Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions. Matthew Dennison

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СКАЧАТЬ from her husband. Later she prevented her eldest son, Bertie, from sharing her burden, apparently untroubled by the piquant contrariness which permitted her to castigate Bertie for futility even as she denied him any alternative.

      Earliest commentators focused on Victoria’s diminutive height: she was ‘the little queen’, ‘her little majesty’. The adjective suggests infantilisation and, mistakenly, a quality akin to negligibility, neutering the threat of the first female sovereign since the dropsical Queen Anne of chequered record: the subversive re-envisioned as simply small. Physically the new Queen was little: most accounts agree on a height of four feet eleven inches. Moreover the Kensington system had deliberately stunted her experience. But her thoughts began to soar even before her accession. ‘I do not suppose myself quite equal to all,’ she had written to Leopold with fine equivocation during William IV’s last illness; ‘I trust, however, that with good-will, honesty, and courage, I shall not at all events, fail.’⁴ Leopold’s response had been to dispatch to London Baron Christian Stockmar, liberal-minded éminence grise of the Coburg dynasty, physician and Leopold’s confidential adviser, ‘the most discreet man, the most well-judging, and most cool man’; he attended Victoria at breakfast on the morning of her accession and remained on call for the next twenty years.⁵ A political polymath of chilly wisdom committed to the spread of constitutional monarchy and, in Leopold’s words, ‘a living dictionary of all matters scientific and political that happened these thirty years’,⁶ Stockmar too played his part in the evolution of ‘Victorian’ Victoria. In July, Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, indiscreet, once beautiful tell-tale daughter of George III, wrote to her brother Ernest, ‘I really pity the Queen, for she has no soul about her to tell her what she ought to do.’ That had never been the case and would not be so until 1861. Thanks to Stockmar, and to Leopold’s assiduousness as correspondent, it was not so now. Mary’s assertion that, ‘I really think that she is disposed to what is right if put in the right way’ came closer to the mark.⁷ In 1837, Victoria’s ‘littleness’ did not proscribe her good intentions; pettiness came later. Unabashed in her eminence, she vowed in the beginning to exert herself in pursuit of a greater good: ‘I shall do my utmost to fulfil my duty towards my country; I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure, that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.’⁸ It is a rebuttal of sorts of Carlyle’s poxy dismissal.

      Through the mid-1830s, as Victoria’s accession advanced from possibility to likelihood, the princess had been revealed to her future subjects in a series of stately ‘progresses’ around England and Wales organised, to the intense irritation of the King, by Conroy and the Duchess of Kent. Engravings of her portraits also circulated. In those images – by Henry Collen and George Hayter – Victoria dressed her hair not in the current style of the day, made fashionable by Queen Adelaide, but like deceased cousin Charlotte, a plaited coronet symbolically on the crown of her head. This iconographic kinship was an expression of continuity and of the younger heiress presumptive’s right to rule. With the throne hers, Victoria’s thoughts abandoned Charlotte: henceforth the cousins shared only a passion for music and their affection for Leopold. Charlotte had been ‘forward, dogmatical on all subjects, buckish about horses, and full of exclamations very like swearing’, a perfect compound of her disreputably unprissy parents.⁹ Determined to be ‘good’, Victoria would emulate her cousin only in being ‘dogmatical’.

      The new Queen described ‘the good humour and excessive loyalty’ of the large crowds who turned out to witness her lavish but comically under-rehearsed coronation on 28 June 1838 as ‘beyond everything, and I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation’.¹⁰ Queen and country were united in mutual admiration, demand for coronation newspapers so high that the Post Office was forced to organise extra carriages to transport them to the provinces.¹¹ It looked as though the prophecy of Barrett’s ‘The Young Queen’, published in The Athenaeum on 1 July 1837, had been fulfilled: ‘the grateful isles/ Shall give thee back their smiles’. Throughout that first year, smiles pursued Victoria’s progress, friendly crowds ‘thronging, bustling, gaping, and gazing at everything, at anything, or at nothing’, as Greville recorded; afterwards Victoria described 1837 as ‘the pleasantest summer I EVER passed in my life’. She was acclaimed as ‘the Queen of Hearts’: ‘loved soon as seen’.¹² Flattered, naive and willing to please, Victoria formulated resolutions with dizzying zeal: ‘It is to me the greatest pleasure to do my duty for my country and my people, and no fatigue, however great, will be burdensome to me if it is for the welfare of the nation.’¹³ She did not recognise that the country responded to her youth and her Lilliputian femininity: their reaction was not to her personally.

      Instead, in the aftermath of the Reform Act of 1832, with its symbolic extension of the franchise, the numberless watchers glimpsed in her the promise of a new start. ‘The accession of our young queen is a circumstance full of hope and promise,’ asserted the Manchester Guardian. Victoria was the sovereign created in the climate of reform; the newspaper claimed on her behalf sympathy with reformers’ aims: ‘As the first sovereign who has acceded to the throne since the time of our great political regeneration, her feelings, it seems to us, must be much identified with that important measure, and her principles inclined to the furtherance of those objects which were looked to as its natural results.’¹⁴ In the month of Victoria’s accession, an unnamed poetaster in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine offered: ‘With glowing hopes our bosoms burn,/ Our hearts with eager fondness yearn;/ Millions in thee an interest claim –’¹⁵ Victoria herself apparently told Lady Cowper, ‘that sometimes when she wakes of a morning she is quite afraid that it should be all a dream’.¹⁶ It was indeed a moment for optimism.

      Since 1760, court and government had existed in a virtual stranglehold of Toryism: from the throne George III and his two eldest sons had all supported the Tory party. Imprecisely if unconcernedly political at this stage, Victoria was by upbringing a Whig, warmly sympathetic to that aristocratic party which, opposing the Tories, upheld the supremacy of Parliament over monarchy and advanced, with unsteady conviction, an agenda for reform; the Duke of Kent had favoured intermittent liberal-mindedness, his duchess too. The general election necessitated by Victoria’s accession – the last of its sort in British history – returned a Whig government with a small majority. At its head was a man of few political convictions ideally suited to becoming Victoria’s mentor.

      William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, was above all externally insouciant. Wry and charmingly disdainful, he was urbane, patrician and ironical, dilettantish even in his philandering: a cynic along Leopold’s lines but without the latter’s affectation of rectitude. He struggled to interest himself fully in politics. Averse to dogma, responsible but without the impulse to pontificate, he was persuaded only of the rightness of aristocratic government and the folly of tinkering, a Regency figure whose weary glamour seduced a Victoria unused to men and still happy to be amused. By 1837, more than a decade had passed since the death of Melbourne’s impossible and unstable wife, Lady Caroline Lamb; the couple’s epileptic only son was also dead. The relationship that Melbourne established so swiftly with his royal mistress, a rapport so absorbing that rumours described them as considering marriage, is testament to personal chemistry, his own astuteness and the neediness of both – in Victoria’s case for guidance and a father figure, in Melbourne’s for diversion and an emotional outlet. Forty years separated them. Beneath the Queen’s veneer of youth was a steeliness born of protracted struggles with Conroy and her mother. It was balanced by a lack of confidence and a degree of immaturity which, as he later confessed to Albert, initially unsettled the older man. Melbourne became for Victoria a tragic-romantic figure whom she sketched over and over again: still handsome with his grey eyes and sonorous voice, bearing with such lightness the imprint of an emotional life that was at the same time rackety and affecting. To modern eyes they appear an unlikely couple to have inspired in editors of a northern newspaper any certainty of civic-mindedness. Their personal honeymoon period, in which ‘Lord M’ was almost constantly at Victoria’s beck and call, shaping СКАЧАТЬ