Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  Moreover, after the miserable incompetence of the Queen’s early years – with the Bedchamber Crisis and the Lady Flora Hastings affair; and after the rocky start of the Tories openly scorning Albert in the House of Commons – the Queen was lucky enough to suffer several assassination attempts. Although never slow to let anyone know if she felt slightly bilious or had a mild headache, the Queen was physically courageous in graver circumstances, and the many attempts made during her reign upon her life never saw her reduced to panic, or even to displays of fear. The first of these occurred on 10 June 1840, when Edward Oxford – ‘he is seventeen years old, a waiter in a low inn – not mad – but quite quiet and composed’15 – shot at Albert and Victoria not a hundred yards from Buckingham Palace in Hyde Park.

  In May 1842, they were shot at by one John Francis, again as they passed in their carriage. ‘The pistol was about a yard from the window,’16 Albert recollected. He was condemned to death, but, since his pistol had in all probability not been loaded, Victoria and Albert spared his life. In July of that year ‘a hunchbacked lad named Bean’17 also fired at their carriage.

  It was a dangerous time. Peel’s secretary was assassinated not long afterwards, by a man mistaking him for the Prime Minister himself. Not only did these events raise the royal pair in the public esteem, but the prospect of being shot would appear to have taught them to count their blessings and to be less quarrelsome – though it was always a stormy marriage, and Queen Victoria’s children, servants, secretaries and Prime Ministers all knew the force of Prince Albert’s judgement that she ‘is too hasty and passionate’.

  When the Tories won the election, there was no repetition of the Bedchamber Crisis. On the contrary, Prince Albert ensured that there were Tory ladies introduced into his wife’s household. Albert, who was himself a skilled home economist, was impressed by Peel’s desire to get the economy of the country straight, with income tax of seven pence in the pound being imposed for a limited period of three years as a way of turning the budget deficit into a surplus, which placed him in a position to review the tariffs on imported goods – including corn. He cleverly brought in the Canada Corn Act of 1843, on the one hand appearing to side with the Protectionists – for he was actually bringing into the legislature a protection of a particular imported grain – and on the other defending the Canadian economy against the incursions, fiscal or actual, of the United States.

  It is interesting that, as the family grew, neither Victoria nor Albert considered the possibility of moving either to Kew, where George III had led a blameless (if sometimes mad) family existence, or to Kensington Palace, where Victoria had herself grown up, occupying, by the end – to her uncle William IV’s disgust – over seventeen rooms. Claremont, though still belonging to King Leopold, was always at their disposal, and they often went there. It was entirely rural and entirely suitable as a house for a young Royal Family. Both Victoria and Albert complained that Buckingham Palace, in spite of the money spent on it by George IV, was unsuited to their needs as royal personages with an expanding number of children. The alterations to the Palace by John Nash, finished as George IV was dying, had cost over £500,000, but it was estimated by a Select Committee that a further £150,000 was needed to make it habitable. Edward Blore was the architect employed to finish Nash’s work. Nevertheless, by the time Victoria and Albert started to have children, they found there was no suitable room for the brood. Dr Lyon Playfair, having inspected the kitchens and sanitation, declared them to be worse than many of the places he had visited as Commissioner of Inquiry into the State of Large Towns. Windsor Castle was deemed equally impractical, and the area around the Brighton Pavilion had been so built up as to block the view of the sea from the Queen’s windows. It also lacked privacy.18

  These were the stated reasons, or ‘reasons’, for the acquisition of a new royal residence. The glaringly obvious psychological reason is that the royal pair, and Albert in particular, needed to start something new. He did not wish to be seen as the young man from Coburg, meekly fitting into the traditions of the English Royal House and living in the houses and palaces of his wife’s predecessors.

  Sir Robert Peel, who had by now become Prince Albert’s friend, made inquiries and lighted upon, of all places, the Isle of Wight, considering two properties to be suitable: Norris Castle, where the child Victoria had spent holidays with her mother and the Conroys, and Osborne where the Conroys actually had a house. In March 1843, it became clear that Lady Isabella Blachford, the owner of Osborne House, would be prepared to sell it, and Prince Albert paid her a flying visit; he decided at once that it was suitable. The Queen could not accompany him. As for much of the 1840s, she was pregnant, this time eight months into her pregnancy with Princess Alice. Peel advised them to make inquiries ‘through some very confidential channel as a suspicion of the object of them would probably greatly enhance the price’.19 Albert took the point, but bombarded the Prime Minister with practical questions: ‘Can one see the sea from the House at Osborne or from any part of the Park? Is there any right of way, or a public footpath through the Park? What kind of House is it? How many rooms? Does the wood run down to the sea? Is the Farm on the land side or the sea side of the Park, is it New Barn Farm (as marked on the Ordnance Map?) Is Barton Farm included in the purchase money? & must this Leasehold be purchased with the Freehold?’20 In spite of all their attempts at secrecy, the prince was obliged to ask Peel, ‘Have you seen in the Chronicle our whole scheme about the Isle of Wight detailed?’21 So they bought Osborne. It must be one of the most idyllic spots in the south of England, with its gentle, natural cove, and its trees framing the views of the Solent. Here the children would grow up. Here Victoria would spend most of her life – certainly, most of the happiest times of her life. And here she would die.

  1843 was a happy year and the young parents did not allow the existence of small children to deter them from the pleasures of travel. In the summer, they visited France as guests of the French King and stayed with Louis-Philippe at Château d’Eu. ‘The King and Queen are all kindness and affection to us,’ the Queen wrote to her Prime Minister, ‘and treat us quite as members of their family.’ They weren’t family exactly, but there was a connection – King Leopold of Belgium having married, en secondes noces, Louise, Louis-Philippe’s daughter. ‘Aunt’ Louise had been a kind friend to Victoria during her teenage misery and an ally against Conroy and the Kensington System. The Queen continued, ‘this union and harmony which reigns among us does our hearts good. The Château is fine and full of many fine old Family pictures. The country reminds the Queen of Brighton. The people are very friendly, crying, Vive la Reine d’Angleterre! whenever the Queen appears.’22 She always enjoyed visits to France, and they were a feature of her life until deep old age.

  At the end of the year, Prince Albert told Peel that they had decided to have a little English tour, basing themselves at Peel’s house, Drayton Park, visiting surrounding nobility, taking in a trip to Birmingham to see the factories, and paying a call on the Queen Dowager at Witley Court in Worcestershire. They made the journey to the Midlands by train. Clearly there were no lavatories on board, since the ever-practical Peel told them that they would be stopping for five minutes at Watford, and again at Wolverton where a room had been made ready, ‘in the event of H.M. wishing to occupy it during the short time (five minutes) that the train will stop there’.23 It is perhaps worth noting in passing that such an earthy mindset was not Prince Albert’s. In spite of suffering throughout his life from chronic indigestion, he made efforts to discontinue the habit, in his household, of the men lingering over their dessert, while the ladies withdrew after dinner. Albert was obviously among those who considered that the chief function of this custom was to allow the men to overindulge in alcohol, and perhaps in ribaldry, whereas surely the reason the convention arose was to allow the two sexes to relieve themselves without drawing attention to the prosaic reality of things.

  It must have been quite
demanding for Peel, on top of his ministerial duties, to arrange this royal visit at his home in Drayton, but all seems to have passed off happily. Victoria and Albert then went on to Chatsworth, seat of the 6th Duke of Devonshire. Rather tactlessly perhaps, George Anson, thanking Peel for his hospitality on behalf of the royal pair, wrote to the Prime Minister from Chatsworth, ‘The weather continues to favour us here & this beautiful place has appeared this morning in a white frost to great advantage. The prince thinks it is the finest place he has yet seen in England.’24

  Although the stylish bachelor Duke of Devonshire had been given very short notice for the royal visit, his genius gardener, Joseph Paxton, who had built the superb giant greenhouse nicknamed the ‘Great Stove’, was stimulated by a challenge. All the garden walks were tidied. The lime trees between the park and the neighbouring village of Edensor were pruned and ‘made perfect’, in case the royal couple wished to visit the village church. ‘The road from the arboretum walk is to be covered with white and yellow gravel . . . there must be not a drop of water on the arboretum walks.’25 Paxton then set to work for his greatest extravaganza. He ordered over 13,000 oil lamps, to illuminate the trees, the south front of the house and the Great Stove.

  The duke, despite the pretence of being bored by the visit, put on a display which no Prime Minister or royal personage in England (George IV being dead) could dare, or afford, to match. It was a glorious demonstration of the Whig aristocracy at its grandest. A party of uniformed Yeomanry met the train at Chesterfield, and as the Queen and prince were conveyed over the twelve miles of Derbyshire Peaks to this superb Cavendish palace, they were greeted by a twenty-one-gun salute from the hunting tower. It is recorded that 194 gallons of ale and 436 gallons of beer were ordered to keep the crowds happy, 6 oxen and 20 sheep were slaughtered for the guests who included Lord Palmerston, the Duke of Wellington and Lord Melbourne; 45 bedrooms were required and 140 sat to dinner each night. As the royal carriages came into the park, the National Anthem struck up, and Paxton’s crystal palace, the Great Stove, was lit up like a pleasure dome in the land of faeries. At 9 pm, from the house, the guests could look at Paxton’s great cascade lit with coloured Bengal lights, while 3,000 Russian lanterns flickered from the winter trees and the fountains were lit by lamps. At 10 pm exactly, a rocket was launched, cannons fired from the cascade and the hunting tower, and a magnificent display of fireworks crackled all over the park. The Duke of Wellington said, ‘I have travelled Europe through and through and witnessed scenes of surpassing grandeur on many occasions, but never before did I see so magnificent a coup d’oeil as that now extended before me.’26

  Albert conveyed to the Prime Minister his desire to have Osborne, and Peel at once felt visited by the spectre of the extravagant George IV. Albert insisted that the house could be made habitable by rebuilding the kitchens, and extending the stables and building dormitories for the servants. Blore was put in charge of drawing up the architectural plans. But then, the work was placed in the hands of Thomas Cubitt.

  Thomas Cubitt (1788–1856) had started out as a jobbing carpenter. A classic case of ‘Self-Help’, as defined by that manual of self-made men by Samuel Smiles, Cubitt became a speculative builder at just the moment when the building boom in London took off. His great coup was to build the Calthorpe Estate in Bloomsbury, and on the basis of that he got the contract, in 1825, to start building the Grosvenor Estate near Buckingham Palace. This meant the construction of sewers, paving, street lighting, as well as the handsome and palatial residences of Belgrave Square, Chester Street, Eaton Square and Eaton Place, a colossal undertaking which, by the time Victoria became queen, had made Cubitt a prodigious fortune. He left over £1 million in his will.27

  He was the natural choice of builder for Osborne House. Professor Henry-Russell Hitchcock, an historian of architecture, criticized Albert for not employing one of the leading architects of the day. ‘The stupid result,’ he wrote in Early Victorian Architecture in Britain (1945), ‘confirms the suspicion based on the employment of a builder rather than an architect, that the Royal Family had no real respect for the profession.’28

  But the architectural historian missed the historical point. Osborne did have an architect: Prince Albert himself; he did not feel the need of Sir Charles Barry or Decimus Burton to tell him what to build. His Italianate villa beside the Solent makes a statement. As a student at Bonn University, he had read the History of the Renaissance, attending weekly two-hour classes with the art historian Eduard Joseph d’Alton, attending the lectures of August William Schlegel. His wide knowledge of European art was in marked contrast to the tastes of Queen Victoria herself, which, until she married, would appear to have been limited to exclamations of rapture when Sir Edwin Landseer captured the likeness of a favourite pony or dog. In the early months of 1839, Albert had visited Italy with Stockmar and an English army officer supplied by King Leopold, Lieutenant Francis Seymour – who had subsequently become part of his household. January and February had been spent in Florence, and in March he had gone on to Rome and Naples. It was the period when the literate world was reading Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes (1834), that gloriously self-confident work of scholarship, in which a liberal Lutheran polymath surveyed with a superior eye the Papacy in the times of Michelangelo, the new St Peter’s and the Council of Trent. During his hour-long audience with Pope Gregory XVI, the nineteen-year-old prince had discussed Greek art. When the Pope ventured to say that he thought Greek art owed much to the Etruscan influence, Albert was able to put him right and point to the great influence of Ancient Egypt. Gregory XVI was a scholarly monk, who had encouraged the excavation of the Forum and the Catacombs, and who founded both the Etruscan and the Egyptian Museums in the Vatican.29 He was too polite, however, not to defer to the German teenager in such matters.

  The young man who knew better than the learned founder of Italian museums scarcely needed the assistance of an English architect to construct a seaside villa.

  In 1841, Ludwig Grüner came to England. He had started as a scene painter and engraver in Dresden but, after extensive travel in Europe, he had built up an unrivalled expertise, particularly in Raphael, whose work he reproduced in engravings; and in the decoration of Italian churches in fresco and mosaic. Grüner became one of Prince Albert’s closest artistic advisers, and helped him build up his considerable collection. He also took a hand himself in the adornment of the Garden Pavilion at Buckingham Palace. (Sadly, the Pavilion was demolished during the 1930s.)

  The fire which had devastated the Palace of Westminster in 1834 necessitated the building of new Houses of Parliament. As Barry and Pugin’s work was completed, the question of such matters as the decoration of corridors and staircases arose. Peel suggested to the Queen in 1841 that inquiries should be conducted by a select committee under royal chairmanship – Prince Albert being the obvious choice of chair.

  Albert’s mind turned at once to the work of the German artist Peter Cornelius, who had been responsible for the revival of the art of fresco painting in Rome in 1816, had returned to Germany and made Munich ‘the unrivalled queen of modern art’. King Ludwig I of Bavaria commissioned him to embellish the Hofgarten, the Neue Residenz, the Glyptothek, the Pinakothek, as well as various churches with frescoes depicting scenes from German history and mythology. When he visited London in 1841, this Catholic founder of the ‘Nazarene’ or neo-medieval school of painting was enlisted to instruct English painters in the techniques he had mastered in Italy. ‘The effect on British art will be tremendous,’ Benjamin Robert Haydon predicted; and the artist who learned the most from Cornelius was undoubtedly William Dyce. Prince Albert was keen from the first to encourage English artists along this path. ‘If the same fire was lighted amongst the English,’ he wrote to Peel, ‘if an encouraging opportunity were afforded them, if some were sent to study at Munich, Florence and Rome, I have not the slightest doubt, that they would produce works equal to the present school of Germans.�
�30

  Cornelius was both a leading exemplar of neo-medievalism and a great influence on British neo-medievalists. His work was not confined to frescoes, or even to painting. When Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, was born, Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, commissioned Cornelius to design a silver shield – the Shield of Faith (Der Glaubenschild). It took five years to complete. Goldsmith Johann Georg Hossauer worked to Cornelius’s designs. In the centre of the shield is the golden head of Christ, surrounded by dark blue enamelling and gilded stars. The circular shield is set with onyx and chrysoprase, with scenes from Christ’s life picked out as reliefs in silver. Albert compared the shield to the best efforts of ‘the classic Italian masters of the 15th and 16th centuries’.31 Albert himself designed jewellery, of which a striking example is a brooch of 1841 which he had made as a Christmas present for the Queen. It depicts the Princess Royal, Vicky, as a cherub clutching a string of pearls and wearing a blue enamelled dress dotted with golden stars. Her wings are set with emeralds, diamonds, topazes and rubies. ‘The workmanship and design are quite exquisite, & dear Albert was so pleased at my delight over it, its having been entirely his own idea and taste.’32

  Inspired by the German artistry of Cornelius, then, and encouraged by the prince, artists were invited to submit cartoons of subjects drawn from British history or from Spenser, Shakespeare or Milton to adorn the new Palace of Westminster. The exhibitions of these cartoons in 1844 were tremendously popular and provoked what was called at the time ‘a prevailing national mania’33 for fresco painting. Dyce was the first to finish a fresco in the Palace of Westminster, with The Baptism of King Ethelbert in June 1846. Daniel Maclise, C. W. Cope and J. C. Horsley followed with Chivalry, Edward the Black Prince and Religion in August 1846. In 1847, Dyce did a series of frescoes based on the Arthurian legends. Albert also commissioned him to decorate the Garden Pavilion at Buckingham Palace with scenes from Milton’s Comus, and, in 1846, Dyce created one of his finest works, a fresco for the staircase at Osborne House of Neptune resigning his Empire of the Sea to Britannia.