Читать книгу The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Vol. 1-4) - Robert Thomas Wilson - Страница 24

Table of Contents

The Queen’s Administrative Work—The “Condition of England” Question—The Court and the Working Classes—Royal Plans for Ameliorating the Lot of Labour—Threatened Attacks on the Queen—The Demagogues Abashed—A Royal-Hearted Speech—The Queen’s Private Correspondence—A Pension Fund for the Working Classes—Pauperism among Domestic Servants—Prince Albert’s Relief Plan—The Court at Osborne—Birth and Christening of the Princess Louise—Removal to Balmoral—The Queen at Kirk—A Royal Geologist—Sir Charles Lyell’s Anecdotes of the Royal Family—An Accident in the Solent—Prince Albert as a University Reformer—Death of Lord Melbourne and Lord George Bentinck.

To the Queen and the Prince Consort the year of the Revolution brought many domestic anxieties which the Court newsman of the day could not chronicle. We have seen, from some expressions in her Majesty’s own letters, how sharply her heart was touched by the misfortunes of her French friends and her German kinsfolk. But the public business connected with the distressing and alarming state of affairs abroad condemned both the Queen and her husband to the severest toil. Twenty-eight thousand despatches were received by or sent out from the Foreign Office during 1848, and most of these had to be studied closely, and annotated and advised on either by her Majesty or Prince Albert. Lord Palmerston’s irrepressible restlessness and boyish imprudence kept the Queen in a state of feverish anxiety, for she never knew when some fresh freak of the Foreign Secretary might not make her appear ridiculous to Continental Courts.

Moreover, it occurred to the Royal pair that the troubles at home might perchance be smoothed if the influence of the Crown were judiciously and delicately applied to promote a peaceful solution of many alarming social problems. Mr. Carlyle was then thundering forth anathemas against the governing orders of England for neglecting what he called “the Condition of England Question,” and accusing them of abdicating their natural position as leaders and guides of the people. Had he suspected what was going on in the Royal circle, he would have known that this charge did not at all events lie against the highest of all the governing orders in the State. The “Condition of England Question,” in fact, had now become a subject of engrossing interest to the Queen and her consort.

Prince Albert’s letters to Baron Stockmar indicate that he over-estimated the power and significance of the Chartist organisation. But they show that he did not under-estimate the disastrous effect of popular discontent on the commerce and industry of the nation. Her Majesty and the Prince seemed to have arrived at a very clear idea as to how far they could either of them affect the crisis. Personally, the Sovereign at such a time could not with propriety mingle in the social warfare waged between rich and poor. But much might be done through Prince Albert to show that the Crown was not unmindful of the claims of Labour, and to indicate that her Majesty bated not one jot or tittle of her sympathy for that class of our community, which, as Prince Albert pithily said, in a speech he delivered on the 18th of May, “has most of the toil, and least of the enjoyments, of life.”

As far back as 1844 he had become President of a Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Working Classes. This apparently was an organisation somewhat of the dilettante type, but it now occurred to the practical mind of the Prince that it might be turned at such a crisis to a useful purpose. He seized the opportunity afforded by an invitation to preside at one of its public meetings, for carrying out the cherished design of the Court, and it is curious to note that when this intention was bruited about, the strongest objections were made to it. Violent demagogues, he was told, would attend and say rude things about the Sovereign. Lord John Russell sent him a copy of a book containing a ribald attack on the Royal Family; and it is not pleasing to recollect that if the Court had permitted itself to be overruled by the Government, this golden chance of conciliating contending classes would have been lost at a critical moment in the history of the English people. But neither the Queen nor the Prince was to be daunted. These attacks, they said, merely convinced them all the more that the time had come when they should put themselves in touch with the great interests of Labour, and show that the Royal Family was not, as was alleged, living on the earnings of a people, for whose sufferings it had no sympathy, and to whose welfare it was indifferent. What the Prince called “a tangible proof” of the desire of the Queen and her family to co-operate in any scheme for lightening and brightening the lot of her poorer subjects was needed, and he meant to give that proof.

A sour critic would perhaps say that in analysing the Royal ideas on the “Condition of England” Question a good deal of State Socialism lurked in them. They suggest undoubtedly the influence of many German writers on State Socialism; but Prince Albert, so far as he was the exponent of her Majesty’s thoughts, seems to have been careful to burn much incense on the altar of Voluntaryism, before which all the prominent economic writers of the day bowed down. If he roused their suspicions by denying that the people should be let alone, and left to help themselves in what Mr. Carlyle calls “the desolate freedom of the wild ass,” he deferred to their prejudices by proposing that the help and guidance which they needed should come not from Government, but from voluntary combinations of individuals. It is possible that he might have gone farther if he had dared. As it was, the position of the Court in relation to the social question at this time seems to have been midway between that of the younger school of sociologists in our day, and the almost defunct school whose principle and shibboleth were laissez faire.

According to the Prince’s speech at the meeting of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Working Classes, on the 18th of May, two objects should be kept in view. Firstly, Society, through individual and associated effort, should show what can be done by model lodging-houses, improved dwellings, loan funds, allotments, and the like, to ameliorate the lot of the poor. Secondly, the poor must be taught that all the work of amelioration cannot be done by Society—that, in fact, they must, by their cultivation of the homely virtues of thrift, honesty, diligence, and self-denial, help themselves into the condition in which it is possible for others, either by individual or associated effort, to help them. He implored the country to think more of the identity than the rivalry of class interests, and contended that it was the imperative duty of the rich, each one in his sphere, “to show how man can help man, notwithstanding the complicated state of Society.” Self-reliance in the individual, and confidence between individuals—these were the moral forces which Prince Albert seems to have thought it was the mission of all good citizens to evoke. It has been hinted that such utterances are mere platitudes, and hardly worth recording. As David Hume observed, the truths that are prized as discoveries by a few philosophers in one generation become the commonplaces of their grandchildren. Had the ideas of the Queen and her husband on the Social Problem been platitudes among statesmen in 1848, Revolution would not have fallen on Europe like “a bolt out of the blue,” nor would the panic-stricken kings and princes of the Continent have been flying, as Mr. Carlyle put it, “like a gang of coiners when the police had come among them.”112 Nothing could be more gratifying to the Queen than the universal approval that greeted this address. It struck the true note of sympathy with Labour that should ever ring through “the sad, sweet music of Humanity.” Her Majesty said, in a letter to Stockmar, “the Prince made a speech on Thursday which has met with more general admiration from all classes and parties than any I can remember;” and it

THOMAS CARLYLE. (After the Medallion by T. Woolner, 1855.)

is in truth impossible to give a juster idea of the effect which it produced all over the English-speaking world.

It is curious to observe that all through the Queen’s correspondence during the most alarming year of her reign, there is expressed a feeling of proud confidence in the stability of the British Monarchy, and an abiding certitude that under her rule no effort will be spared to minimise the sufferings or better the lot of the poor. Bolingbroke’s “patriot King” could not have more completely identified Sovereignty with national life and national yearning. That the Revolution had no perceptible effect on England, one can now see was mainly due to the fact that alike in the repeal of the Corn Laws, and in the encouragement of schemes for social improvement, the Monarchy

CHRISTENING OF THE PRINCESS LOUISE IN BUCKINGHAM PALACE CHAPEL.

became almost guilty of partisanship in espousing the popular cause. The air was indeed full of such schemes, and it is hardly a breach of confidence now to say that but for the risk of incurring the reproach of infecting England with German ideas, the Court would have marched in advance of its advisers. It was generally believed at this time that the Queen and Prince Albert were first struck with the inadequacy of the provision made in England to mitigate the painful chancefulness of life among the artisan classes. It has been, in fact, supposed that it was in a special sense for her Majesty’s perusal that the late Dr. Farr then investigated the problem, from a point of view which was as essentially German as it was antagonistic to the ideas of the English laissez faire school. Our Poor Law, Dr. Farr argued, is really a great scheme for insuring every man’s life against the risk of starvation. In those days to die from starvation was an accident in England. In the countries which were swept by the Revolution, however, to be succoured from death by starvation was the accident. The Poor Law had, therefore, with other influences, saved Society in England. Whether, in these circumstances, it might not be well to develop the beneficent idea underlying it, was a question often thoughtfully pondered in the Royal Family.

For this reason it may not be amiss to call attention to what Dr. Farr laid down for the guidance of those who at this anxious time had the destinies of the people in their hands. He pointed out that “Society without a legal system of relief for destitution can be scarcely said to exist, as it leaves the protection of life against the most imminent calamity unprovided for.”113 Insecurity of life among the masses, he contended, naturally weakens their instinctive conservatism. It drives them into communism and anarchy, which are the rank and unwholesome outgrowths of a state in which Property is too selfish to appropriate a small portion of its profits as a life insurance premium for Labour—and where the State has not yet discovered that the insurance of the life of all is the insurance of the property of all. The Poor Law to a certain extent made this appropriation. But the objection to it was its cast-iron administration; its indiscriminating application to the good and the bad, the industrious and the idle, the worthy and the worthless. Was it not, then, possible to make Poor Law Relief bear some proportion to the ratepayer’s previous contributions to the Insurance fund against destitution? Could not the whole country be converted into a gigantic Friendly Society, of which the rich should be, so to speak, honorary members, but capable without the least shame or humiliation of becoming benefiting members, should sudden misfortune hurl them from the heights of opulence to the depths of destitution? Many philanthropic firms of employers co-operated at this time with their workmen in founding benefit societies for the purpose of insurance against sickness or accident. Why, it was asked, could they not develop this idea, and insure their workpeople against the consequences of that infirmity which is the result of old age? In other words, could not the Friendly Society be also made a Pension Club? The practical difficulty obviously lay in the complicated account-keeping which was necessary for the success of such schemes, and which private firms could hardly be expected to undertake. It was, however, shown by Dr. Farr, in the letter which has been quoted, and which is one of the most curious and characteristic products of a time of social turmoil, that the Government could alone with advantage receive small deposits of money in the early life of a generation, invest them at compound interest, and pay the accumulated amounts at short intervals to the aged and infirm survivors. Each establishment might, according to Dr. Farr’s idea, organise three insurance funds—a Pension Fund, a Health Fund, and a Life Fund—the premiums to be paid to the Government, who should conduct the whole business for the parties interested on fair and easy terms.

It is curious that though the Chartists and a large number of the Tories—notably the remnants of the “Young England” Party, led by Mr. Disraeli and Lord John Manners—sympathised with these ideas, they were coldly frowned down by the Whigs and the Manchester School of Radicals. The argument against the social reformers was that employers did enough for their “hands” when they bought their labour and paid for it in the open market. It was for the workpeople to spend their money as they pleased—if in insurance against sickness and old age, so much the better; if not, so much the worse. But even in the last case no real harm, it was urged, could come to them, for there was always “the parish” to fall back upon. In a word, Capital argued that it did enough for Labour when it paid wages and poor rates. On the other hand, it might be retorted, that by helping on schemes for promoting the permanent comfort of his workpeople the employer is only paying wages in the way which pays all parties best in the long-run. Such an employer, it might be said, gets the strongest command of the labour market, and the best and most efficient service from his men. His prestige becomes lustrous like that of a general who refuses to desert his wounded on the field where he wins his victorious laurels, or of a conquering king who refuses to let the veterans perish, whose valour has widened the range of his dominion. Often did the Queen and Prince Albert ponder these things in their hearts. Hence their eagerness to seize every opportunity, not of pressing schemes such as these on a Society whose economic prejudices were antipathetic to them, but for stimulating the upper and middle classes in such voluntary movements for ameliorating the lot of Labour, as were possible and practicable in these “bad old times.” It was in this spirit that they even studied the barren statistics of Pauperism, and that their discovery, in 1849, of the fact that the great majority of the poor people in London workhouses had been domestic servants, prompted Prince Albert to stimulate the Servants’ Provident and Benevolent Society to find a remedy for such a distressing state of things. “The appalling pauperism of this class,” as the Prince described it in a memorable speech, he strove to arrest by inducing servants to invest their savings under the Deferred Annuities Act, through the agency of the Society.114

On the 18th of March the Princess Louise was born, and on the 13th of May she was baptised in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace, being

VIEW IN LOCHNAGAR.

named after Prince Albert’s mother and the Queen of the Belgians. The Prince himself adapted the music of a chorale he had composed for the Baptismal Service. “The Royal christening,” writes Bishop Wilberforce to Miss Noel, “was a very beautiful sight in its highest sense of that word beauty; the Queen, with the five Royal children around her, the Prince of Wales and Princess Royal hand-in-hand, all kneeling down quietly and meekly at every prayer, and the little Princess Helena alone just standing and looking round with the blue eyes of gazing innocence.” This was the little Princess a peep at whom, Lady Lyttelton says, always cheered her, for she was then “an image of life”—it is to be presumed Lady Lyttelton means child-life—in its prime, with “cheeks like full-blown roses, and her nose like a bud.” This month of May was ostensibly a merry one at Court, though from the correspondence that passed between the Queen and her half-sister, it is quite evident that her Majesty went through the festal pageant of Court balls and Royal birthday fêtes with her heart heavy from the anxieties of the times.

In July the Royal circle was broken up by the departure of Prince

PROFESSOR ANDERSON AT BALMORAL.

Albert to open the great Agricultural Show at York, where his speech, identifying himself closely with the farming interest, gave the country gentry and husbandmen of England the keenest delight. The Queen again wrote to Stockmar and the King of the Belgians, expressing her personal satisfaction with the Prince’s speeches at York, and her pleasure at seeing him develop high gifts of oratory. The rest of the summer her Majesty and her family spent at Osborne—a little anxious on account of the feeble health of Prince Alfred (Duke of Edinburgh), whose removal to the keen mountain air of the Highlands had been strongly pressed on them by Sir James Clark. Her Majesty then came to town on the 5th of September to prorogue Parliament. The present House of Lords was on that occasion used for the first time, and this fact, together with the interest excited by the appearance before her Senate of almost the only great European Sovereign who at this time dared appear in public, caused enormous crowds to assemble. The Queen was received by the mob who lined the route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster in a delirium of enthusiastic loyalty, and that she felt grateful for their greeting was evident from the emotion with which she delivered those passages of her Address, in which she referred to the mutual affection and trust that linked Queen and country together in England.

No sooner had this function been discharged than the Royal Family made haste to proceed to the Aberdeenshire Highlands, where, on the recommendation of Sir James Clark, Prince Albert had leased the Balmoral estate from the Earl of Aberdeen. Mountain air, at once dry and keen, was, in Clark’s opinion, essential for the health of the Royal Family, and Balmoral was the driest place in Deeside. Nobody has described this romantic retreat better than the Queen herself. From the hill above the house the view, she says, is charming. “To the left you look to the beautiful hills surrounding Lochnagar, and to the right towards Ballater, to the glen or valley along which the Dee winds, with beautiful wooded hills, which reminded us very much of the Thuringian Forest. It was so calm and so solitary, it did one good as one gazed around, and the pure mountain air was most refreshing. All seemed to breathe freedom and peace, and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils. The scenery is wild and yet not desolate; and everything looks much more prosperous and cultivated than at Laggan.”115

The journey northward was made by sea to Aberdeen, and from thence to Balmoral her Majesty met at every stage of the road with the warmest of Highland welcomes. Balmoral has changed much since those days, when it was the loveliest of mountain solitudes. The little whitewashed castle, with its pepper-box turrets, reminded one of the feats of those old Scottish architects who flourished at the period when the baronial wars had ceased, but when the builders had not learnt to adapt their art to peaceful or domestic purposes. It was not till after the fee-simple of the property was bought by the Prince in 1852, that it became transformed and transfigured by “improvements.” The Queen devoted herself to holiday-making after the free and informal fashion that made desolate Ardverikie a terrestrial Paradise. Her winning ways charmed the cottagers and the peasantry, to whom she soon became a veritable Lady Bountiful. As for Prince Albert, sport lightened the anxieties of politics. The vast panorama of mountain, glen, and forest which unfolds itself from the summit of dark Lochnagar invited him to resume the geological studies which in his youth he had pursued with ardour, and the greatest modern master of the science, Mr. (afterwards Sir Charles) Lyell,116 was his guest and guide. A pleasing and graphic sketch is given by Sir Charles Lyell of the Royal Family in their Highland home. “At Balmoral, the day I went to dine there,” he writes, “Saturday last, I had first a long walk—Sir James Clark and I—with Mr. Birch and his pupil,117 a pleasing, lively boy, whose animated description of the Conjurer, or ‘Wizard of the North,’118 whom they had seen a few days before, was very amusing. ‘He (the Wizard) had cut to pieces mamma’s pocket-handkerchief, then darned it and ironed it, so that it was as entire as ever; he had fired a pistol and caused five or six watches to go through Gibb’s (one of their footmen) head, and all were tied to a chair on Gibb’s other side,’ and so forth; ‘but papa (Prince Albert) knows how all these things are done, and had the watches really gone through Gibb’s head he would hardly have looked so well, though he was confounded.’ Sometimes I walked alone with the child, who asked me the names of plants, and to let him see spiders, &c., through my magnifying-glass; sometimes with the tutor, whom I continue to like the more as I become better acquainted. After our ramble of two hours and a half through some wild scenery, I was sent for to join another party; where I found the Queen, Prince, and Lord John by a deep pool on the river Dee, fishing for trout and salmon. After the Queen had entered the Castle the Prince kept me so long, and we kept one another so late, talking on all kinds of subjects, that a messenger came from her Majesty, saying it was only a quarter of an hour to dinner-time. After the ladies had gone to the drawing-room we had much lively talk, which the Prince promoted greatly, telling some amusing stories himself, and encouraging others by laughing at theirs. Next day I went to church. The prayer for the parish magistracy, Queen, and Royal Family, judges, ministers of religion, Parliament, and the whole nation, was just such as you would have liked, and in excellent taste, with nothing which a Republican, jealous of equality, could, I think, have objected to, and which, I believe, our Sovereign and her husband could thoroughly appreciate the simplicity of. They shoved the box,119 on the end of a long pole, to the Queen and Prince, and maids of honour, as to all the rest of the congregation, and each dropped in their piece of coin. After church I had much conversation alone with Prince Albert, whose mind is in full activity on a variety of grave subjects, while he is invigorating his body with field sports.” Lyell, who was a very observant man, and an astute judge of character, conceived a very high opinion of the Prince from his conversations with him. After his death, according to Sir Theodore Martin, he wrote a long letter to Mr. John Murray, criticising the Prince’s abilities, and expressing his hope that justice would be done to him in an éloge in the Quarterly.

On the 28th of October the Queen and her retinue left Balmoral for Osborne. On the 9th they left Osborne for London, and when crossing the Solent they saw a boat full of women who had relatives on board the Grampus frigate, then coming into Portsmouth after a cruise in the Pacific, capsized in a squall. Prince Albert gave the alarm, and the Queen writes:—“I rushed out of the pavilion, and saw a man sitting on something which proved to be the keel of a boat. The next moment Albert called out in a horrified voice, ‘Oh, dear, there are more!’ which quite overcame me.” Her Majesty stopped her yacht at once. A boat was lowered, and three women—one still alive—were

THE OLD BRIDGE, INVERCAULD.

rescued. But the sea ran so heavily that Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence refused to let the yacht lie to any longer, and the Queen had to yield to his determination to proceed without waiting for the return of the boat. “It was,” she writes, “a dreadful moment too horrible to describe.... It is a terrible thing, and haunts me continually.”

One more triumph over insular prejudice won by the Court during the year of Revolution remains to be recorded. Prince Albert, very soon after his election as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, alarmed the Colleges by indicating that he had no intention of being merely an ornamental official. His first demand to be supplied with a sketch of the plan of academic study at Cambridge was ominous of interference. At Cambridge everything was at this time sacrificed to mathematical studies, and an idea of the state of mind in which University reformers approached the Prince with suggestions may be found in Dr. Whewell’s liberal proposal, that a century should pass before new discoveries could be admitted into the academic curriculum. Nominally philosophy, literature, and science were included in that curriculum, as the

THE VICTORIA TOWER, WESTMINSTER PALACE.

table of studies prepared by Dr. Philpott for the Prince showed. But there was no denying the truth of his Royal Highness’s trenchant criticism on this document in his letter to Lord John Russell, in which he said that all the activity in these departments was “on paper,” and even if it had been real, the scheme was incomplete. After a long and laborious correspondence with the best authorities on the subject, the Prince succeeded in persuading the University to thoroughly modernise its course of instruction, and his revised plan of studies was triumphantly carried on the 1st of November, 1848. As Punch in a clever cartoon put it, H.R.H. Field-Marshal Chancellor Prince Albert took the pons asinorum after the manner of Napoleon at Arcola.

As winter drew on, the state of Ireland became increasingly distressful, and the confusion on the Continent more and more ominous. In England some faint signs of reviving trade were discernible, but only just discernible. The death of Lord Melbourne, however, on the 24th of November, painfully affected the Queen, whose affection for her first guide in statecraft had never abated. “Truly and sincerely,” she writes in her Diary, “do I deplore the loss of one who was a most kind and disinterested friend of mine, and most sincerely attached to me. He was indeed for the first two years and a half of my reign almost the only friend I had, except Stockmar and Lehzen.” Her last letter to the aged Minister, expressed in terms of simple but touching solicitude, according to his sister, Lady Palmerston, did much to lift from his wearied spirit the cloud of melancholy that had settled on it. Melbourne’s character was rather misunderstood, for his whole life was a conceited protest against affectation. He was one of those who get great amusement out of life by treating it as a comedy, in which even in withered age they persist in playing the rôle of the jeune premier. He toiled hard to persuade Society that he was an elegant idler, and masked his vaulting ambition under the guise of a cynical indifference to worldly pomp and power. His tastes were a little coarse—otherwise his imposture would have been complete, and he would have perhaps realised the “grandly simple ideal” of a perfect aristocratic character, which the Earl of March imputed to George Selwyn. Melbourne’s first impulse was usually to frivolity. But when he saw that business must be attended to, no man could work harder or bring to bear on affairs of State a keener intellect, a more astute judgment, or a craftier scheme of strategy. His handsome person and his charm of manner rendered him in his old age a persona grata at the Court of the Queen, who treated him with filial affection and respect. In him one often fancied the characters of Walpole and Bolingbroke met in combination, and there is a passage in his speech on the Indemnity Bill (11th of March, 1818) which may be cited as strangely appropriate to his career. It is that in which, after expatiating on the advantages which a soldier has whose exploits are performed in the light of day, before his comrades and his foes, and so publicly, that his valour and his virtues cannot be denied or disputed before a world in which they receive bold advertisement, he proceeds to show that it is far otherwise with the politician. “Not so the services of the Minister,” exclaimed Melbourne, with a little sub-acid cynicism; “they lie not so much in acting in great crises, as in preventing those crises from arising; therefore they are often obscure and unknown, subject to every species of misrepresentation, and effected amidst obloquy, attack, and condemnation, whilst in reality—entitled to the approbation and gratitude of the country—how frequently are such services lost in the tranquillity which they have been the means of preserving, and amidst the prosperity which they have themselves created.”

Another stout political chieftain had passed away on the 21st of September, when Lord George Bentinck died suddenly of heart disease. His leadership of the Protectionists had latterly been imprudent and unpopular, and he had indeed thrown it up during the Session, when it was no longer possible to conceal the dissatisfaction which it created among his followers. Lord George Bentinck was an able man, but like Achilles, “iracundus, inexorabilis, acer.” Discredit has recently been cast on his career on the turf, which too late in life he deserted for politics. His indignation at “being sold,” as he phrased it, when Peel abandoned Protection, flung him headlong into the civil strife of the times, with all his prejudices thick upon him, and with a mind ill-equipped by study or training for political controversy or the practice of statecraft. Fury and rancour, and a strange confusion of mind in marshalling his arguments, marked his harangues, and in strategy his impulsiveness and his arrogance often led him into serious errors. Yet he was popular on the whole in the House of Commons, for he was a man of dauntless courage, and was supposed to be guided by honesty of purpose in defending the interests of his order. If he had not been a little too much given to trumpeting his personal integrity, his zeal and self-sacrifice would have been better appreciated by his contemporaries, who till his death did him less than justice.