Read A History of Britain, Volume 3 Online
Authors: Simon Schama
Reginald Richardson, ex-physical force Salford Chartist and gaolbird, was himself one of those working men who, in the less abrasively confrontational climate of the mid-Victorian boom, reserved his campaign energies for quite different battles. In the mid-1850s he took on the ‘slink’ trade, accused of slaughtering diseased cattle and ‘dressing’ them so they could be passed off as food. He campaigned for public rights of way on ancient footpaths in the countryside between Cheadle and Altrincham. In 1854 he waxed lyrical in the
Salford Evening Weekly
, while lamenting industrial pollution: ‘How many thousands yet living remember the beautiful walk from Oldham Lane and down the Adelphi across Bank Mill Yard and along the southern side of the river, with its fine green bank shelving down to the pure stream overshadowed by tall poplars. …
Along
the river bank to Springfield … every inch of this has been absorbed – to use a mild term – by the rapacity of those who have built works along the river side.’ The old warrior for working men’s democracy had become – in advance of the invention of the term – an ecologist. The British revolution had been put out to grass.
PHOTOGRAPHING QUEEN VICTORIA,
the results make clear, was seldom an opportunity for a sunny grin. But then smiling seemed beside the point for most 19th-century photographers and their subjects. They were after grander things; in the case of the royal family, a fine balance between majesty and familiarity. Being summoned to take photographs of Albert, Victoria and the children must have been daunting for Roger Fenton and John Edwin Mayall; but also perhaps exhilarating. Who else got to tell a sovereign to sit perfectly still, even in the most respectful style of address? Lady Day, about whom little is known, went to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1859 and managed to capture just the slight degree of informality that the prince and the queen had allowed themselves: a country bonnet and an easy lean against a creamy wall. It helped, of course, that the royals were such enthusiasts of the new art. A darkroom had been built and stocked at Windsor. Whenever painters came to do a portrait in oils, the first thing Victoria did was to press on them a photograph as a way of indicating her expectations. This put them on the spot. Were they really supposed to record, with the camera’s unblinking faithfulness to the truth, the podgy cheeks, the rather alarming eyes and the excessively compact royal form?
Plainly, the queen was not vain. But the queen was also not stupid. She and Albert knew precisely what they were doing when they commissioned photographs. The thousands of prints made between the late 1850s and the end of the reign transformed the relationship between crown and people more thoroughly than anything since the Civil War.
Lady
Day’s photographs of the Osborne summer were engraved for public circulation; but 14 of the plates from a series made a year later by Mayall were specifically chosen for publication as cartes-de-visite. Invented by the French photographer André Disdéri, these were multiple (usually eight) exposures that could be taken from a single plate, and were originally meant, as their name implied, as trade or artistic advertisements to be exchanged between photographers themselves, either amateur or professional. In Britain, however, they were circulated – so the authority on royal photographs, Helmut Gernsheim, claims – in hundreds of thousands. Escaping from the rarefied circles of photography into the public domain of the middle class, the cards were prized, collected and traded as cherished objects. Family albums, specially designed with windows into which cartes-de-visite could be slipped without the need for gum, meant that for the first time the image of the royal family could appear on the drawing-room tables of the British middle classes.
That image, carefully designed by Albert and Victoria themselves, was itself an extraordinary departure from tradition. ‘They say no Sovereign was ever more loved than I am (I am bold enough to say)’, the queen had written to her uncle, King Leopold, in 1858 in a rush of pardonable self-congratulation. And she had no doubt why. It was ‘because of our domestic home; the good example it sets’. So none of the Mayall, Day or Fenton photographs of the royal couple showed Albert and Victoria in anything remotely approaching a ceremonial role, or in military finery, swagged with the tiers of medals and ropes of epaulettes favoured by European autocrats. It would have been unthinkable, of course, for Victoria to have donned a uniform, and Albert had specifically declined the Duke of Wellington’s proposal, in 1850, that he should serve as commander-in-chief of the army. So the prince filled his frock coat as majestically and martially as he could, while little Victoria, plumping out to the pudding shape that would be her enduring image, ballooned in satin crinoline. It was the rituals of the bourgeois calendar that were most on show – the holidays in the Highlands and on the Isle of Wight; the stroll with the dogs in the park; carol-singing around the Christmas tree; Albert playing Mendelssohn at the organ; Victoria adoringly cross-stitching. There was even a white-haired, bonneted granny to round out the scene since a chastened Duchess of Kent, far removed from her dynastic adventurism, had been welcomed back into the family fold. Never mind that the holiday homes were palatial; the park was Windsor and mostly off limits to the public; and that none of these activities was exactly comparable to the annual round of a Tunbridge Wells solicitor, much less a Solihull grocer; the artfully conveyed impression was of a reassuringly
solid,
unpretentious and, above all, Christian–patriotic way of life. Reciprocal visits in 1855 of the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie to Britain, and of Victoria and Albert to Paris, only reinforced the image of the queen as wholesomely innocent of glamour (although not of gaiety). Sniggering criticism of her fashion sense, or lack of it, was provoked not so much by dowdiness as by unfortunate gaudiness; typical (it was insinuated in Paris) of the bourgeoise trying a little too hard to be cheerful. The black and white collotypes of the 1850s do little to suggest the brilliant stripes and checks loved by Victoria, along with parasols of clashing colours. Parrot-green was apparently a favourite.
Especially when compared to modern royal photography, the albums from 1859, 1860 and 1861 seem startlingly candid in registering the strains and ambiguities of a relationship that had somehow to preserve the authority of a husband over a wife, while conceding the inferiority of the consort to the queen. Albert stands patriarchally lofty – but not so lofty as he would have been had the queen herself not been standing on steps concealed beneath the hooped crinoline. Victoria appears just as she must have been: weary of being a baby factory for dynastic posterity (‘Vicky’, the first of nine surviving, was born in 1840, ‘Baby’ Beatrice, the last, in 1857).
Serial pregnancies had taken their toll on the dewy-eyed romance with which Victoria had begun her marriage. When her eldest child, Vicky – who had been married at 18 to the Crown Prince of Prussia, 10 years her senior – became pregnant for the first time, making her a grandmother in her early 30s, she wrote gushingly of the Expected Event. The queen, however, responded with tactless earthiness: ‘What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.’ Inevitably, some of the royal children fell ill, sometimes dangerously. Fierce arguments erupted between Victoria and Albert as to which of the doctors to trust. It was then that the conflict between the dual role of the couple – on the one hand husband and wife, on the other sovereign and consort – became most aggravated. When Vicky was desperately sick, an unusually distraught Albert told Victoria that ‘Dr Clark has mismanaged the child and poisoned her with calomel and you have starved her. I shall have nothing more to do with it! Take the child away and do as you like and if she dies you will have it on your conscience.’ The queen shot back, operatically, ‘You can
murder
the child if YOU want to!’ No wonder that Albert thought, ‘Victoria is too hasty and passionate for me to be able often to speak of my difficulties. She will fly into a rage
and
overwhelms me with reproaches of suspiciousness, want of trust, ambition, envy.’
But even these temporary estrangements were testimony to the fact that Albert and Victoria were both intensely engaged in the welfare of their family. Albert constructed an elaborate and exhaustive educational programme for the children and, although there were tutors to carry it out, supervised the instruction down to the last detail. When, to his growing anxiety and exasperation, Bertie, the Prince of Wales, showed no sign of applying himself to his lessons (quite the reverse, in fact), Albert bore down on him with relentless interrogations in an attempt to discover whether it was intellectual or moral failing that was the problem. Equally, however, there were times when both the queen and the prince allowed themselves the luxury of cosiness. Victoria’s journal recorded many such moments of bedroom happiness: ‘Albert brought in dearest little Pussy [Vicky] in such a smart white merino dress trimmed with blue which Mamma had given her and a pretty cap, and placed her on my bed, seating himself next to her and she was very dear and good. And as my precious invaluable Albert sat there and our little Love between us I felt quite moved with happiness and gratitude to God.’
The bliss might not have been perfectly symmetrical. For many years in the late 1840s and 1850s, Albert chafed at the limitations placed on his part in public business. It did not help that they had been self-imposed, apparently willingly. Albert’s German background in Coburg explains a lot about his mixed constitutional feelings. The smaller German states in the mid-19th century were on the cusp of making important decisions about how best to avoid the fate of the red republicanism that Karl Marx had confidently predicted for them (as well as for Britain). Would liberalism or authoritarianism be the best preventive against revolution? Albert was not so obtuse as to imagine Britain would even flirt with the latter possibility. In fact, after a period of innocence he had rather fallen in love with English (as distinct from British) constitutional history, swotting up on Sir William Blackstone’s
Commentaries on the Laws of England
(1723–80) and, over-optimistic about Victoria’s own eagerness to be enlightened about her monarchy, reading aloud to her passages from Henry Hallam’s
The Constitution from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of George II
(1827). But Albert’s own mentor, Baron von Stockmar, had warned him that Britain was in danger of establishing, by political
fait accompli
, a mere ‘ministerial government’ in which the monarchy did no more than rubber stamp the decisions of parliament and the political parties. And to begin with – until put right by Sir Robert Peel’s careful but firm guidance – Albert shared Victoria’s uneducated instinct that the
crown
should reserve the possibility at least of withholding confirmation of ministerial appointments or policies of which it disapproved. What Stockmar wanted was that the sovereign be akin to a ‘permanent Prime Minister’ – above the fray of party – and therefore somehow entitled to the trust and respect of both politicians and the people.
It was to Albert’s credit that he rapidly understood this to be an impossibly over-ambitious plan. Instead, the sketch of his duties written in 1843, and revised and extended in 1850 when he turned down the Duke of Wellington’s invitation to command the army, described a subtler role. He would, he said, ‘sink his own
individual
existence into that of his wife … assume no separate responsibility before the public but make his position entirely a part of hers’. This sounds like an act of almost perverse (and uncharacteristic) self-effacement – until, that is, one reads on in the Consort’s job description and discovers that Albert also commanded himself to ‘continually and anxiously watch every part of the public business, in order to be able to advise and assist her at any moment. … As the natural head of her family, superintendent of the royal household’ (in which he had rapidly made swingeing cuts – no more wine allowance for the ‘Red Chamber’ at Windsor); ‘manager of her private affairs, sole
confidential
adviser in politics, and her only assistant in her communications with the officers of the Government, he is, besides, the husband of the Queen, the tutor of the royal children, the private Secretary of the Sovereign and her permanent minister’.
The most extraordinary thing about this list was not its exhaustiveness, but its conversion of domestic authority into a substantive political equivalent. This was not the passive companionship exercised by the last ‘Prince Consort’, George of Denmark, husband to Queen Anne in the early 18th century, still less the nervously tentative presence of King Philip of Spain, the husband of Mary Tudor in the mid-16th. Albert was to be ubiquitous, watchful, omniscient; always there at the back of the chair, behind the desk; available for consultation even when not asked. What he had drafted was in some ways a throwback to the ancient privileges of the Groom of the Stool – the person, who, closest to the body of the monarch, made himself the indispensable medium through which politicians sought, and were granted, access to the sovereign. Whenever ministers were in the presence of the queen, so was Albert.
Exerting his authority by appearing not to, being a presence by confining himself to being a husband, father and secretary, was all very nice in theory but often tricky in practice. While it put little strain on the constitution, paradoxically it put a lot of strain on the royal union. Early in the marriage he had complained that he was ‘husband not master of my own
house’;
and he continued to fret that his necessarily inferior political standing somehow undermined his patriarchal role in the family, however ardently Victoria protested to the contrary. Neither of them would have disagreed with Carlyle’s repetition of the truism that it was ‘an eternal axiom [and] the law of nature that man should bear rule in the home and not the woman’. The queen, was, in fact, painfully conscious of the anomaly by which her public presence was supposed to convey, simultaneously, both wifely decorum and regal superiority. She was a conscientious and opinionated reader of state papers; but, as Albert came to have more outlets for his driven sense of civic responsibility, so Victoria came to feel that perhaps he had more of an appetite for this work than she did herself. Sometimes, especially in the chaotic years after the fall of Peel in 1846, with governments coming and going, she felt at sea politically. During these years Victoria leaned heavily on Albert’s views, changing her opinion of Peel himself. Originally she had detested him as the common manufacturer who had usurped the rightful place of dearest Lord M; but, when seen through Albert’s eyes, he turned into a figure of tragic rectitude. The terrier-like Lord John Russell had to be endured. Lord Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, whom they gigglingly nicknamed ‘Pilgerstein’ (from the German for ‘palmer’ or ‘pilgrim’), with his dyed whiskers, languid manners and cynical jingoism, they could barely tolerate and wrote off as a suspicious adventurer – a staggering underestimate of the foreign secretary’s dangerous talent. It was all very wearying. ‘I love peace and quiet’, Victoria wrote in her journal, ‘in fact I hate politics and turmoil. … Albert grows daily fonder of politics and business and is so wonderfully fit for both – such perspicacity and courage – and I grow daily to dislike them both more and more. We women are not made for governing – and if we are good women, we must dislike these masculine occupations; but there are times which force one to take an interest in them.’