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QUEEN VICTORIA
by Thewolf Fri Apr 30, 2010 6:18 pm
in full Alexandrina Victoria born May 24, 1819, Kensington Palace, London, England
died January 22, 1901, Osborne, near Cowes, Isle of Wight
queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1837–1901) and empress of India (1876–1901). She was the last of the House of Hanover and gave her name to an era, the Victorian Age. During her reign the English monarchy took on its modern ceremonial character. She and her husband, Prince Consort Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, had nine children, through whose marriages were descended many of the royal families of Europe.
Victoria first learned of her future role as a young princess during a history lesson when she was 10 years old. Almost four decades later Victoria's governess recalled that the future queen reacted to the discovery by declaring, “I will be good.” This combination of earnestness and egotism marked Victoria as a child of the age that bears her name. The queen, however, rejected important Victorian values and developments. Although she hated pregnancy and childbirth, detested babies, and was uncomfortable in the presence of children, Victoria reigned in a society that idealized both motherhood and the family. She had no interest in social issues, yet the 19th century in Britain was an age of reform. She resisted technological change even while mechanical and technological innovations reshaped the face of European civilization.
Most significantly, Victoria was a queen determined to retain political power; yet unwillingly and unwittingly she presided over the transformation of the sovereign's political role into a ceremonial one and thus preserved the English monarchy. When Victoria became queen, the political role of the crown was by no means clear; nor was the permanence of the throne itself. When she died and her son Edward VII moved from Marlborough House to Buckingham Palace, the change was one of social rather than of political focus; there was no doubt about the monarchy's continuance. That was the measure of her reign.
Lineage and early life
On the death in 1817 of Princess Charlotte, daughter of the prince regent (later George IV), there was no surviving legitimate offspring of George III's 15 children. In 1818, therefore, three of his sons, the dukes of Clarence, Kent, and Cambridge, married to provide for the succession. The winner in the race to father the next ruler of Britain was Edward, duke of Kent, fourth son of King George III. His only child was christened Alexandrina Victoria. After his death and George IV's accession in 1820, Victoria became third in the line of succession to the throne after the Duke of York (died 1827) and the Duke of Clarence (subsequently William IV), whose own children died in infancy.
Victoria, by her own account, “was brought up very simply,” principally at Kensington Palace, where her closest companions, other than her German-born mother, the Duchess of Kent, were her half sister, Féodore, and her governess, Louise (afterward the Baroness) Lehzen, a native of Coburg. An important father figure to the orphaned princess was her uncle Leopold, her mother's brother, who lived at Claremont, near Esher, Surrey, until he became king of the Belgians in 1831.
Victoria's childhood was made increasingly unhappy by the machinations of the Duchess of Kent's advisor, Sir John Conroy. In control of the pliable duchess, Conroy hoped to dominate the future queen of Britain as well. Persuaded by Conroy that the royal dukes, “the wicked uncles,” posed a threat to her daughter, the duchess reared Victoria according to “the Kensington system,” by which she and Conroy systematically isolated Victoria from her contemporaries and her father's family. Conroy thus aimed to make the princess dependent on and easily led by himself.
Strong-willed, and supported by Lehzen, Victoria survived the Kensington system; when she ascended the throne in 1837, she did so alone. Her mother's actions had estranged her from Victoria and taught the future queen caution in her friendships. Moreover, her retentive memory did not allow her to forgive readily.
Accession to the throne
In the early hours of June 20, 1837, Victoria received a call from the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord chamberlain and learned of the death of William IV, third son of George III. Later that morning the Privy Council was impressed by the graceful assurance of the new queen's demeanour. She was small, carried herself well, and had a delightful silvery voice, which she retained all her life. The accession of a young woman was romantically popular. But because of the existence in Hanover of the Salic law, which prevented succession by a woman, the crowns of Great Britain and Hanover became separated, the latter passing to William IV's eldest surviving brother, Ernest, the unpopular duke of Cumberland.
The queen, who had never before had a room to herself, exiled her mother to a distant set of apartments when they moved into Buckingham Palace. Conroy was pensioned off. Only Lehzen, of whom Victoria was still in awe, remained close to the queen. Even her beloved uncle Leopold was politely warned off discussions of English politics. “Alone” at last, she enjoyed her new-found freedom. “Victoria,” wrote her cousin, Prince Albert, who later married her,
It was, in retrospect, “the least sensible and satisfactory time in her whole life”; but at the time it was exciting and enjoyable, the more so because of her romantic friendship with Lord Melbourne, the prime minister.
Melbourne was a crucial influence on Victoria, in many ways an unfortunate one. The urbane and sophisticated prime minister fostered the new queen's self-confidence and enthusiasm for her role; he also encouraged her to ignore or minimize social problems and to attribute all discontent and unrest to the activities of a small group of agitators. Moreover, because of Melbourne, Victoria became an ardent Whig.
Victoria's constitutionally dangerous political partisanship contributed to the first two crises of her reign, both of which broke in 1839. The Hastings affair began when Lady Flora Hastings, a maid of honour who was allied and connected to the Tories, was forced by Victoria to undergo a medical examination for suspected pregnancy. The gossip, when it was discovered that the queen had been mistaken, became the more damaging when later in the year Lady Flora died of a disease that had not been diagnosed by the examining physician. The enthusiasm of the populace over the coronation (June 28, 1838) swiftly dissipated.
Between the two phases of the Hastings case “the bedchamber crisis” intervened. When Melbourne resigned in May 1839, Sir Robert Peel, the Conservative leader, stipulated that the Whig ladies of the bedchamber should be removed. The queen imperiously refused, not without Melbourne's encouragement. “The Queen of England will not submit to such trickery,” she said. Peel therefore declined to take office, which Melbourne rather weakly resumed. “I was very young then,” wrote the queen long afterward, “and perhaps I should act differently if it was all to be done again.”
The Albertine monarchy
Victoria's wedding to Prince Albert served as a stage for displays of political partisanship: very few Tories received invitations, and the Tories themselves rejected Victoria's request that Albert be granted rank and precedence second only to her own. Victoria responded violently, “Monsters! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!” Marriage to Albert, however, lessened the queen's enthusiasm for Melbourne and the Whigs. She admitted many years later regarding Melbourne that “Albert thinks I worked myself up to what really became rather foolish.” Albert thus shifted Victoria's political sympathies; he also became the dominant figure and influence in her life. She quickly grew to depend on him for everything; soon she “didn't put on a gown or a bonnet if he didn't approve it.” No more did Victoria rule alone.
Marriage to Albert
Attracted by Albert's good looks and encouraged by her uncle Leopold, Victoria proposed to her cousin on Oct. 15, 1839, just five days after he had arrived at Windsor on a visit to the English court. She described her impressions of him in the journal she kept throughout her life: “Albert really is quite charming, and so extremely handsome…a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist; my heart is quite going.” They were married on Feb. 10, 1840, the queen dressed entirely in articles of British manufacture.
Children quickly followed. Victoria, the princess royal (the “Vicky” of the Letters), was born in 1840; in 1858 she married the crown prince of Prussia and later became the mother of the emperor William II. The Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) was born in 1841. Then followed Princess Alice, afterward grand duchess of Hesse, 1843; Prince Alfred, afterward duke of Edinburgh and duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, 1844; Princess Helena (Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein), 1846; Princess Louise (duchess of Argyll), 1848; Prince Arthur (duke of Connaught), 1850; Prince Leopold (duke of Albany), 1853; and Princess Beatrice (Princess Henry of Battenberg), 1857. The queen's first grandchild was born in 1859, and her first great-grandchild in 1879. There were 37 great-grandchildren alive at her death.
Victoria never lost her early passion for Albert: “Without him everything loses its interest.” Despite conflicts produced by the queen's uncontrollable temper and recurrent fits of depression, which usually occurred during and after pregnancy, the couple had a happy marriage. Victoria, however, was never reconciled to the childbearing that accompanied her marital bliss—the “shadow-side of marriage,” as she called it. Victoria explained to her eldest daughter in 1858:
At the beginning of their marriage the queen was insistent that her husband should have no share in the government of the country. Within six months, on Melbourne's repeated suggestion, the prince was allowed to start seeing the dispatches, then to be present when the queen saw her ministers. The concession became a routine, and during her first pregnancy the prince received a “key to the secret boxes.” As one unwanted pregnancy followed another and as Victoria became increasingly dependent on her husband, Albert assumed an ever-larger political role. By 1845 Charles Greville, the observer of royal affairs, could write, “it is obvious that while she has the title, he is really discharging the functions of the Sovereign. He is the King to all intents and purposes.” Victoria, once so enthusiastic about her role, came to conclude that “we women are not made for governing.”
Relations with Peel
The prince came into his own to negotiate with Peel a compromise on the bedchamber question after the Melbourne government had been defeated in the general election of 1841. The queen's first interview with Peel went well, eased by Melbourne's advice to his successor:
If, as Lady Lyon once noted, “there was ‘a vein of iron' which ran through the Queen's extraordinary character,” the iron could bend; Victoria was able to revise her opinions and reevaluate her judgments. Peel's very real distress when in the summer of 1842 an attempt was made to assassinate the queen—together with the affinity between the prince and the new prime minister—soon converted the “cold odd man” of the queen's earlier comment into “a great statesman, a man who thinks but little of party and never of himself.” Lord Aberdeen, the foreign secretary, also became a great favourite. “We felt so safe with them both,” she told King Leopold.
The departure of the possessive Lehzen for Germany in 1842 signaled Albert's victory in the battle between the two for Victoria's loyalty and for power in the royal household. He became effectively the queen's private secretary—according to himself, “her permanent minister.” As a result of Albert's diligence and refusal to accept the obstacles that ministers threw in his path, the management of the queen's properties was rationalized and her income thus increased.
A visible sign of the prince's power and influence was the building of the royal residences of Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, and Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Albert, who taught the once party-loving Victoria to despise London, played a central role in the acquisition of both properties as well as in designing the homes he and Victoria erected on them between 1845 and 1855.
Victoria described Osborne as “our island home” and retreated there frequently; it was, however, at Balmoral that she was happiest. The royal pair and their family were able to live there “with the greatest simplicity and ease,” wrote Greville. The queen soon came to hold the Highlanders in more esteem than she held any other of her subjects. She liked the simpler life of the Highlands, as her published journal was to reveal: she came to make the most of the thin stream of Scottish blood in her veins; also, so long as the sermons were short enough, she came to prefer the Scottish form of religious service. “You know,” she was to tell her prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, “I am not much of an Episcopalian”; and she developed a comfort in the consolations of the Reverend Norman Macleod and also a delight in the plain speech of John Brown, the Highland servant who stalked with Albert and became her personal attendant.
The royal couple's withdrawal to Scotland and the Isle of Wight bore witness to a new sort of British monarchy. In their quest for privacy and intimacy Albert and Victoria adopted a way of life that mirrored that of their middle-class subjects, admittedly on a grander scale. Although Albert was interested in intellectual and scientific matters, Victoria's tastes were closer to those of most of her people. She enjoyed the novels of Charles Dickens and patronized the circus and waxwork exhibitions. Both Victoria and Albert, however, differed from many in the middle class in their shared preference for nudes in painting and sculpture. Victoria was not the prude that many claimed her to be. She was also no Sabbatarian: “I am not at all an admirer or approver of our very dull Sunday.”
Victoria's delight in mingling with the Scottish poor at Balmoral did little to raise the level of her social awareness. Although in 1846 she and Albert supported the repeal of the Corn Laws (protectionist legislation that kept the price of British grain artificially high) in order to relieve distress in famine-devastated Ireland, they remained much more interested in and involved with the building of Osborne and foreign policy than in the tragedy of Ireland. Victoria, moreover, gave her full support to the government's policy of repression of the Chartists (advocates of far-reaching political and social reform) and believed the workers in her realm to be contented and loyal. In 1848, rejoicing in the failure of the last great Chartist demonstration in London, the queen wrote:
The consequences of continental revolutions led her to conclude:
Yet, revolution or no revolution, many of her people lived in “untold misery,” a fact Victoria rarely confronted.
For both the queen and the prince consort the highlight of their reign came in 1851, with the opening of the Great Exhibition. Albert poured himself into the task of organizing the international trade show that became a symbol of the Victorian Age. Housed in the architectural marvel of the Crystal Palace, a splendid, greenhouse-inspired glass building erected in Hyde Park, the Great Exhibition displayed Britain's wealth and technological achievements to a wondering world. To Victoria the success of the Great Exhibition provided further evidence of her husband's genius: “I do feel proud at the thought of what my beloved Albert's great mind has conceived.” Profits from the Great Exhibition funded what became the South Kensington complex of colleges and museums.
Albert has been credited with teaching Victoria the importance of remaining above party. Certainly he saw the danger in the Whig partisanship she openly displayed before their marriage; more clearly than Victoria he realized the fine sense of balance required of a constitutional monarch. Albert's own actions, however, such as his much-criticized appearance in the gallery of the House of Commons during Peel's speech on the first day of the Corn Laws debates (and thus his open and partisan show of support for Peel), revealed his political sympathies. Gladstone noted in 1846 that
Like the queen, Albert believed that the sovereign had an important and active role to play in British politics. The fluid political situation operating during the prince's lifetime made such an active role seem possible. After the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846) there was a period, not ending until the election of 1868, when politics tended to consist of a series of temporary alliances between splinter groups and no single group could guarantee its extended control over the House of Commons: the golden age of the private member, a condition rendering active political intervention by the crown not only possible but sometimes even necessary. There was a role for the cabinet maker, especially in helping to compose coalitions. Its significance must not, however, be overemphasized; although Victoria probably would not have admitted it, the queen's role, albeit “substantial,” was always “secondary.”
Foreign affairs
The tradition also persisted that the sovereign had a special part to play in foreign affairs and could conduct them alone with a secretary of state. Victoria and Albert had relatives throughout Europe and were to have more. Moreover, they visited and were visited by other monarchs. Albert was determined that this personal intelligence should not be disregarded and that the queen should never become (as his own mentor the Baron Stockmar had indicated) “a mandarin figure which has to nod its head in assent or shake it in denial as its Minister pleases.” The result was a clash with Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, who could look back on a career of high office beginning before the royal couple was born. The prince distrusted Palmerston's character, disapproved of his methods, thought his policy shallow, and disagreed with his concept of the constitution.
Even after Victoria insisted to Palmerston in 1850, “having once given her sanction to a measure, that it be not arbitrarily altered or modified by the minister,” the foreign secretary continued to follow policies disapproved of by both Albert and Victoria, such as his encouragement of nationalist movements that threatened to dismember the Austrian Empire. Finally, after Palmerston expressed his approval of the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon (later Napoleon III) in 1851 without consulting the queen, the prime minister, Lord John Russell, dismissed him. Within a few months the immensely popular Palmerston was back in office, however, as home secretary. He would serve twice as prime minister. After Albert's death Victoria's disapproval of Palmerston diminished; his conservative domestic policy and his insistence that Britain receive its due in world affairs accorded with her own later views.
On the eve of the Crimean War (1854–56) the royal pair encountered a wave of unpopularity, and Albert was suspected, without any foundation, of trying to influence the government in favour of the Russian cause. There was, however, a marked revival of royalist sentiment as the war wore on. The queen personally superintended the committees of ladies who organized relief for the wounded and eagerly seconded the efforts of Florence Nightingale: she visited crippled soldiers in the hospitals and instituted the Victoria Cross for gallantry.
With the death of Prince Albert on Dec. 14, 1861, the Albertine monarchy came to an end. Albert's influence on the queen was lasting. He had changed her personal habits and her political sympathies. From him she had received training in orderly ways of business, in hard work, in the expectation of royal intervention in ministry making at home, and in the establishment of a private (because royal) intelligence service abroad. The English monarchy had changed. As the historian G.M. Young said, “In place of a definite but brittle prerogative it had acquired an undefinable but potent influence.”
Widowhood
After Albert's death Victoria descended into deep depression—“those paroxysms of despair and yearning and longing and of daily, nightly longing to die…for the first three years never left me.” Even after climbing out of depression, she remained in mourning and in partial retirement. She balked at performing the ceremonial functions expected of the monarch and withdrew to Balmoral and Osborne four months out of every year, heedless of the inconvenience and strain this imposed on ministers. After an initial period of respect and sympathy for the queen's grief, the public grew increasingly impatient with its absent sovereign. No one, however, could budge the stubborn Victoria.
Although Victoria resisted carrying out her ceremonial duties, she remained determined to retain an effective political role in the period after Albert's death and to behave as he would have ordained. Her testing point was, then, her “dear one's” point of view; and this she had known at a particular and thereafter not necessarily relevant period in English political life. Her training and his influence were ill suited to the “swing of the pendulum” politics that better party organization and a wider electorate enjoined after the Reform Bill of 1867. And since she blamed her son and heir for Albert's death—the prince consort had come back ill from Cambridge, where he had gone to see the Prince of Wales regarding an indiscretion the young prince had committed in Ireland—she did not hesitate to vent her loneliness upon him or to refuse him all responsibility. “It quite irritates me to see him in the room,” she startled Lord Clarendon by saying. The breach was never really healed, and as time went on the queen was clearly envious of the popularity of the Prince and Princess of Wales. She liked to be, but she took little trouble to see that she was, popular.
It was despite, yet because of, Albert that Victoria succumbed to Benjamin Disraeli and thus made herself a partisan in the most famous political rivalry of the 19th century. Albert had thought Disraeli insufficiently a gentleman and remembered his bitter attacks on Peel over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846; the prince, on the other hand, had approved of Gladstone, Disraeli's political rival. Yet Disraeli was able to enter into the queen's grief, flatter her, restore her self-confidence, and make the lonely crown an easier burden. Behind all his calculated attacks on her affections there was a bond of mutual loneliness, a note of mystery and romanticism, and, besides, the return to good gossip. Disraeli, moreover, told the queen in 1868 that it would be “his delight and duty, to render the transaction of affairs as easy to your Majesty, as possible.” Since the queen was only too ready to consider herself overworked, this approach was especially successful. Gladstone, on the other hand, would never acknowledge that she was, as she put it, “dead beat,” perhaps because he never was himself; Disraeli, however, tired easily. The contrast between Disraeli's gay, often malicious, gossipy letters and Gladstone's 40 sides of foolscap is obvious. And there was no Albert to give her a neat précis. Gladstone, moreover, held the throne as an institution in such awe that it affected his relations with its essentially feminine occupant. His “feeling” for the crown, said Lady Ponsonby, was “always snubbed.” The queen had no patience with Gladstone's moralistic (and, she believed, hypocritical) approach to politics and foreign affairs. His persistent and often tactless attempts to persuade her to resume her ceremonial duties especially enraged her.
Over the problem of Ireland their paths separated ever more widely. Whereas “to pacify Ireland” had become the “mission” of Gladstone's life, the queen (like the majority of her subjects) had little understanding of, or sympathy for, Irish grievances. She disliked disorder and regarded the suggestion of Irish Home Rule as sheer disloyalty. The proposal of an Irish “Balmoral” was repugnant to her, especially when it was suggested that the Prince of Wales might go in her place. To avoid the Irish Sea, she claimed to be a bad sailor; yet she was willing in her later years to cross the English Channel almost every year. In all, she made but four visits to Ireland, the last in 1900 being provoked by her appreciation of the gallantry of the Irish regiments in the South African War.
The news of Gladstone's defeat in 1874 delighted the queen. “What an important turn the elections have taken,” she wrote.
If, years before, Melbourne, almost despite himself, had made her a good little Whig, and if Albert had left her, in general, a Peelite, temperamental and subsequently doctrinal differences with Gladstone helped make it easy for Disraeli to turn Victoria into a stout supporter of the Conservative Party.
One of the bonds shared by Victoria and Disraeli was a romantic attachment to the East and the idea of empire. Although she supported Disraeli's reform of the franchise in 1867, Victoria had little interest in or sympathy with his program of social reform; she was, however, entranced by his imperialism and by his assertive foreign policy. She applauded his brilliant maneuvering, which led to the British purchase of slightly less than half of the shares in the Suez Canal in 1875 (a move that prevented the canal from falling entirely under French control), especially since he presented the canal as a personal gift to her: “It is just settled; you have it, Ma'am.” The addition of “Empress of India” in 1876 to the royal title thrilled the queen even more. Victoria and Disraeli also agreed on their answer to the vexing “Eastern question”—what was to be done with the declining Turkish empire? Even the revelation of Turkish atrocities against rebelling Bulgarians failed to sway the sovereign and her prime minister from their position that Britain's best interests lay in supporting Turkey, the “Sick Man” of Europe. The fact that Gladstone took the opposing view, of course, strengthened their pro-Turkish sympathies. With the outbreak of a Russo-Turkish war in 1877, however, Disraeli found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to restrain his bellicose sovereign, who demanded that Britain enter the war against Russia. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878 Disraeli emerged triumphant: Russian influence in the Balkans was reduced, and Britain gained control of the strategically located island of Cyprus. The queen was ecstatic.
Victoria's delight in Disraeli's premiership made further conflict with Gladstone inevitable. When in September 1879 a dissolution of Parliament seemed imminent, the queen wrote to the Marchioness of Ely (who was, after the Duchess of Argyll, perhaps her most intimate friend):
After the blow fell with the Conservative Party's defeat in 1880, Victoria sent for Lord Hartington.
Nevertheless, as Hartington pointed out, it was Gladstone whom she had to have. She made no secret of her hostility, she hoped he would retire, and she remained in correspondence with Lord Beaconsfield (as Disraeli had become). Gladstone, indeed, said that he himself “would never be surprised to see her turn the Government out, after the manner of her uncles.” The queen abhorred Gladstone's lack of Disraelian vision of Britain's role in the world. Over the abandonment of Kandahar in Afghanistan, in 1881, for example, Sir Henry Ponsonby had never seen her so angry: “The Queen has never before been treated,” she told him, “with such want of respect and consideration in the forty three and a half years she has worn her thorny crown.”
Victoria convinced herself that Gladstone's government, dominated (she believed) by Radicals, threatened the stability of the nation:
Nevertheless, Victoria did act as an important mediating influence between the two houses to bring about the compromise that resulted in the third parliamentary Reform Act in 1884.
Victoria never acclimatized herself to the effects of the new electorate on party organization. No longer was the monarchy normally necessary as cabinet maker; yet, the queen was reluctant to accept her more limited role. Thus, in 1886 she sought to avoid a third Gladstone ministry by attempting to form an anti-Radical coalition. Her attempt failed. Irish Home Rule, not the queen, would defeat the “People's William.”
Last years
In the Salisbury administration (1895–1902), with which her long reign ended, Victoria was eventually to find not only the sort of ministry with which she felt comfortable but one which lent a last ray of colour to her closing years by its alliance, through Joseph Chamberlain, with the mounting imperialism that she had so greatly enjoyed in Disraeli's day when he had made her empress of India.
The South African War (1899–1902) dominated her final years. The sufferings of her soldiers in South Africa aroused the queen to a level of activity and public visibility that she had avoided for decades. With a demanding schedule of troop inspections, medal ceremonies, and visits to military hospitals, Victoria finally became the exemplar of a modern monarch.
Victoria absorbed a great deal of the time of her ministers, especially Gladstone's, but after 1868 it may be doubted whether, save in rare instances, it made a great deal of difference. She may have postponed an occasional evil day; she certainly hampered an occasional career. And sometimes that “continuous political experience,” which Walter Bagehot remarked as a long-lived monarch's greatest asset, was invaluable: in stopping “red tapings,” as the queen called them, or in breaking a logjam. Meanwhile—“a comparatively late growth”—she had gained the affection of her subjects. The sheer endurance of her reign in a time of swift change deepened her symbolic value and hence heightened her popularity. Lord Salisbury observed in the House of Lords (Jan. 25, 1901) after her death that:
The queen, as the Jubilees of 1887 and 1897 showed, was popular. Gone were the days when pamphlets were circulated asking what she did with her money. More and more fully with advancing years, she was able to satisfy the imagination of the middle class—and the poorer class—of her subjects.
She remained, nevertheless, either aloof from or in opposition to many of the important political, social, and intellectual currents of the later Victorian period. She never reconciled herself to the advance of democracy, and she thought the idea of female suffrage anathema. The sufferings of an individual worker could engage her sympathy; the working class, however, remained outside her field of vision. After Albert's death Victoria had little contact with intellectual and artistic subjects and so remained happily unaware of the unsettling new directions being explored in the world around her. Her reign was shaped by the new technology—without the railroad and the telegraph, her extended stays in Osborne and Balmoral would have been impossible—yet she never welcomed innovation.
Many of the movements of the day passed the aged queen by, many irritated her, but the stupendous hard work that Albert had taught her went on—the meticulous examination of the boxes, the regular signature of the papers. To the very end Victoria remained a passionate and strong-willed woman.
Those who were nearest to her came completely under her spell; yet all from the Prince of Wales down stood in considerable awe. A breach of the rules could still make a fearsome change in the kindly, managing great-grandmother in black silk dress and white cap. The eyes would begin to protrude, the mouth to go down at the corners. Those who suffered her displeasure never forgot it, nor did she. Yielding to nobody else's comfort and keeping every anniversary, she lived surrounded by mementos, photographs, miniatures, busts, and souvenirs in chilly rooms at the end of drafty corridors, down which one tiptoed past Indian attendants to the presence. Nobody knocked; a gentle scratching on the door was all that she permitted. Every night at Windsor Albert's clothes were laid out on the bed, every morning fresh water was put in the basin in his room. She slept with a photograph—over her head—taken of his head and shoulders as he lay dead.
Queen Victoria had fought a long rearguard action against the growth of “democratic monarchy”; yet, in some ways, she had done more than anyone else to create it. She had made the monarchy respectable and had thereby guaranteed its continuance—not as a political power but as a political institution. Her long reign had woven a legend, and, as her political power ebbed away, her political value grew. It lay, perhaps, more in what the electorate thought of her, indeed felt about her, than in what she ever was or certainly ever believed herself to be. Paradoxically enough, her principal contribution to the British monarchy and her political importance lay in regard to those “dignified” functions that she was accused of neglecting rather than to the “business” functions that, perhaps sometimes, she did not neglect enough.
The queen died after a short and painless illness. “We all feel a bit motherless today,” wrote Henry James, “mysterious little Victoria is dead and fat vulgar Edward is King.” She was buried beside Prince Albert in the mausoleum at Frogmore near Windsor. Young said,
Her essential achievement was simple. By the length of her reign, the longest in English history, she had restored both dignity and popularity to a tarnished crown: an achievement of character, as well as of longevity. Historians may differ in their assessment of her political acumen, her political importance, or her role as a constitutional monarch. None will question her high sense of duty or the transparent honesty, the massive simplicity, of her royal character.
died January 22, 1901, Osborne, near Cowes, Isle of Wight
queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1837–1901) and empress of India (1876–1901). She was the last of the House of Hanover and gave her name to an era, the Victorian Age. During her reign the English monarchy took on its modern ceremonial character. She and her husband, Prince Consort Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, had nine children, through whose marriages were descended many of the royal families of Europe.
Victoria first learned of her future role as a young princess during a history lesson when she was 10 years old. Almost four decades later Victoria's governess recalled that the future queen reacted to the discovery by declaring, “I will be good.” This combination of earnestness and egotism marked Victoria as a child of the age that bears her name. The queen, however, rejected important Victorian values and developments. Although she hated pregnancy and childbirth, detested babies, and was uncomfortable in the presence of children, Victoria reigned in a society that idealized both motherhood and the family. She had no interest in social issues, yet the 19th century in Britain was an age of reform. She resisted technological change even while mechanical and technological innovations reshaped the face of European civilization.
Most significantly, Victoria was a queen determined to retain political power; yet unwillingly and unwittingly she presided over the transformation of the sovereign's political role into a ceremonial one and thus preserved the English monarchy. When Victoria became queen, the political role of the crown was by no means clear; nor was the permanence of the throne itself. When she died and her son Edward VII moved from Marlborough House to Buckingham Palace, the change was one of social rather than of political focus; there was no doubt about the monarchy's continuance. That was the measure of her reign.
Lineage and early life
On the death in 1817 of Princess Charlotte, daughter of the prince regent (later George IV), there was no surviving legitimate offspring of George III's 15 children. In 1818, therefore, three of his sons, the dukes of Clarence, Kent, and Cambridge, married to provide for the succession. The winner in the race to father the next ruler of Britain was Edward, duke of Kent, fourth son of King George III. His only child was christened Alexandrina Victoria. After his death and George IV's accession in 1820, Victoria became third in the line of succession to the throne after the Duke of York (died 1827) and the Duke of Clarence (subsequently William IV), whose own children died in infancy.
Victoria, by her own account, “was brought up very simply,” principally at Kensington Palace, where her closest companions, other than her German-born mother, the Duchess of Kent, were her half sister, Féodore, and her governess, Louise (afterward the Baroness) Lehzen, a native of Coburg. An important father figure to the orphaned princess was her uncle Leopold, her mother's brother, who lived at Claremont, near Esher, Surrey, until he became king of the Belgians in 1831.
Victoria's childhood was made increasingly unhappy by the machinations of the Duchess of Kent's advisor, Sir John Conroy. In control of the pliable duchess, Conroy hoped to dominate the future queen of Britain as well. Persuaded by Conroy that the royal dukes, “the wicked uncles,” posed a threat to her daughter, the duchess reared Victoria according to “the Kensington system,” by which she and Conroy systematically isolated Victoria from her contemporaries and her father's family. Conroy thus aimed to make the princess dependent on and easily led by himself.
Strong-willed, and supported by Lehzen, Victoria survived the Kensington system; when she ascended the throne in 1837, she did so alone. Her mother's actions had estranged her from Victoria and taught the future queen caution in her friendships. Moreover, her retentive memory did not allow her to forgive readily.
Accession to the throne
In the early hours of June 20, 1837, Victoria received a call from the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord chamberlain and learned of the death of William IV, third son of George III. Later that morning the Privy Council was impressed by the graceful assurance of the new queen's demeanour. She was small, carried herself well, and had a delightful silvery voice, which she retained all her life. The accession of a young woman was romantically popular. But because of the existence in Hanover of the Salic law, which prevented succession by a woman, the crowns of Great Britain and Hanover became separated, the latter passing to William IV's eldest surviving brother, Ernest, the unpopular duke of Cumberland.
The queen, who had never before had a room to herself, exiled her mother to a distant set of apartments when they moved into Buckingham Palace. Conroy was pensioned off. Only Lehzen, of whom Victoria was still in awe, remained close to the queen. Even her beloved uncle Leopold was politely warned off discussions of English politics. “Alone” at last, she enjoyed her new-found freedom. “Victoria,” wrote her cousin, Prince Albert, who later married her,
is said to be incredibly stubborn and her extreme obstinacy to be constantly at war with her good nature; she delights in Court ceremonies, etiquette and trivial formalities.…She is said not to take the slightest pleasure in nature and to enjoy sitting up at night and sleeping late into the day.
It was, in retrospect, “the least sensible and satisfactory time in her whole life”; but at the time it was exciting and enjoyable, the more so because of her romantic friendship with Lord Melbourne, the prime minister.
Melbourne was a crucial influence on Victoria, in many ways an unfortunate one. The urbane and sophisticated prime minister fostered the new queen's self-confidence and enthusiasm for her role; he also encouraged her to ignore or minimize social problems and to attribute all discontent and unrest to the activities of a small group of agitators. Moreover, because of Melbourne, Victoria became an ardent Whig.
Victoria's constitutionally dangerous political partisanship contributed to the first two crises of her reign, both of which broke in 1839. The Hastings affair began when Lady Flora Hastings, a maid of honour who was allied and connected to the Tories, was forced by Victoria to undergo a medical examination for suspected pregnancy. The gossip, when it was discovered that the queen had been mistaken, became the more damaging when later in the year Lady Flora died of a disease that had not been diagnosed by the examining physician. The enthusiasm of the populace over the coronation (June 28, 1838) swiftly dissipated.
Between the two phases of the Hastings case “the bedchamber crisis” intervened. When Melbourne resigned in May 1839, Sir Robert Peel, the Conservative leader, stipulated that the Whig ladies of the bedchamber should be removed. The queen imperiously refused, not without Melbourne's encouragement. “The Queen of England will not submit to such trickery,” she said. Peel therefore declined to take office, which Melbourne rather weakly resumed. “I was very young then,” wrote the queen long afterward, “and perhaps I should act differently if it was all to be done again.”
The Albertine monarchy
Victoria's wedding to Prince Albert served as a stage for displays of political partisanship: very few Tories received invitations, and the Tories themselves rejected Victoria's request that Albert be granted rank and precedence second only to her own. Victoria responded violently, “Monsters! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!” Marriage to Albert, however, lessened the queen's enthusiasm for Melbourne and the Whigs. She admitted many years later regarding Melbourne that “Albert thinks I worked myself up to what really became rather foolish.” Albert thus shifted Victoria's political sympathies; he also became the dominant figure and influence in her life. She quickly grew to depend on him for everything; soon she “didn't put on a gown or a bonnet if he didn't approve it.” No more did Victoria rule alone.
Marriage to Albert
Attracted by Albert's good looks and encouraged by her uncle Leopold, Victoria proposed to her cousin on Oct. 15, 1839, just five days after he had arrived at Windsor on a visit to the English court. She described her impressions of him in the journal she kept throughout her life: “Albert really is quite charming, and so extremely handsome…a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist; my heart is quite going.” They were married on Feb. 10, 1840, the queen dressed entirely in articles of British manufacture.
Children quickly followed. Victoria, the princess royal (the “Vicky” of the Letters), was born in 1840; in 1858 she married the crown prince of Prussia and later became the mother of the emperor William II. The Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) was born in 1841. Then followed Princess Alice, afterward grand duchess of Hesse, 1843; Prince Alfred, afterward duke of Edinburgh and duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, 1844; Princess Helena (Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein), 1846; Princess Louise (duchess of Argyll), 1848; Prince Arthur (duke of Connaught), 1850; Prince Leopold (duke of Albany), 1853; and Princess Beatrice (Princess Henry of Battenberg), 1857. The queen's first grandchild was born in 1859, and her first great-grandchild in 1879. There were 37 great-grandchildren alive at her death.
Victoria never lost her early passion for Albert: “Without him everything loses its interest.” Despite conflicts produced by the queen's uncontrollable temper and recurrent fits of depression, which usually occurred during and after pregnancy, the couple had a happy marriage. Victoria, however, was never reconciled to the childbearing that accompanied her marital bliss—the “shadow-side of marriage,” as she called it. Victoria explained to her eldest daughter in 1858:
What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.
At the beginning of their marriage the queen was insistent that her husband should have no share in the government of the country. Within six months, on Melbourne's repeated suggestion, the prince was allowed to start seeing the dispatches, then to be present when the queen saw her ministers. The concession became a routine, and during her first pregnancy the prince received a “key to the secret boxes.” As one unwanted pregnancy followed another and as Victoria became increasingly dependent on her husband, Albert assumed an ever-larger political role. By 1845 Charles Greville, the observer of royal affairs, could write, “it is obvious that while she has the title, he is really discharging the functions of the Sovereign. He is the King to all intents and purposes.” Victoria, once so enthusiastic about her role, came to conclude that “we women are not made for governing.”
Relations with Peel
The prince came into his own to negotiate with Peel a compromise on the bedchamber question after the Melbourne government had been defeated in the general election of 1841. The queen's first interview with Peel went well, eased by Melbourne's advice to his successor:
The Queen is not conceited—she is aware there are many things she cannot understand and she likes to have them explained to her elementarily—not at length and in detail but shortly and clearly.
If, as Lady Lyon once noted, “there was ‘a vein of iron' which ran through the Queen's extraordinary character,” the iron could bend; Victoria was able to revise her opinions and reevaluate her judgments. Peel's very real distress when in the summer of 1842 an attempt was made to assassinate the queen—together with the affinity between the prince and the new prime minister—soon converted the “cold odd man” of the queen's earlier comment into “a great statesman, a man who thinks but little of party and never of himself.” Lord Aberdeen, the foreign secretary, also became a great favourite. “We felt so safe with them both,” she told King Leopold.
The departure of the possessive Lehzen for Germany in 1842 signaled Albert's victory in the battle between the two for Victoria's loyalty and for power in the royal household. He became effectively the queen's private secretary—according to himself, “her permanent minister.” As a result of Albert's diligence and refusal to accept the obstacles that ministers threw in his path, the management of the queen's properties was rationalized and her income thus increased.
A visible sign of the prince's power and influence was the building of the royal residences of Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, and Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Albert, who taught the once party-loving Victoria to despise London, played a central role in the acquisition of both properties as well as in designing the homes he and Victoria erected on them between 1845 and 1855.
Victoria described Osborne as “our island home” and retreated there frequently; it was, however, at Balmoral that she was happiest. The royal pair and their family were able to live there “with the greatest simplicity and ease,” wrote Greville. The queen soon came to hold the Highlanders in more esteem than she held any other of her subjects. She liked the simpler life of the Highlands, as her published journal was to reveal: she came to make the most of the thin stream of Scottish blood in her veins; also, so long as the sermons were short enough, she came to prefer the Scottish form of religious service. “You know,” she was to tell her prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, “I am not much of an Episcopalian”; and she developed a comfort in the consolations of the Reverend Norman Macleod and also a delight in the plain speech of John Brown, the Highland servant who stalked with Albert and became her personal attendant.
The royal couple's withdrawal to Scotland and the Isle of Wight bore witness to a new sort of British monarchy. In their quest for privacy and intimacy Albert and Victoria adopted a way of life that mirrored that of their middle-class subjects, admittedly on a grander scale. Although Albert was interested in intellectual and scientific matters, Victoria's tastes were closer to those of most of her people. She enjoyed the novels of Charles Dickens and patronized the circus and waxwork exhibitions. Both Victoria and Albert, however, differed from many in the middle class in their shared preference for nudes in painting and sculpture. Victoria was not the prude that many claimed her to be. She was also no Sabbatarian: “I am not at all an admirer or approver of our very dull Sunday.”
Victoria's delight in mingling with the Scottish poor at Balmoral did little to raise the level of her social awareness. Although in 1846 she and Albert supported the repeal of the Corn Laws (protectionist legislation that kept the price of British grain artificially high) in order to relieve distress in famine-devastated Ireland, they remained much more interested in and involved with the building of Osborne and foreign policy than in the tragedy of Ireland. Victoria, moreover, gave her full support to the government's policy of repression of the Chartists (advocates of far-reaching political and social reform) and believed the workers in her realm to be contented and loyal. In 1848, rejoicing in the failure of the last great Chartist demonstration in London, the queen wrote:
The loyalty of the people at large has been very striking and their indignation at their peace being interfered with by such worthless and wanton men—immense.
The consequences of continental revolutions led her to conclude:
Revolutions are always bad for the country, and the cause of untold misery to the people. Obedience to the laws and to the Sovereign, is obedience to a higher Power, divinely instituted for the good of the people, not the Sovereign, who has equally duties and obligations.
Yet, revolution or no revolution, many of her people lived in “untold misery,” a fact Victoria rarely confronted.
For both the queen and the prince consort the highlight of their reign came in 1851, with the opening of the Great Exhibition. Albert poured himself into the task of organizing the international trade show that became a symbol of the Victorian Age. Housed in the architectural marvel of the Crystal Palace, a splendid, greenhouse-inspired glass building erected in Hyde Park, the Great Exhibition displayed Britain's wealth and technological achievements to a wondering world. To Victoria the success of the Great Exhibition provided further evidence of her husband's genius: “I do feel proud at the thought of what my beloved Albert's great mind has conceived.” Profits from the Great Exhibition funded what became the South Kensington complex of colleges and museums.
Albert has been credited with teaching Victoria the importance of remaining above party. Certainly he saw the danger in the Whig partisanship she openly displayed before their marriage; more clearly than Victoria he realized the fine sense of balance required of a constitutional monarch. Albert's own actions, however, such as his much-criticized appearance in the gallery of the House of Commons during Peel's speech on the first day of the Corn Laws debates (and thus his open and partisan show of support for Peel), revealed his political sympathies. Gladstone noted in 1846 that
the Prince is very strongly Conservative in his politics and his influence with the Q. is over-ruling; through him she has become so attached to Conservative ideas that she could hardly endure the idea of the opposite Party as her ministers.
Like the queen, Albert believed that the sovereign had an important and active role to play in British politics. The fluid political situation operating during the prince's lifetime made such an active role seem possible. After the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846) there was a period, not ending until the election of 1868, when politics tended to consist of a series of temporary alliances between splinter groups and no single group could guarantee its extended control over the House of Commons: the golden age of the private member, a condition rendering active political intervention by the crown not only possible but sometimes even necessary. There was a role for the cabinet maker, especially in helping to compose coalitions. Its significance must not, however, be overemphasized; although Victoria probably would not have admitted it, the queen's role, albeit “substantial,” was always “secondary.”
Foreign affairs
The tradition also persisted that the sovereign had a special part to play in foreign affairs and could conduct them alone with a secretary of state. Victoria and Albert had relatives throughout Europe and were to have more. Moreover, they visited and were visited by other monarchs. Albert was determined that this personal intelligence should not be disregarded and that the queen should never become (as his own mentor the Baron Stockmar had indicated) “a mandarin figure which has to nod its head in assent or shake it in denial as its Minister pleases.” The result was a clash with Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, who could look back on a career of high office beginning before the royal couple was born. The prince distrusted Palmerston's character, disapproved of his methods, thought his policy shallow, and disagreed with his concept of the constitution.
Even after Victoria insisted to Palmerston in 1850, “having once given her sanction to a measure, that it be not arbitrarily altered or modified by the minister,” the foreign secretary continued to follow policies disapproved of by both Albert and Victoria, such as his encouragement of nationalist movements that threatened to dismember the Austrian Empire. Finally, after Palmerston expressed his approval of the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon (later Napoleon III) in 1851 without consulting the queen, the prime minister, Lord John Russell, dismissed him. Within a few months the immensely popular Palmerston was back in office, however, as home secretary. He would serve twice as prime minister. After Albert's death Victoria's disapproval of Palmerston diminished; his conservative domestic policy and his insistence that Britain receive its due in world affairs accorded with her own later views.
On the eve of the Crimean War (1854–56) the royal pair encountered a wave of unpopularity, and Albert was suspected, without any foundation, of trying to influence the government in favour of the Russian cause. There was, however, a marked revival of royalist sentiment as the war wore on. The queen personally superintended the committees of ladies who organized relief for the wounded and eagerly seconded the efforts of Florence Nightingale: she visited crippled soldiers in the hospitals and instituted the Victoria Cross for gallantry.
With the death of Prince Albert on Dec. 14, 1861, the Albertine monarchy came to an end. Albert's influence on the queen was lasting. He had changed her personal habits and her political sympathies. From him she had received training in orderly ways of business, in hard work, in the expectation of royal intervention in ministry making at home, and in the establishment of a private (because royal) intelligence service abroad. The English monarchy had changed. As the historian G.M. Young said, “In place of a definite but brittle prerogative it had acquired an undefinable but potent influence.”
Widowhood
After Albert's death Victoria descended into deep depression—“those paroxysms of despair and yearning and longing and of daily, nightly longing to die…for the first three years never left me.” Even after climbing out of depression, she remained in mourning and in partial retirement. She balked at performing the ceremonial functions expected of the monarch and withdrew to Balmoral and Osborne four months out of every year, heedless of the inconvenience and strain this imposed on ministers. After an initial period of respect and sympathy for the queen's grief, the public grew increasingly impatient with its absent sovereign. No one, however, could budge the stubborn Victoria.
Although Victoria resisted carrying out her ceremonial duties, she remained determined to retain an effective political role in the period after Albert's death and to behave as he would have ordained. Her testing point was, then, her “dear one's” point of view; and this she had known at a particular and thereafter not necessarily relevant period in English political life. Her training and his influence were ill suited to the “swing of the pendulum” politics that better party organization and a wider electorate enjoined after the Reform Bill of 1867. And since she blamed her son and heir for Albert's death—the prince consort had come back ill from Cambridge, where he had gone to see the Prince of Wales regarding an indiscretion the young prince had committed in Ireland—she did not hesitate to vent her loneliness upon him or to refuse him all responsibility. “It quite irritates me to see him in the room,” she startled Lord Clarendon by saying. The breach was never really healed, and as time went on the queen was clearly envious of the popularity of the Prince and Princess of Wales. She liked to be, but she took little trouble to see that she was, popular.
It was despite, yet because of, Albert that Victoria succumbed to Benjamin Disraeli and thus made herself a partisan in the most famous political rivalry of the 19th century. Albert had thought Disraeli insufficiently a gentleman and remembered his bitter attacks on Peel over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846; the prince, on the other hand, had approved of Gladstone, Disraeli's political rival. Yet Disraeli was able to enter into the queen's grief, flatter her, restore her self-confidence, and make the lonely crown an easier burden. Behind all his calculated attacks on her affections there was a bond of mutual loneliness, a note of mystery and romanticism, and, besides, the return to good gossip. Disraeli, moreover, told the queen in 1868 that it would be “his delight and duty, to render the transaction of affairs as easy to your Majesty, as possible.” Since the queen was only too ready to consider herself overworked, this approach was especially successful. Gladstone, on the other hand, would never acknowledge that she was, as she put it, “dead beat,” perhaps because he never was himself; Disraeli, however, tired easily. The contrast between Disraeli's gay, often malicious, gossipy letters and Gladstone's 40 sides of foolscap is obvious. And there was no Albert to give her a neat précis. Gladstone, moreover, held the throne as an institution in such awe that it affected his relations with its essentially feminine occupant. His “feeling” for the crown, said Lady Ponsonby, was “always snubbed.” The queen had no patience with Gladstone's moralistic (and, she believed, hypocritical) approach to politics and foreign affairs. His persistent and often tactless attempts to persuade her to resume her ceremonial duties especially enraged her.
Over the problem of Ireland their paths separated ever more widely. Whereas “to pacify Ireland” had become the “mission” of Gladstone's life, the queen (like the majority of her subjects) had little understanding of, or sympathy for, Irish grievances. She disliked disorder and regarded the suggestion of Irish Home Rule as sheer disloyalty. The proposal of an Irish “Balmoral” was repugnant to her, especially when it was suggested that the Prince of Wales might go in her place. To avoid the Irish Sea, she claimed to be a bad sailor; yet she was willing in her later years to cross the English Channel almost every year. In all, she made but four visits to Ireland, the last in 1900 being provoked by her appreciation of the gallantry of the Irish regiments in the South African War.
The news of Gladstone's defeat in 1874 delighted the queen. “What an important turn the elections have taken,” she wrote.
It shows that the country is not Radical. What a triumph, too, Mr. Disraeli has obtained and what a good sign this large Conservative majority is of the state of the country, which really required (as formerly) a strong Conservative party!
If, years before, Melbourne, almost despite himself, had made her a good little Whig, and if Albert had left her, in general, a Peelite, temperamental and subsequently doctrinal differences with Gladstone helped make it easy for Disraeli to turn Victoria into a stout supporter of the Conservative Party.
One of the bonds shared by Victoria and Disraeli was a romantic attachment to the East and the idea of empire. Although she supported Disraeli's reform of the franchise in 1867, Victoria had little interest in or sympathy with his program of social reform; she was, however, entranced by his imperialism and by his assertive foreign policy. She applauded his brilliant maneuvering, which led to the British purchase of slightly less than half of the shares in the Suez Canal in 1875 (a move that prevented the canal from falling entirely under French control), especially since he presented the canal as a personal gift to her: “It is just settled; you have it, Ma'am.” The addition of “Empress of India” in 1876 to the royal title thrilled the queen even more. Victoria and Disraeli also agreed on their answer to the vexing “Eastern question”—what was to be done with the declining Turkish empire? Even the revelation of Turkish atrocities against rebelling Bulgarians failed to sway the sovereign and her prime minister from their position that Britain's best interests lay in supporting Turkey, the “Sick Man” of Europe. The fact that Gladstone took the opposing view, of course, strengthened their pro-Turkish sympathies. With the outbreak of a Russo-Turkish war in 1877, however, Disraeli found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to restrain his bellicose sovereign, who demanded that Britain enter the war against Russia. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878 Disraeli emerged triumphant: Russian influence in the Balkans was reduced, and Britain gained control of the strategically located island of Cyprus. The queen was ecstatic.
Victoria's delight in Disraeli's premiership made further conflict with Gladstone inevitable. When in September 1879 a dissolution of Parliament seemed imminent, the queen wrote to the Marchioness of Ely (who was, after the Duchess of Argyll, perhaps her most intimate friend):
Dear Janie,…I hope and trust the Government will be able to go on after the Election, as change is so disagreeable and so bad for the country; but if it should not, I wish the principal people of the Opposition should know there are certain things which I never can consent to.…
I never COULD take Mr. Gladstone…as my Minister again, for I never could have the slightest particle of confidence in Mr. Gladstone after his violent, mischievous, and dangerous conduct for the last three years.
After the blow fell with the Conservative Party's defeat in 1880, Victoria sent for Lord Hartington.
Mr. Gladstone she could have nothing to do with, for she considers his whole conduct since '76 to have been one series of violent, passionate invective against and abuse of Lord Beaconsfield, and that he caused the Russian war.
Nevertheless, as Hartington pointed out, it was Gladstone whom she had to have. She made no secret of her hostility, she hoped he would retire, and she remained in correspondence with Lord Beaconsfield (as Disraeli had become). Gladstone, indeed, said that he himself “would never be surprised to see her turn the Government out, after the manner of her uncles.” The queen abhorred Gladstone's lack of Disraelian vision of Britain's role in the world. Over the abandonment of Kandahar in Afghanistan, in 1881, for example, Sir Henry Ponsonby had never seen her so angry: “The Queen has never before been treated,” she told him, “with such want of respect and consideration in the forty three and a half years she has worn her thorny crown.”
Victoria convinced herself that Gladstone's government, dominated (she believed) by Radicals, threatened the stability of the nation:
No one is more truly Liberal in her heart than the Queen, but she has always strongly deprecated the great tendency of the present Government to encourage instead of checking the stream of destructive democracy which has become so alarming.…She will not be a Sovereign of a Democratic Monarchy.
Nevertheless, Victoria did act as an important mediating influence between the two houses to bring about the compromise that resulted in the third parliamentary Reform Act in 1884.
Victoria never acclimatized herself to the effects of the new electorate on party organization. No longer was the monarchy normally necessary as cabinet maker; yet, the queen was reluctant to accept her more limited role. Thus, in 1886 she sought to avoid a third Gladstone ministry by attempting to form an anti-Radical coalition. Her attempt failed. Irish Home Rule, not the queen, would defeat the “People's William.”
Last years
In the Salisbury administration (1895–1902), with which her long reign ended, Victoria was eventually to find not only the sort of ministry with which she felt comfortable but one which lent a last ray of colour to her closing years by its alliance, through Joseph Chamberlain, with the mounting imperialism that she had so greatly enjoyed in Disraeli's day when he had made her empress of India.
The South African War (1899–1902) dominated her final years. The sufferings of her soldiers in South Africa aroused the queen to a level of activity and public visibility that she had avoided for decades. With a demanding schedule of troop inspections, medal ceremonies, and visits to military hospitals, Victoria finally became the exemplar of a modern monarch.
Victoria absorbed a great deal of the time of her ministers, especially Gladstone's, but after 1868 it may be doubted whether, save in rare instances, it made a great deal of difference. She may have postponed an occasional evil day; she certainly hampered an occasional career. And sometimes that “continuous political experience,” which Walter Bagehot remarked as a long-lived monarch's greatest asset, was invaluable: in stopping “red tapings,” as the queen called them, or in breaking a logjam. Meanwhile—“a comparatively late growth”—she had gained the affection of her subjects. The sheer endurance of her reign in a time of swift change deepened her symbolic value and hence heightened her popularity. Lord Salisbury observed in the House of Lords (Jan. 25, 1901) after her death that:
She had an extraordinary knowledge of what her people would think—extraordinary, because it could not come from any personal intercourse. I have said for years that I have always felt that when I knew what the Queen thought, I knew pretty certainly what views her subjects would take, and especially the middle class of her subjects.
The queen, as the Jubilees of 1887 and 1897 showed, was popular. Gone were the days when pamphlets were circulated asking what she did with her money. More and more fully with advancing years, she was able to satisfy the imagination of the middle class—and the poorer class—of her subjects.
She remained, nevertheless, either aloof from or in opposition to many of the important political, social, and intellectual currents of the later Victorian period. She never reconciled herself to the advance of democracy, and she thought the idea of female suffrage anathema. The sufferings of an individual worker could engage her sympathy; the working class, however, remained outside her field of vision. After Albert's death Victoria had little contact with intellectual and artistic subjects and so remained happily unaware of the unsettling new directions being explored in the world around her. Her reign was shaped by the new technology—without the railroad and the telegraph, her extended stays in Osborne and Balmoral would have been impossible—yet she never welcomed innovation.
Many of the movements of the day passed the aged queen by, many irritated her, but the stupendous hard work that Albert had taught her went on—the meticulous examination of the boxes, the regular signature of the papers. To the very end Victoria remained a passionate and strong-willed woman.
Those who were nearest to her came completely under her spell; yet all from the Prince of Wales down stood in considerable awe. A breach of the rules could still make a fearsome change in the kindly, managing great-grandmother in black silk dress and white cap. The eyes would begin to protrude, the mouth to go down at the corners. Those who suffered her displeasure never forgot it, nor did she. Yielding to nobody else's comfort and keeping every anniversary, she lived surrounded by mementos, photographs, miniatures, busts, and souvenirs in chilly rooms at the end of drafty corridors, down which one tiptoed past Indian attendants to the presence. Nobody knocked; a gentle scratching on the door was all that she permitted. Every night at Windsor Albert's clothes were laid out on the bed, every morning fresh water was put in the basin in his room. She slept with a photograph—over her head—taken of his head and shoulders as he lay dead.
Queen Victoria had fought a long rearguard action against the growth of “democratic monarchy”; yet, in some ways, she had done more than anyone else to create it. She had made the monarchy respectable and had thereby guaranteed its continuance—not as a political power but as a political institution. Her long reign had woven a legend, and, as her political power ebbed away, her political value grew. It lay, perhaps, more in what the electorate thought of her, indeed felt about her, than in what she ever was or certainly ever believed herself to be. Paradoxically enough, her principal contribution to the British monarchy and her political importance lay in regard to those “dignified” functions that she was accused of neglecting rather than to the “business” functions that, perhaps sometimes, she did not neglect enough.
The queen died after a short and painless illness. “We all feel a bit motherless today,” wrote Henry James, “mysterious little Victoria is dead and fat vulgar Edward is King.” She was buried beside Prince Albert in the mausoleum at Frogmore near Windsor. Young said,
She had lived long enough. The idol of her people, she had come to press on the springs of government with something of the weight of an idol, and in the innermost circle of public life the prevailing sentiment was relief.
Her essential achievement was simple. By the length of her reign, the longest in English history, she had restored both dignity and popularity to a tarnished crown: an achievement of character, as well as of longevity. Historians may differ in their assessment of her political acumen, her political importance, or her role as a constitutional monarch. None will question her high sense of duty or the transparent honesty, the massive simplicity, of her royal character.
Thewolf- Number of posts : 1050
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GEORGE III
by Thewolf Fri Apr 30, 2010 6:34 pm
in full George William Frederick, German Georg Wilhelm Friedrich born June 4 [May 24, Old Style], 1738, Londondied Jan. 29, 1820, Windsor Castle, near London
king of Great Britain and Ireland (1760–1820) and elector (1760–1814) and then king (1814–20) of Hanover, during a period when Britain won an empire in the Seven Years' War but lost its American colonies, and then, after the struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, emerged as a leading power in Europe. During the last years of his life (from 1811) he was intermittently mad—his son, the future George IV, acting as regent.
Early years
George III was the son of Frederick Louis, prince of Wales, and Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. From his parents and their entourage, the young George imbibed an unreasonable dislike of his grandfather, King George II, and of all his policies. George was a child of strong feelings but of slow mental development. This unequal growth of brain and heart made him difficult to teach and too easy to command and produced in him an appearance of apathy; he could not read properly until he was 11. His affection for his immediate family circle dominated his life.
George was 12 when his father died, leaving him heir to the throne. It is clear that, in beginning with his 18th birthday to prepare conscientiously for his future responsibilities, he tormented himself with thoughts of his inadequacy. The curious blend of obstinate determination with self-distrust, a feature of his maturity, was already evident. His method of screwing up his courage was to set himself an ideal of conduct. This ideal George thought he had found personified in John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, who became his inspiration, his teacher, and later his chief minister.
George was potentially a better politician than Bute, for he had tenacity, and, as experience matured him, he could use guile to achieve his ends. But at his accession in 1760 in the midst of the Seven Years' War (1756–63), between Great Britain and Prussia on one side and France, Austria, and Russia on the other, George did not know his own capacity nor the incapacity of his hero. As king, in 1761, he asked Bute for a review of all eligible German Protestant princesses “to save a great deal of trouble,” as “marriage must sooner or later come to pass.” He chose Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and married her on Sept. 8, 1761. Though the marriage was entered into in the spirit of public duty, it lasted for more than 50 years, due to the king's need for security and his wife's strength of character. Bute's only other useful contribution to his royal pupil was to encourage his interest in botany and to implant in the court more respect for the graces of life, including patronage of the arts, than had been usual for the past half century.
Political instability, 1760–70
Politically, Bute encouraged the most disastrous of George's delusions. The government of England at the time lacked effective executive machinery, and members of Parliament were always more ready to criticize than to cooperate with it. Moreover, the ministers were, for the most part, quarrelsome and difficult to drive as a team. The king's first responsibility was to hold coalitions of great peers together. But under Bute's influence he imagined that his duty was to purify public life and to substitute duty to himself for personal intrigue. The two great men in office at the accession were the elder Pitt and Thomas Pelham-Holles, duke of Newcastle. Bute and George III disliked both. Pitt was allowed to resign (October 1761) over the question of war against Spain. Newcastle followed into retirement when his control of treasury matters seemed to be challenged. The two former ministers were each dangerous as a focal point for criticism of the new government under the touchy captaincy of Bute. The government had two principal problems: to make peace and to restore peacetime finance.
Peace was made but in such a way as to isolate Britain in Europe, and for almost 30 years the country suffered from the new alignments of the European powers. Nor was George III happy in his attempt to express the agreed purposes of the country that to Bute had seemed so clear. George III might “glory in the name of Briton,” but his attempts to speak out for his country were ill-received. In 1765 he was being vilified by the gutter press organized by the parliamentary radical John Wilkes, while “patriotic” gentlemen, moved by Pitt or Newcastle, suspected that the peace had been botched and that the king was conspiring with Bute against their liberties. For Bute the way out was easy—he resigned (April 1763).
George realized too late that his clumsiness had destroyed one political combination and made any other difficult to assemble. He turned to George Grenville, to his uncle, William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, to Pitt, and to the 3rd duke of Grafton for help. All failed him. The first decade of the reign was one of such ministerial instability that little was done to solve the basic financial difficulties of the crown, made serious by the expense of the Seven Years' War. Overseas trade expanded, but the riches of the East India Company made no significant contribution to the state. The attempt to make the American colonists meet their own administrative costs only aroused them to resistance. Nor was there consistency in British colonial policy. The Stamp Act (1765) passed by Grenville was repealed by Lord Rockingham in 1766. Indirect taxes, in the form of the Townshend Acts (1767), were imposed without calculation of their probable yield and then repealed (except for that on tea) as a maneuver in home politics.
George III was personally blamed for this instability. According to the Whig statesman Edmund Burke and his friends, the king could not keep a ministry because he was faithless and intrigued with friends “behind the curtain.” Burke's remedy was to urge that solidity should be given to a cabinet by the building up of party loyalty: the king as a binding agent was to be replaced by the organization of groups upon agreed principles. Thus the early years of George III produced, inadvertently, the germ of modern party politics. In truth, however, the king was not guilty of causing chaos by intrigue. He had no political contact with Bute after 1766; the so-called king's friends were not his agents but rather those who looked to him for leadership such as his predecessors had given. The king's failure lay in his tactlessness and inexperience, and it was not his fault that no one group was strong enough to control the Commons.
By 1770, however, George III had learned a good deal. He was still as obstinate as ever and still felt an intense duty to guide the country, but now he reckoned with political reality. He no longer scorned to make use of executive power for winning elections nor did he withhold his official blessing from those of whose characters he disapproved.
North's ministry, 1770–82
In 1770 the king was lucky in finding a minister, Lord North, with the power to cajole the Commons. North's policy of letting sleeping dogs lie lulled the suspicions of independent rural members who were always ready to imagine that the executive was growing too strong. As a result, 12 years of stable government followed a decade of disturbance.
Unfortunately, issues and prejudices survived from the earlier period that North could only muffle. America was the greatest and the fatal issue, and North could not avoid it because the English squires in Parliament agreed with their king that America must pay for its own defense and for its share of the debt remaining from the war that had given it security. George III's personal responsibility for the loss of America lies not in any assertion of his royal prerogative. Americans, rather, were disposed to admit his personal supremacy. Their quarrel was with the assertion of the sovereignty of Parliament, and George III was eventually hated in America because he insisted upon linking himself with that Parliament. North would have had difficulty in ignoring the colonists' insults in any case; with the king and the House of Commons watching to see that he was not weak, he inevitably took the steps that led to war in 1775.
By 1779 the typical English squires in Parliament had sickened of the war, but the king argued that though the war was indefensible on economic grounds it still had to be fought, that if disobedience were seen to prosper, Ireland would follow suit. He argued also, after the French had joined the Americans in 1778, that French finances would collapse before those of Britain. So the king prolonged the war, possibly by two years, by his desperate determination. The period from 1779 to 1782 left a further black mark upon the king's reputation. By 1780 a majority in Parliament blamed North's government for the calamities that had befallen the country, yet there was no responsible or acceptable alternative, for the opposition was reputed to be both unpatriotic and divided. At the time people believed that corruption alone supported an administration that was equally incapable of waging war or ending it. This supposed increase in corruption was laid directly at the king's door, for North wearily repeated his wish to resign, thus appearing to be a mere puppet of George III. When North fell at last in 1782, George III's prestige was at a low ebb. The failure of Shelburne's ministry (1782–83) reduced George to the lowest point of all. North joined with the liberal Whig Charles James Fox to form a coalition government, and George even contemplated abdication.
George and the Younger Pitt, 1783–1806
Yet within a year the king had dramatically turned the tables, carrying out amid applause the most high-handed act of royal initiative in 18th-century England. When Fox and North produced a plan to reform the East India Company, which aroused fear that they intended to perpetuate their power by controlling Eastern patronage, the king reemerged as the guardian of the national interest. He let it be known that anyone who supported the plan in the House of Lords would be reckoned his enemy. The bill was defeated, and the ministers resigned. The king was ready with a new “patriotic” leader, William Pitt, the Younger. This initiative was dangerous. Pitt's government was in a minority in the Commons, and the discarded ministers were in a mood to threaten a constitutional upheaval. Everything depended on the verdict of a general election in March 1784. The country, moved by real feeling as well as by treasury influence, overwhelmingly endorsed the king's action. The king did not go on after his victory to further demonstrations of power. Though many of Pitt's ideas were unwelcome to him, he contented himself with criticism and a few grumbles. Pitt could not survive without the king, and the king, if he lost Pitt, would have been at the mercy of Fox. They compromised, but the compromise left most power, with the king's willing assent, in Pitt's capable young hands.
George loved his children possessively and with that hysterical force that he had always shown in relations with those close to him. He was depressed by the prince of Wales's coming of age in 1783 as it meant emancipation from the family. The king's ruefulness was soon converted into rage. The prince associated politically with Fox's Whigs and socially with Fox's gaming friends. In contrast to George III's rather straitlaced court, the prince's circle was lively and dissolute. As his sons escaped him, one by one, George oscillated between excitement and despair. In the crises of his reign he frequently talked of abdication; but in 1788 it was announced that it was his reason that had fled its throne.
The stresses endured by this hard-working man seemed sufficient to account for his violent breakdown. Twentieth-century medical investigation, in fact, suggested that the king had an inherited defect in his metabolism known as porphyria. An excess in purple-red pigments in the blood intoxicated all parts of the nervous system, producing the agonizing pain, excited overactivity, paralysis, and delirium that the king suffered in an acute form at least four times during his reign. The porphyria diagnosis, however, is not universally accepted by medical opinion.
The king's incapacity produced a political storm. But while Pitt and Fox battled over the powers that the prince of Wales should enjoy as regent, the king suddenly recovered in 1789. He was left with the fear that he might again collapse into the nightmare of madness. For the last decade of the 18th century, he was bothered more about the details than about the main lines of policy. Pitt, whose policies contented him more and more, gradually absorbed in his own following most of North's old following and even some of Fox's. After the outbreak of war with Revolutionary France in 1793, all but the most radical Whigs joined the government, leaving Fox in hopeless, if eloquent, opposition.
The war with France seemed to most of the aristocracy and the upper middle class to be waged for national survival. The old king, an object of compassion in his collapse and obviously a well-meaning man, was soon a symbol of the old English order for which the country was fighting. Although his potential power in politics was greatly increased, his will to wield it was enfeebled. George enjoyed himself in encouraging farmers to grow more food; or he talked for hours (ending his sentences rhetorically and fussily with the repeated words “what, what, what?”) about past conflicts, or military tactics, or even of the shortcomings of Shakespeare; or he played to himself on his harpsichord; or he regulated the lives of his daughters, who found it so much less easy to escape than did his sons. From such quiet occupations he was aroused to activity by Pitt's Irish policy at the turn of the century.
The French war had made the issue of RomanCatholic emancipation urgent. Rebellion in Ireland, in Pitt's view, could not be cured simply by the union of the British and Irish Parliaments. Conciliation, by the political emancipation of the Roman Catholics, was a necessary concomitant of union. George III believed this proposal to be radical ruin and used all his personal prestige to have emancipation defeated. Pitt resigned (1801), and George persuaded Henry Addington (later 1st Viscount Sidmouth) to form a less adventurous cabinet. The collapse of Addington's administration in 1804, after the short Peace of Amiens (1802–03), brought Pitt back into office (1804–06), but he returned at the cost of giving up his emancipation proposals. The king was decisive in this crisis only because it was an issue upon which he felt most deeply and upon which he instinctively expressed the feelings of the majority of the backbenchers in the House of Commons, though Pitt never pushed the matter to a real trial of strength.
Last years, 1806–20
On the death of Pitt (January 1806), the king accepted Fox as foreign secretary in a coalition “ministry of all the talents” (1806–07). He even came to feel affection for Fox and sincerely to lament his death in 1806. During this short period of Whig administration, the king allowed his ministers to discuss (abortively) peace with Napoleon and to abolish the slave trade; he asserted himself and forced their resignation only when they dared to propose some amelioration of the laws against Roman Catholics. This second break on the Roman Catholic issue came about in circumstances which witnessed to George's declining abilities. Still strong in body, he had become almost blind. He needed the help of a secretary in the task, which he would not reduce, of reading all the official papers. Lord Grenville thought the king had agreed to a paper that proposed the grant of higher rank in the army for papists. The king thought that his ministers were trying to trick him and that Sidmouth alone had explained to him the significance of the paper. He demanded from his ministers a promise not to bring up the subject again, for he feared he might be deceived into betraying his sworn duty to the Church of England. The perfectly proper refusal of ministers to pledge themselves for the future led to their supersession by the Tories, under Lord Portland (1807–09), Spencer Perceval (1809–12), and Lord Liverpool (1812–27), successively.
Much of the remainder of the king's lifetime was a living death. The death of his youngest child and frequent companion, Princess Amelia, in 1810, was a bitter blow; she had, in part, consoled him for his disappointment about his sons. Worse still was the return of the king's illness. In 1811 it was acknowledged that he was violently insane. The doctors continued to hope for recovery, but Parliament enacted the regency of the prince of Wales (the future George IV) and decreed that the queen should have the custody of her husband. He remained insane, with intervals of senile lucidity, until his death at Windsor Castle. George III's reign, on its personal side, was the tragedy of a well-intentioned man who was faced with problems too great for him to solve but from which his conscience prevented any attempt at escape.
king of Great Britain and Ireland (1760–1820) and elector (1760–1814) and then king (1814–20) of Hanover, during a period when Britain won an empire in the Seven Years' War but lost its American colonies, and then, after the struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, emerged as a leading power in Europe. During the last years of his life (from 1811) he was intermittently mad—his son, the future George IV, acting as regent.
Early years
George III was the son of Frederick Louis, prince of Wales, and Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. From his parents and their entourage, the young George imbibed an unreasonable dislike of his grandfather, King George II, and of all his policies. George was a child of strong feelings but of slow mental development. This unequal growth of brain and heart made him difficult to teach and too easy to command and produced in him an appearance of apathy; he could not read properly until he was 11. His affection for his immediate family circle dominated his life.
George was 12 when his father died, leaving him heir to the throne. It is clear that, in beginning with his 18th birthday to prepare conscientiously for his future responsibilities, he tormented himself with thoughts of his inadequacy. The curious blend of obstinate determination with self-distrust, a feature of his maturity, was already evident. His method of screwing up his courage was to set himself an ideal of conduct. This ideal George thought he had found personified in John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, who became his inspiration, his teacher, and later his chief minister.
George was potentially a better politician than Bute, for he had tenacity, and, as experience matured him, he could use guile to achieve his ends. But at his accession in 1760 in the midst of the Seven Years' War (1756–63), between Great Britain and Prussia on one side and France, Austria, and Russia on the other, George did not know his own capacity nor the incapacity of his hero. As king, in 1761, he asked Bute for a review of all eligible German Protestant princesses “to save a great deal of trouble,” as “marriage must sooner or later come to pass.” He chose Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and married her on Sept. 8, 1761. Though the marriage was entered into in the spirit of public duty, it lasted for more than 50 years, due to the king's need for security and his wife's strength of character. Bute's only other useful contribution to his royal pupil was to encourage his interest in botany and to implant in the court more respect for the graces of life, including patronage of the arts, than had been usual for the past half century.
Political instability, 1760–70
Politically, Bute encouraged the most disastrous of George's delusions. The government of England at the time lacked effective executive machinery, and members of Parliament were always more ready to criticize than to cooperate with it. Moreover, the ministers were, for the most part, quarrelsome and difficult to drive as a team. The king's first responsibility was to hold coalitions of great peers together. But under Bute's influence he imagined that his duty was to purify public life and to substitute duty to himself for personal intrigue. The two great men in office at the accession were the elder Pitt and Thomas Pelham-Holles, duke of Newcastle. Bute and George III disliked both. Pitt was allowed to resign (October 1761) over the question of war against Spain. Newcastle followed into retirement when his control of treasury matters seemed to be challenged. The two former ministers were each dangerous as a focal point for criticism of the new government under the touchy captaincy of Bute. The government had two principal problems: to make peace and to restore peacetime finance.
Peace was made but in such a way as to isolate Britain in Europe, and for almost 30 years the country suffered from the new alignments of the European powers. Nor was George III happy in his attempt to express the agreed purposes of the country that to Bute had seemed so clear. George III might “glory in the name of Briton,” but his attempts to speak out for his country were ill-received. In 1765 he was being vilified by the gutter press organized by the parliamentary radical John Wilkes, while “patriotic” gentlemen, moved by Pitt or Newcastle, suspected that the peace had been botched and that the king was conspiring with Bute against their liberties. For Bute the way out was easy—he resigned (April 1763).
George realized too late that his clumsiness had destroyed one political combination and made any other difficult to assemble. He turned to George Grenville, to his uncle, William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, to Pitt, and to the 3rd duke of Grafton for help. All failed him. The first decade of the reign was one of such ministerial instability that little was done to solve the basic financial difficulties of the crown, made serious by the expense of the Seven Years' War. Overseas trade expanded, but the riches of the East India Company made no significant contribution to the state. The attempt to make the American colonists meet their own administrative costs only aroused them to resistance. Nor was there consistency in British colonial policy. The Stamp Act (1765) passed by Grenville was repealed by Lord Rockingham in 1766. Indirect taxes, in the form of the Townshend Acts (1767), were imposed without calculation of their probable yield and then repealed (except for that on tea) as a maneuver in home politics.
George III was personally blamed for this instability. According to the Whig statesman Edmund Burke and his friends, the king could not keep a ministry because he was faithless and intrigued with friends “behind the curtain.” Burke's remedy was to urge that solidity should be given to a cabinet by the building up of party loyalty: the king as a binding agent was to be replaced by the organization of groups upon agreed principles. Thus the early years of George III produced, inadvertently, the germ of modern party politics. In truth, however, the king was not guilty of causing chaos by intrigue. He had no political contact with Bute after 1766; the so-called king's friends were not his agents but rather those who looked to him for leadership such as his predecessors had given. The king's failure lay in his tactlessness and inexperience, and it was not his fault that no one group was strong enough to control the Commons.
By 1770, however, George III had learned a good deal. He was still as obstinate as ever and still felt an intense duty to guide the country, but now he reckoned with political reality. He no longer scorned to make use of executive power for winning elections nor did he withhold his official blessing from those of whose characters he disapproved.
North's ministry, 1770–82
In 1770 the king was lucky in finding a minister, Lord North, with the power to cajole the Commons. North's policy of letting sleeping dogs lie lulled the suspicions of independent rural members who were always ready to imagine that the executive was growing too strong. As a result, 12 years of stable government followed a decade of disturbance.
Unfortunately, issues and prejudices survived from the earlier period that North could only muffle. America was the greatest and the fatal issue, and North could not avoid it because the English squires in Parliament agreed with their king that America must pay for its own defense and for its share of the debt remaining from the war that had given it security. George III's personal responsibility for the loss of America lies not in any assertion of his royal prerogative. Americans, rather, were disposed to admit his personal supremacy. Their quarrel was with the assertion of the sovereignty of Parliament, and George III was eventually hated in America because he insisted upon linking himself with that Parliament. North would have had difficulty in ignoring the colonists' insults in any case; with the king and the House of Commons watching to see that he was not weak, he inevitably took the steps that led to war in 1775.
By 1779 the typical English squires in Parliament had sickened of the war, but the king argued that though the war was indefensible on economic grounds it still had to be fought, that if disobedience were seen to prosper, Ireland would follow suit. He argued also, after the French had joined the Americans in 1778, that French finances would collapse before those of Britain. So the king prolonged the war, possibly by two years, by his desperate determination. The period from 1779 to 1782 left a further black mark upon the king's reputation. By 1780 a majority in Parliament blamed North's government for the calamities that had befallen the country, yet there was no responsible or acceptable alternative, for the opposition was reputed to be both unpatriotic and divided. At the time people believed that corruption alone supported an administration that was equally incapable of waging war or ending it. This supposed increase in corruption was laid directly at the king's door, for North wearily repeated his wish to resign, thus appearing to be a mere puppet of George III. When North fell at last in 1782, George III's prestige was at a low ebb. The failure of Shelburne's ministry (1782–83) reduced George to the lowest point of all. North joined with the liberal Whig Charles James Fox to form a coalition government, and George even contemplated abdication.
George and the Younger Pitt, 1783–1806
Yet within a year the king had dramatically turned the tables, carrying out amid applause the most high-handed act of royal initiative in 18th-century England. When Fox and North produced a plan to reform the East India Company, which aroused fear that they intended to perpetuate their power by controlling Eastern patronage, the king reemerged as the guardian of the national interest. He let it be known that anyone who supported the plan in the House of Lords would be reckoned his enemy. The bill was defeated, and the ministers resigned. The king was ready with a new “patriotic” leader, William Pitt, the Younger. This initiative was dangerous. Pitt's government was in a minority in the Commons, and the discarded ministers were in a mood to threaten a constitutional upheaval. Everything depended on the verdict of a general election in March 1784. The country, moved by real feeling as well as by treasury influence, overwhelmingly endorsed the king's action. The king did not go on after his victory to further demonstrations of power. Though many of Pitt's ideas were unwelcome to him, he contented himself with criticism and a few grumbles. Pitt could not survive without the king, and the king, if he lost Pitt, would have been at the mercy of Fox. They compromised, but the compromise left most power, with the king's willing assent, in Pitt's capable young hands.
George loved his children possessively and with that hysterical force that he had always shown in relations with those close to him. He was depressed by the prince of Wales's coming of age in 1783 as it meant emancipation from the family. The king's ruefulness was soon converted into rage. The prince associated politically with Fox's Whigs and socially with Fox's gaming friends. In contrast to George III's rather straitlaced court, the prince's circle was lively and dissolute. As his sons escaped him, one by one, George oscillated between excitement and despair. In the crises of his reign he frequently talked of abdication; but in 1788 it was announced that it was his reason that had fled its throne.
The stresses endured by this hard-working man seemed sufficient to account for his violent breakdown. Twentieth-century medical investigation, in fact, suggested that the king had an inherited defect in his metabolism known as porphyria. An excess in purple-red pigments in the blood intoxicated all parts of the nervous system, producing the agonizing pain, excited overactivity, paralysis, and delirium that the king suffered in an acute form at least four times during his reign. The porphyria diagnosis, however, is not universally accepted by medical opinion.
The king's incapacity produced a political storm. But while Pitt and Fox battled over the powers that the prince of Wales should enjoy as regent, the king suddenly recovered in 1789. He was left with the fear that he might again collapse into the nightmare of madness. For the last decade of the 18th century, he was bothered more about the details than about the main lines of policy. Pitt, whose policies contented him more and more, gradually absorbed in his own following most of North's old following and even some of Fox's. After the outbreak of war with Revolutionary France in 1793, all but the most radical Whigs joined the government, leaving Fox in hopeless, if eloquent, opposition.
The war with France seemed to most of the aristocracy and the upper middle class to be waged for national survival. The old king, an object of compassion in his collapse and obviously a well-meaning man, was soon a symbol of the old English order for which the country was fighting. Although his potential power in politics was greatly increased, his will to wield it was enfeebled. George enjoyed himself in encouraging farmers to grow more food; or he talked for hours (ending his sentences rhetorically and fussily with the repeated words “what, what, what?”) about past conflicts, or military tactics, or even of the shortcomings of Shakespeare; or he played to himself on his harpsichord; or he regulated the lives of his daughters, who found it so much less easy to escape than did his sons. From such quiet occupations he was aroused to activity by Pitt's Irish policy at the turn of the century.
The French war had made the issue of RomanCatholic emancipation urgent. Rebellion in Ireland, in Pitt's view, could not be cured simply by the union of the British and Irish Parliaments. Conciliation, by the political emancipation of the Roman Catholics, was a necessary concomitant of union. George III believed this proposal to be radical ruin and used all his personal prestige to have emancipation defeated. Pitt resigned (1801), and George persuaded Henry Addington (later 1st Viscount Sidmouth) to form a less adventurous cabinet. The collapse of Addington's administration in 1804, after the short Peace of Amiens (1802–03), brought Pitt back into office (1804–06), but he returned at the cost of giving up his emancipation proposals. The king was decisive in this crisis only because it was an issue upon which he felt most deeply and upon which he instinctively expressed the feelings of the majority of the backbenchers in the House of Commons, though Pitt never pushed the matter to a real trial of strength.
Last years, 1806–20
On the death of Pitt (January 1806), the king accepted Fox as foreign secretary in a coalition “ministry of all the talents” (1806–07). He even came to feel affection for Fox and sincerely to lament his death in 1806. During this short period of Whig administration, the king allowed his ministers to discuss (abortively) peace with Napoleon and to abolish the slave trade; he asserted himself and forced their resignation only when they dared to propose some amelioration of the laws against Roman Catholics. This second break on the Roman Catholic issue came about in circumstances which witnessed to George's declining abilities. Still strong in body, he had become almost blind. He needed the help of a secretary in the task, which he would not reduce, of reading all the official papers. Lord Grenville thought the king had agreed to a paper that proposed the grant of higher rank in the army for papists. The king thought that his ministers were trying to trick him and that Sidmouth alone had explained to him the significance of the paper. He demanded from his ministers a promise not to bring up the subject again, for he feared he might be deceived into betraying his sworn duty to the Church of England. The perfectly proper refusal of ministers to pledge themselves for the future led to their supersession by the Tories, under Lord Portland (1807–09), Spencer Perceval (1809–12), and Lord Liverpool (1812–27), successively.
Much of the remainder of the king's lifetime was a living death. The death of his youngest child and frequent companion, Princess Amelia, in 1810, was a bitter blow; she had, in part, consoled him for his disappointment about his sons. Worse still was the return of the king's illness. In 1811 it was acknowledged that he was violently insane. The doctors continued to hope for recovery, but Parliament enacted the regency of the prince of Wales (the future George IV) and decreed that the queen should have the custody of her husband. He remained insane, with intervals of senile lucidity, until his death at Windsor Castle. George III's reign, on its personal side, was the tragedy of a well-intentioned man who was faced with problems too great for him to solve but from which his conscience prevented any attempt at escape.
Thewolf- Number of posts : 1050
Age : 424
Location : Desert
Registration date : 2010-01-12
Re: Everything about British Civ
by louli Fri Apr 30, 2010 10:05 pm
thnx m8 wol!.. nice educated postinz!
hope u were her last year i needed'em!!...
any way!!...thnx again!
read ya
hope u were her last year i needed'em!!...
any way!!...thnx again!
read ya
louli- Number of posts : 452
Age : 33
Location : Office.Quite busy
Registration date : 2009-05-14 -
Re: Everything about British Civ
by louli Fri Apr 30, 2010 10:13 pm
thnx m8!!.. her life was so full of events!
i like th movies abt her 2, it was pretty interestin!!
thnx.. read ya sUn!...
i like th movies abt her 2, it was pretty interestin!!
thnx.. read ya sUn!...
louli- Number of posts : 452
Age : 33
Location : Office.Quite busy
Registration date : 2009-05-14 -
Re: Everything about British Civ
by Thewolf Sat May 01, 2010 4:16 am
U r welcome Louli, these two lessons r for second year students in Laghouat Uni, and for all members of cours 
if u need anything just order Louli, we might help nshalah
if u need anything just order Louli, we might help nshalah
Thewolf- Number of posts : 1050
Age : 424
Location : Desert
Registration date : 2010-01-12
Thewolf- Number of posts : 1050
Age : 424
Location : Desert
Registration date : 2010-01-12
Re: Everything about British Civ
by louli Wed May 05, 2010 12:45 pm
thnx indeed Wol!..
u'r such a g8 memba!... keep ya
u'r such a g8 memba!... keep ya
louli- Number of posts : 452
Age : 33
Location : Office.Quite busy
Registration date : 2009-05-14 -
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
by Thewolf Thu May 06, 2010 3:15 pm
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
INTRODUTION
INTRODUTION
In modern history, the process of change from an agrarian, handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture. This process began in England in the 18th century and from there spread to other parts of the world. Although used earlier by French writers, the term Industrial Revolution was first popularized by the English economic historian Arnold Toynbee (1852–83) to describe England's economic development from 1760 to 1840. Since Toynbee's time the term has been more broadly applied.
A brief treatment of the Industrial Revolution follows. For full treatment, see Europe, history of: The Industrial Revolution.
The main features involved in the Industrial Revolution were technological, socioeconomic, and cultural. The technological changes included the following: (1) the use of new basic materials, chiefly iron and steel, (2) the use of new energy sources, including both fuels and motive power, such as coal, the steam engine, electricity, petroleum, and the internal-combustion engine, (3) the invention of new machines, such as the spinning jenny and the power loom that permitted increased production with a smaller expenditure of human energy, (4) a new organization of work known as the factory system, which entailed increased division of labour and specialization of function, (5) important developments in transportation and communication, including the steam locomotive, steamship, automobile, airplane, telegraph, and radio, and (6) the increasing application of science to industry. These technological changes made possible a tremendously increased use of natural resources and the mass production of manufactured goods.
There were also many new developments in nonindustrial spheres, including the following: (1) agricultural improvements that made possible the provision of food for a larger nonagricultural population, (2) economic changes that resulted in a wider distribution of wealth, the decline of land as a source of wealth in the face of rising industrial production, and increased international trade, (3) political changes reflecting the shift in economic power, as well as new state policies corresponding to the needs of an industrialized society, (4) sweeping social changes, including the growth of cities, the development of working-class movements, and the emergence of new patterns of authority, and (5) cultural transformations of a broad order. The worker acquired new and distinctive skills, and his relation to his task shifted; instead of being a craftsman working with hand tools, he became a machine operator, subject to factory discipline. Finally, there was a psychological change: man's confidence in his ability to use resources and to master nature was heightened.
THE FIRST INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
In the period 1760 to 1830 the Industrial Revolution was largely confined to Britain. Aware of their head start, the British forbade the export of machinery, skilled workers, and manufacturing techniques. The British monopoly could not last forever, especially since some Britons saw profitable industrial opportunities abroad, while continental European businessmen sought to lure British know-how to their countries. Two Englishmen, William and John Cockerill, brought the Industrial Revolution to Belgium by developing machine shops at Liège (c. 1807), and Belgium became the first country in continental Europe to be transformed economically. Like its English progenitor, the Belgian Industrial Revolution centred in iron, coal, and textiles.
France was more slowly and less thoroughly industrialized than either Britain or Belgium. While Britain was establishing its industrial leadership, France was immersed in its Revolution, and the uncertain political situation discouraged large investments in industrial innovations. By 1848 France had become an industrial power, but, despite great growth under the Second Empire, it remained behind England.
Other European countries lagged far behind. Their bourgeoisie lacked the wealth, power, and opportunities of their British, French, and Belgian counterparts. Political conditions in the other nations also hindered industrial expansion. Germany, for example, despite vast resources of coal and iron, did not begin its industrial expansion until after national unity was achieved in 1870. Once begun, Germany's industrial production grew so rapidly that by the turn of the century that nation was outproducing Britain in steel and had become the world leader in the chemical industries. The rise of U.S. industrial power in the 19th and 20th centuries also far outstripped European efforts. And Japan too joined the Industrial Revolution with striking success.
The eastern European countries were behind early in the 20th century. It was not until the five-year plans that the Soviet Union became a major industrial power, telescoping into a few decades the industrialization that had taken a century and a half in Britain. The mid-20th century witnessed the spread of the Industrial Revolution into hitherto nonindustrialized areas such as China and India.
THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Despite considerable overlapping with the “old,” there is mounting evidence for a “new” Industrial Revolution in the late 19th and 20th centuries. In terms of basic materials, modern industry has begun to exploit many natural and synthetic resources not hitherto utilized: lighter metals, new alloys, and synthetic products such as plastics, as well as new energy sources. Combined with these are developments in machines, tools, and computers that have given rise to the automatic factory. Although some segments of industry were almost completely mechanized in the early to mid-19th century, automatic operation, as distinct from the assembly line, first achieved major significance in the second half of the 20th century.
Ownership of the means of production also underwent changes. The oligarchical ownership of the means of production that characterized the Industrial Revolution in the early to mid-19th century gave way to a wider distribution of ownership through purchase of common stocks by individuals and by institutions such as insurance companies. In the 20th century, many countries of Europe socialized basic sectors of their economies. There was also a change in political theories: instead of the laissez-faire ideas that dominated the economic and social thought of the classical Industrial Revolution, governments generally moved into the social and economic realm to meet the needs of their more complex industrial societies.
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Re: Everything about British Civ
by faith forever!! Sun Jun 27, 2010 11:19 pm
Although I have very well understood this lesson which we had learned in the first semestre but it is always a pleasure to read about my favourite modul........
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Re: Everything about British Civ
by happiness Mon Jul 05, 2010 12:50 am
A VERY INTERESTING PERSONALITY TO TALK ABOUT IT.THX MILLION TIMES WOLF UR A WISE TO CHOOSE THIS GREAT WOMAN VICTORIA THX AGAIN
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Re: Everything about British Civ
by Hayamoto Mon Jul 05, 2010 4:24 pm
Many thanks , highly appreciate your help 
.
.
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Everything about British Civ
by Thewolf Sat Jul 17, 2010 7:06 pm
Helle again mates, to make findig Docs easy, and the help easier, let's post everything about British Civ here please.
I want start by this book: A History of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts, Part I - Robert Bucholz
Link: http://www.4shared.com/document/lGwp-cTQ/_A_History_of_England_from_the.html
I want start by this book: A History of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts, Part I - Robert Bucholz
Link: http://www.4shared.com/document/lGwp-cTQ/_A_History_of_England_from_the.html
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Re: Everything about British Civ
by Guest Sat Jul 17, 2010 8:52 pm
Thanks a lot Wolf, my favourite module is British Civ.
Guest- Guest
Re: Everything about British Civ
by Thewolf Sun Jul 18, 2010 12:33 am
Book title: The History of England- Absolute monarchy-
Link: http://www.4shared.com/account/document/niSUsSK_/the_history_of_england.html
Link: http://www.4shared.com/account/document/niSUsSK_/the_history_of_england.html
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Re: Everything about British Civ
by Thewolf Sun Jul 18, 2010 3:08 pm
Title: The kings and The Queens of briatin
Link: http://www.4shared.com/document/kfLLmocE/Oxford_University_Press_-_The_.html
Link: http://www.4shared.com/document/kfLLmocE/Oxford_University_Press_-_The_.html
Thewolf- Number of posts : 1050
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Re: Everything about British Civ
by Guest Tue Jul 20, 2010 3:33 am
Wow Smarty, wonderful books..............thanks a lot my friend.
Guest- Guest
Re: Everything about British Civ
by Nacerpro Tue Jul 20, 2010 1:41 pm
Thx a lot dear bro.
This is really helpful.
Keep posting,
Regardz.
This is really helpful.
Keep posting,
Regardz.
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Re: Everything about British Civ
by bilinda Tue Jul 20, 2010 8:08 pm
Thank you wolf. That so sweet from your part.
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Re: Everything about British Civ
by sandrilla Tue Jul 20, 2010 8:53 pm
Thanks a lot friend, you are reaaaaaaaaaaally helping.
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Re: Everything about British Civ
by Thewolf Thu Jul 22, 2010 1:52 am
Thank very much mates, at your service...
UK-Government
- First use of parliament
- Suffrage for women over
- House of Lords no longer hereditary
- Central Londwon government over Scotland & Ireland
- Prime minister
- Last catholic king of Britain
- Establishment of Labour Party
- Parliament regulates royal succession
- Britain becomes a constitutional monarchy
- Regular assembly of parliament
- House of Lords / House of Commons
**************************************
You are going to benefit from this book nchalah, it is really nice.
Link: http://www.4shared.com/account/document/0tPgnAyE/UK_Government.html
UK-Government
- First use of parliament
- Suffrage for women over
- House of Lords no longer hereditary
- Central Londwon government over Scotland & Ireland
- Prime minister
- Last catholic king of Britain
- Establishment of Labour Party
- Parliament regulates royal succession
- Britain becomes a constitutional monarchy
- Regular assembly of parliament
- House of Lords / House of Commons
**************************************
You are going to benefit from this book nchalah, it is really nice.
Link: http://www.4shared.com/account/document/0tPgnAyE/UK_Government.html
Thewolf- Number of posts : 1050
Age : 424
Location : Desert
Registration date : 2010-01-12
Re: Everything about British Civ
by Guest Thu Jul 22, 2010 2:12 am
Hey you, you are driving me crazy!!! everything about British Civ, and what? UK (my dream!!)?!!! U got me wolfy..............
Guest- Guest
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Similar topics» Thatcher and Thatcherism
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» Oddities on British Parliament
» THE ORIGIN OF THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT
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