Chapter 26
'PAM IS OUT'
'The levity of the man is really inconceivable.'
Lord John Russell, third son of the sixth Duke of Bedford, was an emaciated little man, not noticeably taller than his dumpy monarch who found him stubborn, opinionated and graceless. He would be better company, she said, 'if he had a third subject; for he was interested in nothing except the Constitution of 1688 and himself'.1 Worse than this, he was either incapable or unwilling to curb the excesses of his tiresome Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston.
Month after month the Queen and Prince had cause to complain of Palmerston's behaviour, his continued habit of sending her drafts of his despatches after the despatches themselves had been sent, his agreeing to alterations and then taking no notice of them, the intemperate language in which some of them were framed, in one case so annoying the Spanish government that they expelled the British Ambassador from Madrid, in another wording a despatch which the Queen described as being 'unworthy of a gentleman'.2 It made her feel ill, she told her doctor, to read such things. In January 1849 the tiresome man went so far as secretly to supply Garibaldi's rebels in Sicily with arms for use in an uprising against their legitimate sovereign, King Ferdinand II. It really was too bad, the Queen complained: it was she, after all, who had to bear the responsibility for such activities.3
She told the Prime Minister, not for the first time, that the day might well come when she would have to insist upon having the man dismissed. Could not some other appointment for him be found? Could he be sent to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant? Russell toyed with the idea, considering the possibility of offering him an earldom and the Order of the Garter as an inducement. But then Palmerston said he was willing to apologize fully for any problems he may have caused; and so he was still Foreign Secretary when the country was brought to the brink of war after the house of a Jewish merchant of Portuguese descent, Don David Pacifico, Portugal's Consul-General in Athens, had been burned down by an anti-semitic mob of Greek Orthodox rioters. Don Pacifico sent an absurdly inflated bill for damages of £80,000 to the King of Greece. The Greek government naturally rejected it; and, since he had been born in Gibraltar and was accordingly a British subject, Don Pacifico appealed for help to London.
Palmerston was quite ready to intervene and a fleet was despatched to blockade Piraeus and seize ships of a sufficient value to meet Don Pacifico's claims. This was too much for both France and Russia to tolerate. Palmerston had provoked another diplomatic crisis, though he seemed quite unconcerned by all the fuss. The Queen, who had given birth to her seventh child, Prince Arthur, on 1 May 1850, wrote in her diary a fortnight later, 'The levity of the man is really inconceivable.'4 She told Lord John Russell that he really must be forced to leave the Foreign Office.
The next month, however, Palmerston made his position virtually unassailable by a speech in the House which even the Queen felt obliged to describe as 'most brilliant'. For nearly five hours, 'without stopping for one moment even to drink a little water', he justified his actions with a peroration which delighted the nationalist sentiments of his countrymen and was worthy of a man who, after Prince Albert's death, the Queen decided had, 'with all his many faults, the honour and power of his country strongly at heart':
As the Roman in days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus Sum, so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.5
The debate lasted four days but the issue could not be in doubt. The week before, the Conservative leader, Lord Stanley, had moved a vote of censure on the Government in the House of Lords which had been carried by thirty-seven votes; now, in the House of Commons, Palmerston had ensured that the Government would survive; and so, by forty-six votes, it did.
The Queen, much as she could not help but admire the Foreign Secretary's speech, could not condone his actions. With Prince Albert to help her, she composed a memorandum to be sent to the Prime Minister setting out what was in future to be expected from Lord Palmerston, and making clear that if he 'arbitrarily altered or modified' measures to which the Queen had given her royal sanction she would 'exercise her constitutional right of dismissing' him. He was, she recognized, an 'able, sagacious, patriotic and courageous' man, but 'his modes of proceeding were often too violent and corrupt', while the language of his despatches 'was often less calculated to conciliate than to mortify and offend'.6
Lord John sent this memorandum to Palmerston who asked to be granted an interview with Prince Albert. The Prince was, as he confessed, moved by the demeanour of the Foreign Secretary who appeared before him 'much agitated' and with tears in his eyes. He undertook to mend his ways. He had promised to do so before, however; and neither then nor now did he do so.7
A month after Palmerston's interview with Prince Albert there arrived in London on a tour of Europe a retired Austrian general with a most unsavoury reputation. This was Julius, Freiherr von Haynau, known to the public in England as 'Hyena', a man who had suppressed nationalist uprisings in Hungary and in Brescia in Italy with notorious brutality and who was alleged to have had a woman flogged almost to the point of death. Soon after his arrival in London, where his evil reputation had been broadcast by Hungarian refugees, he visited Barclay and Perkins's Brewery. Immediately recognized by his martial bearing and by the prominent nose, deep-set eyes and enormous yellow moustache which had been featured in caricatures of him in the popular press, he was set upon by draymen who knocked 'the Austrian butcher' down, beat him with broom handles and dragged him along Bankside by his hair and whiskers. An apology for this degrading treatment of one of the Emperor of Austria's generals was drafted by Palmerston for despatch to the Emperor's Ambassador in London, but it was accompanied by some aspersions on the regime for which General Haynau had fought and a suggestion that he had been ill-advised to come to England at a time when he was likely to be unwelcome here. Sent this draft, the Queen asked for some alterations to be made to it, only to be told, as she had been so often told in the past, that the text had already been despatched.8 As though it were excuse enough for this breach of his undertaking not to send unapproved despatches, Palmerston assured the Queen that he had 'good reason to know that General Haynau's ferocious and unmanly treatment of the unfortunate inhabitants of Brescia and of other places and towns in Italy ... and his barbarous acts in Hungary excited almost as much disgust in Austria as in England'.9
The next year a leader of those Hungarian revolutionaries against whom Haynau had acted with such brutality, Lajos Kossuth, also arrived in London where he addressed several mass meetings, speaking in excellent English which he had taught himself in prison from a study of the Bible and Shakespeare.
The welcome accorded to this enemy of Austria - the 'stupid Kossuth fever', as she referred to it - exasperated the Queen; and, when she learned that her Foreign Secretary intended to receive the revolutionary, she threatened to dismiss him if he presumed to do so. The Prime Minister warned him not to be so provocative. Palmerston replied that he would not be told whom he could and whom he could not receive in his own house.10 But, as he had done in the past, he climbed down rather than be dismissed. 'Oh wonder,' wrote the Queen who had reason to believe that he had seen Kossuth anyway. 'Lord Palmerston yielded to the general will ... He lowers himself more and more.'11
He had, however, survived only to make more trouble. Having first caused offence by officially receiving a deputation of radicals who thanked and praised him for his support of Kossuth and who referred to the Emperors of Austria and Russia as 'odious and detestable assassins', he then entangled himself with the politics of France where Prince Louis Napoleon, the Austrian Emperor's nephew, who had been elected President of the French Republic in December 1848, staged a coup d'etat at the beginning of December 1851 and later declared himself Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.
On hearing of this coup, the Queen wrote to the
Prime Minister asking him to tell Lord Normanby, British Ambassador in Paris, to do nothing for the moment. Normanby was consequently instructed that 'nothing should be done ... which would wear the appearance of an interference of any kind in the internal affairs of France'.12 When Normanby next called on the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, however, the Minister told him that he had heard from Count Walewski, Napoleon I's illegitimate son and the French Ambassador in London, that Lord Palmerston had already expressed to him the British Government's full approval of the French Emperor's coup d'etat.
The Queen, who had hoped that one of her Orleans relations might perhaps become King of France one day, was extremely angry when she learned of this latest example of Lord Palmerston's infuriating independence.
Lord John Russell agreed that this time Lord Palmerston had gone too far and must be required to resign, popular though he was in the country. It was no good his making the excuse that what he said to the French Ambassador was his own private view and not the Government's official opinion. His lack of 'decorum and prudence' was such that he could no longer be trusted with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The Queen and Prince Albert had been most concerned by Palmerston's friendly reception of the radicals who came to thank him for his support of Kossuth. But this fresh contretemps provided a more satisfactory excuse to get rid of him. Lord John offered him the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, an offer which he rejected with the observation that he could scarcely be considered lacking in 'decorum and prudence' since these were qualities which surely were required in Ireland as much as anywhere else.13
Palmerston is out! actually, really and irretrievably out [Charles Greville recorded in his diary on 23 December 1851]. I nearly dropt off my chair yesterday afternoon, when at five o'clock, a few moments after the Cabinet had broken up [Lord Granville, a favourite at Court] rushed into my room and said 'Pam is out, the offer of the F. Office goes to Clarendon to-night, and if he refuses (which of course he will not) it is to be offered to me!!... December 24th. To my unspeakable astonishment Granville informed me yesterday that Clarendon had refused the Foreign Office and that he had accepted it.14
'Our relief was great,' wrote the Queen in her journal, 'and we felt quite excited by the news, for our anxiety and worry during the last five years and a half, which were indescribable, was mainly, if not entirely, caused by [Lord Palmerston]. It is a great and unexpected mercy.'15
Chapter 27
THE GREAT EXHIBITION
'Dearest Albert's name is for ever immortalized.'
'It was the happiest, proudest day in my life, and I can think of nothing else,' the Queen wrote of 1 May 1851. 'Albert's dearest name is for ever immortalized with this great conception, his own, and my own dear country showed she was worthy of it.'1
At the beginning of the previous year, the Prince, as President of the Royal Society of Arts, had presided over the first meeting of the Commissioners for the Great Exhibition which had been conceived as a means of demonstrating that the progress of mankind depended upon international cooperation, that the prosperity of one country depended upon the prosperity of others, and that Britain's mission was 'to put herself at the head of the diffusion of civilization'.
The idea had been discussed in the summer of 1849 at a conference in Buckingham Palace attended by, amongst others, Thomas Cubitt, the builder, John Scott Russell, the civil engineer, who was Secretary of the Royal Society of Arts, and the versatile Henry Cole, soon to be the Society's Chairman. Cole was a remarkable and astonishingly versatile man. At one time or another an assistant keeper of the Public Record Office, closely concerned with the inauguration of the penny post, exhibitor at the Royal Academy, newspaper and magazine editor, writer of children's books, associated with the establishment of schools of music and cookery, ceramic designer, Secretary of the Anti-Corn-Law League, friend of the novelist Thomas Love Peacock, whose collected works he edited, and of W. M. Thackeray, Cole was a man not only of extraordinary resource and energy, but also of unfailing good temper. The Prince -making one of those rather heavily humorous plays on words which so much appealed to him - would say, when faced with some difficulty or delay, 'We must have steam, send for Cole.'2
The difficulties were, indeed, formidable. There were problems in finding a suitable site for the Exhibition: Battersea Fields, Regent's Park, Primrose Hill, the Isle of Dogs, Leicester Square, and the courtyard of Somerset House were all suggested before it was decided to settle upon Hyde Park, much to the displeasure of people whose houses overlooked it or were in the habit of riding there, as well as of The Times, which forecast that the whole of the park would become 'a bivouac of all vagabonds'. Kensington and Belgravia would be uninhabitable and the Season would be ruined. 'The annoyance inflicted on the neighbourhood will be indescribable ... We can scarcely bring ourselves to believe that the advisers of the Prince cared to connect his name with such an outrage to the feelings and wishes of the inhabitants of the metropolis.'3
Other Jeremiahs forecast food shortages caused by the crowds of foreigners who would come to see the Exhibition, as well as riots, robberies and an influx of 'bad characters at present scattered over the country' which would make it advisable for all 'wise persons residing near the Park to keep a sharp look out over their silver forks and spoons and servant maids'.4 Engineers, so Prince Albert told the King of Prussia in a facetious letter, had warned that the galleries would collapse killing the visitors beneath; doctors that the Black Death would break out again; 'theologians that this second Tower of Babel would draw upon it the vengeance of an offended God'.5
Henry Manning, the future Cardinal, who had been received into the Roman Catholic Church in April that year, did, indeed, condemn the project as a potential danger to faith and morals, while the King of Hanover, as ready to cause trouble in England as he had been as Duke of Cumberland in the past, warned the Crown Prince William of Prussia and his wife and son not to accept the Queen's invitation to 'this rubbishy Exhibition'. 'I am not easily given to panicking,' King Ernest added, 'but I confess to you that I would not like anyone belonging to me exposed to the imminent peril of these times. Letters from London tell me that the Ministers will not allow the Queen and the great originator of this folly, Prince Albert, to be in London while the Exhibition is on.'6 When it became known that, after 230 entries proposing ideas for the Exhibition hall had been rejected, a huge glass building, designed by Joseph Paxton, the superintendent of the Duke of Devonshire's gardens at Chatsworth, was to be erected in the Park, the alarmists became more vociferous than ever: the Crystal Palace, as Punch was the first to call it - 'a cucumber frame between two chimneys', in John Ruskin's description - would be blown down in the first strong gale; the galleries would collapse; hailstones and thunder would smash the glass; the sparrows in the tall elm trees which were to be enclosed in the edifice would spatter visitors and exhibits alike.[xxxiii]
The Prime Minister, concerned by talk of riots and assaults, consulted the Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Wellington, who considered that soldiers, largely cavalry, should be employed but kept out of sight, as he had suggested at the time of the Chartist demonstration in 1848. But Prince Albert did not like this talk of soldiers: he argued that the presence of the military would not be in keeping with the tone and purpose of the Exhibition. So the Prime Minister suggested enlisting policemen from Paris. The Duke might as well have been asked to send for bashi-bazouks or Zulu warriors. He replied to Lord John Russell's proposition in a letter which made the Prime Minister hastily and apologetically explain that he was only trying to be helpful. 'I feel,' the Duke protested, 'no want of confidence in my own powers to preserve the public peace and to provide for the general safety without requiring the assistance of French officers.'7
Colonel Charles Sibthorp, the anti-Catholic, anti-Reform, ultra-Tory Lincolnshire landowner, who was Member of Parliament for Lincoln, forecast all manner of evils likely to result from a needless exhibition of foreign paraphernalia which was no less than an advertisement for f
ree trade and all its attendant threats to landed society. The whole concept, Sibthorp declared in the House in his usual wild manner, was 'the greatest trash, the greatest fraud and the greatest imposition ever attempted to be palmed upon the people of this country. The object of its promoters is to introduce among us foreign stuff of every description.'8
The Queen dismissed all fears and prejudiced opinions out of hand. Like Prince Albert, she was greatly impressed by the proposal for a vast glass edifice almost two thousand feet in length and sixty-four feet high - containing 4,500 tons of iron and nearly 300,000 panes of glass, thirty miles of guttering, two hundred miles of wooden sash bars - which would provide space for some 14,000 displays from every corner of the world. Of course, it would withstand the noise and tramping feet of any number of visitors: it had been tested by three hundred workmen jumping up and down in the galleries, by soldiers marching heavily along the central aisle and trundling trolleys of cannon balls across the pine floor. The Queen made numerous visits to the Park to see the Crystal Palace - 'one of the wonders of the world' as she called it. When it was finished, she took her five eldest with her, and was amused and touched to hear the Duke of Devonshire exclaim in admiration and wonder, 'Fancy one's gardener having done all this.'9
The Queen, of course, took even greater pride in Prince Albert's part in it. 'I do feel proud,' she wrote, 'at the thought of what my beloved Albert's great mind has conceived.' On the day of the opening ceremony she left Buckingham Palace soon after eleven o'clock in a procession of nine state carriages.
The Green Park & Hyde Park were one mass of densely crowded human beings in the highest good humour & most enthusiastic [she recorded in her journal]. I never saw Hyde Park look as it did, being filled with crowds as far as the eye could reach. A little rain fell, just as we started, but before we neared the Crystal Palace, the sun shone & gleamed upon the gigantic edifice upon which the flags of every nation were flying.10
QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History Page 24