Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  Meanwhile, the injudicious award of a baronetcy and a pension to Conroy in a clumsy attempt to buy him off – ‘surely never was such a blunder committed as letting this man have the most unlimited means of intriguing against the Queen’s Government’, Liverpool remarked with valid vehemence to Stockmar – was arousing public attack, notably from The Times, to which Conroy responded with an action for criminal libel, and writs flew bitterly. Stockmar, who unhappily found himself subpoenaed in this bizarre and demeaning episode, became very alarmed by the reactions of Queen Victoria to these difficulties, reporting to Leopold that she had become ‘as passionate as a spoilt child, if she feels offended, she throws everything overboard without exception’. She had become impatient with Leopold’s frequent attempts to guide and advise her, and Lehzen’s suspicions about Leopold’s ambitions for a marriage with Albert were fortified by those of Melbourne, to the point that Stockmar himself urged Leopold to amend his attitude and style of approach to the Queen – wise advice which Leopold, equally wisely, followed. Stockmar reported that she ‘had begun to take ill every piece of advice . . . which does not agree with her own opinion, and to see it as unjustified and undeserved criticism. On these occasions I have also found in her an underlying feeling that resembles the wounded pride of a person so highly placed that she says to herself “in normal circumstances these admonitions might be appropriate, but for me they are out of place” . . . and Lehzen encourages her. Just like the nurse who hits the stone that tripped the child up’. ‘This year I did not enjoy pleasure so much’, Queen Victoria wrote.

  An additional and major problem was that Victoria now had only one adviser whom she truly trusted and revered – her Whig Prime Minister, Melbourne. It was not at all surprising that the Queen became besotted by Melbourne. He was fifty-eight, hand-some, worldly, amusing, and genuinely devoted to her service; ‘he alone inspires me with that feeling of great confidence and I may say security’, she wrote, ‘for I feel so safe when he speaks to me and is with me’. ‘He has such stores of knowledge; such a wonderful memory; he knows about everything and everybody; who they were and what they did . . . it does me a world of good, and his conversations always improve me greatly’. Noting this remarkable relationship, Greville wrote that the Queen’s feelings ‘are sexual, though she does not know it’, and that Melbourne’s ‘province [is] to educate, instruct, and form the most interesting mind and character in the world’. Hobhouse described the relationship more accurately and shrewdly as that of a child to a father, and Creevey tartly commented that ‘the part she at present plays is putting herself unreservedly into the exclusive management of Melbourne, without apparently thinking of anyone else’. Lord Aberdeen wrote to Princess Lieven that ‘no minister in this country, since the days of Protector Somerset, was ever placed in such a situation . . . He has a young and inexperienced infant in his hands, whose whole conduct and opinions must necessarily be in complete subservience to his views. I do him the justice to believe that he has some feeling for his situation . . . but in the nature of things, this power must be absolute, at least at Court’.

  In many respects Melbourne was an admirable first Prime Minister for a very young and politically naïve Queen; as Greville wrote, ‘He treats her with unbounded consideration and respect, he consults her tastes and her wishes, and he puts her at her ease by his frank and natural manners, while he amuses her by the quaint, queer, epigrammatic turn of his mind, and his varied knowledge upon all subjects’. But however great the benefits of Melbourne’s excellent company, consideration, and sardonic observations – ‘none of the Pagets can read or write, and they get on well enough’ – the fact was that he was a Whig Prime Minister, and a particularly reactionary, cynical, and insensitive one. When taxed by Queen Victoria about his irregular attendance at Church and his doubtful full-hearted commitment to religion he retorted that ‘I am a quietist’, and this honest self-description had significant application to his political attitudes. ‘You had better try to do no good, and then you’ll get into no scrapes’ was not only his advice to the young Queen, but his entire philosophy.

  In her Journal she meticulously noted his observations.

  ‘ “All depends on the urgency of a thing”, said Lord M. “If a thing is very urgent, you can always find time for it; but if a thing can be put off, why then, you put it off.” ’ (September 21st, 1838). On September 28th he told her that ‘I like what is tranquil and stable’. And to these commentaries and views the very young Queen responded very eagerly. When Greville wrote that she was ‘blinded by her partialities’, it was only too true.

  But these were not quiet times.

  The Chartist movement, whose first meeting was held only a few weeks after the Queen’s Coronation, sprang from several sources of discontent and concern, involving alike the desperately poor in town and country and middle class reformers who believed that the 1832 Reform Act was only the first step in substantial political peaceful change. When the People’s Charter was eventually produced its famous Six Points – manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, vote by secret ballot, abolition of the property qualification for Parliamentary candidates, payment of Members of Parliament, and the creation of equal electoral districts – clearly emphasised its essentially peaceful and constitutional nature. This was not the general reaction of Parliament or the Melbourne Government, and the fact that serious urban and rural violence was linked with the aspirations of the Chartists did not lessen their dismay and fear. In the words of Justin McCarthy, ‘an ignorant panic prevailed on all sides’. Today, with all the points except annual Parliaments accepted and established as major features of the British Constitution it is perhaps difficult to appreciate the extent and fierceness of the controversies, and the vehemence with which the established political confederations denounced the Six Points and successfully prevented their introduction for a generation. In the Queen, they had a strong, determined, and convinced ally, in every respect far closer to Melbourne’s distaste for any reform and change than to Russell’s commitment to modest but genuine liberalism and Peel’s pragmatic Toryism. When she described Peel in her Journal as a ‘nasty wretch’ she meant it.

  Queen Victoria’s complex personality at this time has never been better described than by A. C. Benson:

  She was high-spirited and wilful, but devotedly affectionate, and almost typically feminine. She had a strong sense of duty and dignity, and strong personal prejudices. Confident, in a sense, as she was, she had the feminine instinct strongly developed of dependence upon some manly adviser. She was full of high spirits, and enjoyed excitement and life to the full. She liked the stir of London, was fond of dancing, of concerts, plays, and operas, and devoted to open-air exercise. Another important trait in her character must be noted. She had strong monarchical views and dynastic sympathies, but she had no aristocratic preferences; at the same time she had no democratic principles, but believed firmly in the due subordination of classes.17

  With the latter principles Melbourne was in emphatic agreement, and her personal dependence upon, and reverence for, Melbourne dangerously included his political attitudes and those of his Party.

  Melbourne had been Home Secretary in 1834 when six Dorset farm labourers in Tolpuddle, whose employers had reneged on a modest wage increase, formed a Friendly Society, and were arrested. Melbourne wholly approved and took advice about which statute should be employed to prosecute; under the Secret Oaths Act of 1797, passed to combat the naval mutiny at the Nore, the men were prosecuted and sentenced to seven years’ deportation. This savage treatment of desperately poor men in a starving village aroused an intense reaction and several heated debates in the Commons. Melbourne was indifferent to mass petitions and marches, but his colleague Lord John Russell took a different view, and at his insistence the sentences were remitted and the men given a free passage home. But the episode of the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, although the legend has become embellished, was of truly historic magnitude, and the
fact that the Government had been forced to bow before the storm was significant. As has been wisely remarked, ‘the reforming energy was in the time, and not in the Ministry’.18 By the time Victoria became Queen Melbourne’s reactionary instincts had become even more firmly entrenched.

  The Melbourne Government had no real majority, no policy save that of maintaining a precarious status quo, amid notably little public or political esteem, facts which Melbourne appreciated clearly, with great regret and some incomprehension, but which Queen Victoria did not. ‘I am sure that there are some times of trouble approaching for which Your Majesty must be prepared’, he wrote to her in October 1838. ‘Your Majesty is too well acquainted with the nature of human affairs not to be aware that they cannot very well go on as quietly as they have gone for the last sixteen months’. But Queen Victoria did not share Melbourne’s melancholy and physical weariness – features which were now becoming notably significant in his conduct of affairs, and increasingly obvious to his colleagues, opponents, and political commentators, but not, unhappily, to the Queen.

  The Queen’s enthusiasm for Melbourne did not wholly extend to his outspoken and flamboyant Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston. A notorious womaniser, with a number of illegitimate progeny to testify to the fact, he had late-developing and surprising gifts of demagoguery and a leaning to liberalism at home and abroad that had been unsuspected in his previous political career, which had begun in 1809 when he had entered Parliament at the age of twenty-five after several unsuccessful endeavours and had been at once offered Cabinet office as either Chancellor of the Exchequer or Secretary for War, a commentary more on the grievous dearth of talent available rather than on a visionary appreciation of his future eminence. In the event he became Secretary for War outside the Cabinet, and since then had been a standard fixture in almost every Administration. Regarded by politicians as a poor orator but a notably hard-working Minister he also gave an appearance of flippancy, while his many female conquests were regarded with that mixture of shock and admiration that the English affect on such matters. But Palmerston was a professional politician, and the first to grasp and use the new weapon of the Press. He arranged for the Whigs to secretly buy their own newspapers, and wrote unsigned anonymous leading articles and commentaries. He developed a populist approach to foreign affairs; his formidable Parliamentary skills, although they burgeoned relatively late, were beginning to mark him as a coming man. Melbourne was nervous of him, and so was the Queen, but her disapproval of his deplorable private life was overridden by the fact that he was a Whig, and Melbourne’s choice as Foreign Secretary. These were sufficient lines of credit at that time.

  Queen Victoria’s blind devotion to Melbourne, his Government, its attitudes, and the Whig Party, now deeply imperilled her own position. She was not only young, emotional, ill-prepared, prejudiced, reckless, imperious, and totally politically inexperienced, but she was, above all, alone, without access to any impartial political advice – Lehzen being a vehement Whig – and quite unaware of its necessity. Even Stockmar’s former special authority was temporarily severely clouded by his close relationship with Leopold, with whom Queen Victoria had lost patience. This was particularly unfortunate, as his advice at this difficult time was very wise. ‘You are too clever not to know’, he wrote carefully on January 16th 1838, ‘that it is not the being called Queen or King, which can be of the least consequence, when to the title there is not also annexed the power indispensable for the exercise of those functions. All trades must be learned, and nowadays the trade of a constitutional Sovereign, to do it well, is a very difficult one . . .’ In her Court, she leant only on Lehzen and her Whig ladies, but on them far less than on Melbourne. Her attitudes were implacable and open. At her very first levée a Whig renegade, Lord Lyndhurst, was in attendance; when she saw him, Creevey recorded, she drew herself up ‘as if she had seen a snake’. She thought she knew her friends; she thought she knew her enemies, and her apparent popularity and power had gone to her head. All this was very human, very understandable, but very dangerous. As Stockmar realised from afar, she was frighteningly vulnerable, and in her personal obsessions wholly unaware of the fact.

  The Tory Arbuthnot wrote angrily that ‘with the young foolish Queen against us we can have but little hope. She seems to be full of power for evil – and to be full of weakness for good’, a sentiment which accurately enough represented Tory impatience at the manifest partisanship of the Monarch. This was not a new phenomenon at all; what made Queen Victoria’s partiality so unfortunate was that the real hopes that had been felt on her accession that a genuinely disinterested and politically unbiassed Sovereign had arrived had proved unfounded. Peel had remarked to Greville immediately after her first meeting with the Privy Council that ‘how amazed he was at her manner and behaviour, at her apparent deep sense of her situation, her modesty, and at the same time her firmness’. But although Peel himself was cautious, ‘the great body of the Tories, on the other hand, are thirsting for office’, as Greville wrote; ‘. . . they are chafing and fuming that they can’t get in, and would encounter all the hazards of defeat for the slightest chance of victory. It is only the prudent reserve of Peel (in which Stanley and Graham probably join) that restrains the impatience of the party within moderate bounds’.

  This was written immediately after the Queen’s accession. By the spring of 1839 the position had become infinitely worse. Melbourne’s Whig administration clung precariously on to Office with highly unreliable Radical and Irish supporters in the House of Commons, increasingly unpopular, querulously divided in Cabinet, and dominated solely by a passion for survival, which the Queen vehemently shared. Lord Howick wrote that ‘Lord Melbourne adhered to the “stationary system”, cannot bear adopting any new measures unless he is absolutely compelled to do so, and thinks it quite enough to deal with the difficulties which immediately press upon him without looking to those which are likely to arise hereafter’. Following the dictum, ‘Why do you bother the poor? Leave them alone’, the Melbourne Government found itself assailed with a crisis in Canada – partially resolved by the dispatch of Lord Durham, whom Melbourne detested – the evident continuance of slavery in spite of its technical abolition, urban and agrarian unrest, the rise of public education – not a subject at all close to Melbourne’s heart – and the first serious indications of the emergence of a national campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws.

  Few issues in modern British politics have aroused such passions, and had more notable political consequences. The Corn Law of 1815 banned the import of grain until the price of home-grown grain reached eighty shillings per quarter; Customs Duty, subsequently amended with a sliding scale whose effect was to reduce the duty on imported wheat as the price of home-grown rose, and thereby gave a double protection to the grower. Behind the Anti-Corn Law League, whose roots were essentially in the Midlands, and especially in Manchester, was the cause of Free Trade, espoused with an almost messianic fervour by its advocates, of whom the most notable was Richard Cobden, first elected to Parliament in 1841, but for some time beforehand the outstanding populist champion of what Disraeli described as ‘the School of Manchester’, one of his many phrases that almost at once entered, and remained in, the political vocabulary. Cobden’s principal lieutenant was John Bright, who brought to Cobden’s sweet reason and mastery of statistics an oratorical power that Cobden lacked; they were, on platform and in Parliament, a most formidable combination. But the landed interest, as dominant in the Whigs as in the Tories, was implacable on the Corn Laws. It might be possible for politicians such as Russell and Peel to flirt with the principle of Free Trade in generalities, but not with the Corn Laws. On this matter Melbourne was as vehement as any Tory – ‘I doubt whether property or the institutions of the country can stand it [repeal]’ – but his tactics were to procrastinate, to express formal concern, and to calm those of his Ministers who were beginning to give evidence of some sympathy with the League. He also had a characteristically
shrewd judgement that Peel, the leader of the Corn Law protectionist Tories, was already more persuaded of the need for reform – if not repeal – than he was prepared to admit even to himself, let alone to his followers.

  The Cabinet by the beginning of 1839 was, as Lord Tavistock wrote, ‘disunited, dissatisfied, and disgusted’. ‘Lord Melbourne cannot but consider that affairs are in a most precarious state’, he reported to the Queen on February 10th, ‘and that whilst there is so much discontent fermenting within the Cabinet itself there must be great doubt of Lord Melbourne’s being much longer to hold the Administration together’. A new Member of Parliament was the Tory Benjamin Disraeli, whose maiden speech on December 7th 1837 had been a famous disaster, redeemed only by the final declaration, ‘I sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me’. He wrote in Coningsby (published in 1844) that the death of King William ‘was a great blow to what had now come to be generally styled the “Conservative Cause”’, and he subsequently admirably described the position of the Melbourne Government: