Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  The vastly complicated scene has too many elements to be summarized glibly; but from 1849 until the late 1850s, we can watch Victoria and Albert attempting to guide their Prime Ministers towards a greater acceptance of Free Trade and its natural political consequence: a gradual extension of the franchise, and the involvement of greater numbers of the electorate in the process of choosing Members of Parliament. In this, one can say that Prince Albert had a decisively positive role to play, in particular with the triumph of the Great Exhibition. In two other great areas of governance, however, matters were more complex. In Ireland, for the next two decades, both in relation to detailed land reforms, and to the much bigger question of whether the Irish felt they were properly represented by the Westminster Government, the royal pair were as adrift and as out of touch as their ministers. In the matter of foreign policy, we find a truly fascinating situation developing, in which the royal pair, especially when Palmerston was Foreign Secretary (less so, paradoxically, when he had at last become Prime Minister), we find a Britain at odds with itself; the Foreign Office and the Crown often completely opposed to one another in their attitudes to France, to Russia, to Germany and the Danish claims over the Schleswig-Holstein Duchies, and to the whole complexity of the Eastern Question – Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean.

  Since it was also a time when the fecund Queen continued to expand her family, with Prince Arthur being born in 1850 and Prince Leopold in 1853, it was inevitable that for at least some of the time Prince Albert took the primary role as royal arbiter. You see this, for example, in the anguished and punctilious correspondence between Buckingham Palace and the Foreign Office during 1849 and 1850. Over the Schleswig-Holstein Duchies, the Queen wrote, ‘the cause of the war [between Denmark and Prussia] having been the unlawful attempt to incorporate Schleswig into Denmark, the peace cannot be lasting unless it contains sufficient guarantees against the resumption of that scheme’.9 There is a perfect logic in the Queen writing from this point of view in the light of her deep involvement on the side of Germany: her sister was married to the Augustenburg claimant to one of the Duchies; her husband, brother-in-law and many other relations were all deeply committed to the success of German unification and the protection of the Holstein Duchy from Denmark’s intrusion. From Palmerston’s point of view, however, British interests were best served by forging a strong Scandinavian alliance – especially in view of his increased belligerence towards Russia.

  Similarly, when Palmerston, at the beginning of 1851, wanted to move Lord Cowley, a very able diplomat, from Germany to St Petersburg, he did so with the logic of his own position unimpaired. He was warming up to major fisticuffs with Russia and he wanted in place at the Russian Court a diplomat of the first rank. From Victoria and Albert’s point of view, however, little as they liked Russia, it was a power to be reckoned with and they had not (as yet) foreseen the extraordinary turn of events which would bring Britain and Russia to war with one another. From their position, the really big ‘story’ in Europe during those times was not the expanding power of Russia in the East; it was the future of Germany after the Year of Revolutions. After the failure of a left-wing putsch in Frankfurt (hence the arrival of Karl Marx as a refugee in London) the Queen and the prince favoured keeping Cowley in Frankfurt. And the Queen wrote to Palmerston that ‘she must insist that the posts of Berlin and Frankfort [sic – it was the common Victorian spelling] which in her opinion are of nearly equal importance, should be filled by men capable of dealing with the complicated and dangerous political questions now in agitation there’.10 ‘She’ – the letter bears all the hallmarks of having been written by Albert – links ‘the peace of Europe’ with the ‘welfare of England’. From now onwards, and until the end of her reign, the tendency was for the Queen to take a more Eurocentric approach to foreign policy while her ministers, of whatever political complexion, vacillated between various positions of cynicism in what they considered to be ‘British interests’. But with none of her ministers was the contrast sharper than with Palmerston in these years of 1849–51.

  The Prime Minister, however, was not Palmerston, but Lord John Russell. It is a strange fact that Russell – who in 1832 had been one of the prime architects of the Great Reform Bill, and who could lay claim to being one of the great British legislators – should, as Prime Minister, have been responsible for only one major Act of Parliament: the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851. It was generally agreed, even at the time, to be a mistake; Lord Clarendon was against it – warning that it would cause bad feeling, possibly something rather worse, in Ireland; Gladstone, no doughtier defender of the Church of England than he, was against it; even the Queen had mixed feelings about it, being afraid to upset her Roman Catholic subjects by too open a sympathy with Russell’s Bill. Indeed, many of her relations, for one reason or another, such as the King of the Belgians, had embraced Roman Catholicism on variations of the Henri IV principle. (In Leopold’s case it was Brussels, rather than Paris, which was worth the Mass.) The Duke of Nemours congratulated her on the ‘moderation’ of her responses to the ‘Papal Aggression’11 (that is, to the anti-Papal Agression Addresses she had received). She favoured a diplomatic solution – the sending of diplomats to Rome to dissuade the Pope from setting up the new hierarchy, but this scheme ‘foundered on the everlasting rock – Lord Palmerston – the obstacle to everything that is good & right’.12 Prince Albert ‘entirely agreed’ with Russell’s views on Papal Aggression.13 The more the Queen heard about the antics of Bishop Nicholas Wiseman, the senior English Roman Catholic cleric, the more she agreed too, but she kept her views private. She was torn, as she told her aunt the Duchess of Gloucester, between her ‘sincerely Protestant feelings’, and ‘the unchristian and intolerant spirit exhibited by many people at the public meetings’.14 Lord John Russell nevertheless persuaded her that Wiseman ‘was doing all he could to Romanize this country – to detach the Roman Catholics from their allegiance to me & to bring them entirely under the sway of the Pope. This is very dangerous.’15

  The 1840s had seen a growth of Irish immigration to England, and a consequent increase in the Roman Catholic population. At the same time, quite unconnectedly, a group of Anglican intellectuals, chiefly from the University of Oxford, and chiefly inspired by the writings and example of John Henry Newman (Vicar of St Mary’s, Oxford), had left behind the Church of England and joined that of Rome. They were eminent more than numerous – out of nearly 20,000 Victorian Church of England clergy, only about 400 in the whole nineteenth century followed Newman to Rome, and many of these, like Colonel Sibthorp’s clerical brother, hopped back again – some, like the younger Thomas Arnold (brother of Matthew), hopping to and fro more than once.

  It nevertheless seemed to both sides of the argument, Catholic and Anglican, as if a great Catholic revival was under way. Newman preached a famous sermon called ‘The Second Spring’, and the genial leader of the Catholics, Bishop Wiseman, in 1850 made an announcement, writing a letter ‘From out of the Flaminian Gate’: the Pope had made him a cardinal, and for the first time since the Reformation, there was to be a Roman Catholic hierarchy of bishops, with their own cathedrals and dioceses. He was to be the Archbishop of Westminster; another would be Bishop of Birmingham, another of Liverpool, Salford, Middlesbrough, and so forth. By choosing these unglamorous titles for themselves, and planting their new bishoprics in the working-class Irish heartlands of industrial Britain, they were polite enough not to trespass on Anglican territory, though as one of the Queen’s most amusingly mischievous private secretaries was to point out, there was nothing to stop the Pope from creating a Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury – ‘and if so, could under the Act of Henry VIII claim precedence as such’.16 After all, in Ireland, even though there was a Protestant Archbishop of Armagh, the Catholic opposite number, Dr Cullen, styled himself Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland.

  Lord John Russell perhaps feared some such piece of bravado on the part of the exuberant Card
inal Wiseman. (A stout party who liked his food and wine, Wiseman, it was said, ‘had his lobster salad side’, but was surely not a mischief-maker, and incapable of upstaging ‘the Crumpet’ by calling himself the Real Archbishop of Canterbury.) More likely, Russell was simply guided by that gut anti-Catholicism which certainly formed a part of the collective English psyche in the nineteenth century, and perhaps for much longer. As Owen Chadwick, greatest of church historians for this period, wrote, Russell ‘clumsily expressed the popular mind’.17 He who in 1829 had urged the liberty of Roman Catholics to read for the Bar or study at the universities, now felt it was necessary to ban them from having a Bishop of Salford. He laboriously pushed through Parliament the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, making the new dioceses and bishoprics illegal. There were a few No Popery demonstrations, some of them quite nasty.

  Cardinal Wiseman sent an exuberant invitation to all ‘les puissances catholiques’ in Europe to attend his enthronement in London. ‘This is really rather too much,’ commented the Queen, ‘& would seem to place Wiseman on an equality with myself!’18 Wiseman was burnt in effigy. In Fleet Street, there were no fewer than fourteen guys burned on 5 November, with a colossal guy sixteen feet high, drawn by a cart, driven by a fat man in a red robe wearing his improvised version of a cardinal’s hat. The Roman Catholics defiantly continued to have their bishops and cathedrals, and twenty years later, the legislation was scrapped by Parliament. Lord John Russell had bitterly commented that the Irish famine was a medieval disaster happening in the nineteenth century. By a similar token it could be said that his anti-Catholic legislation provoked an outburst of seventeenth-century prejudice in the middle of the nineteenth. It seems strange to reflect that this esoteric legislation was being pushed through Parliament at the very time when Prince Albert and a Royal Commission were planning the Great Exhibition, as a demonstration of Britain as the most modern and forward-looking nation in the world.

  The Queen’s strength, high energy levels and general good spirits are demonstrated by the fact that she managed to spend so much of her time, at this period, devoted to discussing political questions with Albert and her ministers; and to music, and sketching and holiday-making in the Isle of Wight and Scotland. For the cycle of pregnancy appeared everlasting. 1850 saw the birth of Arthur, the future Duke of Connaught, named after the Duke of Wellington, who was his godfather. One of Prince Albert’s early blunders, when a new arrival, had been to cut a Waterloo Dinner with the Iron Duke. The choice of Wellington as the aged godfather of the new baby was a token of Albert becoming acclimatized to the country of his adoption. Perhaps, too, it reflected the Queen’s inclinations more than those of the prince.

  Queen Victoria had adored Lord Melbourne, and she respected Sir Robert Peel, but in her heart she was always – unlike her husband – a robust, small-t English Tory. Every instinct made her hero-worship the old victor of Waterloo and Assaye. The soldier’s daughter revered the old commander-in-chief, and it was fitting that when he grew up, Prince Arthur should have been a soldier also. He was always her favourite child.

  As soon as she was well enough to appear in public again, on 27 June, she took Alice and Affie for a drive in Hyde Park. A large crowd had collected to see her trot past on her way back from Cambridge House. The gate at that point into the park was too narrow for the equerry to ride alongside, so the carriage was compelled to pass within touching distance of the crowds. She had often thought at this point in the drive that it would be a place where an ‘attempt’ could be made upon her. On this occasion, a particularly unpleasant incident occurred. A fair young man, with a fair moustache, whom she had often noticed on her drives in the park, stepped forward with a small stick in his hand. ‘I felt myself violently thrown by a blow to the left of the carriage. My impulse had been to throw myself that way, not knowing what was coming next – till I was raised the moment afterwards by poor Fanny [Frances, Countess of Gainsborough, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Roden, a lady of the bedchamber], who was dreadfully frightened, “saying they have got the man”.’ The Queen’s bonnet was crushed, and she felt ‘an immense bruise’ on the right side of her head where she had been hit by the stick. She got up in the carriage, ‘having quite recovered myself, & telling the good people who anxiously surrounded me, “I am not hurt”. I saw him being violently pulled about by the people.’19 It was the second time that Affie and Alice had witnessed an attack on their mother. She was well enough in the evening to attend the opera – the second act of Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète.

  It was a week of intense drama, in which the attack upon the Queen was only one element. The House of Commons witnessed a debate about Palmerston’s handling of a bizarre incident in Athens. Although the matter in question was minor, even farcical, it was really a debate about something much bigger than itself – nothing less was being discussed than Britain’s standing in the world, and her attitude to other nations.

  A Portuguese Jew called Don Pacifico, resident in Athens, had had his house pillaged. Because he had been born in Gibraltar, he was technically a British subject, and he applied to the Foreign Office in his claim for enormous compensatory damages from the Greek Government.

  Palmerston’s reaction, even by his own melodramatic standards, was extreme. He ordered the British Fleet in the Mediterranean to blockade the harbour at Piraeus. Greece appealed for help to Russia and France. A ludicrous diplomatic incident could easily have turned into war. The Queen and Prince Albert, despite the fact that she was far gone in her pregnancy when the incident happened and the crisis was brewing, had long talks with Russell about dimissing Palmerston over the incident. But the Prime Minister, little as he liked Palmerston, was afraid of him, pointing out, fairly shamelessly, that both the Protectionists on the right and the extreme radicals on the left of the House of Commons loved Pam. ‘Lord John was therefore much anxious to do nothing that could hurt Lord Palmerston’s feelings.’20

  When the matter was aired in the Commons, it was assumed that Palmerston would be severely censured, if not actually defeated in the divisions; and that the matter would be his downfall. By contrast, he used it for one of his stagiest definitions of how he regarded his role, not merely as Foreign Secretary but as what the newspapers called ‘the English Minister’. It was Pam, more than Lord John, or sensible Sir Robert Peel, or moderate Lord Aberdeen or Prince Albert, who, in the eyes of the populist press, ‘spoke for England’.

  He considered himself bound to protect ‘our fellow subjects abroad’. He asked whether ‘as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say, Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England, will protect him against injustice and wrong’.21 The Protectionists opposite – led by Disraeli – could scarcely speak against this patriotic and stirring sentiment. The Government won the vote by 310 to 264 – it was not a triumph for Palmerston but nor was it the disgrace that his enemies had been hoping for.

  Among those who spoke against him was Sir Robert Peel. A week after the debate, Peel was riding up Constitution Hill when his horse stumbled, and he fell from the saddle. His injury was serious and on 2 July, to the enormous distress of the Queen and the prince, their political hero died. A week later, her old uncle the Duke of Cambridge also died – ‘We live in the midst of sorrow and death!’22 she exclaimed, though she had never greatly liked the old boy. Her cousin George, however, now the 2nd duke, had always been a friend (even though she recognized that he could be ‘disagreeable’). How different public life in England would have been had she married him – though he would always ungallantly say that he had not been tempted to marry ‘plain little Victoria’. More or less exactly the Queen’s age, George was now a major general, who had done service in Ireland throughout the famine. On the day of his cousin’s wedding, he had met the beautiful actress Louisa Fairbrother. They had two children; living a century before the name Adolf became one of
dread for the Germans, this Hanover-born soldier called both his sons by the name: George William Adolphus (born 1843) and Adolphus Augustus Frederick (born 1846). In 1847, in defiance of the Royal Marriages Act, George had married Mrs Fairbrother and, although he was not especially faithful to her, the pair lived harmoniously together at 6 Queen Street, Mayfair, until her death in 1890.

  Though the Queen was still recovering from her injuries in the park, and though they were both stung by the loss of Peel, Prince Albert was also preoccupied throughout the summer by the future of the Great Exhibition, planned for the following year in the park.

  The idea for the Exhibition had been born the previous year, 1849, when Henry Cole and other dignitaries of the Society of Arts visited a large exhibition in Paris. They conceived the idea of a huge exhibition in London, the largest the world had ever seen, as demonstration of industrial design and expertise. Britain was supreme in the economies of the Western world. This exhibition – called from the first the ‘Great’ Exhibition – would be the outward and visible sign of everything which had been achieved in the nation since the Industrial Revolution began; but it would, more than this, be a celebration of the Free Trade which had been the British privilege since the abolition of the Corn Laws.

  Cole – an assistant in the Public Record Office who did much to expand that great institution, and who had also been instrumental in promoting the Penny Post – soon realized that their idea for the Exhibition was too big to be administered by the Society of Arts alone, and needed the backing of a Royal Commission.

  As soon as Prince Albert took the chair of this commission, in January 1850, he was taking a bold risk. What Cole and his friends were organizing could turn out to be a financial and propaganda disaster. The commission, which included Lord John Russell, Peel, Henry Labouchere (President of the Board of Trade), architects Barry and Cubitt, and others, quickly found themselves with logistical challenges on a scale unprecedented in the capital. It was possible they would be receiving a million visitors, and as the time raced forward, it became clear that none of the plans had coalesced. Where would the Exhibition be held exactly? Who was to pay for it? In answer to this last question, the members of the commission themselves undertook to come up with the cash, but some of this would have to be raised in the City, and Albert accordingly spoke at a great dinner at the Mansion House in March, setting out their aims.