QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  When we went into the drawing-room, and huddled about the door in the sort of half-shy, half-awkward way people do, the Queen advanced, and spoke to everybody in succession ... As the words of Kings and Queens are precious, and as a fair sample of a royal after-dinner colloquy, I shall record my dialogue with accurate fidelity.

  Q. 'Have you been riding to-day Mr Greville?

  G. 'No, Madam, I have not.'

  Q. 'It was a fine day.'

  G. 'Yes, Ma'am, a very fine day.'

  Q. 'It was rather cold though.'

  G. (like Polonius). 'It was rather cold, Madam.'

  Q. 'Your sister, Ly. Francis Egerton, rides I think, does not She?'

  G. 'She does ride sometimes, Madam.'

  (A pause, when I took the lead through adhering to the same topic.)

  G. 'Has your Majesty been riding to-day?'

  Q. (with animation). 'O yes, a very long ride.'

  G. 'Has your Majesty got a nice horse?'

  Q. 'O, a very nice horse.'

  - gracious smile and inclination of head on part of Queen, profound bow on mine, and then She turned again to Lord Grey. Directly after I was deposited at the whist table to make up the Duchess of Kent's party, and all the rest of the company were arranged about a large round table (the Queen on the sofa by it), where they passed about an hour and a half in what was probably the smallest possible talk, interrupted and enlivened, however, by some songs which Ossulston sang. We had plenty of instrumental music during and after dinner.

  Nobody expects from her any clever, amusing, or interesting talk, above all no stranger can expect it. She is very civil to everybody, and there is more of frankness, cordiality, and good-humour in her manner than of dignity. She looks and speaks cheerfully: there was nothing to criticise, nothing particularly to admire. The whole thing seemed to be dull, perhaps unavoidably so, but still so dull that it is a marvel how anybody can like such a life. This was an unusually large party, and therefore more than usually dull and formal; but it is much the same sort of thing every day. Melbourne was not there, which I regretted, as I had some curiosity to see Her Majesty and her Minister together.9

  Had Melbourne been of the company that evening, Greville would have seen the Queen in a far more lively mood.

  The Queen's relationship with Melbourne was of the closest and most trusting kind. He was fifty-eight when she came to the throne, still attractive though rather portly now, sophisticated and urbane. She delighted in his conversation, rejoiced in his celebrated epigrams, aphorisms and paradoxes, his well-told reminiscences, his brilliant table-talk and anecdotes which were full of irreverent, heterodoxical and sometimes flippant asides but usually contained information 'of the most interesting kind'. It became 'a source of great amusement' to her to 'collect his "sayings"'. 'He has such stores of knowledge,' she wrote; 'such a wonderful memory; he knows about everybody and everything; who they were and what they did.' He remembered things 'from thirteen months old' and his days at Eton in great detail.10 She delighted in the stories he told her about Napoleon and Byron, Pitt and Charles James Fox, her wicked uncles, and was very pleased that he did not include their brother, her father, as being of their naughty company. 'From all what I heard,' she wrote, 'my father was the best of all.'11

  His conversation was not only unfailingly interesting, it made her laugh. He would plead, for example, that he rarely went to church 'for fear of hearing something very extraordinary'. Besides, his 'father and mother never went. People didn't use to go so much formerly; it wasn't the fashion.' Or he would protest that it was almost worthwhile for a woman to be beaten by her husband, 'considering the exceeding pity she excites'. In the world of Whiggery, in which Whigs were 'all cousins', people used never to change their lives when they married: 'they were very fond of their wives, but did not take care of them, and left them to themselves'. Chastity was not prized and there was 'great licence'. In any case, the wife was 'always in the wrong'.

  Whig families like his also emphasized their separateness from the rest of society by bestowing nicknames which were recognized only by the cognoscenti and they pronounced words in a peculiarly Whiggish way. When Queen Victoria was once asked if Lord Melbourne had been a proper Whig she replied that he must have been because he spoke in a recognizably Whiggish manner, pronouncing Rome as 'room' and gold as 'goold'.[xii]12

  Talking of children he said that 'almost everybody's character was formed by their mother and that if children did not turn out well, their mothers should be punished for it'. Talking of doctors he would say that the English variety killed you while the French merely let you die; and commenting on horse racing he would express the opinion that the Derby was 'not perfect without somebody killing himself. Yet at heart he was 'such a good man', 'excellent and moral with such a strong feeling against immorality and wickedness'. One day when she remarked that there were so few good preachers in the Church, he agreed with her and added, 'But there are not many very good anything.' That was very true, the Queen thought. She was equally sure, though, that he was one of the 'very good'.13

  Having so high an opinion of Melbourne's talents and virtues, she basked in his skilful flattery. Her shyness, he assured her, was not only appealing, it was indicative of a sensitive and susceptible temperament; her smallness, of which she was continually conscious, was a positive advantage in a queen; her inexperience was all to the good: she came to her duties fresh and unprejudiced. Upon her complaining of the great difficulty she had in keeping her temper when she was 'very much irritated and plagued' and how 'very sorry' she was when she 'let it out' towards her servants, he comforted her by observing that a person who had rather a choleric disposition might control it, never wholly got over it and could not help letting it out at times.

  He endeavoured to curb her tendency to intolerance and to a truthful directness which verged on tactlessness; but the advice was given in such a 'kind and fatherly' way she never resented it. Nor did she mind when he warned her that, having inherited the Hanoverian tendency to plumpness, she was liable to grow 'very fat'.

  The Queen was well aware of Melbourne's past amours, of the divorce cases in which he had been involved, of his late, unbalanced wife, Lady Caroline Ponsonby, who had been so much in love with Byron, and of his pathetic, infantile son, also dead. These misfortunes made him all the more fascinating in her eyes, all the more to be pitied, loved and indulged. She soon concluded 'that he was, in fact, the best-hearted, kindest and most feeling man in the world ... straightforward, clever and good', a 'most truly honest and noble-minded man'. She esteemed herself 'most fortunate to have such a man at the head of the government', a man in whom she could 'safely place confidence'. There were 'not many like him in this world of deceit'.[xiii]14

  Drawn to Melbourne by their common experience of loneliness, the Queen spoke to him of her past life, as well as the problems and business of politics, talking to him for three or four hours a day and writing to him on the occasions when they could not meet. These occasions were rare enough since he now virtually lived at Court where their intimacy was plain for all to see. 'I have seen the Queen with her Prime Minister,' wrote Princess Lieven. 'When he is with her he looks loving, contented, a little pleased with himself; respectful, at his ease, as if accustomed to take first place in the circle, and dreamy and gay - all mixed up together.'15 Charles Greville, who suspected that the Queen's feelings for him were 'sexual though she [did] not know it', thought that no man was more formed to ingratiate himself with her than Lord Melbourne.

  He treats her with unbounded confidence and respect, he consults her tastes and her wishes, and he puts her at her ease by his frank and natural manners, while he amuses her by the quaint, queer, epigrammatic turn of his mind, and his varied knowledge upon all subjects ... [He is] so parental and anxious, but always so respectful and deferential ... She is continually talking to him. Let who will be there, he always sits next to her at dinner, and by arrangement, because he always takes in the Lady-in-Waiting which neces
sarily places him next to her, the etiquette being that the Lady-in-Waiting sits next but one to the Queen. It is not unnatural, and to him it is peculiarly interesting. I have no doubt he is passionately fond of her as he might be of his daughter if he had one, and the more because he is a man with capacity for loving without having anything in the world to love. It is become his province to educate, instruct, and form the most interesting mind and character in the world ... Melbourne thinks highly of her sense, discretion, and good feeling.16

  Content as she was to listen to his advice, to be instructed in such simple matters of propriety as the inadvisability of receiving divorced women at Court, of allowing maids-of-honour to walk unchaperoned on the terraces at Windsor Castle and of accepting the dedication of novels until he had read them to ensure that they contained nothing 'objectionable', the Queen was always ready, having formed her own views, to express her own opinions.17

  While the Queen's feelings for Melbourne may have been subconsciously sexual, as Charles Greville suggested, she herself said that she loved him like 'a father'. She forgave him when he fell asleep after dinner and when he snored, as he did even in chapel, or became 'very absent' and began talking to himself, 'loud enough to be heard but never loud enough to be understood'. 'I am now, from habit,' she wrote, 'quite accustomed to it; but at first I turned round, thinking he was talking to me.' By way of apology, and then with welcome regularity, bouquets of flowers would arrive at the Palace from Brocket Hall, Melbourne's house in Hertfordshire.

  Although he was conscientious in instructing the young and, in many respects, naive Queen about the political problems of the day, the workings of Parliament and the Cabinet, and the mysteries of the Constitution - leaving Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, to acquaint her with international relations - Lord Melbourne cannot be said to have aroused the Queen's social conscience, or to have made her more aware of the pitiable conditions in which so many of her people lived and which she had briefly glimpsed in her travels in the Midlands and in the North before her accession to the throne. Melbourne was far from being an idle man. That acute observer, the Revd Sydney Smith, commented: 'Our Viscount is somewhat of an impostor ... I am sorry to hurt any man's feelings and to brush away the magnificent fabric of levity and gaiety he has reared, but I accuse our Minister of honesty and diligence. '18 Yet Melbourne's suspicion of reform and of the motives of reformers, his not altogether flippant suggestion that one should 'try to do no good' and then one wouldn't 'get into any scrapes', undoubtedly had their effect on the still developing sensibilities of the young Queen Victoria. He maintained that Sir Walter Scott was quite right to suggest that it was not worthwhile bothering with the poor; it was better to 'leave them alone'. Melbourne was quite convinced that the attempts by his niece's husband, Lord Ashley, later Lord Shaftesbury, to improve the conditions of children working in mines and factories were quite unnecessary and doomed to failure: since education of such children would never 'do any good'; parents should be free 'to send them under a certain age to work'.

  One day the Queen mentioned that she had just read Oliver Twist and had been much affected by its 'accounts of starvation in the Workhouses'. But Melbourne dismissed the book as one of Dickens's own blinkered characters might well have done: 'It's all among Workhouses, and Coffin Makers, and Pickpockets ... It's all slang; just like the Beggar's Opera ... I don't like these things; I wish to avoid them; I don't like them in reality and therefore I don't wish to see them represented.'19 As for railways, which were built by Irishmen - 'who mind neither lord nor laws' - and which he refused to have within fifteen miles of his house at Brocket, he didn't 'care about them'. 'None of these modern inventions,' he told the Queen, 'consider human life.'20

  Chapter 9

  CORONATION

  'What was called an Altar was covered with sandwiches, bottles of wine, etc'

  After a disturbed night in which she had 'a feeling that something awful was going to happen tomorrow', the Queen was woken up at four o'clock in the morning in her bedroom at Buckingham Palace by the sound of guns in the Park, and 'could not get much sleep afterwards on account of the noise of the people, bands etc. etc.'. It was Thursday, 28 June 1838 and she was to be crowned that day in Westminster Abbey. Thousands of people had travelled to London the day before until, as the diarist Mary Frampton told her mother, there were 'stoppages in every street ... Hundreds of people waiting ... to get lifts on the railway in vain ... Not a fly or cab to be had for love or money. Hackney coaches £8 or £12 each, double to foreigners. '1

  'The uproar, the confusion, the crowd, the noise are indescribable,' Charles Greville confirmed. 'Horsemen, footmen, carriages squeezed, jammed, intermingled, the pavement blocked up with timbers [for the spectators' stands], hammering and knocking and falling fragments stunning the ears and threatening the head ... The town all mob, thronging, bustling, gaping and gazing at everything, at anything, or at nothing. The Park one vast encampment, with banners floating on the tops of tents and still the roads are covered, the railroads loaded with arriving multitudes.' He found the racket 'uncommonly tiresome', yet he had to concede that the 'great merit of this Coronation is that so much has been done for the people [the theatres, for example, and many other places of entertainment were to be free that night]. To amuse and interest them seems to have been the principal object.'2 While not prepared to spend as much as the lavish sum of £243,000 which Parliament had voted for the coronation of King George IV, the Government were prepared to ensure that the ceremony in the Abbey and its attendant processions and celebrations were conducted with appropriate grandeur and an eye to the enjoyment of the people. £70,000 was deemed a reasonable sum, £20,000 more than had been spent on the coronation of King William IV.

  Much attention was paid to the pretty dresses of the Queen's eight young, unmarried trainbearers, the Queen's own three different robes, the new uniforms of the Warders of the Tower and the Yeomen of the Guard, the regalia to be used in the various rites of the Abbey service, and the crown which had been used for the coronation of George IV but which had to be modified for Queen Victoria's much smaller head before being reset with diamonds, pearls, rubies, emeralds and sapphires.

  'It was a fine day,' the Queen, having been up since seven o'clock, wrote in her journal, recalling the long ride to the Abbey in the state coach drawn by eight cream horses, down gravelled streets lined with policemen and soldiers, up Constitution Hill to Hyde Park Corner, then down Piccadilly, St James's and Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, accompanied by the Duchess of Sutherland, her Mistress of the Robes, and the Earl of Albemarle, the Master of the Horse.

  'The crowds of people exceeded what I have ever seen,' the Queen continued her account. 'Many as there were the day I went to the City, it was nothing - nothing to the multitude, the millions of my loyal subjects, who were assembled in every spot to witness the Procession. Their good humour and excessive loyalty was beyond everything, and I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation. I was alarmed at times for fear that the people would be crushed and squeezed on account of the tremendous rush and pressure.'3 But she kept smiling and bowing from side to side.

  Preceded by the Royal Huntsmen, the Yeomen Prickers and Foresters and the Yeomen of the Guard, and followed by an escort of cavalry, the state coach drew up outside the Abbey door to be greeted by thunderous cheers. Inside the Abbey there were more cheers for the Queen and clapping, too, for Lord Melbourne and for the Duke of Wellington and for Wellington's opponent in the Peninsular War, Marshal Soult, created Duke of Dalmatia by Napoleon and appointed French Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of St James's by Louis-Philippe, King of the French. 'Soult was so much cheered, both in and out of the Abbey,' commented the dandiacal merchant, Thomas Raikes, 'that he was completely overcome. He has since publicly said, "C'est le plus beau jour de ma vie. It shows that the English believe I have always fought loyally." In the Abbey he seized the arm of his aide-de-camp, quite overpowered, and exclaimed, "
This is truly a great people."'4

  Wellington was predictably not so pleased by his own reception, the 'great shout and clapping of hands'. He looked down the aisle 'with an air of vexation', his friend, Lady Salisbury thought, as if to say, 'This should be for the Queen.'5 She fully deserved the acclamation, the Duke considered: she carried herself with such charm, dignity and grace, never more so than when the frail and ancient Lord Rolle tripped up as he approached her to make his homage. 'It turned me very sick,' the writer, Harriet Martineau, recorded. 'The large, infirm old man was held by two peers, and had nearly reached the footstool when he slipped through the hands of his supporters, and rolled over and over down the steps, lying at the bottom coiled up in his robes. He was instantly lifted up; and he tried again and again, amidst shouts of admiration of his valour.'6 'May I not get up and meet him?' the Queen asked in anxious concern; and, since no one answered her, she outstretched her hand as he manfully rose to his feet and attempted to climb the steps once more as the congregation's vociferous cheers echoed round the Abbey walls.7

  Wellington's high opinion of the Queen's demeanour was commonly shared. As she caught her first glimpse of the brilliant assembly in the Abbey she was seen to catch her breath and turn pale, clasping her hands in front of her. One of her trainbearers, Lady Wilhelmina Stanhope, believed 'her heart fluttered a little' as they reached the throne; 'at least the colour mounted to her cheeks, brow, and even neck, and her breath came quickly'8 and there were those who regarded with some disapproval the smile she exchanged with Baroness Lehzen when, while sitting on the throne, she caught sight of that 'most dear Being' in the box above the royal box.