Queen Victoria

Queen of Great Britain (r. 1837–1901)

• Born: May 24, 1819
• Birthplace: Kensington Palace, London, England
• Died: January 22, 1901
• Place of death: Osborne House, Isle of Wight, England

While striving to assert a greater role for the sovereign in British constitutional government, Queen Victoria accepted a gradually diminishing role. Her personal moral force lent such prestige to the Crown, however, that she made it possible for her successors to play a creative part in the continuity of government.

Early Life

Queen Victoria came to the British throne through a circuitous path that began on November 6, 1817, when Princess Charlotte, the only child of George, Prince of Wales, died in childbirth, and her infant son died with her. Their deaths meant that of the twelve surviving children of King George III, not one could claim legitimate offspring. Stained by debauchery, the monarchy had lost much of its prestige. Consequently, 1818 became the year in which three of King George III’s unmarried sons were called upon to marry and beget royal progeny.

Leopold of Saxe Coburg Saalfeld, the widower husband of the late Princess Charlotte, served as matchmaker, presenting his sister Victoria as a bride for Edward, duke of Kent. Victoria was thirty years old, the widow of Prince Emich Charles of Leiningen, and unquestionably fertile, having borne her late husband a son, Charles, and a daughter, Feodore. The prospective parents of an heir to the British throne were married on July 11, 1818. On May 24, 1819, their daughter was born. The child was christened Alexandrina Victoria, the first name ultimately abandoned, being a tribute to Czar Alexander I of Russia, the infant’s godfather. The duke of Kent died of pneumonia on January 23, 1820, but he had already served his country by producing the heir presumptive to the throne.

Princess Victoria grew to womanhood under the smothering watchfulness of her mother. Victoria of Leiningen shielded her daughter from too much contact with her uncles, King George IV and William IV, regarding their courts as hopelessly dissolute. Closeted at Kensington Palace, the two Princesses Victoria shared a chaste bedroom every night until the daughter became queen and could command her mother to give her some privacy. The young Victoria entered adolescence almost entirely deprived of the companionship of children her own age and surrounded by adults maneuvering to advance their own self-interest.

Under these abnormal conditions, observers may perceive the sources of three seemingly contradictory lifelong attitudes of Queen Victoria: She had a strong aversion to the physical aspect of sexuality, she overidealized male perfection, and she desperately needed a series of strong male figures whom she could dominate even as she was dominated by them. Understanding these elements is the key to grasping her complex relationship with her Uncle Leopold, who became king of the Belgians in 1831, with Baron Ernest Stockmar, with Prime Minister William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, with her husband, Prince Consort Albert, with Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, and with her Scottish servant John Brown.

In reverse, those men who did not choose to master the fine art of simultaneously dominating and being dominated ended in stormy relationships with the queen. One need only remember Prime Ministers Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, Lord John Russell, William Ewart Gladstone, and most tragically, her son and heir the future King Edward VII.

Life’s Work

At six o’clock on the morning of June 20, 1837, the eighteen-year-old Princess Victoria received word that she was queen, at the death of her uncle, William IV. She was fortunate in two ways. As she had passed her eighteenth birthday, no regency council was required. Her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, established an excellent rapport with her from the start, training her unobtrusively in the delicate matter of understanding the limits placed on royal power under the unwritten British constitution.

Understanding British constitutional limits, always difficult, was particularly challenging in 1837. Until the onset of George III’s final, nightmarish, ten-year illness in 1810, the old king had personally controlled patronage and appointments. This meant that through the disposition of thousands of lucrative posts and sinecures, Victoria’s grandfather had been able to create a political machine that ensured that he could choose his own ministers. The king had no need to dirty his hands with the purchase of parliamentary seats. That task could be left to borough mongers who owed the king their positions in society and government. Consequently, the king did not ordinarily have to fear a confrontation with his ministers, because nothing was likely to get through Parliament unless it had royal approval beforehand.

From 1810 to 1837, all that had changed. George IV and William IV, Queen Victoria’s uncles, had allowed power to slip from their hands. Ambitious politicians had taken over the all-important power of patronage, though the sovereign was consulted, and usually heeded, if he chose to assert his will. The fact is that Victoria’s two predecessors lacked the skill and the will to operate such a delicate mechanism. By the time that Victoria came to the throne, it would have taken such enormous strength to retrieve what had been squandered in the previous twenty-seven years that the politicians would not have tolerated it. A constitutional crisis would have resulted. In the low state of royal prestige following the reigns of three sick, debauched, or ineffective kings, the British might have toppled the throne itself, rather than allow an eighteen-year-old queen to assume powers last exercised by her grandfather in 1810.

Working to press Queen Victoria toward her proper constitutional role was her Uncle Leopold, king of the Belgians, and his confidential agent Baron Ernest Stockmar, a physician turned political philosopher. These two very able men began to inculcate in the young monarch their own view of the British constitution as seen through German binoculars. On February 10, 1840, a third and much more important Saxe Coburg ally entered Victoria’s life. Her marriage to Prince Albert meant that a strong view of royal powers would prevail for the next twenty-one years, until the prince consort died in 1861. The match might never have been made if Uncle Leopold had not conspired to lead his brother’s son and his sister’s daughter to the altar. Nevertheless, the political alliance proved to be a love match.

While Albert lived, he was the gray eminence behind the throne. He read and made comments on all ministerial correspondence. It was Albert who saw to it that no important diplomatic dispatches left England until the queen had read and initialed them. Albert took care to allow Victoria to conduct interviews with ministers by herself, but she was the faithful conduit for his ideas and attitudes.

Even Albert, however, could not recover for Victoria what the royal uncles had thrown away. Parliament chose its own leaders. The chief of the majority party was almost always accepted as prime minister by the queen. As late as 1880, Queen Victoria tried to install a prime minister other than William Ewart Gladstone, whom she detested. However, she was beaten, had to accept Gladstone, and never attempted to assert her will in the choice of a prime minister again.

Precisely because the queen read all major foreign office correspondence, Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston sent controversial orders to envoys on their own personal stationery, without showing them to the queen. By that technique, Palmerston was able to recognize Napoleon III’s seizure of power and to encourage the unification of Italy without gaining the royal assent. It was little wonder, then, that the queen referred to Lords Russell and Palmerston as “those terrible old men.” Nevertheless, Albert, acting as royal watchdog, certainly placed restraints on the behavior of ministers acting irresponsibly. It is probable that the prince, by his editing of one of Lord Russell’s ultimata to the United States in 1861, played a major role in preventing the Trent Affair from dragging Great Britain into the American Civil War.

The death of Prince Albert in 1861 brought the queen into the second phase of her sixty-three-year reign. At Albert’s death, Victoria fell into such a pathologically deep mourning that her behavior bordered on psychotic. Two forces kept her in contact with reality. One was the obsessive need to control the lives of her nine children and, ultimately, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The enormous volume of her correspondence with her descendants reflects an energy that is essentially healthy.

The second element drawing Victoria to reality was her continued interest in all aspects of government. A prime minister such as Benjamin Disraeli, who needed a mother figure in his life as badly as the queen needed a father figure, enjoyed what can only be described as a perfect platonic love. Disraeli was always able to persuade the queen that a given measure would have pleased Prince Albert. Disraeli could dispense flattery with a neat blend of sincere devotion and theatrical art. Granting the queen the title empress of India in 1876 and staging a durbar at Windsor Castle, at which she wore the jewelry of the Moguls and received the homage of Indian princes, did not add one iota to royal power. It did, however, enhance Victoria’s self-image to sign her letters, thenceforth, Victoria R[egina] and I[mperatrix]. The creation of an imperial monarchy encouraged the queen, to the end, to hold close to her heart every shred of the royal prerogative that had survived.

Nevertheless, the very fact that Victoria enjoyed one of the longest reigns in British history meant that an eighty-one-year-old woman, at the end of her long career, could no longer keep her hand on all the strands of government. Even the railroad, the telegraph, and ultimately the telephone did not suffice to keep the queen entirely au courant on the fine details of events at London, when she was summering at Balmoral in Scotland, at Osborne on the south coast, or enjoying a winter visit to France or Germany. After every cabinet meeting, the queen’s prime ministers dashed off reports of the minutes for the queen, but nothing replaced face-to-face discussions held at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle. The queen was too seldom in residence near London.

To almost the end, the queen remained free of serious illness. As late as January 15, 1901, she was prepared to go out for a drive at Osborne. Her final illness and confinement to bed lasted only six days. Surrounded by her family, she died peacefully on January 22.

Significance

At the end of her life, Queen Victoria was the grandmother of an emperor of Germany, an empress of Russia, a queen of Spain, and of a vast concourse of lesser royal personages. In her person, she was the only link binding independent dominions such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to the United Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1837, she had inherited the throne of an oligarchic aristocracy dominated by a few hundred families. When she died in 1901, she found herself the beloved mother of a great industrial democracy in which any man of talent might rise in society and government. The early death of Prince Albert had been a great blow to the revival of royal power, but it may have been the greatest contribution possible to the survival of monarchy in Great Britain.

The historian Walter Bagehot defined the sovereign’s rights as “to be consulted, to encourage and to warn.” It is probable that Victoria never heard that definition. It is certain that she would not have accepted it as accurate. Nevertheless, the British monarchy has survived precisely because it is exactly what Bagehot said that it should be. Depending upon the intelligence and personality of individuals, British monarchs may still play a role in shaping policy, as King Edward VII certainly affected foreign affairs. Fundamentally, however, it was Victoria at the end of her career who captured the essence of a modern sovereign’s role. She had become neutral in politics, elevated above national debates. She alone knew all the state secrets and could serve as a link, uniting all the administrations of her reign, a symbol of the eternity of the state itself.

Bibliography

Arnstein, Walter L. Queen Victoria. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Concise, balanced chronicle of Victoria’s public and personal life.

Benson, Edward Frederic. Queen Victoria. New York: Longmans, Green, 1935. An excellent early study of the reign by one of the first scholars to have access to a full range of primary sources.

Bolitho, Hector. The Reign of Queen Victoria. New York: Macmillan, 1948. This treatment of the queen is more intimate than most, due to the author’s experience as a biographer of several generations of the British royal family.

Cecil, Algernon. Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1953. A solid survey of the long series of ministers who shaped the course of the reign, 1837-1901.

De-la-Noy, Michael. Queen Victoria at Home. London: Constable, 2003. Focuses on Victoria’s personal life, including her relationships with her husband, children, and other relatives; her household; and her various residences.

Eyck, Frank. The Prince Consort: A Political Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. A particularly valuable book because it downplays the role of the prince as a husband and emphasizes his role as a royalist political leader interested in restoring the queen’s prerogative rights.

Hibbert, Christopher. Queen Victoria: A Personal History. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Entertaining biography, focusing on Victoria’s character and relationships with her husband, her children, and the politicians who ran her government. Describes how Great Britain evolved into a constitutional monarchy during her long reign.

Longford, Elizabeth. Queen Victoria: Born to Succeed. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. An exceptionally well-written, scholarly, and detailed account of the reign.

Marriott, Sir John Arthur Ransome. Queen Victoria and Her Ministers. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1934. This relatively short book cannot do full justice to all the prime ministers who served Victoria from 1837 to 1901. It is valuable, however, in two contexts. It emphasizes such noteworthy relationships as those of the queen with the great political rivals, Disraeli and Gladstone; it also offers particularly valuable insights drawn from analyses of the changing role of the monarchy.

Monypenny, William Flavelle, and George Earle Buckle, eds. The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. 6 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1913-1920. This six-volume work is rich in selections from the correspondence of Disraeli, containing candid references to the queen. As Disraeli enjoyed a more confidential relationship with Victoria than did any of her other ministers, his comments are revealing.

Victoria, Queen of Great Britain. The Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence Between the Years 1837 and 1901. Edited by Arthur C. Benson et al. 3 series in 9 vols. New York: Longmans, Green, 1907-1930. This is the largest published collection of the queen’s correspondence, but there are numerous other collections of letters, particularly to and from her family. See Roger Fulford’s Dearest Child (1964) and Sir Frederick Ponsonby’s Letters of the Empress Frederick (1928).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Regina v. Palmerston: The Correspondence Between Queen Victoria and Her Foreign and Prime Minister, 1837-1865. Edited by Brian Connell. London: Evans Brothers, 1962. Traces the gradually deteriorating relationship between the queen and one of her least liked ministers.