Читать книгу Queen Victoria: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 24

‘You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!’

ON 23 NOVEMBER 1839 the Queen made her Declaration of Marriage at Buckingham Palace before an assembly of Privy Councillors. She appeared before them in a simple dress and wearing a miniature of Prince Albert in a bracelet on her wrist. It was ‘rather an awful moment’, she confessed; and her hands were so fluttering that she nearly dropped the paper on which the Declaration was written.¹ But, as at her first Council meeting, her voice was clear and true. J. W. Croker, the politician and essayist, thought her ‘as interesting and handsome as any young lady’ he had ever seen.²

News of the engagement had already reached Coburg and Gotha where it had been received with great pleasure. In Coburg the sounds of gunfire and pistol shots in the streets could be heard throughout the night; and in Gotha cannon thundered as the Prince, standing in the throne room before the ladies and gentlemen of the Court, was invested with the Order of the Garter by his father, the Duke, and Queen Victoria’s half-brother, Prince Charles of Leiningen, both Knights of the Garter themselves. At the subsequent banquet the band of the Coldstream Guards, which had sailed from England for the occasion, played ‘God Save the Queen’.³

In England, where the Prince landed at Dover on 7 February after a stormy, five-hour crossing, crowds gathered to cheer him on his way through Kent in the pouring rain, escorted by the Earl of Cardigan’s 11th Light Dragoons, henceforth known as the 11th Prince Albert’s Own Hussars⁴. At Canterbury, where he and his brother stayed the night and attended a service in the Cathedral, the city was illuminated in his honour.⁵

The enthusiasm of the populace was not, however, universally shared at Queen Victoria’s Court or in Tory aristocratic circles, though it was generally conceded that, ‘if her political partisanship were to be limited, she undoubtedly needed a husband’s guidance and support’. Yet this husband was only twenty, the same age as herself; and, so The Times observed, ‘one might without being unreasonable, express a wish that the Consort selected for a Princess so educated and hitherto so unfairly guided as Queen Victoria – should have been a person of riper years, and likely to form more sound and circumspect opinions.’⁶

The Queen’s uncles were scornful of the match; so were many of the prosperous middle classes. Newspapers reported it with lukewarm approbation or with unconcealed disapproval. Versifiers proposed that Prince Albert had come to England to marry the Queen for money:

He comes the bridegroom of Victoria’s choice

The nominee of Lehzen’s Voice;

He comes to take ‘for better or for worse’

England’s fat Queen and England’s fatter purse.⁷

The question of money had, in fact, already arisen as one of the first problems to blight the Queen’s happiness. Lord Melbourne had assured her that there would be no difficulty in getting Parliament to agree that the Prince should receive the same provision of £50,000 a year which Prince Leopold had received upon his marriage to Princess Charlotte, and which Prince George of Denmark had had when he married the future Queen Anne in 1683. But there was difficulty. The Radical, Joseph Hume, protested that, having regard to the financial state of the country and the distress of the poor, £21,000 would be quite sufficient. The House of Commons did not think so; but when a Tory Member proposed that £30,000 a year would be a fair compromise this amendment was accepted by a large majority.⁸

The Queen was furious: she said she hated the Tories more than ever. She had long decided that, like insects and turtle soup, they were among the things she most disliked in all the world. The Prince, who greatly regretted that he would not now be able to do so much as he had hoped for poor scholars and artists, was also much put out. ‘I am surprised that you have said no word of sympathy to me about the vote of the 28th,’ he wrote to the Queen in a letter far sharper than any he had yet sent her, ‘for those nice Tories have cut off half my income…and it makes my position not a very pleasant one. It is hardly conceivable that anyone could behave as meanly and disgracefully as they have to you and me. It cannot do them much good for it is hardly possible to maintain any respect for them any longer. Everyone, even here [Coburg], is indignant about it.’⁹

The Queen became even angrier with the Tories, and with their standard bearer the Duke of Wellington, when it was suggested that Prince Albert, like many of his Coburg relations, had ‘papistical leanings’. In Victoria’s Declaration of Marriage to the Privy Council, the Prince had not been specifically described as a Protestant prince and therefore able to receive Holy Communion in the form prescribed by the Church of England, since Lord Melbourne had thought it best not to mention religion at all. He did not want to upset the Irish Catholics, who supported him in the House of Commons, and he could not employ the usual formula about ‘marrying into a Protestant family’ because a large number of Coburgs were either Roman Catholics themselves, or, like King Leopold, had married into Catholic families.

The Duke of Wellington – who, while not really caring a fig about it, according to his private secretary, had expressed the opinion that the annual income of £30,000 was quite sufficient for Prince Albert – now rose in the House of Lords to declare that the people ought to know something about the Queen’s future husband other than his name, that they should be given the satisfaction of knowing that he ‘was a Protestant – thus showing all the public that this is still a Protestant State’.¹⁰

‘Do what one will,’ the Queen protested to King Leopold, ‘nothing will please these most religious, most hypocritical Tories whom I dislike (I use a very soft word), most heartily.’ It was absurd of them to make this fuss, seeing that, by the law of the land, she could not ‘marry a Papist’ anyway. Sir Robert Peel was ‘a low hypocrite’, a ‘nasty wretch’; as for that ‘wicked old foolish’ Duke of Wellington, she would never speak to him or look at him again; she would certainly not ask him to her wedding. ‘It is MY marriage,’ she protested when Melbourne endeavoured to dissuade her from slighting the Duke in this way, ‘and I will only have those who can sympathize with me.’ Nor would she send a message to Apsley House when it was reported that the Duke was ill. Charles Greville called there and found ‘his people indignant that, while all the Royal Family have been sending continually to enquire after him, and all London has been at his door, the Queen alone has never taken the slightest notice of him’. Greville immediately sent Melbourne a note ‘representing the injury it was to herself not to do so’. Melbourne asked Greville to come to see him without delay and told him when he arrived that the Queen was ‘very resentful, but that people pressed her too much, did not give her time’. To this Greville replied that it ‘really was lamentable’ that she did the things she did, that she would get into a great scrape. The people of England would not endure that she should treat the Duke of Wellington with disrespect. Greville had no scruple in saying so to Melbourne since he knew that he was doing his utmost to keep her straight. ‘By God!’ Melbourne said, ‘I am moving noon and night at it.’

He wondered, though, if it were not too late now for the Queen to send a message to Apsley House. ‘Better late than not at all,’ Greville advised him; so Melbourne sat down and wrote to the Queen. ‘I suppose she will send now?’ Greville asked. ‘Oh, yes,’ Melbourne replied. ‘She will send now.’¹¹

Then there was trouble over the precedence to be granted the Prince. King Leopold, who regretted not having accepted the offer of an English peerage as Duke of Kendal himself, had suggested that Prince Albert should be created an English peer so that his ‘foreignership should disappear as much as possible’. But the Queen dissented. ‘The whole Cabinet agrees with me in being strongly of the opinion that Albert should not be a Peer,’ she replied to her uncle. ‘I see everything against it and nothing for it.’ She told the Prince why:

The English are very jealous of any foreign interference in the Government of the country and have already in some of the papers…expressed a hope that you would not interfere: – now, tho’ I know you never would, still, if you were a peer they would all say the Prince meant to play a political part – I am sure you will understand.¹²

The Prince himself had no wish to be an English peer: ‘It would be almost a step downwards, for as a Duke of Saxony, I feel myself much higher than as Duke of Kent or York.’ He was quite content to have no title other than his own. ‘As regards my peerage and the fears of my playing a political part, dear, beloved Victoria,’ he wrote, ‘I have only one anxious wish and one prayer: do not allow it to become a matter of worry to you.’¹³

Though Albert had expressed his own opposition to receiving a peerage, the Queen was strongly of the view that he should have precedence over all other peers in the country, including the royal dukes. If she had her way he would be King Consort.

Once again the Duke of Wellington, now recovered from his illness, opposed her: the precedence of the Royal Family, he pointed out, was fixed by Act of Parliament. It was well known that he held no brief for the royal dukes; but it would be unfair to ask them to support a change in the law to interfere with their rights. When Charles Greville asked the Duke what he thought should be done about the Prince’s precedence, he answered emphatically, ‘Oh, give him the same which Prince George of Denmark had: place him next before the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ ‘That will by no means satisfy her,’ Greville objected. At this the Duke ‘tossed his head and with an expression of extreme contempt said, “Satisfy her! What does that signify?”’¹⁴

Upon hearing Tory objections to her granting the Prince the precedence she had in mind for him, the Queen was quite as cross as Melbourne had feared she would be. She ‘raged away’, perfectly ‘frantic’, in her own words, railing at her uncles and the vile, confounded, ‘infernal Tories’ responsible for this ‘outrageous insult’. They were ‘wretches’, ‘scoundrels’ ‘capable of every villainy [and] personal spite’. ‘Poor dear Albert, how cruelly they are ill-using that dearest Angel! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!’¹⁵

In her anger she turned upon Melbourne himself. She was forced to concede that the state of feeling in the country, the unemployment and the unrest – the plight of the poor which he usually did not care to think or talk about – made the reduction of Albert’s allowance at least tolerable. But there could be no excuse for this cruel slight over the matter of precedence. Lord Melbourne really ought to have foreseen the trouble that there might be. He should not have led her ‘to expect no difficulties’.

Melbourne unwisely commented that there would not have been such difficulties were Prince Albert not a foreigner: foreigners always caused trouble, particularly from Coburg. They had been through all this before, the Queen crossly rejoined. She could never have married one of her own subjects, and she was not marrying Albert because he was a Coburg but because she loved him and he was worthy of her love. Later Melbourne tactlessly stumbled into trouble again when the Queen remarked that one of the things she most loved about Albert was his indifference to the charms of all women other than herself. ‘No,’ said Melbourne carelessly, ‘that sort of thing is apt to come later.’ It was ‘an odd remark to make to any woman on the eve of marriage, let alone the Queen’, Lord Clarendon observed when Melbourne told him of this gaffe, chuckling ‘over it amazingly’. Certainly the Queen took it very ill. ‘I shan’t,’ she said, ‘forgive you for that.’

She did, of course, and she came close to forgiving the Duke of Wellington when, having read a pamphlet prepared by Charles Greville, he changed his mind about Prince Albert’s precedence. The Queen, he now declared, much to the annoyance of the Duke of Cambridge, had ‘a perfect right to give her husband whatever precedence she pleased’. So, the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General concurring, Letters Patent granting the Prince the precedence she had wanted to give him were issued by the Queen. From then on the Queen’s attitude to the Duke of Wellington softened. He had, after all, supported her when she had expressed a wish to be accompanied only by her mother and one of her ladies in the state coach on her way to St James’s Palace to be proclaimed. Her Master of the Horse, Lord Albemarle, insisted that he had a right to ride with her as he had done with William IV. ‘The point was submitted to the Duke of Wellington as a kind of universal referee in matters of precedence and usage. His judgement was delightfully unflattering to the outraged magnate – “The Queen can make you go inside the coach or outside the coach or run behind it like a tinker’s dog.”’¹⁶ The Queen decided to ask the Duke to her wedding after all. She drew the line, however, at inviting him to the wedding breakfast. She had not entirely forgiven him yet. ‘Our Gracious,’ Wellington concluded, was still ‘very much out of Temper.’¹⁷

A problem which concerned the Prince far more than his title or his precedence was the composition of his Household which he hoped would be of perfect respectability, unlike the Queen’s which comprised a number of men whose morals were highly questionable, including the Lord Chamberlain, the Marquess of Conyngham, whose mistress was employed as Housekeeper at Buckingham Palace, and the Earl of Uxbridge, the Lord Steward, whose mistress had also been found a position in Her Majesty’s household. Indeed, there were so many Pagets living at Court, in addition to Lord Alfred Paget, the Clerk-Marshal, that it was known as ‘the Paget Club House’.

Prince Albert had assumed that he would be allowed to choose his gentlemen himself and that some of them might be German and all, of course, ‘well educated and of high character’. Believing as he did that the Crown should not display a preference for any political party, that King William IV had been much misguided to favour the Tories and Queen Victoria was equally in error to demonstrate her support of the Whigs, he had hoped that his own household would indicate his impartiality. ‘It is very necessary,’ he wrote, ‘that they should be chosen from both sides – the same number of Whigs as of Tories.’¹⁸

The Queen, encouraged by Melbourne, did not agree. ‘As to your wish about your Gentlemen, my dear Albert,’ she told him severely, ‘I must tell you quite honestly that it will not do. You may entirely rely upon me that the people who will be round you will be absolutely pleasant people of high standing and good character…You may rely upon my care that you shall have proper people and not idle and not too young and Lord Melbourne has already mentioned several to me who would be very suitable.’¹⁹

It was useless for the Prince to protest. ‘I am very sorry,’ he had replied, ‘that you have not been able to grant my first request, the one about the Gentlemen, for I know it was not an unfair one…Think of my position, dear Victoria, I am leaving my home with all its associations, all my bosom friends, and going to a country in which everything is new and strange to me…Except yourself I have no one to confide in. And it is not even to be conceded to me that the two or three persons who are to have the charge of my private affairs should be persons who already command my confidence.’²⁰

The Queen was not softened by this appeal, although Lord Melbourne thought that it might now be better to give way, and King Leopold wrote what the Queen described as ‘an ungracious letter’ urging the Prime Minister to persuade the Queen to take a ‘correct view’. But, so she wrote to Prince Albert, that was just like Uncle Leopold: he was ‘given to believe that he must rule the roast [sic] everywhere…I am distressed to be obliged to tell you what I fear you do not like but it is necessary, my dearest most excellent Albert…I only do it as I know it is for your own good.’ It was conceded that a German whom the Prince did know, Herr Schenk, should be appointed to a minor post which did not entitle him to a place at the equerries’ table; but the appointment of Private Secretary, the principal post in his Household, was to be filled by George Anson who was not only a confirmed Whig and Secretary to the Whig Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, but whose uncle, Sir George Anson (chosen for an appointment as Groom of the Bedchamber), was also a Whig. In vain the Prince protested to his ‘dearest love’ that taking the Secretary of the Prime Minister as his own Private Secretary would surely from the beginning make him ‘a partisan in the eyes of many’. The Queen, however, was ‘very much in favour’ of the appointment: Mr Anson was ‘an excellent young man, very modest, very honest, very steady, very well informed’ and would be ‘of much use’ to him. Further objection was clearly useless: advised to do so by Baron Stockmar, the Prince gave way, on condition that Anson resigned as the Prime Minister’s Secretary before he became his own.²¹

The Prince submitted with a good grace, much to the relief of the Queen who had been warned by King Leopold that Prince Albert had seemed ‘pretty full of grievances’ when he had passed through Brussels on his way back to England. She had, in fact, been so worried that he would be resentful that she was feeling ill when he returned. But all was well. ‘Seeing his dear dear face again’ put her ‘at rest about everything’.²²

Almost at once she spoke to him about Anson’s appointment and the ‘little misunderstandings’ that had arisen because of it. He accepted the fait accompli and was, so the Queen said, ‘so dear and ehrlich [honest] and open about it’. She ‘embraced him again and again’.²³ Her recent peevishness evaporated in her love for him, in her pleasure at his having given way to her demands and in excited anticipation of their marriage. Yet she felt it impossible to agree with his suggestion that her bridesmaids must be selected only from those young ladies whose mothers were of unblemished character. Lord Melbourne had been aghast at this suggestion. As he told Greville, the Prince was ‘a great stickler for morality’ and ‘extremely strait-laced’. He did not seem to appreciate that the lower orders should, of course, be judged by moral standards but those of high birth must be deemed above such considerations. The Queen at first objected that there surely could not be one set of moral standards for the humble poor and another for the aristocratic rich; but she acknowledged the impossibility of submitting to Prince Albert’s severe proscriptions; and among the twelve tall, plain bridesmaids there were several whose mothers could not have passed his test.

‘I always think one ought always to be indulgent towards other people,’ the Queen explained to Prince Albert, ‘as I always think, if we had not been well brought up and well taken care of, we might also have gone astray.’²⁴

The evening before the wedding the Queen and Prince Albert went through the marriage service together and, mindful of the painful embarrassment at the coronation, tried on the ring. The Prince, who had endured yet another fearful Channel crossing, seemed tired and rather nervous, still suffering from the effects of severe seasickness which had left his face, so he said, more the colour of a wax candle than that of a human visage. But the Queen was in high spirits and serenely happy. She went to bed excitedly conscious that it would be, as she wrote in her journal, the last time she would sleep alone. She slept peacefully, quite untroubled by the agitation she had noticed in her dear bridegroom’s manner, worried only by the thought that she might have a lot of children.