation brought no benefits. Ironically, in the hands of Frank Holl, Luke Fildes and Hubert von Herkomer, such scenes later commanded large sums. The poet Tennyson, not yet called to heel by any appointment to the laureateship, expressed restlessness with the old order: ‘A simple maiden in her flower/ Is worth a hundred coats-of-arms.’

  Against this backdrop of grit and upheaval, Victoria and Albert evolved a holiday world of escape. It was the first decade of their private neverlands, fantastical houses shaped by childhood memories and paper sketches and airy dreams and snippets of novels and operas: the new Edens of Osborne and Balmoral, acquired respectively in 1845 and 1847. There was nothing furtive in their royal retreat. On the contrary, the couple publicised what were in effect carefully considered stage sets for a new performance monarchy.

  In the Hungry Forties, Victoria gave birth to six of her nine children, beginning with Victoria, Princess Royal in 1840. The Prince of Wales, known in the family as Bertie, followed in 1841, then came Alice (1843), Alfred (1844), Helena (1846) and Louise (1848). Arthur, Leopold and Beatrice completed the family: the last was born in 1857, weeks short of Victoria’s thirty-eighth birthday. In addition to nine children, Victoria and Albert bought and built two new royal residences and oversaw extensive alterations to Buckingham Palace, which Victoria described in 1845 as providing a ‘total want of accommodation for our growing little family’.2 Later Albert triumphed in the Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1857, her resistance to sharing her public life long forgotten, Victoria issued Letters Patent investing him with the title Prince Consort; belatedly she endowed him with the status she had continually sought for him – ‘Oh! if only I could make him King!’ she had yearned in 1845. For throughout this fertile period, despite her emphatic dislike of pregnancy, repeated instances of postnatal depression and her variable attachment to her ‘frog-like’ children in their earliest infancy, Victoria rejoiced in her increasing harmony and compatibility with her husband; first tensions evaporated. Her own enforced capitulation to domesticity and childbirth was rewarded by Albert’s steady encroachment upon her official life, a shift in the sexual politics of their marriage in line with current thinking – as Landseer depicted her in Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the Bal Costumé of 12 May 1842, a diminutive figure swamped by the robes of office, leaning on the firm arm of her husband who so evidently guided her. As time passed, she responded to this development with something like relief. Although her acceptance of women’s subjection was wholehearted, she was aware of the unequal weighting of the bargain. ‘There is great happiness and great blessedness in devoting oneself to another who is worthy of one’s affection,’ she wrote later; ‘still men are very selfish and the woman’s devotion is always one of submission which makes our poor sex so very unenviable.’3

  ‘Albert grows daily fonder and fonder of politics and business, and is so wonderfully fit for both – such perspicacity and such courage,’ Victoria wrote to Leopold on 3 February 1852, ‘and I grow daily to dislike them both more and more. We women are not made for governing – and if we are good women, we must dislike these masculine occupations.’4 It was the very mindset which had enabled Sir John Conroy to attain such ascendancy over the Duchess of Kent, and perhaps implicit in Victoria’s first attentiveness to Leopold and her subsequent willing reliance upon Melbourne. Impossible not to regret the bravado of that crowing Queen of England who had so recently refused to be treated like a girl. ‘While [Albert] lived,’ Theodore Martin intoned, ‘the cares of Royalty pressed comparatively lightly upon the Queen.’5 By the end of the decade she had become in the fullest sense Albert’s wife, a process of diminishment by which Victoria became ‘Victorian’, reborn in the crucible of Albert’s limitations. Henceforth she fulfilled a series of contemporary gender stereotypes, which sought to rob her both of vigour and aptitude and to channel her energy towards safely ‘female’ outlets. She fell casualty to a widely held belief in the sexes’ separate spheres, as expounded by Ruskin in 1864: ‘Each [sex] has what the other has not: each completes the other, and is completed by the other: they are in nothing alike.’6 In practice it was a philosophy which denied the possibility of female independence. ‘Some day … she will become a mother – of your children,’ Housman has Stockmar tell Albert. ‘Then, my Prince, if she still loves you, you will not be her Puppet, nor her Plaything anymore. You will be King.’7 This may indeed have been the blueprint shared by Leopold, Stockmar and Alb
ert, the end to which both older men had clung in directing Albert’s studies; it was only partly shaped by cynicism.

  Such role reversal demanded Victoria’s submergence of herself in Albert. Serendipitously she contrived to combine self-denial with assertiveness: in adapting herself to Albert’s pattern she lost none of her self-identity as Queen of England, even as she helped create in him an ersatz fellow sovereign. The result was the evolution of what historians label the ‘dual monarchy’. As he described himself to the Duke of Wellington, Albert had become ‘superintendent of [the Queen’s] household, manager of her private affairs, her sole confidential adviser in politics, and only assistant in her communications with the officers of the Government, her private secretary, and permanent Minister’, a voracious and all-encompassing remit for indispensability, which seems to leave little room for Victoria herself.8 Yoked together in gilded harness, Victoria and Albert henceforth shared the activities of sovereignty, as closely intertwined as the ‘V&A’ monogram which became their favourite decorative flourish. A former Cabinet minister dismissed the changed and chastened Victoria as ‘Queen Albertine’. ‘The Prince is become so identified with the Queen,’ wrote Charles Greville in December 1845, ‘that they are one person.’9

  Yet the dualism of their dual monarchy amounted to more than a division of labour, Victoria assuming Albert’s reproductive function, Albert filching Victoria’s bureaucratic role. It was one of aspect. From 1840 to 1861, Victoria and Albert expanded the cardboard-cutout version of royalty which past monarchs had offered to their subjects: public personae shaped by images of power and wealth. They promoted a vision of their private lives – themselves, their children, their homes, their animals – which celebrated what was ordinary and typical in them, a ‘first among equals’ variant of royalty which excluded the trappings of rank in order to emphasise the human face of loftiness. As subsequent publication of extracts from Victoria’s Highland journals demonstrated, their audience was avid and hungry and responded to this apparent downsizing with increased loyalty and affection. ‘They say no Sovereign was ever more loved than I am (I am bold enough to say),’ Victoria wrote in 1844, ‘& this because of our domestic home, the good example it presents.’10 It was a cult of togetherness and, in an era of increasing moral restrictiveness, suggested blameless royal downtime. Although Victoria may not have acknowledged it, it was ‘pattern’ behaviour of the sort the Duchess of Kent had enjoined two decades earlier when she urged her daughter to be ‘free from all the faults of former reigns’.11 A lithograph of 1843, To the Queen’s Private Apartments, depicted Victoria and Albert with their three eldest children. While Victoria dandles Alice on Albert’s back, Albert, on all fours, is pulled in different directions by his son, who tugs his necktie, and his eldest daughter, who has harnessed him with a garland of flowers. The father’s response is one of happy forbearance. Unobjectionable and endearing, such images suggested a life decorative in its decorousness and delighted their first viewers with glimpses into a formerly hidden world, hidden no longer; a world intended to resemble an idealised version of the viewer’s own. It was conduct, as the Leeds Mercury had earlier commented, ‘such as might have characterised the most loving couple in the middle class of society’.12

  At the same time, Victoria and Albert kept faith with age-old ceremonial aspects of monarchy. In 1845, Victoria importuned Sir Robert Peel for funds for ‘a room [at Buckingham Palace], capable of containing a large number of those persons whom the Queen has to invite in the course of the season to balls, concerts, etc… .’13 The dual rulers transmitted their messages visually, through architecture, portraiture, artistic patronage and even jewellery: brooches and earrings set with the milk teeth of their children, each one a public token of happy consanguinity. Landseer’s Windsor Castle in Modern Times, begun in 1840, reimagined the ancient citadel of royal power as a framing device for a couple lustrous in their vitality, complete with offspring, dogs and the sfumato effect of young love. But Victoria had no intention of denying her status as queen. She commissioned portraits of herself that asserted and reasserted her majesty. Two portraits of 1843, the year of Alice’s birth and Alfred’s conception, reference only her role as sovereign. On his second visit to England, Franz Xaver Winterhalter depicted Victoria in the robes of the Order of the Garter in an idiom of uncompromising grandeur, close to hand the Imperial State Crown and the sceptre, her tiny head and shoulders overwhelmed by heavy-duty diamonds; Victoria subsequently described it as ‘the portrait she liked best’. Sir Francis Grant, a Scottish painter whose ‘sense of beauty derived from the best source, that of really good society’,14 unsurprisingly chose to seat Victoria on a throne; his backdrop is one of similar architectural magnificence and an excess of molten velvet. In both paintings, Victoria wears a diamond diadem fashioned around the emblems of the four kingdoms. It had been commissioned by the most splendid of her uncles, the vain and prickly George IV.

  And there was more. The dual monarchy became uniquely a creation of its time, as successfully aligned to contemporary tastes as those shrieking aniline dyes responsible for the heliotrope-coloured fabrics Victoria wore, or the interest in vanished rusticity which made George Eliot’s Adam Bede a runaway success in 1859: Victoria and Albert commissioned paintings of scenes from the novel and Albert quoted the maxims of its Mrs Poyser. Husband and wife celebrated current preoccupations like family in a manner newly made possible by evolving technology. In March 1842, Albert was first photographed. William Constable had the honour, at his studio in Brighton. Victoria’s response, as preserved in her journal for 7 March, was muted: ‘Saw the photographs, which are quite good.’15 Yet two years later, she too sat for the camera. She was not alone. With her was her eldest daughter, Victoria’s part not that of queen but mother, and she wore a day dress in place of the ubiquitous diadem, heavily ruffled but not exaggeratedly flattering – like the image itself. Consigning herself to eternal castigation for her lack of amusement, she omitted to smile, her faraway expression part dreamy, part bilious, as if the pressures of her office were indeed inescapable. As she later wrote of her portraiture, ‘I think that for a picture to represent the Queen it was necessary to have it serious.’16

  For a decade photographs of the royal couple repeated the same story, careful studies in torpid ordinariness. This black-and-white Victoria is a woman of uncertain dress sense and unlovely appearance, with her weak chin, amphibious glare and stolid expression; Albert broods, sternly attentive. Although photographs of the royal family were not publicly displayed until May 1857, images of this sort had been engraved in periodicals for some time, disseminating the happy family album. In May 1842, The Illustrated London News claimed, ‘Queen Victoria will never appear more exalted in the world’s opinion than when each side of the picture is … revealed – the great Queen and stateswoman in the gorgeous palace – the young, lovely and virtuous mother amidst the pure joys of sylvan retreat and domestic relaxation.’17 In the following decade, the paper expanded its focus to Victoria’s children.18

  Today it is easy to overlook the radicalism of this calculated embracing of the present. Then as now the camera’s truthfulness in conveying its sitters’ message was selective. ‘Realistic’ impressions of an ideal that was never fully realised, Victoria and Albert’s photographic portraits broadcast to a watching nation the felicitous domesticity of this family of eleven newly installed in their ‘family’ homes of Osborne and Balmoral, the former the first of Victoria’s houses to include children’s bathrooms served by hot and cold water, both practicable only since the spread of the railways. It was Albert’s riposte to memories of Victoria’s uncles, with their paunchy dysfunctionalism and irregular liaisons. His own father had embraced serial infidelities and adultery had forced his mother’s banishment; his only brother contracted syphilis in a career of determined philandering. Albert’s distaste for sexual incontinence and the havoc that churned in its wake was acute. The worship of home life banished that divisive spectre. It did something
too to balance initial concerns at the size and expense of a dynasty so lavishly endowed with progeny.

  Like a careful housewife, Albert supervised the royal purse strings, thrift an appropriately middle-class virtue with which to regulate this masquerade of homeliness. To fund Blore and Cubitt’s extension and renovation of Buckingham Palace, the Brighton Pavilion was sold. It smacked too vividly of the Regent’s peacock bibulousness and fleshy excess to satisfy Victoria and Albert’s quite different aspirations; some of its furnishings were recycled. Albert rationalised the running of the Queen’s households, imposing order in place of a cumbrousness hijacked by absentee sinecures, syncopated government departments and potty traditions; Lehzen became his first victim. She departed for Bückeburg and a quiet life with her sister on 30 September 1842, accused of meddling and ineptness. Victoria wept, but quickly regained her composure; the pension she granted her ‘dearest’ Lehzen was generous but not so generous as that bestowed on Sir John Conroy. In the autumn of 1852, the Privy Purse was further swelled by an unexpected windfall of half a million pounds from an eccentric miser with a tendresse for Victoria, John Camden Neild. (Newspapers wrongly predicted that Victoria would not touch a single coin but give it all to charity. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper outlined needier causes than the Queen.19 Victoria had other ideas, comforting herself that Neild had known she ‘would not waste it’.) In a period of extreme suffering for so many of Victoria’s subjects, Albert’s financial common sense and the couple’s ‘normal’ family life helped defuse the potentially sensitive issue of significant royal spending on Osborne and Balmoral (Victoria’s bill for Osborne alone ultimately reached £200,000 20).