A letter by the Duke of Wellington of the previous January to Sir John Burgoyne was published in which he claimed that, after detailed examination of the coast from the North Foreland to Portsmouth ‘excepting immediately under the fire of Dover Castle, there is not a spot on the coast on which infantry might not be thrown on shore at any turn of the tide, with any wind and in any weather, and from which such body of infantry, so thrown on shore, would not find within the distance of five miles a road into the interior of the country through the cliffs, practicable for the march of troops . . . When did any man hear of allies of a country unable to defend itself?’
This was palpable nonsense, as any person conversant with the bleak and inhospitable, and virtually harbourless, English southeastern coast can easily testify, but the military judgement of the Duke was unquestioned and unquestionable, and a great and unnecessary stir was occasioned, to which the timorous Government eagerly bowed. With wholly uncustomary celerity, the Russell Administration bounded into precipitate and patriotic reaction.
On February 18th Russell announced to the House of Commons an increase of £358,000 to the Military, Naval, and Ordnance Estimate, with a further £150,000 to form a Militia Force. But he also announced a Budget deficit of £3,346,500 to be met by renewing Income Tax (about to expire) for three years, and to raise it from 7d to one shilling in the £ for the next two years. Such was the uproar that within ten days the increases were withdrawn, ‘In the country’, Disraeli sardonically remarked, ‘a menagerie before feeding-time could alone give an idea of the unearthly yell with which it was received’.
Prince Albert, obsessed by the crisis in Europe and the threat it posed to the institution of Monarchy itself, was baffled by the fact that London seemed considerably more concerned with the possible fall of the Government over this – to him – relatively minor issue than with violent Revolution on the Continent. His bewilderment emphasised his continuing difficulty in identifying himself with English attitudes; but we can now clearly see that the general indifference in England to the European storm was a highly encouraging political response.
The widespread European upheavals, initiated by the collapse of Louis Philippe, also spread to Germany. Albert hoped that Germans would see what Revolution had brought to France, where, he wrote to Stockmar, ‘the dregs of the populace, who now alone may be styled the people, are to be the rulers; they are armed, and in a fortnight will be without bread, for all labour is at a standstill, the banks are failing, the capitalists getting out of the way’. ‘The poor King of Prussia has made a sad mess’, Stockmar commented on March 31st. ‘Never has he made a move or a concession but it was too late, nay, when it would have been better had he done nothing’.
The Queen wrote to Leopold that ‘Belgium is a bright star in the midst of dark clouds. It makes us all very happy’, but to Stockmar on March 6th: ‘I am quite well – indeed particularly so, though God knows we have had since the 25th enough for a whole life, – anxiety, sorrow, excitement, in short, I feel as if we had jumped over thirty years’ experience at once. The whole face of Europe is changed, and I feel as if I lived in a dream . . .
‘You know my love for the [French Royal] family; you know how I longed to get on better terms with them again . . . and you said, “Time will alone achieve this, but will certainly bring it about”. Little did I dream that this would be the way we should meet again, and see each other all in the most friendly way. That the Duchesse de Montpensier about whom we have been quarrelling for the last year and a half, should be here as a fugitive, and dressed in the clothes I sent her, and should come to thank me for my kindness, is a reverse of fortune which no novelist would devise, and upon which one could moralise for ever’.
The forlorn French Royal Family sought succour in England, Louis Philippe arriving at Windsor on March 6th, while in Germany there were reports of violence and anarchy, which deeply troubled Albert. ‘It is wonderful to see how my dear Prince bears up under so much anxiety and distress’, the Queen wrote to Stockmar, ‘for these one must feel, if one loves one’s country and sees the awful state things have got into. But he is full of courage, and takes such a large and noble view of everything that he overlooks trifles, and looks solely to the general good’.
The Queen – advised by Albert and Russell – firmly took the view that hospitality for refugees should not be seen as political support for the old regime, and that the new one must be recognised and accepted. ‘It will not be pleasant to do this’, she wrote to Leopold, ‘but the public good and the peace of Europe go before one’s personal feelings’. Their hospitality was somewhat ill-rewarded. The French Royal Family and its retinue could not believe that their exile was likely to be permanent, and demonstrated a marked lack of appreciation for the considerable assistance and consideration shown to them, particularly by Albert, who rapidly became exasperated by these ungrateful and not particularly welcome guests. At a time of considerable concern for him, with Europe in turmoil and the sounds of revolution heard in several English cities, and his wife about to have another child, his irritation and impatience with the exiles was wholly understandable. They accused him of being ‘hard and unfeeling’, and continued to complain and quarrel with each other.
‘Things are going badly,’ he wrote on February 27th to Stockmar. ‘I lose flesh and strength daily. European war is at our doors. France is ablaze in every quarter, Louis Philippe is wandering about in disguise, so is the Queen . . . [yet] I am not cast down, still I have need of friends and counsel in these heavy times.’ The death of his beloved surviving grandmother was an additional, and heavy, blow. Victoria wrote that he was ‘pale and sad’, and another observer – almost certainly Henry Reeve – wrote of him ‘in these days of gloom with an expression on his face which was harrowing.’
In London, in spite of considerable tension and damage by wandering crowds, the authorities had little difficulty in controlling the somewhat aimless mobs, which received very little support. ‘Our little riots here are mere nothings’, the Queen wrote to Leopold on March 11th, ‘and the feeling here is good . . . but what an extraordinary state of things everywhere! Je ne sais plus où je suis, and I could almost fancy we have gone back into the last century. But I also feel that one must not be nervous or alarmed at these moments, but be of good cheer and muster up courage to meet all the difficulties’.
The Glasgow riots, beginning on March 5th, were much more serious, but were short-lived, and firmly met by special constables and the military. Other disturbances in Edinburgh, Newcastle and Manchester were swiftly and easily dealt with. ‘I believe’, Peel wrote to Stockmar, ‘that the times are in our favour, that is, in favour of the course of constitutional freedom under the aegis of Monarchy’.
There were real fears, however, about what would happen when the Chartists carried out their intention of marching a vast procession from Kennington Common to Parliament on April 10th with their monster national petition. It was an immensely difficult period for the Royal couple. On March 18th Queen Victoria gave birth to her sixth child, Princess Louise – named after Albert’s mother – and it was a particularly difficult and painful confinement. On top of these strains there were now the fears about the situation in London, and which naturally caused both considerable concern. ‘I never was calmer and quieter and less nervous’, the Queen wrote to Leopold on April 4th, with rather more bravado than veracity. ‘Great events make one quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves’.
In fact, both were genuinely – and understandably – concerned about their safety, and it was decided that the Royal Family should leave London for Osborne. They left Waterloo station on April 8th, and arrived at ‘our dear Osborne’ that afternoon.
In the event, this reasonable precaution turned out to be unnecessary. The Duke of Wellington took charge, and massive troop and artillery forces were introduced into London, kept well out of sight, but readily available. There was a heavy enrolment of s
pecial constables, but the Chartist crowd was hardly much more than 20,000, and the petition was conveyed to Westminster in three cabs amid widespread derision and relief. Furthermore, the petition itself proved to contain a large number of false names, not excluding those of the Queen, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, ‘and others of equally Chartist proclivities’.
A telegram was sent to the Queen by the Government informing her of the peaceful resolution of the threat. ‘Thank God!’, she wrote; ‘the Chartist meeting & Procession has turned out a complete failure; the loyalty of the people at large has been very striking & their indignation at their peace being interfered with by such worthless and wanton men – immense’. ‘What a glorious day was yesterday for England!’ Albert wrote to Phipps. ‘How mightily will this tell all over the world!’ Greville recorded that ‘In the midst of the roar of the revolutionary waters that are deluging the whole earth, it is good to see how we stand erect and unscathed. It is the first tribute that has ever been paid to our Constitution, the greatest that has ever been applied to it’.
Prince Albert wrote to Stockmar on the 11th: ‘We had our revolution yesterday and it ended in smoke. London turned out some hundreds of special constables; the troops were kept out of sight, to prevent the possibility of a collision, and the law has remained triumphant. I hope this will read with advantage on the Continent. Ireland still looks dangerous’.
Ireland did indeed ‘still look dangerous’. The conditions there were now unspeakable, and the exodus of wretched and near-starving Irish to England and Scotland brought to the country thousands of understandably embittered and desperate people. It was not surprising that Young Ireland should endorse revolution and the use of arms. The United Irishman, edited by John Mitchel, spoke in language that has become only too grimly familiar to the present day:
Let the man amongst you who has no gun, sell his garment to buy one. Every street is an excellent shooting-gallery for disciplined troops; but it is a better defile in which to take them.
A deputation went to France to seek assistance to create the Irish Republic; United Irishman gave detailed instructions on streetfighting and missiles for maiming horses, to which ‘revolutionary citizens add always boiling water or grease, or, better, cold vitriol, if available’. The French absolutely refused to be involved, and the Government asked Parliament for additional powers to deal with Irish insurrection, which were quickly granted. Meanwhile, dissent had broken out in Ireland itself between the remaining supporters of O’Connell and Mitchel and his allies, to the point where the latter had to seek police protection. Mitchel himself was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, to the fury of the Irish, Chartists, and Repealers in the north of England. ‘We have Chartist riots every night, which result in numbers of broken heads’. Prince Albert wrote grimly at Buckingham Palace on May 6th.48 ‘The organisation of these people is incredible . . . if they could, by means of their organisation, throw themselves in a body upon any one point, they might be successful in a coup-de-main’. He was, however, optimistic that the police could handle the situation without military force, as it transpired.
But it was an ugly, menacing, and frightening period. ‘Commerce is at a deadlock’, he wrote to Stockmar on April 29th, ‘and manufacturers depressed; numbers of citizens are out of work, and the prospects of the revenue are gloomy’. ‘Albert is my constant pride and admiration’, the Queen wrote to Leopold, ‘and his cheerfulness and courage are my great comfort and satisfaction; but, believe me, I am often very sad’. In another letter to him at this time she wrote of her husband that ‘He has that happy gift of constant cheerfulness, which is a treasure in these times.’ For the christening of Princess Louise, in the Private Chapel at Buckingham Palace on May 13th, he adapted a chorale he had written some years before to the hymn ‘In Life’s Gay Morn.’
In the lowering and difficult political circumstances of 1848, Prince Albert resolved to reassert his deep and genuine concern for what he described as ‘that class of our community which has most of the toil, and least of the enjoyments, of this world’. His reading, his observations, and his discussions with Ashley and other concerned public men had made him profoundly worried by the poverty, abominable housing, and malnutrition that were the dark side of Britain’s rapid and dramatic economic and industrial advance. ‘It is dreadful to see the sufferings at this moment’. he wrote to Phipps after inspecting housing conditions in London, and in the fevered atmosphere of April 1848 he bombarded Russell with complaints and appeals. ‘Surely’, he wrote, ‘this is not the moment for the taxpayers to economise upon the working classes!’; he was shocked by high unemployment, and the fact that the number of people receiving poor relief was over four and a half million, some one-seventh of the entire population of the United Kingdom. He told Russell that the Government was ‘bound to do what it can to help the working classes over the present moment of distress’. Lord John and his colleagues did not agree.
Frustrated by Ministers, Prince Albert now looked for a convenient and appropriate public platform from which he could express his feelings, and found it in The Society for Improving the Conditions of the Labouring Classes, of which he had been President for four years. The Society had made little real progress, but the Prince eagerly took Ashley’s suggestion that he should speak at a public meeting to support the Society’s aims.
Ministers, when informed of the Prince’s intentions, were hostile to them, and it became quickly evident that the gulf in attitudes between Prince Albert and the Cabinet was a very substantial one. Palmerston was adept at stirring the excitement of large audiences by his audacious nationalism, but his concern for the circumstances of the people was as minimal as that of Melbourne and Russell. But the Prince had got the measure of the Prime Minister, whose timorousness over Palmerston’s activities had confirmed the low opinion of his political courage that Prince Albert had formed in December 1845.
In an attempt to dissuade the Prince, Russell sent him a copy of a tract assailing the Royal Family, which the recipient regarded as further evidence for the need for him to make his position clear. ‘We (the Queen and I) may possess these feelings [of sympathy and interest] and yet the mass of the people may be ignorant of it’, he wrote to Russell on April 29th, ‘because they have never heard it expressed to them, or seen any tangible proof of it.’ ‘It will be difficult’, he wrote to Ashley (April 23rd), ‘to find another becoming opportunity for expressing the sincerest interest which the Queen and myself feel for the welfare and comfort of the working classes.’ ‘I conceive’, he wrote bleakly but emphatically to Russell, ‘that one has a Duty to perform towards the great mass of the working classes which will not allow one’s yielding to the fear for some possible inconvenience’.
Thus, in total defiance of the advice and wishes of the Queen’s Ministers, Prince Albert took the chair at the public meeting of the Society on May 18th, to express his apprehensions and put forward his remedies. He did so with the full support of the Queen; Ministers, their advice and warnings ignored, were powerless.
Today, the Prince’s prescription for curing the ills which he depicted with impressive clarity and a strength of feeling that impressed his large audience may appear somewhat paternalistic, and certainly the theme of ‘self-help’ is very strong. But there were two features that startled his audience, and which were deeply significant. First, while strongly opposing ‘any dictatorial interference with labour and employment, which frightens away capital, destroys that freedom of thought and independence of action which must remain to everyone if he is to work at his own happiness, and impairs that confidence under which alone engagements for mutual benefit are possible’, he argued that it was the duty of those with capital to give practical assistance to housing, loan funds, and land allotments to those who wished to advantage themselves. ‘The interests of classes, too often confronted, are identical, and it is only ignorance which prevents their uniting for each other’s advantage. To dispe
l that ignorance, to show how man can help man, notwithstanding the complicated state of civilised society, ought to be the aim of every philanthropic person; but it is more peculiarly the duty of those who, under the blessing of Divine Providence, enjoy station, wealth, and education’.
The second argument, which was particularly and carefully attuned to the mood of the increasingly prosperous but still troubled middle-class, was to point out the long-term advantages of social advances in prosperity and housing for ‘their poorer brethren’. ‘God has created man imperfect, and left him with many wants, as it were to stimulate each to individual exertion, and to make all feel that it is only by united exertions and combined action that these imperfections can be supplied, and these wants satisfied. This presupposes self-reliance and confidence in each other’.
The speech, which was widely reported, had a considerable impact. It appalled those magnates and entrepreneurs imbued with Melbourne’s still-pervading hostility to, and terror of, the potential power of the labouring masses; it deeply troubled Ministers, who had little confidence in the desire, or the capacity, of poor people to improve their lot peaceably; but it struck a real chord in enlightened businessmen, attracted political radicals – a far from revolutionary group – and, by the strange processes that often attend certain speeches, filtered through to a largely illiterate and despairing multitude. Indeed, it was a major episode in the development of the Monarchy into a genuinely popular and, in the best sense of the word, populist element. At a time when few politicians except Peel and Ashley seemed to care particularly about the circumstances in which millions of people barely survived, it was obvious to the immediate audience and those who read the speech, or heard of it, that he was not only concerned but was absolutely sincere. And so he was. To his brother Ernest he wrote in April 1849:
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