by Julia Baird
Robert Peel, who had inherited something of a mess, was a great contrast to Lord Melbourne, the last of the Georgian prime ministers, with his laissez-faire philosophy and marked immunity to the heaving, toiling energy of the age. Melbourne had been unmoved by the problems plaguing the country during the early years of Victoria’s reign: economic depression, high unemployment, rampant crime, and poverty. After the inertia of Lord Melbourne, Peel led what was called a “real working government.” In two years, he turned a deficit into a surplus despite cutting more than half the tariffs in his first budget in 1842. After 1845, wheat was the only primary product that was still heavily protected. He introduced an income tax of seven pennies on the pound for those who earned more than £150 per year—equivalent to a rate of 3 percent. (When Peel announced that the queen had agreed to have her income taxed, it caused a “very great sensation” in the House.) He reformed the banking system, regulated companies, and grappled with burgeoning complex issues spurred by industrialization and rapid urbanization. He knew the urgency of simmering public anger. The economic and political analyst Walter Bagehot said Peel was as “afraid of catching revolution as old women are of catching cold.”
The mid-1840s in England were dominated by debates about two vegetables: potatoes and wheat. The devastating failure of the Irish potato crop in 1845, following a very wet summer and a blight that spread from America to Europe, finally gave the Corn Law debate some urgency. The artificially high prices that resulted from the tariff made grain too expensive for the Irish poor, and most of it was exported to England, removing a crucial alternative food source from the ravaged country. Peel argued that “the removal of impediments to import is the only effectual remedy.” Victoria became increasingly worried about reports of the “extreme distress” of the Irish, who lacked dignity even in death, when their bodies were tossed into the ground without rites or coffins. She decided to limit palace bread rations to a pound per person per day.
The response of the British government to the tragedy in Ireland was appallingly inadequate. In the first phase of the famine, in 1845 and 1846, the British acted to set up a relief organization, invest in public works, and fund soup kitchens. They gave the Irish £7 million, which was merely one-tenth of the money raised for the Crimean War a few years later. But in 1847, as the famine worsened, their actions only aggravated the hardship: the Irish Poor Law Extension Act steered the impoverished away from handouts and into overcrowded workhouses where they labored under horrific conditions. Those who occupied more than a quarter acre of land were refused relief; many were forced to give up their holdings. No substantial attempts were made to remove the dependence on the potato, improve agriculture, or change the tenancy system. Staggeringly, food continued to be exported from Ireland to England during the famine years. Unfortunately, the repeal of the grain tariffs would do little to help the Irish.
The English had a deep, enduring belief in the importance of laissez-faire. The government was loath to intervene, ostensibly on the grounds that those suffering should be able to hoist themselves out of their misery and poverty without requiring aid. Kindness, it was feared, would corrupt them. There was also a profound and long-standing prejudice against the Irish in England. As the wry Anglican cleric Sidney Smith wrote: “The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.” The young queen was not immune to these feelings. She swung from anger at the landlords for taking wheat rations for themselves to disgust at the Irish who murdered those landlords. When hearing of the murder of one man as he was driving home in his carriage, she wrote: “Really they are a terrible people, & there is no civilized country anywhere, which is in such a dreadful state, & where such crimes are perpetrated! It is a constant source of anxiety & annoyance.” She did not visit Ireland until 1849, twelve years into her reign.
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In the 1840s, political attention was turning, in general, to the way the working class lived and worked. In May 1842, the first parliamentary report on the employment of children was accompanied by shocking illustrations of six-year-olds chained to coal carts. According to the report, the youngest children employed were responsible for ventilating the mines, keeping the trapdoors shut until a coal car needed to pass through, then opening and shutting them correctly. These children, called trappers, were aged between four and ten. The Examiner reported that what they hated most was the dark in the dungeons: they used to beg colliers for candle stubs. Women and older children were put to use drawing the coal carts along passageways too narrow for grown men. They crawled along the ground like animals through puddles and piles of rocks. The girls sometimes worked stripped to the waist like the boys, men often went naked in the intense heat, and rape and sexual assault were common in the mines and pits. There were concerns that women who worked there would no longer be suitable for marriage.
These stories stoked the public imagination and provided impetus for change, which only occurred incrementally, against great resistance. The Coal Mines Act of 1842 made employment of all females and boys under ten under the ground illegal, and ensured that inspectors would enforce the law. The Factory Act of 1844 limited the working day for those in textile factories to six and a half hours for children between eight and thirteen, and twelve hours for women. In 1847, a bill was passed legislating a ten-hour working day. By the end of the decade, there had been a dramatic shift. By 1851, only 2 percent of children aged five to nine worked, and only a quarter of ten- to fourteen-year-olds. Over the course of Victoria’s reign, the living conditions of most of her subjects improved considerably; more people voted, and more had basic protections at work. The modernizing of the country had truly begun.
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Meanwhile, in that spring of 1842, Buckingham Palace was frantically preparing for a ball. On May 12, the fanciest, richest, and most decorated personages of England would gather dressed in costumes made from English silk as an expression of support for the impoverished silk weavers of the Spitalfields. It had been Albert’s idea, and Victoria thrilled to it. For weeks, seamstresses labored over their costumes in Spitalfields; Victoria painted hers in her journal with watercolors.
The ball was a resounding success. Jewelers across London were emptied of diamonds. The queen wore a stunning gown lined with miniver, a silver surcoat embroidered with gold flowers, open hanging velvet sleeves, a velvet demi-train edged with fur, and armlets studded with precious gems. A gold crown crusted with jewels sat on her head. Albert wore a scarlet velvet cloak lined with ermine and edged with twelve hundred pearls and gold lace. A brooch fastening his cloak sparkled with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, topazes, and other precious gems. Under this was a robe of gold and blue brocade slashed with diamond-studded royal blue velvet. His sword hilt was also covered in diamonds. Victoria’s crown kept slipping, and her heels made dancing difficult, but she declared that the night could not have gone better: Never did England display its “supremacy in female beauty” more decidedly than on this night, wrote The Illustrated London News. The queen danced until 2:45 A.M.
The contrast could not be starker: the bejeweled aristocrats sparkling under candelabra and the children working all day in darkness, begging for candle stubs. This was a time when the opulence of the royal court was considered a subject of pride, a symbol of English might and wealth. The reaction to this ball, however, revealed the rising temperature of resentment toward the wealthy. The Odd Fellow, a satirical working-class paper, wrote: “A number of benevolent peers and peeresses have resolved to disguise themselves as starving weavers, in order to give her Majesty some faint idea of the extensive misery now existed. When this group enter[s], her Majesty will be deeply affected, and the newspapers will have observed next morning that she shed tears.”
The scorn was palpable. The Northern Star compared Victoria to Nero, playing a violin as the flames devoured the city. Using money wrung from the poor
by their monopoly of the market, the aristocrats were renting diamonds and feasting to excess in a “childish display of the waste of thousands.” Victoria meant well with the Spitalfields ball, and briefly the weavers were overwhelmed with work, but this was short-lived. The decline of the industry was inevitable.
At a time when most working-class people lived in misery, Victoria was more readily stirred by compassion for individuals she met than by reform movements. She worried about whether widowed women had enough money to live on and whether dwarves who performed for her were well treated. She worried about the well-being of orphans, wounded military veterans, and victims of sexual assault. When she saw how “lonely” child offenders jailed on the Isle of Wight spent months in solitary confinement, she was troubled by their sad existence. (Always aesthetically tuned, she also puzzled over how unattractive they were, “really frightful” looking.) She asked that “the most deserving boy” in each ward be pardoned. But when Lord Shaftesbury—an aristocratic politician who campaigned for two decades for the rights of the working poor—introduced an amendment to a bill to cut working hours to ten a day, she opposed it, agreeing with Peel that it would cripple economic productivity. While Albert labored over plans to lift people out of poverty and to improve the housing of the working class, Victoria needed more visual, immediate, individual prompting.
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Despite his obvious good grace, Albert still struggled to be fully accepted in England. Victoria was infuriated by the continuing hostility from her family toward her husband. Her uncles were often jostling for precedence, insisting they be placed before the German prince, which led to farcical situations in which Victoria and Albert were physically shoving them out of the way at formal events. At a wedding in July 1843, Albert, who had just recovered from a bout of the flu, strongly pushed the king of Hanover (the Duke of Cumberland) down the altar steps, and Victoria sprinted from one side of the altar to the other so she could pass the pen to Albert after signing the register.
Victoria fretted that Albert’s pride would be hurt. She was furious when in Germany the king of Prussia snubbed Albert by placing an Austrian archduke in the seat next to Victoria, thereby demonstrating his precedence. (It took years before she would agree to accept any more hospitality from the Prussians.) In June 1842, she spoke to Peel about “dear Albert’s awkward & painful position, & its being so strange that no provision had been made for the position of the Queen’s Consort, which I wished could be defined for futurity.” She had worried, she wrote, “that the position of a Prince Consort must be painful and humiliating to any man,” so much so “that at times I almost felt it would have been fairer to him for me not to have married him. But he was so good & kind & had loved me for myself.” She tried but failed to have him formally recognized as King Consort. Finally, in 1857, Victoria used her royal prerogative to make him Prince Consort by Royal Letters Patent.
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Albert’s isolation became starker when his father died in January 1844. He had not seen him for four years. While Albert wept in private, he complained to Stockmar that they had “a great cold public around us, insensible as stone.” Duke Ernst had not been a perfect father: he had betrayed Albert’s mother, had plagued him for money, had tried to seduce the ladies of the royal court, and had been angry when Albert’s first boy did not bear his name. But Albert had loved him, and he was devastated. Victoria shared her husband’s distress, writing in her diary: “We shall not see his like again.” Albert was “wretched & desolate, though comforted & happy in the intimate love we bear one another.” Every time she stared at her husband, her eyes filled with tears.
Albert saw his father’s death as a sign that he must now dedicate himself to the second part of his life, to his wife and growing family. His home was now England, more than ever. He no longer had a paternal home to return to, writing to his brother Ernest: “Our little children do not know why we cry and they ask us why we are in black; Victoria weeps with me, for me and for all of you. Let us take care of [our wives], let us love and protect them, as in them we shall find happiness again.” The grief drew Albert and Victoria closer: “[Victoria] is the treasure on which my whole existence rests,” Albert wrote. “The relation in which we stand to one another leaves nothing to desire. It is a union of heart and soul, and is therefore noble, and in it the poor children shall find their cradle, so as to be able one day to ensure a like happiness for themselves.”
Albert, always practical, declared himself just a week later to have recovered from his father’s passing. He was ready to “fortify [him]self by constant activity” and devote himself to his family. The prince returned to Germany to comfort his brother and arrange his father’s affairs. This was the first time he had left Victoria since marrying, and letters he wrote to his “dear little wife” were full of sweet reassurance and love.
When Albert returned after the two-week separation, Victoria ran downstairs at the sound of his carriage. She was so excited she lay awake next to him for most of that night, watching him sleep, “agitated with joy and thankfulness.”
The queen had much to be thankful for. Throughout the 1840s, she continued to lead a charmed life with her husband: her children were flourishing, they had found respite in Scotland and the Isle of Wight, and she was delighted by the coziness and warmth of their domesticity. She wrote glowingly in her journal about their children playing on the floor as she and Albert sat reading by lamplight. They went for long walks, played skittles, and drank cowslip tea. Late in 1843, she expressed regret at having to leave Buckingham Palace for another residence, but she knew she had nothing to complain about: “I have been so happy there—but where am I not happy now?”
Victoria gave birth to their third child in April 1843. The baby was named Princess Alice Maud Mary, but she was nicknamed Fatima, because she was such a chubby baby. Victoria was relieved to have survived another labor. Just two days later, she was bored: “It is rather dull lying quite still and doing nothing particularly in moments when one is alone.” She was rolled in her bed to the sitting room, then in an armchair to dinner. She examined jewels that Indian princes sent as presents and waited for Albert to return to her side. Albert was busy adding to his list of responsibilities and hosting official receptions on the queen’s behalf. While she was heavily pregnant with Alice, Victoria had agreed to see the Duke of Wellington, but Albert saw several other ministers for her, as she felt tired. Albert met with Peel and they decided that titles held by Victoria’s “rather peculiar” uncle Sussex, who had died just days before Victoria gave birth to their third child, should now go to Albert: the office of Knight Great Master Order of the Bath and Governor of the Round Tower.
Soon Victoria became pregnant again with her fourth child. On August 6, 1844, she gave birth to a boy whom they named Alfred Ernest Albert. He was beautiful, with a thatch of long dark hair, blue eyes, and a big nose. The labor was grueling, and Victoria’s suffering was “severe,” but the joy of her “immense, healthy boy” erased the memory of the pain. Albert was once again with his wife throughout. As the family grew, Albert started planning for their future. At the christening of the boy they would call “Affie,” Albert was already plotting the marriage of his four-year-old Vicky to the king of Prussia’s twelve-year-old son. Albert’s plan was for Bertie to be the future king, Affie to be the Duke of Coburg—if his brother did not produce any heirs—and Vicky to be a linchpin in Europe as the wife of the Prussian king. While Victoria and Albert could not possibly have foreseen the tectonic shifts in Europe over the next century, some of the alliances they made for their offspring would prove extremely difficult for England in later years, and heartbreaking for their children.
As Victoria produced four babies in the first five years of marriage, Albert took on ever broader responsibilities. Peel appointed him the chairman of the Arts Commission for rebuilding of Parliament, which oversaw the artworks to be installed in the new Parliament house after the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834. He was also
offered the chancellorship of Cambridge University, where he made an impressive, lasting contribution by modernizing and broadening the curriculum. Much of his time was also taken up with the remodeling of Osborne House, their family residence on the Isle of Wight, and Buckingham Palace throughout the 1840s. He added a farm, kennels, and a dairy to Windsor Castle and drew up designs for workers’ dwellings. Stockmar attributed Albert’s relentless, rapid development to “a practical talent, by means of which he in a moment seizes what is really important in any matter, and drives his talons into it, like a vulture into his prey; and flies off with it to his nest.”
Albert’s curiosity was rapacious. He studied his new country like a man cramming for an exam, poring over architectural plans, visiting art galleries, craning his neck inside the machines of factories he visited. He archived everything he could, including precious manuscripts held at Windsor such as the Leonardo da Vinci collection. Albert was in the fortunate position of being able to have many of his bold ideas implemented; he lobbied successfully to outlaw dueling, and he designed helmets for the army, cribs for the nursery, and model farms for his children. His pigs won first prize at agricultural fairs. Perhaps his greatest triumph was overcoming “all impertinent sneering” about his horsemanship, showing the British he could ride “boldly and hard.” Victoria was disgusted that he had been criticized in the first place.
Albert’s industry, thrift, prudery, religious devotion, and desire to harness the steaming activity of the century in many ways encapsulated the Victorian age better than Victoria did. It also made him a candidate for what we might today call burnout. Albert was driven but delicate. When the couple traveled on a train for the first time, a short trip from Slough to London in 1843, Albert suffered motion sickness and was unsettled by the speed of forty-four miles per hour. Victoria loved it: “I find the motion so very easy, far more so than a carriage and cannot understand how any one can suffer from it.” Albert was a man surrounded by luxury and comfort, but he denied himself rest and allowed workaholism to undermine his health. Had he not, the century might have been better known as the Albertine age.