A History of Britain, Volume 3 (21 page)

She needed to be sure-footed: the economy had taken a sharp turn for the worse, and radical movements, such as Chartism, were beginning to attract a serious following, so not everyone was in thrall to the spell of the Rose of England. But at least Victoria was not an active liability, and among the propertied classes won relieved respect from unforced acts of kindness and a disarming frankness that was half ingenuous, half knowing. She was also becoming quickly convinced of the soundness of her own judgement. When she knighted the Jewish Moses Montefiore in 1837 over a fit of raised eyebrows at court, she wrote that he was ‘an excellent man … I was very glad to do what I think quite right, as it should be.’

As for spectacle, Victoria sensed – again, perhaps, guided by Melbourne – how important it was to the survival of the monarchy. George IV had been determined to stage a coronation of stupendous lavishness, complete with pseudo-medieval banquets in Westminster Hall (and in Scotland at Holyroodhouse) at which the King’s Challenger would enter in chain mail ostensibly to do combat with anyone who presumed to question the succession. But the more elaborately got up he was – and
George
IV was an apparition in ostrich plumes – the more grotesque he appeared. It seemed right that, when the chain-mailed Challenger cantered over to kiss his sovereign’s hand, he fell off his horse. William IV had no time or taste for such flummery. But Victoria’s accession was a heaven-sent opportunity for the impresarios of monarchy, with a canny sense of publicity, to present a tableau – almost a modern masque – of the rebirth of Britannia’s innocence and virtue. Images of sweet nature abounded. Victoria’s train was carried by eight ladies dressed in white satin with wreaths of silver ears of corn in front, and wreaths of pink roses (by now the talisman of the new reign) behind. And despite having to bear the considerable weight of robes and regalia, Victoria carried off the occasion with satisfying aplomb. When the 87-year-old Baron John Rolle tripped as he attempted to mount the steps before the throne to do homage, the queen’s instinct was to rise and go down to help him, an act of consideration that was widely noticed. When it came to Melbourne’s turn, she noticed tears welling in his eyes. Her even more spectacular wedding ceremony a few years later would further capture the popular imagination.

Her strong-minded piety, although an undoubted asset, could sometimes threaten to become a headache for the worldly wise prime minister. She disliked Baron John Lyndhurst, she told him, because he was a bad man. ‘Do you dislike all bad men?’ he asked roguishly. ‘For that comprises a large number.’ And although she indulged, even enjoyed, Melbourne’s raffish past she was quick to make censorious judgements. Toleration for human frailty was the one quality he failed to impart. So when the shape of her mother’s unmarried lady-in-waiting Lady Flora Hastings started to become suspiciously round, Victoria assumed it was a pregnancy and demanded that she be punished (another echo of the Virgin Queen) for her immorality by being removed from court. A medical inspection to which the unfortunate young woman was subjected judged that her condition was a liver tumour, not a pregnancy. Initially the queen refused to believe she was actually ill, provoking some criticism at court for her lack of sympathy; but once she was persuaded by Melbourne of the truth she steeled herself – also at his firm suggestion – to go and see the dying woman. Victoria held her hand, and on departure cried, ‘Poor Lady Flora.’

When Melbourne’s administration fell, to be replaced by a Tory government under Sir Robert Peel, Victoria took the change as a personal affront. She tearfully stormed over the removal of her friend and mentor, expressed her disgust at the uncouth chilly manners of Peel (a mere manufacturer, after all), and adamantly refused to abide by the convention that her ladies of the bedchamber change with the altered government.
Although
Melbourne did his tactful best to explain that the queen really had no choice, Victoria refused to understand that this was a constitutional, not a personal, matter. The precondition of the monarchy’s survival was its distance from political partisanship. She herself might see her ladies as her own attendants, but the fact was that they had been Whig appointees and retaining them meant – as far as the incoming government was concerned – tolerating a fifth column in the Palace. Eventually Victoria conceded, but only with a fuming sense of indignity.

By the time Melbourne was departing in 1839, plans were advanced to find Victoria someone else to lean on: a consort. It had been King Leopold, in cahoots with her old governess Lehzen and Baron Christian von Stockmar of Saxe-Coburg, who, in the summer of 1839, had suggested she might like to think again about her cousin Albert. She initially took strong exception to being cajoled, even by the two men she trusted most – Melbourne and Leopold (‘the whole subject was an odious one and one I hated to decide about’); but eventually she relented. When Albert arrived in England, in October, Victoria was immediately startled by the ‘beauty’ of his person, especially on the dance floor where a few years before he had cut such a pallid figure. She was overcome by the ‘exquisite neck’; ‘such a pretty mouth with delicate moustaches and a beautiful figure, broad shoulders and fine waist; my heart is quite going – it is quite a pleasure to look at Albert when he galops and valses.’ When allied to his moral seriousness, his evident intelligence and unimpeachable virtue, the ‘angelic’ good looks prompted her to make up her mind – fast. To the amused delight of the cartoonists, it was obvious that it had been the queen who had proposed. ‘At about half past twelve I sent for Albert; he came to the Closet where I was alone and after a few minutes I said to him that I thought he must be aware of why I wished him to come here and that it would make me too happy if he would consent to what I wished (to marry me); we embraced each other over and over again.’

Expeditious was the word. Victoria supplied the ring, asked Albert for a lock of his hair, wallowed in the long kissing sessions, and decreed that two or three days was quite enough for the honeymoon. ‘You forget, my dearest love that I am the sovereign and that business will stop and wait for nothing.’ A more serious shock was the discovery that the queen would lay down the law as to who would be his personal secretary. While she would fight like a tigress (especially with Peel) to resist Albert’s allowance under the civil list from being whittled down as the Radicals in parliament wanted, it was depressingly apparent to him from the start that his function was supposed to be decorative, supportive and generative, possibly in that order. He was her ‘angel in the house’! But if Victoria
tested
their affection by her adamant assumption that her husband could have no part in matters of state, condemning Albert to a state of uselessness that he found humiliating and un-Christian, there were also times, early in the marriage, when she simply melted away in the amazed bliss of conjugal love. After their first night together, she wrote:

When day dawned, for we did not sleep much and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express! He does look so beautiful in his shirt only with his beautiful throat seen …

… Already the second day since our marriage; his love and gentleness is beyond everything and to kiss that dear soft cheek, to press my lips to his is heavenly bliss. I feel a purer, more unearthly feeling than I ever did. Oh! Was ever woman so blessed as I am …

… My dearest Albert put on my stockings for me. I went in and saw him shave; a great delight for me …

Albert and Victoria’s passion for each other was, of course, a strictly private affair (only later revealed to us through her diaries, edited by her daughter Princess Beatrice). But very soon – and with an equal degree of innocence and calculation – it became a public asset for the monarchy, especially as the economic climate deteriorated. At first sight, the Plantagenet Ball of 12 May 1842 – at which Albert and Victoria appeared as the legendary happy royal couple, Edward III and Philippa of Hainault, with medieval dress and decor designed by the medieval antiquarian James Planché – looks like the most unconscionable extravagance, not to say appalling tactlessness, in a year of acute economic distress. While the queen’s jewelled and brocaded stomacher was revealed as having cost £60,000, industrialists in Lancashire and Yorkshire, exploiting their power at a time of high unemployment, caused by mechanization, were imposing wage cuts of as much as 25 per cent. They were met by a wave of strikes. Teams of workers pulled plugs from the steam engines, so as to cut power to the factory floor. No wonder that Friedrich Engels, the future translator and collaborator of Karl Marx but now working for the family cotton firm in Manchester, assumed Britain would be the theatre of the first great class war between capital and proletariat. That same year there were two assassination attempts on the queen.

But the organizers of the ball were not suicidally obtuse. Since the proceeds would go to relieve the plight of distressed silk weavers in Spitalfields, they billed the event as an example of heartfelt royal philanthropy, Victoria’s sympathy with the poor and unemployed. Thanks to the
ball,
the apologia ran, the Spitalfields weavers got some piecework and their charities received an inflow of funds. The weepy story – once known to all schoolchildren – of Queen Philippa interceding with her warrior husband in the Middle Ages to spare the lives of the burghers of Calais was now given a modern gloss as a philanthropic melodrama of the 19th century: a tender-hearted monarch moved by the plight not of hostages but of unemployed artisans. ‘We have no doubt’, declared the
Illustrated London News
, somewhat optimistically, ‘that many thousands are this day grateful for the temporary aid which this right royal entertainment has been the means of affording them.’

Not everyone was persuaded, however, especially when it was revealed that half the proceeds from the ball were going to meet the expenses of the occasion. One newspaper printed lists of workers said to have starved to death in May 1842, and alongside it the expenses of the Plantagenet Ball. A minister preached a sermon warning that ‘when Charity took to dancing it ceased to be charity and became wanton’. And for the seer of Ecclefechan, Craigenputtock and Chelsea, Thomas Carlyle, it was a monstrous case of medieval dilettantism, all the more offensive because medievalism was not, in his view, something to be toyed with as a fashion. It was the ideology of resistance to the despotism of the machine age.

In
Past and Present
, written in 1843, a year after the Plantagenet Ball, Carlyle reiterated his argument that the sacred relics of medieval Christian England were not just material for dressing up and dancing, much less bucolic reveries of ‘Merrie England’. They were a reproach to the inhumane soullessness of an age in which everything was determined by material calculation; in which the engineers of felicity greased the cogs of power and profit, and people got trapped between the flywheels. Travelling through East Anglia (where the young Victoria too had made a tour, wrinkling her nose at the sub-human specimens she found amidst the turnips and the brussels sprouts) while beginning research on his hero Oliver Cromwell, Carlyle visited the ruins of the great Cistercian monastery at Bury St Edmunds. The overpowering sense of another world, removed from the present not just by the passage of centuries but by a universe of morality, was what drove him to write
Past and Present
; part tract, part historical novel, it evoked the actual chronicle of the monk Jocelin of Brakelond. On the same trip Carlyle had visited the poorhouse at St Ives and had waxed wrathful at the inhumanity of systems that kept men either idle or, under the New Poor Law, in places designed to be like prison.

So Carlyle had the Plantagenet Ball squarely in his sights when he wrote, feelingly, of old Bury that

these grim old walls are not a dilettantism and a dubiety; they are an earnest fact. It was a most real and serious purpose they were built for! Yes, another world it was, when these black ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiselling first saw the sun as walls long ago. Gauge not, with thy dilettante compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven’s Watchtower of our Fathers …

Their architecture, belfries, land-carucates? Yes, – and that is but a small item of the matter. Does it never give thee pause, this other strange item of it, that men then had a
soul
– not by hearsay alone and as a figure of speech; but as a truth they practically
knew
and practically went upon! Verily it was another world then … Another world truly and this present poor distressed world might get some profit by looking wisely into it, instead of foolishly.

That world was dead and gone now, for sure. But Carlyle wanted to rescue its moral force, its lesson for the present, from the antiquarians and the fake medievalists; somehow to reinstate its spiritual power amidst a culture otherwise capitulated to godless machinery. He had grown up in southwest Scotland, one of the most intensely Calvinist corners of the country, listening to perfervid preachers call down the wrath of Providence on the vain and the profligate. To the summer thunder of their eloquence Carlyle had added German metaphysical philosophy, especially its musings on the historical Spirit of the Times, the
Zeitgeist
. Together they gave him his voice. And it was the voice of a modern Moses, exhorting the worshippers of the new Golden Calf to fall on their faces in front of the revealed light of truth before they were consumed in wicked self-destruction. In 1829, while still perching on his ‘Hawk’s Crag’ at Craigenputtock, Carlyle had burst on the polite rationalist pages of the
Edinburgh Review
with a tirade against the tyranny of the machine and its destruction of the work of the hand. It was, in effect, a counter-blast to the jubilant mechanical triumphalism of the Brunels, the Cubitts and the Stephensons; and to the ethos that would produce the Great Exhibition.

Nothing is now done directly or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness…. On every hand the living artisan is driven from his workshop to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. The sailor furls his sail and lays down his oar, and bids a strong unwearied servant, on vaporous wings [steamships] bear him through the waters. Men have
crossed
oceans by steam; the Birmingham Fire-King has visited the fabulous East.… There is no end to machinery.… We have machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep. We remove mountains and make seas our smooth highway. Nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature, and by our resistless engines, come off always victorious and loaded with spoils.