The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Wednesday 14 April 2004

Queen Victoria

Many of us who are interested in history or royalty have at least one particular, favourite personality.  Mine is Queen Victoria.  People tend to either love her or hate her.  I battle with a friend in America who reckons the Queen was more or less an indulgent, overbearing woman, prone to histrionics and too hard on her children.  My friend also feels that the stability and respect the royal family built over her reign was for the most part due to Victoria’s rather forward thinking husband, Albert and the groundwork he laid. 

While not wanting to take any due kudos away from the man who was somewhat unlike lots of other German princes of his time,  I have to disagree with my friend for the most part.  Albert did implement some great foundations of what a ‘modern’ royal family should be but I think Victoria was an incredible individual, an exciting woman and able queen.

She was bold, passionate, forthright, emotional, complex, warm and gained great insight into mankind during her reign.  There’s no doubt that she was formidable, just ask Bismarck.  I’ve also no doubt that she drove some of her children at different times to near dementia with her often unrealistic expectations and demands but at the same time she had a great capacity for love and a strong sense of humanity.

She held much of the idle upper class in contempt, found the suffering of the poor painful, was unafraid to confront the unjust and would never accept taking second place in what was at the time very much a man’s world.  Despite her station, or perhaps because of it, she was not blind to the plight of women of her time or ‘slaves’ of men as she referred to them. “I think people really marry far too much, it is such a lottery after all, and for a poor woman a very doubtful happiness.” she wrote.

That she wasn’t crazy about the more ‘animalistic’ side of humans, like childbirth is well known. “Oh! if those selfish men – who are the cause of all one’s misery, only knew what their poor slaves go through!”  She also never understood how her daughters and other women delighted in being pregnant, despite having a large brood herself. “I positively think those ladies who are always enceinte quite disgusting; it is more like a rabbit or guinea-pig than anything else and really it is not very nice.”

But Victoria was a woman full of contradictions.  She was wise but of fragile nerves, she possessed a quick wit but was just as quick at rebuking, she had a huge capacity for love but could set almost impossible expectations on her children and others and while she lay blame easily, she had a great capacity to forgive.  Despite the renowned closeted Victorian ways, she was attracted to clever, good looking men and while on the one hand preferred to gloss over anything of a sexual nature, was rather a flirt and passionate in her writing.

She was devoted to her job or ‘harness’ as she called it and despite her widowhood and the ensuing, years long seclusion she sank into, never stopped being Queen and fulfilling her duty, much as she felt like not going on.  In this dark time she begrudged public appearances and was so ‘unseen’ by the people that one subject with a sense of humour hung a ‘For Rent’ sign on the gates of Buckingham Palace!

Anyone in a position as long as Queen Victoria and with an ounce of intelligence can only gather mountains of knowledge along the way and Victoria comes to understand all that is good and evil in people.   While she began her reign as a na�ve young girl, her transformation into a competent and wise monarch did really not take long.  In many ways she was eventually too smart for her ministers and those who tried to go behind her back were always found out and scolded, in no uncertain terms.

She was once put out about the speech she was supposed to read at the Opening of Parliament over the military withdrawal from Kandahar The Queen wanted the paragraph mentioning this deleted while various ministers, including the Lord Spencer of the time, wished it to be kept, as did Gladstone, personally, her most unpopular Prime Minister.  Finally the problem was partially solved and the Queen recorded, “….The business was hurriedly gone through, and the Speech approved.  I spoke to no one, and the Ministers nearly tumbled over each other going out.  My headache had got very bad.”

Mr Gladstone and the Queen shared no rapport at all, unlike her relationship with her beloved Disraeli.  Relations were so bad that even Victoria’s eldest daughter, Vicky, married to the heir to the Prussian throne could not do right by it.  When the Gladstones visited Germany, the princess met them for tea.  Queen Victoria was unimpressed by her daughter’s hospitality, “Mrs Gladstone told me you had been to tea with her and Mr G.  Was that really necessary?”

She was constantly unimpressed by Gladstone’s passion for change (one might compare this to the current Queen and Tony Blair today) and rarely hid her displeasure or constitutional rights. “The H. of Lords cannot be totally set aside or a republic with one House had better be proposed.  Mr Gladstone is dragged along by his dreadful Radical following and is ruining the country.”  And when Mr Gladstone took it upon himself to begin lecturing his progressive ways on an international level, the Queen was less than amused that she was not consulted, “The Queen is a good deal surprised and she must say annoyed at Mr Gladstone’s ‘Progress’.  He ‘was not to cross the border’ and yet he has been landing and receiving Addresses from many places in Scotland and now is off to Norway.”

But it wasn’t just Gladstone who copped the remonstrative hand of the Queen.  When Lord Derby was made Colonial Secretary, she wrote to Sir Henry Ponsonby of her displeasure, “Would Sir Henry tell Mr Gladstone how unpleasant it is for her to have Lord Derby as a Minister for she utterly despises him…Tell this all to Mr Gladstone.  It is too bad of Lord Granville not to give her a hint of this before it was too late.  He had not once been of the slightest help to her at all.”

There are even times when she utterly despaired of everyone in her government: “Mr Gladstone cares little for and understands still less foreign affairs.  He is a great optimist and thinks all is doing well.  Lord Granville is absolutely pass� and baiss� and neglects things (not answering them even) in a dreadful way.  Lord Hartington is very idle and hates business!  And so on.  God knows what is to happen next!”

That said, while being one of the Queen’s ministers often held mixed blessings, being a child of Victoria was not easy either.  A mother more often than not pedantic about the right way to do things – well at least the way the Queen felt matters should be handled, she was dictatorial, often domineering and did not take to being argued with. On the other hand she could be sympathetic, offer sound advice and be objectively fair in contentious family issues.

As with her ministers, sometimes her family fared little better.  Initially she blamed her eldest son and heir and the scandal he had involved himself in on the death of her beloved Albert.  Her love for the Prince Consort was extreme and although she was not beyond arguing loudly with him her devotion to his spirit took on psychotic qualities.  She did however love all of her children intensely although she did, “…feel very deeply that my opinion and my advice are never listened to and that it is almost useless to give any.”

As the mother of a large family herself, she had much experience in raising a family and offered sound advice to her children about their own.  Understandably one such problem grandchild was Wilhelm of Prussia, Vicky’s eldest son and the future Kaiser Wilhelm whose jealousy of Britain’s greatness and developing megalomania were unsurprisingly a constant source of grief to his rather liberal, if not left-wing mother.  

Queen Victoria was amused when on inheriting the German throne after the early death of his father, that Wilhelm addressed her in a letter as ‘Dear Colleague’.  She would however not stand for his grandness and was perhaps, in the end, one of the few people that could keep his personality in relative check.

Those of us who have an interest in Victoria are indeed very fortunate that she was such a prolific writer.  She literally wrote volumes a day in letters, memorandums and in her journal.  While much of her diaries were rewritten after her death by her younger daughter, Princess Beatrice they and the other documents provide a superbly detailed insight into one of the most interesting personalities in modern history.

- Gioffredo

* Extracts taken from Lives & Letters, Queen Victoria in her Letters and Journals selected by Christopher Hibbert and published by Penguin 1985.