Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (73 page)

At almost eighty-two, she was the longest lived of any English sovereign and, with over sixty-three years on the throne, the longest reigning also. In her funeral procession through London, her coffin was followed by two emperors and the heir to a third, three kings, two crown princes and leading members of every royal family in Europe. Never had the world seemed so safe for kings. Less than twenty years later, however, this royal Europe tore itself apart in the holocaust of the First World War. It began with the murder of the Habsburg heir and it ended with the fall of all three Continental empires: the Russian, the German and the Austro-Hungarian.

Now only one Western king-emperor survived: Victoria’s grandson, George V of Great Britain. At the height of the conflict, in 1917, he had changed his family name to Windsor.

Windsor. The name, selected after careful consideration, is redolent of all things English. Shakespeare. Pageantry. Sweet, old-fashioned smells.

And the magic worked. Or something did. For, eighty years later, the House of Windsor still soldiers on, and George V’s granddaughter, Elizabeth II, still sits on the British throne.

This part shows how and why this extraordinary survival against the odds took place. It asks what the nation has gained as well as lost from the continuance of monarchy. And it looks to the future, if indeed there is one. Will green become the new royal purple? Or will the glory of monarchy finally fade away having bored us and itself to death?

I

In 1859 Queen Victoria was painted as she appeared at the state opening of Parliament: robed, diademed and glittering in diamonds, with her Speech from the Throne and the Imperial State Crown, made for her coronation in 1838 and set with the finest and most famous jewels of the Royal Collection, on the table beside her. Rising romantically in the background are the towers and spires of the Palace of Westminster, which she and Albert had opened in 1852 and which was at last nearing completion. No doubt the painter flattered. But the spirit is right. With Albert to guide and steer her, she was enjoying the giddy whirl of being queen.

Two years later, it was all over. Though she had four decades more to live and reign, she would never wear the Imperial Crown again.

On 25 November 1861 Albert, who had been secretly warned that his eldest son, Albert-Edward, prince of Wales, was keeping a woman in his student rooms at Cambridge, travelled by train from Windsor to confront him. He spent the night at Madingley Hall just outside Cambridge, before returning to Windsor the following morning.

Already unwell before his journey, which had taken place in soaking-wet weather, his condition rapidly worsened. But Victoria was oblivious and his doctors powerless, doing little more than drugging him with ever more frequent slugs of brandy. Soon he was delirious, and on the night of 14 December his breathing began to change. Victoria was summoned and, confronting the truth at last, exclaimed, ‘This is death’ and fell on his body.

Once she emerged from the immediate paralysis of grief, Victoria’s first thought was to preserve Albert’s private memory for herself and her children. The Blue Room at Windsor, where he had died, was turned into a shrine, where she came to meditate each year on the anniversary of his death. Similarly, his rooms at Osborne were kept unchanged, with his pictures, knick-knacks and his omnipresent bust. Even his shaving-water continued to be put out as usual.

But would Albert’s public achievements, in identifying the monarchy with the forces of progress in the arts, industry and politics, survive as well? Here, on the contrary, Victoria’s behaviour seemed to risk throwing everything away. Locked in her own misery, she refused point blank either to come to London or make public appearances. Buckingham Palace, the now all-too-visible symbol of monarchy, stood empty and shuttered, and in 1864 some joker tied a mock advertisement to the gates: ‘These commanding premises to be let or sold, in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business’.

Two years later, in 1866, under immense pressure from the government, she agreed to open Parliament for the first time since Albert’s death. But she could not have made her real feelings plainer. She refused to walk along the Royal Gallery –
his
gallery. Or wear the crown. Or even read the speech. Instead, she sat, frozen and impassive, on the throne, with a black cap, a black dress and a long black veil, while the Lord Chancellor delivered the speech on her behalf.

The following year, Britain took ‘a step in the dark’ with the passage of the Second, much more radical, Reform Act. This gave the vote to the skilled urban working class and added more than a million voters to the roll.

The age of mass politics had begun.

Victoria reacted calmly, asserting, with her characteristically vigorous underlinings, that ‘the country was never so loyal or so devoted to their Sovereign as now’. Her confidence was soon put to the test by the dramatic events in France. On 2 September 1870 at Sedan, the Prussians crushed the French armies and took the Emperor Napoleon III prisoner. France declared a republic and, early the following year, a left-wing rising – the Commune – left the centre of Paris and its great public buildings a blackened, smouldering ruin.

As a century before, the republican infection quickly spread to Britain.
The Republican
newspaper was founded and more than fifty republican clubs established from Aberdeen to Plymouth.

Faced with this direct challenge to her throne, Victoria bestirred herself at last and in 1871 performed more public engagements than in the decade since Albert’s death. In February, she opened Parliament, wearing a new, small diamond crown. Weighing only a few ounces (in contrast to the two and a half pounds of the Imperial State Crown), it was designed to fit neatly over her widow’s cap and veil and, perched on top of her head, quickly became her acknowledged symbol.

In March, she presided, wearing rubies as well as diamonds, over the wedding of her daughter, Princess Louise, to the marquess of Lorne at Windsor Castle, and followed it by joining the couple on a drive through London. At the end of the month, she opened the Royal Albert Hall, which was packed to capacity with 8000 people. Finally, in June, she drove to the newly completed St Thomas’s Hospital, where her statue commemorates her visit. She paid tribute to Florence Nightingale; toured the building, naming one ward ‘Victoria’ and another ‘Albert’; and declared the hospital open. Albert’s improving, philanthropic legacy was, after all, safe in her hands.

Despite all this activity, public opinion hung in the balance, and on 6 November 1871, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, a Liberal MP and a baronet, openly called for a republic: ‘I say, for my part – and I believe the middle classes in general will say – let it come!’

The salvation of the ‘monarchy business’ came from an unexpected quarter. The behaviour of the prince of Wales – known to his family as ‘Bertie’ – had not improved since Albert’s death, and only the previous year he had been summoned as a witness in the sensational Mordaunt divorce case. But in late November 1871 he fell dangerously ill of typhoid fever. It was just ten years since his father had supposedly died of the same disease, and it seemed more than likely that there would be the same outcome.

As the royal family, headed by Victoria herself, gathered round the prince’s sickbed at Sandringham, a remarkable change took place in the popular mood. Hitherto the press had pilloried Albert-Edward as a good-for-nothing wastrel. Now it kept vigil with the afflicted family. The crisis came on 14 December, the anniversary of Albert’s death. But instead of succumbing, the prince survived and began a slow but sure recovery.

The opportunity was too good to miss for the Liberal prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone. Throughout his sixty-year-long political career, which took him from High Toryism in youth to the wilder shores of Liberalism in old age, Gladstone remained constant to the belief that religion was central to politics and that monarchy was the best embodiment of that relationship.

How better to reaffirm this belief and dish Dilke and the republicans than by holding a Day of National Thanksgiving for the prince’s recovery, with the queen and the prince of Wales processing through London to a service at St Paul’s? The only obstacle, ironically enough, was Victoria herself. She preferred her religion plain and private. And she detested cathedral services with what she saw as their hypocritical combination of religion and pomp.

But Gladstone, for all his religiosity, was an astute politician: the moment was too good to miss and he browbeat Victoria into acceptance. Their personal relations, awkward from the start, never recovered. But, having given way, the queen played her part to perfection.

Temple Bar, which has now been moved to a site by St Paul’s Cathedral, then still stood at the entrance to the City in Fleet Street. As the royal carriage passed through it, it halted to be greeted by the Lord Mayor. During the pause, Victoria seized her son’s hand, held it up in front of the vast crowd and kissed it extravagantly. It was a gesture worthy of her great predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I herself. The republican movement collapsed and Dilke himself forswore the faith, only to be later forced out of public life by charges of adultery.

In 1874 Gladstone fell and was replaced as prime minister by the other great figure in Victorian politics, the Tory leader, Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli, feline and slippery as opposed to the craggy Gladstone, was a bundle of contradictions: dandy, novelist and supremely professional politician; baptized Jew and hardline Tory; elitist and populist; cynic and courtier. The moment he became prime minister, Disraeli set himself to charm Victoria, ageing though she was, as his ‘Faery Queen’. Victoria, used to Gladstone’s lecturings, responded with coquettish glee.

But she also took advantage of the change. Intensely conscious of her royalty, she had been reluctant to yield precedence to the Continental monarchs who bore the title ‘emperor’ or ‘empress’. But the declaration of the German Empire, which followed the defeat of France, raised a particular problem since in time her own eldest daughter, who had married the German crown prince, would be empress herself.

But wasn’t she the doyenne of European sovereigns? The ruler of the world’s greatest empire, with a fifth of the globe’s inhabitants as her subjects? And in India, as heir of the Mughals, wasn’t she even regularly called ‘empress’? So from 1873 she began to badger about a formal assumption of the title.

The Bill to create her officially ‘Empress of India’ was introduced in 1876. Gladstone spoke vehemently against it. And even Disraeli harboured doubts, though he kept them to himself. But, once the Act had passed, he moved with characteristic dexterity to exploit it as the centre-piece of a new Tory ‘imperial policy of England’.

In 1875, he guaranteed communications to India by buying a controlling interest in the Suez Canal; in 1877 he engaged in a stand-off with Russia, Britain’s chief imperial rival, in the Balkans and the Bosporus; then in 1878 the old prestidigitator pulled off a final coup at the Congress of Berlin by acting as arbiter of Europe and bringing home ‘peace with honour’. As he returned to Downing Street in an open carriage, a huge bunch of flowers was thrust into his hands: ‘From the queen,’ the messenger bellowed above the cheers.

At the height of the crisis, the mob had chanted their new song:

We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.

Then they let off steam by breaking the windows of Gladstone’s fine house in Carlton House Terrace. ‘Dizzy’, Gladstone wrote, ‘is looking for the weak side of the English people.’ In ‘imperialism’, as it was soon called, he had found it.

But, deadly political rivals though they were (the mere thought of having to deliver Disraeli’s eulogy after his death in 1881 gave Gladstone a fit of diarrhoea), the triumphant late Victorian monarchy is their joint creation. The increasingly grandiose acts of national dedication were Gladstone’s progeny (though he intensely disliked the grandiosity); the mounting imperial stridency, enthusiastically abetted by the queen-empress herself, was Dizzy’s contribution. And the two came together in the celebrations for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

European royalties were deliberately omitted: instead, pride of place was given to the prime ministers of the newly self-governing white colonies of the empire, together with troops representing all its diverse and many-coloured peoples. The celebrations culminated in a carefully rehearsed open-air service, held in brilliant July weather, in front of St Paul’s. Looking down on the ceremonies was the statue of Queen Anne, who had reigned almost two centuries before. Anne had come frequently to St Paul’s in great, popular processions to celebrate England’s victories over the French.

But, despite her shyness and idiosyncrasy, Victoria’s popularity was wider and deeper than that of any previous monarch. Her statue stands across the globe; she gave her name to hospitals and universities, cities and waterfalls, entire provinces, and to the greatest and most creative age in our history. She was Britannia, representing in her dumpy little person Britain and her empire, at once embattled and triumphant.

As the queen’s carriage pulled off at the end of the service, the choir-boys broke rank to scoop up the gravel that had been crushed by its wheels as a sort of sacred relic.

II

But, for all Victoria’s achievements, something was missing. On 23 March 1887, on one of her new-style royal progresses, Victoria visited Birmingham. She travelled by train and then drove from the station in a carriage procession to the magnificent town hall, for a civic reception which ended with a performance of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.

As she got back into her train, Victoria told the mayor she was delighted at the warmth of her welcome. But the Brummies felt cheated. ‘Why had there been so few carriages?’ Joseph Chamberlain, the Birmingham City boss, asked after dinner at Windsor a few days later. ‘Where was the Household Cavalry?’ The courtiers explained that Victoria preferred simplicity. ‘Simplicity’, replied Chamberlain, ‘was suitable to a Republic. But a Sovereign should make such visits with all possible state.’ There would be no ‘republican simplicity’ in the new reign.