Shooting Victoria (36 page)

Seclusion with Albert and her children, of course, meant that her regular airings from Buckingham Palace decreased dramatically. Indeed, even when she was in residence in London, she and
Albert were more likely to walk in the privacy of the palace gardens than ride out together. Would-be Oxfords could no longer assume that Victoria would ride regularly even when she was in residence. The Queen's ever-increasing urge to remove herself and her family from direct public view did nothing to diminish her popularity. She was paradoxically much more in the eyes of her subjects than any of her predecessors, because of the rise of a cheap illustrated press, beginning with the
Illustrated London News
in 1842. Now the royal couple, the royal children, the royal residences, and every royal event were a part of the shared experience of her subjects of all classes. These illustrations were inexpensive enough to adorn the walls of the poorest. Victoria no longer had to travel among her people to be seen by them. Indeed, it was in the public revelations of her private life that she saw as the key to her ever-growing popularity. “The papers … are most kind and gratifying,” she wrote to Uncle Leopold in 1844; “they say no Sovereign was more loved than I am (I am bold enough to say) and that, from our happy domestic home—which gives such a good example.” A new and enduring idea of monarchy had emerged: the royal family as the ideal family.

She owed it all to Albert: Albert had opened her eyes to the key to happiness, and then had given it to her. And yet she could not have been blind to the disjunction between her private happiness and the public turbulence of the 1840s.

Life had indeed improved for most after that dark year 1842. Industry grew by leaps and bounds. The population, employment, exports, and gross national product all shot up. The railways were the most visible manifestation of this reality-shaking growth, tearing up the old cities, revolutionizing trade and mobility, soaking up surplus labor, and making and breaking fortunes. In 1847, to be sure, the speculative bubble burst and a subsequent run on the banks led to a financial crisis. Recovery, however, was swift, and Britain was poised for the great boom of the 1850s.

And yet. Amidst all the growth existed pockets of dire poverty and hunger; the Hungry Forties was a decade that well deserved its
name. In spite of the fact that, economically, 1842 was a turning point, and the economy grew dramatically after that, there existed all this time pockets of terrible suffering—suffering that was brought to the attention of an often-sympathetic but often-stymied public, leading to finger-pointing, handwringing, the shedding of a few sentimental tears, and usually little in the way of remedy. In 1843, Elizabeth Barrett Browning caused a sensation with her “Cry of the Children,” laying bare the soul-crushed existences of boys and girls denied their youth by the harrowing demands of factory labor. Four months later, in a Christmas issue of
Punch
, Thomas Hood caused an even greater sensation with “The Song of the Shirt,” a poem about London's starving piecework seamstresses, living in low-wage slavery so that their employers, London's slop-sellers or cheap clothing dealers, could undercut the competition:

Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!

Oh, men, with Mothers and Wives!

It is not linen you're wearing out,

But human creatures' lives!

Stitch—stitch—stitch,

In poverty, hunger and dirt,

Sewing at once, with a double thread,

A Shroud as well as a Shirt.

And later in 1849, Henry Mayhew would begin publishing his evocative exploration of the hidden world of London's working poor in the
Morning Chronicle
. The poorer of the “two nations” to which Benjamin Disraeli referred in his 1845 work
Sybil, or the Two Nations
, had never been more a part of the awareness of the wealthy—but never, at the same time, was poverty more accepted as an unfortunate and unalterable fact of life. Political economy might have been the dismal science, but it was indeed a science in the minds of the best thinkers of the 1840s, its speculations to them dogma.
Laissez-faire
ruled. Even radical reformers opposed
attempts by the government to assist the poor: that, according to the science, would only make things worse.

The worst hunger of all, that decade, struck Ireland with a vengeance—and completely by surprise—in 1845. No one knew exactly where the fungal disease
Phytophthora infestans
, or potato blight, came from; the disease had spread across northern Europe, and, in mid-September, reached Ireland: in a month, a third of that country's overwhelmingly predominant crop transmogrified into a stinking, inedible goo. Prime Minister Robert Peel quickly understood the enormity of the crisis and tried to meet it, ordering £100,000 worth of Indian corn bought with government funds and sent from the United States. Moreover, he came to a momentous decision about the Corn Laws, which protected British farmers by regulating foreign grain imports—and which, many argued, kept the price of food artificially high. Support for the Corn Laws had been fundamental Tory doctrine. But Peel decided that the Corn Laws must be repealed.

It was a decision that destroyed Peel politically, as the majority of his own party turned on him ferociously. Peel could only hope to pass repeal of the Corn Laws by resigning and letting Lord John Russell and the Whigs handle the problem, or by introducing the bill himself and splitting his own party irreparably. When a majority of his own cabinet would not support repeal, then, he resigned. The Queen called upon Russell to form a cabinet. He was unable to do so, and Victoria, with a sense of relief—for Peel had in his own way grown as close to Victoria as Melbourne had—then recalled Peel, who promptly formed a cabinet committed to repeal. From that moment, more than half his party turned on him, vowing to bring him down at any cost. Lord Derby in the House of Lords led this Protectionist faction, and Benjamin Disraeli and George Bentinck in the House of Commons took upon themselves the roles of Peel's chief tormentors, ferociously and regularly attacking Peel's character as well as his policy. Disraeli “hacked and mangled Peel with the most unsparing severity, and positively tortured his victim,” Charles Greville wrote of a speech
that nearly brought Peel to tears. Ultimately, Peel won—and lost: on 25 June 1846, the same night that the Corn Law repeal passed in the House of Lords, the Protectionists in Commons voted against their principles to defeat a coercion bill for turbulent Ireland, in order to bring down Peel's government. Four days later, Peel resigned. Though John Russell and his Whigs were in the minority—and, after a general election, remained in the minority—the cataclysmic split of the Tories, and the support Peel's faction, the “Peelites,” gave the Whigs, kept Russell's government securely in power. And Russell's government still ruled three years later when his ministers threw dinners for the Queen's thirtieth birthday. Lord Wellington was bitter about the cause of Peel's fall, grumbling “rotten potatoes have done it all; they put Peel in his damned fright.”

Peel's downfall was a personal tragedy, and a greater one for starving Ireland. For while the chief architect of relief for Ireland, Charles Trevelyan, permanent undersecretary of the Treasury, worked under Peel as well as Russell, with the Whigs he found kindred spirits and full support for a grim
laissez-faire
response to Irish hunger. Under the Whigs, Trevelyan insisted that Irish pay for their own relief. He continued importing food, but demanded that local relief committees buy the food at market price. He instituted a program of public works—but insisted that they be paid for locally, with the help of government loans. When it became clear that the blight had utterly destroyed the potato crop of 1846, he allowed public works to continue, but government loans ceased completely. During the unusually bitterly cold winter months of early 1847, as thousands starved and fever ravaged the population, the government decided upon a radical change of policy: they would halt public works altogether, and feed the starving with soup kitchens, paid for largely from private charity. Victoria contributed £2,000 to one of these charities.
*
In a few months, the soup kitchens closed
and charity dried up. The British were by then frankly tired of this interminable famine, and most were certain that the indolent Irish were responsible for their own plight. “The great evil with which we have to contend,” declared Trevelyan at the end of 1846, is “not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.” Victoria and Albert, originally deeply sympathetic to the plight of the Irish, concurred with this assessment, Albert writing at around the same time, in a memorandum, “The state of Ireland is most alarming and seems quite hopeless as every attempt on the part of the Government to relieve it, is turned by the Irish themselves to bad account.” In June 1847, the British government essentially washed its hands of the problem by reforming the Irish poor law to fix the costs of relieving the poor entirely upon the poor law unions—the workhouses—of Ireland.

And the famine went on. The crop of 1847–8 was healthy but scarce: amid general starvation and destitution, few healthy seed potatoes were to be found, and fewer planted. The crop of 1848–9 was another total failure, and the suffering during the first few months of 1849 was among the worst of all. In the end, one million died: one out of eight of the Irish population. An equal number emigrated: many to the slums of English cities, but most to the United States. Most brought with them undying hatred for the British and a desire for revenge that would in years to come lead to bitter consequences for Britain—would indeed come to threaten Victoria personally.

Indeed, Irish rage had already burst out a year before, in July 1848, in spite of debilitating fever and hunger.

The spark was the February Revolution in Paris, which in two days toppled Louis-Philippe from the throne. (He and his family sought refuge with the Queen; she put him up at Claremont.) The revolutionary fever spread like wildfire; within weeks Prussia had granted a new, liberal constitution, the King of Bavaria abdicated in favor of his son, and in Austria the chancellor Metternich was
forced to flee—to England, of course—and the Emperor forced to give concessions. Austria's Italian domains rose up, as did the rest of the country. Victoria's royal palaces became aristocratic refugee camps.

The revolutionary spark took fire in England, where the Chartists, in decline since the hot summer of 1842, burst back to life under the leadership of the movement's fiery and charismatic agitator-in-chief, Feargus O'Connor. Rioting erupted in Glasgow and London in March. That month, the Chartists announced that they planned to march from Kennington Common, south of the river, to present the People's Charter to Parliament for the third time—and planned to accompany the petition with a threatening procession of 200,000 people. The government betrayed the depth of its alarm with the enormity of its response. The troops in the capital were doubled and stationed out of sight at strategic points across the city, concentrating on the bridges over the Thames, upon which artillery was trained. Eighty-five thousand men were sworn in as special constables—a government masterstroke, ensuring that the middle class, unlike the French middle class, would remain squarely with the state. (One of these constables was Louis Napoleon, who had not yet taken advantage of the French revolution to return to his country, get elected president, and then make himself emperor.) On the advice of Russell and the Home Secretary, Victoria and Albert and their family (including 22-day-old Princess Louise) slipped through the pouring rain onto a train at closely guarded Waterloo Station, and decamped to Osborne.

The revolutionary tenth of April turned out to be a complete bust. Though estimates of the crowd differ widely, nowhere near the 400,000 which Feargus O'Connor expected to come actually showed up. O'Connor, alarmed by the military preparations, lost his own fire on this day. Upon his arrival at Kennington Common, he was called into a pub by Commissioner Mayne and told that he could hold his meeting, but that a monster procession to Parliament was out of the question. O'Connor meekly agreed, mounted
the rostrum to ask the crowd to disperse, and took the petition to Parliament himself in a cab. The petition itself only earned ridicule as it was found (after a suspiciously quick count) to have less than a third of the six million signatures claimed, and many of those signatures were found to be fraudulent, including the Queen's as “Victoria Rex.” Though the movement percolated on through the summer, the threat had passed. “We had our revolution yesterday, and it went up in smoke,” Albert wrote to Stockmar.

He added, however, “in Ireland things look still more serious.” There, revolution fermented as spring turned to summer. Daniel O'Connell had died in 1847, and his non-violent movement to repeal the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland had been eclipsed by that of Young Ireland, a group who differed from the O'Connellites in their willingness to use physical force to repeal the union. The February revolution in France electrified Young Ireland as it had the Chartists. “The shock awakened mankind,” proclaimed the movement's leader, William Smith O'Brien. “Those who believed themselves to be weak now felt themselves to be strong.”

Young Ireland began to promote rebellion openly, and formed the Irish Confederation—clubs across the island with the avowed aim of preparing for insurrection. Lord Clarendon, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, was deeply alarmed by all this activity, sending Cassandra cries to the government, pleading for a suspension of
habeas corpus
in Ireland. When Parliament did just that at the end of July, the leaders of Young Ireland were faced with a stark decision: passivity and arrest, or outright rebellion. Smith O'Brien feared the worst, but felt bound by honor to raise an insurrection. Dublin was a British armed camp; the south was more auspicious for rebellion. Smith O'Brien thus tramped through the southern towns and countryside, finding large crowds of poorly armed but ardent adherents at every turn—and demonstrating at every turn his utter inability to lead a revolution, tenaciously holding to his belief in the sanctity of private property before would-be rebels who had none. When an excited crowd of six thousand began to build barricades
in the village of Mullinahone, Smith O'Brien forbade them to fell trees without the permission of the owners of the nearby estates. To another crowd, hungry and ready to despoil in order to eat, Smith O'Brien ordered them instead to return home, provide four days' provisions for themselves, and return the next day. “This announcement gave a death-blow to the entire movement,” stated a witness. The crowds melted away as fast as they formed.