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JUST BEFORE DAWN on the morning of 20 June 1837, William Howley, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Lord Chamberlain ordered a carriage and drove post-haste from Windsor to Kensington Palace. They gained admittance to the sleeping household only with difficulty, the Duchess eventually conceding to wake Victoria. The Princess, still in her nightclothes and with her fair hair loose about her shoulders, entered her sitting room alone – she stresses this being ‘alone’ in her journal with relish. The two men greeted her with the words ‘Your Majesty’, knelt and kissed her hand. Lord Conyngham told her that the King had died just after two and ‘consequently that I am Queen’.
‘Since it has pleased Providence to place me in this station,’ she confided in her journal, ‘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.’
Although Victoria might sometimes act misguidedly during a reign of over sixty years, her good intentions could never be called into question.
The proclamation of accession declared that ‘the High and Mighty Princess Alexandrina Victoria is now, by the death of our late Sovereign William the Fourth, of happy memory, become our only lawful and rightful liege Lady Alexandrina Victoria I, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland…’. On her first day as queen, Victoria settled the name problem once and for all. One of her first acts was to write to Uncle Leopold, signing herself ‘Your devoted and attached Niece, Victoria R’. Later in the day, she signed the Privy Council register as ‘Victoria’. ‘Alexandrina’ was quietly dropped.
She breakfasted with Baron Stockmar, Leopold’s long-standing friend and adviser, whom he had sent to England to guide her. A native of Coburg, Stockmar was a man of no personal ambition and had won general respect as a man of quiet common sense. The Prime Minister, William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, sent the Queen a note to advise her that he would wait on her after breakfast in order to brief her for the Privy Council meeting at eleven. It was fortunate for Victoria that, unlike her uncles who were strict Tories, her mother had always been associated with the Whigs and that a Whig government was currently in power. Leopold had already advised her of her part:
The moment you get official communication of it [William IV’s death], you will entrust Lord Melbourne with the office of retaining the present Administration as your Ministers … The fact is that the present Ministers are those who will serve you, personally with the greatest sincerity and, I trust, attachment. For them, as well as for the Liberals at large, you are the only Sovereign that offers them des chances d’existence et de durée.
She followed his advice to the letter, receiving Melbourne at nine ‘in my room, and of course quite alone, as I shall always do all my Ministers’. Aristocratic, urbane, and, as she was soon to discover, harbouring a romantic and tragic past, Melbourne endeared himself to Victoria and immediately won her confidence. ‘He is a very honest, good and kind hearted, as well as very clever man,’ she reported. A childless widower in his fifties – his late wife Lady Caroline Lamb had fallen in love with Byron and gone mad, while none of Melbourne’s three children by her had reached maturity – he easily assumed the role of mentor to the young Queen, spending far more time with her than is usual for a Prime Minister. ‘It is become his province to educate, instruct and form the most interesting mind and character in the world,’ Charles Greville commented. Melbourne was charming and Victoria, always a woman of fierce loyalties, soon came to adore and rely on him. While he probably looked upon her as fondly as he would a daughter, Greville believed that her feelings for Melbourne were sexual ‘though she does not know it, and are probably not very well defined to herself’.
At eleven the doors of the red saloon were thrown open and Victoria entered alone. A painting of the occasion by Sir David Wilkie highlights the small, female figure, radiant in a dress of shining white, although in fact Victoria was plainly dressed in a simple black gown, in mourning for her uncle. The most powerful men in the nation gaze raptly at the young woman, their faces shining in the light she exudes. They are grouped together as a distinct entity, their age and gravitas accentuating Victoria’s youth and femininity. Although she is undoubtedly the focal point of the painting, there can be no doubt that real power has shifted to Parliament, represented by the men in the room. Melbourne holds out the pen for her to sign her document of accession, a reminder that she is a constitutional monarch and that her sovereignty is only possible by the validation of Lords and Commons.
Kept in ‘such jealous seclusion’ by her mother, no one quite knew what to expect of the eighteen-year-old Queen, whose ‘character, disposition, and capacity’ was a mystery. The diarist Charles Greville, Clerk to the Council, records the impact she made at that Privy Council meeting:
There never was anything like the first impression she produced, or the chorus of praise and admiration which is raised about her manner and behaviour … It was very extraordinary, and something far beyond what was looked for. Her extreme youth and inexperience, and the ignorance of the world concerning her, naturally excited intense curiosity to see how she would act on this trying occasion … the Queen entered, accompanied by her two uncles, who advanced to meet her. She bowed to the Lords, took her seat, and then read her speech in a clear, distinct, and audible voice, and without any appearance of fear or embarrassment.
She had a clear, melodious speaking voice which carried far. The speech had been prepared for her by Melbourne and Victoria thought it ‘very fine’. The old question of whether the power of the state resided in the crown or in Parliament had been irrevocably settled in favour of Parliament, whose power now rested on a more broad-based electorate. ‘I place my firm reliance upon the wisdom of Parliament and upon the loyalty and affection of My People,’ she assured those present. She praised her predecessor under whom the Great Reform Act of 1832, giving parliamentary representation to new industrial towns such as Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, and extending the franchise, had been passed. Leopold had advised her to show attachment to the Church of England as ‘you are particularly where you are, because you are a Protestant.’ Now she declared that ‘it will be my unceasing study to maintain the reformed religion as by law established, securing at the same time to all the full enjoyment of religious liberty.’ In a society rent by class division and poverty on a massive scale she promised to ‘promote to the utmost of my power the happiness and welfare of all classes of my subjects’.
Leopold had taught her that as queen she was to be above party. As the 220 Privy Counsellors present advanced, she was careful not to betray any preference for Whig or Tory. She occasionally looked towards Melbourne for guidance, but otherwise impressed everyone with her ‘perfect calmness and self-possession … graceful modesty and propriety’. The eldest of Victoria’s surviving uncles, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, was absent. Since the reign of George I, the sovereign of Great Britain had also been Elector, latterly King, of Hanover, but the Salic law, whereby a woman might not succeed to the crown, applied in Hanover. Cumberland now succeeded as King of Hanover; the old reactionary was apparently highly resentful that Victoria should succeed to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland. He was not popular with the English, especially the Whigs. As Leopold had already explained to Victoria, ‘your immediate successor with the moustaches is enough to frighten them into the most violent attachment to you.’ The other royal dukes, Cambridge and Sussex, were the first to swear allegiance, kneeling before her. Greville noticed that she blushed as they did so and seemed ‘rather bewildered at the multitude of men who were sworn and came one after another to kiss her hand’.
Victoria came to the throne in a period of social, political and economic turbulence, one in which the monarchy was at a particularly low ebb. The nation welcomed the advent of a new, young monarch who contrasted in every way – age, gender and political loyalty – with her unpopular predecessors, George III, George IV and William IV: ‘an imbecile, a profligate and a buffoon’. Everyone seemed to have forgotten that the young George III, like Victoria born in England and fiercely patriotic, had begun his reign with similar optimism; like him she was also to be a model of domestic propriety.
Even more, perhaps, than was the case with Queen Anne, it was not a disadvantage to be a female sovereign in 1837. Both Victoria’s youth and her sex were disarming. She invited the sentiment previously roused by Queen Caroline and Princess Charlotte, receiving such saturation coverage that the press was accused of suffering from ‘Reginamania’, and a chivalric protectiveness from the men who were bound to serve her. An anonymous pamphlet written by Lord Brougham in the form of an open Letter to the Queen on the State of the Monarchy summed up this patriarchal attitude, incidentally highlighting the contradiction between Victoria’s state body and her private body:
I am an experienced man, well stricken in years. I hold myself before you, a girl of eighteen, who, in my own or any other family in Europe, would be treated as a child, ordered to do as was most agreeable or convenient to others – whose inclinations would never be consulted – whose opinion would never be thought of – whose consent would never be asked upon any one thing appertaining to any other human being but yourself, beyond the choice of gown or cap, nor always upon that: yet before you I humble myself …
Victoria’s political innocence meant that she was not associated with the oppressive power of the monarchy and, indeed, her assumed Whig sympathies linked her with the impulse for political reform. As a fetching young woman in a sentimental age, she appeared less politically threatening to the opponents of monarchy and more amenable to constitutional control in the eyes of those who supported a limited monarchy than her grandfather and uncles, who made no secret of their political partisanship. A female monarch must always have appeared less ‘political’ in an age in which public political action was exclusively a male preserve. In contrast to her debauched uncles, Victoria was a virgin queen and had decorative appeal.
But while she excited the protective feelings of the male counsellors who caught their first glimpse of her that morning, Victoria was no ingénue. For some time she had been quietly coached for her role by Leopold. ‘My object,’ he told her, ‘is that you should be no one’s tool, and though young, and naturally not yet experienced, your good natural sense and the truth of your character will, with faithful and proper advice get you very well through the difficulties of your future position.’ The ‘irksome position’ in which she had lived, he knew, would have taught her ‘discretion and prudence, as in your position you never can have too much of either’. He advised her to stress the fact that she had been born in England and that she could never sing the praises of her country and its inhabitants too loudly.
A year before her accession she read avidly his ‘Directions and Advices’, outlining the rules of sovereignty in general, which Leopold had prepared for his nephew and Victoria’s cousin, Ferdinand, upon his marriage to the Queen of Portugal. Leopold liked to think of himself as a ‘constitutional’ monarch, but that is not to be confused with the modern, post-Bagehot understanding of the term in which the monarch’s role is merely to be consulted, to encourage and to warn. Leopold left Victoria in no doubt that the monarchy should be strong and that she should vigorously guard her prerogatives and seek to augment the power of the crown lost by her predecessors:
Monarchy to be carried on requires certain elements, and the occupation of the Sovereign must be constantly to preserve these elements, or should they have been too much weakened by untoward circumstances, to contrive by every means to strengthen them again. You are far too clever not to know, that it is not the being called Queen or King, which can be of the least consequence, when to the title there is not also annexed the power indispensable for the exercise of those functions. All trades must be learned, and nowadays, the trade of a constitutional Sovereign, to do it well, is a very difficult one.
When Leopold advised Victoria that the crown should be above party he did not mean that she should be a sovereign with no governing power. Party was anathema to royal thinking, giving too much scope for self-seeking politicians to place their individual interests before the good of the nation as a whole; it made it impossible to form an administration of the best men, loyal and obedient to the sovereign; and it meant that the power of the monarch to be centrally, creatively and actively involved in the governing process was fatally circumscribed. Constitutional monarchy, as Leopold and Stockmar saw it, implied a ruler who was emancipated from the politicians, rather than fettered by them; a crown that was influentially, not impotently, above the battle; a sovereign who ruled as well as reigned. Indoctrinated with these views, Victoria was to be no cipher, vigorously defending monarchical power, until in the course of time that power was quietly exchanged for influence.
Leopold ‘conceptualized’ monarchy for the nineteenth century in bourgeois terms, imagining the monarch to be ‘in trade’; the notion anticipated King George VI’s labelling of the royal family as ‘The Firm’ in the twentieth century. Just as Lehzen had instilled the work ethic in her pupil, now Leopold wrote to advise the new Queen on ‘the habits of business’ the role entailed. ‘The best plan is to devote certain hours to it; if you do that, you will get through it with ease.’ Nor was she to decide on any question of importance, no matter how urgent, until she had had a chance to sleep on it. Even Melbourne was to find that she would never give him an immediate answer, but would keep the papers to consider overnight. ‘Good habits formed now may for ever afterwards be kept up, and will become so natural to you that you will not find them at all fatiguing,’ Leopold continued. He advocated firmness: ‘People must come to the opinion it is of no use intriguing, because when her mind is once made up, and she thinks a thing is right, no earthly power will make her change.’ Victoria’s Prime Ministers would often have cause to complain of her stubbornness and immovability. They were lessons that Victoria faithfully followed for a lifetime.
Before long, Leopold must have been thinking that his niece had absorbed his teaching a little too thoroughly. He was in the habit of writing to Victoria about foreign affairs. Belgium was in dispute with France and Holland and, instead of siding with Belgium, the British government was being frustratingly neutral. Within a year of her coming to the throne Leopold tried to exert pressure on Victoria to persuade her government to declare outright support for Belgium.
‘All I want from your kind Majesty,’ he wrote, ‘is that you will occasionally express to your Ministers, and particularly to good Lord Melbourne, that, as far as it is compatible with the interests of your own dominions, you do not wish that your Government should take the lead in such measures as might in a short time bring on the destruction of this country, as well as that of your uncle and his family.’
A week later, after consulting Melbourne on the subject, she gently rebuffed him. While expressing her affection for her uncle, she informed him that although her government would not be party to any measure prejudicial to Belgium, it would not intervene to alter existing treaty arrangements. Victoria was fiercely patriotic. She and her ministers would decide Britain’s foreign policy and do what was best for Britain. Faced with his niece’s forthright determination not to be swayed by family pressure, Leopold retreated.
Victoria embraced her new role with enthusiasm, delighting in the work and relishing her new-found independence. Her pleasure in the latter can be gauged by her proud use of the word ‘alone’ in her journal in describing her first acts as queen. On the morning of her accession she wrote a kind letter to Queen Adelaide, inviting her to reside at Windsor for as long as she liked. She wasted no time in asserting her independence from her mother by ordering that her bed be removed from her room that very day. The poor Duchess was now to be made to pay for her championship of Conroy against her own daughter. She resented her displacement as Victoria’s manager and the growing influence of Melbourne. ‘Take care Victoria, you know your Prerogative! Take care that Lord Melbourne is not King,’ she wrote waspishly. Conroy himself was summoned to Victoria’s presence and invited to name his price for the services he had rendered her parents; she was prepared to pay any amount just to see the back of him. A baronetcy and a pension of £3,000 a year was agreed upon and Victoria made it clear that, although he remained for the time being in her mother’s household, he would never be admitted to her presence again.
Three weeks after her accession, the Queen moved into Buckingham Palace, the first British sovereign to take up residence there. As she was unmarried, she had to bring her mother with her as chaperone, but she was careful to place the Duchess in an apartment as far away from her own as possible. A public appearance of cordiality between mother and daughter was maintained, but the Duchess was soon bemoaning the fact to Princess Lieven that she had to make an appointment to see Victoria, who often sent back a note that she was too busy. Dear Lehzen was placed in the bedroom next to the Queen’s with a communicating door between them. She would remain with Victoria as a friend, but would ‘take no situation about me’; in effect, she assumed an unspecified responsibility for Victoria’s household. Ministers noted that Lehzen would discreetly leave the room when they arrived for an audience with the Queen and slip back in again as they left.
‘She has great animal spirits,’ Greville wrote, ‘and enters into the magnificent novelties of her position with the zest and curiosity of a child.’ As a young unmarried woman, she loved to be in London and heartily embraced its pleasures. She enjoyed the opera and the theatre and liked nothing better than to dance until dawn. ‘I can assure you all this dissipation does me a great deal of good,’ she told Leopold. She had ‘no pretension to beauty’, Greville decided, but ‘the gracefulness of her manner and the good expression of her countenance give her on the whole a very agreeable appearance’. Charles Creevey noted her joie de vivre: ‘A more homely little being you never beheld, when she is at her ease, and she is evidently dying to be always more so. She laughs in real earnest, opening her mouth as wide as it can go, showing not very pretty gums … She eats quite as heartily as she laughs, I think I may say she gobbles … She blushes and laughs every instant in so natural a way as to disarm anybody.’
Victoria was always hungry and had a lifelong habit of eating her food too fast, to the consternation of the slow eaters at her table whose plates were whisked away as soon as the Queen had finished. One of her biographers suggested that her passionate, vibrant nature foreshadowed her sexual liveliness.
Carefully managed by Melbourne, Victoria would ride out regularly in Hyde Park with her Prime Minister and other Whig ministers beside her. She was distancing herself from the ‘old royal family’ with its disreputable ways. That summer, she reviewed her troops in the park, wearing a version of the Windsor uniform, a dark blue habit with red collar and cuffs. Priding herself on being a soldier’s daughter, Victoria always enjoyed military display, although as a female sovereign she could only play at soldiers. ‘The whole went off beautifully,’ she wrote on this first occasion, ‘and I felt for the first time like a man, as if I could fight myself at the head of my Troops.’ She was less enthusiastic about addressing the members of both Houses of Parliament, when she went to the Lords to prorogue Parliament that July. Even with Lord Melbourne carrying the Sword of State before her and standing beside her while she read her speech, she confessed in her journal that she was extremely shy and nervous. It was something that she was never able to overcome, made worse in middle age after her widowhood, when she just could not bring herself to do it.
Compared to the superbly orchestrated royal ceremonies in the latter part of her reign, Victoria’s coronation, on Thursday, 28 June 1838, was an ill-managed affair. Figaro in London, the predecessor of Punch, called it ‘the shabby Coronation’ and depicted Victoria being carried in a wooden chair by two footmen, a parasol in one hand, the orb and sceptre in the other, with the crown hung negligently on the back of the chair. The Tories saw the pared-down coronation as yet another example of the Whigs’ relentless drive to diminish the constitutional role of the crown. Public enthusiasm for the event seemed strong in London, but was less fulsome in the industrial North, particularly in Manchester, the cotton manufacturing centre whose sudden growth made it the ‘shock city’ of the age. Chartists, pressing for all adult males to be given the vote, and working-class radicals were critical of the coronation’s medieval flummery and expense; as far as they could see, the new reign had changed nothing.
Nothing could mar the day for Victoria. Having been awoken at four by the noise of the people and the bands in the park, she left Buckingham Palace at ten in the state coach. ‘It was a fine day, and the crowds of people exceeded what I have ever seen,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘many as there were the day I went to the City [for the Lord Mayor’s dinner], it was nothing, nothing to the multitudes of my loyal subjects, who were assembled in every spot to witness the Procession. Their good humour and excessive loyalty was beyond everything, and I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation.’
The processional route no longer encompassed the old, sacred route from the Tower in the east through the City but centred on Westminster and was much longer than hitherto, to allow the maximum number of people – perhaps as many as 1 million – to glimpse the new monarch. Only six years after the Great Reform Act, this was, after all, the dawn of the democratic age. At Westminster Abbey, there had been no rehearsal and Victoria looked in vain for guidance from the officiating clergy, while some of her eight train-bearers, dressed in white satin and silver tissue with pink roses, chattered throughout the ceremony. The ruby ring had been measured for the wrong finger, but the archbishop insisted on forcing it on to the fourth finger; it was only with the greatest difficulty that Victoria managed to ease it off in the robing room afterwards. When it came to the peers swearing allegiance, eighty-two-year-old Lord Rolle lived up to his name by failing to make it up the steps to the seated Queen and rolling down again. ‘May I not get up to meet him?’ a concerned Victoria asked, before descending the steps to help him.
The existing crown, made for George IV, was far too heavy for a young woman and a new one, including the Black Prince’s ruby, which Henry V reputedly wore at Agincourt, and other precious gems and pearls, was fashioned for Victoria. Even so, its weight was considerable.
It was not until six that she returned to the palace through the cheering crowds. Not at all tired, she ran upstairs to give her spaniel Dash his bath. In a break with tradition, there was to be no coronation banquet for the nobility, no Queen’s champion throwing down his gauntlet to any who challenged her title, just a small family dinner. In another nod to populism, theatres and places of popular entertainment were free that night and there was a three-day fair in Hyde Park, while in provincial towns and rural parishes celebratory dinners were provided for the poor, aged and infirm. Victoria enjoyed the fireworks standing on her mother’s balcony. ‘You did it beautifully – every part of it,’ Lord Melbourne assured her at the end of the day, ‘with so much taste; it’s a thing that you can’t give a person advice upon; it must be left to a person.’
Early in 1839 the new Queen began to lose some of her gloss. Prompted by her old hatred of Sir John Conroy, she became mired in a court scandal. Her mother’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Flora Hastings, daughter of the Marquess of Hastings, began to display a suspiciously enlarged abdomen. Before long, the gossips had it that she was pregnant. Who was the father? Had she not travelled down from Scotland after Christmas with Sir John Conroy? Willing to believe any misdeed of Conroy and encouraged by his old nemesis, Lehzen, Victoria lent an ear to the rumours, when what she should have done as queen and head of society was to investigate, discover the truth, and act decisively, either clearing the unfortunate lady’s reputation or asking her to leave court.
‘Lady Flora had not been above two days in the house before Lehzen and I discovered how exceedingly suspicious her figure looked – more have since observed this and we have no doubt that she is – to use the plain words – with child!!!’ Victoria wrote in her journal: ‘the horrid cause of all this is the Monster and Demon Incarnate whose name I forbear to mention [Conroy].’ Having worked herself into a state of righteous indignation, she ended with the words: ‘this disgraceful subject … makes one loathe one’s own sex. When they are bad how disgracefully and disgustingly servile and low women are! I don’t wonder at men considering the sex despicable.’
In the Flora Hastings affair Victoria was not well served by Melbourne, who with his laissez-faire inclinations advised her to wait and see, nor by the royal physician, Sir James Clark, who examined the lady. Although handicapped by the convention of examining a female patient fully dressed, Sir James failed to consider the other possible explanations for Lady Flora’s enlarged abdomen. He was inclined to believe that she was pregnant, until a second examination with another physician – this time with the lady having removed her stays – confirmed that she was a virgin. The outraged Hastings family demanded the dismissal of Clark; Victoria failed to comply. Not only was this unwise – Clark, after all, was expendable – but it would come back to haunt her many years later when he failed to diagnose Prince Albert’s typhoid. Embarrassed now, she was induced to visit Lady Flora:
I found Lady Flora stretched on a couch looking as thin as anybody can be who is still alive; literally a skeleton, but the body very much swollen like a person who is with child; a searching look in her eyes, a look rather like a person who is dying … she was friendly, said she was very comfortable, and was very grateful for all I had done for her … I said to her, I hoped to see her again when she was better, upon which she grasped my hand as if to say ‘I shall not see you again’.
Lady Flora died on 5 July 1839 and a post-mortem revealed she had been suffering from a growth on the liver. Although the public at large was not much concerned with this court scandal, society was scathing of Victoria’s behaviour in the affair. The Hastings family were Tories and were determined to make political capital out of Melbourne’s failure. It reflected badly on Victoria. ‘Nobody cares for the Queen,’ Greville concluded, ‘her popularity has sunk to zero, and loyalty is a dead letter.’ Two aristocratic ladies hissed as the Queen passed at Ascot, although they claimed their target was Melbourne who accompanied her.
Meanwhile, it looked as if Melbourne’s government, facing defeat on a colonial issue, would have to resign. Victoria dreaded losing the man on whom she was so dependent, politically and personally. ‘The state of agony, grief and despair into which this placed me may be easier imagined than described! All all my happiness gone! That happy peaceful life destroyed, that dearest kind Lord Melbourne no more my minister,’ she wrote melodramatically. When Melbourne came to offer his resignation on 7 May 1839 she sobbed and grasped his hand and could not bear to let go, pleading that he not forsake her. Although the sovereign no longer had the power enjoyed by Queen Anne to choose between Whig and Tory, she could exercise the option to choose between one man and another of the incoming party to lead the government, as well as appoint the ministry. Melbourne advised her to send for the Duke of Wellington. While negotiations with the Tories were under way, it would not be proper for Melbourne and the Queen to meet, but she wrote begging him: ‘The Queen ventures to maintain one thing, which she thinks is possible; which is, that if she rode out tomorrow afternoon, she might just get a glimpse of Lord Melbourne in the Park; if he knew where she rode, she would meet him and it would be such a comfort; there surely could be no earthly harm in this.’ No wonder the public had taken to shouting ‘Mrs Melbourne’ at her.
Wellington explained that he would not be the best man to lead the government; he was too old and he had no influence in the House of Commons. He advised the Queen to send for Sir Robert Peel. Prone to make hasty judgements about people and very decided in her likes and dislikes, Victoria did not care for Peel. A clever, plain-speaking man of middle-class origin with none of Melbourne’s romantic appeal or suavity, he and Victoria had an awkward meeting, his stiffness and abruptness no doubt exacerbated by the fact that it was obvious that she did not want him to be there. Ministers were always at a disadvantage when there was antipathy or controversy, because in an audience with the sovereign a minister had to stand and must always show respect and restraint. He was unable to argue or employ the frankness he would with an equal. This was especially the case when the sovereign was a woman.
Unwittingly, Melbourne had already put the idea into Victoria’s head that Peel would demand some changes among her ladies. At the outset of the reign, when the Queen knew no one, all the ladies Melbourne had placed about her, from the Mistress of the Robes downwards, happened to be Whigs. ‘Your Majesty better express your hope that none of Your Majesty’s Household, except those who are engaged in Politics, may be removed. I think you can ask him for that.’ Obviously no women were engaged in politics, but took their political affiliations from fathers and husbands.
Forewarned, Victoria was adamant when Peel raised the subject. He probably would have been content with a gesture, but in her frenzied state of mind she chose to believe that he meant her to get rid of all her ladies. ‘I cannot give up any of my Ladies,’ she told him at their second meeting. ‘What, Ma’am!’ Peel queried. ‘Does your Majesty mean to retain them all?’ ‘All,’ she replied. Perhaps she saw a means of getting Lord Melbourne back. She fired off a letter to him:
The Queen writes one line to prepare Lord Melbourne for what may happen in a very few hours. Sir Robert Peel has behaved very ill, and has insisted on my giving up my Ladies, to which I replied that I never would consent, and I never saw a man so frightened. He said he must go to the Duke of Wellington and consult with him … He was quite perturbed … I was 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.
Later that day, she wrote again:
Lord Melbourne must not think the Queen rash in her conduct; she saw both the Duke and Sir Robert again, and declared to them she could not change her opinion … The Queen felt this was an attempt to see whether she could be led and managed like a child; if it should lead to Sir Robert Peel’s refusing to undertake the formation of the Government, which would be absurd, the Queen will feel satisfied that she has only been defending her own rights, on a point which so nearly concerned her person, and which, if they had succeeded in, would have led to every sort of unfair attempt at power.
The principal male officers of the household, including the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward, the Master of the Horse and the eight Lords-in-Waiting, were always political; usually members of the House of Lords, they changed with the government of the day. Victoria had no quarrel with that. The protocol governing a queen regnant was ill defined, but the convention for a queen consort since the Hanoverian succession had been to replace some of the Ladies of the Bedchamber with those of the same political persuasion as the incoming government, and this seemed a good enough precedent for a queen regnant to follow. The key appointment was the Mistress of the Robes, always a duchess. She was not in attendance on a daily basis, only on state occasions. The rest comprised the Ladies and Women of the Bedchamber – known as ladies-in-waiting when on duty – and the Maids of Honour.
Their function was to keep the Queen company when she needed it, to go driving or sketching or walking with her, dine with her, sit with her, and undertake a certain amount of correspondence. They were expected, therefore, to have a working knowledge of French or German, preferably both, to be able to sing and play the piano and ride. Below them, a dresser such as Marianne Skerrett, who had been in the Queen’s service since her accession, acted as a personal secretary, writing letters on her behalf to tradespeople.
Peel’s argument was that the Queen’s household was a public and state, not a private, institution, so that she must make changes among her ladies. Her refusal to co-operate indicated to the outside world that she had no confidence in Peel, making it impossible for him to accept the reins of government. ‘Was Sir Robert so weak that even the ladies must be of his opinion?’ she asked. Actually Victoria might well have played into Peel’s hands; he cannot have relished the task of forming a minority government. There was a feeling that the Queen had overstepped the thin line of constitutional propriety.
‘It is a high trial of our institutions when the caprice of a girl of nineteen can overturn a great Ministerial combination,’ Greville wrote in exasperation, ‘and when the most momentous matters of Government and legislation are influenced by her pleasure about her Ladies of the Bedchamber.’ It was ironic that the Tories, traditionally the upholders of the royal prerogative, were effectively prevented from taking office by an assertion of that prerogative and the Whigs, one of whose salient principles was the curtailment of the prerogative, found themselves kept in power by it. What were the Whigs thinking of, Greville asked, to pander to her private gratifications rather than the public good? Nor had Wellington succeeded in persuading her. ‘There is something which shocks one’s sense of fitness and propriety in the spectacle of this mere baby of a Queen setting herself in opposition to this great man,’ Greville continued, ‘to whom her Predecessors had ever been accustomed to look up with unlimited confidence as their surest and wisest Councillor in all times of difficulty and danger.
Victoria had given Melbourne and the Whigs the impression that Peel had been unreasonable and they naturally rushed to her defence, without taking time to ascertain the truth of the matter. They acted unconstitutionally in communicating with the Queen while negotiations were still in hand with the Tories. ‘She might be excused for her ignorance of the exact limits of constitutional propriety, and for her too precipitate recurrence to the Counsels to which she had been accustomed,’ Greville mused, ‘but they ought to have explained to her, that until Sir Robert Peel had formally and finally resigned his commission into her hands, they could tender her no advice, and that her replies to him, and her resolutions with regard to his proposals must emanate solely and spontaneously from herself.’
In the ‘bedchamber crisis’ Victoria had acted emotionally, but she was also testing the limits of her power. Her behaviour raised a larger question: that of whether Parliament or the sovereign should have the decisive say in the formation of the government. Victoria’s fierce partisanship and meddling in politics had interrupted the natural course of parliamentary government, but, ironically, her interference made her less of a sovereign than if she had been above it all; she was seen as ‘Queen of the Whigs’ rather than Queen of the nation. She was spared the reprimand she deserved because, as Greville put it, ‘it would be to impair the authority, the dignity, the sanctity of the Crown she wears … it is necessary to spare the individual for the sake of the institution.’
She had won Lord Melbourne back for another two years, but her behaviour had awakened doubts in some minds about the suitability of a woman, especially one so headstrong, on the throne. All the old arguments about female weakness resurfaced. It was time for the Queen to take a husband; it was hoped that a dominant male partner would be able to mend her ways.