INTRODUCTION
Apart from the onward surge of Empire during both epochs, apart from the flow of scientific thought and the breeze of literary enthusiasm characterising them, there is much in the atmosphere of Victoria’s advent to the Throne, and her long and glorious tenure of it, to remind us of the central figure of the Elizabethan age.
Both princesses were reared and educated, although for very different reasons, in the uncertain glory of succession to the Throne. Both mounted the Throne early in life alone and unprotected, at a moment of reaction against the abuses of monarchy. Under George III. as under Henry VIII. this country had been subjected to violent commotion consequent on the struggle for national freedom against a foreign power. The Reformation in England and the Napoleonic wars owed their successful issue to the persistent determination of the English people to be free. The hated marriage of Mary and the matrimonial scandals of George IV. had cast a gloom over the temper of the nation. Even the triumph of the popular cause, due to the grudging support given by William IV. to his Whig Ministers, had not restored the forfeited prestige of the Monarchy.
Reaction was the corollary against the fear inspiredby Philip in the one case and the humiliating memories of Queen Caroline in the other. That reaction came in the shape of the popular enthusiasm inspired by a young and attractive Tudor princess, who at Hatfield on a late November afternoon in 1558 heard from Cecil that she was Queen of England. Three centuries later a similar outburst followed the accession of another youthful princess only just eighteen years old, looking scarcely more than a child, when she received the homage of Lord Melbourne at Kensington Palace on a June morning of 1837.
It is tempting to follow this seductive pathway through the devious alleys of historical comparison and contrasts. The troubles of Elizabeth’s childhood at Hunsdon, the pitiful laments of her excellent governess at the poverty of her ward’s surroundings, and the hostile atmosphere surrounding her person were reflected in a minor degree within the precincts of Kensington during the early years of Princess Victoria’s life.
Our concern, however, is not with Elizabeth but with Victoria, with the England into which she was born, and with the influences which helped to give her character and bearing a certain strength and dignity, and attuned her heart, not perhaps to deep tenderness, but to much compassion.
The pen recoils from an attempt to tell again the story of Princess Victoria’s birth and early life, or to describe once more the political events of her first years upon the Throne. Moreover, these volumes tell their own tale. They set forth in the young Princess’s own artless words the daily facts of herexistence at Kensington, or when making some provincial royal progress in the company of her mother.
The reader can catch many a glimpse here and there of the soul of a Princess, proud and headstrong, affectionate and sometimes perverse, seated on the lonely heights of the Throne. The portrait is here, within these pages. It is not unskilfully drawn, when the youth of the artist is borne in mind. At the time when the first entries in these Journals were made, the writer was thirteen years old. The last page was written on the day of her marriage. She had been two years a Queen, and she was in her twenty-first year.
Princess Victoria, the only child of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, and the ultimate heiress in direct succession of George III., was born on May 24, 1819. In 1819 the aspect of English country life was not very different from that of to-day; if the roads were not so well surfaced, and if woodlands were rather more plentiful, the fields and hedgerows, the farmsteads with cottages grouped around them, the Tudor manor-houses, the Georgian villas, the church spires, and the village greens have remained unchanged. Except for lines of railway and telegraph poles, the hop-fields of Kent and the Surrey commons have kept their shape and contours. So that, in spite of the miracles wrought by machinery in the minutiæ of life, any one of our grandparents cruising in an airship at an elevation of some hundreds of feet over the lands where he hunted and shot, or even the great town in which he spent his summer months,would probably be unconscious of much distinctive change.
Young people, however, think it odd when they read that when Princess Victoria was taken from Kensington to Claremont—a journey now accomplished with as little thought as would then have been given to a drive between the Palace and Hyde Park—it was considered a “family removal” of such moment as to require all the provision and precautions associated to-day with an autumn holiday.
To those still young, but old enough to remember Queen Victoria, it may seem hardly credible that she was born into a world devoid of all the marvels of steam and electric contrivance that appear to us the necessities, and not merely the luxuries, of life. How much more difficult it must be for them to realise that when the young Princess (whom they remember a great and mysterious figure, welcoming back only the other day her soldiers from South Africa, and rejoicing in their victories) was carried into the saloon of Kensington Palace to be received by Archbishop Manners Sutton into the Church of Christ, the mighty spirit of Napoleon brooded still behind the palisades of Longwood, and George III.’s white and weary head could still be seen at the window of his library at Windsor!
The Victorian era covers the period of the expansion of England into the British Empire. The soldier, still young to-day, who put the coping-stone on the Empire in Africa in 1900 is linked by the life of the Queen to his forbears, who, when shewas born, were still nursing the wounds gloriously earned four years before in laying its foundation in a Belgian cornfield.
That year 1819, however, was a year of deep despondency in England. In Europe it was the “glorious year of Metternich,” then at the height of his maleficent power. Europe was quit of Napoleon, but had got Metternich in exchange, and was ill pleased with the bargain. Great Britain, it is true, was free, but our people were overwrought by poverty and suffering. The storm-swell of the great Napoleonic wars still disturbed the surface of English life, and few realised that they were better off than they had been during the past decade.
At Holland House, its coteries thinner but still talking, Lady Holland—old Madagascar—was still debating what inscription should record the merits of Mr. Fox upon his monument in the Abbey for the edification of future ages. In St. James’s Place Sam Rogers’s breakfasts had not lost their vogue. Tommy Moore was still dining with Horace Twiss, and meeting Kean, and Mrs. Siddons, “cold and queenlike,” on her way to view Caroline of Brunswick’s “things” shortly to be sold at Christie’s, or to criticise Miss O’Neill’s dress rehearsals. On the very day that Princess Victoria was born, Byron was writing to John Murray from Venice “in the agonies of a sirocco,” and clamouring for the proofs of the first canto ofDon Juan. In that yearIvanhoewas finished, and in the hands of eager readers; whilst Scott was receiving at Abbotsford a certain Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, uncle of the babyat Kensington, destined thereafter to play a large part in her early life. Keats had just publishedEndymion. It was his last year in England before going south to die. And it was Shelley’sannus mirabilis: the year in which he wrotePrometheusandThe Cenci—an achievement, some have since said, unparalleled in English poetry since Shakespeare lived and wrote.
The Excursionhad been published five years before, but Wordsworth was at Rydal Mount completingThe White Doe of Rylston. Southey was Poet Laureate. Three years before, in the “wild and desolate neighbourhood amid great tracts of bleak land enclosed by stone dykes sweeping up Clayton heights,” Charlotte Brontë’s eyes had opened upon her sad world. Carlyle, then a young teacher in Edinburgh, was passing through that stormy period of the soul which comes sooner or later to every one whose manhood is worth testing by God. And half-way between Horncastle and Spilsby, on the lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold, Alfred Tennyson was reading Pope’sIliadand himself “writing an epic of 6,000 linesà laWalter Scott.” At Shrewsbury School under Dr. Butler, Charles Darwin, then a boy of ten, had already begun to develop a taste for “collecting,” manifested in “franks” and seals and coins. Robert Browning, a turbulent and destructive child of seven, had already commenced making rhymes less complicated, but not less ambitious, than those which puzzled his readers sixty years later. Goethe, who had grown to manhood within earshot of Frederick the Great and of theEmpress Maria Theresa, was living at Weimar with many years of life still before him, corresponding with the boy Mendelssohn, later to be a welcome guest, at Windsor, of the little Princess, then in her cradle in Kensington Palace. Mazzini, aged fourteen, was at the University in Genoa, a rebellious lad, but already affecting the deep mourning dress he never altered later in life. Cavour, aged nine, was at school in Turin. Sir Thomas Lawrence was in that year engaged in finishing his magnificent series of historical portraits afterwards to find a home at Windsor Castle, illustrating for all time the Congress of Vienna and the story of the Great Coalition against Napoleon.
Under this galaxy of stars, some slowly sinking below the horizon, and others just rising above it, Princess Victoria was born.
In the year following, King George III. died. Historians, mostly partisans of the Whig party, have not done this King justice. Of all Sovereigns who have ever reigned in England, none so completely represented the average man among his subjects. The King’s blameless morals, his regular habits, his conservative instincts and narrow obstinacy, were characteristics which he shared with the people he ruled. Of the House of Hanover he was the first King born in England, and he spoke his native tongue without a foreign accent. If he could have reconciled it to the family tradition, he would have married an English wife. He was essentially British in character and sentiment. Had he not been overborne by his Ministers, he would have foughtout to a finish the war with America, and peace with Washington would not have been concluded. He never for a moment contemplated abandoning the struggle against Napoleon. No party whip could have taken more trouble to keep his chief in office than did George III. to support Mr. Pitt throughout that Minister’s first administration. He has been called despotic, but that adjective can only be used, in speaking of him, in the sense that he wished to see his views prevail. He was a good partisan fighter, and this, in the main, his subjects never disliked. A close and impartial examination of the character of George III. discloses a temperament strongly resembling that which her Ministers were destined in the middle and later years of her reign to find in his granddaughter. Strong tenacity of view and of purpose, a vivid sense of duty, a firm though unrevealed belief in the transcendental right of the Sovereign to rule, a curious mingling of etiquette and domestic simplicity, and a high standard of domestic virtue were marked characteristics of George III. and of Queen Victoria. Both these descendants of Princess Sophia had little in common with the Stewarts, but, like Elizabeth and the Tudors, they had intense pride in England, and they showed a firm resolve to cherish and keep intact their mighty inheritance.
When George III. died at Windsor in 1820, and during the ten following years, Princess Victoria’s uncle, George IV., reigned as King. For the previous ten years he had reigned as Prince Regent. If his father has been misjudged, this Sovereign too hasbeen misrepresented by those who have made it their business to write the political history of our country. He is generally described as being wholly bad, and devoid of any decent quality as a man and as a Sovereign. Decency perhaps was not his strong point; but though it is not possible to esteem him as a man, George IV. was not a bad King. In his youth, as Prince of Wales, in spite of glaring follies and many vices, he possessed a certain charm. When a boy he had broken loose from the over-strict and over-judicious watchfulness of his parents. Kept in monotonous seclusion, cloistered within the narrow confines of a Palace, fettered by an Oriental system of domestic spies, cut off from intercourse with the intellectual movement of the outer world, the royal children, warm-blooded and of rebellious spirit, ran secret riot after a fashion which modern memoirs have revealed in Borgian colours. It was a natural reaction of young animal life against unnatural and unhealthy restraint. The Prince of Wales, when he was eighteen years old, was unwillingly and perforce liberated. It followed, simply enough, that he became a source of constant grief and annoyance to his royal father. Not only were the canons of morality violated by him with little regard for the outward decorum due to his great position, but the young Prince plunged into a turgid sea of politics, and it was not long before he stood forth as the nominal head of a faction bitterly opposed to the King’s Ministers, and the head and front of personal offence to the King himself.
In the eyes of high society he was a PrinceCharming, vicious if you will, a spendthrift and a rake, the embodiment of a reactionary spirit against the dulness and monotonous respectability of the Court. He was known to appreciate beautiful objects as well as beautiful faces. He was not altogether without literary culture. He appeared to be instinctively drawn to the arts and sciences with a full sense of the joy of patronage, and he made it clear to every one that he welcomed the free intercourse of men of all ranks, provided that they possessed some originality of character or some distinction of mind. In Mr. Fox he found a willing mentor and an irresistible boon companion. Among that little group of Whigs, of whom Sheridan was the ornament and the disgrace, he found precisely the atmosphere which suited him, so completely was it the antithesis of that in which his boyhood had been spent. As he grew older, the rose-tinted vices of his youth became grey and unlovely, while the shortcomings of his mind and his heart were more readily discerned; but much of his personal charm remained. In his most degenerate days, in the years of his regency and kingship, when he dragged into the public eye the indecencies of his domestic misfortunes and paraded his mistresses before the world, he still managed to retain a curious and genuine hold upon the affections of his Ministers. Although he possessed none of their regard, he was not altogether without some following among the people.
George IV.’s merits were a certain epicurean kindness of heart and a not ungenerous desire togive pleasure, coupled with a true sense of his constitutional position and a firm-drawn resolve to distinguish between his private predilections and his public duty. The nation owes him very little, but in any case it owes him this, that he was the first Sovereign since Charles I. who showed a blundering reverence for beautiful things. He enlarged and consolidated the artistic wealth of the nation. A life-long patron of artists, he fostered the growth of national art. He added largely to the splendid collections which now adorn Windsor and the metropolis. Whatever the final judgment passed upon him may be, both as a man and as a Sovereign, he must in strict justice be spared the unqualified contempt with which superior spirits, taking their cue from Thackeray, have treated him. It should weigh with every man who readsThe Four Georgesthat King George IV. was certainly liked, and was certainly not despised, by Sir Walter Scott. In his later years the old King displayed some little kindness to his niece, the young Princess Victoria, who had succeeded his own daughter as prospective heiress of England. If he saw her but rarely, he now and again betrayed knowledge of her existence, and once took her for a drive in his pony-carriage. There are still extant some short letters which she wrote to him in a large baby hand. In 1830 he died, and was succeeded by his brother the Duke of Clarence.
William IV. was the most fortunate of the children of George III. Thanks to his profession as a sea-officer, he escaped early from the stifling atmosphere of the Court, and had the glorious privilegeof serving under the command of Hood and of Nelson. His sea service ended when he was only twenty-five years old. It left the usual dominant sea-mark upon his character. Like so many gallant sailors, his mind was untrained and ill-disciplined. His sense of duty was strong, though undiscerning. He was courageous and truthful. He had ten children by Mrs. Jordan born out of wedlock, but they were all well cared for and never disowned. He realised his constitutional duty sufficiently to see that he must yield to the expressed will of the nation, but he yielded so clumsily that all men believed him to be coerced. Wisely anxious to be well known and popular among his subjects, he chose the curious method of walking down St. James’s Street dressed in long boots and spurs during the most crowded hour of the afternoon. His predecessor had lived the last years of his life in seclusion and silence; he determined therefore to give full scope to his naturally garrulous disposition. He talked in season and out of season with an irresponsibility which savoured of the quarter-deck, but wholly without the salt of the sea. By his Ministers he was regarded with kindliness, although it cannot be said, in spite of Lord Grey’s panegyric, that they held him in much respect. By the middle classes he was looked upon with amused and not unfriendly amazement. In the eyes of the masses he was “Billy,” their sailor-King, and among monarchical safeguards there are few stronger than a nickname and the aureole of the Navy.
William IV. married late in life Princess Adelaideof Saxe-Coburg-Meiningen, but the fates left him with no surviving children when he ascended the Throne in 1830. During his reign of seven years the King showed much kindness to the little niece who was clearly designated as his successor. Her mother, however, contrived to irritate him by giving too much prominence to the obvious fact of her daughter’s heirship to the Throne. By “progresses” made on different occasions and undertaken with considerable ceremonial, the Duchess of Kent excited the wrath of the King, who made no attempt to conceal his annoyance, and took evident pleasure in the display of it at embarrassing moments in public. It was partly owing to the friction between her mother and King William and to the unpleasant atmosphere created in consequence of these quarrels, and partly to the presence in her mother’s household of Sir John Conroy and his family—persons very distasteful to the young Princess—that Queen Victoria was in the habit of saying that her childhood had been a sad one. These Journals, begun in her fourteenth year, betray no sense of childish sorrow, and no reader can glean from them any confirmation of her statement that her early life was unhappy. It must be remembered, however, that this Journal was not a sealed book. It was not privately put away under lock and key and reserved only for the eye of the writer. The young Princess’s Journals were commenced in a volume given to her by her mother for the express purpose that she should record the facts of her daily life, and that this record of facts and impressions should be open to the inspection of the child’s governessas well as of her mother. It is natural, therefore, that the earlier volumes should contain very little beyond the obvious and simple things which any girl would be likely to write down if she were attempting to describe her life from day to day. When the Princess ascended the Throne and assumed her queenly independence, the tone of the Journals changes at once. It becomes immediately clear to the reader that while the Princess’s Journal was written for her mother, the Queen’s Journal was written for herself. One of her earliest entries after her succession was to state her intention of invariably seeing her Ministers alone; and she might have added, had she thought it worth stating, that her Journal also would in future be seen by her alone.
Journals are often said to be useful to the historian. This theory is based on the assumption, hardly borne out by experience, that he who writes a journal writes what is true. A journal is supposed to record events, great or small, which are happening at the moment, and to convey impressions about personages with whom the writer comes in contact, or who loom sufficiently large to justify their being mentioned. When, however, it is remembered how inaccurate our information generally is, and how mistaken we often are about the character and motives even of those we know intimately, it is not surprising that the most brilliant diarist should frequently state facts which cannot be verified from other sources, and colour the personality of his contemporaries in a manner quite unjustifiable unless truth be deliberately sacrificed to the picturesque.The Journal of Charles Greville, perhaps the most famous of English modern journals, is full of gross inaccuracies in matters of fact and still grosser distortions of character. It is, nevertheless, a striking picture of the political and social world haunted by that persistent eavesdropper, and, like any well-written journal, throws a vivid and interesting light upon the character of the writer.
Similar criticisms apply to most famous memoirs, like Saint-Simon’s or Lord Hervey’s, written with a view to serving the historian of the future, and with the distinct purpose of giving bias to history.
They do not apply to these diaries of Queen Victoria. The Queen makes no attempt to analyse character or the meaning of events. She never strives after effect. Her statements are just homely descriptions of everyday life and plain references to the people she meets at Kensington or at Windsor. If the young Princess sees a play that pleases her or hears a song that touches her, she says so. If the Queen hears something said that strikes her as original or quaint, the saying is put on record. She is not writing for the historian. She writes for her own pleasure and amusement, although there is always present to her mind a vague idea, common enough at the time, that to “keep a journal” is in some undefined way an act of grace.
The reader should not lose sight of the fact that these Journals are the simple impressions of a young girl, not twenty years old, about her own life and about the people she met. This constitutes their charm. She writes of her daily movements, and ofthe men and happenings that gave her pleasure. Either by nature or design, she avoided the mention of disagreeable things, so that these early Journals give one a notion of a life happily and simply led.
If they throw no new light on the history of the period, they will give to future generations an insight, of never-failing interest, into the character of the young Queen.
Princess Victoria’s first Journal was commenced on August 1, 1832. She was thirteen years old. The first entry is made in a small octavo volume half bound in red morocco, of a very unpretentious kind.[1]On the first page there appear the words, “This book Mamma gave me, that I might write the journal of my journey to Wales in it.—Victoria, Kensington Palace, July 31.”
The Duchess of Kent was at this time forty-six years of age. She had been a widow for twelve years. She was the fourth daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and was first married to the Prince of Leiningen-Dachburg-Hadenburg. He was twenty-three years her senior. By him she had one son, Charles, often mentioned in these Journals, and one daughter Feodorowna, subsequently married to Ernest, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg.
Two years after her second marriage, to the fourth son of George III., the Duchess of Kent was left awidow for the second time. Crippled by the Duke’s debts, that she was quite unable to pay,[2]with three young children on her hands, she was miserably poor. Her jointure yielded her an income of under £300. Her brother Leopold, then living at Claremont, came to her assistance, and made her an allowance of £3,000 a year.
In 1825, when it became evident that her daughter Princess Victoria would in all probability succeed to the Throne of England, Parliament voted an annuity of £6,000 to the Duchess, for the maintenance and education of her child, and this was subsequently increased after the accession of William IV.
The upbringing of her daughter became her absorbing occupation, and, shutting herself up in Kensington Palace, she devoted herself to the child’s education.
The lessons of Princess Victoria’s childhood were superintended by the Dean of Chester. Her education, judged by the standards of to-day, was not of an exceptionally high order. It would be interesting to know what old Roger Ascham would have thought of the Dean of Chester’s curriculum. So far as can be gathered from her own childish records and from the correspondence and memoirs of those who had access to Kensington, she was taught the ordinary things which children are supposed to learn. Fortunately, perhaps, no effort of any special kind was made to train her mind or mould her character, with aview to the responsibilities which lay before her or to the position she appeared destined to fill. When, at a later stage, the Bishops of London and Lincoln were requested to draw up a report, for presentation to Parliament, upon her moral and intellectual attainments, they found no difficulty in giving credit to the Duchess of Kent for the conscientious manner in which she had endeavoured to educate the heiress to the Throne. We may, however, take leave to doubt whether those entrusted with the Princess’s education were teachers endowed with any special aptitudes; and it is certain that the outlook of the Duchess herself, although practical and wise, was not of that discerning character which enabled her to differentiate between a commonplace education and its more subtle forms. It was precisely what might have been expected from one whose youth had been spent in a small German Court, and whose later opportunities had not brought her into contact with highly trained and thoughtful minds.
A foreign observer and critic once suggested a doubt whether the Queen could have maintained through life her admirable mental equilibrium if education had developed in her high intellectual curiosity or fantastic imagination. It is an interesting speculation. Soundness of judgment possibly rests upon the receptive rather than upon the creative faculties, and upon physical rather than upon intellectual activities. It may, as has been said, require a rare type of intelligence—that of Disraeli—to combine ideas and dreams with the realities of public life. In the domain of learning, QueenVictoria had very little in common with Elizabeth or with any Sovereign of the Renaissance. Her mother and the worthy Dean, who watched over her youth, were content to foster the quality of good sense, and to inculcate high standards of private and public virtue. Her future subjects, could they have been consulted, would have strongly approved. In after-years the English middle-class recognised in the Queen a certain strain of German sentimentality which they affectionately condoned, and a robust equilibrium of mind which they thoroughly admired.
It is as well, therefore, that events took the shape they did, and that the mind and character of the Princess were trained upon simple lines in accordance with the practice of the average citizen families subsequently to be her subjects. In years to come the Queen was perhaps better able to look at events and persons from the point of view of the majority of her people than would have been possible if her education had given her a high place among the intellectuals. It was a saving grace throughout her long reign that while she could recognise intellect and capacity, her sympathies were with average people, whose feelings and opinions she more readily understood and in reality represented.
In these days, when Accomplishments, as they were called in the first half of the nineteenth century, are no longer esteemed in young people, and their place has been usurped by athletic exercises, it is difficult to describe, in a way that appeals to the serious imagination, the girlish tastes of PrincessVictoria. Perhaps the world has not lost much because young ladies to-day learn to play golf and have ceased to sing duets.
In the thirties, music and painting and a knowledge of modern languages were the necessary equipment of a girl destined to move in Society. It mattered little how reedy and small the voice, she was expected to vocalise like Grisi and to sing duets with Mario.
The Queen had been well trained musically, according to the lights of those days. She could appreciate the simpler forms of melody, especially Italian opera, while she could sing and play sufficiently well to give much pleasure to herself and mild pleasure to others. As a linguist, as a reader, and as a writer of letters and memoranda she had no pretensions to pre-eminence; but she could speak modern languages as well as any Queen is called upon to do, she could read and appreciate high literature, although not without effort, and she could express herself with pungency and vigour, although not with any marked literary skill or distinction of style.
Her drawings and water-colour sketches were through life a constant source of happiness to the Queen. There are at Windsor literally hundreds of small sketch-books, containing reminiscences of her journeys and sojournings in Scotland and in Italy, again not of high artistic merit, but sufficiently vital to suggest the reflection that a young lady of to-day is possibly no gainer by having substituted the golf-club for the pencil.
The Queen’s teachers were excellent, commonplacepeople, and they left precisely those traces on her mind that might have been expected. Her character was another matter. They could not and did not influence that, and it is the character of the Queen that places her in the small category of rulers who have not only deserved well of their country, but have left an indelible stamp upon the life of their people.
These Journals were commenced in the year 1832, a year memorable in our history for the fruition of hopes deeply cherished by the political party that had arisen, under the auspices of Canning, after the close of the struggle with Napoleon.
During the year when the first Reform Bill became the law of the land, the passions of men had been deeply stirred throughout Great Britain. The political struggle, begun seventeen years before, had come to a head. The classes still paramount had found themselves face to face with the desires and aspirations of classes hitherto subordinate to have a share in the government of the country. These feelings had grown fiercer year by year, and, encouraged by the Whig party headed by Earl Grey, had found ultimate expression in the Reform Bill of 1832, framed under the ægis of that Minister. All over Europe the stream of change and reform, loosed by the French Revolution and subsequently checked by the Congress of Vienna, began once more to flow. During the sixteen years that followed PrincessVictoria’s first entry in these Journals, the waters of Revolution had flooded Europe. Thrones and institutions in every European country were shaken, many of them to their foundations, and some with disastrous results. Fortunately for Great Britain, her statesmen had anticipated the events of 1848, and the Reform Bill had so far satisfied the aspirations of the hitherto unenfranchised classes as to render innocuous the frothing of agitators during that tragic year of revolution. In aptitude for anticipating social and political change and avoiding violent manifestations of popular will, the English race stands pre-eminent. Our people as well as our statesmen have from the earliest times proved themselves to be experts in the art of government, and the history of Europe is a commentary upon that gift of the British nation.
There have, of course, been moments when the atmosphere of politics has been highly charged with electricity. Such a moment occurred in 1832. A storm broke with unusual violence over the head of William IV. The House of Lords was bitterly hostile to a Bill, accepted by the House of Commons and supported with enthusiasm by the majority of his subjects. There was no machinery existing under the Constitution for adjusting these differences except that of creating a sufficient number of Peers to ensure the passage of the Reform Bill through the House of Lords. The King therefore found himself in the unpleasant position of having to place his prerogative of creating peers in the hands of his Ministers, or else by his own act to dispense withtheir services. The choice found him undecided and left him baffled. He was not acute enough to see that in the existing state of public opinion he had no choice. If he had possessed wit to read the signs of the times, it is doubtful whether he would have had sufficient single-minded courage to take immediate action in accordance with the opinion he had formed. Penetrating vision the King lacked, and responsibility was distasteful to him. Consequently he was not only weak, but he showed weakness. It was clear that the Government of Lord Grey held unimpaired the confidence of the House of Commons and possessed the full approval of the country. Every intelligent observer realised that the Reform Bill, in spite of its aristocratic foes, in spite of the prophets of evil, and in spite of its inherent defects, was bound to be passed into law. King William, however, conceived it to be his duty to endeavour to find an alternative Government. It was as certain as anything could be in politics, that Sir Robert Peel would not, and that the Duke of Wellington could not, come to his assistance. There was something pitiful about the spectacle of the old sailor-King casting about for a safe anchorage, and finding one cable parting after another. Security was only to be found in the Ministers who had advised him, in the last resort, to use his prerogative for the purpose of swamping a majority in the House of Lords that hesitated to bow to the will of the people. Ultimately he was constrained to accept their advice, but it was only after a loss of personal dignity and a distinct weakening of the authority of theCrown. The King, men said, had touted about to find Ministers to serve him, and had failed to find them. This humiliation, at least, King William might have avoided, had he possessed a clearer vision of possibilities and greater firmness of character.
The political storms of 1832 appear to have broken noiselessly against the walls of Kensington Palace, for in the little Princess’s Journals there is no sign that she was aware of them. The King’s worries, however, so affected his temper, that it was impossible for the Princess and her mother not to feel its reflex action. In the Journals no mention is made of the domestic troubles which have been described elsewhere, and we know, from expressions of Queen Victoria’s in later years, that she had purposely refrained, in compiling her Journals, from referring to her mother’s worries and her own.
During the four years that immediately preceded Princess Victoria’s accession to the Throne, from 1832 to 1836, these Journals give us the picture of a young life passed amid the tranquil surroundings of Kensington Palace, its educational monotony only varied by attendance at the opera or the theatre, by autumnal trips into the provinces, or by welcome visits from foreign cousins. These autumnal trips were the “royal progresses,” as he called them, against which King William was wont to protest in vehement language. They evidently gave intense pleasure to the Princess. Her Journals contain records of them all. Some examples have been given, in these extracts, of her method of describingher visits to provincial cities and towns, to seaside summer resorts, and to a few of the great homes of those who were afterwards to be her Ministers or subjects.
It was during this period that she got her first glimpse of the Isle of Wight, where so much of her life was afterwards to be spent. The fact that Sir John Conroy, whom she disliked, lived for many years at Osborne Lodge seems not to have prevented her from subsequently becoming deeply attached to that quiet home amid beautiful surroundings created by her and Prince Albert upon the site where Osborne Lodge had stood. Whippingham Church, to be so closely connected with her and her children, was first visited in the year 1833.
Enough has been included in these extracts to show her liking for the opera and for the theatre, her pleasure in music, her devotion to the pursuit of riding, and that love for animals which characterised her through life.
When she was sixteen she went to Ascot for the first time, and figured in the royal procession. It began to be recognised that the young Princess had passed the threshold of girlhood. In that year her Confirmation took place at the Chapel Royal, St. James’s, and Archbishop Howley, believed to be the last prelate who wore a wig, officiated. During the autumn she visited Yorkshire and stayed with Archbishop Harcourt at Bishopthorpe and with Lord Fitzwilliam at Wentworth. Coming south, she was the guest of the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir, of Lord Exeter at Burghley, and of Lord Leicesterat Holkham. In the following year, 1836, she met for the first time her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg. He and his elder brother Ernest visited Kensington Palace at the instance of her uncle Leopold. The fact that Prince Albert had been thought of years before by the King of the Belgians as a possible husband for Princess Victoria was sufficient to set King William IV. against the match. The King, however, was not uncivil to the brothers when they visited London, but he had ideas of his own about the future of his niece, and he tried hard to lay the foundations of an alliance between the young Princess and the younger son of the Prince of Orange. Prince Albert on this occasion made no deep impression upon Princess Victoria’s mind or heart, but her loyalty to her uncle Leopold and her regard for his opinion led her to show the graceful young Coburg Prince marked preference over the somewhat ungainly candidate of King William. Her heart was clearly untouched, but she was willing to be guided by the advice of that counsellor and friend to whom in preference to every one she had already begun to turn for help and guidance. As this became obvious to King William, his jealousy and dislike for the Duchess of Kent increased; and in the autumn of this year, 1836, having invited his sister-in-law to a state banquet, he scandalised Society by delivering an after-dinner speech charged with recrimination and insult to his guest.
This was the Princess’s penultimate year as a minor. King William had for a long time been haunted with the fear that he would die before hisniece came of age, and that a regency would devolve upon his hated sister-in-law. He was spared what he would have considered this final humiliation, for on May 24, 1837, the young Princess came of age, just a month before the King died at Windsor.
During the final years of her minority she was thrown freely into the society of many of the eminent and distinguished persons soon to be her subjects. The Duchess gave a series of entertainments at Kensington Palace, and the Princess was brought into contact with her mother’s guests. Accounts of these dinners and concerts, and full lists of the guests, are all minutely recorded in the Journals. Comments, however, beyond an occasional expression of delight at the music and admiration for its performers, are excluded. Her life was still the life of a child, and her days were mostly spent with her preceptors, under the auspices of the Duchess of Northumberland, her official governess, and of the Dean of Chester, her tutor.
She had been parted some years before from her half brother and sister by the usual exigencies of time. Prince Charles of Leiningen had become a sea-officer, and Princess Feodore was married. Into the inner orbit of her young life there penetrated only Sir John Conroy, whose person was odious to her, and Baroness Lehzen, the daughter of a Hanoverian clergyman, who had been the Princess’s governess since 1824, and to whom she was deeply attached. Lablache, her singing-master, a man of some originality and charm, was a constant source of interestand amusement to the young Princess, and she preferred his lessons to all others.
It was during these last few years before her accession that the final touches were given to her character by the subtle influences of her environment. The position occupied by Sir John Conroy in her mother’s house inspired and fortified her subsequent resolve to avoid intimacies with members of her household. She became distant and reserved to those about her, and her relations with her mother were chilled. Her mind acquired an impression that family ties, however binding from the point of view of duty, might be superseded by those of friendship. It is undoubtedly the case that Baroness Lehzen occupied at this time the first place in her pupil’s thoughts and affections; while the dawning necessity felt by Princess Victoria for sympathy, and for those intimate communings so attractive to sentimental natures, had a very distinct influence upon the mind and conduct of the Queen in subsequent years. Her Journals afford proof, if proof had been wanting, that, in spite of the opinions of her attainments vouchsafed by eminent clerics, the Princess had not been afforded an education specially designed to fit her for the situation she was to occupy.
She was, at eighteen, as moderately and indifferently equipped as the average girl of her age. If her conversation was not brilliant, her heart was kindly and her judgment sound. She was shrewd and eminently truthful. In spite of her small stature, she was curiously dignified and impressive. Her voice was musical and carried far. And aboveall things, her rectitude was unassailable, and her sense of duty so keen and high that it supplied any lack of imagination or spiritual deficiency. She was humble-minded, but not, perhaps, very tender. She was passionate and imperious, but always faithful. She was supremely conscious of the responsibilities and prerogatives of her calling, which she was convinced, then and always, were her appanage by the gift of God.
There is nothing in her Journals or elsewhere to show that before she was eighteen years old she had ever talked seriously and at any length to any man or woman of exceptional gifts. It was only when her uncle King Leopold heard of the illness of William IV. that Stockmar was instructed to speak with due gravity upon important matters to the young girl whose accession to the Throne appeared imminent. Her mind at that time was a blank page in so far as questions of high politics or of administration were concerned. In point of fact, this was a fortunate circumstance, and rendered easier the task of those who were bound in the nature of things, and under the constitution of these islands, to use this youthful Princess as one of the chief instruments of government. Her mind was free from any political bias or complexion, and ready to receive the impress of her constitutional Ministers. When, within less than a month of her eighteenth birthday, King William died, and when on June 20, 1837, the Queen found herself face to face with those Whig statesmen in whose hands the destinies of the country had been placed for the time being,their task was unhampered by preconceived ideas or by foregone prejudice in their pupil. For the Queen a new chapter of life was opened. She at once threw off the trammels of pupilage. Not only was she able immediately and without effort to shake herself clear of the domestic influences she had resented and disliked, but for the first time she was enabled to meet and to question distinguished men, with whose names she was familiar, but whose standards of thought and conversation were far higher than any to which she had been accustomed.
It was “in a palace in a garden, meet scene for youth and innocence,” as one in later years to be her favoured Minister wrote, that Princess Victoria received the news of her accession to a Throne overlooking “every sea and nations in every zone.” The scene and the circumstances in which her accession was announced to her by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conynghame are described by the Queen in her Journal. She has also recorded her impressions of what followed when for the first time she met the Privy Council. What the Queen has not described is the effect produced upon those present by her personality, her youthful charm, her self-possession and perfect modesty, in such strong contrast to everything which her Privy Councillors had been accustomed to find in their former Sovereigns. The Queen was not aware of the interestand curiosity she then excited in the minds of her subjects. She had been brought up in such comparative seclusion, that both to “Society” and to the great world outside her character was an enigma and even her appearance very little known. Her sex and youth rendered her personality exciting to a public satiated with the elderly vagaries of her uncles. It was noticed at her first Council that her manner was very graceful and engaging. It was particularly observed that after she had read her speech in a clear and singularly firm voice, when the two surviving sons of George III., the Dukes of Cumberland and Sussex, knelt before her, swearing allegiance, she blushed up to the eyes as if she felt the contrast between their public and private relations, between their august age and her inexperienced youth. It was also noticed that she spoke to no one, and that not the smallest difference in her manner could be detected, even by sharp watching eyes, between her attitude towards Lord Melbourne and the Ministers on the one hand, and towards the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel on the other. The Queen does not mention, for she was not then aware of it, that Lord Melbourne was charmed and Sir Robert Peel amazed at her demeanour. They spoke afterwards with emotion of her modesty, firmness, and evident deep sense of her situation. She did not know then, although she knew later, that the Duke of Wellington said that had she been his own daughter he could not have desired to see her perform her part better.
These Journals only accentuate what is alreadyknown from many sources, that the Queen showed in difficult circumstances not only good taste and good feeling, but admirable good sense. Her attention to details, which some might consider trifles, but which differentiate the careful from the thoughtless mind, was noticed with approval and surprise by her Ministers. She exhibited caution in her treatment of those persons who had been about her since childhood, and she made no appeal to any of them for advice or guidance. Nor did she permit advice to be proffered. Sir John Conroy was dismissed at once from her surroundings. Baroness Lehzen she retained, as before, about her person, and she speaks of her, throughout these Journals, with deep feeling. It was noticed, whenever she was asked to decide some difficult matter, her customary reply was that she would think it over, and give her answer on the morrow. Onlookers, knowing that she relied on the advice of Lord Melbourne, generally assumed that she referred to him in the interval. He, however, declared that to many of his questions a similar reply was given. In point of fact, she was obeying one of the precepts of her uncle, the King of the Belgians.
It will be obvious to the readers of this book that a potent influence over the mind and actions of the young Queen was exercised by Lord Melbourne. It was the natural outcome of the business relation between a very charming and experienced man of the world who happened to be her Prime Minister and a very young girl isolated in the solitary atmosphere of the Throne.From the Queen’s accession to the day of her marriage the table-talk of Lord Melbourne fills the largest space in her journals. Her description of their intercourse confirms what we know from other sources, that Lord Melbourne became absorbed by the novel and striking duty that had fallen to his lot. His temperament and his antecedents rendered him peculiarly sensitive to the fascinating influences of the strange relation in which he stood to this young Queen. Lord Melbourne’s life had been chequered by curious experiences, and his mind had been thoroughly well trained, for a man of his station, according to the lights of those days. A classical education, the privilege from youth upwards of free intercourse with every one worth knowing, the best Whig connection, and an inherited capacity for governing men under oligarchic institutions, had equipped his intellect and judgment with everything that was necessary to enable him carefully to watch and safeguard the blossoming of the character of the girl who was both his pupil and his Sovereign.
He was no longer young, but he was not old. His person was attractive. According to Leslie, no mean judge, his head was a truly noble one, and he was a fine specimen of manly beauty in the meridian of life. Not only were his features handsome, but his expression was in the highest degree intellectual. His laugh was frequent and the most joyous possible, his voice so deep and musical that to hear him say the most ordinary thing was a pleasure; and his frankness, his freedom from affectation, and his peculiar humour rendered almost everything he said,however easy and natural, quite original. Chantrey’s bust and the well-known portraits of Melbourne corroborate the descriptions given by his contemporaries.
The Queen’s Journals afford us some illustrations of the extent of his memory and reading. In his knowledge of political history he was unsurpassed by any living Englishman, and among the statesmen of that day there were none by age, character, and experience so well qualified for the task of making the Queen acquainted with the art of government, or better able to give her a correct interpretation of the laws and spirit of the constitution. He understood perfectly the importance of training her to work straightforwardly but secretly with that small committee of active politicians, representing the parliamentary majority of the day, which goes by the name of the Cabinet. Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, the Leaders of the Opposition, felt and admitted that for her initiation into the mysteries of Kingcraft, the Queen could not have been in wiser hands. It will be obvious from these Journals that the Queen drifted into political partisanship. She lived in dread of losing her Whig Ministers, and she got “to hate” the Tories. This only meant—and under all the circumstances it was natural—that she ardently desired to retain her mentor at her side. It is to the credit of Lord Melbourne that he was constantly discouraging his Sovereign’s bias towards the Whig Party, of which he was the head, and that he never lost an opportunity of smoothing the way for the advent of Sir Robert Peel which heknew to be inevitable. He was, not inaptly, called a Regius Professor with no professorial disqualifications, and it was precisely from this point of view that the Tory leaders recognised the indispensable nature of his task, and approved his manner of performing it. He was a Whig no doubt, says his biographer, but at any rate he was an honest-hearted Englishman, and, in no merely conventional sense, a gentleman on whose perfect honour no one hesitated to place reliance.
He treated the Queen with unbounded consideration and respect, yet he did not hesitate to administer reproof. He consulted her tastes and her wishes, but he checked her inclination to be headstrong and arbitrary. He knew well how to chide with parental firmness, but he did so with a deference that could not fail to fascinate any young girl in a man of his age and attainments. The Queen was completely under his charm. The ease of his frank and natural manners, his quaint epigrams and humorous paradox, his romantic bias and worldly shrewdness, were magnified by her into the noblest manly virtues.
He saw her every day, but never appeared to weary of her society. She certainly never tired of his. Yet he was fifty-eight years old, a time-worn politician, and she was a girl of eighteen. He was her confidential servant and at the same time her guardian. She was his ward and at the same time his Sovereign. The situation was full of the possibilities of drama, yet nothing can be more delightful than the high comedy revealed in the passages of the Journals that refer to Lord Melbourne. Thathe should have happened to be First Minister of the Crown when King William died was a rare piece of good fortune for the new Sovereign and for the country. With all the immense powers of head and heart which the Queen came later to discover in Sir Robert Peel, we may take leave to doubt if he could so lightly and so wisely have assumed and fulfilled the duties imposed upon his predecessor.
It is impossible to exaggerate the effect produced upon the mind and character of the Queen by the apostolic letters of her uncle. Even the sound constitutional dogma of Stockmar might have failed to influence one naturally inclined to be autocratic. Those, however, who were to reap the profit in later years of the shrewd daily culture of the Queen’s mind, of the skilful pruning away of ideas dangerous in a British Sovereign, of the respectful explanation of her duties, of the humorous rallying upon slight weaknesses which might have developed into awkward habits, were deeply indebted, as these Journals show, to the sagacity of Lord Melbourne.
Two Queens Regnant, Queen Mary and Queen Anne, both of Stewart blood, lived much at Kensington Palace, and both died there. As a place of residence it had no attractions for the Sovereigns of the House of Hanover. Queen Victoria was fond of the old wing in which her youth had been spent, and which was subsequently occupied for many yearsby the Duchess of Teck and her children. Built on piles, those portions of the Palace that were uninhabited, and therefore indifferently looked after, had towards the end of the Queen’s reign fallen into such disrepair that their demolition had been decided by the Treasury. The Queen disliked intensely the idea of removing any part of the old building. Ultimately a bargain was made with the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the day. It involved a certain exchange of houses in the gift of the Crown and some shifting of financial responsibility. Kensington Palace was saved, and a considerable sum was voted by Parliament for its restoration, on condition that the public should be admitted to certain rooms of historic interest.
King George’s dream, and no one knows better its visionary character, is to pull down Buckingham Palace, to round off St. James’s and the Green Parks at Constitution Hill and Buckingham Gate, and then, with the money obtained by the sale of the Gardens of Buckingham Palace, to reconstruct Kensington Palace as the town residence of the Sovereign.
For Queen Mary the place is full of memories and, because of her keen historic sense, full of interest.
Compared with most of the great European capitals, London is poor in palaces. The homes of the Tudor Sovereigns in and near the metropolis, Nonsuch, Greenwich, and Whitehall, have disappeared. London contains no single palace residentially associated with our long line of Sovereigns. The Court of St. James was housed, in the eighteenth century,in the Palace of that name. It seems to have been adequate for the needs of the Hanoverian Princes, who had none of the amplitude of the Tudors or the fine taste of the Stewarts.
The memories of Windsor, however, are long memories. Although Queen Victoria never liked Windsor, perhaps because she was never in good health there, it is with Windsor Castle that the principal events of her reign are associated. The thoughts of the few, the very few, comparatively speaking, of her subjects who were admitted to the seclusion of Court life during two-thirds of the Queen’s reign may carry them back to quiet days at Balmoral or Osborne, but it was round Windsor that the political interest of the Victorian era centred. There the links of the chain have remained unsevered between the Sovereigns of Great Britain to-day and their Plantagenet ancestors.
If the Queen’s attachment to Windsor was not deep, she was more indifferent still to Buckingham Palace. There is not a word in her Diaries or correspondence to show that she in any way looked upon it as a home or even a residence in any degree interesting or attractive. No attempt was made, after the death of the Prince Consort, to improve or beautify it. The magnificent objects of art and the splendid collection of pictures were badly displayed and quite unappreciated. Few, outside the circle of the Court, knew of their existence. The Palace was judged by its mean façade, and the nation was rather shamefaced about the home of its Sovereign, and certainly took no credit for the reallynoble rooms and their contents which Buckingham Palace contains.
Yet, through the picture-gallery of this Palace hung with masterpieces of the Dutch School, through the throne-room and the drawing-room resplendent with the royal portraits of Reynolds and Gainsborough, or through the matchless corridor at Windsor, have passed nearly all the great figures of the nineteenth century, practically the whole of which was spanned by the life of the Queen.
It is an imposing array, worthy of its setting. Heroes and statesmen, men of science and letters, artists and scholars, all moved, with a feeling of awe, into the presence of the Queen whose girlhood is recounted by herself in these pages.
To those accustomed to the easier manners of more recent times it is difficult to convey a sense of the atmosphere of Windsor during the reign of the Queen. Her extraordinary aloofness was its determining cause, but the effect was that of a shrine. Grave men walked softly through the rooms of the Castle, and no voice was ever raised. The presence of the Sovereign brooded, so to speak, over the Palace and its environment. The desire to be negligently at ease never entered the mind. The air was rarefied by a feeling that somewhere, in a region unvisited by any but the most highly privileged, was seated, not in an ordinary arm-chair, but on a throne, the awe-inspiring and ever-dignified figure of the Sovereign. The proud intellect of Gladstone and the rugged self-sufficiency of Bright bent before the small, homely figure in widow’s weeds.In spite of this homeliness of appearance, notwithstanding her love of simplicity and her dislike of tawdriness and display, her spirit never put aside the regal habit. How rarely the Queen extended her hand! It was a great privilege, and only on special occasions vouchsafed to her Ministers. Men and women bent very low to kiss that hand. This was not due to her small stature, but to the curious, indefinable awe that she undoubtedly inspired during the later portion of her life in all who approached her. Will the reader find, in these records of her girlhood, intimations of that moral ascendency she afterwards acquired over her subjects?
It was unquestionably a triumph of character. Even now to attempt a serious estimate of the intellectual capacity of Queen Victoria is a difficult task. There are too many still among us the greater part of whose lives were spent under her sway. It is a fault in nearly all recent biographies that they attempt appreciations which only the lapse of time can enable a writer to draw in true perspective.
A venerable Sovereign, in full possession of his great powers of intellect and character, who was almost an exact contemporary, still rules a European people as proud of him as were her subjects of the Queen. At least one of her faithful servants, who was present at her Coronation seventy-four years ago and at every great ceremonial throughout her reign, is still alive and full of manly vigour. Her children are in the prime of life, and her favourite grandson is the beloved Sovereign of the people she governed.Unqualified praise is always distasteful, and critical analysis may easily prove to be in singularly bad taste. Queen Victoria’s womanly and royal virtues are written in golden letters upon the face of the vast Empire over which she reigned. Her faults may well lie buried, for some time yet, in her grave under the shadow of Windsor.
In the muniment-room of the Castle are preserved the private records of her life-work. Over a thousand bound volumes of letters, from and to the Queen upon all subjects, public and domestic, are there; and over a hundred volumes of her Journals written in her own hand.
It is a unique record. The private papers of George III. have disappeared. Of those of George IV. and William IV., only a few are in existence. Selections from the correspondence of the Queen up to 1861 were published by permission of King Edward. These selections from her early Journals have been made by the gracious leave of King George. It may be many years before it would be wise or prudent to make public any more of the private history of Queen Victoria’s reign. Those who, by good fortune, have had access to these records can, however, safely predict that whatever hereafter leaps to light, the Queen never can be shamed.