Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ peers in the country, including the royal dukes. If she had her way he would be King Consort.

      Once again the Duke of Wellington, now recovered from his illness, opposed her: the precedence of the Royal Family, he pointed out, was fixed by Act of Parliament. It was well known that he held no brief for the royal dukes; but it would be unfair to ask them to support a change in the law to interfere with their rights. When Charles Greville asked the Duke what he thought should be done about the Prince’s precedence, he answered emphatically, ‘Oh, give him the same which Prince George of Denmark had: place him next before the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ ‘That will by no means satisfy her,’ Greville objected. At this the Duke ‘tossed his head and with an expression of extreme contempt said, “Satisfy her! What does that signify?”’¹⁴

      Upon hearing Tory objections to her granting the Prince the precedence she had in mind for him, the Queen was quite as cross as Melbourne had feared she would be. She ‘raged away’, perfectly ‘frantic’, in her own words, railing at her uncles and the vile, confounded, ‘infernal Tories’ responsible for this ‘outrageous insult’. They were ‘wretches’, ‘scoundrels’ ‘capable of every villainy [and] personal spite’. ‘Poor dear Albert, how cruelly they are ill-using that dearest Angel! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!’¹⁵

      In her anger she turned upon Melbourne himself. She was forced to concede that the state of feeling in the country, the unemployment and the unrest – the plight of the poor which he usually did not care to think or talk about – made the reduction of Albert’s allowance at least tolerable. But there could be no excuse for this cruel slight over the matter of precedence. Lord Melbourne really ought to have foreseen the trouble that there might be. He should not have led her ‘to expect no difficulties’.

      Melbourne unwisely commented that there would not have been such difficulties were Prince Albert not a foreigner: foreigners always caused trouble, particularly from Coburg. They had been through all this before, the Queen crossly rejoined. She could never have married one of her own subjects, and she was not marrying Albert because he was a Coburg but because she loved him and he was worthy of her love. Later Melbourne tactlessly stumbled into trouble again when the Queen remarked that one of the things she most loved about Albert was his indifference to the charms of all women other than herself. ‘No,’ said Melbourne carelessly, ‘that sort of thing is apt to come later.’ It was ‘an odd remark to make to any woman on the eve of marriage, let alone the Queen’, Lord Clarendon observed when Melbourne told him of this gaffe, chuckling ‘over it amazingly’. Certainly the Queen took it very ill. ‘I shan’t,’ she said, ‘forgive you for that.’

      She did, of course, and she came close to forgiving the Duke of Wellington when, having read a pamphlet prepared by Charles Greville, he changed his mind about Prince Albert’s precedence. The Queen, he now declared, much to the annoyance of the Duke of Cambridge, had ‘a perfect right to give her husband whatever precedence she pleased’. So, the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General concurring, Letters Patent granting the Prince the precedence she had wanted to give him were issued by the Queen. From then on the Queen’s attitude to the Duke of Wellington softened. He had, after all, supported her when she had expressed a wish to be accompanied only by her mother and one of her ladies in the state coach on her way to St James’s Palace to be proclaimed. Her Master of the Horse, Lord Albemarle, insisted that he had a right to ride with her as he had done with William IV. ‘The point was submitted to the Duke of Wellington as a kind of universal referee in matters of precedence and usage. His judgement was delightfully unflattering to the outraged magnate – “The Queen can make you go inside the coach or outside the coach or run behind it like a tinker’s dog.”’¹⁶ The Queen decided to ask the Duke to her wedding after all. She drew the line, however, at inviting him to the wedding breakfast. She had not entirely forgiven him yet. ‘Our Gracious,’ Wellington concluded, was still ‘very much out of Temper.’¹⁷

      A problem which concerned the Prince far more than his title or his precedence was the composition of his Household which he hoped would be of perfect respectability, unlike the Queen’s which comprised a number of men whose morals were highly questionable, including the Lord Chamberlain, the Marquess of Conyngham, whose mistress was employed as Housekeeper at Buckingham Palace, and the Earl of Uxbridge, the Lord Steward, whose mistress had also been found a position in Her Majesty’s household. Indeed, there were so many Pagets living at Court, in addition to Lord Alfred Paget, the Clerk-Marshal, that it was known as ‘the Paget Club House’.

      Prince Albert had assumed that he would be allowed to choose his gentlemen himself and that some of them might be German and all, of course, ‘well educated and of high character’. Believing as he did that the Crown should not display a preference for any political party, that King William IV had been much misguided to favour the Tories and Queen Victoria was equally in error to demonstrate her support of the Whigs, he had hoped that his own household would indicate his impartiality. ‘It is very necessary,’ he wrote, ‘that they should be chosen from both sides – the same number of Whigs as of Tories.’¹⁸

      The Queen, encouraged by Melbourne, did not agree. ‘As to your wish about your Gentlemen, my dear Albert,’ she told him severely, ‘I must tell you quite honestly that it will not do. You may entirely rely upon me that the people who will be round you will be absolutely pleasant people of high standing and good character…You may rely upon my care that you shall have proper people and not idle and not too young and Lord Melbourne has already mentioned several to me who would be very suitable.’¹⁹

      It was useless for the Prince to protest. ‘I am very sorry,’ he had replied, ‘that you have not been able to grant my first request, the one about the Gentlemen, for I know it was not an unfair one…Think of my position, dear Victoria, I am leaving my home with all its associations, all my bosom friends, and going to a country in which everything is new and strange to me…Except yourself I have no one to confide in. And it is not even to be conceded to me that the two or three persons who are to have the charge of my private affairs should be persons who already command my confidence.’²⁰

      The Queen was not softened by this appeal, although Lord Melbourne thought that it might now be better to give way, and King Leopold wrote what the Queen described as ‘an ungracious letter’ urging the Prime Minister to persuade the Queen to take a ‘correct view’. But, so she wrote to Prince Albert, that was just like Uncle Leopold: he was ‘given to believe that he must rule the roast [sic] everywhere…I am distressed to be obliged to tell you what I fear you do not like but it is necessary, my dearest most excellent Albert…I only do it as I know it is for your own good.’ It was conceded that a German whom the Prince did know, Herr Schenk, should be appointed to a minor post which did not entitle him to a place at the equerries’ table; but the appointment of Private Secretary, the principal post in his Household, was to be filled by George Anson who was not only a confirmed Whig and Secretary to the Whig Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, but whose uncle, Sir George Anson (chosen for an appointment as Groom of the Bedchamber), was also a Whig. In vain the Prince protested to his ‘dearest love’ that taking the Secretary of the Prime Minister as his own Private Secretary would surely from the beginning make him ‘a partisan in the eyes of many’. The Queen, however, was ‘very much in favour’ of the appointment: Mr Anson was ‘an excellent young man, very modest, very honest, very steady, very well informed’ and would be ‘of much use’ to him. Further objection was clearly useless: advised to do so by Baron Stockmar, the Prince gave way, on condition that Anson resigned as the Prime Minister’s Secretary before he became his own.²¹

      The СКАЧАТЬ