Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers: A Personal History by Anne Somerset
Queen Victoria possessed, Anne Somerset observes about half-way through this wonderful book, “an instinctive flair for theatrical gestures”.
There is an operatic quality about Victoria’s dealings with her ten Prime Ministers. We find ourselves watching a grand but comic opera crammed with unexpected changes of fortune and sung with marvellous passion and sincerity as a series of duets.
In the beginning was her love affair with Lord Melbourne, the incumbent Whig PM when on 20th June 1837, a month after her 18th birthday, she became Queen. She received him, she recorded in her journal (the words which follow in italics were underlined), “of course quite alone, as I shall always do all my Ministers.”
Victoria was determined not to allow her mother, the Duchess of Kent, and her mother’s dreadful factotum, Sir John Conroy, to exercise the control over her on which they had long been intent.
The Queen was young (the portrait above, by George Hayter, shows her at her Coronation, a year after her accession), but already she knew her own mind, and by the end of her first meeting with Lord M she decided, “I like him very much and feel confidence in him. He is a very straightforward, honest, clever and good man.”
Soon she was writing, “He is…my friend, I know it.” By August she was confiding in the journal, “I am so fond of him and his conversations do me much good.”
The Queen had no father, while the PM, who was 58, had no wife or daughter. Each filled a void in the other’s life, and Lord M was brilliant at “filling gaps in her knowledge without making her feel ignorant”, as Somerset puts it.
Victoria loved Lord M’s “very peculiar laugh; it is so joyous and truly merry and makes one laugh when one hears it”. Lord M, though he wore his learning lightly, was deeply read in classics, history, theology and literature, could tell her with judicious omissions about the lives of her wicked uncles, and often spent six hours a day with her.
She began to collect his sayings: “actresses are the dullest people that ever lived”. When she said it was regrettable anyone came out of prison “worse than he went in”, Lord M made her “laugh very much” by pointing out that “one often comes out worse of a ballroom than one went in”.
She became very cross when he could not dine with her on an evening several foreign princes had been invited: “He ought to be near me, it is his place!”
When it seems in 1839 that she is about to lose Lord M as PM, because the Tories under Sir Robert Peel are going to come into government, she is so “very, very unhappy” that she does not eat dinner but stays in her room where she “sobbed and cried convulsively”.
These scenes are at variance with the received image of Victoria from the end of her reign as the nation’s solemn and unsmiling matriarch, imperial bastion of middle-class morality.
But she was always a woman of opposites. When some years ago I wrote a brief life of Victoria, I confessed the difficulty of conveying, in a few pages,
“the contradictions of this shy, brave, passionate, truthful, dutiful, hysterical, self-controlled, self-indulgent, reckless, reticent, regal, modest, absurd, humorous, serious-minded, vulnerable and loveable woman”.
Somerset in her 546 pages wisely refrains from trying to resolve the contradictions. She instead illustrates them, and is not short of material, for it is estimated that Victoria wrote an average of 2,500 words every day of her adult life, amounting during her reign to perhaps 60 million words.
Her ten Prime Ministers likewise left voluminous records. Disraeli, of whom she became as enamoured as she had been of Lord M, was a prolific novelist, and the classic life of him by Monypenny and Buckle runs to over 3,000 pages.
Disraeli’s admirers would not wish it a page shorter. How difficult, even agonising, it must have been for Somerset to make her relatively short selection from such riches, including various voluminous archives.
Gladstone, who accused Disraeli of “flunkeyism”, made titanic but unavailing attempts to get on with Victoria, and at length admitted: “The conduct of the Queen…weighs upon me like a nightmare.”
The Queen at this time – 1870 – lived almost as a recluse, and became very unpopular. During the Franco-Prussian War she was strongly pro-German, and regarded France’s defeat as “a just retribution on…a very frivolous, vainglorious people”, as she put it in a letter to her daughter Vicky, who was married to the heir to the Prussian throne.
Again and again one comes in these pages across passages with a modern resonance. Somerset relates how on 1st June 1840, Prince Albert, who had married Victoria in February of that year, took one of his first steps in British public life
“when he presided at a meeting of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade held at Exeter Hall in London. In a brief speech that he had rehearsed with Victoria until word-perfect, he urged England’s government and navy to keep up their ‘benevolent and persevering exertions to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings’, whose continuance constituted ‘the blackest stain upon civilised Europe’. His words were greeted with ‘great applause’ and the prince felt his intervention ‘produced a good effect in the country’.”
In this book we are not offered a theory, but a woman of irresistible vitality, who all her life resisted the constraints of her role as a constitutional monarch, while also taking seriously her duty to uphold the Constitution.
One might say our Constitution is best upheld by people who resist its constraints.
When Lord Rosebery, a brilliant man of erratic judgement who in 1894 succeeded Gladstone as Liberal PM, wrote to her to say that the Commons could no longer allow its measures to be mutilated or thrown out by the Lords, she passed on the letter to Lord Salisbury, the Conservative leader, to whom she complained that Rosebery was contemplating something “mischievous in the highest degree, and she must add disloyal”.
This was one of many occasions when she herself was disloyal to the PM of the day, by communicating behind his back with the Leader of the Opposition.
Yet Salisbury wisely advised her not to be precipitate, observing that public opinion on Lords reform was “so sluggish…that people would be startled by the direct intervention of the Crown”, which might prove counter-productive.
Rosebery himself was “taken rather aback” when his Cabinet colleagues turned out to have no enthusiasm for Lords reform. Victoria was relieved, and sent him, Somerset relates, “a kind letter” in which she recognised that his motives were good, before asking him
“to bear in mind that 57 years ago the Constitution was delivered into her keeping, and that, right or wrong, she has her views as to the fulfilment of that trust. She cannot but think Lord Rosebery will feel that his position is not the only difficult one in these democratic days.”
There is a kind of priggish commentator who notes Victoria’s sometimes outrageous behaviour and concludes that she must have been a bad monarch.
But again and again she forced the PM to explain and justify what he was doing. She did not shrink from having the necessary argument, and in that respect she was a better friend to freedom than those who suppose that politics can be reduced to a virtuous consensus to which every progressive person must subscribe.
One of the failings of the prigs is their belief that it is reasonable to demand perfection in our rulers. In reality, all rulers have weaknesses, and sometimes behave imperfectly.
An overlooked virtue of our Constitution is that it makes allowance for human imperfection. We generally select, as our leader, the lesser of two evils. But a PM who offends too often, and misjudges the spirit of the times, is soon replaced.
Gladstone was a giant, but capable of great misjudgements. As Somerset points out, he was “both idolised and reviled”, and “the genesis of populism dates back to him”. In his Midlothian campaign at the end of 1879, he denounced Disraeli’s policy of support for the Ottoman Empire in the kind of moralistic terms in which parts of the Left now denounce the British Government’s support for Israel. The Bulgarian atrocities stirred as much indignation as Gaza.
The Queen lamented in her journal:
“Mr Gladstone is going about in Scotland, like an American stumping orator, making the most violent speeches.”
She could not prevent the rise of great public meetings, addressed by brilliant orators, nor were we able to avert, in the television age, the decline of that form of campaigning.
Somerset does not irritate us by telling us what to think, but ends by quoting with approval from the speech delivered by Victoria’s last PM, Salisbury, after her death in 1901:
“She reigned by sheer force of character…over the hearts of her subjects, and exercised an influence in moulding their character and destiny which she could not have done more if she had had the most despotic power in her hands.”