Victoria

by Julia Baird

  So what exactly was the constitutional role of the queen then? Britain has no written constitution, but rather a host of pieced-together materials: statutes, judgments, authoritative works, treaties, and conventions. In 1867, during the queen’s reclusive mourning period, Walter Bagehot, in his seminal work The English Constitution, noted there was no clear articulation of the monarch’s constitutional role anywhere. Yet he argued that the lack of comprehension of the queen’s role added to her prestige: “When there is a select committee on the Queen, the charm of royalty will be gone. Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic. We must not bring the Queen into the combat of politics, or she will cease to be reverenced by all the combatants; she will become one combatant among many.”

  Bagehot decided the monarch had three rights: “the right to be consulted; the right to encourage; and the right to warn.” While the monarch was the “face” of democracy, he wrote, his or her role was primarily ceremonial and symbolic. But it was not until after Bertie ascended the throne that this ceremonial, symbolic kind of monarchy would become the norm. Victoria exercised many other rights beyond what Bagehot suggested: the right to berate, withdraw support, shape Cabinets, scheme against prime ministers, and instruct military officers.

  The first function of a royal family, wrote Bagehot, was to sweeten politics “by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty events.” Their second function was to provoke loyalty among the uneducated or simple-minded: “to be a visible symbol of unity to those still so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol.” The third was to welcome foreign ministers and dignitaries. The fourth was to provide an example of morality (while noting that many of Victoria’s ancestors failed at this). The last was to provide stability during times of transition, which would serve as some kind of “disguise” for changes of government.

  The monarch’s greatest powers came into play during the collapsing and creating of governments. When a party was divided and unable to choose a leader, the monarch might, wrote Bagehot, “pick out from the ranks of the divided party its very best leader,” provided the monarch was unprejudiced. But who would be the judge of the monarch’s discernment? Bagehot concluded that, due to the early acquired feebleness of hereditary dynasties, few monarchs would be actually equipped for such a task: “Probably in most cases the greatest wisdom of the constitutional king would show itself in well-considered inaction.” Yet the power, it is clear, was there, and Victoria took it when she could, even when the party was not divided. Technically, division could occur only when there was more than one person who could command a majority of politicians in the Commons. This happened only once in Victoria’s time, in 1894. Yet she also chose Lord Aberdeen in 1852 and Lord Rosebery in 1894—these men were legitimate royal selections. During the split over Irish Home Rule in 1886, Victoria tried to push the Duke of Argyll to create a new party of moderates to “save the country and the Constitution.” She also encouraged Liberals who opposed Home Rule to form a separate group of Liberal Unionists.

  It is clear Victoria also believed she had the power to dismiss a prime minister, and ministry, though this was never exercised. When the king of Greece sacked his entire Cabinet in 1892 for “leading the country to bankruptcy,” Victoria thought he was entitled to do so: “but whether it is wise to exercise this right must depend on circumstances.” She objected to certain men being made ministers, but she did not think she could dismiss them once appointed. Her protests were often at least ostensibly on moral grounds—as in the case of Henry Labouchere, who had cohabited with his actress wife before marrying her—as well as personal grounds (Labouchere had also criticized the monarchy). As he did with Dilke, Gladstone protested but accepted the veto, and left both men out.

  Despite being the head of the executive, kings and queens were supposed to agree with the advice given by their ministers. But the idea of just stamping policies handed to her was insulting to Victoria: she was not a “mere machine.” Stockmar, after all, had told her the monarch was the “permanent Premier” and the prime minister merely the “temporary head of the Cabinet.” Disraeli had also encouraged an inflated sense of her place, calling her the “Dictatress” and “Arbitress.” Henry Ponsonby tacked in the other direction, spending many anxious years trying to ensure that Victoria relied on the advice of her ministers, and not simply on her own mind. But she never vetoed a Cabinet proposal, even as she fought to defeat them. When Gladstone pushed through a bill to disestablish the Irish church, for example, Victoria simultaneously indicated her opposition to it and offered her assistance in passing it.

  By the end of Victoria’s reign, England was drawing closer to becoming a democracy—two-thirds of men could now vote (although still no women), and the monarch’s powers were substantially diminished. As queen, Victoria carried out a job undergoing continual redefinition. She worked furiously to maintain her powers, but did so in private. She was a clever and forceful political calculator, but she cannily presented herself to her subjects as an ordinary mother trotting about Scotland. This was evidence of her sharp political intuition; she knew the country loved her when she appeared to be one of them, but with her ministers, she clung tenaciously to her unconventional powers. She had watched Bismarck erode the influence of the German emperor, Vicky’s father-in-law, and she had no intention of allowing the same to happen to her. She tried to ignore the fact that Gladstone was the leader of his party and had popular support, but she was forced to acknowledge it when her scheming proved to be futile. What she was insisting on—with threats of abdication if she did not get her way—was her own relevance.

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  By the 1880s, Gladstone had come to view his queen as “somewhat unmannerly.” She pushed him harder than she had pushed any other prime minister—and he pushed back with almost equal force, calling her demands for information on Cabinet disputes “intolerable” and “inadmissible.” He wished she’d step down for Bertie and admitted that his confidence in the monarchy had been shaken. Over time, he cared less about what she thought of him. Her dislike was so naked and obdurate that by 1886, the time of Gladstone’s second premiership, he had grown resigned to her reprimands and barbs. He was keenly aware that she would delight in his government’s falling after a few months, following the Irish split.

  In 1881, he wrote of an audience with the queen: “Received with much civility, had a long audience, but I am always outside an iron ring: and without any desire, had I the power, to break through.” He wrote to Charles Dilke: “I am convinced, from a hundred tokens, that she looks forward to the day of my retirement as a day if not of jubilee yet of relief.” He was right, and yet the two of them lived on together, horns locked, into improbable old age. Victoria perpetually underestimated Gladstone’s potential longevity. Every time she saw him, she described him as being in a state of illness and deterioration. She, too, was growing old, walking with the help of a stick and having daily massages to try to soothe pain in her sciatic nerve and alleviate her rheumatism.

  It is quite possible Victoria was jealous of Gladstone, as his secretary, Edward Hamilton, concluded, especially of his extraordinary hold over her subjects. She frequently cautioned him from campaigning as he had done in the Midlothian campaign. She told him to mind his words, treating him much like a teenager requiring perpetual monitoring, even though he was a decade older than she. She sent him notes before he was due to give big speeches: in 1881 she told him to be “very cautious,” in 1883 to be “very guarded in his language.” In September 1883 Hamilton wrote:

  She feels, as he [Gladstone] puts it, aggrieved at the undue reverence shown to an old man of whom the public are being constantly reminded, and who goes on working for them beyond the allotted time, while H.M. is, owing to the life she leads, withdrawn from view….She can’t bear to see the large type which heads the columns of newspapers by “Mr. Gladstone’s movements,” while down below is in small type the Court Circular….She finds Herself with a Prime Minister whose position in this count
ry is unique and unlike that of anyone else of whom She has had experience, or of whom indeed any of Her predecessors had experience.

  Of all the statesmen Victoria worked with, Gladstone was the most visionary. He was utterly unlike the bruised, wisecracking Lord Melbourne, who had preferred inaction to effort. Gladstone wrestled with the greatest questions of his time, vowing to press ahead even if he had to do so alone. He would not have had patience for polls or focus groups—he preferred to try persuasion and leadership. He introduced the first national schooling laws in the Education Act of 1870, cracked the political clout of Irish landlords with the Ballot Act of 1872, disestablished the Anglican Church in Ireland, tried to stamp out the purchase of votes with the Corrupt Practices Act, introduced the test of merit for employment of civil servants, and stopped the practice of men paying for official positions in the army.

  Perhaps there has not been more controversy over Victoria’s veering across constitutional lines because she rarely did so successfully; had she managed to push Gladstone from power, or managed to persuade one of her centrists to form a government, people would have been shocked, and she would have been condemned. Her subjects pictured her ambling around Scotland, not shoving a popularly elected prime minister from his perch. Theirs was a great clash of wills and personalities.*4 Ponsonby grew so tired of passing politely angry missives from Victoria to Gladstone and back again that, during one protracted dispute in 1884, he instructed the prime minister to write directly to his queen. Ponsonby told his wife, Mary, that he had no desire to put his “finger in between two ironclads colliding.”

  * * *

  *1 It happened at the wedding of Alice’s eldest daughter, Victoria, to Henry’s older brother, Louis. Victoria had been distracted by the discovery that Alice’s widower, Louis, the Duke of Hesse, had just married his mistress, a Russian divorcée. She instantly arranged to have the marriage annulled, dispatching Bertie to tell the hapless woman. (She went on to bear the duke’s child, but gave it up for adoption.) “We are a close family when we all agree,” Bertie said. And somewhat brutal.

  *2 As the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Stead would go on to conduct a spectacular exposé of the child sex trade in London—The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon—in 1885, with the help of feminist reformer Josephine Butler. Victoria was horrified by the publication of the gruesome tales for public consumption, and when Stead was arrested for obscenity, she refused to intervene. Gladstone, who was surprisingly uninterested in the stories, hurried reform through Parliament, conscious that Stead might have the names of some compromised MPs. (Gladstone said he was “not well satisfied with the mode in which this mass of horrors has been collected, or as to the moral effect of its general dispersion by sale in the streets.” July 15, 1885, Matthew, Gladstone, 541–42.) But the age of consent was raised from thirteen to sixteen, and penalties were strengthened. Stead, who was on the Titanic when it sank, dying in the icy North Atlantic waters, had gained a lasting fame.

  *3 Both houses of Parliament did not pass Home Rule until 1914, and it was then postponed because of the outbreak of war. It was not until 1921, upon the signing of a treaty after a guerrilla war by nationalists, that Ireland was granted independence. Southern Ireland seceded the following year—and was called the Irish Free State—while Northern Ireland remained under British rule.

  *4 The irony was that one of the few things Victoria and Gladstone agreed on was that it was nonsense to give women the vote, or any political power. The old man protested that it might cause women to undermine the source of their power: “the delicacy, the purity, the refinement, the elevation of her own nature.” Victoria agreed, even while firing rounds of letters and telegrams into her prime minister’s camp, demanding his surrender.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Monarch in a Bonnet

  The symbol that unites this vast Empire is a Crown not a bonnet.

  —LORD ROSEBERY

  They wanted her to wear a crown. That was, after all, what monarchs did. Surely, at her Golden Jubilee, the queen would wear a sparkling reminder of her fifty-year reign, a symbol of her height, command, wealth, and singularity. But Victoria shrugged off the pleas of her prime minister and family. In 1887, she wore a bonnet to her Golden Jubilee, with a plain black dress. She refused to wear the traditional violet velvet robes and the ceremonial crown, or to carry the heavy scepter and orb as she had done so carefully at her coronation half a century ago. There were kings and queens, princesses and princes, great men and women of Europe who dazzled in their plumage, jewels, and finery; but Victoria rolled behind them in her carriage, small and clad in black. This was her hallmark and her instinct, and it was entirely original: she was the queen who wore a bonnet, not a crown. She appeared at the top of the world’s mightiest empire as the meekest of figureheads.

  On June 21, 1887, the brilliantly sunny day of the thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey, Victoria sat in her carriage, shielding her face with a parasol. Fifty years ago, she had been an excited, pretty teenager: the “rose of England.” Today she was a white-haired widow who had given birth nine times, lost a husband, two children, five grandchildren, and her most loyal friend and companion. Instead of thundering through parks on horseback, as she had done as a young girl, she was now pushed around in pony chairs, lame and often exhausted. As she looked around on that bright June day, the deafening roars, the cheers, and the ocean of grinning, upturned, squinting faces overwhelmed her. The Duchess of Cambridge, a lady-in-waiting, described the “masses and millions of people thronging the streets” as looking “like an anthill.”

  A mob of workingmen ran alongside Victoria’s carriage, cheering and shouting as loudly as they could: “You go it, old girl! You done it well! You done it well!” She nodded at them, laughing, as her eyes reddened with tears. Before her were rows of her royal men: her three sons, five sons-in-law, and nine of her grandsons. The swords of the Indian cavalry flashed in the sun. Cream-colored horses pulled state carriages filled with royals, mostly from Europe. Victoria had forty-three family members in the Westminster Abbey procession, including the spouses of her children and grandchildren. Once inside, she sat on top of the scarlet and ermine robes draped over her coronation chair in Westminster Abbey—but, pointedly, “in no way wore them around her person.” She looked down at the members of the House of Commons sitting below her. She scanned their faces, unable to see Gladstone, though he was there.

  The women who attended wore mostly pale colors, white and gray, in the plain morning dress Victoria had prescribed. It was the men who strutted: in scarlet uniforms, embroidered civil suits, and purple velvet episcopal copes that swept the ground.The most glamorous participants were those from the far-flung colonies, “chiefs of Eastern climes” who sported pebble-sized diamonds and emeralds, strung along chests and woven into turbans.

  The queen did make one concession: for the first time in twenty-five years she trimmed her bonnet with white lace and rimmed it with diamonds. Within days, fashionable women of London were wearing similar diamond-bedecked bonnets. One reporter noted this trend disapprovingly at a royal garden party at Buckingham Palace in July, the month after the Jubilee: “Her Majesty and the Princesses at the Abbey wore their bonnets so trimmed in lieu of wearing coronets. It is quite a different matter for ladies to make bejeweled bonnets their wear at garden-parties.”

  Across England for several days, there were fairs, picnics, regattas, sporting tournaments, and dinners for the young, poor, and elderly. For children, the anticipation was magical. A twelve-year-old Winston Churchill wrote to his mother from school: “I can think of nothing but Jubilee.” The two days of celebration concluded with a party for thirty thousand schoolchildren in Hyde Park. They stuffed themselves with meat pies, buns, and oranges, as well as milk, lemonade, and ginger beer. For entertainment, there were six military bands, twenty Punch and Judy shows, a hundred “lucky dip” barrels, eight marionette theaters, nine troupes of performing dogs, ponies, and monkeys, one thousand skipping
ropes with “Jubilee handles,” ten thousand little balloons, and forty-two thousand other toys. Giants strolled alongside pygmies.

  From the northern part of Scotland to the southernmost tip of England, “beacons flamed from most of the hills, and bonfires were lighted and kept blazing until daybreak.” More than a thousand fires were lit in the fifty-two counties of England and Wales alone, and as far north as the Orkney Islands, where locals struggled to see the flames because the skies were still light with the midnight summer sun. The blazing pride of empire lit up the heights of the British Isles. The celebration was unprecedented: there had been some feeble attempts to celebrate George III’s Silver Jubilee in 1785, marking twenty-five years, but few people came.

  Now London was like an enchanted city, flickering with gaslight, oil light, limelight, electric light, candelabra, and fairy lights. So many lamps illuminated the city that in some parts it was brighter than day. A Mr. Breidenbach of Bond Street arranged for jets of violet-scented perfume to be sprayed fifty feet into the air, then lit up by electric lamps.