A History of Britain, Volume 3 (33 page)

To crank up the publicity machine further, Besant stood outside the gates of the Fairfield Works along with her socialist colleague Herbert Burrows, handing out specially printed copies of the article to the match girls. A few days later a delegation of the girls came to their Fleet Street office to tell Besant and Burrows that they had been threatened with dismissal unless they signed a document repudiating the information contained in the article. Instead, they had gone straight to
The Link
with their story. ‘You had spoken up’, one of them told Annie. ‘We weren’t going back on you.’ A strike committee was formed to resist the threats of the company. Photographs of the plucky, photogenically salt-of-the-earth girls were taken. In another brilliant and shaming stunt, Besant and Burrows solemnly promised to pay the wages of any girls dismissed for their action. George Bernard Shaw volunteered to be treasurer and cashier of the strike fund. Some 1400 of the girls came out. Hugely embarrassed and economically damaged by both the publicity and the stoppage, Bryant and May eventually settled, and the match girls won a rise in July 1888. Annie Besant was hailed as the champion of London working women and was immediately sought after by many other constituencies in need of a campaign – boot-finishers and the rabbit-fur pullers who worked for the felt trade in even more horrible conditions than the match girls. In 1888 Annie entered the political fray through the same route used by many of her generation of ‘platform women’: election to a school board, in this case Tower Hamlets. She campaigned from a dog cart festooned with red ribbons. Incredibly, 15,296 votes were cast for her.

Could the queen – just entering her 70s – comprehend, much less sympathize with, any of this? The answer is less straightforward than one might imagine. Her chosen role, now that she was a little more in the
public
eye again, was that of matriarch, and her motherliness or grand-motherliness extended to utterances and even acts of sympathy for the victims of an increasingly plutocratic Britain. She was much more likely to erupt in rage against the immorality, idleness and general worthlessness of the upper classes than the lower classes and took special exception to those who defamed the working families of Britain by painting a portrait of them soaked in beer and beastliness. She too read
The Bitter Cry of Outcast London
(1883), by the Congregationalist minister Andrew Mearns, and was so shaken by its revelations of the one million East Enders living in horrifyingly overcrowded and insanitary conditions that she pressed Gladstone’s government to spend more of its time on the problem of housing for the poor. Her indignant pestering paid off with the setting up of a royal commission.

The last of Victoria’s many roles – after English rose, model wife and grief-stricken widow – was that of imperial matriarch. As such, she genuinely felt herself to be mother or grandmother to all her people. But in the ever expanding household of her empire there were more and more orphans; millions kept shivering on its doorstep. And, lest the queen become unduly distressed at the spectacle in the streets, there were always servants who Knew What Was Best – to close the carriage blinds until cheerful, loyal throngs could be guaranteed. It is unlikely, for example, that Victoria would have known that on 19 March 1887, in her Jubilee year, fully 27 per cent of the 29,000 working men, when asked about their last job, replied that they were unemployed. A third of those had not worked in over three months. The previous year, in February 1886, she would certainly have noticed that something was unsettled. A mass meeting of unemployed dock and building workers in Trafalgar Square had listened to radical and socialist orators denounce the heartlessness of the rich and the unscrupulousness of capitalists. On their way to Parliament Square, the processing demonstrators were assaulted by missiles thrown from the open windows of Pall Mall clubs where the well-heeled members were jeering. The procession turned into a riot. Gangs looted shops; windows were smashed and carriages overturned.

Victoria gave Gladstone, whom she thought had no idea how to keep order, a piece of her mind: ‘The Queen cannot sufficiently express her indignation at the monstrous riot which took place in London the other day and which risked people’s lives and was a momentary triumph of socialism and a disgrace to the capital.’ She consoled herself with the certainty (not entirely misplaced) that the vast majority of working people in Britain were of an unrevolutionary temper. When she went to Liverpool and Birmingham as a warm-up for the Jubilee celebrations, she
saw
nothing but adoring crowds cheering themselves hoarse, even though in Birmingham she had been warned that she would be moving among the ‘roughest’ kind of people. During the summer festivities, tens of thousands of the unemployed who were sleeping in the parks of central London were turfed out and moved on to more remote heaths away from the royal gaze. Some used the open coffins that lay around in undertakers’ yards as improvised beds. When she got to Hyde Park all Victoria saw were 30,000 poor schoolchildren, their faces well scrubbed, who each got a meat pie, a piece of cake and an orange to celebrate the great day. ‘The children sang “God Save the Queen”’, she wrote, ‘somewhat out of tune.’

All the people whom she really cared about expressed their devotion, starting with her own extended family, which had by now expanded to a small army. Exactly 50 years to the day after she had been woken, an 18-year-old in a nightdress, to be told she was queen, she rode in an open carriage from Buckingham Palace to Westminster, wearing not the state robes that she had been implored to don but her usual black and widow’s cap. In front of the carriage were 12 Indian officers, and in front of them her posterity: ‘My three sons, five sons-in-law, nine grandsons and grand-sons-in-law. Then came the carriages containing my three other daughters, three daughters-in-law, granddaughters, one granddaughter-in-law.’ The evening before, she had been surrounded by this enormous troop of royals, ‘the Princes all in uniform and the Princesses … all beautifully dressed’. Two days later a deputation from ‘The Women of England’ presented her with a gift on behalf of millions of their sex. At Eton, as Victoria was
en route
to Windsor Castle, it was the boys’ turn. ‘There was a beautiful triumphal arch, made to look exactly like part of the old College and boys dressed like Templars stood on top of it. The whole effect was beautiful, lit up by the sun of a summer evening.’ On the Isle of Wight, the general good cheer was so heartwarming that a toothy smile broke out between the plump cheeks. Her private secretary’s wife, Lady Ponsonby, claimed it happened more often than people imagined, coming ‘very suddenly in the form of a mild radiance over the whole face, a softening, a raising of the lines of the lips, a flash of kindly light beaming from the eyes’.

It would be like this for the rest of her life, through another Jubilee a decade later: the country bathed in summer evening light; the throngs on the street, much flag-waving; brass bands from barracks and collieries; a great Handel–Harty coda on the opening night of the big round Albert Hall, finished at last. But
that
reminded her that there was someone missing from the family photographs. In Westminster Abbey, in June 1887, she felt the sudden pang and wrote that ‘I sat alone (OH!) without my
beloved
husband for whom this would have been such a proud day.’ It would be another 14 years before she would be reunited with ‘him to whom I and the nation owe so much’. Sir Henry Frederick Ponsonby, her private secretary, said that there was nothing Victoria enjoyed so much as arranging funerals, and her own was no exception. This would be the one occasion when, in anticipation of her reunion, she would doff the widow’s black. When she had taken Tennyson into the mausoleum at Frogmore, ‘I observed that it was light and bright, which he thought a great point.’ So Victoria ordered an all white funeral. The queen was robed in white, her body covered with cheerful sprays of spring flowers like some bedecked virgin bride. Some of them, however, had to be tactfully placed since, along with the locks of hair, rings and many other keepsakes she had ordered to be placed in the coffin with her, there was also, embarrassingly, in her
left
hand, a photograph of John Brown; it was carefully concealed by lilies and freesias.

There was another problem, too, that Victoria had left for the managers of the obsequies. For, when Albert’s memorial effigy had been ordered from the sculptor Carlo Marochetti in 1862, Victoria had insisted on hers being made at the same time, and in the likeness of her at exactly the time the prince had been taken from her. (If anything Marochetti followed his orders too well, and made Victoria seem more like she had been when they were first married.) They were supposed to be reunited, at least in marble, at the same age they had been in the glowing prime of their union. The trouble was that this had been so long ago that no one could seem to remember where the Victoria sculpture was. It was finally discovered behind one of the walls of a renovated room in Windsor Castle. The image of a young, medieval princess lies next to her
preux chevalier
as if the clocks had stopped along with the heart of the Prince Consort.

But Albert, above all others, knew that they had not; that progress had indeed been the mainspring of his modern century. By 1900 that progress had extended beyond anything he could have imagined – and not just to science, technology and commerce, but to the lives of Britain’s women. Education and politics had begun to give the angels in the house an altogether earthier set of ambitions. And those subtle but powerful revolutionaries, the latch key, the cheque book and the bicycle, would go a long way to realizing them.

Young ladies would never be quite the same. Riding with the body of Queen Victoria from London to Windsor was Lady Lytton, the widow of one of her viceroys of India, the Earl of Lytton. Seven years later her daughter Lady Constance, in prison as a militant suffragette, hunger-striker and compulsive cell-scrubber, would make
her
statement about the
future
of women in Britain by desecrating the ‘temple of purity’ so slavishly adored by the fetishists of domestic life. Her idea was to carve the slogan of her movement on her upper body all the way up to her face. She chose a piece of broken enamel from a hatpin as her tool of mutilation, but it took her 20 minutes to carve a great ‘V’ on her breast before the prison officers caught her in the act. Never mind. ‘Con’ had made her statement. It was ‘V’ not for Victoria, but for Votes.

THE BRITISH EMPIRE
, Lord Curzon could state without fear of contradiction, was quite simply ‘the greatest force for good the world has ever seen’. And he, perhaps, was its purest personification. Curzon was, at any rate, exceptionally, almost unnaturally, white. Someone who saw him in his prime as viceroy of India described him as having ‘the complexion of a milkmaid and the stature of Apollo’. (Years later, seeing Tommies bathing in the First World War, Curzon would be astonished how white the skins of the working class could be once scraped of grime and, one supposes, blood.) The viceroy’s bearing was conspicuously erect, the ramrod posture only partly the effect of the steel and leather backbrace he had been forced to wear since adolescence. Every day, he composed himself into an expression of stoic indifference to discomfort. It was the perfect pose of paramountcy; the burden that weighed but did not crush.

Puffers of empire, like J. R. Seeley, the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, talked often and loudly of Britain’s civilizing ‘destiny’. But Curzon didn’t need lectures. He knew in his aching bones that he had been summoned to rule. To a well-intentioned friend who presumed to suggest he might be a little less unyielding in his views he retorted, ‘I was born so, you cannot change me.’ Born and raised, it seemed, for the very architecture of the Viceroy’s House in Calcutta was a virtual copy of his house in Derbyshire, Kedleston Hall. Curzon had first seen the Calcutta edifice in 1887, 11 years before he became viceroy, and declared it, morally as well as architecturally, home from home. Prophetically, Robert Adam’s 18th-century façade at Kedleston had
incorporated
a solidified version of the Arch of Constantine in Rome. So George Nathaniel Curzon, with his aquiline nose and conqueror’s jaw-line, would have been stirred, early on, like all boys of the British ruling classes steeped in classicism, by visions of imperial triumph. (Emperor Constantine, the boy prodigy would have known, was supposed to have been born in northern Britannia.) Eton, Balliol and All Souls would have done nothing to dilute this precocious sense of vocation. Nor would his appointment as private secretary to the most unapologetically imperialist of all the Victorian prime ministers: Lord Salisbury. Not content with being made under-secretary at the India Office when he was just 32, at the first possible opportunity Curzon nominated himself for the viceroyalty and, to decreasing astonishment, got the job. So when the moment to fulfil all this long-heralded potential arrived and Curzon entered his Calcutta Kedleston in 1899, with his Irish peerage fresh-minted for the occasion and his American vicereine, Mary, rich and glamorous, at his side, it must have seemed only right that he should be greeted by the bust of Augustus Caesar.

Curzon knew all about oriental empires. He had travelled the Silk Road and had written elegantly three books on Russian imperial ambitions in Central Asia and Persia. So he also knew that great Asiatic empires were expected to express their majesty in magnificent monuments. Building such edifices was not just a matter of vulgar bragging: the Raj owed it to its subjects to give them a sense of the strength and endurance of the power to which they were fortunate enough to be subjected. And it went without saying that, at the dawn of the British Empire’s fourth century, it seemed its staying power could be taken for granted, at least for the foreseeable future. And why should he not think this? The Union Jack flew over a fifth of the globe and nearly a quarter of its population – some 372 million by the turn of the century. In June 1897, 50,000 troops from every corner of the empire – Camel Corps and Gurkhas, Canadian hussars and Jamaicans in white gaiters, the procession led by the loftiest officer in the army, 6-foot-8 Captain Ames of the Horse Guards – had marched or trotted through London to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The tabloid imperialist press (above all, the
Daily Mail
) had been ecstatic; the crowds drunk with top-nation elation. Up and down the country, on 22 June schoolchildren were given the day off, herded into parks and, courtesy of the queen, given two buns and an orange. Mass singing of the national anthem was reinforced by a new ‘Imperial March’ composed for the Jubilee by Edward Elgar. The queen, now very lame, conceded just enough to the delirium to decorate her black satin with Cape ostrich feathers.