Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  In the evening, her chief ministers and her household officers would toast her at the full-dress dinners they held in her honor, while the rest of London, it seemed, crowded into the West End in slowly snaking queues to ooh and aah at the elaborate illuminations on the façades of the ministerial residences, the clubs on Pall Mall, and the establishments of the Queen’s tradesmen: brilliant, variegated gaslight displays of crowns, stars, mottoes, laurel wreaths, English roses and British lions, portraits of the Queen—and a thousand blinding permutations of VR.

  None of it was new to her. But this year, more than any other, the cheers, the well-wishing, the feux de joie and toasts, the bows and curtsies, must have seemed more appropriate to her than ever before. Life simply was different this year—different than it had been just a year before, or during any of the years of this difficult decade—years of poverty and hunger, class conflict and outright rebellion.

  Much had changed as the decade progressed, but for Victoria, there was one constant: Albert. And Victoria had developed one belief, the anchor of all her thinking: Albert’s perfection in all things. Since the fall of Melbourne and the departure of Lehzen, Albert had been her sole confidant and her private secretary, reading, summarizing, drafting replies to all her official correspondence, and tirelessly composing memoranda on issues he deemed important. His ideas became hers. “It is you who have entirely formed me,” she once told him. They met with her ministers together, and spoke as one. When the Whigs returned to political office in 1846, they were amazed at the change since the days of Melbourne: “The Prince is become so identified with the Queen, that they are one person,” wrote Charles Greville. “He is King to all intents and purposes.”

  While never forgetting Victoria was the monarch, and while always subsuming his own interests to hers, Albert embraced the role of a co-ruler, occupying his own throne at openings and closings of Parliament or at the Royal Balls; when the Queen was indisposed—as she was because of pregnancy nine times during the first seventeen years of their marriage—he took her place at government meetings and public functions. Victoria’s Hanoverian relatives carped bitterly at his elevation, especially during the early years of their marriage. When Princess Alice was born in 1843 and Albert stood in for his wife at a court levée, the Cambridges absented themselves from the Court in a huff. A month after this, the King of Hanover battled with Albert physically for precedence at Victoria’s cousin’s wedding. Hanover lost: “I was forced to give him a strong push and drive him down a few steps, where the First Master of Ceremonies led him out of the chapel,” Albert wrote his brother. Victoria was livid at any sign of others’ blindness to what were in her mind Albert’s transcendent merits. Time was on Albert’s side in this respect: the original public image of Albert as a penniless foreign interloper had largely shifted to one of selfless public servant—and respectable paterfamilias.

  Albert repaid Victoria’s complete trust in him by giving her the best years of her life. He had convinced her that her true fulfillment was never to be found in the social whirl she had so delighted in during the Melbourne days, and those days were long gone: just a week after Lehzen had left the palace forever, in 1842, Victoria looked upon that time as if it were a strange dream from which she had awoken: “The life I led then was so artificial and superficial and yet I thought I was happy. Thank God! I now know what real happiness means.” Albert never overcame his sense of foreignness, and was resistant to the charms of society—notoriously, almost comically resistant in particular to the charms of society women. He—and, before long, Victoria—found pleasure in escaping the aristocratic sparkle of Court life for the bourgeois gemütlichkeit of secluded family life. And over the past few years, he had labored mightily to create that life for his wife and their children.

  He gave Victoria babies, for one thing. In 1849, there were six: after Vicky and Bertie came Alice (April 1843), and then Alfred (“Affie,” August 1844), Helena (“Lenchen,” May 1846) and Louise (March 1848) born just as Europe was erupting into revolution. Albert was a naturally loving and doting father—supervising the royal nursery, to which he kept the keys and constantly checked the locks—concerned, especially in the early days, by intrusions such as the Boy Jones’s, and by a number of letters received threatening harm to the royal infants. The Queen was more ambivalent about children: she disliked the discomforts of pregnancy and feared the pains of childbirth, thought infants unpleasantly “frog-like,” and confessed that she “only very exceptionally” found conversation with her children “either agreeable or easy.” None the less, Victoria learned to find her greatest fulfillment among her family. “I am coming more and more convinced,” she would later declare, “that the only true happiness in this world is to be found in the domestic circle.” Of course Albert, who always took precedence over her children in her affections, was absolutely necessary to complete that happiness.

  Albert’s reform of the royal households and his management of the royal estates made his wife rich, and made possible the domestic cocoon he created for her. Once he wrested the management of the royal household from Lehzen, he set to work and replaced the bureaucratic anarchy of the three competing household departments by appointing a single master of the household in each royal residence. Fires were lit without confusion, windows were washed, guests were well attended to—and costs went down. More than this, he took control of the royal estates, and they soon began to pay handsomely. In short order he made the monarchy profitable, removing it forever from the chronic indebtedness that had plagued the Queen’s royal uncles.

  As the family grew, they spent far less time in London, finding seclusion at first at Windsor and Claremont. (The other royal residence, Brighton, set amid the bustle of the city and away from the ocean, they both disliked; they shut the place up and sold it in 1845, using the money to enlarge Buckingham Palace.) By 1843, they wanted even more seclusion—a residence bought with their own funds, and thus free of government administration. By October they had negotiated the purchase of a thousand-acre estate, Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. And a little over a year before this birthday—at the end of 1847—they solidified their mutual love for the Highlands by leasing “a pretty little Castle in the old Scotch style”: Balmoral. No English monarch before Victoria had ever resided so distantly from the capital before this: such a thing would not have been possible before the 1840s and two great technological developments of the decade. Railways were booming and interconnecting the nation, reducing in particular travel time from London to Osborne House (with the help of a steam-powered yacht) to three hours, and to Aberdeen to less than nine. And the telegraph, which had entered into nationwide operation by the end of the decade, gave the Queen the ability to conduct government business from virtually anywhere in the Kingdom.

  Seclusion with Albert and her children, of course, meant that her regular airings from Buckingham Palace decreased dramatically. Indeed, even when she was in residence in London, she and Albert were more likely to walk in the privacy of the palace gardens than ride out together. Would-be Oxfords could no longer assume that Victoria would ride regularly even when she was in residence. The Queen’s ever-increasing urge to remove herself and her family from direct public view did nothing to diminish her popularity. She was paradoxically much more in the eyes of her subjects than any of her predecessors, because of the rise of a cheap illustrated press, beginning with the Illustrated London News in 1842. Now the royal couple, the royal children, the royal residences, and every royal event were a part of the shared experience of her subjects of all classes. These illustrations were inexpensive enough to adorn the walls of the poorest. Victoria no longer had to travel among her people to be seen by them. Indeed, it was in the public revelations of her private life that she saw as the key to her ever-growing popularity. “The papers … are most kind and gratifying,” she wrote to Uncle Leopold in 1844; “they say no Sovereign was more loved than I am (I am bold enough to say) and that, from our happy domestic home—which gives su
ch a good example.” A new and enduring idea of monarchy had emerged: the royal family as the ideal family.

  She owed it all to Albert: Albert had opened her eyes to the key to happiness, and then had given it to her. And yet she could not have been blind to the disjunction between her private happiness and the public turbulence of the 1840s.

  Life had indeed improved for most after that dark year 1842. Industry grew by leaps and bounds. The population, employment, exports, and gross national product all shot up. The railways were the most visible manifestation of this reality-shaking growth, tearing up the old cities, revolutionizing trade and mobility, soaking up surplus labor, and making and breaking fortunes. In 1847, to be sure, the speculative bubble burst and a subsequent run on the banks led to a financial crisis. Recovery, however, was swift, and Britain was poised for the great boom of the 1850s.

  And yet. Amidst all the growth existed pockets of dire poverty and hunger; the Hungry Forties was a decade that well deserved its name. In spite of the fact that, economically, 1842 was a turning point, and the economy grew dramatically after that, there existed all this time pockets of terrible suffering—suffering that was brought to the attention of an often-sympathetic but often-stymied public, leading to finger-pointing, handwringing, the shedding of a few sentimental tears, and usually little in the way of remedy. In 1843, Elizabeth Barrett Browning caused a sensation with her “Cry of the Children,” laying bare the soul-crushed existences of boys and girls denied their youth by the harrowing demands of factory labor. Four months later, in a Christmas issue of Punch, Thomas Hood caused an even greater sensation with “The Song of the Shirt,” a poem about London’s starving piecework seamstresses, living in low-wage slavery so that their employers, London’s slop-sellers or cheap clothing dealers, could undercut the competition:

  Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!

  Oh, men, with Mothers and Wives!

  It is not linen you’re wearing out,

  But human creatures’ lives!

  Stitch—stitch—stitch,

  In poverty, hunger and dirt,

  Sewing at once, with a double thread,

  A Shroud as well as a Shirt.

  And later in 1849, Henry Mayhew would begin publishing his evocative exploration of the hidden world of London’s working poor in the Morning Chronicle. The poorer of the “two nations” to which Benjamin Disraeli referred in his 1845 work Sybil, or the Two Nations, had never been more a part of the awareness of the wealthy—but never, at the same time, was poverty more accepted as an unfortunate and unalterable fact of life. Political economy might have been the dismal science, but it was indeed a science in the minds of the best thinkers of the 1840s, its speculations to them dogma. Laissez-faire ruled. Even radical reformers opposed attempts by the government to assist the poor: that, according to the science, would only make things worse.

  The worst hunger of all, that decade, struck Ireland with a vengeance—and completely by surprise—in 1845. No one knew exactly where the fungal disease Phytophthora infestans, or potato blight, came from; the disease had spread across northern Europe, and, in mid-September, reached Ireland: in a month, a third of that country’s overwhelmingly predominant crop transmogrified into a stinking, inedible goo. Prime Minister Robert Peel quickly understood the enormity of the crisis and tried to meet it, ordering £100,000 worth of Indian corn bought with government funds and sent from the United States. Moreover, he came to a momentous decision about the Corn Laws, which protected British farmers by regulating foreign grain imports—and which, many argued, kept the price of food artificially high. Support for the Corn Laws had been fundamental Tory doctrine. But Peel decided that the Corn Laws must be repealed.

  It was a decision that destroyed Peel politically, as the majority of his own party turned on him ferociously. Peel could only hope to pass repeal of the Corn Laws by resigning and letting Lord John Russell and the Whigs handle the problem, or by introducing the bill himself and splitting his own party irreparably. When a majority of his own cabinet would not support repeal, then, he resigned. The Queen called upon Russell to form a cabinet. He was unable to do so, and Victoria, with a sense of relief—for Peel had in his own way grown as close to Victoria as Melbourne had—then recalled Peel, who promptly formed a cabinet committed to repeal. From that moment, more than half his party turned on him, vowing to bring him down at any cost. Lord Derby in the House of Lords led this Protectionist faction, and Benjamin Disraeli and George Bentinck in the House of Commons took upon themselves the roles of Peel’s chief tormentors, ferociously and regularly attacking Peel’s character as well as his policy. Disraeli “hacked and mangled Peel with the most unsparing severity, and positively tortured his victim,” Charles Greville wrote of a speech that nearly brought Peel to tears. Ultimately, Peel won—and lost: on 25 June 1846, the same night that the Corn Law repeal passed in the House of Lords, the Protectionists in Commons voted against their principles to defeat a coercion bill for turbulent Ireland, in order to bring down Peel’s government. Four days later, Peel resigned. Though John Russell and his Whigs were in the minority—and, after a general election, remained in the minority—the cataclysmic split of the Tories, and the support Peel’s faction, the “Peelites,” gave the Whigs, kept Russell’s government securely in power. And Russell’s government still ruled three years later when his ministers threw dinners for the Queen’s thirtieth birthday. Lord Wellington was bitter about the cause of Peel’s fall, grumbling “rotten potatoes have done it all; they put Peel in his damned fright.”

  Peel’s downfall was a personal tragedy, and a greater one for starving Ireland. For while the chief architect of relief for Ireland, Charles Trevelyan, permanent undersecretary of the Treasury, worked under Peel as well as Russell, with the Whigs he found kindred spirits and full support for a grim laissez-faire response to Irish hunger. Under the Whigs, Trevelyan insisted that Irish pay for their own relief. He continued importing food, but demanded that local relief committees buy the food at market price. He instituted a program of public works—but insisted that they be paid for locally, with the help of government loans. When it became clear that the blight had utterly destroyed the potato crop of 1846, he allowed public works to continue, but government loans ceased completely. During the unusually bitterly cold winter months of early 1847, as thousands starved and fever ravaged the population, the government decided upon a radical change of policy: they would halt public works altogether, and feed the starving with soup kitchens, paid for largely from private charity. Victoria contributed £2,000 to one of these charities.* In a few months, the soup kitchens closed and charity dried up. The British were by then frankly tired of this interminable famine, and most were certain that the indolent Irish were responsible for their own plight. “The great evil with which we have to contend,” declared Trevelyan at the end of 1846, is “not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.” Victoria and Albert, originally deeply sympathetic to the plight of the Irish, concurred with this assessment, Albert writing at around the same time, in a memorandum, “The state of Ireland is most alarming and seems quite hopeless as every attempt on the part of the Government to relieve it, is turned by the Irish themselves to bad account.” In June 1847, the British government essentially washed its hands of the problem by reforming the Irish poor law to fix the costs of relieving the poor entirely upon the poor law unions—the workhouses—of Ireland.

  And the famine went on. The crop of 1847–8 was healthy but scarce: amid general starvation and destitution, few healthy seed potatoes were to be found, and fewer planted. The crop of 1848–9 was another total failure, and the suffering during the first few months of 1849 was among the worst of all. In the end, one million died: one out of eight of the Irish population. An equal number emigrated: many to the slums of English cities, but most to the United States. Most brought with them undying hatred for the British and a desire for revenge that would in years to come lead
to bitter consequences for Britain—would indeed come to threaten Victoria personally.

  Indeed, Irish rage had already burst out a year before, in July 1848, in spite of debilitating fever and hunger.

  The spark was the February Revolution in Paris, which in two days toppled Louis-Philippe from the throne. (He and his family sought refuge with the Queen; she put him up at Claremont.) The revolutionary fever spread like wildfire; within weeks Prussia had granted a new, liberal constitution, the King of Bavaria abdicated in favor of his son, and in Austria the chancellor Metternich was forced to flee—to England, of course—and the Emperor forced to give concessions. Austria’s Italian domains rose up, as did the rest of the country. Victoria’s royal palaces became aristocratic refugee camps.

  The revolutionary spark took fire in England, where the Chartists, in decline since the hot summer of 1842, burst back to life under the leadership of the movement’s fiery and charismatic agitator-in-chief, Feargus O’Connor. Rioting erupted in Glasgow and London in March. That month, the Chartists announced that they planned to march from Kennington Common, south of the river, to present the People’s Charter to Parliament for the third time—and planned to accompany the petition with a threatening procession of 200,000 people. The government betrayed the depth of its alarm with the enormity of its response. The troops in the capital were doubled and stationed out of sight at strategic points across the city, concentrating on the bridges over the Thames, upon which artillery was trained. Eighty-five thousand men were sworn in as special constables—a government masterstroke, ensuring that the middle class, unlike the French middle class, would remain squarely with the state. (One of these constables was Louis Napoleon, who had not yet taken advantage of the French revolution to return to his country, get elected president, and then make himself emperor.) On the advice of Russell and the Home Secretary, Victoria and Albert and their family (including 22-day-old Princess Louise) slipped through the pouring rain onto a train at closely guarded Waterloo Station, and decamped to Osborne.