Victoria

by Julia Baird

  England was mostly spared the revolutionary fervor that was sweeping the Continent. In March, just two weeks after the uprising in Paris, a much-hyped meeting in Trafalgar Square ended only in the destruction of Prince Albert’s skittle alley and the arrest of the young leader, who burst into tears. Victoria wrote impatiently that the “foolish” protests were scaring her French relations. The next day, Albert told her some of “the mob” had broken her mother’s windows at her London home and had contemplated attacking Buckingham Palace, but were deterred by the sight of numerous guards. There was really no danger, she wrote in her journal, but “after the horrors of Paris, one cannot help being more anxious.”

  The queen spent her days poring over dispatches from Europe and soothing her French guests. Albert, who thought princes were better placed than any politician to advise on foreign policy, had been devastated to hear of turmoil in his beloved Germany. He sensibly cautioned his brother, the Duke of Coburg and Gotha, against using or extending military power to quell the local riots. Albert was also concerned about the growing confidence of the Chartists in England, who had garnered strength in recent years with the release of many of its leaders from jail. The Irish had also grown desperate after several bitter winters of starvation, and financial speculation had created instability and panic. Chartists had danced until dawn in the streets of London when they heard France had become a republic, shoving their king from his throne.

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  On March 18, in the thick of the turmoil, Victoria gave birth to her fourth daughter, Louise Caroline Alberta. She had almost forgotten she was pregnant until the excruciating labor began.* When baby Louise was just a couple of days old, Victoria and Albert were forced to leave London in fear of their lives. The Chartists had declared a massive meeting of half a million people for April 10 in London, which most expected to turn ugly, if not incendiary.

  Victoria, who was still recovering from the difficult labor, lay on her bed and sobbed:

  The sorrow at the state of Germany—at the distress and ruin all around, added to very bad news from Ireland & the alarm in people’s minds at the great meeting which is to take place in London on the 10th are trying my poor Albert very much….Yes, I feel grown 20 years older, & as if I could not any more think of any amusement. I tremble at the thought of what may possibly await us here though I know how loyal the people at large are. I feel very calm & quite prepared to meet what God may send us, if only we are spared to one another to share everything.

  The royal family retreated to the woods of Osborne, where they awaited news from London with some trepidation. Victoria quickly regained her composure, boasting in a letter to Leopold: “Great events make me quiet & calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.” Albert’s equerry, Colonel Phipps, stayed behind and walked through the streets of London, eavesdropping on random conversations, trying to gauge the reaction to the queen’s exit. He wrote: “Her reputation for personal courage stands so high, I never heard one person express a belief that her departure was due to personal alarm.”

  Back in London, military-style preparations were being made for the April 10 meeting. Volunteers swarmed police stations, with an astonishing eighty-five thousand men signing up to be special constables on the day of the meeting. Volunteers included Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who would later become emperor of the French. The hero-worshipped, elderly Duke of Wellington was placed in charge of the army once again, for the last time. The government seized control of the telegraphic system to ensure that revolutionaries could not broadcast false information, and a Removal of Aliens Act was rushed through Parliament to give the home secretary powers to remove any foreign citizen against whom allegations had been made. The Chartists boasted of a petition bearing five million names, so enormous it was rolled up like a large bundle of hay and pulled by four horses. They hoped for revolution, but at the very least they planned to wring some compromises out of Parliament.

  On April 10, under a bright blue sky, the Chartists trekked to four meeting points around London, holding banners that read LIVE AND LET LIVE. A phalanx of four thousand Metropolitan Police surrounded Kennington Common—formerly used for public executions and cricket matches—and a further eight thousand regular troops were hidden at various points around London. Four batteries of artillery were installed along bridges, and armed ships were anchored at key points along the Thames. Armed men lined the Mall to prevent access to Buckingham Palace. Prime Minister Lord John Russell lined his windows with parliamentary papers, and his pregnant wife accompanied him to the safety of Downing Street for fear the sound of cannons firing would trigger early labor. In the empty government buildings, which were barricaded with boxes of papers, men with guns hid behind pillars and curtains, peering out every few minutes to see if the rioting had begun. The troops were told to fire if necessary.

  The reports of tight security had rattled Feargus O’Connor, the leader of the Chartists and the MP for Nottingham. He had been unable to sleep for several days. He had decided, turning in his bed the night before, that he would approach the demonstration with a spirit of conciliation. He could have ordered the Chartists to attack, in the hope that troops and police would crumble and defect as they had in many European countries, but his instincts told him this was futile. On the day of the protest, his fears were confirmed: only twenty-three thousand turned up, just one-tenth the number hoped for.

  O’Connor stood on the stage erected at Kennington surrounded by flags reading NO SURRENDER! and told supporters not to fight with the police. Most obeyed, and only the odd skirmish erupted. The leaders agreed to deliver their petition—later found to contain a host of fake names, including “Queen Victoria”—to the Houses of Parliament in three hansom cabs. Lord Palmerston called it “the Waterloo of peace and order.” Victoria was thrilled at the triumph of British lawfulness:

  What a blessing!…The loyalty of all classes, the excellent arrangement of the Troops & Police, the efficiency of Special Constables, high & low, Lords, Shopkeepers.—& the determination to put a stop to the proceedings,—by force if necessary,—have no doubt been the cause of the failure of the Meeting. It is a proud thing for this country, & I trust fervently, will have a beneficial effect in other countries.

  Albert, too, was relieved, although he continued to monitor the ongoing rumbles and Chartist meetings—some reaching fifty thousand in number. He remarked to Stockmar on their sophisticated organization, with secret signals and carrier pigeons. He also wrote to Prime Minister Russell, telling him his personal research found a dismayingly large number of unemployed persons in London, mostly because the government had cut its budget for capital works. He suggested the government look at ways to create jobs and resume schemes to assist those without work. He also reminded the prime minister that the government was obliged to help the working class at a time of distress.

  The Prince Consort was unable to shake a sense of gloom about Europe in 1848. The recent death of his grandmother had saddened him, and he had grown quite depressed. The work was relentless: “I never remember to have been kept in the stocks as I am just now. The mere reading of the English, French, and German papers absorbs nearly all the spare hours of the day; and yet one can let nothing pass without losing the connection and coming in consequence to wrong conclusions.” In March 1848, he had begged Stockmar to travel to be with him and bear some of his burden: “My heart is heavy. I lose flesh and strength daily. European war is at our door….I have need of friends. Come, as you love me.”

  Victoria tried to convince him not to be too black about the future, but Albert was so “overwhelmed with business” that insomnia struck. Every morning, he woke early, unable to sink back into sleep. Victoria would often wake to see Albert staring at the bedposts, turning over problems in his mind. He rose at seven, walking to his desk and turning on the green lamp as his wife slept. “I am not half grateful enough for the many ways in which he helps me,” Victoria wrote, a little guiltily.

  The ugliness of th
e violence in Europe had a lasting effect on the queen. She remained spooked by the constant, albeit low, threat of an attack. The Chartists’ curse seemed almost biblical: in June 1848, heavy rain at Osborne saw thousands of toads swarming across the terrace and slopes, “like a plague.” Three days later, there were false reports of Chartists coming to invade the family’s private home; laborers stood on the lawns armed with sticks. Just four days later, Victoria was genuinely frightened riding home at night from the opera; she had been warned that Chartists would strike in stealth, in the dark. As their carriage rumbled along toward the palace, a man ran up to the open window on Albert’s side, mumbling the words “a real murderer” over and over. He was quickly arrested—and found to be mad—but Victoria was stiff with fear for hours.

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  Every day, Victoria and Albert woke to another batch of urgent dispatches from Europe, and they passed them back and forth to each other across their adjacent wooden desks. The workload was extraordinary. In 1848, twenty-eight thousand dispatches came to them from the Foreign Office alone, on everything from the Chartists and the European revolutions to the devastating impact of increased tariffs on sugar in the West Indies (which were also struggling with the economic impact of the abolition of slavery) and the ambitious king of Sardinia. Victoria and Albert jointly wrote letters, corrected drafts sent from the foreign minister and PM, fired off letters to a host of political figures, both domestic and foreign, and prepared memoranda on events. They were intensely involved in all correspondence with other countries. They helped their government craft a nuanced British response that was supportive of legitimate governments and assisted allies and relatives where they could. Uncle Leopold and his relatively tranquil Belgium remained a beacon of peace in Europe for them.

  The foreign secretary at this time was Lord Palmerston, a man who had an unshakable belief in his own diplomatic skills. Known as Lord Cupid because he had charmed women as a bachelor, in 1848 he was still a good-looking fifty-four-year-old, now married to Lord Melbourne’s clever sister Emily. The queen had found him pleasant when she was a teenager, but now she and Albert were suspicious of him. One winter’s night in 1839, he was found in the bedrooms of one of the ladies-in-waiting, allegedly forcing himself upon her before screams rang through the corridors and he fled the room. Palmerston insisted he was merely lost; in truth, he was simply letting himself into a room he thought was occupied by Lady Emily Lamb, to whom he was then engaged. Albert remained uncertain, though, and used the story to argue against Palmerston a decade later.

  Lord Palmerston was a unilateral liberal interventionist who tended to support European rebels and independence movements. A Whig minister who had started out as a Tory, he had a starkly different approach to foreign policy from that of Victoria and Albert. The couple had their own biases, wanting to maintain a close alliance between France and England and backing Austria in its territorial hold of Italy (Palmerston wanted Italy to be independent and united and secretly funneled arms to Italian rebels). Albert wanted to see a strong Prussia leading a united Germany. But the royal couple clashed with the foreign secretary over style as well as policy. They resented Palmerston’s failure to consult them or heed their advice, and his tendency to send off dispatches without their review. As early as 1841, Victoria had reprimanded him for disregarding procedure. Palmerston wrote a typically smooth response, assuring the queen he would make sure it would never happen again, while blithely continuing in practice to ignore her. Victoria and Albert considered him a danger.

  Victoria believed foreign policy was a core part of the monarch’s role because it involved questions of peace and war. She felt upholding “the dignity, the power and the prestige” of Britain was one of the most important aspects of her job. While Palmerston was willful and impulsive, she saw herself as above political intrigues and better able to “maintain at all times a frank and dignified courtesy towards other Sovereigns and their governments.” In her view, Palmerston had a ministerial duty to keep her fully informed, to seek her consent, to take her advice, and not to change documents or policies after she had sanctioned them.

  On August 20, 1848, Victoria wrote a reprimanding letter to Palmerston after discovering that a “private letter” addressed to her had been “cut open at the Foreign Office.” She reproached him again a few days later for failing to update her on the feud between Austria and Sardinia. A series of high-minded, dictatorial dispatches by Palmerston to Spain and then Portugal—which ignored the advice of the prime minister, the man who was his superior—also infuriated the queen. Palmerston was eager to help pry Italy away from Austria and make Venice a republic, which Victoria thought abominable: Why help these foreign rebels when they were wrestling with their own rebels in Ireland?

  Victoria and Albert privately called Palmerston “Pilgerstein,” or the devil’s son. (This was later edited out of their official correspondence.) Victoria told Prime Minister Lord John Russell that she could no longer see Palmerston socially, as she would not be able to treat him with respect. She mused with Russell about how to get rid of him—perhaps a foreign posting might suit, for example in Ireland. Victoria thought Russell showed a “lamentable weakness” in failing to confront Palmerston, but the PM was loath to jeopardize the support of the Radicals and Liberals that Palmerston commanded. A steady stream of angry correspondence passed between the queen and her foreign secretary, especially in the years 1848 to 1851. Victoria often wrote daily in her journal about how much she despised Palmerston.

  But outside the palace, Palmerston was hugely popular, the only government minister to have a public following. He was widely viewed as a democratic hero, and was prone to grand, dramatic gestures. In 1850, he got embroiled in a dispute when a Portuguese man, Don Pacifico, had his house pillaged while living in Athens. Pacifico’s attempts to seek an immense amount of compensation from the Greek government were unsuccessful. Because Pacifico was born in Gibraltar, he appealed to the British government as a British subject. Palmerston, incredibly, ordered a fleet to be sent to Piraeus to demonstrate official support for him. Victoria and Albert were furious and the House of Lords condemned his actions, but after a long, inspired piece of oratory, Palmerston’s misstep was hailed by the House of Commons as an act of heroism. They cheered his idea that every British citizen must be forcefully defended, wherever they happened to be. Buoyed by this broad support, Palmerston ignored Victoria and Albert’s suggestions on a draft dispatch to be sent to the British minister in Greece. The queen said she could not consent to “allow a servant of the Crown and her Minister, to act contrary to her orders, and this without her knowledge.” This pattern continued for years—Palmerston’s unilateralism, Victoria’s objections, and Lord John Russell’s reluctant intervention, followed by insincere apologies from Palmerston. When Don Pacifico’s vastly exaggerated claims were finally settled years later, he was awarded only a small sliver of his original demand. For this paltry sum, Victoria thought, England had almost gone to war, angered Greece, and alienated France.

  In August 1850, on the heels of the Greek debacle, Victoria wrote to Prime Minister Russell firmly laying out her complaints against Palmerston and outlining her expectations that she be fully, promptly, and respectfully informed by her ministers. Otherwise, she said, she would use her constitutional powers to dismiss him. Palmerston came to see Albert with tears in his eyes, insisting that he had thought his only difference with the queen was one of policy. His contrition was short-lived, and soon after, the skirmishes began again.

  In 1850, the Austrian general Julius Jacob von Haynau, a despotic, sadistic man who had treated rebels in Austria brutally, visited England. He was recognized by some workers, who threw missiles at his head and dragged him along the street by his long, gray mustache. Victoria was horrified that a foreign statesman should be assaulted in her country; but the liberal Palmerston thought “the Austrian Butcher” deserved it. In contrast, when the rebel Hungarian leader Lajos Kossuth made a tour to England during which
he delivered speeches railing against the Austrian and Russian emperors, Palmerston was eager to host him. He was forced to cancel the invitation after the Cabinet objected and Victoria threatened to sack him. But just ten days later, Palmerston received a deputation of Radicals who called the Austrian and Russian emperors despots and tyrants. Greville declared this provocative act “an unparalleled outrage.”

  Lord Palmerston’s final, most costly mistake was his unlilateral declaration of support for Louis-Napoleon when the French king arrested the leaders of the National Assembly in Paris in December 1851 and declared himself the emperor for life in a coup d’état. The British government had decided to remain neutral, instructing the ambassador to refrain from backing either side. Palmerston, however, congratulated the French ambassador and gave his support to the coup, which was extremely embarrassing for the British government. Lord John Russell finally dismissed him, and Victoria was elated.

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  The queen could not be persuaded that a revolution could be a good thing. In August 1848, she stated, “I maintain that Revolutions are always bad for the country & the cause of untold misery to the people. Obedience to the laws & to the Sovereign, is obedience to a higher Power, divinely instituted for the good of the people, not of the Sovereign, who has equally duties & obligations.” For Victoria, hierarchy was divine: men were the heads of their households, and the sovereign was the head of state. She believed that peace in both her marriage and her country required obedience—even though her own was rarely forthcoming. A strong strain of liberal sympathy had emerged in Europe, but for now, her country was safe, and little had changed.