A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (5 page)

Albert wanted Victoria to claim foreign policy as a personal sphere. It was to her that ambassadors presented their credentials, and he therefore saw the Queen as legitimately entitled to exert influence. This was, he considered, necessary because Lord Palmerston, who was Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister during much of her first two decades, was reckless and confrontational. It was also obvious that Victoria could deal directly with other monarchs in a way that her Government could not. It was the Queen who, by making a private visit to King Louis-Philippe in 1843, began to develop cordial official relations with France for the first time in centuries. This friendship survived a change of dynasty, for in 1855 she journeyed to Paris to see Napoleon III, and both French monarchs reciprocated by coming to England. These connections (interestingly, both monarchs settled in England after being overthrown) set a precedent in Anglo-French friendship that was to be significant in the following century.

While Victoria appreciated Albert’s assistance, it increased his unpopularity in the country at large. In Parliament, the press and the public, there was considerable resentment of his perceived interference in affairs of state. The period between his marriage in 1840 and his death in 1861 has been dubbed ‘the dual monarchy’. He did not lack defenders, however, on the grounds that his advice was given without political bias. Lord Malmesbury wrote that: ‘No sovereign could have at his side a better counsellor, removed as he is from all personal disputes of parties.’
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He also persuaded Victoria to adopt a more politically neutral stance. In the volatile political climate of the 1840s it was vital that extremes be avoided. Though this period of instability passed without mishap, the lesson was never adequately taken to heart, for throughout her life she would display both personal and political favouritism towards governments and prime ministers. He persuaded her, however, to abandon her reservations regarding Peel and to work with the Tory Government. By doing so she increased public respect, for her Whig loyalties had been much discussed in the press. This show of impartiality would not last, and in the latter part of her reign it would be the Tory party with whose policies and outlook she would openly sympathize.

Needing privacy for their growing family – for at Windsor the public could come close enough to peer through the castle windows – Victoria and Albert sought homes of their own that were more suited to bringing up children. The result was the creation of two personal retreats. The first was at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, where, between 1845 and 1849, they had an existing house converted into a rambling Italianate villa. Here they spent idyllic summers, though it also provided a refuge when in 1848 a mass demonstration by Chartists made London seem too dangerous.

Their other sanctuary was at Balmoral in Scotland. In 1842 they had visited the Queen’s northern realm and had fallen in love with the Highlands, which bore a passing resemblance to the Germany of Albert’s youth. They found the local people – forthright in speech and behaviour – a pleasing contrast to the deference and backbiting of London. Between 1853 and 1855, a Scottish baronial castle was built for them. Here they lived, for months at a time, in a world of kilts and pipers and stalking and fishing. As at Osborne, Albert’s influence on the building and its interiors was noticeable. With its tartan wallpaper and deer-antler furniture it was a fantasy almost worthy of the Bavarian king, Ludwig II.

Such was Victoria’s pleasure in these surroundings that she published two books about her life in Scotland.
Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands
sold well, spawning a sequel – if only because it was unprecedented for a reigning monarch to publish a work about her life (she presented Dickens with a copy of the first book inscribed: ‘From the humblest of writers to one of the greatest.’). The fact that her subjects could read about her summer holidays and family picnics was symptomatic of the monarchy as it had developed under Victoria. Previously, the private life of the Royal Family had been a subject for scurrilous mockery. Depictions of it in popular prints had been disrespectful and often vicious. Now the monarch and her consort were a model of respectability whose example the public were encouraged to follow. The fact that Albert did not gamble, keep a mistress or waste his time in idleness, and that Victoria was a doting wife and mother as well as a queen, meant that their private life fitted – entirely unintentionally – with the ideals of an evangelical element in public opinion that was at its most powerful around the mid-century. Their earnestness, together with a climate of piety, were a marked influence on the Victorian era and have been seen by later generations as
defining its character. Pictures, which sold well in cheap coloured editions, showed them enjoying simple pleasures in cosy domestic settings – gathering around a Christmas tree (Albert was credited with introducing this custom to Britain, though in fact it was probably Queen Charlotte, the German wife of George III, who did so) or romping on the carpet. One such image, entitled ‘The Queen and Prince Albert at Home’, shows the Prince on all fours while his children pretend he is a horse.

Albert and Victoria were untypical parents, as they were atypical of many things that characterized their era. They were not punctilious churchgoers, for instance, and did not believe in the keeping of the Sabbath as rigorously as many of Victoria’s subjects did. Though their children were naturally put in the care of nurses and tutors, they were not in the least neglected, and a great deal of attention was paid to them – especially remarkable considering the commitments of both parents. Their education was meticulously planned, but was not without pleasures. At Osborne they each had garden plots to look after. In the grounds can be seen their toy blockhouse and the miniature Swiss chalet in which they learned housekeeping and entertained their parents to tea. One of its features was a little grocer’s shop called Spratt’s, in which they learned the value of money. The Queen described how, on one occasion she: ‘went with the children – Alice and I driving – to the Swiss Cottage, which was all decked out with flags in honour of [Prince] Alfred’s birthday. A band played and after dinner we danced, with the three boys and three girls and the company, a merry country dance on the terrace.’
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The Queen had no fondness for babies (she thought they looked like ‘frogs’) and found it difficult to talk to her children, of whom she and Albert made considerable demands. Yet their sons and daughters were given a childhood that was often idyllic, and on which in later years they would look back with immense nostalgia.

Two new developments meant that some of this family life could be shared with the public. The first was the railway. A royal train enabled the Queen and her family to travel swiftly all over the realm and permitted vast numbers of people to see them. The other was the invention of photography, which had coincided with the Queen’s accession. In 1841 the first photographic portrait studio opened in London. Albert was photographed the following year and Victoria in 1845. By the 1850s it was possible to make numerous copies of a single photograph, and the result was the
carte de visite
, a visiting-card-sized image. A widespread and long-lasting fashion developed for collecting pictures of celebrities, and this brought the Queen’s family into the public eye in a way never before possible. Numerous, young and attractive, the Royal Family was an obvious subject for photographs. Before Victoria’s reign, very few people had seen the monarch other than as an image on coins. Now millions of subjects knew what she, her husband, her children and her homes looked like. The clothes they wore could be imitated, and, in two cases, quickly set fashions for children’s dress: the kilts and bonnets worn by the boys were adopted in thousands of middle-class households. The sailor suit made for Bertie in 1846 by a tailor aboard the royal yacht – and recorded in a portrait by Winterhalter – was so enchanting that it was also adapted for girls and set a worldwide trend that lasted until the Second World War (the original is in the National Maritime Museum). The Royal Family had become – to use a modern phrase – accessible. As a result of new technology (the mass-printed illustrated newspaper as well as photography) they became part of everyday life in precisely the way that television documentaries have demystified the Royal Family in our own time. These things made a cult of Victoria and Albert.

The Queen had a sharp eye for detail and sometimes her foibles took on the nature of commands. When visiting France in 1855, she recorded in her sketchbook the uniforms of the soldiers who lined the route or guarded her residences – these were, after all, the allies of her own troops in the Crimea. She was especially taken with the Zouaves – infantrymen dressed in a North African uniform of turbans, short jackets and immensely baggy trousers. On her return she expressed a desire to see some of her own soldiers outfitted in this manner. Englishmen would have looked ridiculous in such clothing, so War Office officials were obliged to study maps of the Empire in search of somewhere in which it could be introduced. They chose the Caribbean, and it became the distinctive uniform of black troops of the West India Regiment. It was seen in London when a contingent participated in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and it is still worn by bandsmen of the Barbados Defence Force.

A notable characteristic of the Royal Family was its seeming ordinariness. The Queen, when not in robes of state, had a dress-sense that was much commented upon, and not favourably. When she made her visits to France, in 1843 and 1855, the crowds were astonished at her appearance. Charlotte Brontë happened to see her on the former occasion, and described her as ‘a little, stout, vivacious lady, very plainly dressed, not much dignity or pretension about her’.
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On the latter visit the public – accustomed to their own Empress, the statuesque and beautiful Eugénie – were surprised to see Victoria in an unremarkable dress, carrying a large green umbrella and an ugly handbag decorated with a parrot that had been embroidered by one of her children. It was also noticed that she wore rings on every finger and even on both thumbs (though this habit was an attempt to conceal her somewhat unsightly hands rather than to show off wealth
or taste in jewellery). She could easily have been mistaken for the wife of a bourgeois Englishman, and this too enabled her subjects to identify with her.

As well as their irreproachable family life, Victoria and Albert won admiration by their enthusiasm for progress. In an era of self-conscious modernity, they clearly enjoyed and made use of the conveniences and pleasures that technology provided, and whatever was done by the Queen and her family was inevitably going to be emulated by others. They travelled extensively by rail. They became patrons of the Photographic Society. Most significantly, the Queen agreed to have chloroform when giving birth to her eighth child, Prince Leopold, in 1853. At the time this caused considerable controversy. The practice of giving this anaesthetic to women during childbirth had been introduced only in 1847, and its dangers and possible side-effects were not well understood. Attempting to avoid the pain of labour was also seen in devout circles as proof of a lack of trust in the divine will. The Queen ignored these criticisms, and was profoundly grateful for the benefits. As Elizabeth Longford has written, it could be argued that Victoria’s greatest gift to her people ‘was a refusal to accept pain in childbirth as woman’s divinely appointed destiny’.
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Despite the Royal Family’s perceived goodness and empathy, Albert was still widely disliked. Yet his achievements were considerable. Among other things, he had the Cambridge curriculum modernized, rescuing the university from a state of moribund complacency and putting it on a par with those on the Continent. He guaranteed the success of the Great Exhibition. It was he, as president of the Royal Commission that organized it, who decided on its name and approved the design for the revolutionary glass building that became its symbol. He also defied opposition and had it built in Hyde Park, increasing its accessibility. By insisting that foreign
manufactures be displayed beside those of the United Kingdom, he ensured that the exhibition had international, rather than merely national appeal. The resulting success owed more to him than to any other individual, and the considerable profit – £185,437 – was sufficient to purchase 70 acres of nearby land and ultimately to build the great museums that have given the district the nickname ‘Albertopolis’.

These things were achieved, however, at considerable personal cost. As the 1850s wore on Albert aged prematurely, becoming increasingly stout and bald, and his health was in visible decline. He was worn out with stress and overwork, and with worry. The decade witnessed two outbreaks of conflict: the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. Both were traumatic for Britain, but Victoria, extremely proud of being ‘a soldier’s daughter’ (the Duke of Kent had been a much-hated Commander-in-Chief), discovered a new role as a symbolic war leader, for she had perhaps seen an opportunity to emulate Queen Elizabeth. Her statement that she had never regretted more that she was a ‘poor woman and not a man’, for she would love to have gone to war herself, has about it a conscious echo of Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury. The country indulged in a frenzy of war fever and the Queen, showing a pugnacious side of her nature that was at odds with her more customary shyness, was carried away by it. She watched the departure of troops and ships, visited the wounded and knitted woollen garments for the army (but was annoyed to find that the things she had made were distributed among officers rather than given to the common soldiery).

Albert, a reluctant field marshal with an antipathy to militarism, acted as a restraining influence on his wife’s enthusiasm. Nevertheless his idea for a gallantry medal named after the Queen proved highly popular, and she took great pleasure in awarding the first Victoria Crosses in Hyde Park in June 1857.
During the Crimean War, press and public criticism of him had risen to such heights of hysteria and absurdity that eventually a reaction had set in. Since he had not – as anticipated – sided with Russia and had worked tirelessly in support of Britain’s war effort his critics were to a large extent silenced. He would not suffer as greatly at their hands thereafter.