Queen Victoria (11 page)

In 1834 he retired to Coburg, but later was chosen, as we have seen, to lend his valuable advice toward bringing about a union between Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, both of whom he knew and admired.

Immediately before Victoria’s accession King Leopold had sent him to England, where his counsel, judgment, and thorough knowledge of the English Constitution were placed at the service of the young Princess. He accompanied Prince Albert on a tour in Italy, and again returned to England to make arrangements for the Prince’s future household.

All that he did during this period was done quietly and behind the scenes, and though he was a foreigner by birth, he worked to bring about the marriage for the sake of the country he loved so well. He looked upon England as the home of political freedom. “Out of its bosom,” he stated, “singly and solely has sprung America’s free Constitution, in all its present power and importance, in its incalculable influence upon the social condition of the whole human race; and in my eyes the English Constitution is the foundation-, corner-, and cope-stone of the entire political civilization of the human race, present and to come.”

He soon became the Prince’s confidential adviser, and his unrivalled knowledge and strict sense of truth and duty proved of the utmost value.

He endeared himself to both the Queen and the Prince, and successive statesmen trusted him absolutely for his freedom from prejudice and for his sincerity.

In 1842 he drew up for the Queen some rules for the education of her children. “A man’s education begins the first day of his life,” was one of his maxims. He insisted that “the education of the royal infants ought to be from its earliest beginning
 
a truly moral and a truly English one
.” The persons to whom the children are entrusted should receive the full support and confidence of the parents, otherwise “education lacks its very soul and vitality.” He suggested that a lady of rank should be placed at the head of the nursery, as being better able to understand the responsibilities and duties attached to the education and upbringing of the Queen’s children.

His advice was again taken when it was necessary to settle upon what plan the young Prince of Wales should be educated.

Stockmar’s judgment of men was singularly correct and just. He formed the highest opinion of Sir Robert Peel, and on the Duke of Wellington’s death in 1852 he wrote in a letter to the Prince a masterly analysis of the great commander’s character, concluding with these words: “As the times we live in cannot fail to present your Royal Highness with great and worthy occasions to distinguish yourself, you should not shrink from turning them to account . . . as Wellington did, for the good of all, yet without detriment to yourself.”

The Prince corresponded regularly with ‘the good Stockmar,’ and always in time of doubt and trial came sage counsel from his trusted friend. In fact, the Prince took both the Queen and his friend equally into his confidence; they were the two to whom he could unbosom himself with entire freedom.

Disraeli, afterward Lord Beaconsfield, obtained the Queen’s fullest confidence and won her friendship to an extent which no Minister since Melbourne had ever been able to do. ‘Dizzy,’ the leader of the ‘Young England’ party, the writer of political novels, was a very different person from the statesman of later years. It is difficult to remember or to realize in these days that it was looked upon as something quite extraordinary for a member of a once despised and persecuted race, the Jews, to hold high office. The annual celebrations of ‘Primrose Day,’ April 19, the anniversary of his death, are sufficient proof that this great statesman’s services to the British Empire are not yet forgotten.

Lord Beaconsfield, whom she regarded with sincere affection, possessed a remarkable influence over the Queen, for the simple reason that he never forgot to treat her as a woman. He was noted throughout his life for his chivalry to the opposite sex, and his devotion to his wife was very touching.

He was a firm believer in the power of the Crown for good. “The proper leader of the people,” he declared, “is the individual who sits upon the throne.” He wished the Sovereign to be in a position to rule as well as to reign, to be at one with the nation, above the quarrels and differences of the political parties, and to be their representative.

When quite a young man, he declared that he would one day be Prime Minister, and with this end in view he entered Parliament against the wishes of his family. He was an untiring worker all his life, and a firm believer in action. “Act, act, act without ceasing, and you will no longer talk of the vanity of life,” was his creed.

His ideas on education were original, and he did everything in his power to improve the training of the young. In 1870 he supported the great measure for a scheme of national education. Some years earlier he declared that “it is an absolute necessity that we should study to make every man the most effective being that education can possibly constitute him. In the old wars there used to be a story that one Englishman could beat three members of some other nation. But I think if we want to maintain our power, we ought to make one Englishman equal really in the business of life to three other men that any other nation can furnish. I do not see otherwise how . . . we can fulfil the great destiny that I believe awaits us, and the great position we occupy.”

He did more than any other Minister to raise the Crown to the position it now occupies, and no monarch ever had a more devoted and faithful servant. His high standard of morals and his force of character especially appealed to the English people, and his loyalty to his friends and colleagues remained unshaken throughout his whole life. He impressed not only his own countrymen, but also foreigners, with his splendid gifts of imagination and foresight.

Bismarck, the man of ‘blood and iron,’ who welded the disunited states of Germany into a united and powerful empire, considered that Queen Victoria was the greatest statesman in Europe, and of the great Beaconsfield he said: “Disraeli
 
is
 
England.”

Disraeli was a master of wit and phrase, and many of his best sayings and definitions have become proverbial,
 
e.g.
 
”the hansom, the ‘gondola’ of London,” “our young Queen and our old institutions,” “critics, men who have failed,” “books, the curse of the human race.”

The central figure of his time was the statesman-warrior, the great Duke of Wellington, ‘
the
 
Duke.’ After the famous Marlborough, England had not been able to boast of such a great commander. He was the best known figure in London, and though he never courted popularity or distinction, yet he served his Queen as Prime Minister when desired. “The path of duty” was for him “the way to glory.” In 1845 the greatest wish of his life was realized when the Queen and her husband paid him a two days’ visit at his residence, Strathfieldsaye.

Alfred Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” in 1852, praises him as ‘truth-teller’ and ‘truth-lover,’ and mourns for him:

Let the long, long procession go,
And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow,
And let the mournful, martial music blow;
The last great Englishman is low.

In striking contrast to the ‘Iron Duke’ was the man whom Disraeli could never learn to like, Lord John Russell. Generally depicted in the pages of
 
Punch
 
as a pert, cocksure little fellow, ‘little Johnny,’ the leader of the Whig party was a power as a leader. He knew how to interpret the Queen’s wishes in a manner agreeable to herself, yet he did not hesitate, when he thought it advisable, to speak quite freely in criticism of her actions.

His ancestors in the Bedford family had in olden days been advisers of the Crown, and Lord John thus came of a good stock; he himself, nevertheless, was always alert to prevent any encroachment upon the growing powers and rights of the people.

He was a favourite of the Queen, and she gave him as a residence a house and grounds in Richmond Park. He was a man of the world and an agreeable talker, very well read, fond of quoting poetry, and especially pleased if he could indulge in reminiscences in his own circle of what his royal mistress had said at her last visit.

Finally, mention must be made of one who, though he held no high position of State, can with justice be regarded as both friend and adviser of the Queen - John Brown. He entered the Queen’s service at Balmoral, became later a gillie to the Prince Consort, and in 1851 the Queen’s personal outdoor attendant. He was a man of a very straightforward nature and blunt speech, and even his Royal Mistress was not safe at times from criticism. In spite of his rough manner, he possessed many admirable qualities, and on his death in 1883 the Queen caused a granite seat to be erected in the grounds of Osborne with the following inscription:

A TRUER, NOBLER, TRUSTIER HEART, MORE LOVING
AND MORE LOYAL, NEVER BEAT WITHIN
A HUMAN BREAST.

What should they know of England who only England know?

The England of Queen Elizabeth was the England of Shakespeare:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

In Tennyson’s
 
Princess
 
we find an echo of these words, where the poet, in contrasting England and France, monarchy and republic - much to the disadvantage of the latter - says:

God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,
And keeps our Britain, whole within herself,
A nation yet, the rulers and the ruled.

But at a later date, in an “Epilogue to the Queen,” at the close of the
 
Idylls of the King
, Tennyson has said farewell to his narrow insular views, and speaks of

Our ocean-empire with her boundless homes
For ever-broadening England, and her throne
In our vast Orient, and one isle, one isle,
That knows not her own greatness: if she knows
And dreads it we are fall’n.

He had come to recognize the necessity for guarding and maintaining the Empire, with all its greatness and all its burdens, as part of this country’s destiny.

It is a little difficult to realize that the British Empire, as we now know it, has been created within only the last hundred years. Beaconsfield, in his novel
 
Contarini Fleming
, describes the difference between ancient and modern colonies. “A modern colony,” he says, “is a commercial enterprise, an ancient colony was a political sentiment.” In other words, colonies were a matter of ‘cash’ to modern nations, such as the Spaniards: in the time of the ancients there was a close tie, a feeling of kinship, and the colonist was not looked upon with considerable contempt and dislike by the Mother Country.

Beaconsfield believed that there would come a time, and that not far distant, when men would change their ideas. “I believe that a great revolution is at hand in our system of colonization, and that Europe will soon recur to the principles of the ancient polity.”

This feeling of pride in the growth and expansion of our great over-seas dominions is comparatively new, and there was a time when British ministers seriously proposed separation, from what they considered to be a useless burden.

The ignorance of all that concerned the colonies in the early years of Victoria’s reign was extraordinary, and this accounted, to a great extent, for the indifference with which the English people regarded the prospect of drifting apart.

Lord Beaconsfield was a true prophet, for this indifference is now a thing of the past, and in the year 1875 an Imperial Federation League was formed, which, together with the celebrations at the Jubilees in 1887 and 1897, helped to knit this country and the Dominions together in bonds of friendship and sympathy. The rapid improvements in communication have brought the different parts of the Empire closer together; the Imperial Penny Postage and an all-British cable route to Australia have kept us in constant touch with our kinsmen in every part of the world where the Union Jack is flown.

But this did not all come about in a day. Prejudice and dislike are difficult to conquer, and it was chiefly owing to the efforts of Lord Beaconsfield that they were eventually overcome.

Imperialism too often means ‘Jingoism,’ - wild waving of flags and chanting of such melodies as:

We don’t want to fight,
    But, by Jingo, if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men,
    We’ve got the money too.

The true Imperialism is “defence, not defiance.” Beaconsfield looked back into the past and sought to “resume the thread of our ancient empire.” For him empire meant no easy burden but a solemn duty, a knitting together of all the varied races and religions in one common cause. “Peace with honour” was his and England’s watchword. He believed, in fact, like Shakespeare, in saying

Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but, being in,
Bear’t, that th’ opposèd may beware of thee.