Shooting Victoria (22 page)

The aristocracy had strained to outdo one another in preparing for this ball. They bought up the metropolis's supply of the finest embroidered silk, the prescribed fabric for the occasion, as well as the costliest furs—miniver, ermine, sable—to create outrageously expensive costumes, which they embellished with their family jewels. The gold lace of Albert's tunic was edged with 1,200 pearls, and Victoria wore a pendant stomacher valued at 60,000 pounds, but the Duchess of Sutherland outdid them both, wearing jewels valued at an astronomical hundred thousand pounds. Those who did not own, rented, emptying the shelves of London's finest jewelers, paying hundreds of pounds for one night's security.

The newspapers played to the public's wild anticipation and ensured that they were able to savor every detail, dwelling for
weeks with awe and careful calculation on the lavish specifics of the royal and aristocratic outfits. As it happens, the balls coincided with a startling innovation in the press: on 14 May 1842, the
Illustrated London News
—the first fully illustrated newsmagazine—published its very first issue, and its first full layout covered the
bal masque
. In a sense, Britain experienced its first multimedia event—and hailed its first media monarch.

The contrast between these highly publicized, opulent
haute monde
fantasies and the hard reality of life in Britain during this year could not but strike everyone forcefully. This was
1842
, after all, the hungriest year of the “Hungry Forties”: the year of the worst industrial recession of the nineteenth century. A series of bad harvests, dating back to the thirties, had raised food prices and the overall cost of living. The Corn Laws, which guaranteed high tariffs on foreign grain, helped keep those prices up. A nationwide economic slowdown hit everywhere, but hit the northern industrial towns particularly hard, leading there to massive unemployment and depressed wages for those who could still find work. Crime rates and pauperism skyrocketed.

Chartism, the working-class political movement which had come to life in the first year of Victoria's reign, reached a peak in membership and agitation in this year. On 2 May, just ten days before the
bal masque
, the Chartists had, with banners and bands and great hope, trundled an immense petition through the crowd-lined streets of London to Parliament. The petition, signed by 3,317,752—well over a tenth of the entire population of Britain—was too large to fit through the members' entrance, and so was brought in pieces into the chamber, where it lay in a massive 671-pound pile on the floor. In their petition, the Chartists claimed that the current misery facing working people was the direct consequence of a corrupt Parliament that acted solely in the interest of the upper classes, a corruption they claimed could only end with working-class participation in government. The petition lashed out at the (to the Chartists) obscene gap in income between
rich and poor, targeting the Queen in particular: “whilst your petitioners have learned that her Majesty receives daily for her private use the sum of 164
l
. 17
s
. 10
d
., they have also ascertained that many thousands of the families of labourers are only in receipt of 3¾
d
. per head per day.” A motion to have six Chartists speak at the bar of the Commons about the sufferings of the poor was soundly defeated, and the petition itself was never considered. This crushing of hopes, coupled with sheer hunger, bore bitter fruit: by the time the Queen attended the ball at Her Majesty's, riots were already erupting in the Midlands and the North. The Queen's government was about to confront a long, hot summer of violent agitation.

Also during this month of May 1842, Parliament released its first report on the employment of children, over two thousand pages with illustrations, spelling out in sickening detail the dire physical and moral conditions that children as young as six faced in Britain's mines: half or fully naked creatures laboring as many as sixteen hours a day, often in utter darkness, chained with “dog-belts” to coal carts, crawling up and down two-foot-high passages for hours, subject to the physical and at times sexual abuse of adult miners. The newspapers culled the reports and presented to their readers the darkest, most painful details, in articles in the same newspapers that detailed the luxurious ball-costumes of the rich. The “Condition of England Question,” in the parlance of the day, was never more apparent, and never more pressing.

The popular satirical magazine
Punch
bitterly contrasted the “purple dress” of the reveling rich with the “cere-cloth” or shroud of the destitute. And the Chartist newspaper
Northern Star
scathingly compared Victoria to Rome's most vicious emperor: “The most detested tyrant whose deeds history hands down to posterity, set fire to Rome that he might enjoy the sight of a city in conflagration, and while the flames were raging, he amused himself by playing on the violin. We know of no nearer approximation to the unmatched cruelty of the monster Nero, than the conduct of the British Court and aristocracy, in thus reveling amidst the most
superfluous waste, while the more humble of their countrymen are doomed to starve for bread, by the laws these same Nobility have framed for their own advantage.”

Victoria, however, did not plan these balls simply to escape the hard reality her subjects faced. Rather, she was attempting to confront the Condition of England Question directly, attempting to aid the most miserable of the poor by encouraging luxurious consumption, to reawaken dormant industry by creating need.

She wished to assist one particular industry with these balls. For years—long before the present recession—the silk-weaving trade of Spitalfields had become synonymous with London's most grinding poverty. The weavers had once been among the aristocracy of labor, but the economic forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution had strangled their trade nearly to the point of extinction. Competition, for one thing, was killing the weavers: they had once enjoyed protection in the form of a tariff against foreign goods, but this had been revoked in the 1820s, and imports of cheaper French silks, generally acknowledged to be the finest in Europe, cut into their trade, as did rougher silks woven on the handlooms of northern England, cheaper because weavers there could survive upon a lower wage. And mechanized looms were beginning to match in quality the work of Spitalfields handlooms. The present recession, and the subsequent drop in demand for the weavers' luxury product, had simply made a bad situation worse. Charles Dickens a few years later described the under- and unemployed weavers of Spitalfields as “sallow” and “unshorn,” living a miserable existence in London's most densely populated neighborhood, suffering from the highest mortality rate: Spitalfields, he claimed, “is now the grave of modern Manufacturing London.”

The Queen hoped to set the Spitalfields handlooms clacking away again by requiring that the costumes, the dresses, and the waistcoats for the ball be spun exclusively from Spitalfields silk. It was a plan that speaks volumes about the Queen's—and Prince Albert's—political and social sensibilities. They both genuinely
cared about the sufferings of the poor: for Albert, in particular, improving the lot of the poor was becoming a mission. But they were hardly egalitarians; their ideal society depended on strict social demarcation. The pleasure of the rich would enable the content—and busy—life of the laborer.

In the short term, the Queen's plan worked. In April and May of this year, the Spitalfields weavers had as much work as they could handle. But in the long term, nothing could halt the decline of that pre-modern industry. Dickens knew that the effect was as a drop in a bucket: “the weavers dine for a day or two, and, the ball over, they relapse into prowling about the streets, leaning against posts, and brooding on door-steps.” The organizers of the ball at Her Majesty's Theatre hoped for a more lasting support for the weavers: a school of design for their children built on the ball's proceeds—but the school was to fail. Improving the dismal economy of 1842 depended on more than a party or two, however extravagant.

Despite the limited economic impact of the balls, Victoria scored a symbolic
coup
with them, demonstrating with an enormous amount of publicity that her own interests were completely intertwined with the interests of her people. As the
Times
put it, the ball at the theatre was an occasion in which the Queen associated “publicly and personally with her subjects in promoting a common object.” And Victoria was fortunate in having a government and prime minister to aid her in achieving her object. Robert Peel had taken office the previous August, and, since then, Victoria was slowly warming to the man she had found so “insufferably cold and officious” during the bedchamber crisis. Albert was very largely responsible for the change; it was Albert, fearing a repeat of the crisis, who had, with the help of his secretary, George Anson, smoothed Peel's path to power, negotiating an amicable solution to the problem of the Queen's ladies: Peel would make his suggestions, but the Queen would make the appointments.

Albert found a kindred spirit in Peel. Both men were generally perceived as haughty and aloof in public, but both were actually
deeply shy, their shyness born of the unshakable sense that they were outsiders in British society. Albert was a foreigner in a society ever conscious of its own national superiority, and Peel was the son of a manufacturer amongst a class-conscious elite. Albert discovered in Peel a guide and mentor; indeed, in Peel he discovered one of the two Britons he could honestly call a friend. (Anson was the other.) Peel offered Albert an entry into public affairs: as one of his first acts as Prime Minister, Peel appointed Albert president of the Fine Arts Commission. Victoria later said that Albert found a “second father” in Peel—and, she might have added, a better one. Peel in return found in Albert a path to the good graces of the Queen. And as Victoria began more and more to adopt Albert's political perspective, her respect for Peel would grow—would, indeed, grow considerably with the events of the coming weeks.

There was a world of difference between Victoria's old prime minister and her new one. Her beloved Lord Melbourne, for all his avuncular warmth and charm, was a complete cynic who believed poverty an inescapable reality in society, and therefore impossible to manage effectively through legislation. He practiced a negative
laissez-faire
in his government, rarely concerning himself with the political affairs of his ministers, and putting off dealing with problems whenever he could. He once told Victoria “all depends on the urgency of a thing. If a thing is very urgent, you can always find time for it; but if a thing can be put off, well then you put it off.” Melbourne was the last Georgian prime minister, yearning for a country and a way of life that was quickly passing. Peel, on the other hand, was the first modern PM, always looking forward, fully aware that the momentous material developments of his time forced equally momentous social change; he came into office committed to reform. Certainly, the leader of the Tories was no radical: he was a social conservative and a true believer in the class hierarchy, dead set against the Reform Bill of 1832, for example, which extended the franchise to the middle class. He certainly had no objection to the privilege and luxury of the rich; he attended the
bal masque
,
dressed as a figure from a van Dyck painting. Nevertheless—and despite his perpetually icy demeanor—he was an empathetic humanist and a committed social activist. That commitment drove him while in the Home Office in the 1820s to simplify the criminal codes and to form the Metropolitan Police. And now he was seeking to legislate social change through a budget that was nothing short of revolutionary. He proposed the introduction of the first-ever income tax in peacetime—a tax of seven percent, to be levied on all incomes over 150 pounds. Moreover, he proposed massive overall tariff reduction. Together, these changes would have the effect of limiting indirect taxation, which burdened all including the poor, and making up for the loss of revenues by taxing the middle and wealthier classes. It was a budget informed by his growing belief in free trade, calculated not simply to redistribute wealth—but to
create
wealth.

On this Thursday night at Her Majesty's Theatre, positioned directly above the pit, Victoria had the best view in the house of the energetic dancers below. A barrier had been erected beyond the pavilion's base to allow space for a chosen few to trip out waltzes and quadrilles before their monarch. The crowd, however, watched not the dancers but the royal pavilion, as with “mute up-gazing curiosity” they observed Victoria perform the rituals of state, alternating between observing her subjects with greeting their special guests: the Queen's uncle Cambridge and his family, the Lady Patronesses of the ball, and the Duke of Wellington.

All of it—the court ceremony, the omnipresent silk and satin, the crush of spectators in this very theatre—all of it must have seemed familiar to Victoria. It had all happened five years before, at the beginning of June 1837—a week after her eighteenth birthday. This place was the King's Theatre, then, for William IV was suffering through the last month of his reign. The Spitalfields weavers were then as now experiencing horrible destitution, and to aid them William and his queen Adelaide had come up with the idea of a
ball, everyone attending in Spitalfields silk. Then, too, the pit was covered over, the walls were festooned with multicolored, shiny Spitalfields fabric, decorated with arms and armor. Adelaide and William were expected to be the guests of honor, but William was dying (and would die in three weeks), so Victoria took his place, arriving amid “deafening plaudits” to play the same role that she played on this night. But if the similarities between that night and this were striking to Victoria, so were the differences. Five years before, she was accompanied by her mother and attended to by John Conroy and Lady Flora Hastings; her uncle the Duke of Cumberland was seen to be “very constant in his attention” to his Royal niece. Cumberland was now king in Hanover, his despotic ways finding much greater favor among the Hanoverians than among the British. Flora Hastings was of course dead, and Conroy—an exile in Berkshire—as good as dead to Victoria. Her mother of course was still at her side—but the tenor of their relationship had changed beyond recognition: now, Victoria was in control. And Victoria's world had changed absolutely, because of the man who was
not
there five years before, but who stood beside her now, towering over her in his Field Marshal's uniform dripping with five orders of knighthood, his power implicit in the enormous jackboots he wore (attire that the more proper of the ladies in attendance considered not quite
de rigueur
for the ballroom): Victoria's all-in-all, her Albert.