A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  Necessity, however, can be the mother of politics. And, much as the duchess hated it, a virtue was made of the frugality imposed by financial stringency, so severe at one point that mother, daughter and governess had to move out of Kensington Palace to more ordinary, even suburban, residences at Ramsgate and Sidmouth. Compared with the distasteful luxury of the court, the Kent household could be made to seem a model of austere self-denial. Victoria’s childhood suppers, she recalled, were very simple (up to a point) – bread and milk from a little silver basin. Wherever she was, Victoria was subjected to the full Evangelical regime of constant prayers and self-inspection for the blemish of the day. She inherited the forbidding guidance manual written for Princess Charlotte by the arch-evangelical Hannah More, Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess (1805). And she kept (or was made to keep) a Behaviour Book, in which all these failings, as well as a strict accounting of how she had spent her time, were mercilessly recorded. One much-underlined, self-chastising entry, that for 21 August 1832, reads, ‘Very very very TERRIBLY naughty!’

  It may have been that the duchess and Baroness Lehzen schooled the girl in Christian correctness and domestic propriety only too well. For as she grew, and became more solemnly conscious of the destiny awaiting her, Victoria also became deeply unsettled by what seemed to be her mother’s craven dependence on the Irish adventurer Sir John Conroy, ostensibly her household secretary but, even to a young girl, quite evidently something more. Although she still slept in the duchess’s bedchamber, she was beginning to keep her own company and commune with the past. ‘I am very fond of making tables of the Kings and Queens,’ she wrote to Leopold, ‘… and I have lately finished one of the English Sovereigns and their Consorts as, of course, the history of my own country, is one of my first duties.’ Anne Boleyn was ‘extremely beautiful, but inconsiderate’; Elizabeth I ‘a great Queen but a bad woman’.

  And as her trim figure filled out, so Victoria became awkwardly aware that she was the most desirable catch in Europe. Like any mother trawling for a suitable match, the duchess threw banquets and balls to show her off, the invitation list prominently featuring eligible bachelor princes – Dutch, Portuguese and German. As a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha himself, Leopold of the Belgians was keen to promote the cause of the princes of his own family, Ernest and Albert; but a first encounter with the latter at Victoria’s 17th birthday ball was not promising. Although undeniably good looking in a grave, erect kind of way, Albert seemed silent and prim, and turned so ashen white during the dancing that he needed to leave in haste lest, it was thought, he should faint. Victoria was also growing more curious about the public world beyond the court and society; she read the newspapers, and became initiated into the rituals of royal philanthropy that would become one of the mainstays of the modern monarchy. In 1836 she visited an asylum for ‘vagrant girls’ and, closer to home, all but adopted a distressed gypsy family, the ‘Coopers’, whom she had discovered camping near the gates of her childhood home, Claremont House, but whose family virtue in adversity she pronounced so exemplary as to make it clear that these gypsies, at any rate, were good English Christians. ‘Their conjugal, filial and paternal affection is very great as also their kindness and attention to their sick, old and infirm.’

  As she moved out a little into the wider world, Victoria became more reluctant to do her mother’s bidding so meekly. She was becoming painfully aware that the duchess and the adhesive Conroy were shamelessly exploiting her prospects in order to feather their own nests. Should she become queen while still a minor, they could establish a kind of regency. But when William IV died, on the night of 20 June 1837, Victoria had already turned 18. The duchess was put on notice what this would mean when one of the first acts of the new queen was to move her bed out of her mother’s room and insist on dining alone. She was, henceforth, to be very much her own mistress.

  William IV’s extended decline into fatal sickness (punctuated by startling revivals of good cheer when he would summon ministers to dine, stipulating that they each consume two bottles of wine) had given Victoria ample time to contemplate her impending translation. She faced her situation with striking self-possession. To Leopold she wrote, with a winning combination of modesty and courage, ‘I look forward to the event, which, it seems, is likely to occur soon, with calmness and quietness; I am not alarmed at it, and yet, I do not suppose myself equal to all; I trust, however, that with good will, honesty and courage, I shall not, at all events fail:’ The astonishing tone of clear purpose continued on the famous night itself, when she was woken (first by her mother) to find the Lord Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury sinking to their creaking knees: ‘Since it has pleased Providence to place me in this station, I shall do my utmost to fulfil my duty toward my country; I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things inexperienced, but I am sure that very few have more real good will and desire to do what is fit and right than I have.’

  Breakfast was taken with the prime minister, William Lamb, Baron Melbourne, in whom Victoria was lucky enough to find a supremely skilled and almost tearfully dedicated guardian; the next in succession, after her uncle Leopold, in her line of surrogate fathers. From their first meeting the relationship was one of mutual devotion, which bordered, almost, on compulsive love. The age difference was not a barrier; it was, in fact, the permitting condition of the reciprocal adoration. Lord Melbourne was a Whig grandee who had lived the kind of life from which Victoria might have been expected to recoil. But as far as she was concerned he had been more sinned against than sinning, and this was not entirely untrue. When his wife Caroline had been jilted by her lover, Lord Byron, Melbourne’s instinct was to care for her as best he could. When he was named in a divorce suit by Lady Caroline Norton’s husband, he accepted the role even though it seems more likely the relationship had been platonic. A year before he met Victoria his only son, Augustus, had died. So he came to the queen with an allure of battered gallantry, more than ready for his avuncular role.

  Romanticized in the newspapers as ‘England’s Rose’, Victoria needed a tutor who could help develop a public persona, gently build her confidence and launch her on the vast and terrifying stage of British history. Rose she may have looked, with that pink complexion, those round cheeks and blue eyes; but Melbourne understood very quickly that she also came with her fair complement of thorns. In the 4-foot-11 doll, he already saw the formidable woman – impetuous and headstrong. So he never made the mistake of talking down to Victoria, or of treating her as a child in need of basic schooling. Instead, he spoke to her as someone sophisticated enough to appreciate his shrewd political information and his droll, elliptical humour; even his waggish take on English history. (Henry VIII? ‘Those women bothered him so.’) Victoria’s journal entries describing their meetings are full of complicit laughter.

  Those meetings were a constant feature of the young queen’s life. Reporting on politics – the state of the economy and international affairs; playing chess with Victoria; accompanying her riding; dining with her (seated always on her left); poring together over the royal collection of prints and drawings – Melbourne spent on average four or five hours with her each day. She watched the faded peacock preen himself and strut, in a tottery sort of way, for her benefit; lean over at dinner to impart a sly titbit of intelligence; or just tuck in (‘He has eaten three chops and a grouse – for breakfast!’). And she carefully noted down his pearls of wisdom even when they scarcely amounted to dazzling insight (‘People who talk much of railways and bridges are generally Liberals’). Their intimacy was not without costs – the occasional jeering shout of ‘Lady Melbourne’ came the queen’s way at Ascot. But such costs were more than compensated for by the benefits. Victoria now had a pseudo-father who was not always disappearing back to Belgium and, with Melbourne’s encouragement, she decisively liberated herself from the tentacles of the unfortunate duchess and Conroy. Two months after her accession, in September 1837, the queen inspected her guardsmen and lan
cers in Windsor Great Park and carried the event off with extraordinary dash and confidence. Her account is strikingly reminiscent of that ‘great’ queen but ‘bad woman’ Elizabeth I. ‘I cantered up to the Lines with all the gentlemen and rode along them. Leopold [the horse, not the king] behaved most beautifully, so quietly, the Bands really playing in his face. I then cantered back to my first position and there remained while the Troops marched by in slow and quick time. … The whole went off beautifully and I felt for the first time like a man, as if I could fight myself at the head of troops.’

  She needed to be sure-footed: the economy had taken a sharp turn for the worse, and radical movements, such as Chartism, were beginning to attract a serious following, so not everyone was in thrall to the spell of the Rose of England. But at least Victoria was not an active liability, and among the propertied classes won relieved respect from unforced acts of kindness and a disarming frankness that was half ingenuous, half knowing. She was also becoming quickly convinced of the soundness of her own judgement. When she knighted the Jewish Moses Montefiore in 1837 over a fit of raised eyebrows at court, she wrote that he was ‘an excellent man … I was very glad to do what I think quite right, as it should be.’

  As for spectacle, Victoria sensed – again, perhaps, guided by Melbourne – how important it was to the survival of the monarchy. George IV had been determined to stage a coronation of stupendous lavishness, complete with pseudo-medieval banquets in Westminster Hall (and in Scotland at Holyroodhouse) at which the King’s Challenger would enter in chain mail ostensibly to do combat with anyone who presumed to question the succession. But the more elaborately got up he was – and George IV was an apparition in ostrich plumes – the more grotesque he appeared. It seemed right that, when the chain-mailed Challenger cantered over to kiss his sovereign’s hand, he fell off his horse. William IV had no time or taste for such flummery. But Victoria’s accession was a heaven-sent opportunity for the impresarios of monarchy, with a canny sense of publicity, to present a tableau – almost a modern masque – of the rebirth of Britannia’s innocence and virtue. Images of sweet nature abounded. Victoria’s train was carried by eight ladies dressed in white satin with wreaths of silver ears of corn in front, and wreaths of pink roses (by now the talisman of the new reign) behind. And despite having to bear the considerable weight of robes and regalia, Victoria carried off the occasion with satisfying aplomb. When the 87-year-old Baron John Rolle tripped as he attempted to mount the steps before the throne to do homage, the queen’s instinct was to rise and go down to help him, an act of consideration that was widely noticed. When it came to Melbourne’s turn, she noticed tears welling in his eyes. Her even more spectacular wedding ceremony a few years later would further capture the popular imagination.

  Her strong-minded piety, although an undoubted asset, could sometimes threaten to become a headache for the worldly wise prime minister. She disliked Baron John Lyndhurst, she told him, because he was a bad man. ‘Do you dislike all bad men?’ he asked roguishly. ‘For that comprises a large number.’ And although she indulged, even enjoyed, Melbourne’s raffish past she was quick to make censorious judgements. Toleration for human frailty was the one quality he failed to impart. So when the shape of her mother’s unmarried lady-in-waiting Lady Flora Hastings started to become suspiciously round, Victoria assumed it was a pregnancy and demanded that she be punished (another echo of the Virgin Queen) for her immorality by being removed from court. A medical inspection to which the unfortunate young woman was subjected judged that her condition was a liver tumour, not a pregnancy. Initially the queen refused to believe she was actually ill, provoking some criticism at court for her lack of sympathy; but once she was persuaded by Melbourne of the truth she steeled herself – also at his firm suggestion – to go and see the dying woman. Victoria held her hand, and on departure cried, ‘Poor Lady Flora.’

  When Melbourne’s administration fell, to be replaced by a Tory government under Sir Robert Peel, Victoria took the change as a personal affront. She tearfully stormed over the removal of her friend and mentor, expressed her disgust at the uncouth chilly manners of Peel (a mere manufacturer, after all), and adamantly refused to abide by the convention that her ladies of the bedchamber change with the altered government. Although Melbourne did his tactful best to explain that the queen really had no choice, Victoria refused to understand that this was a constitutional, not a personal, matter. The precondition of the monarchy’s survival was its distance from political partisanship. She herself might see her ladies as her own attendants, but the fact was that they had been Whig appointees and retaining them meant – as far as the incoming government was concerned – tolerating a fifth column in the Palace. Eventually Victoria conceded, but only with a fuming sense of indignity.

  By the time Melbourne was departing in 1839, plans were advanced to find Victoria someone else to lean on: a consort. It had been King Leopold, in cahoots with her old governess Lehzen and Baron Christian von Stockmar of Saxe-Coburg, who, in the summer of 1839, had suggested she might like to think again about her cousin Albert. She initially took strong exception to being cajoled, even by the two men she trusted most – Melbourne and Leopold (‘the whole subject was an odious one and one I hated to decide about’); but eventually she relented. When Albert arrived in England, in October, Victoria was immediately startled by the ‘beauty’ of his person, especially on the dance floor where a few years before he had cut such a pallid figure. She was overcome by the ‘exquisite neck’; ‘such a pretty mouth with delicate moustaches and a beautiful figure, broad shoulders and fine waist; my heart is quite going – it is quite a pleasure to look at Albert when he galops and valses.’ When allied to his moral seriousness, his evident intelligence and unimpeachable virtue, the ‘angelic’ good looks prompted her to make up her mind – fast. To the amused delight of the cartoonists, it was obvious that it had been the queen who had proposed. ‘At about half past twelve I sent for Albert; he came to the Closet where I was alone and after a few minutes I said to him that I thought he must be aware of why I wished him to come here and that it would make me too happy if he would consent to what I wished (to marry me); we embraced each other over and over again.’

  Expeditious was the word. Victoria supplied the ring, asked Albert for a lock of his hair, wallowed in the long kissing sessions, and decreed that two or three days was quite enough for the honeymoon. ‘You forget, my dearest love that I am the sovereign and that business will stop and wait for nothing.’ A more serious shock was the discovery that the queen would lay down the law as to who would be his personal secretary. While she would fight like a tigress (especially with Peel) to resist Albert’s allowance under the civil list from being whittled down as the Radicals in parliament wanted, it was depressingly apparent to him from the start that his function was supposed to be decorative, supportive and generative, possibly in that order. He was her ‘angel in the house’! But if Victoria tested their affection by her adamant assumption that her husband could have no part in matters of state, condemning Albert to a state of uselessness that he found humiliating and un-Christian, there were also times, early in the marriage, when she simply melted away in the amazed bliss of conjugal love. After their first night together, she wrote:

  When day dawned, for we did not sleep much and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express! He does look so beautiful in his shirt only with his beautiful throat seen …

  … Already the second day since our marriage; his love and gentleness is beyond everything and to kiss that dear soft cheek, to press my lips to his is heavenly bliss. I feel a purer, more unearthly feeling than I ever did. Oh! Was ever woman so blessed as I am …

  … My dearest Albert put on my stockings for me. I went in and saw him shave; a great delight for me …

  Albert and Victoria’s passion for each other was, of course, a strictly private affair (only later revealed to us through her diaries, edited by her daughter Princess Beatrice). Bu
t very soon – and with an equal degree of innocence and calculation – it became a public asset for the monarchy, especially as the economic climate deteriorated. At first sight, the Plantagenet Ball of 12 May 1842 – at which Albert and Victoria appeared as the legendary happy royal couple, Edward III and Philippa of Hainault, with medieval dress and decor designed by the medieval antiquarian James Planché – looks like the most unconscionable extravagance, not to say appalling tactlessness, in a year of acute economic distress. While the queen’s jewelled and brocaded stomacher was revealed as having cost £60,000, industrialists in Lancashire and Yorkshire, exploiting their power at a time of high unemployment, caused by mechanization, were imposing wage cuts of as much as 25 per cent. They were met by a wave of strikes. Teams of workers pulled plugs from the steam engines, so as to cut power to the factory floor. No wonder that Friedrich Engels, the future translator and collaborator of Karl Marx but now working for the family cotton firm in Manchester, assumed Britain would be the theatre of the first great class war between capital and proletariat. That same year there were two assassination attempts on the queen.

  But the organizers of the ball were not suicidally obtuse. Since the proceeds would go to relieve the plight of distressed silk weavers in Spitalfields, they billed the event as an example of heartfelt royal philanthropy, Victoria’s sympathy with the poor and unemployed. Thanks to the ball, the apologia ran, the Spitalfields weavers got some piecework and their charities received an inflow of funds. The weepy story – once known to all schoolchildren – of Queen Philippa interceding with her warrior husband in the Middle Ages to spare the lives of the burghers of Calais was now given a modern gloss as a philanthropic melodrama of the 19th century: a tender-hearted monarch moved by the plight not of hostages but of unemployed artisans. ‘We have no doubt’, declared the Illustrated London News, somewhat optimistically, ‘that many thousands are this day grateful for the temporary aid which this right royal entertainment has been the means of affording them.’