We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  The purple prose of the memorandum in Albert’s own hand reveals how important a part sexual morality played in determining the prince’s attitude toward the British foreign secretary. The Palmerstons in their youth had not played by the rules of premarital chastity and conjugal fidelity that Albert lived by. The prince was sure that his higher standards of morality entitled him to lead the nation. Lord John Russell showed his weakness as a statesman and as a friend when he failed to tell the prince that Palmerston’s behavior ten years earlier, however reprehensible, had no bearing on his current competence as foreign secretary. That Russell kept Palmerston in the cabinet indicates that this was what he thought but dared not say.

  Exasperated by Palmerston’s obduracy and Lord John’s shilly-shallying, the royal couple took another tack and sat down at their adjoining writing desks to compose a letter. In August 1850, the Queen specified to Lord John exactly what she wanted from Lord Palmerston “in order to prevent any mistake in the future” [QV’s underlining]. She required “(1) that he will distinctly state what he proposes in a given case so that the Queen may know as distinctly to what she has given her Royal sanction; (2) Having once given her sanction to a measure, that it be not arbitrarily altered or modified by the Minister; such an act she must consider as failing in sincerity towards the Crown, and justly to be visited by the exercise of her Constitutional right of dismissing that Minister. She expects to be kept informed of what passes between him and Foreign Ministers before important decisions are taken … to receive the Foreign Despatches in good time … The Queen thinks it best that Lord Russell should show this letter to Lord Palmerston.”

  Cornered, and never happy to be out of favor with the Queen of whom he was paternally fond, Palmerston agreed to abide by the terms of the letter. In so doing, he conceded the Crown’s constitutional right to dismiss a minister. This concession infuriated Palmerston’s allies and weakened him in the cabinet, where, in fact if not in theory, ministers no longer considered that they served at the Queen’s pleasure.

  In late 1850, the Don Pacifico affair hit the headlines, and the Crown was sure that at last Lord Palmerston had overplayed his hand. The house in Athens of the merchant David Pacifico was burned down by a mob, and the Greek government of King Otto scornfully refused to consider his rather exorbitant claims for restitution. Pacifico was of Portuguese Jewish origins, but he had been born in the British possession of Gibraltar, and he appealed to the British government to defend his interests. Lord Palmerston, without consulting Lord John Russell or his cabinet colleagues, ordered a British naval squadron to sail to the Mediterranean, where it captured Greek vessels and blockaded the port of Piraeus. After two months, the Greek government capitulated and settled Pacifico’s claims.

  France and Russia, Britain’s treaty allies in support of the fragile new monarchy of Greece, howled in protest at this bullying. The foreign secretary was formally censured in the House of Lords. But when Palmerston stood up before the Commons to defend his actions, his five-hour speech carried the day, and the motion of censure against the government was defeated. In words that have been quoted by British historians ever since, the foreign secretary declared: “As the Roman in days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum [I am a Roman citizen], so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong.” To the horror of the Queen and the prince, Lord Palmerston stayed on at the foreign office.

  But then the foreign secretary got careless. When in December 1851 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the president of the French republic, staged the famous coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire and declared himself emperor of the French, the British government was taken aback, and the Queen and the prince were appalled. The name Bonaparte was anathema to every European monarch, and in 1848 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte himself had helped to topple the Orléans dynasty with whom the Coburgs were closely linked. With characteristic impulsiveness, Palmerston telegraphed off a letter of congratulations to the new French head of state, without any prior consultation with his prime minister or his sovereign. It was not that Palmerston personally approved of Napoleon III—or, indeed, any other French head of state—but rather that he was sure that Britain would be dealing with the new emperor for the foreseeable future, whether or not they liked him.

  As events would prove, Palmerston was perfectly right, but his congratulatory note was a blatant contravention of the terms he had agreed to abide by in his relations with the Crown. Queen Victoria rose up in holy wrath. Injured in his amour propre, Lord John Russell lost his temper, and the rest of the cabinet was now fed up with Lord Palmerston. The foreign secretary was asked to return the seals of his office and retired crestfallen to the backbenches. The Queen and the prince were jubilant. Victoria wrote to her uncle Leopold: “My Dearest Uncle,—I have the greatest pleasure in announcing to you a piece of news which I know will give you as much satisfaction and relief as it does to us, and will to the whole of the world. Lord Palmerston is no longer Foreign Secretary.”

  But no one was better at playing the underdog than Palmerston, and, unlike Prince Albert, he knew how to manage the press and manipulate public opinion. The word got out that Prince Albert, after years of trying, had at last managed to sack good old “Pam,” which was pretty much the truth. At court and in government circles, it had long been known that the prince habitually carried on the business of state in his wife’s name, but it suited all the power sharers to keep that news to themselves. But once a respected statesman like Palmerston was sent off like a whipped schoolboy just because he would not let the prince dictate to the foreign office, then the gloves were off as far as the English political establishment, Tory and Whig, was concerned. The whispering campaign against the prince as a foreign traitor began, and British politics entered a period of dangerous weakness.

  AS LORD JOHN RUSSELL had feared, his government soon collapsed once Palmerston left the cabinet. Lord Derby and the High Tories, whom the Queen felt obliged to call upon next, were soon defeated in the Commons. Then a coalition of Whigs and Peelite (moderate) Tories was cobbled together under Lord Aberdeen, with Lord Clarendon at the foreign office. The Aberdeen ministry was, overall, personally agreeable to the Queen and the prince, and showed a delightful willingness to cooperate with the Crown. But 1853 was a very bad time for the nation to be in the hands of a cabinet that was incapable of reaching agreement on any issue of substance and of a Crown that was under withering attack. Russia was making a determined move to topple the Ottoman Empire and assert control over the territories around the Black Sea. Napoleon III, counting on a victorious campaign against Russia to shore up his shaky hold on power, loudly proclaimed his intention to support Turkey against Russian aggression, and called on Great Britain to honor its treaty obligations to do the same. England was stumbling into a war that its leaders knew all too well did not serve its interests.

  Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were not warmongers. They fully supported the Aberdeen government’s attempts to placate the tsar and keep the French emperor from engaging in a mad pursuit of Napoleonic gloire. The Queen had nightmares when she thought of the soldiers who would die and the families that would be ruined. The prince, who had long campaigned in vain for more money for the army, feared the worst. Lord Aberdeen, who had lived in Russia as a young man and was personally known to the tsar, was a pacifist who believed in diplomacy, not war. He had a beloved brother in the army who was sure to see combat.

  But the English people wanted to go to war. Patriotic fervor stirred the nation, and members of parliament pontificated that Britain had grown soft, too ruled by “Calico and Cant,” as The Spectator put it. The death of the Duke of Wellington in 1853 roused the nation to reconsider its past glories on the battlefield and to bemoan the loss of the martial spirit that the Iron Duke had personified. British popular opinion had long been deeply antagonistic toward Russia, a vast empire that op
enly opposed the liberal democratic institutions that Britain held dear: an elected parliament with full control over the public purse, the subordination of the army to civilian control, trial by jury, judicial independence from the executive, and a free press.

  So when Russia defeated the Turkish navy at Sinope, and the Crown and its pet government proved unwilling to declare war, the British people were enraged. Their quarrel was not especially with Aberdeen, a decent man doing his best in a tough situation. It was not with Queen Victoria, a wife and mother who properly delegated the business of the nation to her ministers. It was with Prince Albert, a foreigner who had dared to intervene between the sovereign and the nation’s elected representatives. The popular press treated its readers to lurid stories of the prince as a lackey in the ser vice of England’s continental enemies, specifically Russia. At one point, a crowd gathered outside the Tower of London, persuaded that the Queen’s husband would soon be brought there to face a charge of treason.

  When vicious attacks on her husband began to appear in the press, the “intense” interest in state business that Victoria had felt before her marriage revived. Albert needed her, and she felt fully justified in asserting her authority as sovereign and flying to his rescue. Blazing with anger, the Queen demanded that the government organize the prince’s defense. In a special Commons debate, the prince’s long, unselfish, and meritorious service to his adopted country was extolled from both sides of the aisle, and the right honorable members were adjured to wipe every smear from His Royal Highness’s good name. But the prince had received a severe reprimand from the public, and his political ambitions were deeply impaired.

  Albert put the best face on things he could, but his pride and self-confidence had received a heavy blow. He had aimed to take his wife’s place at the helm of the ship of state, and now he was once again forced to bow to her power and rely on her support. It was humiliating. In thirteen years, nothing had changed. More tolerated than loved at court, receiving at best token loyalty from the British aristocracy whom he despised, Albert had reached over the heads of the establishment. He had made a play for the support and even the love of the increasingly influential British professional and mercantile classes by championing their social values. Now suddenly these very people had turned on him. Victoria was adored by the English people; he was hated.

  Lord Palmerston had set his attack dogs loose on the prince, but he quickly called them off. The prince had questioned his competence, undermined values he held sacred, and put the nation at risk, and so he had fought to win. But he was not an aggressive or vindictive man, and once he saw Albert bloodied, Palmerston joined the chorus of support for the prince in the Commons. The important thing now was to concentrate on affairs in the Black Sea, where war now seemed inevitable.

  Palmerston believed that had he been in control of foreign office policy in 1852 and 1853, the Great Powers of Russia, Austria, France, and Great Britain would have patched together a settlement in the Balkans. He was probably right. Foreign courts hated Palmerston, but they knew where they stood with him. Napoleon III could bully Aberdeen but not Palmerston. The tsar grew bold in part because he knew that his declared enemy Lord Palmerston was in disgrace, and he believed that his good friend Lord Aberdeen would never go to war with Russia.

  But in 1854 Lord Aberdeen did declare war in support of Britain’s allies France and Turkey and with a sinking heart sent a British expeditionary force to destroy the Russian fortress at Sebastopol in the Crimean Peninsula. It was an ill-conceived campaign, and from the outset it ran into the intractable problems of weak supply routes and rampant infectious disease. Lord Palmerston now had occasion to regret that, in the matter of Russia, he had deserted his usual pragmatism in favor of political theorizing and demagoguery He was the man most responsible for the anti-Russian fervor sweeping the country, and he saw that the country would pay for his mistakes. Like the Crown and the Aberdeen ministry, Palmerston saw no reason for England to go to war with Russia in defense of Turkey in 1854. The Ottoman Empire was the most reactionary, corrupt, and dysfunctional of all European autocracies. Britain had no outstanding national interests at stake in the Balkans, and, if its navy was strong, its army was not.

  If popular opinion pushed the Aberdeen government into war with Russia against its will, the British nation quickly discovered that patriotic zeal alone did not win wars, especially a war fought half a world away. Once the Crimean campaign began, the Times reporters were able to telegraph back reports of how gallant British soldiers had to fight not only the armies of the tsar but the criminal inadequacy of their senior officers. Men deprived of boots and greatcoats, eating shreds of raw meat in the snow, dug into the frozen mud below Sebastopol and met the combined onslaught of the Russian winter and cholera, dysentery, and typhoid. Called to account in the House of Commons for its abominably lax conduct of the war, the Aberdeen government fell, and Lord Palmerston was swept into office as prime minister by collegial enthusiasm and public acclaim. In the teeth of resistance from the entrenched army bureaucracy at Whitehall and from the medical corps in the Crimea, he and his cabinet colleagues got the men through a second winter, coordinated with the French army the combined assault that led to the surrender of Sebastopol, and in the spring of 1856 negotiated a peace treaty with the new tsar, Alexander II. Thus ended a short, bloody, expensive, and pointless war.

  WHEN WAR WITH Russia was declared, Queen Victoria put her doubts and fears aside and concentrated all her energies on victory. She had always taken her official title of commander in chief of the armed forces with the utmost seriousness, and she now threw herself into the war effort. Understanding at last that Palmerston represented a force in English politics that they could not withstand, and perceiving the need for national unity, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert fully cooperated with the new head of government. As a result, the British government worked with outstanding efficiency and focus. In cabinet there was now no strife between the prime minister and the Crown, just serious and informed discussion of what had to be done next.

  One crucial source of information came from the eyewitness reports written from the main army hospital at Scutari by Lord Palmerston’s neighbor and sanitarian ally, Florence Nightingale. Unlike army officials bound by a code of silence, this lady was prepared to say how the military procurement system had broken down and to list exactly what the soldiers needed to survive not just in the field but in the hospital: shirts, sheets, socks, beds, soap, toweling, mops, basins, brooms, plates, trays, knives, forks, spoons, shoe brushes, coconut matting. Queen Victoria wrote: “We are much struck by her [Nightingale] … wonderful, clear, and comprehensive head. I wish we had her at the War Office!” When the Queen asked specifically what she could send to the men as personal gifts, and suggested Eau de Cologne, a light toilet water, Nightingale replied: “The Queen ought to give something which the man will feel as a daily extra comfort which he could not have had without her. Would some woolen material do, cut up into comforters for the neck when the man began to get out of bed? … Or a brush and comb for each man? or a Razor for each man. As to the Eau de Cologne, a little gin & water would do better.”

  Her Majesty was not at all put out by Nightingale’s asperity. It was the result of stress and overwork, and she rightly saw it as a mark of respect from one woman warrior to another. In addition to knitting socks and comforters with her daughters, Victoria sent all kinds of gifts for the ordinary soldiers, including magazines and books and etchings of the portrait of her son Arthur with his godfather the Duke of Wellington. These gifts were extraordinarily prized and, to Nightingale’s impotent fury, were confiscated by the officers as too good for common men.

  Since her marriage, Queen Victoria had moved further and further out of the public eye, but during the Crimean War she was once again a presence in the nation. She toured barracks and hospitals, awarded medals, and publicly rejoiced with her people when news came of great victories against fearsome odds at the Alma, Balaklava, and Inkerma
n. Filled with new energy and confidence, the Queen seized the opportunity to ride out to review her troops, on horseback and in uniform, just as she had as a girl, and her popularity soared to new heights.

  Queen Victoria reviewing the troops during the Crimean War

  In a welcome change from the grim news from the front, the Illustrated London News was lyrical in its praise of Her Majesty’s excursion at Alder shot on her “superbly caparisoned charger.” The magazine offered its women readers a detailed description of the beautifully tailored new uniform tunic the Queen had come up with. It was scarlet, just like a real officer’s, and decorated not only with the blue ribbon and cross of the Order of the Garter but also a crimson and gold sash with “gold bullion tassels.” Two more such tassels decorated the Queen’s black felt hat, together with “a plume of red and white feathers.” In 1857, two months after the birth of her ninth child, the Queen reprised her role as Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, distributing the new Victoria Crosses for valor in Hyde Park, sitting sidesaddle on her horse, wearing her magnificent tunic and hat. The Queen was emerging at last from the shadow side of life, as she called childbearing, unaware that darker shadows awaited her.

  IN APRIL 1856, the queen wrote to Lord Palmerston: “Now that the moment for the ratification of the Treaty of Peace is near at hand, the Queen wishes to delay no longer the expression of her satisfaction as to the manner in which both the War has been brought to a conclusion, and the honour and interests of this country have been maintained by the Treaty of Peace, under the zealous and able guidance of Lord Palmerston. She wishes as a public token of her approval to bestow the Order of the Garter upon him.” This was the highest honor in the Queen’s gift, and few prime ministers received it.