A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  Especially when compared to modern royal photography, the albums from 1859, 1860 and 1861 seem startlingly candid in registering the strains and ambiguities of a relationship that had somehow to preserve the authority of a husband over a wife, while conceding the inferiority of the consort to the queen. Albert stands patriarchally lofty – but not so lofty as he would have been had the queen herself not been standing on steps concealed beneath the hooped crinoline. Victoria appears just as she must have been: weary of being a baby factory for dynastic posterity (‘Vicky’, the first of nine surviving, was born in 1840, ‘Baby’ Beatrice, the last, in 1857).

  Serial pregnancies had taken their toll on the dewy-eyed romance with which Victoria had begun her marriage. When her eldest child, Vicky – who had been married at 18 to the Crown Prince of Prussia, 10 years her senior – became pregnant for the first time, making her a grandmother in her early 30s, she wrote gushingly of the Expected Event. The queen, however, responded with tactless earthiness: ‘What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.’ Inevitably, some of the royal children fell ill, sometimes dangerously. Fierce arguments erupted between Victoria and Albert as to which of the doctors to trust. It was then that the conflict between the dual role of the couple – on the one hand husband and wife, on the other sovereign and consort – became most aggravated. When Vicky was desperately sick, an unusually distraught Albert told Victoria that ‘Dr Clark has mismanaged the child and poisoned her with calomel and you have starved her. I shall have nothing more to do with it! Take the child away and do as you like and if she dies you will have it on your conscience.’ The queen shot back, operatically, ‘You can murder the child if YOU want to!’ No wonder that Albert thought, ‘Victoria is too hasty and passionate for me to be able often to speak of my difficulties. She will fly into a rage and overwhelms me with reproaches of suspiciousness, want of trust, ambition, envy.’

  But even these temporary estrangements were testimony to the fact that Albert and Victoria were both intensely engaged in the welfare of their family. Albert constructed an elaborate and exhaustive educational programme for the children and, although there were tutors to carry it out, supervised the instruction down to the last detail. When, to his growing anxiety and exasperation, Bertie, the Prince of Wales, showed no sign of applying himself to his lessons (quite the reverse, in fact), Albert bore down on him with relentless interrogations in an attempt to discover whether it was intellectual or moral failing that was the problem. Equally, however, there were times when both the queen and the prince allowed themselves the luxury of cosiness. Victoria’s journal recorded many such moments of bedroom happiness: ‘Albert brought in dearest little Pussy [Vicky] in such a smart white merino dress trimmed with blue which Mamma had given her and a pretty cap, and placed her on my bed, seating himself next to her and she was very dear and good. And as my precious invaluable Albert sat there and our little Love between us I felt quite moved with happiness and gratitude to God.’

  The bliss might not have been perfectly symmetrical. For many years in the late 1840s and 1850s, Albert chafed at the limitations placed on his part in public business. It did not help that they had been self-imposed, apparently willingly. Albert’s German background in Coburg explains a lot about his mixed constitutional feelings. The smaller German states in the mid-19th century were on the cusp of making important decisions about how best to avoid the fate of the red republicanism that Karl Marx had confidently predicted for them (as well as for Britain). Would liberalism or authoritarianism be the best preventive against revolution? Albert was not so obtuse as to imagine Britain would even flirt with the latter possibility. In fact, after a period of innocence he had rather fallen in love with English (as distinct from British) constitutional history, swotting up on Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1723–80) and, over-optimistic about Victoria’s own eagerness to be enlightened about her monarchy, reading aloud to her passages from Henry Hallam’s The Constitution from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of George II (1827). But Albert’s own mentor, Baron von Stockmar, had warned him that Britain was in danger of establishing, by political fait accompli, a mere ‘ministerial government’ in which the monarchy did no more than rubber stamp the decisions of parliament and the political parties. And to begin with – until put right by Sir Robert Peel’s careful but firm guidance – Albert shared Victoria’s uneducated instinct that the crown should reserve the possibility at least of withholding confirmation of ministerial appointments or policies of which it disapproved. What Stockmar wanted was that the sovereign be akin to a ‘permanent Prime Minister’ – above the fray of party – and therefore somehow entitled to the trust and respect of both politicians and the people.

  It was to Albert’s credit that he rapidly understood this to be an impossibly over-ambitious plan. Instead, the sketch of his duties written in 1843, and revised and extended in 1850 when he turned down the Duke of Wellington’s invitation to command the army, described a subtler role. He would, he said, ‘sink his own individual existence into that of his wife … assume no separate responsibility before the public but make his position entirely a part of hers’. This sounds like an act of almost perverse (and uncharacteristic) self-effacement – until, that is, one reads on in the Consort’s job description and discovers that Albert also commanded himself to ‘continually and anxiously watch every part of the public business, in order to be able to advise and assist her at any moment. … As the natural head of her family, superintendent of the royal household’ (in which he had rapidly made swingeing cuts – no more wine allowance for the ‘Red Chamber’ at Windsor); ‘manager of her private affairs, sole confidential adviser in politics, and her only assistant in her communications with the officers of the Government, he is, besides, the husband of the Queen, the tutor of the royal children, the private Secretary of the Sovereign and her permanent minister’.

  The most extraordinary thing about this list was not its exhaustiveness, but its conversion of domestic authority into a substantive political equivalent. This was not the passive companionship exercised by the last ‘Prince Consort’, George of Denmark, husband to Queen Anne in the early 18th century, still less the nervously tentative presence of King Philip of Spain, the husband of Mary Tudor in the mid-16th. Albert was to be ubiquitous, watchful, omniscient; always there at the back of the chair, behind the desk; available for consultation even when not asked. What he had drafted was in some ways a throwback to the ancient privileges of the Groom of the Stool – the person, who, closest to the body of the monarch, made himself the indispensable medium through which politicians sought, and were granted, access to the sovereign. Whenever ministers were in the presence of the queen, so was Albert.

  Exerting his authority by appearing not to, being a presence by confining himself to being a husband, father and secretary, was all very nice in theory but often tricky in practice. While it put little strain on the constitution, paradoxically it put a lot of strain on the royal union. Early in the marriage he had complained that he was ‘husband not master of my own house’; and he continued to fret that his necessarily inferior political standing somehow undermined his patriarchal role in the family, however ardently Victoria protested to the contrary. Neither of them would have disagreed with Carlyle’s repetition of the truism that it was ‘an eternal axiom [and] the law of nature that man should bear rule in the home and not the woman’. The queen, was, in fact, painfully conscious of the anomaly by which her public presence was supposed to convey, simultaneously, both wifely decorum and regal superiority. She was a conscientious and opinionated reader of state papers; but, as Albert came to have more outlets for his driven sense of civic responsibility, so Victoria came to feel that perhaps he had more of an appetite for this work than she did herself. Sometimes, especially in the ch
aotic years after the fall of Peel in 1846, with governments coming and going, she felt at sea politically. During these years Victoria leaned heavily on Albert’s views, changing her opinion of Peel himself. Originally she had detested him as the common manufacturer who had usurped the rightful place of dearest Lord M; but, when seen through Albert’s eyes, he turned into a figure of tragic rectitude. The terrier-like Lord John Russell had to be endured. Lord Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, whom they gigglingly nicknamed ‘Pilgerstein’ (from the German for ‘palmer’ or ‘pilgrim’), with his dyed whiskers, languid manners and cynical jingoism, they could barely tolerate and wrote off as a suspicious adventurer – a staggering underestimate of the foreign secretary’s dangerous talent. It was all very wearying. ‘I love peace and quiet’, Victoria wrote in her journal, ‘in fact I hate politics and turmoil. … Albert grows daily fonder of politics and business and is so wonderfully fit for both – such perspicacity and courage – and I grow daily to dislike them both more and more. We women are not made for governing – and if we are good women, we must dislike these masculine occupations; but there are times which force one to take an interest in them.’

  The place where the ideal of a family partnership came closest to realization was Osborne House. It was there, as at Balmoral in Aberdeenshire at the other end of the island, that the day would be divided into a governing morning and a family afternoon. And it was there that Victoria made the all-important symbolic gesture of providing Albert with his own desk, placed beside hers, so that incoming ministers would see the two of them, side by side, and get the message that this was indeed the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha monarchy. Albert had bought the 1000-acre estate on the Isle of Wight in 1845, on the advice of Peel, as a retreat for the queen; a resort where the cares of state could be balanced by the pleasures of family life. The prince claimed that the pine woods gently sloping down to the bay reminded him of the coast near Naples (as well as the forests near his birthplace at Rosenau), an impression made only a little less improbable by the brightly painted Italianate house with its yellow and white towers and formal gardens and fountains, whose every detail he either designed or supervised. By the time Albert had finished with the house it had cost a cool £200,000, an immense fortune by the standards of the mid-19th century; the ‘retreat’ had become, in effect, an alternative place of government, with ministers and dispatch boxes, to the queen’s chagrin, constantly arriving. But the working routine of Osborne (and Balmoral) did indeed work: a walk before breakfast; newspapers with or after breakfast, followed by spirited discussion; the queen inspecting papers that Albert had already screened and prepared (in his capacity as private secretary) for her signature; joint meetings, if necessary, with ministers. And after luncheon, further informal discussion of the implications of the morning’s business.

  But afternoons were also the time when the family romance could be most fully indulged with picnics, fishing trips and pony rides. In Scotland there would be deer stalking; heavily unannounced ‘visits’ to local crofters; reels and flings in the evening, with the queen got up in the freshly invented Balmoral red and grey tartan. In both places Albert set his mind to all kinds of Improving Projects, which would provide, at the same time, physical exercise, moral instruction and even a little harmless play for the children. The pièce de résistance was the Swiss Cottage at Osborne, with its own kitchen garden, built in the park by the prince acting as foreman to his four eldest children – Vicky, Bertie, Affie and Alice – who provided the labour. It featured furniture and even working cooking stoves, all scaled down to child size, so that they could play house.

  The idea was that the royal children should inherit from their parents the idyll of the happy family. (Predictably the boys, and most notoriously Bertie, the Prince of Wales, who felt most put upon by their father, spurned the role as soon as they were of an age to escape.) But although she never stopped believing she had been uniquely blessed in her husband and (between tantrums) confiding professions of her love to her diary, Victoria was also capable of statements of startling disenchantment, especially when her daughters were contemplating their own dynastic marriages. Marriages were all very nice, she let it be known, assuming they were happy marriages. But many were anything but happy, and then a heaven could indeed turn into a hell. Single people were, she thought, much better off than partners who were doomed to inflict unrelenting daily misery on each other. Moreover, the chances of happiness were much slimmer than poor naïve girls, groomed for the altar, were made to believe by their ambitious parents. Keenly feeling the burdens of continuous childbirth, she declared, ‘All marriage is a lottery, the happiness is always an exchange – though it may be a poor one. Still, the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave – that always sticks in my throat.’

  Victoria, of course, was no feminist, but at times like this she certainly sounded like one. The chances are that she knew about a number of notorious court cases highlighting the plight of unhappily married wives. The best known had been that of Lord Melbourne’s intimate friend Caroline Norton, whose brutal husband, George, had then deserted her, denying her custody or even access to their children and leaving her without any means of support. The reason was that, as Blackstone had laid down (and therefore Victoria and Albert, both assiduous Blackstone students, knew), ‘by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law, that is the very being or existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated … into that of the husband under whose wing, protection and cover she performs anything’. In practice, this meant that, until reforms in the last quarter of the century, married women were incapable of owning property or of being party to any kind of contract, much less suing for divorce. It meant that Elizabeth Gaskell, for example, was not entitled to any of the earnings from her own novels, but had to satisfy herself with an allowance from her husband. Vindictively, George Norton had used his conjugal power to prevent Caroline from receiving any income after they were separated. The publicity given to the case had resulted in an act of parliament in 1839 that gave abandoned mothers custody of children under seven – but not thereafter.

  Since Victoria was always inclined to give Lord M the benefit of the doubt, it is likely that she accepted his insistence, when Norton named him as co-respondent in the divorce, that his relationship with Caroline had been perfectly above board; so she would have been able to see Caroline as a victim, and her battle for custody and support as heroic as it genuinely was. But, 20 years on, could the queen conceivably have been reading the Englishwoman’s Journal, published by the Victoria Press from 1860, which contained articles forcefully arguing the right of married women to their own property and, exactly like the queen, routinely compared bad marriages either to a lottery or to slavery? Perhaps Victoria had noticed or read Barbara Leigh Smith’s Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854), and even sympathized with its mission of educating young women in what to expect from marriage.

  The possibility of Victoria’s familiarity with early feminist writing is not quite as staggering as it might seem. The founder of the Victoria Press (which employed women compositors) was the remarkable Emily Faithfull, of whom the queen thought well enough to appoint her as her own Printer and Publisher in Ordinary in 1862 – not a position she would have given to someone who had incurred her disapproval. As a friend and colleague of Barbara Leigh Smith, Faithfull was a member of the Langham Place Circle – writers, social activists and critics who, at 19 Langham Place, just off London’s Regent Street, spurred by Jessie Boucherett’s Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, had established a register (in fact an employment agency) for women seeking work as teachers and governesses. The aim was to extend the list to the enormous category of domestic service, as had been done in Bristol. There, a similar office sent out inspectors to ensure that places of employment were physically and morally sound, and that working conditions and pay were decent. The Langham Place Circle’s office included a
reading room where women could peruse newspapers (including the Englishwoman’s Journal) while they were looking at job opportunities, sign petitions for the campaign for married women’s property, and read essays by Barbara Leigh Smith, Isa Craig and Bessie Rayner Parkes, editor of the Englishwoman’s Review from 1858. These writers argued for the importance of women’s work, and believed that it should extend to watchmaking, journalism, medicine, prison and workhouse inspection and custodial work, the arts and, of course, teaching in schools and colleges set up for girls.

  These women were, admittedly, an exceptional, but middle-class vanguard. They had little in common with the Edinburgh Maidservants’ Union, which in 1825 had had the temerity to threaten a strike. On the contrary, they depended on the 1.3 million women domestic servants to give them the freedom to agitate. Barbara Leigh Smith was a cousin of Florence Nightingale and the illegitimate daughter of the Radical Unitarian MP for Norwich, Benjamin Smith, who had deliberately refused to marry her mother, and who had settled an annual income on his golden-haired daughter precisely so that she might lead an independent life. But the 26,000 signatures that she and her colleagues secured for a petition to urge a Married Women’s Property Bill on parliament in 1855 is evidence enough that the Langhamites were neither tiny in number nor insignificant. Among those who actively joined the cause were some of the best-known and most widely read and admired of all Victorian women writers – Elizabeth Gaskell, of course; but also Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Ann Evans a.k.a. George Eliot, Harriet Martineau and Harriet Taylor. It is ironic that Taylor’s part in the Victorian battle for women’s rights (itself undeservedly less well known than the later militant suffragettes) is often best remembered as the recruitment of her husband, John Stuart Mill, the ‘saint of rationalism’ and the greatest pillar of mid-Victorian liberalism, to the feminist cause. Mill himself was at pains, especially in his Autobiography (1873), to insist that it was Taylor who had educated him in the outrageous anomalies of women’s position in marriage, in the labour force and in political society; who had been his true partner in works like Principles of Political Economy (1848), where the absence of women as a subject for the discussions of social science was first explicitly addressed; and that the work for which he would be best remembered, On Liberty (1859), formally dedicated to his wife, was the result of their joint authorship.