Victoria and the Victorian Age

Introduction

Victoria served as the queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837 until 1901. In 1876 she also became empress of India. During her reign the English monarchy took on its modern ceremonial character.

Victoria first learned of her future role as a young princess during a history lesson when she was 10 years old. Almost four decades later Victoria's governess recalled that the future queen reacted to the discovery by declaring, "I will be good." This combination of earnestness and egotism marked Victoria as a child of the age that bears her name. The queen, however, rejected important Victorian values and developments. A mother of nine who hated pregnancy and childbirth, detested babies, and was uncomfortable in the presence of children, Victoria reigned in a society that idealized both motherhood and the family. She had no interest in social issues, yet the 19th century in Britain was an age of reform. She resisted technological change even while mechanical and technological innovations reshaped the face of European civilization.

Most significantly, Victoria was a queen determined to retain political power; yet unwillingly and unwittingly she presided over the transformation of the sovereign's political role into a ceremonial one and thus preserved the English monarchy. When Victoria became queen, the political role of the crown was by no means clear; nor was the permanence of the throne itself. When she died and her son Edward VII moved from Marlborough House to Buckingham Palace, the change was one of social rather than of political focus; there was no doubt about the monarchy's continuance. That was the measure of her reign.

Lineage and early life.

On the death in 1817 of Princess Charlotte, daughter of the prince regent (later George IV), there was no surviving legitimate offspring of George III's 15 children. In 1818, therefore, three of his sons, the dukes of Clarence, Kent, and Cambridge, married to provide for the succession. The winner in the race to father the next ruler of Britain was Edward, duke of Kent, fourth son of King George III. His only child, christened Alexandrina Victoria, was born at Kensington Palace, London, on May 24, 1819. After his death and George IV's accession in 1820, Victoria became third in the line of succession to the throne after the Duke of York (died 1827) and the Duke of Clarence (subsequently William IV), whose own children died in infancy.

Victoria, by her own account, "was brought up very simply," principally at Kensington Palace, where her closest companions, other than her German-born mother, the Duchess of Kent, were her half sister, Féodore, and her governess, Louise (afterward the Baroness) Lehzen, a native of Coburg. An important father figure to the orphaned princess was her uncle Leopold, her mother's brother, who lived at Claremont, near Esher, Surrey, until he became king of the Belgians in 1831.

Victoria's childhood was made increasingly unhappy by the machinations of the Duchess of Kent's advisor, Sir John Conroy. In control of the pliable duchess, Conroy hoped to dominate the future queen of Britain as well. Persuaded by Conroy that the royal dukes, "the wicked uncles," posed a threat to her daughter, the duchess reared Victoria according to "the Kensington system," by which she and Conroy systematically isolated Victoria from her contemporaries and her father's family. Conroy thus aimed to make the princess dependent on and easily led by himself.

Strong-willed, and supported by Lehzen, Victoria survived the Kensington system; when she ascended the throne in 1837, she did so alone. Her mother's actions had estranged her from Victoria and taught the future queen caution in her friendships. Moreover, her retentive memory did not allow her to forgive readily.

Accession to the throne.

In the early hours of June 20, 1837, Victoria received a call from the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord chamberlain and learned of the death of William IV, third son of George III. Later that morning the Privy Council was impressed by the graceful assurance of the new queen's demeanour. She was small, carried herself well, and had a delightful silvery voice, which she retained all her life. The accession of a young woman was romantically popular. But because of the existence in Hanover of the Salic law, which prevented succession by a woman, the crowns of Great Britain and Hanover became separated, the latter passing to William IV's eldest surviving brother, Ernest, the unpopular duke of Cumberland.

The queen, who had never before had a room to herself, exiled her mother to a distant set of apartments when they moved into Buckingham Palace. Conroy was pensioned off. Only Lehzen, of whom Victoria was still in awe, remained close to the queen. Even her beloved uncle Leopold was politely warned off discussions of English politics. "Alone" at last, she enjoyed her new-found freedom. "Victoria," wrote her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who later married her,

is said to be incredibly stubborn and her extreme obstinacy to be constantly at war with her good nature; she delights in Court ceremonies, etiquette and trivial formalities. . . . She is said not to take the slightest pleasure in nature and to enjoy sitting up at night and sleeping late into the day.

It was, in retrospect, "the least sensible and satisfactory time in her whole life"; but at the time it was exciting and enjoyable, the more so because of her romantic friendship with Lord Melbourne, the prime minister.

Melbourne was a crucial influence on Victoria, in many ways an unfortunate one. The urbane and sophisticated prime minister fostered the new queen's self-confidence and enthusiasm for her role; he also encouraged her to ignore or minimize social problems and to attribute all discontent and unrest to the activities of a small group of agitators. Moreover, because of Melbourne, Victoria became an ardent Whig.

Victoria's constitutionally dangerous political partisanship contributed to the first two crises of her reign, both of which broke in 1839. The Hastings affair began when Lady Flora Hastings, a maid of honour who was allied and connected to the Tories, was forced by Victoria to undergo a medical examination for suspected pregnancy. The gossip, when it was discovered that the queen had been mistaken, became the more damaging when later in the year Lady Flora died of a disease that had not been diagnosed by the examining physician. The enthusiasm of the populace over the coronation (June 28, 1838) swiftly dissipated.

Between the two phases of the Hastings case "the bedchamber crisis" intervened. When Melbourne resigned in May 1839, Sir Robert Peel, the Conservative leader, stipulated that the Whig ladies of the bedchamber should be removed. The queen imperiously refused, not without Melbourne's encouragement. "The Queen of England will not submit to such trickery," she said. Peel therefore declined to take office, which Melbourne rather weakly resumed. "I was very young then," wrote the queen long afterward, "and perhaps I should act differently if it was all to be done again."

The Albertine monarchy.

Victoria's wedding to Prince Albert served as a stage for displays of political partisanship: very few Tories received invitations, and the Tories themselves rejected Victoria's request that Albert be granted rank and precedence second only to her own. Victoria responded violently, "Monsters! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!" Marriage to Albert, however, lessened the queen's enthusiasm for Melbourne and the Whigs. She admitted many years later regarding Melbourne that "Albert thinks I worked myself up to what really became rather foolish." Albert thus shifted Victoria's political sympathies; he also became the dominant figure and influence in her life. She quickly grew to depend on him for everything; soon she "didn't put on a gown or a bonnet if he didn't approve it." No more did Victoria rule alone.

Marriage to Albert.

Attracted by Albert's good looks and encouraged by her uncle Leopold, Victoria proposed to her cousin on Oct. 15, 1839, just five days after he had arrived at Windsor on a visit to the English court. She described her impressions of him in the journal she kept throughout her life: "Albert really is quite charming, and so extremely handsome . . . a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist; my heart is quite going." They were married on Feb. 10, 1840, the queen dressed entirely in articles of British manufacture.

Children quickly followed. Victoria, the princess royal (the "Vicky" of the Letters), was born in 1840; in 1858 she married the crown prince of Prussia and later became the mother of the emperor William II. The Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) was born in 1841. Then followed Princess Alice, afterward grand duchess of Hesse, 1843; Prince Alfred, afterward duke of Edinburgh and duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, 1844; Princess Helena (Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein), 1846; Princess Louise (duchess of Argyll), 1848; Prince Arthur (duke of Connaught), 1850; Prince Leopold (duke of Albany), 1853; and Princess Beatrice (Princess Henry of Battenberg), 1857. The queen's first grandchild was born in 1859, and her first great-grandchild in 1879. There were 37 great-grandchildren alive at her death.

Victoria never lost her early passion for Albert: "Without him everything loses its interest." Despite conflicts produced by the queen's uncontrollable temper and recurrent fits of depression, which usually occurred during and after pregnancy, the couple had a happy marriage. Victoria, however, was never reconciled to the childbearing that accompanied her marital bliss — the "shadow-side of marriage," as she called it. Victoria explained to her eldest daughter in 1858:

What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.

At the beginning of their marriage the queen was insistent that her husband should have no share in the government of the country. Within six months, on Melbourne's repeated suggestion, the prince was allowed to start seeing the dispatches, then to be present when the queen saw her ministers. The concession became a routine, and during her first pregnancy the prince received a "key to the secret boxes." As one unwanted pregnancy followed another and as Victoria became increasingly dependent on her husband, Albert assumed an ever-larger political role. By 1845 Charles Greville, the observer of royal affairs, could write, "it is obvious that while she has the title, he is really discharging the functions of the Sovereign. He is the King to all intents and purposes." Victoria, once so enthusiastic about her role, came to conclude that "we women are not made for governing."

Relations with Peel.

The prince came into his own to negotiate with Peel a compromise on the bedchamber question after the Melbourne government had been defeated in the general election of 1841. The queen's first interview with Peel went well, eased by Melbourne's advice to his successor:

The Queen is not conceited — she is aware there are many things she cannot understand and she likes to have them explained to her elementarily — not at length and in detail but shortly and clearly.

If, as Lady Lyon once noted, "there was 'a vein of iron' which ran through the Queen's extraordinary character," the iron could bend; Victoria was able to revise her opinions and reevaluate her judgments. Peel's very real distress when in the summer of 1842 an attempt was made to assassinate the queen — together with the affinity between the prince and the new prime minister — soon converted the "cold odd man" of the queen's earlier comment into "a great statesman, a man who thinks but little of party and never of himself." Lord Aberdeen, the foreign secretary, also became a great favourite. "We felt so safe with them both," she told King Leopold.

The departure of the possessive Lehzen for Germany in 1842 signaled Albert's victory in the battle between the two for Victoria's loyalty and for power in the royal household. He became effectively the queen's private secretary — according to himself, "her permanent minister." As a result of Albert's diligence and refusal to accept the obstacles that ministers threw in his path, the management of the queen's properties was rationalized and her income thus increased.

A visible sign of the prince's power and influence was the building of the royal residences of Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, and Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Albert, who taught the once party-loving Victoria to despise London, played a central role in the acquisition of both properties as well as in designing the homes he and Victoria erected on them between 1845 and 1855.

Victoria described Osborne as "our island home" and retreated there frequently; it was, however, at Balmoral that she was happiest. The royal pair and their family were able to live there "with the greatest simplicity and ease," wrote Greville. The queen soon came to hold the Highlanders in more esteem than she held any other of her subjects. She liked the simpler life of the Highlands, as her published journal was to reveal: she came to make the most of the thin stream of Scottish blood in her veins; also, so long as the sermons were short enough, she came to prefer the Scottish form of religious service. "You know," she was to tell her prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, "I am not much of an Episcopalian"; and she developed a comfort in the consolations of the Reverend Norman Macleod and also a delight in the plain speech of John Brown, the Highland servant who stalked with Albert and became her personal attendant.

The royal couple's withdrawal to Scotland and the Isle of Wight bore witness to a new sort of British monarchy. In their quest for privacy and intimacy Albert and Victoria adopted a way of life that mirrored that of their middle-class subjects, admittedly on a grander scale. Although Albert was interested in intellectual and scientific matters, Victoria's tastes were closer to those of most of her people. She enjoyed the novels of Charles Dickens and patronized the circus and waxwork exhibitions. Both Victoria and Albert, however, differed from many in the middle class in their shared preference for nudes in painting and sculpture. Victoria was not the prude that many claimed her to be. She was also no Sabbatarian: "I am not at all an admirer or approver of our very dull Sunday."

Victoria's delight in mingling with the Scottish poor at Balmoral did little to raise the level of her social awareness. Although in 1846 she and Albert supported the repeal of the Corn Laws (protectionist legislation that kept the price of British grain artificially high) in order to relieve distress in famine-devastated Ireland, they remained much more interested in and involved with the building of Osborne and foreign policy than in the tragedy of Ireland. Victoria, moreover, gave her full support to the government's policy of repression of the Chartists (advocates of far-reaching political and social reform) and believed the workers in her realm to be contented and loyal. In 1848, rejoicing in the failure of the last great Chartist demonstration in London, the queen wrote:

The loyalty of the people at large has been very striking and their indignation at their peace being interfered with by such worthless and wanton men — immense.

The consequences of continental revolutions led her to conclude:

Revolutions are always bad for the country, and the cause of untold misery to the people. Obedience to the laws and to the Sovereign, is obedience to a higher Power, divinely instituted for the good of the people, not the Sovereign, who has equally duties and obligations.

Yet, revolution or no revolution, many of her people lived in "untold misery," a fact Victoria rarely confronted.

For both the queen and the prince consort the highlight of their reign came in 1851, with the opening of the Great Exhibition. Albert poured himself into the task of organizing the international trade show that became a symbol of the Victorian Age. Housed in the architectural marvel of the Crystal Palace, a splendid, greenhouse-inspired glass building erected in Hyde Park, the Great Exhibition displayed Britain's wealth and technological achievements to a wondering world. To Victoria the success of the Great Exhibition provided further evidence of her husband's genius: "I do feel proud at the thought of what my beloved Albert's great mind has conceived." Profits from the Great Exhibition funded what became the South Kensington complex of colleges and museums.

Albert has been credited with teaching Victoria the importance of remaining above party. Certainly he saw the danger in the Whig partisanship she openly displayed before their marriage; more clearly than Victoria he realized the fine sense of balance required of a constitutional monarch. Albert's own actions, however, such as his much-criticized appearance in the gallery of the House of Commons during Peel's speech on the first day of the Corn Laws debates (and thus his open and partisan show of support for Peel), revealed his political sympathies. Gladstone noted in 1846 that

the Prince is very strongly Conservative in his politics and his influence with the Q. is over-ruling; through him she has become so attached to Conservative ideas that she could hardly endure the idea of the opposite Party as her ministers.

Like the queen, Albert believed that the sovereign had an important and active role to play in British politics. The fluid political situation operating during the prince's lifetime made such an active role seem possible. After the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846) there was a period, not ending until the election of 1868, when politics tended to consist of a series of temporary alliances between splinter groups and no single group could guarantee its extended control over the House of Commons: the golden age of the private member, a condition rendering active political intervention by the crown not only possible but sometimes even necessary. There was a role for the cabinet maker, especially in helping to compose coalitions. Its significance must not, however, be overemphasized; although Victoria probably would not have admitted it, the queen's role, albeit "substantial," was always "secondary."

Foreign affairs.

The tradition also persisted that the sovereign had a special part to play in foreign affairs and could conduct them alone with a secretary of state. Victoria and Albert had relatives throughout Europe and were to have more. Moreover, they visited and were visited by other monarchs. Albert was determined that this personal intelligence should not be disregarded and that the queen should never become (as his own mentor the Baron Stockmar had indicated) "a mandarin figure which has to nod its head in assent or shake it in denial as its Minister pleases." The result was a clash with Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, who could look back on a career of high office beginning before the royal couple was born. The prince distrusted Palmerston's character, disapproved of his methods, thought his policy shallow, and disagreed with his concept of the constitution.

Even after Victoria insisted to Palmerston in 1850, "having once given her sanction to a measure, that it be not arbitrarily altered or modified by the minister," the foreign secretary continued to follow policies disapproved of by both Albert and Victoria, such as his encouragement of nationalist movements that threatened to dismember the Austrian Empire. Finally, after Palmerston expressed his approval of the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon (later Napoleon III) in 1851 without consulting the queen, the prime minister, Lord John Russell, dismissed him. Within a few months the immensely popular Palmerston was back in office, however, as home secretary. He would serve twice as prime minister. After Albert's death Victoria's disapproval of Palmerston diminished; his conservative domestic policy and his insistence that Britain receive its due in world affairs accorded with her own later views.

On the eve of the Crimean War (1854-56) the royal pair encountered a wave of unpopularity, and Albert was suspected, without any foundation, of trying to influence the government in favour of the Russian cause. There was, however, a marked revival of royalist sentiment as the war wore on. The queen personally superintended the committees of ladies who organized relief for the wounded and eagerly seconded the efforts of Florence Nightingale: she visited crippled soldiers in the hospitals and instituted the Victoria Cross for gallantry.

With the death of Prince Albert on Dec. 14, 1861, the Albertine monarchy came to an end. Albert's influence on the queen was lasting. He had changed her personal habits and her political sympathies. From him she had received training in orderly ways of business, in hard work, in the expectation of royal intervention in ministry making at home, and in the establishment of a private (because royal) intelligence service abroad. The English monarchy had changed. As the historian G.M. Young said, "In place of a definite but brittle prerogative it had acquired an undefinable but potent influence."