Shooting Victoria (43 page)

On this very day that the Queen visited her dying uncle Adolphus, the debate had reached its midpoint and was the talk of the nation. The previous Monday, radical (and highly nationalist) M.P. John Arthur Roebuck had introduced the motion “that the principles on which the foreign policy of Her Majesty's government has been regulated have been such as were calculated to maintain the honour and dignity of this country.” On that night and the next, members dissected into the early hours of the morning Palmer-ston's role in the Greek affair. His opponents called attention to the unfounded or exaggerated claims of that man of dubious character, Don Pacifico, and decried the loss of British prestige that resulted from the incident; his proponents waxed indignant about iniquitous Greece and its atrocities against Don Pacifico and others: Britain had had no choice but to intervene. One supporter raged about the vast right-wing conspiracy combining English conservatives and European despots, bent on bringing Palmerston and liberalism down: a vote against Palmerston was a vote for “Cossack domination.” The last speaker on the first night, James Graham—once Home Secretary in Peel's government—analyzed every major Foreign Office decision of the last four years and concluded that Palmerston's heavy-handed tactics had resulted in fiasco throughout Europe; Palmerston's actions had toppled Louis-Philippe from his throne, led to the failed uprisings of 1848, and were responsible for the current tide of reaction across the continent.

At 9:45 on the second night of the debate, Palmerston rose to defend himself. He gave the speech of his life. Speaking for four and a half hours with few notes and no pause for the water or oranges set beside him, he covered himself rhetorically with the British flag, responding to Graham's attacks country by country, demonstrating
that he had spread the light of liberal reform throughout Europe. In doing this, he had simply enforced the will of the British people, and attacking him personally made no sense: “It is like shooting a policeman,” Palmerston claimed. “As long as England is England, as long as the English people are animated by the feelings and spirit and opinions which they possess, you may knock down twenty Foreign Ministers one after another, but depend upon it, none will keep the place who does not act upon the same principles.” His policy had bettered mankind: advancing civilization, promoting peace, and augmenting prosperity. In his peroration, he whipped up the chamber by appealing to the unparalleled power and greatness of the British empire: “… as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity when he could say
Civis Romanus sum
*
; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.”

He finished to thunderous cheers at 2:20 in the morning. Victoria, reading the speech the next day, could not help but be impressed: “a most brilliant speech,” she admitted in her journal. Russell was ecstatic about it—“one of the most masterly ever delivered,” he wrote—and was now optimistic that the government would win the vote. He was, however, not sure that his ministry would survive, informing the Queen that they needed a sizeable majority—forty votes—if they were to remain in office. After Palmerston spoke, the debate had adjourned, to recommence this evening; indeed, as Victoria prepared to return to Buckingham Palace from Cambridge House, the House of Commons had already been in session for two hours. The Stranger's Gallery was packed more tightly than ever, would-be spectators spilling out of the chamber. Lord John was still to speak, as were Gladstone, Disraeli, and Peel. The Queen was in the eye of the political storm, and her feelings about her own government were decidedly mixed.

Prince Albert, meanwhile, was in the midst of his own tempest, suddenly locked in a battle to keep the most important project of his life alive and to keep his reputation intact. His and Henry Cole's idea a year before of a truly international exhibition had now taken on life, largely thanks to Albert, who was now chair of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition. (This afternoon he had chaired a meeting until six, leaving the Queen to set out to the Cambridges without him.) The project had become to him something of far greater magnitude to him than a simple display of manufactures. Last March he had inspired 136 British mayors and 18 foreign ambassadors with his speech at an elaborate dinner at the Lord Mayor's mansion with his elevated vision of the Exhibition. “We are living at a period of the most wonderful transition,” he told them, “which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which indeed all history points;
the realization of the Unity of mankind
!” The Exhibition was to be nothing less than the manifestation of this millennial moment: “a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.”

Albert acted as if he carried the world upon his shoulders, devoting an immense amount of time and energy overseeing every aspect of the planning. He “appears to be almost the only person who has considered the subject both as a whole and in its details,” wrote Lord Granville, the vice-chair of the Royal Committee. “The whole thing would fall to pieces, if he left it to itself.” The strain upon him showed. In January, Victoria wrote to Stockmar “The Prince's sleep is again as bad as ever, and he looks very ill of an evening.” And now, at the end of June 1850, opposition had grown to the point that failure seemed imminent.

Nothing about the project seemed to please the public. Funding, for one thing, was not forthcoming: the Exhibition was supposed to be supported by public subscription, and while Albert had given £500 and Victoria £1,000, no one had come along with the truly substantial donation needed to attract others, and the fear arose that
the Treasury would have to take up the burden. And then there was the site. Albert had from the first fixed upon Hyde Park for the Exhibition; he had studied the alternatives and was now absolutely committed to that choice: it would be held there or not be held at all. The residents of Knightsbridge adjoining the site raised a stink about the noise, the inevitable invasion of riffraff, the damage to the Park, and the decline in the value of their property. Dismay about the project spread to the rest of the West End, the upper crust bemoaning the certain loss of their favorite airing ground, Rotten Row. When, earlier in the month, the plans of the Exhibition building became public, however, the complainings of the few transformed into a full-throated, universal outcry.

The Building Committee for the Exhibition, in a classic demonstration of the broth-destroying propensity of too many cooks, consisted of three highly celebrated architects (Charles Barry, Charles Robert Cockerell, and Thomas Leverton Donaldson) and three highly celebrated engineers (Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and William Cubitt), as well as two nobles (the Duke of Buccleuch and the Earl of Ellesmere). These eight held a competition for the design of the Exhibition building and netted 245 plans. They scrutinized these, rejected the lot, and produced a plan of their own, for which they “freely”—in both senses of the term—“availed themselves of the most valuable suggestions” of the rejected plans. The committee's design was largely Brunel's, and might have showed his genius as an engineer, but as a work of architecture, it was an ugly mess: a sheet-iron dome 200 feet in diameter and 150 feet high (“a monster balloon in the process of inflation,” according to one angry letter-writer) rising above a squat and sprawling warehouse that would take an estimated 19 million bricks to build: a decidedly permanent solution for a building supposed to be temporary.

Attacks upon the site flooded the papers: the building was an eyesore and an impractical and destructive imposition upon Hyde Park. The
Times
took up the chorus, its attacks reaching a crescendo on this very day, 27 June 1850, when the paper contained not one
but two letters railing against the committee's design, as well as an editorial proclaiming the plan an “insanity,” and threatening Albert personally that his reputation would suffer irreparably if the Commission went ahead with these plans: he “would become associated in the minds of the people not with a benefit, but with an injury; not with an extension of our industry, but with a curtailment of the recreation and an injury to the health of the metropolis.”

The outrage was at its height in Parliament as well, and moves were afoot there to scuttle the Exhibition altogether. In the House of Lords, the quixotic Whig-Radical Lord Brougham had for months railed against the Hyde Park site: any building there would be a “tubercle” on “the lungs of this huge metropolis.” Brougham found in the House of Commons an unlikely ally in the arch-reactionary and xenophobic Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorpe, who warred against anything with the slightest whiff of the modern with such sputtering virulence that he had become
Punch
magazine's favorite figure of fun. He had opposed the 1832 Reform Bill; he was dead set against the railways; he despised Free Trade: and therefore he was naturally opposed to the Exhibition, which he claimed was “one of the greatest humbugs, one of the greatest frauds, one of the greatest absurdities ever known”—a magnet to attract to London the dregs of foreign lands: Papists, thieves, anarchists, and secret societies bent on assassinating the Queen. Usually a strident voice in the wilderness, Sibthorpe must have been amazed to find himself at the spearhead of a popular movement. Both he and Brougham made clear that they intended to have Parliament reconsider the whole idea of the Exhibition.

Albert was frantic. “The Exhibition is now attacked furiously by
The Times
,” he wrote to Stockmar, “and the House of Commons is going to drive us out of the Park. There is immense excitement on the subject. If we are driven out of the Park the work is done for!!” He could rely upon only one man to set things right—his one friend in England and his champion in Parliament: Robert Peel.

*
The 10th Hussars, known as the “Prince of Wales's Own,” was the regiment of Victoria's uncle George, and would be that of her son the Prince of Wales.

*
The Startins' Savile Row home became, over a century later, Apple Studios, its rooftop the site of the Beatles' final concert.

*
Peel, Russell, Stanley (that is, Lord Derby), Aberdeen, Palmerston, Disraeli, and Gladstone.

*
That is, “I am a citizen of Rome.”

seventeen

T
HE
M
OST
D
ISGRACEFUL AND
C
OWARDLY
T
HING
T
HAT
H
AS
E
VER
B
EEN
D
ONE

R
obert Pate had jostled his way nearly to the front of the excited crowd awaiting the Queen's departure; only one man stood between him and the gate, and that man had refused to give way, throwing out his arm every time Pate tried to pass him. No matter; Pate was close enough to the gate to see that the courtyard of Cambridge House had sprung to life, and a small parade was forming to convey Victoria back to the Palace. Two footmen assisted the Queen, Fanny Jocelyn, and the three royal children into the open carriage. Victoria sat at the right rear, and Fanny sat directly across from her. The footmen then clambered up to the rumble seat in the back, Victoria's sergeant-footman Robert Renwick taking his seat directly behind the Queen, where
he had been when he had witnessed Hamilton's attempt the year before. Two mounted outriders took up their position before the carriage's four horses. Colonel Charles Grey, who would usually position himself by the Queen's side, realizing that the gate was simply too narrow to allow his horse to pass through with the carriage, instead took up the rear.
*

Grey could not be comfortable in this position, and he must have viewed the sizeable crowd on the other side of the gate apprehensively. Usually, one or two policemen assigned to Palace duty would be on hand to control the situation: when alerted that the Queen would be going out, they were under orders to get there first and patrol the area. The Queen had not planned this visit to her ailing uncle, however; no one had alerted the police; he, the outriders, and the footmen were the Queen's only security.

The little procession clattered out of the courtyard, the outriders bisecting the crowd into two cheering clusters. They trotted to the edge of the street and then stopped, awaiting their opportunity to make the turn onto busy Piccadilly. Victoria's carriage halted on the pavement side of the gate, trapping Colonel Grey in the courtyard and leaving the Queen unprotected, and close enough to the nearest in the crowd to touch them. Proximity and immobility rendered her instantly nervous: such a situation, she later wrote, “always makes me think more than usually of the possibility of an attempt being made on me.” She surveyed those beside her, and recognized a man she had often seen in the parks: fair hair, a military moustache—and a small stick in his hand: the man who was always bowing so deeply to her.