Shooting Victoria (48 page)

The universal sense of joy and excitement on this day belied the fact that strident criticism of the Exhibition had continued on long after Parliament agreed to the Hyde Park site and Paxton's design had been adopted, a year before. The irrepressible Colonel Sibthorp had been carping at the project ever since, praying for a hailstorm to bring the building down, and raising Cassandra cries about multitudes of foreigners, “thieves and pickpockets and whoremongers” who would, come May, pollute the West End.
John Bull
magazine agreed that foreigners, less emotionally restrained than the British and less hygienic to boot, would bring moral and physical contagion to London: “We have invited the pestilence into our dwellings, and we shall have to submit to its ravages.” Albert in particular suffered from these attacks, and
he wrote with exhaustion and exasperation to his grandmother in Coburg, two weeks before the opening,

I am more dead than alive from overwork. The opponents of the Exhibition work with might and main to throw all the old women into panic and drive myself crazy. The strangers, they give out, are certain to commence a thorough revolution here, to murder Victoria and myself and to proclaim the Red Republic in England; the plague is certain to ensue from the confluence of such vast multitudes, and to swallow up those whom the increased price of everything has not already swept away. For all this I am responsible, and against all this I have to make efficient provision.

These fears and rumors flew abroad to the receptive ears of the autocrats of Europe. The Tsar refused to issue passports to the Russian nobility. The King of Prussia hesitated in allowing his brother and heir, the Prince of Prussia, to attend with his family after the King of Hanover wrote him excoriating this “rubbishy” Exhibition. “I am not easily given to panicking,” said Hanover, “but I confess to you that I would not like anyone belonging to me exposed to the imminent perils of these times.” When the King wrote about these fears to Albert, the Prince replied with annoyed irony, listing all the supposed threats brought on by the Exhibition: the collapse of the building, destroying visitors, a scarcity of food in London, the reappearance of the Black Death, infection by the “scourges of the civilised and uncivilised world,” the vengeance of an angry God. “I can give no guarantee against these perils, nor am I in a position to assume responsibility for the possibly menaced lives of your Royal relatives.” Frederick William relented; the Prince of Prussia and his family were Victoria's and Albert's special guests at the opening.

Many feared for Victoria's personal safety on this day; the Duchess of Kent was not the only one terrified at the prospect of
her daughter going out among the masses. Victoria's government, as well, was nervous. Two weeks before, the Executive Committee of the Exhibition—in consultation with Albert's courtiers—decided that the Queen would open the Exhibition in a small private ceremony; the public would be admitted later in the day. The skittishness of everyone, including the Queen, was understandable, as this sort of intimate contact between public and monarch had never before been tried. This wasn't a levee, drawing room, or court, in which contact was limited to those of high birth. The memory of Pate's attack was still fresh in the minds of the Queen and Albert, as well as their advisers. If the event were to be public, the Queen would be surrounded by those there not by the grace of God but by the price of admission; any man with the 3 guineas (3 pounds, 3 shillings) to buy a season ticket
*
could take his place quite literally within striking distance of Victoria. The public responded to the plan of a private ceremony with anger. The
Daily News
blasted that the Commissioners could not have come to “a more impolitic, a more absurd, or a more ludicrous resolution.” “Surely,” stated the
Times
, “Queen Victoria is not Tiberius or Louis XI, that she should be smuggled out of a great glass carriage into a great glass building under cover of the truncheons of the police and the broadswords of the Life Guards? Where most Englishmen are gathered together there the Queen of England is most secure!” In the face of overwhelming public pressure, Victoria and Albert changed their minds, and Victoria herself decided to open the ceremony to all season ticket holders.

And so on this May Day 1851, Victoria and Albert, hand in hand with the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales, stepped into the ninth and last carriage of the royal cortege, and rode out into the largest crowd by far they had ever seen—as Victoria put it, a “densely crowded mass of human beings, in the highest good humor and most enthusiastic.” The carriages were closed,
perhaps in deference to security, but just as likely because of the falling rain. As they approached the Crystal Palace, however, the dark clouds gave way to the proverbial Queen's weather, and the noonday sun glistened upon the Crystal Palace. They stepped out at Rotten Row and entered the Palace as a sapper on the roof raised the royal standard. “The glimpse of the transept through the iron gates,” Victoria wrote, “the waving palms, flowers, statues, myriads of people filling the galleries and seats around, with the flourish of trumpets as we entered, gave us a sensation which I can never forget, and I felt much moved.”

When the Queen ascended with her family to the throne, two organs burst into the national anthem, sung by six hundred voices—the massed choirs of the Chapel Royal, St. Paul's, Westminster Abbey, and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, among others. Albert then left his wife to join the Commissioners. He approached the dais and presented an address to the Queen. This was unfortunately tedious—to all but Victoria, to whom it was her husband's well-deserved moment in the sun. Victoria made a short reply, and the organ and choir broke into a sublime rendition of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.

And at that moment, in the middle of the happiest day of the Queen's life, she experienced a happy breach of security and a benign assault. From out of the ranks of the diplomats stepped a Chinese man decked out in full native costume. He walked to the base of the throne and bowed, repeatedly and deeply, obeisance that the Queen acknowledged graciously. He had been standing among the dignitaries for hours, and had been seen earlier in the day kowtowing to the Duke of Wellington. But no one knew who he was: the Chinese had not even sent a delegation to the Exhibition. The Lord Chamberlain, perplexed as to what to do with the man, consulted with Victoria and Albert. They recommended that he join the diplomats who were then forming up for the great procession through the Exhibition. And so he amiably marched as the impromptu Chinese ambassador. After the ceremony his identity
was revealed: he was He-Sing, the owner of a Chinese junk moored on the Thames—a “Museum of Curiosities” open to the public for a shilling. His intrusion upon the royal presence, one of the most memorable moments of the ceremony, turned out to be an act of self-promotion nearly as effective as Joseph Paxton's had been.

Victoria held Bertie's hand, Albert held Vicky's, and the four proceeded around the nave and transepts of the Exhibition. The plan had been to keep the public well clear of their route, but everyone advanced to the very edge of the red-carpeted path around the building, and so the royal family walked, hemmed in by thousands, many with tears in their eyes, all cheering deafeningly and waving handkerchiefs. In a cartoon,
Punch
caught the scene of the four royals strolling happily among the joyful public, the cartoon's caption lampooning the groundless fears that the Queen put to rest: “HER MAJESTY, as She Appeared on the FIRST of MAY, Surrounded by ‘Horrible Conspirators and Assassins.'”

Besides the multitudes who cheered her, the Queen could see little else: ahead of her the touching sight of the Duke of Wellington and the Marquis of Anglesey, the heroes of Waterloo, walking arm in arm; towering above her, sculptures such as August Kiss's
Amazon
. She would in the months ahead come back repeatedly to view the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the model of Liverpool docks, the eighty-bladed penknife, the massive steam engines, Mr. Colt's newfangled revolver from America, and the Exhibition's thirteen thousand other displays. Today, it was the people she remembered, in this unprecedented mingling—in what could be justly called the first ever royal walkabout. With this procession, Victoria and Albert declared the beginning of a truly modern monarchy, one in which their legitimacy rested upon the goodwill of the people. It was a unique event, Victoria knew, “a thousand times superior” to her coronation.

Half an hour later, the royal family returned to the throne. Albert spoke to the Lord Chamberlain, who in a booming voice declared the Exhibition open, and a hundred cannons roared
outside. Albert was visibly emotional, and the Queen noticed her Home Secretary was crying. They then returned through the hundreds of thousands, a ride, the Queen declared, “equally satisfactory,—the crowd enthusiastic, the order perfect.” Back at Buckingham Palace, the royal couple inaugurated a new and enduring tradition, walking out for the first time on the royal balcony to greet the shouting masses.
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Victoria knew: she had reached the high point of her co-ruler-ship with Albert. “It was and is a day to live for ever,” she wrote in her journal. “God bless my dearest Albert, God bless my dearest country, which has shown itself so great to-day! One felt so grateful to the great God, who seemed to pervade all and to bless all!”

*
Or any woman with 2 guineas (2 pounds, 2 shillings).

*
The balcony and the entire east façade of Buckingham Palace had been constructed in an expansion just four years before.

Part Four

TRIUMPH

nineteen

W
HAT
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OES
S
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O WITH
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O
n 6 November 1871, Charles Wentworth Dilke, second Baronet of that name, then a young Member of Parliament and brimful with confidence, gave a speech to an overflow crowd of working men in a lecture hall in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His controversial words about Victoria and her family both established him for a time as the people's champion and touched off an impassioned national reaction. He began his speech with a subject that failed to stir the crowd: equal representation for all voters. But when he turned from representation to royalty, the excitement began.

Dilke carefully calculated the cost to maintain British royalty—the privy purse, the household expenses, annuities for the Queen and her nine children, servants' pensions, palaces, the cost of royal protection—and the enormous cost of the royal yachts: it all came to a million a year. And for what? “A vast number of totally useless officials,” for one thing, whom Dilke listed to howls of laughter:
“Chamberlains, Controllers, Masters of Ceremonies, Marshals of the Household, Grooms of the Robes, Lords-in-Waiting, Grooms-in-Waiting, Gentlemen Ushers.…” Then there were several court painters, no fewer than thirty-two doctors, a High Almoner, a Sub Almoner, a Hereditary Grand Almoner—even a Hereditary Grand Falconer. And the list went on. In short, for their million, the public subsidized a host of unnecessary sinecures, “made use of for political purposes,” and thus guaranteeing political corruption. At one time, of course, all of that money had had a visible result, allowing the maintenance of a splendid Court. But now where does the money go, since the Queen lives in seclusion and “there is no Court at all”? “Has there not been,” Dilke asked, “a diversion of pubic moneys amounting to malversation?”

He then questioned a claim that the Queen's former Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, had made in defending the Queen before his Hughenden constituents: the Queen's duties were “multifarious,” “weighty,” and “unceasing”; her days were filled with reading and signing every single dispatch emanating from the government. But, asked Dilke, of what value was that labor? In signing these dispatches, the Queen might either disagree with her Ministers, subverting the will of government, or she might acquiesce to every dispatch, demonstrating no will whatsoever. “If we adopt the latter alternative, it is one little flattering to the intelligence of the Sovereign whose character Mr. Disraeli has described; and if we adopt the former, it affords us a view of Constitutional Monarchy in which it is impossible to distinguish it from the autocracy that all of us condemn.” Moreover, the business of sending dispatches to the Queen had become an enormous waste of time and labor, as every dispatch, as well as a member of government in residence, had to be sent to the Queen at her preferred and distant residences, Osborne and Balmoral—rather than to Windsor and Buckingham Palace, palaces “maintained for her at great cost,” but which she avoided.

The huge and unnecessary royal expenditure, Dilke argued, was worse than waste—it was mischief, a relic of the power of birth over
the power of merit. Perhaps, he suggested in his rousing closing, it was time to put an end to it all: