Victoria
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Victoria had long dreaded this moment. She had tried to prevent the word “wedding” from being uttered in front of Beatrice. She had ensured her daughter was never left alone in a room with a man and never danced with anyone but her brothers. She had delayed her confirmation. She wanted to protect her beloved youngest daughter from an institution she viewed with skepticism; after all, Victoria now claimed to hate marriage. She had adored her own, of course, but thought that incessant pregnancies were traumatic and painful, the loss of a child was an unbearable wrench, and most marriages were miserable. Her own family bore this out. Vicky was miserable in Prussia, bullied by disapproving and controlling parents-in-law; Louise had married a man suspected to be gay and had taken on a series of lovers; Alice had died in a far-off land; only the introverted Helena lived contentedly with her husband nearby. Victoria said glumly, “The longer I live the more I think marriages only rarely are a real happiness. The most are convenience—not real happiness—though of course when it is, it is greatly valued but how rarely it lasts.”
To modern eyes, Victoria’s control of Beatrice seems stifling and selfish, and in many ways it was. But it was also common practice in the nineteenth century for youngest daughters to devote themselves to their surviving parents. Everything else had to be sacrificed for that. Many middle-class daughters chafed against the confines of the spinster existence; it is remarkable that the biddable Beatrice did not. She now had a chance at happiness, though, with “Liko.” Beatrice could be stubborn too, matching her mother’s obstinate silence with her own. Liko was a catch: dashing, kindly, and charming. The silence finally shattered when three male protectors—Bertie; Alice’s widower, the Grand Duke Louis of Hesse; and his brother, Prince Louis of Battenberg—came to plead Beatrice’s case. Victoria laid out her conditions of approval: the couple must live with her, always, and have no homes of their own. A worn-down Beatrice—and Liko, who had few assets anyway—quickly agreed.
The wedding took place on a hot, sunny day in a church near Osborne on July 23, 1885. Only a small crowd witnessed it; notably, Victoria refused to invite Gladstone. Beatrice wore white lace and orange blossoms, just as her mother had, and borrowed her mother’s veil. She looked, said an emotional Victoria, “very sweet, pure & calm.” The night before, the queen had slipped out of a crowded soiree with Beatrice, walked her to her room, and hugged her hard, crying. She was, in a sense, letting go of her last child, after more than four decades of motherhood. She left red-eyed and lay in her bed staring out her window at the illuminations strung up around the villa and gardens, praying Beatrice would be happy and never leave her. Victoria was “utterly miserable” after the wedding, though she was soon won over by her spirited, pliable son-in-law (even, somewhat shockingly, allowing him to smoke with his companions after dinner). Beatrice was relieved to have gained some independence from her moody, controlling mother.
Beatrice quickly became pregnant with the first of four children. It would soon become obvious that she was a carrier of the dreaded hemophilia. One of her sons—who was also named Leopold—inherited the disease. Beatrice’s only daughter, Victoria Eugenie, would become immensely unpopular when she married King Alfonso XIII and passed the affliction on to the Spanish royal family.
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On the day that Gladstone’s government fell in 1885, four months after the death of Gordon, Victoria cheered “like a schoolgirl set free from school.” The government was defeated on a minor matter—a proposal to increase beer duty—but it had struggled with legitimacy ever since the death of General Gordon. The government was also deeply divided on the boiling question of Irish independence. Parliament was dissolved, and the Tory Lord Salisbury became prime minister—a role he would fulfill three times. During his first tenure, he headed a minority government in June 1885 that lasted only several months.
A tall, balding man with a thick beard, Salisbury was a Conservative who had resigned in 1867 over the passage of Disraeli’s reform bill. His suspicion of change dovetailed neatly with Victoria’s. Their relationship was a comfortable one and Victoria grew extremely fond of the genteel Lord Salisbury. He was courteous, intellectual, funny, and shared his queen’s opposition to Home Rule.
Salisbury was also the first of Victoria’s prime ministers to be younger than she was, and the last of the aristocratic politicians to lead the British government from the House of Lords. The man his biographer Andrew Roberts called the Victorian Titan would win smashing majorities for the Tories in 1895 and 1900, cementing a long stretch of Conservative rule.
Victoria relished the time she spent with Salisbury, and told one of her bishops that he had “an equal place with the highest among her ministers, not excepting Disraeli.” His daughter Violet once remarked, after watching them converse in France: “I never saw two people get on better, their polished manners and deference to and esteem for each other were a delightful sight.”
The respect was mutual. Salisbury believed that the queen had an uncanny ability to reflect the view of the public; he felt that when he knew Victoria’s opinion, he “knew pretty certainly what views her subjects would take, and especially the middle class of her subjects.” Salisbury and the queen also shared a concern for the living conditions of the poor. He had written an article in 1883 arguing that poor housing led not just to poor health but poor morality. This nexus had also piqued the interest of Victoria. She had been appalled by the Reverend Andrew Mearns’s account of nearby slums in a report called The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, published in October 1883. It described outrageous overcrowding and contained accounts of incest, and it was promoted by that great self-styled vigilante against dirt, vice, and exploitation in London, the publisher W. T. Stead.*2 Victoria, who was then still mourning the death of Brown a few months earlier, wrote to Gladstone saying she was distressed by stories of “the deplorable condition of the houses of the poor in our great towns” and asked whether a public works program should be begun, and if an inquiry would be conducted into it. In the face of Gladstone’s reluctance, she lobbied other, more sympathetic politicians and clergy. In February 1884, a royal commission was appointed to look into the housing of the working classes; Salisbury served on it, along with Bertie.
In 1885, when Salisbury was prime minister, he introduced an act into the House of Lords that made landlords responsible for unhygienic housing and gave local government boards the power to close down unsanitary residences. These laws were incremental but important; they helped prod the public into thinking about what might be done about conditions in the slums, and further investigations and housing trusts followed.
In January 1886, Salisbury resigned after being defeated on a land bill vote. The eighty-six Irish nationalists in Parliament had stacked the numbers against him, hopeful that Gladstone—who now supported Home Rule—would return to power. Victoria began a concerted and forceful campaign to ensure Gladstone would not become prime minister again. First, she refused to accept Lord Salisbury’s resignation. Second, she tried to create a coalition between moderate Whigs and Conservatives to keep the Liberals out. She told George Goschen, a moderate Liberal Unionist, that to change the government would be “very disastrous,” adding, “I am terrified for the country.” She urged him to create a coalition with centrist Tories and back away from supporting Gladstone, because he would only “ruin the Country if he can.” She told Salisbury she would refuse any “objectionable people” if Gladstone came in. She ended a memorandum self-pityingly: “What a dreadful thing to lose such a man as Lord Salisbury for the Country—the World—and me!”
There was no option Victoria would not explore in order to prevent Gladstone from returning as prime minister. She even asked Lord Tennyson—who had just accompanied his friend Gladstone on a sea cruise to Scandinavia—to try to discourage Gladstone from standing in the upcoming election. Tennyson protested he had little influence over him.
Victoria’s intervention was extraordinary: she did not disguise her antipathy to Gladstone, she tried t
o push—and keep—him out of power, she actively sought to form other coalitions and governments, and she expected to have a pivotal say in who was selected for the Cabinet. There was no pretense of partiality. Victoria’s ministers and secretary repeatedly warned her that public knowledge of these machinations would expose her to criticism and possibly scandal. The moderate Liberal Goschen bluntly refused to visit her for fear it might “compromise” the situation (a view for which she chastised him). He advised Victoria to send for Gladstone, arguing the Liberals were still in Gladstone’s thrall.
Nervous that the press might discover Victoria’s reluctance to call for Gladstone, Ponsonby leapt into action, asking if he might send for him immediately, to “put an end to the nervous excitement.” Passive aggression was Victoria’s final resort. Ponsonby raced to find Gladstone late at night, when he was just about to change into his nightshirt, to ask if he would form an administration; when he found him he said, “Your Majesty had understood from his repeated expression of a desire to retire from public life that he would not accept office and therefore in sending this message she left him free to accept or not.” It was not a warm embrace.
The Grand Old Man, who was by now inured to the queen’s disapproval, accepted and became PM once again. Ponsonby outlined the queen’s choices for the Cabinet selection: she would not accept Charles Dilke, who had been named in a scandalous divorce case and was an outspoken republican. Gladstone grumbled but agreed. The queen also objected to the inclusion of his friend Lord Granville, to which Gladstone also acquiesced. Later, he also agreed not to appoint Hugh Childers to the War Office, which he considered a “great sacrifice.” (He was made home secretary instead.) Victoria reminded him that her objection was not for her own sake, but “for the country’s.” What she was most eager to ascertain was Gladstone’s precise intention with Home Rule: Was he only going to investigate the Irish call for autonomy, as he said? Or was this just a diplomatic paving of the way toward implementation? It was the defining issue of British politics in that era: Should the mutinous Irish be allowed to self-govern? Gladstone’s fervent belief that this issue should at least be considered seriously cost him dearly. It would be his greatest, most farsighted, and yet most self-destructive quest.
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By the 1880s, the Irish Question dominated the British Parliament. Ireland was suffering from a protracted agricultural depression, ruinous bouts of famine, and relentless bursts of violence. Support for the Irish republican Fenians was growing. Even as early as the 1840s, before the potato famine, Gladstone had viewed Ireland as a “coming storm.” In the decades following, he watched the clouds blacken. When he was told he was going to be prime minister in 1868, while chopping down trees at his estate, he paused to declare, “My mission is to pacify Ireland.”
And he tried. First, he freed Catholic farmers from having to pay tithes to the church when he disestablished the Church of Ireland in 1869. Next, he tried to tackle the culture of (mostly absentee) landlordism by providing protections for Irish tenants. In 1870, he passed laws that ensured evicted tenants could be compensated for improvements they had made to properties during their stay. In 1881, he introduced the Second Irish Land Act, which provided some genuine security by allowing tenants to apply for fair rent, fixed tenure, or freedom to sell their lease. (The bulk of Irish farmers did not own their land, and instead leased it from landlords, the majority of whom lived in England. In 1870, only 3 percent of agricultural holdings were occupied by owners.)
The most gargantuan task, though, was Home Rule. This was anathema to the bulk of the House of Lords, to many of his Liberal colleagues, and to the queen herself. The parlous Irish economy, the aftershocks of the famine and sustained depression, and the rumbling republican violence and agrarian unrest were a collective source of embarrassment to Britain. As the British Empire tried to extol liberty and, at times, the recognition of native people’s rights on the world stage, the charge of hypocrisy closer to home was too obvious. Gladstone believed the cycle of anger was a cancer metastasizing on the British body politic.
The queen was not convinced Ireland deserved or needed autonomy. She thought Gladstone was “always excusing the Irish,” and reminded him often of the opposition to his “dreadful” bill. In fact, the violence ended up somehow being his fault. His insistence on stirring up debate, she said, caused unrest and made Ireland a “complete state of terror.” The queen advocated martial law and tried to tighten her grip in Parliament. She encouraged those who opposed it, no matter their party, to band together to protect the empire and defeat the Home Rule bill. She repeatedly rebuked a weary Gladstone and asked him to write a memorandum on his precise intentions. Gladstone’s letter, setting out his wish simply to “examine” the matter of self-government, did not placate her, even though his determination was driven in part by recognition of the will of the Irish. Victoria told him he should never interpret silence from her as approval on this matter, that she could “only see danger to the Empire” in his course, and that she could not give him her support “when the union of the Empire is in danger of disintegration and serious disturbance.” Gladstone pointedly reminded her of her legal responsibilities, writing that he was “most humbly sensible” of her desire “to give an unvarying constitutional support to those who may have the honor to be Your Majesty’s advisers.” He knew well that the queen’s support varied wildly, but that legally she was obliged to give it. But, much like General Gordon, Victoria saw herself as answering to a higher power.
When Gladstone addressed the House of Commons on Home Rule in April 1886, his oratory was electrifying. The bill before them would allow for a separate parliament and government in Dublin, which would control all Irish affairs except foreign policy, defense, and trade. (It also removed Irish MPs from Westminster, which many Liberal MPs objected to, as it would erase votes they often relied on.) “This, if I understand it,” Gladstone said in his strong, upward-lilting voice, “is one of those golden moments in our history, one of those occasions which may come and may go, but which does not often return.”
But the moment went. On June 8, the bill was defeated, 341 to 311. The Liberals split, with 93 voting against. The Liberal Unionists separated from the Liberal Party and aligned with Conservatives in their opposition to Home Rule until 1914. Gladstone’s foresight was greater than his political skill, and he struggled to corral a sufficient number of colleagues.
For Victoria, this was victory. When she received a telegram from Gladstone on July 20, 1886, saying his government would resign, she wrote in her diary: “I cannot help feeling very thankful.” Gladstone’s dedication to the measure made no sense to Victoria, who thought he had become “almost fanatically” earnest “in his belief that he is almost sacrificing himself for Ireland.” She was, as ever, adept at sniffing political winds—and fanning them when she could. She busily encouraged prominent politicians who opposed the bill, and continued to urge moderate Liberals to find common ground with moderate Conservatives.
That summer and fall after the vote in 1886, dozens were killed in sectarian riots in Belfast and several hundred arrested. Gladstone did not give up, even after he had resigned. In 1887, he wrote in his diary: “One prayer absorbs all others: Ireland, Ireland, Ireland.” He went on to fight for Home Rule again in the 1892 election, and managed to push through a watered-down bill in 1893: a version that was quickly, soundly rejected by the House of Lords. Gladstone’s commitment to Irish self-government was fascinating: principled yet politically impossible. The House of Lords would never have supported him. Instead of bringing unity to the Isles, he had split his party, and he would be blamed for keeping Liberals out of office for the better part of two decades. But if Britain had passed Gladstone’s bill in 1886, it would have been spared thirty-five years of turmoil and bloodshed.*3 Gladstone was right—it was a unique opportunity, blown.
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In these years, through the 1870s and 1880s,Victoria was in her political prime. She proved more adept with
the levers of power than most of the men around her. Many of her contemporaries struggled to understand how—or if—a woman could exercise such power. Arthur Ponsonby wrote that his father, Henry, who had become Queen Victoria’s private secretary in 1870, would have found his job intolerable if he had merely been “dancing attendance on an obstinate middle-aged lady who knew little of what was going on and cared less.” But Ponsonby soon gained “a high opinion of her powers and was constantly amazed at her industry.” He considered her a “clear, sensible, honest thinker, who was in some things an excellent woman of business.” But it can be difficult to glean from the accounts of these men exactly how effective she was. Their attitudes so often seemed to reflect Samuel Johnson’s view of women preaching: it was just surprising to see it done at all.
What is more startling today is to discover what a robust and interventionist ruler Victoria was. She regularly stretched the boundaries of her role. She tried as hard as she could to ensure she and the foreign secretary would decide matters of foreign policy together, without their needing to be canvassed in the Cabinet. She bypassed the prime minister to give her own directives to generals. She tried to prevent Gladstone from gaining and keeping power. “The Queen was less ready to yield to ministerial dictation than is commonly supposed,” wrote Sir Edmund Gosse in 1901. Yet Victoria so carefully cultivated the image of a compliant, reclusive, and domesticated queen that the books that emerged after her death were considered radical for implying she had her own mind. The extent of her interference in politics—and the audacity of her reach—did not become apparent until the 1920s and 1930s, when the letters of the final years of her reign were published. Even Lord Salisbury—PM three times while Victoria was queen—wrote: “I may say with confidence that no Minister in her long reign ever disregarded her advice, or pressed her to disregard it, without afterwards feeling he had incurred a dangerous responsibility….She knows what she is talking about.” As one of the editors of her letters, Lord Esher, pointed out, the queen always gave way to the views of a united Cabinet, but would “not always yield at once to the opinion of a single Minister.”