Sons, Servants and Statesmen (7 page)

The feelings of insecurity which the Queen had known since childhood reappeared in widowhood. Now she had no husband to smooth her path or lighten her load, she held fast to old familiar ways. Sometimes family and friends thought she was living in the past. When Victoria was in her mid-seventies, a young lady-inwaiting, Marie Mallet, was struck by the ‘curious charm to our beloved Sovereign in doing the same thing on the same day year after year’.
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The ghost of the Prince Consort still held sway over a court which seemed to have been permanently set in stone since December 1861, over thirty years earlier. His widow resisted any efforts or suggestions to alter her time-honoured rituals or routines, and she remained fiercely resistant to change. There was no little comfort to be found in holding on to the past. Sometimes she would admit to feeling like a lost child.

The remarks of Benjamin Disraeli, who in time would become outwardly the most loyal of Queen Victoria’s prime ministers, have been interpreted (or perhaps misinterpreted) as saying that the Prince Consort’s untimely death was providential for the Crown. Shortly afterwards he remarked in conversation with Count Vitzthum, the Saxon ambassador, that the Prince had governed England for twenty-one years ‘with a wisdom and energy such as none of our Kings have ever shown’, and that had he lived longer, ‘he would have given us, while retaining our constitutional guarantees, the blessings of absolute government’.
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William A. Kuhn, biographer of Sir Henry and Lady Ponsonby, has construed this as saying that had Albert lived longer he would have become a dictator,
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while David Duff would assert that, had his physical strength matched his determination, either parliament would have had to concede ground to ‘King Albert’ or the people would have called for the abolition of the monarchy
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– something which, in view of the republican agitation of 1870–1, might not have been inconceivable. On the other hand, Elizabeth Longford asserted that Disraeli’s gibe was a hollow one, and that there was nothing of substance in it.
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Queen Victoria remained in formal mourning for the rest of her life, thirty-nine years. Every letter she wrote was on paper with thick black borders. She always used the Prince Consort’s copy of the Book of Common Prayer which the Duchess of Kent had given him as a wedding gift. At her insistence, all his rooms remained as they had been at the time of his death, with photographs taken to make sure that no alterations could be made – or, if any were in-advertently made, that they could be rearranged as they had been while ‘he’ lived. Visitors, particularly those outside the family, would be startled many years later to see steaming water carried into Albert’s dressing-room in the morning as if he was about to shave. Such details, such efforts to preserve the routines of his lifetime, were both a means of perpetuating mourning for the dear departed and a source of comfort.

No sovereign’s consort ever made a deeper impact on his spouse’s country, or their life and times, than Albert, Prince Consort. One need go no further than the verdict of Roger Fulford, admittedly a sympathetic rather than objective biographer but one whose assessment cannot be faulted, that his claim to greatness rested on his services to monarchy, and while he did not create the Coburg conception of monarchy – King Leopold of the Belgians, under Stockmar’s guidance, deserved the credit for that – he ‘seized the torch from them and sped it on its way with amazing verve and strength’ – and ‘can certainly claim to be the creator of the modern English monarchical tradition’.
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Only one of Queen Victoria’s father-figures from the family now remained. King Leopold was ageing fast, though from his capital he was still ready to offer the occasional word of solace, encouragement and even warning to his bereaved niece. Within a few weeks of Albert’s death, he was writing to warn her that it was time for grief to give way to duty, and that it was ‘undoubtedly your interest for the sake of having no difficulties as well as that of the country that Pilgerstein [Palmerston] and his people should not be upset’.
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When she persisted in wallowing in her grief and withdrawing into herself, nobody counselled her more strongly against her seclusion than King Leopold. He knew that such a situation would only do her and the monarchy harm, and he found it necessary to remind her gently that the English were ‘very personal’: ‘to continue to love people they must see them’. When the Prince of Wales married Princess Alexandra of Denmark in March 1863, they immediately adopted a high profile in the public eye and instantly gave the monarchy a presence in society life such as it had not seen for many years. Bertie and Alix, Leopold told her, were ‘
constantly before the public
’
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and keeping a high profile for the monarchy which she would do well to emulate.

By this time, King Leopold was in poor health, though he paid one final visit to Queen Victoria in March and April 1865. Soon after returning home, he fell seriously ill with bronchitis, and he was never really well again. He died in his palace at Laeken on 10 December 1865, within less than a week of what would have been his seventy-fifth birthday. ‘Dearly beloved Uncle Leopold is no more,’ wrote the Queen in her journal, ‘that dear loving Uncle, who has ever been to me as a Father, has gone to that everlasting Home, where all is peace and rest.’
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He had left a wish to be buried, not in Belgium beside his second wife, Queen Louise, but instead in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, next to his first wife, the hapless Princess Charlotte. This desire was refused by the Belgian authorities, and he was laid to rest in the family vault at Laeken. Nevertheless, the preacher at Windsor paid tribute to him in the first Sunday service after his death, speaking to the congregation of ‘the Nestor of [Europe’s] sovereigns, not in age and experience only, but in wise and kindly counsel, in just and farsighted prudence’.
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It was left to the Queen’s second daughter, Alice, recently married to Prince Louis of Hesse and the Rhine, to tell her that now she was head of all the family.
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Q
ueen Victoria’s first official act of her reign was an appearance at her first Council, held at 11.30 a.m. on 20 June 1837 at Kensington Palace. Despite the short notice, there was a record attendance of privy councillors, eager to see their new sovereign who had ascended the throne only a few hours previously. The impression she made on everybody present remained with them for a long time, and some years later the 4th Earl of Rosebery described her appearance to his young grandson, the future Liberal prime minister. Her behaviour, he said, ‘was perfectly composed & dignified’ as she read out a written speech, appointed the Marquess of Lansdowne as president of her council and listened to Lansdowne reading out the places where she should be proclaimed. Several councillors, Rosebery observed, ‘were affected to tears’, none more so than the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.
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During the Queen’s sixty-three years on the throne, ten different prime ministers held office. It was her supreme fortune that on her accession the first of them was ready and willing to be the perfect mentor, guiding her in the art of statecraft. William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, had been a member of parliament since 1806, serving in Whig governments as Chief Secretary for Ireland and later as Home Secretary. In 1834 he was appointed prime minister by King William IV, though he only held office for a few months before being dismissed. As there was still a large Whig majority in the Commons, his Tory successor, Sir Robert Peel, found it impossible to govern effectively, and on his resignation in April 1835 Melbourne resumed office.

At the time of the Queen’s accession he was fifty-eight years old. According to Elizabeth Longford, the three-year partnership between the inexperienced young sovereign and her political mentor was ‘one of the romances of history’. King Leopold, she argued, was her second father and Melbourne her third, but as her association with the latter began after her childhood was over, it was more intense than anything which preceded it.
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She was captivated by his worldly-wise store of knowledge and his irreverent wit. How could it have been otherwise of a statesman who could quote to her with a knowing smile that the Four Commandments repeated by a prominent politician’s wife to her children were to fear God, honour the King, obey your parents and brush your teeth?

Within less than a month of her accession, she was writing to King Leopold of her delight and confidence in Melbourne. Here was somebody in England from the older generation whom she could trust: ‘I have, alas! seen so much of bad hearts and dishonest and
double
minds, that I know how to value and appreciate
real worth
.’
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Less than two years later, she was still just as partisan. ‘God knows,
no
Minister, no friend ever possessed the confidence of the Crown so entirely as this truly excellent Lord Melbourne possesses mine.’
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Not only was he a valued political mentor, but his irreverent, cynical comments could always make her laugh. English physicians, he told her, ‘kill you, the French let you die’. When the Duke of Richmond remarked that people often came out of prison worse than when they began their sentence, Melbourne added that the same applied to many other places: ‘one often comes out worse of a ballroom than one went in.’
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If the Queen found the father-figure in him which she needed at such a vulnerable stage in her life, he was thrilled to have the regular company of a young woman who was in effect something of a daughter to him. His own family life had been unhappy. A tempestuous marriage had ended in separation, followed soon afterwards by the death of his wife from dropsy, and their only child, a son, was mentally defective and died as a young man. ‘I have no doubt he is passionately fond of her as he might be of his own daughter if he had one,’ the Hon. George Villiers told the diarist Charles Greville after a visit to Windsor, ‘and the more because he is a man with a capacity for loving without having anything in the world to love. It is become his province to educate, instruct and form the most interesting mind and character in the world.’
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In many ways, Melbourne’s influence on Queen Victoria was all to the good. He imparted to her much wisdom on the duties of a constitutional monarch and had the gift of making affairs of state seem less of a drudge and more interesting than they really were. Her only other prime minister who would ever manage to do this was Benjamin Disraeli – thus explaining why she responded so well to both men as a sovereign. No less important was the self-confidence Melbourne gave her through a judicious degree of praise and affection, and through a sense of sophistication in his table-talk. Several factors had combined to make her basically unsure of herself. She felt she was not properly educated and still had so much to learn, hence clever or learned people tended to make her feel inferior. She was also very small, barely standing five feet in height, and shared the lack of assurance often associated with women who were short in stature.

Less to Melbourne’s credit was the impression he repeatedly gave her that the state of the country was better than it really was, and his failure to inculcate in her any pronounced sense of social conscience or genuine appreciation of the problems of the poor and starving. The lofty aristocrat in him deeply distrusted any thought of social change, and he made her think that unrest was more often than not due to a handful of agitators. His attitude to the discontented poor was equally insensitive. During the previous reign, when a particular group of agricultural workers had protested against their meagre wages in 1834, he endorsed the decision of the judge who tried them on a charge of ‘unlawful assembly’ and sentenced them to seven years’ transportation to a penal colony in New South Wales, Australia, as an example to others, and only public pressure forced the government to remit the sentences of the men who would become known to posterity as the Tolpuddle martyrs.