Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ England, where the Prince landed at Dover on 7 February after a stormy, five-hour crossing, crowds gathered to cheer him on his way through Kent in the pouring rain, escorted by the Earl of Cardigan’s 11th Light Dragoons, henceforth known as the 11th Prince Albert’s Own Hussars⁴. At Canterbury, where he and his brother stayed the night and attended a service in the Cathedral, the city was illuminated in his honour.⁵

      The enthusiasm of the populace was not, however, universally shared at Queen Victoria’s Court or in Tory aristocratic circles, though it was generally conceded that, ‘if her political partisanship were to be limited, she undoubtedly needed a husband’s guidance and support’. Yet this husband was only twenty, the same age as herself; and, so The Times observed, ‘one might without being unreasonable, express a wish that the Consort selected for a Princess so educated and hitherto so unfairly guided as Queen Victoria – should have been a person of riper years, and likely to form more sound and circumspect opinions.’⁶

      The Queen’s uncles were scornful of the match; so were many of the prosperous middle classes. Newspapers reported it with lukewarm approbation or with unconcealed disapproval. Versifiers proposed that Prince Albert had come to England to marry the Queen for money:

      He comes the bridegroom of Victoria’s choice

      The nominee of Lehzen’s Voice;

      He comes to take ‘for better or for worse’

      England’s fat Queen and England’s fatter purse.⁷

      The question of money had, in fact, already arisen as one of the first problems to blight the Queen’s happiness. Lord Melbourne had assured her that there would be no difficulty in getting Parliament to agree that the Prince should receive the same provision of £50,000 a year which Prince Leopold had received upon his marriage to Princess Charlotte, and which Prince George of Denmark had had when he married the future Queen Anne in 1683. But there was difficulty. The Radical, Joseph Hume, protested that, having regard to the financial state of the country and the distress of the poor, £21,000 would be quite sufficient. The House of Commons did not think so; but when a Tory Member proposed that £30,000 a year would be a fair compromise this amendment was accepted by a large majority.⁸

      The Queen was furious: she said she hated the Tories more than ever. She had long decided that, like insects and turtle soup, they were among the things she most disliked in all the world. The Prince, who greatly regretted that he would not now be able to do so much as he had hoped for poor scholars and artists, was also much put out. ‘I am surprised that you have said no word of sympathy to me about the vote of the 28th,’ he wrote to the Queen in a letter far sharper than any he had yet sent her, ‘for those nice Tories have cut off half my income…and it makes my position not a very pleasant one. It is hardly conceivable that anyone could behave as meanly and disgracefully as they have to you and me. It cannot do them much good for it is hardly possible to maintain any respect for them any longer. Everyone, even here [Coburg], is indignant about it.’⁹

      The Queen became even angrier with the Tories, and with their standard bearer the Duke of Wellington, when it was suggested that Prince Albert, like many of his Coburg relations, had ‘papistical leanings’. In Victoria’s Declaration of Marriage to the Privy Council, the Prince had not been specifically described as a Protestant prince and therefore able to receive Holy Communion in the form prescribed by the Church of England, since Lord Melbourne had thought it best not to mention religion at all. He did not want to upset the Irish Catholics, who supported him in the House of Commons, and he could not employ the usual formula about ‘marrying into a Protestant family’ because a large number of Coburgs were either Roman Catholics themselves, or, like King Leopold, had married into Catholic families.

      The Duke of Wellington – who, while not really caring a fig about it, according to his private secretary, had expressed the opinion that the annual income of £30,000 was quite sufficient for Prince Albert – now rose in the House of Lords to declare that the people ought to know something about the Queen’s future husband other than his name, that they should be given the satisfaction of knowing that he ‘was a Protestant – thus showing all the public that this is still a Protestant State’.¹⁰

      ‘Do what one will,’ the Queen protested to King Leopold, ‘nothing will please these most religious, most hypocritical Tories whom I dislike (I use a very soft word), most heartily.’ It was absurd of them to make this fuss, seeing that, by the law of the land, she could not ‘marry a Papist’ anyway. Sir Robert Peel was ‘a low hypocrite’, a ‘nasty wretch’; as for that ‘wicked old foolish’ Duke of Wellington, she would never speak to him or look at him again; she would certainly not ask him to her wedding. ‘It is MY marriage,’ she protested when Melbourne endeavoured to dissuade her from slighting the Duke in this way, ‘and I will only have those who can sympathize with me.’ Nor would she send a message to Apsley House when it was reported that the Duke was ill. Charles Greville called there and found ‘his people indignant that, while all the Royal Family have been sending continually to enquire after him, and all London has been at his door, the Queen alone has never taken the slightest notice of him’. Greville immediately sent Melbourne a note ‘representing the injury it was to herself not to do so’. Melbourne asked Greville to come to see him without delay and told him when he arrived that the Queen was ‘very resentful, but that people pressed her too much, did not give her time’. To this Greville replied that it ‘really was lamentable’ that she did the things she did, that she would get into a great scrape. The people of England would not endure that she should treat the Duke of Wellington with disrespect. Greville had no scruple in saying so to Melbourne since he knew that he was doing his utmost to keep her straight. ‘By God!’ Melbourne said, ‘I am moving noon and night at it.’

      He wondered, though, if it were not too late now for the Queen to send a message to Apsley House. ‘Better late than not at all,’ Greville advised him; so Melbourne sat down and wrote to the Queen. ‘I suppose she will send now?’ Greville asked. ‘Oh, yes,’ Melbourne replied. ‘She will send now.’¹¹

      Then there was trouble over the precedence to be granted the Prince. King Leopold, who regretted not having accepted the offer of an English peerage as Duke of Kendal himself, had suggested that Prince Albert should be created an English peer so that his ‘foreignership should disappear as much as possible’. But the Queen dissented. ‘The whole Cabinet agrees with me in being strongly of the opinion that Albert should not be a Peer,’ she replied to her uncle. ‘I see everything against it and nothing for it.’ She told the Prince why:

      The English are very jealous of any foreign interference in the Government of the country and have already in some of the papers…expressed a hope that you would not interfere: – now, tho’ I know you never would, still, if you were a peer they would all say the Prince meant to play a political part – I am sure you will understand.¹²

      The Prince himself had no wish to be an English peer: ‘It would be almost a step downwards, for as a Duke of Saxony, I feel myself much higher than as Duke of Kent or York.’ He was quite content to have no title other than his own. ‘As regards my peerage and the fears of my playing a political part, dear, beloved Victoria,’ he wrote, ‘I have only one anxious wish and one prayer: do not allow it to become a matter of worry to you.’¹³

      Though СКАЧАТЬ