Also during this month of May 1842, Parliament released its first report on the employment of children, over two thousand pages with illustrations, spelling out in sickening detail the dire physical and moral conditions that children as young as six faced in Britain’s mines: half or fully naked creatures laboring as many as sixteen hours a day, often in utter darkness, chained with “dog-belts” to coal carts, crawling up and down two-foot-high passages for hours, subject to the physical and at times sexual abuse of adult miners. The newspapers culled the reports and presented to their readers the darkest, most painful details, in articles in the same newspapers that detailed the luxurious ball-costumes of the rich. The “Condition of England Question,” in the parlance of the day, was never more apparent, and never more pressing.
The popular satirical magazine Punch bitterly contrasted the “purple dress” of the reveling rich with the “cere-cloth” or shroud of the destitute. And the Chartist newspaper Northern Star scathingly compared Victoria to Rome’s most vicious emperor: “The most detested tyrant whose deeds history hands down to posterity, set fire to Rome that he might enjoy the sight of a city in conflagration, and while the flames were raging, he amused himself by playing on the violin. We know of no nearer approximation to the unmatched cruelty of the monster Nero, than the conduct of the British Court and aristocracy, in thus reveling amidst the most superfluous waste, while the more humble of their countrymen are doomed to starve for bread, by the laws these same Nobility have framed for their own advantage.”
Victoria, however, did not plan these balls simply to escape the hard reality her subjects faced. Rather, she was attempting to confront the Condition of England Question directly, attempting to aid the most miserable of the poor by encouraging luxurious consumption, to reawaken dormant industry by creating need.
She wished to assist one particular industry with these balls. For years—long before the present recession—the silk-weaving trade of Spitalfields had become synonymous with London’s most grinding poverty. The weavers had once been among the aristocracy of labor, but the economic forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution had strangled their trade nearly to the point of extinction. Competition, for one thing, was killing the weavers: they had once enjoyed protection in the form of a tariff against foreign goods, but this had been revoked in the 1820s, and imports of cheaper French silks, generally acknowledged to be the finest in Europe, cut into their trade, as did rougher silks woven on the handlooms of northern England, cheaper because weavers there could survive upon a lower wage. And mechanized looms were beginning to match in quality the work of Spitalfields handlooms. The present recession, and the subsequent drop in demand for the weavers’ luxury product, had simply made a bad situation worse. Charles Dickens a few years later described the under- and unemployed weavers of Spitalfields as “sallow” and “unshorn,” living a miserable existence in London’s most densely populated neighborhood, suffering from the highest mortality rate: Spitalfields, he claimed, “is now the grave of modern Manufacturing London.”
The Queen hoped to set the Spitalfields handlooms clacking away again by requiring that the costumes, the dresses, and the waistcoats for the ball be spun exclusively from Spitalfields silk. It was a plan that speaks volumes about the Queen’s—and Prince Albert’s—political and social sensibilities. They both genuinely cared about the sufferings of the poor: for Albert, in particular, improving the lot of the poor was becoming a mission. But they were hardly egalitarians; their ideal society depended on strict social demarcation. The pleasure of the rich would enable the content—and busy—life of the laborer.
In the short term, the Queen’s plan worked. In April and May of this year, the Spitalfields weavers had as much work as they could handle. But in the long term, nothing could halt the decline of that pre-modern industry. Dickens knew that the effect was as a drop in a bucket: “the weavers dine for a day or two, and, the ball over, they relapse into prowling about the streets, leaning against posts, and brooding on door-steps.” The organizers of the ball at Her Majesty’s Theatre hoped for a more lasting support for the weavers: a school of design for their children built on the ball’s proceeds—but the school was to fail. Improving the dismal economy of 1842 depended on more than a party or two, however extravagant.
Despite the limited economic impact of the balls, Victoria scored a symbolic coup with them, demonstrating with an enormous amount of publicity that her own interests were completely intertwined with the interests of her people. As the Times put it, the ball at the theatre was an occasion in which the Queen associated “publicly and personally with her subjects in promoting a common object.” And Victoria was fortunate in having a government and prime minister to aid her in achieving her object. Robert Peel had taken office the previous August, and, since then, Victoria was slowly warming to the man she had found so “insufferably cold and officious” during the bedchamber crisis. Albert was very largely responsible for the change; it was Albert, fearing a repeat of the crisis, who had, with the help of his secretary, George Anson, smoothed Peel’s path to power, negotiating an amicable solution to the problem of the Queen’s ladies: Peel would make his suggestions, but the Queen would make the appointments.
Albert found a kindred spirit in Peel. Both men were generally perceived as haughty and aloof in public, but both were actually deeply shy, their shyness born of the unshakable sense that they were outsiders in British society. Albert was a foreigner in a society ever conscious of its own national superiority, and Peel was the son of a manufacturer amongst a class-conscious elite. Albert discovered in Peel a guide and mentor; indeed, in Peel he discovered one of the two Britons he could honestly call a friend. (Anson was the other.) Peel offered Albert an entry into public affairs: as one of his first acts as Prime Minister, Peel appointed Albert president of the Fine Arts Commission. Victoria later said that Albert found a “second father” in Peel—and, she might have added, a better one. Peel in return found in Albert a path to the good graces of the Queen. And as Victoria began more and more to adopt Albert’s political perspective, her respect for Peel would grow—would, indeed, grow considerably with the events of the coming weeks.
There was a world of difference between Victoria’s old prime minister and her new one. Her beloved Lord Melbourne, for all his avuncular warmth and charm, was a complete cynic who believed poverty an inescapable reality in society, and therefore impossible to manage effectively through legislation. He practiced a negative laissez-faire in his government, rarely concerning himself with the political affairs of his ministers, and putting off dealing with problems whenever he could. He once told Victoria “all depends on the urgency of a thing. If a thing is very urgent, you can always find time for it; but if a thing can be put off, well then you put it off.” Melbourne was the last Georgian prime minister, yearning for a country and a way of life that was quickly passing. Peel, on the other hand, was the first modern PM, always looking forward, fully aware that the momentous material developments of his time forced equally momentous social change; he came into office committed to reform. Certainly, the leader of the Tories was no radical: he was a social conservative and a true believer in the class hierarchy, dead set against the Reform Bill of 1832, for example, which extended the franchise to the middle class. He certainly had no objection to the privilege and luxury of the rich; he attended the bal masque, dressed as a figure from a van Dyck painting. Nevertheless—and despite his perpetually icy demeanor—he was an empathetic humanist and a committed social activist. That commitment drove him while in the Home Office in the 1820s to simplify the criminal codes and to form the Metropolitan Police. And now he was seeking to legislate social change through a budget that was nothing short of revolutionary. He proposed the introduction of the first-ever income tax in peacetime—a tax of seven percent, to be levied on all incomes over 150 pounds. Moreover, he proposed massive overall tariff reduction. Together, these changes would have the effect of limiting indirect taxation, which burdened al
l including the poor, and making up for the loss of revenues by taxing the middle and wealthier classes. It was a budget informed by his growing belief in free trade, calculated not simply to redistribute wealth—but to create wealth.
On this Thursday night at Her Majesty’s Theatre, positioned directly above the pit, Victoria had the best view in the house of the energetic dancers below. A barrier had been erected beyond the pavilion’s base to allow space for a chosen few to trip out waltzes and quadrilles before their monarch. The crowd, however, watched not the dancers but the royal pavilion, as with “mute up-gazing curiosity” they observed Victoria perform the rituals of state, alternating between observing her subjects with greeting their special guests: the Queen’s uncle Cambridge and his family, the Lady Patronesses of the ball, and the Duke of Wellington.
All of it—the court ceremony, the omnipresent silk and satin, the crush of spectators in this very theatre—all of it must have seemed familiar to Victoria. It had all happened five years before, at the beginning of June 1837—a week after her eighteenth birthday. This place was the King’s Theatre, then, for William IV was suffering through the last month of his reign. The Spitalfields weavers were then as now experiencing horrible destitution, and to aid them William and his queen Adelaide had come up with the idea of a ball, everyone attending in Spitalfields silk. Then, too, the pit was covered over, the walls were festooned with multicolored, shiny Spitalfields fabric, decorated with arms and armor. Adelaide and William were expected to be the guests of honor, but William was dying (and would die in three weeks), so Victoria took his place, arriving amid “deafening plaudits” to play the same role that she played on this night. But if the similarities between that night and this were striking to Victoria, so were the differences. Five years before, she was accompanied by her mother and attended to by John Conroy and Lady Flora Hastings; her uncle the Duke of Cumberland was seen to be “very constant in his attention” to his Royal niece. Cumberland was now king in Hanover, his despotic ways finding much greater favor among the Hanoverians than among the British. Flora Hastings was of course dead, and Conroy—an exile in Berkshire—as good as dead to Victoria. Her mother of course was still at her side—but the tenor of their relationship had changed beyond recognition: now, Victoria was in control. And Victoria’s world had changed absolutely, because of the man who was not there five years before, but who stood beside her now, towering over her in his Field Marshal’s uniform dripping with five orders of knighthood, his power implicit in the enormous jackboots he wore (attire that the more proper of the ladies in attendance considered not quite de rigueur for the ballroom): Victoria’s all-in-all, her Albert.
From the moment she beheld him from the steps of Buckingham Palace in 1839, Victoria’s love for Albert was a fact, and she would never stop loving him until the day of her death. Nevertheless, Albert had suffered greatly during the first two years of their marriage, struggling to establish himself socially and politically in the face of Victoria’s tenacious conviction that she would rule alone: that Albert would be her lover and husband, but never be the master of the Royal Household and never play a role in politics. He had scored a victory with the Regency Bill—but it was a victory more symbolic than actual, where gaining power depended upon Victoria’s death. To become powerful in the Royal Household and in affairs of state, Albert had to change Victoria’s mind about her own self-sufficiency. And to do that, he faced two obstacles, two people who jealously guarded their own influence over Victoria and promoted Albert’s exclusion from power: Victoria’s political mentor and chief political adviser, Lord Melbourne, and her chief confidante, with full sway over household affairs, Baroness Lehzen.
Of the two, Melbourne had been the easier to deal with. His genial hegemony over her political affairs was necessary to Victoria when, throwing off Conroy’s and her mother’s oppressive influence, she first became queen. Melbourne’s influence over her weakened considerably when she fell in love with Albert, and weakened further as she learned of, and fell in love with, his mind and his ways. During the first months of their marriage, Victoria, to Albert’s great frustration, preferred to meet with her ministers alone, keep to herself the key to the government dispatches, and spend her evenings with Albert, wishing to talk about anything but politics. Albert refused to humor her in this way. By the end of 1841, she regularly used the term “we” in setting out her opinions—not a haughty royal we, but rather a simple acknowledgment that she and Albert were politically of one mind. When their daughter Victoria, the Princess Royal, was born on 22 November 1840 (with Albert—unusual for the time—in the room), the Prince hurried from Victoria’s side to lead the Privy Council in her stead. Victoria found him indispensable in dealing with government business during her confinement and recovery, and, soon after Vicky’s birth, she entrusted Albert with the keys to the boxes containing Cabinet and confidential documents. He became, according to his own secretary Anson, “in fact, tho’ not in name, Her Majesty’s Private Secretary.” At both Buckingham Palace and Windsor by this time, their desks were joined so that they could work as one.
Party politics completed the process of Melbourne’s removal. In June 1841, the Whig government lost a vote of no confidence by a single vote and Melbourne called for elections. The results were a disaster for the Whigs: the Tories gained fifty seats, and Peel took Melbourne’s place. With Peel’s coming, Albert and Victoria became full political partners. He attended all ministerial meetings, read his wife’s correspondence, and conducted an extensive political correspondence of his own.
Lehzen might have been a far less significant opponent on a national scale, but she proved to be a much trickier and tenacious one. For two years, she and Albert warred with one another, covertly and overtly, with ferocious intensity. If Lehzen at first welcomed a Coburg consort for Victoria, she quickly and accurately saw him as an enormous threat to her privileged position in Victoria’s court. In the dark days of the Kensington regime, Lehzen was Victoria’s sole ally, and the grateful Queen repaid her loyalty by giving to her complete control over her daily affairs—writing Victoria’s correspondence, holding the keys and the Privy Purse, acting as go-between in dealings with the Queen’s household officers. And when Princess Vicky was born, Victoria naturally gave Lehzen—once her own governess—oversight of the nursery. Lehzen fiercely resisted every attempt by Albert to take control of his household as an attack on her own prerogatives. Less than two weeks after Oxford’s attempt, for example, Albert confronted Lehzen, through Anson, about not reporting to him that a certain Captain Childers was stalking the Queen with “mad professions of love.” Lehzen resisted Albert’s intrusion, telling Anson that Albert had once told her to leave the Palace, but “he had no power to turn her out of the Queen’s house.” Albert, to her mind, had no power whatsoever over palace affairs: “the Queen would brook no interference with the exercise of her powers of which she was most jealous.” Albert responded to Lehzen’s opposition with an obsessive bitterness and loathing. She was to him “die Blaste”—the hag, the “Yellow Lady” (a reference to her jaundice), “a crazy, stupid intriguer, obsessed with the lust of power, who regards herself as a demi-God.” Albert considered her the single cause of every dysfunction in the royal household, including all tension between him and Victoria. Certainly, she took advantage of her position as confidante to pour poison in Victoria’s ear about Albert; Anson noted her “pointing out and exaggerating every little fault of the Prince, constantly misrepresenting him, constantly trying to undermine him in the Queen’s affections and making herself appear a martyr.”
Once again, time—and biology—were Albert’s allies as Victoria’s dependency upon Albert as husband and father grew. During her first pregnancy, Albert attended upon her constantly and arranged for her obstetrician. After Vicky was born, he read to Victoria and wrote for her—and carried her from bed to sofa, and back. Lehzen found herself increasingly shut out.
An assault of sorts upon the Queen, occurring less than tw
o weeks after Vicky’s birth, resulted in a considerable jump in Albert’s influence over the household. On the evening of 3 December 1840, palace servants were startled to discover an unkempt young man hiding under a sofa in the Queen’s dressing room—a sofa upon which just hours before the Queen had been sitting. The boy—Edward Jones—had been roaming the palace for two days, from kitchens to royal apartments. He claimed that he “sat upon the throne, saw the Queen, and heard the Princess Royal… squall.” Jones had broken into the Palace two years before, but then the Queen was at Windsor. This time, the breach in security—literally trespassing under the Queen’s nose—caused a public sensation, and Jones—dubbed “the Boy Jones” (or “In-I-go Jones”)—became a nine-day’s comic wonder in the Sunday papers and in Punch: the epitome of enormous if inappropriate ambition.
In the palace, though, no one was laughing. Baron Stockmar, in a memorandum he wrote for Albert on the deplorable state of the Royal Household, attributed Jones’s intrusion to “the absence of system, which leaves the palace without any responsible authority.” And indeed the Palaces were in a state of sometimes quaint but more usually maddening dysfunction—working according to an archaic structure that would have been familiar to Henry VIII. Servants worked under one of three masters—the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward, and the Master of the Horse—who rarely supervised directly or coordinated their servants’ duties with one another. The results were predictably chaotic. The Lord Chamberlain’s servants, for instance, were in charge of cleaning windows inside the palace, while the Master of the Horse’s servants cleaned the outside—and palace windows were consequently never quite clean. The Lord Steward’s servants laid fuel in fireplaces; the Lord Chamberlain’s servants actually lit fires—and rooms thus remained cold. Repairs were subject to a byzantine process of signature and countersignature—and thus many palace fixtures, once broken, remained broken. Servants, largely unsupervised, were often less than diligent. Moreover, archaic expenses drained money from the royal purse; servants, for example, regularly sold off the day’s unused candles for their own profit. Albert, in going over Palace expenditures, discovered a weekly charge of 35 shillings for guards at Windsor who hadn’t actually served since George III’s day—and now going into the pocket of a half-pay officer who did nothing. Jones’s intrusion gave Albert the excuse that he needed to commence the long process of Palace reform, centralizing authority in the position of a single Master of the Household. Lehzen’s influence over the household faded further.
Shooting Victoria Page 17
