Sons, Servants and Statesmen (10 page)

The Queen dreaded having to ask Peel to assume office. Charles Greville thought that she hated him ‘from old recollections, and she never can forgive him, because she is conscious that she behaved ill to him’.
²⁵
He lacked Melbourne’s easygoing manner; diffident and gauche by nature, he was overawed at first by his sovereign, who in her turn found his apprehensive manner hard to deal with. However, his serious-minded nature was similar to that of Prince Albert. Both men were methodical, analytical characters who took their work very conscientiously. It was noticed by others that Peel was initially shy and awkward in her presence, and irritated her with a nervous twitch, in particular an inability to keep his legs still while speaking to her.

It was partly a sign of her deepening maturity, partly thanks to Albert’s tactful handling of matters, that Queen Victoria quickly formed a better working relationship with Peel than with Melbourne. During Peel’s premiership she became less malleable, more inquiring, more ready to accept ministerial decisions, much as she might initially disagree with them, once Peel and Albert had informed her of them and given her a chance to consider both sides of the issue. Shortly before Peel’s appointment as prime minister, aware that the bedchamber crisis had left a lingering sense of awkwardness, Albert had made an effort to gain his trust and confidence.

Within a few months of his taking office, Queen Victoria’s relations with Peel were excellent. One of her initial reservations about him had been that she found his manner pompous, a trait which could be ascribed to lack of ease. She soon readily admitted that he had a good voice, and she found his first speech from the throne most ‘judicious’. By 1844 she could write to King Leopold that ‘
we cannot
have a better and a
safer
Minister’.
²⁶

One of Peel’s first actions in office was to appoint Albert Chairman of the Royal Commission on Fine Arts, with particular responsibility for examining a scheme for the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament, much of which had been destroyed by fire in 1834. That her new Prime Minister appreciated her husband so well and was ready to involve him in such important matters pleased and flattered the Queen, and it was not long before she began to revise her impressions of him more favourably. She called Peel Albert’s ‘second father’. Both men were in a sense liberal conservatives, who believed that the rising power of the middle classes demanded that the old order should make sensible, well-considered reforms, based not on intellectual text-book theory, but on the pragmatic needs of the British people and contemporary society.
²⁷

Thanks to another recommendation from Peel, from 1842 onwards Albert was invited to attend the ministers’ audiences with the Queen. From that it was but a swift progression to his reading despatches to her, instead of the other way round. Whenever she expressed an opinion to her ministers, it would soon be a case of ‘we’ instead of ‘I’.

It was to Peel that the Queen now readily turned for sympathy every time she considered what she regarded as her husband’s humiliating constitutional position as the untitled, officially unrecognised husband of the Queen. Sometimes, particularly when he was given unduly lowly precedence on royal visits abroad, she wondered if ‘it would have been fairer to him for me not to have married him’.
²⁸
Something, the Prime Minister agreed, would need to be done. ‘Oh! if only I could make him King,’
²⁹
Victoria confided in her journal.

After his resignation, Melbourne’s remaining seven years were marked by poor health. In 1842 he had a stroke and recovered slowly, spending more time at his country house, Brocket, than in London. He and his sovereign still met occasionally. At an evening at Chatsworth he was very excited at the thought of seeing her again, but she was distressed at the sad change in the appearance of the elderly man whom she had remembered as being so full of vitality. To his disappointment, she only chatted to him for a moment before dinner, and during the meal she soon turned her attention to the person who was sitting on her other side.

Sadly, he had to realise that her old friendship with him was little if anything more than ‘the warm remembrance of a period that had been emotionally and politically dismissed’.
³⁰
The widower who had lost not only his wife but also his child had served a Queen who had been his surrogate daughter and given him three years of great happiness, but left him lonely, even grieving, ‘without further emotional resource’
³¹
once she married.

In the spring of 1848 he had a more severe stroke, and after lingering for some months he died on 24 November 1848, aged sixty-nine. The Queen was upset by the loss of one whose faults she had seen, but whom she still regarded as a true friend. ‘One cannot forget how good and kind and amiable he was,’ she wrote to King Leopold when told that Melbourne was seriously ill and not expected to recover, ‘and it brings back so many recollections to my mind, though, God knows! I never wish that time back again.’
³²
Some forty years after his death, she would remember her first Prime Minister kindly but not uncritically. ‘The Queen does retain a most affectionate remembrance of Lord Melbourne,’ she wrote to her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, ‘though he was weak as a Minister.’
³³

After four years, Peel’s position as prime minister was precarious. The Tories had become divided on the issue of the repeal of the Corn Laws. A protective duty had been introduced on imported corn in 1804, and some twenty years later a succeeding administration tried to relieve the distress caused by the high price of bread by introducing a sliding scale of duties according to price. A major trade depression in 1839, followed by poor harvests and potato famine in Ireland, worsened conditions and led to Peel’s intention to repeal the Corn Laws altogether, despite the opposition within his party of a group of protectionists, one of whom was Disraeli. Thanks to support from the opposition, the measure was carried through in June 1846, but later that month the government was defeated in the Commons.

Much to the Queen’s consternation, Peel and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, resigned, to be succeeded by a Whig administration led by Lord John Russell, with Palmerston resuming his old office as Foreign Secretary. The Queen regarded the departure of her outgoing ministers as ‘irreparable losses’ to them and to the nation. ‘Never, during the five years that they were with me, did they ever recommend a person or a thing which was not for my or the Country’s best.’
³⁴

Russell, who served as prime minister until 1852 (and again briefly from October 1865 to June 1866), was never destined to be a favourite of the Queen’s. He ‘had the true Whig’s approach to the monarchy as a convenience rather than an institution for reverence’.
³⁵
She found him dogmatic and opinionated, and once said he would be better company ‘if he had a third subject; for he was interested in nothing except the Constitution of 1688 and himself’.
³⁶

Four years later, on 29 June 1850, Peel was thrown from his horse while out riding, broke his collar bone, and died three days later. The Queen was greatly upset: ‘it does seem mysterious that in these troubled times when
he
could less be spared than any other human being, [he] should be taken from us.’
³⁷
She and Albert had long since come to admire and respect the cotton-spinner’s son whose lack of aristocratic lineage had proved no barrier to the assumption of high office, and whose readiness to put country and the common good before party had made it seem as if he was ‘belonging to no party’. Later the following year, his son entered the Liberal government, and Victoria mused that it had been his father’s misfortune ‘to have been
kept down
to
old
Tory principles, for which his mind was far too enlightened’.
³⁸

With the Duke of Wellington, whose political career had long since come to an end, her early differences were soon forgotten. In the spring of 1850 he told her that, at eighty-one, he felt he should resign as Commander-in-Chief. He particularly wanted Prince Albert to succeed him. ‘With the daily growth of the democratic power the executive got weaker and weaker,’ he declared, ‘and that it was of the utmost importance to the Throne and the Constitution that the command of the Army should remain in the hands of the Sovereign, and not fall into the hands of the House of Commons.’
³⁹
Flattered as the Prince was, he declined on the grounds that it would encroach on the time he could spend with his wife and family. Wellington did the next best thing, by telling them he would send Prince Albert all the Commander-in-Chief’s papers intended eventually for the Queen: ‘let it be
done
first,’ he suggested, ‘&
then
let the Queen
order
it.’
⁴⁰
When the Queen’s third son was born on 1 May 1850, she named him Arthur in the Duke’s honour and invited him to be the boy’s godfather.

There was still one last service Wellington could perform for the Crown. When Prince Albert was planning the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace the following year, nobody else had any idea how to solve the problem of the sparrows which were making such a nuisance of themselves in the building. Only the victor of Waterloo had the answer. ‘Try sparrow-hawks, Ma’am,’ he suggested.

On 14 September 1852 the Duke died. Although he was aged eighty-three and had been in failing health for some time, life without such a towering figure was well-nigh impossible to imagine. ‘One cannot think of this country without “the Duke,” – our immortal hero!’ she wrote in her journal. ‘In him centered [
sic
] almost every earthly honour a subject could possess. His position was the highest a subject ever had, – above party, – looked up to by all, – revered by the whole nation, – the friend of the Sovereign; – and
how
simply he carried these honours!’
⁴¹

She spared no expressions of praise as she wrote sorrowfully to King Leopold that Wellington was ‘the pride and the bon génie, as it were, of this country! He was the greatest man this country ever produced, and the most
devoted
and
loyal
subject, and the staunchest supporter the Crown ever had. . . . We shall soon stand sadly alone; Aberdeen is almost the only personal friend of that kind we have left. Melbourne, Peel, Liverpool – and now the Duke –
all
gone!’
⁴²
Her third son, Arthur, aged two, mourned the ‘Duke of Wellikon’, telling everyone that the great man was ‘little Arta’s godpapa’. The Duke would have rejoiced in the fact that, alone of Queen Victoria’s sons, the lad who was resolved from infancy to be a soldier would honour his promise as an adult.

Thanks to the wishes of Prince Albert, on 18 November 1852 the Duke was given a magnificent, heraldic state funeral, with a centrepiece of a gigantic bronze funeral car, 21ft long, and an enormous coffin. The Queen watched the procession pass down the Mall, her eyes so full of tears that she could hardly make out the car. Even more moving was the sight of the Duke’s charger, his master’s boots reversed in the stirrups.