Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  These commissions from Prince Albert did much to encourage the patronage of the arts in Britain. At Osborne, he could provide a showcase of his taste. Central to the conception of this homage to his cultural tour of Italy as a youth was the sculpture gallery in the principal corridor of the house, where modern busts and statues, such as William Theed the Younger’s Psyche Lamenting the Loss of Cupid (1847), stood side by side with ancient casts. Albert never had the money to be a collector on the grandest scale, which is why the paintings of Dyce provided so acceptable an alternative to buying actual Raphaels. He also commissioned copies of his favourite Italian masters, such as the exquisite reproduction of Raphael’s Colonna Madonna, which he had painted on Berlin porcelain.

  The whole effect of the house, as it reached perfection and completion, was of Enlightenment and airiness. It was a modern palace for a Renaissance prince.

  If the tensions over politics and power never entirely went away, and if Victoria’s resentment at repeated pregnancy clouded her existence, the early to mid-1840s, when their children were infants, was a time of great harmony between the Queen and the prince. Having engaged Lady Lyttelton to be the governess and teacher to the rising tribe, the parents had plenty of time alone together. On a wet May day in 1842, when the family was at Claremont, Victoria and Albert went for a walk on Oxshott Heath and were caught in a violent shower. They took refuge in a shed next to a cottage.

  An old man, who was working in the garden, begged us to walk into the cottage, which we accordingly did, & went into the kitchen, he insisting on our sitting down near the fire. The kitchen was clean & tidy, though he was greatly distressed at its being so dusty. He said it was ‘an humble Cot’; he was very civil, poor old man, but did not in the least know who we were. He told us his whole history, & that he had been 50 years with the Earl of Fingall.34

  Such encounters were unusual in England. The companionship of those who dwelt in ‘an humble Cot’ was one of the things which always attracted the Queen to the Celtic fringes. Both she and Albert were very drawn to Ireland, but, even before the devastating famines of 1846–8, which killed a million people and drove over a million to emigrate, the situation in Ireland was so volatile that they were advised it would not be safe to go there.

  Scotland was a different matter. In September 1842, they made their first visit to Edinburgh. While staying at Dalkeith with the Duke of Buccleuch, the Queen had her first taste of oatmeal porridge ‘which I thought very good, & also some of the Finham [sic] Haddock’.35

  She associated Scotland, always, with feelings of freedom, with a casting off of the restraints of court life and of formality. On this first visit, she delighted in the sight of ‘the old women in their caps, which they call a “Mutch”, & the young girls and children, with flowing hair, many pretty ones amongst them, are so picturesque. One hardly sees a woman with a bonnet.’36 Apart from being enraptured by the bad weather – ‘A thick Scotch mist came out’ followed by the occasional ‘quite enchanting’ view – the Queen loved being away from her children. ‘Albert returned at 1/2 p. 11 having visited the University & various other Institutions. Began reading to him out of Scott’s “Tales of My Grandfather”.’37 That tour took in Taymouth, Craigie Beans, and a wonderful evening staying with Lord Breadalbane at which she saw Highland reels being danced and heard the bagpipes played, ‘which had a wild & very gay effect’.38 Two years later, they took the two elder children to enjoy the delights of Scotland. It was at Blair Atholl, where the prince shot a stag, that he guided his eldest child’s hand to write her name for the first time: an emblematic gesture – both the name, Victoria, and the fact that Albert’s hand guided that of clever little Vicky. When they boarded the royal yacht in choppy waters to leave Scotland, the Queen felt ‘it was indescribably melancholy seeing the dear hills gradually disappear’.39

  At home, life took on a pattern of the Queen continuing to govern within the intervals of pregnancy after pregnancy. In April 1843, ‘a healthy girl’ (Alice) had been born. The Queen – who, as was the custom in England for those who had just given birth, until the 1950s, was laid up for a month – was pushed around in her bed on casters, or took to a wheelchair, or, as she put it in her vividly Hanoverian turn of phrase, ‘was rolled into the Audience Room for my dinner’.40

  With some of the feeling of Shakespeare’s last Romances, as new babies came into the family, the old guard one by one left the stage. Not long after Alice’s birth, the Duke of Sussex, the book-loving eccentric uncle who had given away the Queen in marriage, died. ‘Albert came in at 8 in the morning,’ the Queen wrote, ‘in his mourning attire, ready to attend Uncle Sussex’s funeral. He wore a long black cloth cloak, over a black coat, with a sword, & an immense hat, with black crepe. He drove off with George C. & Fritz Mecklenburg, &c. Returning at 1/2 p. 12. All had gone off extremely well, but they had had to wait a very long time.’41 Ever an odd one out, Sussex had chosen, rather than interment at Windsor, to be buried in the new municipal burying ground at Kensal Green.

  They had royal visitors from abroad. The King of Saxony came in June 1844. ‘We have given him the Breakfast Room,’ she wrote (in Buckingham Palace), ‘& the one next to it, which are the only ones available, as this house has such wretched accommodation.’42

  They took the King on to Windsor where they were joined by no less a personage than the Emperor of Russia, who knew how to please the Queen. He said, ‘C’est impossible d’être plus joli garçon, que n’est le Prince Albert; il a l’air si noble, si bon’; ‘which,’ as she added superfluously, ‘is very true.’43

  By the time the Prime Minister had finally decided to make up his mind to repeal the Corn Laws, in the summer of 1846, he had no stauncher allies than the Queen and the prince. She read the speeches in the House of Commons with mounting disbelief, particularly when Lord George Bentinck called Peel a hypocrite and a turncoat – and ‘that dreadful Disraeli followed in the same track’.44

  Far from being ‘above politics’, Victoria and Albert were now Free Traders and fervent Peelites. The Tories had come into the election pledging to support Protection, and Bentinck and Disraeli were right to say that he was now going back on his word to the electorate. This meant nothing to the Queen, who thought his speeches ‘beautiful and indeed unanswerable’.45

  On 19 January 1846, Peel told the Commons, ‘It is no easy task to ensure the united action of an ancient monarchy, a proud aristocracy and a reformed constituency [i.e. the elected House of Commons post-Reform Act]’.46 A little over a week later, on 27 January, Prince Albert himself came to the gallery of the House to watch his hero introduce the proposal: total abolition of the Corn Laws within three years.

  Colonel Sibthorp ‘trusted that the English people would combine as one man in an effort to make the Prime Minister understand how odious to them were his proceedings’.47 The House divided, with only 112 Conservatives supporting Peel, and 231 following Bentinck and Disraeli into voting against. The Corn Laws were repealed by Whig and radical votes joining those of the Peelites, and the Government limped on until June.

  The Corn Laws were consigned to history, for better or worse. Lord George Bentinck, in an immense speech delivered to the Commons on 27 February, questioned the very economic basis of the argument, pointing out, among an avalanche of statistics, that the price of a four-pound loaf was ten pence in 1842, when Peel had introduced his Canada Corn Bill. Yet Peel now spoke of a ten pence halfpenny loaf as a ‘famine price’, only four years later. He questioned whether the fluctuating price of bread, controlled by corn merchants, would be much lower than it was when controlled by tariff, and he spoke with grave alarm of the effect on the landed classes, the farmers and the aristocracy of the nation. But his deepest thrust was reserved for the Queen and Prince Albert. He asked:

  If so humble an individual as myself might be permitted to whisper a word in the ear of that illustrious and royal Personage, who, as he stands nearest, so is her justl
y dearest, to Her who sits upon the throne, I would take leave to say, that I cannot but think he listened to ill advice when, on the first night of this great discussion, he allowed himself to be seduced by the First Minister of the Crown to come down in this House to usher in, to give éclat, and as it were, by reflection from the Queen, to give the semblance of the personal sanction of Her Majesty to a measure which, be it for good or evil, a great majority at least of the landed aristocracy of England, of Scotland, of Ireland, imagine will be fraught with deep injury, if not ruin, to them – a measure which, not confined in its operation to this great class, is calculated to grind down countless smaller interests, engaged in the domestic trades and industry of this Empire, transferring the profits of all these interests – English, Scotch, Irish and Colonial – great and small alike, from Englishmen, from Scotchmen, and from Irishmen to Americans, to Frenchmen, to Russians, to Poles, and to Germans.48

  It was a devastating speech, implying, without actually stating, by its great rhetorical peroration, that Peel and Victoria had surrendered the Beef and Liberty, or rather the Corn and Liberty, of Old England into German hands. The prince never ventured into the gallery of the House of Commons again.

  SEVEN

  I PURITANI

  THE VISITS TO France, and to Scotland, from 1843 onwards, had been undertaken on board HMY Victoria and Albert, the first royal yacht to be steam powered, being fitted with a 320 kW (430 horsepower) engine. Designed by William Symonds, she was a twin-paddle steamer, 1,034 tons in displacement, laid down in Pembroke Dock in 1842 and launched on 25 April 1843.

  As the royal children grew, the yacht became an ideal vehicle for taking them on holiday. In 1846, for example, the Queen and the prince decided it was time that the Duke of Cornwall, now aged nearly five, should visit his Duchy. The Royal Family ‘were everywhere extremely well received, and so was “The Duke of Cornwall”, who in his sailor dress seemed to be a great favourite with the crew of the Yacht.’1

  Having visited Restormel, Albert wrote, ‘I had long wished to see the mines of Cornwall and was very much pleased with all I saw, particularly the population, which seems to be an excellent one. The women are working together under large sheds, pen at the sides, they sort the ores, wash them, pound them and are said to be very moral and well-behaved. They are certainly very healthy and good-looking. A beautiful new machine, worked by the steam engine, by which the miners are let down the shafts and are brought up again.’2

  The Queen wanted to go down the mine, and wrote in her journal:

  It is an iron mine, & one enters on the level. Albert & I got into one of the trucks & were dragged in by miners, Mr Taylor being so good as to walk behind us. The miners wear a curious dress of wool with a cap, like on the accompanying sketch. They generally have a candle stuck in front of the caps. This time candles were fixed along the inside of the mine, & those of the miners who did not drag or push us, carried lights. There was no room for anyone to pass between the truck & the rock & only just room enough to hold up one’s head & even that not always. The whole thing had a most weird effect with the lights at intervals. We got out of the truck and scrambled a little way to see the veins of ore & Albert knocked off some pieces, but usually it is blown off with gunpowder, being so hard. The miners seemed so pleased & are intelligent good people. It was so dazzling when we came up again into the daylight.3

  On this visit, as on similar excursions into different parts of her kingdom, Victoria was extending the function of the monarchy. George IV did not go down mines. This monarch and her husband were visiting not merely the houses of the great, as in royal progresses of the past, but mines, factories, farms, industrial towns; and by taking their children with them, they were demonstrating the Royal Family as interwoven with the new destiny of Britain, with its reformed Parliament and its expanding industrial economy. Victoria, who was by now regularly taking painting lessons with Edward Lear, saw the passing scenes with the eye of a very accomplished draughtswoman and watercolourist. ‘We remained on deck till past 10, looking out for all the little fishing boats & it was such a fine night.’4

  The family was expanding. There were now five children. Helena was born that June, and named after Prince Albert’s first cousin Hélène of Orléans.5 ‘Really, when one is so happy & blessed in one’s home life, as I am, Politics (provided my Country is safe) must take only a second place,’ the Queen wrote.6 This is precisely the state of things for which Stockmar had been yearning.

  So it was that, as Peel stood down as Prime Minister, it was Albert who saw to the incoming replacement. Peel, whom the Queen had so abominated in 1839, was ‘much overcome’7 when he took leave of her, and kissed hands, in 1846. She wept too. But it was Albert who, on 30 June at Osborne, had seen Lord John Russell, the Whig Leader, and ascertained from him that there was no need for a General Election. The Peelites had agreed that they would support the Whigs in the Commons. Russell and his Whig colleagues could carry on the Government without going to the country.

  It was Albert who made this constitutional decision. Of course, the Corn Laws would have been repealed, come what may. But it was Albert who expedited the political process. Russell held on in office until the due time of the next election – 1847 – and won by a narrow majority.

  So, by the late summer of 1846, Lord John Russell was Prime Minister. A tiny man, with the rather absurd Russell voice – retained and made famous by his grandson the philosopher Bertrand Russell – he was sixty when he took office. When he was asked by the Prince Consort to do so, Lady John (his second wife, who had been Lady Fanny Elliot, a daughter of the Earl of Minto) exclaimed that his would be the most religious and moral Government the country had ever known.8 By ‘most religious’, she meant most Protestant.

  Protestantism did not blight the potato, but it was one of the elements in the English psyche which enabled the Government to be so slow to cope with a disaster which, in Russell’s own words, was ‘a famine of the thirteenth century acting upon a population of the nineteenth’.9 The unhappy marriage between economic liberals, who disapproved of state aid and who felt the economic order must find its own balance, and evangelicals (such as Russell) who believed that the potato blight might be – or actually was – a punishment for popish idolatry, led to a painful slowness of action. The previous year’s potato crop had failed. Even as Russell was forming his first Cabinet, the second crop failed too – unexpectedly. Russell continued a scheme of public works for the poor, which had been set up by Peel the previous summer, but it was not until February 1847 that a halfway efficient system of soup kitchens had been established, nor was it until later in the spring of 1847 that the Government passed the Irish Poor Law Extension Act attempting to deal with the matter as a whole. By then, hundreds of thousands of people had starved to death.

  Among those absentee landlords who owned estates in Ireland while living in England was the new Foreign Secretary, Viscount Palmerston. Just as it was Albert who had interviewed Russell about his fitness to form an administration after the departure of Peel, it was Albert who saw Palmerston at Osborne in July 1846,10 and agreed to his taking over the Foreign Office from his old Harrovian contemporary, the gentler, more moderate Lord Aberdeen.

  It was Palmerston who was, on the whole successfully, to resist the prince’s bid to reclaim royal prerogatives.11 Palmerston was the last, and the most vigorous, embodiment of the Whig power. Karina Urbach has pointed to the significance of a twenty-five page memorandum in the Staatsarchiv in Coburg, which Ernst wrote some time after becoming duke in 1844, setting out what should be the true Coburg policy, at home and abroad. It is a key document to understanding Albert’s political position, especially in foreign policy, where he clashed consistently with Palmerston.

  Since the Family originates from a pure German House, it is essential to direct attention at all times to remaining a pure German. The generality of Family Members [the word used is Glieder, which means both ‘members
’ and ‘links’, as in a chain] will always want to move in a German Element, and never stop contributing to the preservation and wellbeing of Germany. Apart from the Head of the House [that is, Ernst himself, Duke of Coburg], three Members of the Family have been destined through happy circumstances to take part, either directly or indirectly in the powerful control of Government. Two arrived at this position through marriage and one through being selected [i.e. as King of the Belgians]. The first two, by the very nature of their position, stand as an equal to their Parent House, and almost to the Interests of whichever country they have married. On the contrary, it must be easier for Members of our House (in contrast to other Houses) to form, from outside, a powerful overall Unit, if we remain perpetually conscious that, if we are sometimes isolated, we can nonetheless endlessly aspire to, and reach a connection of all the Members.12

  Invoking the spirit of the Three Musketeers, Ernst hoped the Coburgers, whether in England, Belgium, Germany or Portugal, would be All for One and One for All. (Gegen Fremde stehe der eine für den Andern, und Alle für einen.) It would be impossible to find a less ambiguous proof that Prince Albert and his family consciously sought to influence the realpolitik of Europe.