Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ becoming Prime Minister again. He recommended, as Melbourne had supposed he would, that she should send for Sir Robert Peel.

      The prospect of Peel as Prime Minister depressed her still further: he was so difficult to talk to, his shyness made her shy too, his nervous mannerisms were so distracting. Her uncle, George IV, had been driven in his presence to complain of his irritating habit of thrusting out his arms as he talked; the Queen herself said that the way he pointed his toes and shook down his cuffs reminded her of a dancing master. Charles Greville compared him to a ‘dapper shopkeeper’: ‘he eats voraciously and cuts cream jellies with his knife.’

      Although Peel seemed ‘embarrassed and put out’ when he came into the Queen’s presence that afternoon – and was ‘such a cold, odd man…oh, how different, how dreadfully different, to that frank, open, natural and most kind, warm manner of Lord Melbourne’ – the interview was not as painful to her as she had feared it might be.¹³ Melbourne had advised her to express the hope that none of her Household except those engaged in politics would be removed. ‘They’ll not touch your ladies,’ he had said, to which she had replied that they would not dare: she ‘never would allow it’. She mentioned the subject of her Household to Peel, ‘to which at present he would give no answer, but said nothing should be done without the Queen’s knowledge and approbation’.¹⁴

      The next day the Queen received a letter from Lord Melbourne in which he suggested that she ought to ‘urge this question of the household strongly as a matter due to yourself and your own wishes’. But, if Sir Robert Peel insisted upon certain changes she should not refuse them, nor break off negotiations upon the point.

      That, however, was precisely what she intended to do. During Peel’s second audience that day, he came more firmly and directly to the question uppermost in both their minds. ‘Now, Ma’am,’ he said, ‘about the Ladies.’ The Queen, bridling at the implied question, replied that she could never give up any of her ladies, that she ‘had never imagined such a thing’.

      Did she intend to retain all of them? Peel asked

      ‘All.’

      The Mistress of the Robes and the Ladies of the Bedchamber?

      ‘All.’¹⁵

      But some of these ladies were married to his Whig opponents, protested Peel, who, so the Queen noted with satisfaction, began to look ‘quite perturbed’. It did not matter whom they were married to, she riposted: she never talked politics with her ladies. He would not ask her to change her younger ladies, Peel persisted; it was only some of the more important, senior ladies whom he would like to see replaced. But these, she countered, were just the ones she could not spare; besides, queens had not been asked to make such sacrifices in the past. Comparisons with past queens did not really apply, Peel pointed out; they had been queen consorts, she was a reigning queen: that made all the difference. ‘Not here,’ the Queen declared sharply, resolutely standing her ground.¹⁶

      ‘I never saw a man so frightened,’ she reported triumphantly to Lord Melbourne. ‘He was quite perturbed…I was very calm but very decided, and I think you would have been pleased to see my composure and great firmness…the Queen of England will not submit to such trickery. Keep yourself in readiness for you may soon be wanted.’¹⁷

      Some three hours later Peel returned to the Queen. He had already reassured her when she had asked him that he surely could not expect her to give up the society of Lord Melbourne. Nothing could be further from his thoughts, he had said: he would always ‘feel perfectly secure in the honour of Lord Melbourne’. He was also perfectly agreeable to the appointment of the Queen’s friend, Lord Liverpool, as Lord Steward. But the question of the ladies was a different matter. He tentatively suggested that some changes might be desirable to show that the new Government enjoyed Her Majesty’s confidence but he again assured her that nothing would be done without her knowledge and approval. The Queen quickly rejoined that the only members of the Household with whom she could be expected to part were those gentlemen who were also in Parliament. Taking childish pride in her stiff demeanour, she remained, she said, ‘very much collected, civil and high’ throughout the interview. She found the man ‘cold, unfeeling’ and ‘disagreeable’ and took no trouble to disguise her distaste as Peel put forward the names of the men he proposed to her as Ministers. When he awkwardly took his leave and the door closed behind him she gave vent to her feelings in further floods of tears.

      Forced to conclude that he could do nothing more to persuade her to be less intransigent, Peel enlisted the support of the Duke of Wellington who found that the Queen had worked herself up into a state of ‘high passion and excitement’.

      ‘Well,’ he began, ‘I am sorry to find there is a difficulty.’

      ‘Oh, he began it not me,’ she replied. ‘It is offensive to me to suppose that I talk to any of my ladies upon public affairs.’

      ‘I know you do not…But the public does not know this.’¹⁸

      The discussion continued for some time; but the old Duke was powerless in the face of the young girl’s stubborn pertness. As Charles Greville observed, the Queen, ‘a clever but rather thoughtless and headstrong girl’, was ‘boldly and stubbornly’ using her ladies as a pretext to fulfil her ‘longing to get back her old Ministers’ and she was not prepared to abandon that pretext however unconstitutional it might be.

      Soon after Wellington had withdrawn from the battle, Peel returned to the Palace to say that unless there was some demonstration of her confidence in a Tory administration, and if she insisted on retaining all her ladies, his colleagues had concluded ‘unanimously that they could not go on’. Having tartly observed that her ‘Ladies were entirely her own affair and not the Ministers’’ and that ‘Sir Robert must be very weak if even the Ladies were required to share his political opinions’, she wrote in triumph to Melbourne, ‘This was quite wonderful!…What a blessed and unexpected escape.’¹⁹

      Most of the senior members of the Cabinet were far readier than Melbourne himself to believe the Queen had done well to stand firm against Peel’s demands. Melbourne noted with some concern that Peel had asked for some changes not a complete replacement of the entire household as was widely believed. But this did not much concern Lord John Russell, who considered it unthinkable to desert the Queen in her stand against the Tory demands, nor Lord Grey, the former Prime Minister, who believed Her Majesty had ‘the strongest claims’ to the Government’s support ‘in the line which she [had] taken’. So Lord Melbourne, not unwillingly, allowed himself to be persuaded. He read out to his colleagues a summary of two letters he had received from the Queen in which she sounded a highly triumphant note: ‘Do not fear that I was not calm and composed. They wanted to deprive me of my Ladies, and I suppose they would deprive me next of my dressers and my housemaids; they wished to treat me like a girl, but I will show them that I am Queen of England.’²⁰ That evening she gave a ball for the Tsarevich, the future Tsar Alexander II, noting in her diary afterwards that both Peel and the Duke of Wellington looked ‘very much put out…I left the ballroom at ¼ to 3, much pleased, as my mind felt happy.’²¹

      There was, however, a feeling in the country, and not only amongst Tories, that the Queen, as she herself was later to СКАЧАТЬ