Читать книгу Queen Victoria: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 18

‘What was called an Altar was covered with sandwiches, bottles of wine, etc.’

AFTER A DISTURBED NIGHT in which she had ‘a feeling that something awful was going to happen tomorrow’, the Queen was woken up at four o’clock in the morning in her bedroom at Buckingham Palace by the sound of guns in the Park, and ‘could not get much sleep afterwards on account of the noise of the people, bands etc. etc.’. It was Thursday, 28 June 1838 and she was to be crowned that day in Westminster Abbey. Thousands of people had travelled to London the day before until, as the diarist Mary Frampton told her mother, there were ‘stoppages in every street…Hundreds of people waiting…to get lifts on the railway in vain…Not a fly or cab to be had for love or money. Hackney coaches £8 or £12 each, double to foreigners.’¹

‘The uproar, the confusion, the crowd, the noise are indescribable,’ Charles Greville confirmed. ‘Horsemen, footmen, carriages squeezed, jammed, intermingled, the pavement blocked up with timbers [for the spectators’ stands], hammering and knocking and falling fragments stunning the ears and threatening the head…The town all mob, thronging, bustling, gaping and gazing at everything, at anything, or at nothing. The Park one vast encampment, with banners floating on the tops of tents and still the roads are covered, the railroads loaded with arriving multitudes.’ He found the racket ‘uncommonly tiresome’, yet he had to concede that the ‘great merit of this Coronation is that so much has been done for the people [the theatres, for example, and many other places of entertainment were to be free that night]. To amuse and interest them seems to have been the principal object.’²

While not prepared to spend as much as the lavish sum of £243,000 which Parliament had voted for the coronation of King George IV, the Government were prepared to ensure that the ceremony in the Abbey and its attendant processions and celebrations were conducted with appropriate grandeur and an eye to the enjoyment of the people. £70,000 was deemed a reasonable sum, £20,000 more than had been spent on the coronation of King William IV.

Much attention was paid to the pretty dresses of the Queen’s eight young, unmarried trainbearers, the Queen’s own three different robes, the new uniforms of the Warders of the Tower and the Yeomen of the Guard, the regalia to be used in the various rites of the Abbey service, and the crown which had been used for the coronation of George IV but which had to be modified for Queen Victoria’s much smaller head before being reset with diamonds, pearls, rubies, emeralds and sapphires.

‘It was a fine day,’ the Queen, having been up since seven o’clock, wrote in her journal, recalling the long ride to the Abbey in the state coach drawn by eight cream horses, down gravelled streets lined with policemen and soldiers, up Constitution Hill to Hyde Park Corner, then down Piccadilly, St James’s and Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, accompanied by the Duchess of Sutherland, her Mistress of the Robes, and the Earl of Albemarle, the Master of the Horse.

‘The crowds of people exceeded what I have ever seen,’ the Queen continued her account. ‘Many as there were the day I went to the City, it was nothing – nothing to the multitude, the millions of my loyal subjects, who were assembled in every spot to witness the Procession. Their good humour and excessive loyalty was beyond everything, and I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation. I was alarmed at times for fear that the people would be crushed and squeezed on account of the tremendous rush and pressure.’³ But she kept smiling and bowing from side to side.

Preceded by the Royal Huntsmen, the Yeomen Prickers and Foresters and the Yeomen of the Guard, and followed by an escort of cavalry, the state coach drew up outside the Abbey door to be greeted by thunderous cheers. Inside the Abbey there were more cheers for the Queen and clapping, too, for Lord Melbourne and for the Duke of Wellington and for Wellington’s opponent in the Peninsular War, Marshal Soult, created Duke of Dalmatia by Napoleon and appointed French Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of St James’s by Louis-Philippe, King of the French. ‘Soult was so much cheered, both in and out of the Abbey,’ commented the dandiacal merchant, Thomas Raikes, ‘that he was completely overcome. He has since publicly said, “C’est le plus beau jour de ma vie. It shows that the English believe I have always fought loyally.” In the Abbey he seized the arm of his aide-de-camp, quite overpowered, and exclaimed, “This is truly a great people.”’⁴

Wellington was predictably not so pleased by his own reception, the ‘great shout and clapping of hands’. He looked down the aisle ‘with an air of vexation’, his friend, Lady Salisbury thought, as if to say, ‘This should be for the Queen.’⁵ She fully deserved the acclamation, the Duke considered: she carried herself with such charm, dignity and grace, never more so than when the frail and ancient Lord Rolle tripped up as he approached her to make his homage. ‘It turned me very sick,’ the writer, Harriet Martineau, recorded. ‘The large, infirm old man was held by two peers, and had nearly reached the footstool when he slipped through the hands of his supporters, and rolled over and over down the steps, lying at the bottom coiled up in his robes. He was instantly lifted up; and he tried again and again, amidst shouts of admiration of his valour.’⁶ ‘May I not get up and meet him?’ the Queen asked in anxious concern; and, since no one answered her, she outstretched her hand as he manfully rose to his feet and attempted to climb the steps once more as the congregation’s vociferous cheers echoed round the Abbey walls.⁷

Wellington’s high opinion of the Queen’s demeanour was commonly shared. As she caught her first glimpse of the brilliant assembly in the Abbey she was seen to catch her breath and turn pale, clasping her hands in front of her. One of her trainbearers, Lady Wilhelmina Stanhope, believed ‘her heart fluttered a little’ as they reached the throne; ‘at least the colour mounted to her cheeks, brow, and even neck, and her breath came quickly’;⁸ and there were those who regarded with some disapproval the smile she exchanged with Baroness Lehzen when, while sitting on the throne, she caught sight of that ‘most dear Being’ in the box above the royal box.

But to most observers she was a model of dignity and composure as she received the welcome accorded by the boys of Westminster School, whose traditional privilege it was to shout a Latin greeting to the monarch on such occasions. She was equally dignified as she turned from side to side to acknowledge the congregation’s shouts of ‘God Save Queen Victoria’, and as she undertook to ‘govern the people of this United Kingdom…according to the statutes in Parliament…to cause law and justice, in mercy, to be executed in all [her] judgements…[and] to maintain the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel and the Protestant Reformed religion established by law.’

‘All this,’ she replied to the Archbishop of Canterbury in a clear and steady voice, ‘I promise to do.’⁹

She appeared undaunted by the solemnity of the occasion, the blaze of diamonds, the glittering gold plate on the altar, the splendid uniforms of foreign dignitaries, the magnificent robes of the peeresses, the hundreds of faces peering down at her from the specially erected galleries draped with red cloth fringed with gold, and the solemn moment when – as she sat in St Edward’s Chair with four Knights of the Garter holding a canopy of cloth of gold over her head – she was anointed by the Archbishop with holy oil, ‘as Kings, priests and prophets were anointed’.

She appeared equally composed when the crown was placed upon her head and the peers and peeresses put on their coronets and the bishops their caps to cheers and drum beats, to the notes of trumpets and the firing of guns at the Tower and in the royal parks. Indeed, although in doubt from time to time as to what she was expected to do, she seemed far more calm than the clergy, who, as Charles Greville said, ‘were very imperfect in their parts and had neglected to rehearse them’.¹⁰ She was also far calmer than Lord Melbourne who was, she noticed, ‘completely overcome and very much affected’ when the crown was placed on her head and who, kneeling down to kiss her hand, could not hold back his tears as she ‘grasped his with all [her] heart’.¹¹

Lord John Thynne, who, as his deputy, took the place of the elderly, infirm Dean of Westminster, admitted that ‘there was a continual difficulty and embarrassment, and the Queen never knew what she was to do next’. She whispered to Thynne, who appeared to know more than his colleagues did, ‘Pray tell me what to do, for they don’t know!’ Certainly Edward Maltby, the scholarly, ‘remarkably maladroit’ Bishop of Durham, who had an important role in the ceremony, ‘never could tell [the Queen],’ so she complained, ‘what was to take place’. At one point he lost his place in the prayer book and began the Litany too soon. When the time came for the ring to be placed on her little finger, the Archbishop endeavoured to place it on her fourth. She told him it was too small; but he persisted, pressing it down so hard that she had ‘the greatest difficulty’ in getting it off again in the robing room afterwards and had to apply iced water to her fingers for half an hour. When she was given the extremely heavy orb she asked what she was meant to do with it. She was told that she was to carry it; but it then transpired that she had been given it too soon. By this time the Archbishop ‘(as usual) was so confused and puzzled and knew nothing’ that he went away. She, too, was sent away to St Edward’s Chapel and had to be summoned back from it when it was discovered that George Henry Law, Lord Ellenborough’s brother, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, had turned over two pages at once, thus omitting an essential part of the service.¹²

Nor were the lay peers and trainbearers any more adroit than the clergy. The peers gave the Queen a headache, so her Mistress of the Robes said, by ‘very unceremoniously’ knocking her crown instead of touching it gently in their act of homage. One of them ‘actually clutched hold of’ it, while others might well have knocked it off altogether had she not ‘guarded herself from any accident or misadventure by having it made to fit her head tightly’.¹³ As for the bearers of the Queen’s train, they carried it ‘very jerkily and badly’, one of them admitted, ‘never keeping step as she did, even and steadily and with much grace and dignity, the whole length of the Abbey’.¹⁴ Two of them could be heard chattering to each other throughout the service as animatedly as they might have done had they been at a ball.¹⁵ And, when the coronation medals were thrown about in the choir and lower galleries by Lord Surrey, the Treasurer of the Household, everybody scrambled ‘with all their might and main to get them, and none more vigorously than the maids-of-honour!’

All in all, Benjamin Disraeli, one of the recently elected Members of Parliament for the borough of Maidstone, told his sister, ‘the want of rehearsal’ was very obvious: ‘Melbourne [who, feeling ill, had dosed himself with laudanum and brandy] looked very awkward and uncouth, with his coronet cocked over his nose, his robes under his feet, and holding the great Sword of State like a butcher…The Duchess of Sutherland…full of her situation…walked, or rather stalked up the Abbey like Juno…Lord Lyndhurst [the former and future Lord Chancellor] committed the faux pas of not backing from the presence…I saw Lord Ward after the ceremony…drinking champagne out of a pewter pot, his coronet cocked aside, his robes disordered, and his arms akimbo.’¹⁶

Nor were Melbourne and Ward the only peers to appear dishevelled in their robes. Indeed, only two of them apparently knew how to wear them properly, both of these being practised performers in amateur theatricals. If Disraeli had gone into St Edward’s Chapel – ‘a small dark place behind the altar’, as the Queen described it – he would have seen what Melbourne represented as being ‘more unlike a Chapel than anything he had ever seen; for, what was called an Altar was covered with sandwiches, bottles of wine, etc.’

It was almost five hours before the ceremony was over; but conscious that she deserved Lord Melbourne’s words of praise – ‘You did it beautifully – every part of it, with so much taste; it’s a thing that you can’t give a person advice upon; it must be left to a person’ – the Queen did not yet appear to be tired. After an hour spent changing into her purple robe of state in the robing room, then waiting there until half past four, she was taken back through crowds as dense as ever, carrying her sceptre and, heavy as it was, the orb, her close-fitting crown on her head, and the people cheering her all the way to Buckingham Palace where she dashed upstairs to give a bath to her beloved dog, Dash.¹⁷

After dinner she went into the Duchess of Kent’s room; but it was not so much to see her mother – who had burst into tears at the sight of her daughter kneeling alone in the Abbey to receive the Sacrament – as to go out on to the balcony to watch the fireworks in Hyde Park where the next day a grand fair was to be held until the following Monday night. She remained on the balcony until after midnight, when she admitted at last to feeling rather weary. ‘You may depend upon it,’ Melbourne told her solicitously, ‘you are more tired than you think you are.’ She herself, she decided, would ‘ever remember this day as the proudest’ of her life.¹⁸