Victoria

by Julia Baird

  In Ireland, the 1848 potato crop had again failed and people on the streets of Dublin were crying for food. The British Parliament was so nervous about the possibility of rebellion that they suspended habeas corpus so that people in Ireland could be arrested without a warrant. The subterranean anger in the impoverished country threatened only to get worse. In 1848, made nervous by events in Europe, Victoria was of the firm belief that any restive Irish should be “crushed” and taught a lesson. Even then, her views were considered strident.

  The Great Potato Famine, one of the greatest calamities of the century, had sown hatred in Ireland toward the British, and prompted mass emigration. The Irish population had ballooned in the early nineteenth century, but between 1846 and 1851 it plummeted from eight million to about six and a half. About one million died of starvation, and others died from dysentery and cholera. Of those left, three million depended on government assistance for survival. The failure of the English to stem the vast number of deaths permanently estranged the two countries. Between 1801 and 1841, there had been 175 commissions and committees on the state of Ireland—all foretold doom, and none enabled the Irish to climb out of the deepening ravine of poverty the country was slipping into. Many subsisted on water and potatoes.

  Some historians have called the deaths of more than a million starving people a genocide—but it was caused mostly by bigotry and ignorant neglect, not deliberate mass murder. Many British politicians were more intent on reforming the Irish economy and implementing their free-market ideals than on preventing deaths. Much of the reluctance to do anything was driven by anti-Irish prejudice and a belief that the Irish were weak, prone to criminality, and reliant on others; many viewed the famine as a sign of God’s disapproval as well as evidence of defects in the Irish character. The blame for this has, somewhat unfairly, fallen on Victoria’s shoulders. She was called “the Famine Queen” and accused of neglect and a lack of sympathy. She donated £2,000 (worth roughly £200,000 today), the largest single donation to Irish relief, but it was criticized for not being enough; she published two letters urging the public to donate to Ireland; rationed bread in her household; ordered swaths of Irish poplin; and agreed to order that days of fasting be observed in support of the poor. She donated another £500 in 1849.

  It would be a long stretch to blame Victoria for the famine, though she could have done much more for what had become an unpopular cause, and several of her public gestures were made at the insistence of her prime minister, Lord John Russell. She was initially critical of tyrannical landlords, but when some of those she knew personally were murdered, her sympathy for their tenants waned.

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  Albert was as troubled by the root causes of the revolts as he was by the results. He had far more sympathy for the working class than for aristocrats, describing them as having “most of the toil and least of the enjoyments of this world.” In a meeting he chaired in May 1848 of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Working Classes, he said that while the model lodging houses, loan funds, and ground allotments the government had established were important, any improvement in conditions “must be the result of the exertion of the working people themselves,” not dictated by capitalists. He devised four core principles for the improvement of the condition of the working classes: education for children with practical training in industry, improvement of housing, a grant of land allotments with cottages, and the establishment of banks especially for savings. The press reports praised him.

  Politicians on the hard right resented Albert’s political activism. He told his brother in May 1849 that the “ultra Tories” hated his working “energetically…against their plans.” He was known for his dislike of the aristocracy, and he was clear about the purpose of his work: “The unequal division of property, and the dangers of poverty and envy arising therefrom, is the principal evil. Means must necessarily be found, not for diminishing riches (as the communists wish), but to make facilities for the poor. But there is the rub.” Such remarks show that Albert was grappling with the questions raised by the European revolutions—and hoping to stem local unrest by addressing them. Unlike his wife, who was intent on quashing dissent, he was eager to prevent it. His views were rare in his echelon.

  Albert was careful to treat his own staff well, and he earned plaudits for his attempts to improve the lives of those caught within unequal structures. For example, when he was master of Trinity House, ballast heavers gave him the title of Albert the Good after he helped redress their situation when he discovered they were only given work through publicans who insisted they drink before they work, putting them in a sorry state. He also organized a superannuation scheme for servants after reading a report on workhouses and noting the disproportionate number of former servants who were inmates. A bad reference from a single boss could thrust them into poverty. Seventy percent of servants in England or Wales—almost seven hundred thousand—ended up in workhouses or on charity. It is these kinds of initiatives that reveal Albert’s flashes of brilliance, as well as his scope and potential as an acting monarch.

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  In the end, Ireland did not revolt, largely because the people were too hungry. Britain escaped the turbulence of 1848 unscathed. Whig aristocrats still ruled Parliament, Victoria still wore the crown, and Britain continued to inch across the globe, annexing land and dominating the seas. At the end of the year, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president of France. There were repeated scuffles in Prussia and Austria, but Europe was mostly stable again. The major democratic changes demanded by the rioters in 1848 were not made in most countries until the late 1860s. As the historian Miles Taylor writes: “Both to contemporaries and to posterity, 1848 was the year in which British peculiarity seemed to be underlined once again.” Britain avoided revolution for several reasons: a loyal middle class who loved their queen, a government that applied force ruthlessly when needed, and canny politicians like Peel who introduced laws lowering the cost of food. Plus, by transporting the most radical dissenters to far-off colonies such as Australia, the government was able to siphon off some of the greatest political leaders of the Irish independence and Chartist movements. And ultimately, Britain was just not then the land of the revolutionary. Victoria was immensely proud of that.

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  On June 29, 1850, former prime minister Robert Peel’s horse tossed him off and trampled on him, breaking his collarbone, shoulder blade, and a rib that pierced his lungs. Crowds stood for hours outside his house in London, waiting for policemen to read a series of grim medical bulletins and scanning the faces of his friends as they came and went. Three days later, he died. Victoria described Albert as suffering dreadfully, observing that he had “lost a second father”—the man who had been his ally in his rise to power. Albert wrote to the Duchess of Kent: “Blow after blow has fallen on us….And now death has snatched from us Peel, the best of men, our truest friend, the strongest bulwark of the Throne, the greatest statesman of his time.” Peel was hugely popular in death. Almost half a million men gave one penny each to a fund established in his name to buy books for workingmen’s clubs and libraries.

  It had been a hard few years for Victoria and Albert. “Every day,” the prince wrote in July 1850, “brings fresh sorrow.” In the late 1840s, several close friends died in astonishingly quick succession; each loss was a blow, and the prince grew even lonelier. In November 1849, Prince Albert’s private secretary and close friend George Anson died at thirty-seven. Albert mourned him like a brother, wrote Victoria. The dignified Queen Adelaide, the widow of King William IV and Victoria’s aunt, passed away in December 1849. In July 1850, Victoria’s uncle the Duke of Cambridge died. Then, in August 1850, Louis Philippe, the former king of the French, died in exile at Claremont. In October, Uncle Leopold lost his much-loved second wife, Louise. Victoria was inconsolable.

  Only Stockmar, the faithful family adviser who now lived in Germany, remained to counsel the prince; Albert wrote to him often, begging him to come to England.
Albert rose an hour before Victoria to respond to letters and worked until midnight. He began to look “pale and fagged,” as Victoria put it, putting on weight and waking early, still plagued by insomnia.

  Despite his melancholy, Albert’s determination did not flag. On the cusp of turning thirty in 1849, he was finally ready to rule on his own. England was at peace, Victoria was content, and Albert was now acting as monarch, with his wife’s permission. If there were to be an Albertine age, with its strains of prudence, religious earnestness, industry, energy, and determination, it would be the coming decade. In the 1850s, the prematurely aged, troubled, but gifted Prince Consort would reach his full powers.

  * * *

  * The pretty, plump girl grew up to be a strong-minded sculptor with far more sympathy for social movements, such as suffrage, than her mother. On the first birthday of her “good little child,” Victoria wrote: “She was born in the most eventful times, & ought to be something peculiar in consequence.” Queen Victoria’s Journal, Sunday, March 18, 1848.

  CHAPTER 17

  What Albert Did: The Great Exhibition of 1851

  We are capable of doing almost anything.

  —QUEEN VICTORIA, APRIL 29, 1851

  As black clouds slowly parted in the London sky, a vast crowd of people lined the streets. They perched on rooftops, ladders, and boxes and stood jammed together on the banks of the Serpentine River. In Buckingham Palace, Prince Albert was buttoning up a stiff field marshal’s uniform. Nine-year-old Bertie was stepping into a tartan kilt. Ten-year-old Vicky was waiting patiently as a wreath of pink wild roses was pinned to her hair. But the crowd mostly wanted a glimpse of the queen. Victoria glittered with diamonds: hundreds of them were sewn into the pink silk of her dress, clasped around her throat, placed carefully on her head. Across her chest she wore the Order of the Garter, a star on a broad blue ribbon. She glanced at her reflection, then smiled: the first of May 1851 was going to be one of the greatest days she and her country had known.

  Outside, as the crowds waited for the royal carriages to appear, they watched a determined man with a wooden leg awkwardly work his way up a large elm tree. What had taken a boy five minutes took him fifty; when he finally reached an unoccupied branch, face ringed with sweat, he grinned triumphantly as loud applause broke out from the crowd. Moments later, distant cheers signaled the first sighting of the queen.

  On cue, the sun emerged as Victoria’s closed, steel-lined carriage trotted quickly along the streets. Police estimated there were seven hundred thousand people crammed in the streets craning to spy her tiny figure. She flushed with a genuine pride in what Albert had created. All appeared as though in a dream; heat on the damp ground created a fog that made the spectacle seem unreal. At last, she thought as she scanned the crowds packing the streets and bobbing in little boats, her husband would be properly recognized by England for his brilliance.

  Through the clearing mist, the Crystal Palace gleamed in the sunlight, flags fluttering on every corner of the massive building, constructed of one million square feet of glass. The Morning Post described it as a “stupendous cliff of crystal, beautiful beyond the power of language to describe.” When Victoria entered the enormous structure with Albert, her two eldest children, and the royal court, cannons boomed, trumpets sounded, and the organ played “God Save the Queen.” Victoria ascended her temporary throne—an Indian chair draped with a rich scarlet elephant cloth surrounded by statues, a gushing fountain, and wildly colored carpets. She sat upright, clasped her hands together, and gazed at her husband with undisguised adoration.

  The Great Exhibition of 1851 was the most brilliant moment of her reign thus far. Around her, tens of thousands of people crowded the corridors of the marvelous structure that had been built in just seven months by two thousand laborers. And it was all due to her Albert, who stood stiffly in his red and black uniform. He was exhausted but still spectacular to look at. She had woken that morning to see him lying awake, alert, and anxious. The day passed without a glitch (save for the enthusiastic Chinese mandarin who, after prostrating himself before the queen, was thereafter mistaken for a diplomat, and joined the official procession). Victoria would always remember it as a fairy tale:

  The tremendous cheering, the joy expressed in every face, the vastness of the building, with all its decorations & exhibits, the sound of the organ (with 200 instruments & 600 voices, which seemed nothing), & my beloved Husband the creator of this great “Peace Festival,” inviting the industry & art of all nations of the earth, all this, was indeed moving, & a day to live forever.

  To Victoria, Albert was now more than a husband; he was a “creator,” godlike and a subject of awe. That afternoon, the couple appeared on the royal balcony at Buckingham Palace for the first time. Intoxicated by the attention, Victoria struggled to give adequate expression to the joy, marvel, and thrill of the moment. “Albert’s dearest name is immortalized with this great conception,” she wrote. “It was the happiest, proudest day of my life, and I can think of nothing else.” In contrast, Albert soberly described the opening as “quite satisfactory.” It was the culmination of months of work. The entire structure was a symbol of progress: a place of great beauty where science and creativity met industry. Perhaps most of all, it was a showcase of global unity, the glory of empire, and the moral superiority of Britain. Half of the exhibition space was given to foreign countries, to give it an international flavor. It was the first time many citizens were made aware of the riches of these far-flung countries, of the reach and bounty of the British Empire. Dozens of globes were on display, featuring the shapes of the continents and the celestial heavens above. One contraption depicted the globe as an animal curled inside its shell, pushing and pulling the ocean’s tides with its heartbeat.

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  It would have taken at least twenty full working days to view the whole of the Exhibition. There were four sections: Raw Materials, Machinery, Manufacture, and Sculpture and the Fine Arts. The sights on display were wondrous: sperm whale teeth, elephant tusks, nude sculptures, gas fittings, buttonless shirts for bachelors, three-story beehives, enormous jewels, furniture, fertilizer, three-hundred-blade knives, fountains flowing with perfume, diamond-encrusted tartan socks, a collapsible piano, a double piano (Queen Victoria thought the sight of two people playing at each end “had a ludicrous effect”), flowers made from human hair, rhubarb champagne, cake that crumbled into beer, garden benches made of coal, floating deck chairs, a carriage drawn by kites (the “charvolant”), a pulpit with tubes extending to special pews for the hard of hearing, and a hollowed-out walking stick made for doctors that contained enemas. The most popular American exhibits were a reaping machine, the Colt revolver, reclining chairs, a bed that could be converted into a suitcase, and a vacuum-sealed coffin designed to preserve corpses until distant relatives arrived.

  Volunteer patrolling policemen were required to demonstrate one of the most popular exhibits: a device, set like an alarm clock, that tilted a bed and rolled out its sleepy inhabitants, possibly into cold water, at the inventor’s suggestion. A metal mannequin changed shapes for fitting clothes. There were also likenesses of the queen made of hair, zinc, and even soap, which prompted the economist Walter Bagehot to quip, “It must be amusing to wash yourself with yourself.”

  Six million people visited the Exhibition over its five-and-a-half-month span. Many London luminaries made the pilgrimage. Charlotte Brontë described it as “vast, strange, new and impossible to describe.” It seemed quite magical to her, and the hordes filing through seemed “subdued by some invisible influence.” While she stood in a crowd of thirty thousand people, “not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen; the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from the distance.” The wife of the novelist Anthony Trollope, Rose, had a folding tapestry screen in the exhibit; she was delighted to win a bronze medal in her category. Visitors came from every class, and picnicked between pillars or around fountains. Happily for t
he crowds, for the first time, something resembling a flushing toilet—“monkey closets” or “retiring rooms”—were provided, at a penny per visit.

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  The idea for the Exhibition had been floating in Albert’s mind since he saw the Frankfurt fairs, begun in the sixteenth century, as a child. The same idea had occurred to Henry Cole, an energetic civil servant famed for making the first Christmas card and helping to launch the penny post. Cole returned from an exhibition in Paris in 1849 to discuss the idea with Albert, a fellow member of the Royal Society of Arts (Albert was then the president). Albert suggested the fair be international, and it was begun.

  For Albert, the Exhibition was an occasion with serious moral and patriotic underpinnings. “England’s mission, duty and interest,” he wrote to the prime minister, Lord John Russell, in September 1847, “is to put herself at the head of diffusion of civilization and the attainment of liberty.” He recognized the dawning of a new age and saw England as the moral beacon for the world. In a speech aimed at drumming up public support, given at a banquet at Mansion House in March 1850, he outlined his vision:

  We are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end, to which all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind….Gentlemen—the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting-point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.