Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life

by Lucy Worsley

  Yet the vehicle everyone was waiting for was the queen’s. Slowly, ponderously, the ‘cumbrous state-coach’ emerged from beneath the Marble Arch to the ‘general and hearty cheering’ of the crowd.22 According to the composer Felix Mendelssohn, who saw it, it was a ‘golden fairy-like’ vehicle with windows revealing glimpses of a ‘graceful girl’ within, bowing to left and right to acknowledge the cheers. As soon as the coach appeared, ‘the mass of people was completely hidden by their waving handkerchiefs and raised hats, while one roar of cheering almost drowned the pealing of the bells, the blare of the trumpets, and thundering of the guns’. ‘One had to pinch oneself,’ Mendelssohn concluded, ‘to make sure it was not all a dream.’23 Victoria herself was overwhelmed. ‘Their good-humour and excessive loyalty was beyond everything,’ she recorded, ‘and I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation.’24

  It took Victoria a whole hour to cover the half-mile between Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, but at last the golden coach reached the abbey’s great east doors, and she descended. Mendelssohn, who’d been mixing earlier among the crowd, managed to get right up to the abbey’s doors and ‘peered into the solemn obscurity’ before being barred from entry by the scarlet-clad Yeomen of the Guard, whose ‘cheeks suggest beef and whose noses tell tales of whisky and claret’.25

  As Victoria’s little white foot touched the ground, there was the biggest roar of approval so far. And then, she was gone, disappearing inside. The noisy, public part of the coronation was over. Upon the waiting crowds there now ‘fell a sudden silence, the silence of a church’.26

  The people with tickets to the abbey had for the most part risen at four and been en route by five. They had generally arrived in the abbey cloisters at six, there to stand shivering in the wind until the doors opened at seven. One attendee, a young MP named Benjamin Disraeli, hadn’t even been to bed, having only finalised the court costume he was required to wear at half past two.27 By eleven, the congregation had already spent three or four hours inside the abbey, sitting, standing, talking or indeed snoozing. But now, as one body, they turned towards the east doors. ‘I was glad,’ burst out the choir and orchestra, 237 musicians in all, ‘when they said unto me: We will go into the house of the Lord.’28

  Victoria gasped at the sight that met her within. Lady Wilhelmina Stanhope, one of the young ladies carrying the queen’s train, noticed that ‘the colour mounted to her cheeks, brow and even neck, and her breath came quickly.’29 ‘Splendid’, Victoria thought the congregation, many of them, like herself, swathed in red velvet, ‘the bank of Peeresses quite beautiful, all in their robes’.30 Among a host of impressive outfits, that of the Austrian ambassador was particularly noteworthy. Even the heels of his boots were bejewelled. One lady thought that he looked like he’d ‘been caught out in a rain of diamonds, and had come in dripping!’31

  Victoria was accompanied not only by the young ladies who were to carry her train, but also by the Duchess of Sutherland as Mistress of the Robes, who ‘walked, or rather stalked up the Abbey like Juno; she was full of her situation.’32 Throughout the whole ceremony the Bishop of Durham stood near to the queen, supposedly to guide her through the ritual. But he proved to be hopelessly unreliable. The unfortunate bishop ‘never could tell me’, Victoria recorded later, ‘what was to take place’. At one point, he was supposed to hand her the orb, but when he noticed that she had already got it, he was left, once again, ‘so confused and puzzled’.33

  Another hindrance came in the form of the trainbearers’ dresses. Their ‘little trains were serious annoyances’, wrote one of their number, ‘for it was impossible to avoid treading upon them … there certainly should have been some previous rehearsing, for we carried the Queen’s train very jerkily and badly, never keeping step properly’.34 It was the Duchess of Richmond, not the stylish Sutherland, who had signed off the design of the bearers’ dresses, and she found herself ‘much condemned by some of the young ladies for it’. But the Duchess of Richmond had decreed that she would ‘have no discussion with their Mammas’ about what they were to wear. An executive decision was the only way to get the design agreed.35

  Yet many of the spectators watching the little procession’s erratic progress up the aisle were delighted by what they saw. ‘The Queen came in as gay as a lark,’ wrote one of them, ‘and looking like a girl on her birthday.’36 Charles Leslie of the Royal Academy was given a well-placed seat because he had a commission to paint Victoria receiving the sacrament, and needed to be able to see her doing it. He was surprised to find that ‘the first sight of her in her robes’ brought tears into his eyes, because she looked ‘almost like a child’.37

  But her high spirits faded away by the time she reached the middle of the abbey and the ‘foot of the throne’, and Victoria grew subdued.38 The enormity and solemnity of what she was about to undergo seemed to overcome her. She was given a little stool to lean against while she prayed for strength for what was to come. The art historian Marina Warner notes that in the sketches that Victoria made afterwards of the day, she recorded nothing of the splendour of the abbey, nor indeed of the long and chaotic ceremony. She captured simply this moment of private devotion. Her drawings of herself at prayer reveal her sense of the purpose, poignancy and deep power of the occasion.39

  When Victoria rose from her knees, the Archbishop of Canterbury swivelled her round to face, one by one, the four corners of the abbey. He boomed out the words ‘Sirs, I here present unto you the undoubted Queen of this realm. Will ye all swear to do her homage?’ Back from every side there came the sounding of trumpets, the waving of banners and thunderous shouts. ‘God Save Queen Victoria,’ they yelled, with such spirit that it ‘made the poor little Queen turn first very red and then very pale’. ‘Most of the ladies cried,’ recorded one of their number, ‘and I felt I should not forget it as long as I lived.’40

  As the shouts subsided, it was now time for a change of dress, to mark the beginning of Victoria’s transformation from girl to sovereign. Retreating to a special robing room, she took off her crimson cloak and put on ‘a singular sort of little gown of linen trimmed with lace’. This white dress represented her purified, prepared state.

  When she re-entered the abbey, she did so bare-headed. She was presented one by one with the items that would turn her into a monarch. First came the golden robe of a medieval bishop, to show the religious nature of the occasion. Seated upon her throne, she was handed the ancient symbols of kingly authority: spurs, a sword, the sceptre, her ring. Then at last came the very moment of ‘the Crown being placed on my head – which was, I must own, a most beautiful impressive moment; all the Peers and Peeresses put on their Coronets at the same instant.’41 The sound of this moment of the lifting of the coronets had been heard at coronations going back to the Middle Ages, and was once exquisitely described as ‘a sort of feathered, silken thunder’.42

  The ritual was timeless, but this time it was slightly remodelled to suit a girl. Usually a monarch was anointed with holy oil upon his breast. For Victoria, though, this action was thought indelicate and she was anointed just on the head and hands.43 Usually a king wore his blue velvet Order of the Garter round his leg, but Victoria wore hers round her left biceps instead.44 St Edward’s Crown, traditionally used at the climax of the ceremony, had been made for Charles II, a man over 6 feet tall and well able to bear its 5-lb weight. But here problems had been anticipated. A new and smaller ‘Crown of State’ had been specially made ‘according to the Model approved by the Queen’ at a cost of £1,000.45 The orb, however, was still the old one designed for a man. When it was handed to Victoria, she asked what she was supposed to do with it. On being told that she was supposed to carry it in her hand, she was incredulous. ‘Am I?’ she asked. ‘It is very heavy.’46

  Her new crown weighed less than half the load of St Edward’s Crown, but it still gave Victoria a headache. She’d had it made to fit her head extra tightly, so that ‘accident or misadventure’ could no
t cause it to fall off.47 The jewellers Rundell, Bridge & Rundell had made the new crown, and during the build-up towards the coronation it had become the focus of an angry controversy. Mr Bridge had displayed his firm’s finished handiwork to the public in his shop on Ludgate Hill. This was much to the dismay of the touchy Mr Swifte, Keeper of the Regalia at the Tower of London. It was Mr Swifte’s privilege to display the Crown Jewels kept at the Tower to anyone who wanted to see them, for one shilling each, and he’d been counting on a lucrative flood of visitors to pay for the feeding of his numerous and sickly infants. But the new crown proved a greater attraction, and hundreds of people went to Mr Bridge’s shop, Mr Swifte complained, when they would otherwise have come to the Tower. Mr Bridges was not very sympathetic about stealing Mr Swifte’s business. ‘If we were to close our Doors,’ he claimed, ‘I fear they would be forced.’48

  Victoria later confessed that her firmly fitting crown had hurt her ‘a good deal’, but nevertheless she had to sit on her throne in it, while the peers came up one by one to swear loyalty and kiss her hand.49 Most of them did it awkwardly because ‘the throne was very slippery’.50 Indeed, there was a catastrophe when the aged Lord Rolle somehow ‘slipped and rolled down the five or six steps from the throne, on his head, which was a dreadful sight’.51 Victoria leapt up to help him, her spontaneous action earning her a round of applause. A transatlantic pundit, one of the sort whose successors still report upon royal occasions, gravely passed on to his countrymen his misapprehension that ‘the Lords Rolle held their title on the condition of performing the feat at every coronation’.52 When it was Melbourne’s turn to pay homage, Victoria tells us, she grasped his hand ‘with all my heart, at which he looked up with his eyes filled with tears’.53

  Next came one of the subtle, popularising innovations in the service. For the first time in history, 500 members of the House of Commons, seated in their own special ‘Gallery over the Altar’, now gave nine cheers.54 The members were, in the main, excited to take part. They ‘hear, hear’ed’ those among their number who were usually notoriously scruffy in appearance, but who’d risen to the occasion with ‘splendid attire’. The loudest cheers went to a Scottish MP who turned up in ‘the plaid of his clan’, and to another who appeared in a ‘peach-coloured velvet Court dress’.55 But some, like the radical Joseph Hume, had refused to wear court dress, and had therefore been banned from attendance.56

  Seated at the centre of all these excited people, Victoria herself was dignified and calm, going through the ceremony with panache, ‘as if she had often been crowned before’.57 She felt comforted by Melbourne’s ‘fatherly look’ and by the occasional glimpse of ‘dearly beloved angelic Lehzen’. Seated in a box high up towards the roof of the abbey, Lehzen was watching her former pupil so intently that when the queen’s eyes finally fell upon her, they were able to exchange smiles.58 The proud glance of a governess presents quite a contrast to the stir caused at George IV’s coronation when he was observed to exchange fond looks with his mistress Lady Conyngham.

  Victoria’s mother was, of course, present in the abbey as well, but Victoria does not mention her once in her whole long description of the ceremony. His friends (he did have some friends) noticed that Sir John Conroy was absent: ‘I glanced my eye yesterday from Mother to Daughter,’ wrote one of them, ‘then ran it along the line, in the rear, & missed you.’59 Victoire must have missed Conroy too. She’d had him by her side for twenty years, longer than either of her husbands.

  Rather than reaching a magnificent conclusion, the ceremony had overrun, and it tailed off into a certain amount of confusion and disorder. The Lord Treasurer dispersed commemorative medals to the participants, and found himself ‘nearly torn to pieces’ as the pages leapt up to grab them. Victoria was eventually released back into her robing room, where she ‘complained of a headache’. She put down the weighty orb and sceptre, ‘unclasped her mantle, took off her crown, and, having got rid of all her royalty, sat down on the sofa’.60 She found it hard to remove the coronation ring, for the Archbishop had shoved it onto the wrong digit, and it came off only ‘with great pain’ and iced water.

  The misfortune with the ring was just one of a number of mistakes. Disraeli thought the whole affair revealed a sad ‘want of rehearsal’. He judged that Melbourne had held the sword of state ineptly, ‘like a butcher’, and he’d spotted Lord Ward ‘drinking champagne out of a pewter pot, his coronet cocked aside’.61 Melbourne, too, ‘completely tired’, had felt it necessary to refresh himself from the sandwiches and bottles of wine scattered across the altar of St Edward’s Chapel behind the scenes.62 No wonder, after such an early start. It was traditional for peers to conceal sandwiches inside their coronets, and some of those attending the 1911 coronation of Victoria’s grandson George V, another June occasion, would admit to journalists their fears that the butter in their sandwiches might melt and leak.63 And now everyone had a long wait before they could leave the abbey. One spectator, the writer Harriet Martineau, had brought her own sandwich, and book, and read the latter comfortably while ‘leaning against my friendly pillar’, but others, less well prepared, simply ‘sat or lay down’ on the dirty floor, ‘in dust half a foot deep’.64

  Despite her ordeal, Victoria was ‘really not feeling tired’ when she arrived back at Buckingham Palace a little after six.65 One celebrated account of the day has her skipping into the palace to hear her dog ‘barking with joy in the hall’ and running upstairs ‘to go to wash little Dash’.66 It seems highly unlikely, yet it was a story that gained circulation because of the way it illustrated something that was plain to see: the young queen’s ‘great animal spirits’. They were noticed and praised even by ‘The Gruncher’, who described how she entered into ‘the magnificent novelties of her position with the zest and curiosity of a child’.67

  The evening was occupied by a relatively small dinner for thirteen, then Victoria stayed to twelve ‘on Ma.’s balcony looking at the fireworks in Green Park, which were quite beautiful’.68 This reference to her mama’s balcony at midnight is the only time in Victoria’s record of the day when her mother appears. It is striking how much of the long entry is taken up instead with the actions and words of Melbourne. For her, he had become the centre of the world.

  Witty, worldly, but fatherly, Melbourne was the real reason that Victoria had so enjoyed these early months of being queen. His charming, sophisticated conversation was exactly the opposite of the guarded gloom of the ‘System’. But some of Victoria’s subjects thought that she was showing an unhealthy favouritism to, indeed a dangerous dependence upon, the man she called ‘Lord M.’ And behind the splendour of her coronation day, there was a quiet but persistent grumbling note.

  To many it seemed that it wasn’t just Westminster Abbey that was covered in ‘dust half a foot deep’, but also the monarchy itself. Had Victoria been less young, less loveable, it might well have been an institution in danger. Underlying the comments upon the many mess-ups during the ceremony was the idea that in this modern age a coronation, medieval at its heart, had become an anachronism. This was an age of reform; was the mummery still necessary? Coronations were fit only for ‘barbarous’ earlier ages, announced one speaker in the House of Lords, ‘for periods when crowns were won and lost by unruly violence and ferocious contests’.69 Harriet Martineau in her high balcony, a popular and much-read journalist, had watched the peeresses with much distaste. She found the archaic outfits below most unseemly, and would have preferred ‘the decent differences of dress which, according to middle-class custom, pertain to contrasting periods of life’. She particularly criticised the peers’ wives, ‘old hags, with their dyed or false hair’, their bare arms and necks so ‘wrinkled as to make one sick’. She did not like the ‘mixing up of the Queen and the God, such homage to both, and adulation so like in kind and degree that, when one came to think of it, it made one’s blood run cold’.70

  But what carried over the doubtful, what marked a fresh start after the unpleasantness of th
e Royal Dukes was the figure of the young queen herself. Even radicals couldn’t dislike a girl. In fact, as the historian John Plunkett notes, the most important part of Victoria’s coronation wasn’t taking place in the abbey at all. It was happening out in the Hyde Park Fair, awash with ‘iced champagne, ditto soda water, and ginger beer’.71

  It was happening on the streets of London, and indeed in other towns far away. By contrast with the creaky ancient ritual in the abbey, the celebrations outside were full of novelty. At the very moment of the crowning, 2 p.m. on coronation day, one ‘Mrs Graham’ ascended from the Hyde Park fairground in her hot air balloon. (Unfortunately, as she landed in Marylebone, the descent of her craft damaged a building, and falling masonry crushed a man to death.72) Meanwhile, in Preston, a local printer had his press drawn through the town by horses as part of the local celebratory procession, and he continuously printed off handbills outlining Victoria’s life story so far for the crowd to buy. A penny a pop, they powerfully combined monarchy and the modern media.73 Cheap, sometimes crude, but ubiquitous pictures of the new queen, plastered onto all sorts of products, enraged the more sophisticated observers who despised Regina-mania. The popular prints dwelt constantly on Victoria’s (non-existent) beauty, not only of her ‘face and features, but of her feet and even of her slippers’.74

  With the forces of technology on her side against the monarchy’s detractors, Victoria must have concluded that being queen was fun, and that it suited her. It seemed, on coronation day, that she could do no wrong. Yet there wasn’t enough ginger beer and champagne in the world to win over all the unconvinced, and her honeymoon wasn’t to last long.