Sons, Servants and Statesmen (13 page)

Evidently that occasion had been forgotten by February 1868. For the first time since Melbourne’s final resignation, the Queen had a Prime Minister with whom she could establish the close personal relationship so important to her, and who made her feel appreciated as a woman as well as a queen. He had been fulsome in his praise of the Prince Consort, with whom his own acquaintance had been ‘one of the most satisfactory incidents of his life’. Writing to her on acceptance of high office, he could ‘only offer devotion’, while venturing to trust that the Queen would ‘deign not to withhold from him the benefit of your Majesty’s guidance’.
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The right tone was struck at once, and the contrast with Russell, Palmerston or Gladstone, who was destined to hold office as prime minister four times, could hardly have been greater.

Disraeli’s first premiership was brief. He knew he would be unable to govern the country for long through a minority in the House of Commons, and he advised the Queen to dissolve parliament when the new electoral registers were ready. A general election in November resulted in a triumph for Gladstone, with a Liberal majority of 112 seats. The Queen showed her appreciation of Disraeli’s services by creating his wife Mary Anne Viscountess Beaconsfield.

In earlier days, the Queen and Albert had been favourably impressed by William Ewart Gladstone. Had Albert lived longer, she might have kept to this view and been less dazzled by Disraeli. In March 1862 Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer during Palmerston’s last administration, was summoned to an audience with the Queen at Windsor Castle. After a discussion on home and foreign affairs, she spoke to him of her great loss and how kind the nation had been in her time of sorrow. She intended to do her best, she assured him, ‘but she had no confidence in herself’.

Too honest for his own good, he told her that he was not sorry to hear her use such language. To the unassuming, down-to-earth Gladstone, over-confidence was not a virtue. He failed to see that she was looking for reassurance and might have done better to disagree with her, no matter how gently. After the interview was over, he recognised his mistake and acknowledged that he could have ‘gone a little further in the language of hope’. Nevertheless, the Queen found his presence comforting, as he had been ‘very kind and feeling’, and above all he had spoken with unbounded admiration of the Prince Consort, ‘saying no-one would ever replace him’.
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His wife, Catherine, tried to steer him gently in the right direction. Before he went to see his sovereign again at Windsor that autumn, Mrs Gladstone advised her husband that ‘contrary to your ways, do
pet
the Queen, and for once believe you can, you dear old thing’.
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One way in which he conspicuously failed to pet the Queen was in refusing her request, conveyed through her then private secretary, General Grey, to support a motion in the House of Commons for the purchase of a small amount of gun metal for the Prince Consort’s memorial in Kensington Gardens. In his reply to Grey, Gladstone pointed out that £50,000 had been voted in 1863 for the memorial. Not surprisingly, Victoria resented his attitude. It was left to Disraeli, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to secure the assent of the House to the proposal. Also in 1863 Gladstone again incurred the Queen’s displeasure during his period as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Minister at Attendance at Balmoral after she was involved in a carriage accident; he appeared to criticise her for risking life and limb by taking drives along darkened roads in the Highlands (see p. 116). She considered she had every right to continue to do so, and the only threats to her safety which ever resulted were due not to would-be assassins or kidnappers, but the shortcomings of ‘confused’ (in other words, drunk) coachmen. She was furious that Gladstone later told Palmerston about the accident.

Early in 1868 Gladstone succeeded Russell as leader of the opposition, and in September, after a dinner at Balmoral, the Queen found him ‘very agreeable, so quiet & intellectual, with such a knowledge of all subjects, & [he] is such a good man’.
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In November, shortly before he became Prime Minister, he was aware of rumours – as passed by Lord Clarendon to Lady Salisbury, among others – that he was ‘utterly repugnant’ to the Queen. It would be an exaggeration to say that she had conceived a strong antipathy to him at this stage, but it was common knowledge that she did not find him as easy to deal with as some of his predecessors.

Gerald Wellesley, Dean of Windsor, warned him that everything would depend on his manner of approaching her: ‘Her nervous susceptibility has much increased since you had to do with her before, and you cannot show too much regard, gentleness, I might even say tenderness towards her.’
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While she disapproved of his policy to disestablish the Irish Church and would undoubtedly tell him so, she fully realised that he was pledged to the principle before parliament and the country, and she would give him her customary loyal support in carrying on the government as long as he was able to do so. He had his first audience as prime minister with the Queen at Windsor on 3 December, a meeting which passed pleasantly enough.

But it was soon evident that Gladstone had none of Disraeli’s sympathetic and intuitive knack of managing the Queen. Instead of giving her a clear summary of situations or problems, he bored and muddled her with long, over-earnest explanations which she found wearisome and unenlightening. His tendency to lecture, complicate and insist undermined the self-confidence which she had admitted early in her widowhood was in short supply but which she was now regaining. He wrote her lengthy letters of over-meticulous, minutely detailed arguments which would undoubtedly have appealed to Prince Albert and Baron Stockmar but which irritated her beyond measure. She said he treated her like a public meeting, though it never seemed to occur to her that this might have been avoided if she had invited him to sit in her presence instead of keeping him standing throughout. While she accepted the fact of his ‘goodness’, a quality which ought to have commended him to her, she could never bring herself to like him as a person or respect him much, and with his incomprehensible behaviour she often thought him either mad or a humbug. For his part, he was too down to earth and impatient of show to be able to stoop (as he might have seen it) to flatter her.

Another reason, advanced by Gladstone’s first major biographer, John Morley, was the Queen’s dread of ‘enthusiasm’, or what she saw as single-minded obsession. Gladstone, he considered, ‘had a full measure of enthusiasm for causes’,
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such as his zeal for Home Rule. To the Queen, there was something of the fanatic about a man who was determined to pursue individual issues so doggedly. His interventionist manner might have pleased the Prince Consort, but she found the relaxed demeanour of Melbourne, Disraeli and later Salisbury a far more desirable quality.

Another early twentieth-century historian, Philip Guedalla, writing between the wars, suggested that there were three Victorias. Victoria I’s reign was one of ‘a romping sort of innocence’ and ‘a girlish Regency, appropriately based at Brighton, where she rode out with aged beaux, her ministers’. She was succeeded shortly after marriage by Victoria II, a sovereign who ‘bore the unmistakable impress of her married life’.
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Victoria III was the monarch of the 1870s onwards, when she had to some extent shaken off some of Albert’s influences (though she would have been the last person to admit to such a thing) and was emerging from his shadow, the Victoria Regina Imperatrix guided, coaxed and flattered by the courtly Disraeli while being irritated and exasperated by the self-righteous Gladstone.

One of Gladstone’s most recent biographers, Roy Jenkins, maintained that had the Queen possessed a vote, then in the first six general elections of her reign she would have cast hers for the incumbent government, be it Tory or Whig.
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The break-point was 1868, after which she became more partisan than loyal and would have voted Conservative at all subsequent elections. While she moved to the right in political convictions, the man who had begun his parliamentary career as a Tory member of the House of Commons in 1832 and was to take the office of Liberal prime minister four times was moving firmly to the left.

Compared with his later ministries, Gladstone’s first tenure of office, which lasted until 1874, was relatively serene. The Queen reluctantly accepted his Bill to disestablish the Irish Church, arguing that it would do little to solve the increasingly difficult Irish problem. However, she made her views clear by refusing to open parliament in person and thus give tacit approval to the measures, making the state of her health as an excuse. In February 1869 her physician, Sir William Jenner, told Gladstone that she declined to do so not entirely on account of health reasons but ‘from an anxiety to avoid any personal interference in the great question pending with respect to the Irish Church’. She suggested to Gladstone that he could inform the press, if he liked, that she had been suffering ‘more than normally from severe headache’.

This roused him to fury. Keen to get as close to the truth as possible, he discussed the matter with General Grey, who assured him that the Queen’s daughter Louise was ‘
very
decided as to the ability of the Queen to meet any fatigue’, and was indignant with Jenner for encouraging her ‘fancies’ about her ill-health.
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Grey agreed that nothing except a peremptory tone on Gladstone’s part would have any effect. He believed that ‘the long, unchecked habit of self-indulgence that now makes it impossible for her, without some degree of nervous agitation to give up, even for ten minutes, the gratification of a single inclination, or even
whim
’
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had made her increasingly disinclined to discharge her duties properly.

It was the problem between the Queen and her Prime Minister, his approach to what he called with a sigh ‘the Royalty Question’, or his efforts to bring the Queen out of her seclusion, which caused a gulf to open between them. He felt he had a duty to interfere in this issue, which was beginning to cause widespread and increasing discontent. ‘To speak in rude and general terms,’ he observed to Lord Granville, ‘the Queen is invisible and the Prince of Wales is not respected.’
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The raffish young man about town, whose infidelity to his beautiful young Danish wife made him look not unlike a reincarnation of some of his adulterous Hanoverian ancestors, made him popular among the smart set, but the more censorious of his mother’s subjects were dismayed by the Prince’s private life.

The Queen’s pleas of ill-health were not unfounded. During a prolonged series of problems during the summer of 1871, Gladstone was sympathetic enough to earn her gratitude, even though he thought Sir William Jenner ‘a feeble-minded doctor’ when he begged the Prime Minister not to drive the Queen too hard lest her nerves give way. But Gladstone’s constant pressure was strongly resented. In August he tried to persuade her to delay her departure for Balmoral, so she could prorogue in person the parliamentary session which had already been prolonged by a couple of debates, telling her it was her duty to do so. He should have known better. She would not be ordered about, and she angrily informed Lord Hatherley, the Lord Chancellor, that such interference was ‘really abominable’. Overwork and worry had killed her beloved husband. She, the Queen, ‘a woman no longer young, is supposed to be proof against all and to be driven and abused till her nerves and health give way with this worry and agitation and interference in her private life’. Unless the ministers supported her, she declared, she could ‘not go on, but must give her heavy burden up to younger hands’.
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Gladstone found her reaction quite incomprehensible. To Sir Henry Ponsonby, her then private secretary, he raged that it was ‘the most sickening experience’ he had had in almost forty years of public life; ‘smaller and meaner cause for the decay of thrones cannot be conceived.’
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Two months later, in October, he wrote sadly to Lord Granville of ‘the repellent power which she so well knows how to use has been put in action towards me on this occasion for the first time since the formation of the Government’.
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By now British disillusion with the royal family was rife. Republicanism, which had been gathering apace with discontent over the Queen’s seclusion and the Prince of Wales’s scandalous behaviour, was boosted by the overthrow of the Third Empire in France but received a major setback with the Prince’s recovery from an almost fatal attack of typhoid fever in December 1871. Sir Charles Dilke, who had become renowned for his speeches calling for a republic, dismissed the news of the Prince’s illness as ‘a sham panic got up for the occasion to serve a political end’. Once the Prince was reported out of danger, many politicians could scarcely contain their glee. ‘What a sell for Dilke this illness has been!’ wrote Lord Henry Lennox to Disraeli.
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Gladstone claimed that nothing would reverse the monarchy’s declining popularity sooner than by the Queen emerging from her seclusion; she had to shake herself out of the lethargy into which she had fallen since the Prince Consort’s death, make more public appearances, spend less time away from the public gaze at Osborne and Balmoral, establish a residence in Ireland and, above all, let the Prince of Wales play a more active part in public affairs. His repeated insistence in letter after letter, increasingly pedantic and hectoring in tone, that she must play a more positive role, did his case no good. In his personal audiences with her, he bluntly reminded her of the need for her to be seen fulfilling more public engagements, but in vain.

Ironically, Gladstone could be regarded as one of the saviours of the Crown during the height of Victorian England’s republican fervour. As the most radical of the Queen’s prime ministers he could, believed Lady Ponsonby, have destroyed the monarchy if he had decided to ‘show his teeth about Royalty’. Instead he risked incurring the opprobrium of his more left-leaning colleagues by defending the Queen so firmly. It was unfortunate that she would never realise how much she was indebted to him for doing so.