This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  But once on the throne, which it turned out he didn’t like nearly as much as he thought he would, William imagined revolution, the rising of the people and the importing of the principles settled by the guillotine in France. He was comforted by his Home Secretary, Viscount Melbourne. But he didn’t much like Melbourne; he found him too aristocratic.

  Melbourne was a Whig, and the Hanoverians never quite trusted the stylish confidence of the Whigs. William may have wanted to be King but Melbourne had never quite wanted to be Prime Minister. That was difficult for William to understand. As Melbourne remarked: ‘He hasn’t the feelings of a gentleman; he knows what they are, but he hasn’t them.’ However, politicians in the 1830s could not ignore their monarch whatever they thought of him.

  When Grey retired in 1834 and Melbourne became Prime Minister, he lasted only a few months, but by the following spring he was back in Number 10. The change-about presented an interesting constitutional decision. Towards the end of 1834, the Earl Spencer died. His heir, Lord Althorp, was the Whig leader in the Commons. But now he, the most important Whig in the Commons, had gone to the Lords and Melbourne didn’t want to carry on. But he thought it best for the party that he should. The King had other ideas. Even though the Commons was against him doing so, he sacked Melbourne and so, for a few months, Peel was Prime Minister. William IV was the last King to appoint a Prime Minister against the wishes of the Commons.

  Melbourne and the King had one thing in common: a wariness of the growing trades union movement. Melbourne said that employers shouldn’t sack men just because they were trades unionists, the danger lay in the taking of secret oaths. He, and William IV, believed that the move from simple bargaining for wages and conditions could lead to political, ideological and social groupings. The mass demonstration against the sentencing of the six Dorset labourers was not in principle wrong to Melbourne but it was the size that he could not accept. To bow to an argument was reasonable, to a crowd was unthinkable. However, it was Melbourne’s government which, two years later, did pardon the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

  Melbourne was a member of what was generally called the Whig ruling class: a world of people who could, and did, take for granted their mansions in London and the country, their right to provide ambassadors abroad and political leaders at home, and the ease with which they achieved their purpose in life.

  Melbourne’s family name was Lamb. The Lambs revolved about his mother Elizabeth, Lady Melbourne, whose lover was the very influential George Wyndham, the third Lord Egremont. In fact, Egremont was probably Melbourne’s father. Certainly Melbourne’s brother George was fathered by the Prince of Wales.

  If Melbourne’s elder brother Peniston hadn’t died of consumption Melbourne would probably have become a writer rather than a statesman. But as heir to the title, his life took a different route. He became an MP and married Caroline Ponsonby. She, now Lady Caroline Lamb, was erratic, capricious and often unbalanced. She fell in and out of love. And then, most famously and destructively, she fell in love with Lord Byron – or perhaps in love with the idea of being in love with him. By 1825, Melbourne and Caroline were separated. She was dead by 1828.

  By 1835 Melbourne was Prime Minister for the second time. It was hardly an ideal time to be leader. The Whigs were, as ever, split among themselves. They were disliked by the Lords and there never had been a Hanoverian who really trusted them. In Parliament they were more or less a minority and needed the Radical and Irish benches’ support in the lobbies.

  But important legislation did go through, including, in 1835, the Municipal Corporations Act. This set out to be the first reform of city and urban government. Councillors would be elected and therefore, indirectly, so would mayors and the city and town aldermen. But the biggest change in Melbourne’s rule came not with political reform, but with the death of the King. William IV died in 1837.

  Twenty years earlier, the Duke of Kent (the fourth son of George III) had married simply because any child of the marriage was likely to be the future monarch. The Duke married a widow, Princess Mary Louisa Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In 1819, a daughter, Alexandrina Victoria, was born. She became fifth in line to the throne, after her father and her uncles, and in the early hours of 20 June 1837, she became Queen Victoria.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  1837–41

  At nine o’clock on the morning of 20 June 1837, Viscount Melbourne, the Prime Minister, wearing the dress of a Privy Councillor, was ushered into Kensington Palace. He was escorted to a small receiving room. There, quite alone, stood a blue-eyed girl, not five feet tall, dressed in mourning black. Melbourne bowed and kissed her hand. She was eighteen years old, her name was Alexandrina Victoria, and she was now Queen of Great Britain. Melbourne would be her mentor.

  That same morning, her Privy Council stood in a horseshoe and listened to her speech of declaration which had been written for her by Melbourne. Late in the evening, he returned to Kensington Palace and for an hour or so, the two talked. That night she noted in her diary, ‘I had a very important and very comfortable conversation with him.’ Her mother, the Duchess of Kent, and her private secretary, Sir John Conroy (who appears to have been more than private secretary), had longed for her succession and hoped either for an earlier death of William IV or for an extension – a delay – of Victoria’s coming of age. Both would have raised the question of a Regency, and thus the chance of even more power for Victoria’s mother and Conroy. Victoria was defended from the prospect by her governess, the Baroness Louise Lehzen. In the journals of Charles Greville (1794–1865), who according to Benjamin Disraeli was the vainest man he had ever met, there’s a note which tells us how the new Queen dealt with Conroy.

  It is not easy to ascertain the exact cause of her [Victoria] antipathy to him, but it has probably grown with her growth, and results from divers causes. The person in the world she loves best is the Baroness Lehzen, and Lehzen and Conroy were enemies. Her manner to the Duchess is, however, irreproachable, and they appear to be on cordial and affectionate terms.

  Once Victoria was Queen, the dubious ambitions of her mother and Conroy were defeated.

  Victoria’s coronation was a blaze of diamonds, encrusted scabbards and elderly burnished breastplates earned in some of the bloodiest wars Europe had witnessed. It was a pageant of British triumphalism, but for organization it would hardly have won a skirmish because, as Greville noted, few, including the Queen, knew what was going on.

  The different actors in the ceremonial were very imperfect in their parts, and had neglected to rehearse them. Lord John Thynne, who officiated for the Dean of Westminster, told me that nobody knew what was to be done except the Archbishop and himself . . . when the orb was put into her hand, she said to him. ‘What am I to do with it?’

  It was said that one million people watched the procession but the real business of royalty was not the business of pageantry. More important to the young Queen was that she understood what was expected of her, and for others to understand what she expected. The Baroness Lehzen had been Princess Victoria’s confidante, but Queen Victoria now needed more than a trusted governess. Melbourne was wary of letting anyone become the power behind the throne of the young Queen and so he took on that role himself. This meant that he was with her for hours at a time, every day. They wrote to each other, sometimes three or four times a day. At royal dinners, the guest of honour would be at the Queen’s right hand, but Melbourne was always at her left. As they came to know more of each other it became obvious that this was no ordinary relationship between monarch and Prime Minister.

  Melbourne and Victoria were so close that London joked of a romance – although all knew there could be none. The Prime Minister was undoubtedly attracted to the young Queen and she to him. But this was no affair of the heart. Victoria needed someone she could trust and Melbourne was also her friend. And for the moment, while Melbourne was there, Victoria believed, as she wrote to Prince Albert, that ‘The Whigs are the only safe and loyal people.’ But the
Whigs would not be in power for long, even though Melbourne would continue to be an influence at court.

  Victoria had been Queen for just two years when she faced her first major political crisis. In May 1839 a motion to suspend the Jamaican Constitution was carried by just five votes. (Jamaica had refused to implement the 1833 anti-slavery legislation and had defied British instructions to change its prison laws.) Melbourne regarded such a tiny majority as a confidence issue and resigned. Victoria was faced with a Tory government led by Sir Robert Peel. She disliked Tories and Peel knew this, so he wanted some sign that he had her confidence. The way he went about trying to get it was a little clumsy; he said that she should sack some of her Ladies of the Bedchamber, who were the wives of the Whig ministers. The Queen was nervous and she immediately turned to Melbourne for advice. Melbourne wrote to Victoria, telling her not to worry and not be put off by Peel’s cold manner. He was, noted Melbourne ‘the most cautious and reserved of mankind’. The difficulty for Victoria was that she still needed Melbourne. She found him comforting and therefore reassuring, and believed she could not work with Peel. Melbourne’s position was difficult. Firstly, he could not see how the Whigs could last in power for very long. Returning to government would probably mean a collapse in political confidence over one of the many issues of the day and the disgrace of being swept from power. Secondly, Melbourne believed Peel could provide the political stability that Britain needed. Thirdly, he must have known that, at this point in her reign, Victoria should not be seen as a monarch under the spell of the Whigs – or any other political group.

  Melbourne told his Cabinet what the Queen had said and written to him and, to a man, they appear to have fallen under the spell of the new monarch and instructed Melbourne that she must be supported. Melbourne told the Queen that he would stay. Undoubtedly, it was this promise that encouraged Victoria to stand out against Peel. And this she did in a short letter (he called it a note) to him.

  Buckingham Palace, May 10, 1839

  The Queen, having considered the proposal made to her yesterday by Sir Robert Peel, to remove the Ladies of her Bedchamber, cannot consent to adopt a course which she conceives to be contrary to usage, and which is repugnant to her feelings.

  Within three hours Peel was writing to the Queen making out his case and telling her that he couldn’t be her Prime Minister – which is what she wanted to hear anyway. It all seemed quite simple to the Queen; Peel had assumed too much and she would call Melbourne, with whom she felt safe. But Melbourne was far from happy, particularly when the true story of Victoria’s confrontation with Peel became known. Peel had not, as Melbourne had imagined and as the Queen had implied, demanded the removal of all her Ladies of the Bedchamber – only some. But it was too late to change the appointment and, anyway, Peel would not hear of it.

  Melbourne’s first task was to take the blame for the crisis. He could not possibly allow the country to believe that the Queen had behaved wrongly. In the House of Lords he accepted criticism that he had manipulated the matter in order to stay in office. That was far from the truth, but to protect her he made no attempt to deny the political accusations. And so Melbourne reluctantly returned to Downing Street.

  Peel was not dissatisfied with the outcome. He hadn’t really wanted to lead another minority government and he sensed it wouldn’t be long before he could rouse a greater number of seats. For the Whigs, there was little to gain but the satisfaction of demonstrating their loyalty to their Queen who was only nineteen and may have felt vulnerable without the Ladies of the Bedchamber whom she’d learned to trust. The new Queen’s kingdom was less than satisfied with its lot. And Melbourne himself was tired. He was sixty and was sometimes forgetful. His party, the Whigs, had survived for as long as they had perhaps because they were simply the most acceptable alternative to the strengthened Radical movement on the one hand and the Tories on the other. The Whigs were good at giving ground when the governing of the country required compromise, but Melbourne knew that this could not go on. Melbourne’s instinct was simply to avoid the disagreeable, but that policy could not be maintained when the country faced so many difficulties. For example, there was a general recognition that the Poor Laws were not working properly or, more accurately, were too harshly administered.

  But attention was increasingly focused far away from the welfare of the poorhouse tenants towards Afghanistan and China: the First Afghan War and the Opium War. Afghanistan was a land of some 245,000 square miles. In the nineteenth century it was a large and often inhospitable buffer between British interests in India and the Russians, and perhaps the Persians. Whoever controlled Afghanistan could threaten or defend their interests with some assurance. The Russians supported the claims to the Afghan throne of a man called Dost Muhammad. The British candidate was the very unpopular Shah Shuja. Afghanistan rebelled. The three Afghan Wars (1838–42, 1878–81, 1919–1921) were examples of hopeless expectation and even imperial arrogance that were inevitable in a period when, through commitment and necessity, the British believed their superior form of warfare more than capable of imposing their authority. In this assumption, the British were wrong. For example, in the first war, only one soldier of some 16,000 troops and followers who had retreated from the capital Kabul managed to get across the Khyber Pass and home into India. The lessons of those wars was hardly heeded in 2001.

  Just as an interest in the poppy crop played a part in the twenty-first-century Afghan war, so it did in Victoria’s early reign. A district commissioner observed that if the locals could be encouraged to grow poppies they could raise revenue and so pay taxes desperately needed by the British. As for the poppies, they could be converted to opium and sold to the Chinese, even if the Chinese did not want the British merchants to trade the cargo in China, a nation-state already damaged by the effects of opium. Little of this much mattered when it came to the profit and loss sheets in the British counting houses. And so it was with the commercial events that led to what became known as the Opium Wars. Opium farming was a profitable business for the English East India Company and although, officially, the Chinese banned opium imports, some of their officials in Canton were corrupt and opium was stored in large warehouses. A senior Chinese official was sent to Canton to have the millions of pounds’ worth of opium destroyed. The Opium War began. It went on until the summer of 1842 when the heat was so intense that many of the British troops died from sunstroke. In August of that year a truce was signed, the Treaty of Nanking, and the greatest prize was not actually opium, but the ceding by the Chinese of Hong Kong, which remained a British colony until its return to China in 1997.

  During all this warfare, in October 1839, Queen Victoria’s two cousins, Ernest and Albert Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, arrived in England. In 1836, Victoria’s uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, had been determined that she should marry his nephew Albert. They had met and, although she liked Albert, she was not overly impressed. Then in 1837, when Victoria became Queen, she made it clear to Leopold that although Albert might be a decent enough prince, she was after all Queen. Albert was given a tutor, Baron Stockmar, who had instructions to ‘bring on’ the young man – as a trainer might a yearling. When Albert and Ernest arrived in 1839, and the Queen looked him over, she recorded in her diary: ‘It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert – who is beautiful!’ On 13 October 1839, Victoria told Melbourne that she meant to marry her cousin. On 10 February 1840, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were married. Prince Albert was not the most educated prince in Europe. He had had eighteen months at the University of Bonn and a little travelling under the guidance of Stockmar, who commented that Albert did not concentrate very long on any one subject. And the opposition had much fun pointing out that nowhere in official documentation was it written that Albert was a Protestant – which all British monarchs and their spouses had to be by law.

  Victoria had no intention of sharing her constitutional responsibilities with her husband; however, she did want Albert to have a degree of precedence and
privilege which Parliament (in fact, the Lords) was not willing to grant. He would not be King but Victoria said her husband should have first place in the land after herself. Albert himself never quite knew what his constitutional position was, but what he did do, successfully, was replace Melbourne as Victoria’s closest adviser. And even when he was dead, the Queen often considered what he would have advised before taking decisions. As for Melbourne, his time was done. The country had turned against the Whigs. In 1841 they lost four consecutive by-elections. In May they lost a Budget motion in the House. On 4 June, there was a motion of no-confidence in the government: Melbourne lost it by one vote. On 28 August there was another defeat and Melbourne rose in the Lords to announce that the Whig government would resign.

  The end had come and, in his letter to the Queen, Melbourne allowed his emotions to show through. ‘Lord Melbourne,’ he wrote, ‘will ever consider the time during which Your Majesty is good enough to think that he has been of service to Her Majesty the proudest as well as the happiest part of his life.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  1841–53

  In September 1841, the year after the penny postage stamp was introduced, Sir Robert Peel once more became Prime Minister. Peel’s Cabinet was a conservative group with a small ‘c’; some in his administration had resigned from government in 1834 over Catholic Emancipation – and that was a Whig administration – but, although care must still be taken when labelling political parties, it was at about this time that the Tories began to be thought of as Conservative with a capital ‘C’.

  It was also at this point that a new cast stepped on to the Westminster stage; almost all the great names of the rest of the century had now taken their places and one by one they came forward: Derby, the protectionist Conservative; Palmerston, who started the Opium War and would become the first Liberal Prime Minister; Gladstone, soon to be President of the Board of Trade, and Prime Minister four times; and Disraeli, Victoria’s favourite Prime Minister.