Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  Undoubtedly the best joke about Louis Napoleon’s coup was made by Karl Marx in his pamphlet on the 18th Brumaire (that is, on the date in the French Revolutionary Calendar when, in 1799, the first Napoleon became the dictator of France, and, on roughly the same date in 1851, the nephew did the same). ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’9

  There is often far more odium between colleagues inside a political party than between the official opponents sitting opposite one another in either House. So it was with Russell and Palmerston, who cordially detested one another. Far from destroying Pam, his hated old Whig colleague Russell merely brought down his own Government. From the moment of the first Napoleon’s elevation, in 1799, his hostility to Britain had been a constant threat. It was by no means clear that his nephew, in 1851–2, would not pose a comparable threat. Or so it was believed in British military and political circles.

  Russell, in response to the fear of French invasion, proposed the establishment of local militia. Palmerston, from the back benches, opposed the measure, preferring that there should be a regular militia, rather than an ad hoc ‘Home Guard’. Behind this debate stood the unpleasant fact – soon to be revealed on the world stage – of the British Army’s total inadequacy to fight a war. But for the time being, the war which mattered was that fought out in the Commons between the two old ‘friends’, Russell and Pam. Needless to say, Palmerston, in every way the stronger character, rallied support for his idea of a regular militia. Russell’s Government was defeated, and he went to kiss hands.

  He had not been a successful Prime Minister and neither he nor his wife had ever liked the Queen. His grandson Bertrand Russell ‘regretted’ to recall, in his amusing memoirs, that Lady John’s attitude to Queen Victoria ‘was far from respectful. She used to relate with much amusement how one time she was at Windsor and feeling rather ill, the Queen had been graciously pleased to say, “Lady Russell may sit down. Lady So-and-So shall stand in front of her”.’10

  What followed was a coalition in which Russell served as Foreign Secretary. The new Prime Minister was the fifty-three-year-old 14th Earl of Derby. Active in politics since the 1820s as Lord Stanley, he had, the previous year, inherited his father’s earldom and the palatial house of Knowlsey in Lancashire. Surely one of the cleverest in that clever club of Queen Victoria’s Prime Ministers, he was viewed somewhat askance by the puritanical Prince Albert. While Albert might have approved of Lord Derby’s translations from Homer, he was made uneasy by his love of the turf, his ownership of racehorses, and his breezy, laughing coterie of racing pals. The Queen, however, who had very different tastes in human beings from those of her husband, noted, ‘He certainly is a very cheery companion, though at times perhaps a little fatiguing. But he is extremely good-natured and “sans pretention”.’11

  Forming a Government in the difficult circumstances of Russell’s resignation as Prime Minister was not easy. Disraeli was the leader of the Protectionists in the Commons, but this meant that it was next to impossible to persuade any Peelite, still smarting from the wounds of 1844, to serve in a Government with the man who had so effectively knifed their leader at the time of the Corn Law debate. Similarly, there were Whigs, such as Palmerston, who were so opposed to Free Trade that they would not serve in a Government which now appeared, only eight years after the Corn Law debacle, to accept, even to embrace it. The result was a Cabinet which the Queen considered below standard. It became known as the ‘Who, Who?’ ministry, since the Duke of Wellington, now very deaf and old, and sitting beside Derby in the Lords while one of the new ministers was trying to make a speech, said ‘Who? Who?’ every time the nonentity named one of his unremarkable Cabinet colleagues. One of them, however, was the far from unremarkable Benjamin Disraeli, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, which explains how it was he who was responsible for the financing of the ‘Albertopolis’. ‘Mr Disraeli,’ the Queen wrote to her uncle Leopold, ‘(alias Dizzy) writes very curious reports to me of the House of Commons proceedings – much in the style of his books.’12 She was beginning to be fascinated. Albert, had he lived another fifty years, would never have seen the point of Disraeli.

  In April, Lord Derby went to the country. Disraeli wrote the closest their party had to a manifesto in his election address to the voters of Buckinghamshire. His proposal was ‘Conservative progress’. He admitted that the battle against Free Trade was lost. They should embrace ‘maintenance of the colonial empire, the investigation of electoral corruption and commitment to the Protestantism of the English Crown’.

  With a General Election in prospect, the Queen hoped that the confusion of coalition government might be brought to an end. Writing from Osborne in March – where, as so often, Stockmar was staying – she told the King of the Belgians, ‘One thing is pretty certain—that out of the present state of confusion and discordance, a sound state of Parties will be obtained, and two Parties, as of old, will again exist, without which it is impossible to have a strong Government.’13 There were five parties represented in Parliament – the Whigs and the Protectionist Tories were the old aristocratic parties, with their roots in the political world of pre-1832. The Peelites, headed by Lord Aberdeen, obviously had some aristocrats in their number, but in so far as they had come into existence as defenders of Free Trade, they represented an emergent urban mercantile class, which was just as likely to vote, in different regions, for the radicals or Liberals. The Irish formed a block vote in the Commons of ever-increasing power and importance, demanding that their voice be heard. It was unlikely that the Queen’s wish would be granted in the course of just one election, for, of course, these different political interest groups overlapped, and it was possible for individuals to swim in and out of them. Many of the old Whigs, like Palmerston, had their doubts about having supported Free Trade. Some even had their doubts about having extended the franchise. In some aspects they had more in common with the aristocratic Protectionists than with the Peelites. Some Peelites repented of the split in the Conservative ranks and would like to have been back with the Protectionists. Some new Liberals were pro-Irish, and many were not. When the two non-Irish groups later formed parties behind Disraeli and Gladstone, the ‘strong Government’ for which the Queen, and perhaps many of her subjects, longed was not always very durable. Parties have always been coalitions, which can fracture under sufficient pressure.

  Unlike Stockmar and Prince Albert, Queen Victoria was not a cerebral political analyst; yet she was developing, after nearly fifteen years on the throne, a symbiotic sense of her subjects, and what they felt. Sometimes she tried to do this consciously and in those circumstances she often got it wrong. But monarchy is more than a political system. It is a communion between sovereign and people. Victoria sensed the shift which was occurring in Britain, especially in England. While the majority of her ministers were, and would go on being, overwhelmingly aristocratic, the country at large was shifting. The Governing Class, the People who Mattered – what the Victorians called the Upper Ten (meaning the upper 10,000 people in the country) – were no longer all from the landed aristocracy. Many of them were professionals whose backgrounds were in that dreaded word ‘trade’. The professional classes themselves had dynasties – of lawyers and doctors and academics and clergy. The commercial classes, at their upper echelons, became landed, and married within the professions and the aristocracy. So, Britain was in a state of creative flux. It was as unlike pre-Revolutionary France as it was possible to imagine – that France where the clever bourgeois never could, by virtue of the rigidity of privilege, ever penetrate the most influential positions in the land. The Victorians were a prodigious mélange of old and new, of inheritance and self-made, as Thackeray’s Book of Snobs brilliantly pointed out to the readers of Punch. There was one profession, however, which remained unbudgeably aristocratic and self-destructively conservative: and
that was the army. It would take a disgracefully mismanaged war to expose this fact, and nearly a generation to correct the mismanagement it uncovered.

  The election had an inconclusive result. The Conservatives failed to win an overall majority; the Whigs lost heavily in Ireland; and the Independent Irish Party returned fifty-three members. Another coalition was essential. Dizzy knew that it looked ridiculous to have split the party by holding fast to Protectionism in 1844, only to abandon the principle eight years later. ‘We built an opposition on Protection and Protestantism,’ he told Derby. ‘The first, the country has pissed upon,’ while the second ‘seemed to have worked us harm’. 14

  England was not invaded by France. The Iron Duke, who had not heard the names of so many new Cabinet ministers, and who would not have recognized them if he had, witnessed a country preparing to go to war with his old enemy France, but it was a war which never happened. Then, on 14 September, in his little iron bedstead in Walmer Castle, the Duke of Wellington died, and the old pre-Reform Bill world decisively died with him.

  The Queen heard the news at Balmoral. Lords Derby and Aberdeen were both staying with her. ‘One cannot think of this country without “the duke”, our immortal hero!’ she rhapsodized. ‘There will be few dry eyes in the country.’15

  Her neighbour on the Isle of Wight, the new Poet Laureate, decided that his first acknowledged work as Laureate should be an ode on the death of Wellington. Because the old body at Walmer was embalmed, in readiness for a funeral two months hence on 18 November, the poet had time to write his solemn tribute, 10,000 copies of which were put on sale, for two shillings each, on the day of the funeral.16

  Tennyson’s poem saluted Wellington as ‘the last great Englishman’. It remembered not only the military victories, but the charm, and

  one about whose patriarchal knee

  Late the little children clung.

  Tennyson, the Laureate who more than any other was in tune with his own age, instinctively conscious of its mood, linked the death not only with the political uncertainty of the time, but with the advances in science, especially in geology, which had shaken faith for many during the years of Tennyson’s young manhood.

  For though the Giant Ages heave the hill

  And break the shore, and evermore

  Make and break, and work their will;

  Though world on world in myriad myriads roll

  Round us, each with different powers,

  And other forms of life than ours,

  What know we greater than the soul?

  On God and Godlike men we build our trust.17

  As Tennyson would eloquently point out, some of this feeling, of needing a figurehead in times of great national change, would focus itself upon the monarchy, which is one of the reasons that Queen Victoria has remained so fascinating a subject for biography. The emergent Victorians did build their trust on her. ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’18 These words of Marx, on the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, have a peculiar aptness for the Queen of that country where the German philosopher had now taken up residence. The Great Duke was buried with full honours next to Nelson in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. It was one of the largest funerals the capital had ever seen. These Janus-occasions, when a nation surveys the glories of the past, are always preparations for something new: and the ironies of a grand alliance with a Bonapartist regime, which Britain was about to forge, would not have been lost on the wise old head they laid to rest in London’s heart.

  One of the ways in which a female monarch can become a figurehead and focus of national self-awareness is by motherhood. Victorian England was a country growing in population at an enormous rate. As the ingenious agricultural machinery moved from its stands in the Crystal Palace to the fields of the shires, and as the cause of Protectionism was killed in Parliament, agricultural labour became harder to sustain, and workers crowded from the country into the cities. The birth rate soared, even though the mortality rates were still, by the standards of later ages, horrifyingly high, both in mothers and their babies.

  On 7 April 1853, Queen Victoria made history by becoming the first royal personage to give birth using an anaesthetic. Dr John Snow (1813–58), a working-class man from York, had trained as a doctor and worked as a colliery surgeon before coming south to train at the Hunterian School of Anatomy in Soho’s Great Windmill Street. Rather an oddball, Snow was a bachelor, a vegetarian and a teetotaller, and died of a stroke aged only forty-five. But before then, he was an outstanding pioneer in two spheres. As a witness of the appalling cholera outbreak in Soho in 1849, he was a founder member of the Epidemiological Society of London: it was Snow who was largely responsible for discerning that cholera was a water-borne disease, and this was the breakthrough which led to the eventual elimination of this plague in Victorian London.

  He was also a pioneer of anaesthetics. Three of Queen Victoria’s regular doctors had worked with him, and had serious reservations about the practice. They had forbidden the Queen to use chloroform during the birth of Prince Arthur in 1850, but in 1853, she insisted upon the attempt. Snow had invented an inhaler for use in labour, but when he came to treat the Queen he used an open-drop approach, probably at her own request.19 Snow, who anaesthetized seventy-seven obstetric patients with chloroform, waited until the woman had reached the second stage of labour. He limited the dose so that the patient could achieve satisfactory analgesia, but was still capable of obeying the command to push. There were several cases where, far from anaesthesia slowing labour, it actually speeded the process.

  Rather poignantly, the Queen noted in her journal a fortnight after the birth, ‘the dear little Baby is a nice healthy child’. In fact, Prince Leopold was a haemophiliac. ‘He has got as wet nurse, a strong, healthy Highland woman, a Mrs Macintosh, from near Inverness. She can speak but little English & arrived in a Highland cap and plaid shawl!’20

  That year, 1853, was one which saw the total reversal of British foreign policy, in the light of the grave crisis blowing up between Russia and Turkey.

  In October 1852, the Queen had hastened to pass on to her uncle Leopold an anecdote sent to her by Lord Cowley from Paris, ‘that under one of the Triumphal Arches a Crown was suspended to a string (which is very often the case) over which was written, “Il y a bien mérité”. Something damaged this crown, and they removed it, leaving, however, the rope and superscription, the effect of which must have been somewhat edifying!’21 Although she would always enjoy this sort of joke, her opinion of the Emperor Napoleon III would undergo radical alteration. Just as she began by hating Peel, and came to revere him; loathed ‘that dreadful Disraeli’, and came to love him; so ‘the emperor’, as she was perfectly happy to call him, became of all foreign potentates perhaps the one she found most charming. The truth was – as our eyes of hindsight allow us to see – that while loving Albert as a man, she had a fundamentally different political, and personal, temperament. Once she was widowed, she even came to like Palmerston. The harder Albert worked to promote his German federalist view of Europe, the harder she had to struggle to suppress her lack of sympathy with politics. The simplest way of doing this was to adopt the pose that she was only a wife and mother, only a little woman who did not understand male affairs such as politics. Sometimes, quite probably, this really was what she felt.

  ‘Albert becomes really a terrible man of business,’ she once complained to her uncle, King of the Belgians. (The English language is ambivalent; by ‘terrible’, she means he was a ‘workaholic’, not that he was incompetent.) ‘I think it takes a little off from the gentleness of his character, and makes him so preoccupied. I grieve over all this, as I cannot enjoy these things, much as I interest myself in general European politics; but I am every day more convinced that we women, if we are to
be good women, feminine and amiable, and domestic, are not fitted to reign; at least it is contre gré that they drive themselves to the work which it entails.’22

  Events changed things fast. By December, Louis Napoleon who had deserved the rope, and whom Victoria would never receive when he lived in his London exile, was being addressed by her as ‘my good brother, the Emperor of the French’. It was a token that Britain might need France as an ally that she was prepared to sacrifice her loyalty to her Orléanist relations and to acknowledge Napoleon’s royalty. The Russian Emperor would not write to Napoleon as ‘mon frère’ but only as ‘mon cher Ami’.23

  One matter which loosened the Queen’s somewhat taut attitude to ‘the emperor’ was his marriage. As anxious as any would-be monarch to continue his line, Louis Napoleon, since his seizure of power as a republican President, had made it clear that he was on the marriage market. One figure whom he had selected for the role of wife was Queen Victoria’s niece Ada – the daughter of Feodore of Hohenlohe. She was only seventeen, to his forty-five. During his English exile, Louis Napoleon had moved in a raffish set (which included Disraeli and the Count d’Orsay) and openly kept a mistress – though it would be truer to say that she, Harriet Howard, being very rich, had kept him. (This flame-headed millionairess, whose real name was Elisabeth-Ann-Haryett, inherited her fortune from her father, a Brighton hotelier.) She generously bankrolled Louis Napoleon in his political ambitions. Princess Ada turned him down when the proposal reached her – via her own father, Prince Hohenlohe.

  ‘Now that this terrible affair about our dear Ada has been decided by herself,’ the Queen wrote to her sister Feodore, ‘I can and will write to you about what I have felt and what mature reflection has made me feel more strongly even than I did at first. I feel that your dear child is saved from ruin of every possible sort. You know what he is, what his moral character is.’24