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To Walter and Olive Murphy
“It is worth being shot at to see how much one is loved”
—Queen Victoria, 1882
“Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it”
—John Lydon, 1976
Shooting Victoria is the narrative history of the seven boys and men who, driven by a variety of inner demons, attacked Queen Victoria on eight separate occasions between 1840 and 1882. And as all but one of her seven would-be assassins attacked her publicly with pistols, Shooting Victoria—in the most obvious sense of that action—befits the title of this book.
Actually, however, I had a very different notion of “shooting” as I came up with this title, as well as the overall range and shape of this book. I was, rather, inspired by the title and contents of a frantic and fiery mid-Victorian essay written by the great sage and prophet of the era, Thomas Carlyle. In 1867 Carlyle was alone, his wife Jane having died the year before. He was in the twilight of his career, his greatest works behind him. And he was steeped in despair, certain that his society had erred greatly from the true path. He had become a voice—a strident and powerful one—in the Victorian wilderness. In August 1867, Carlyle responded with horror and loathing to the great national event of that year, if not of the entire era: the passage of the Second Reform Act, which in a stroke doubled the British electorate and greatly increased the voting power of the urban working class—the great “leap in the dark,” as Prime Minister Lord Derby put it. Carlyle, who despised democracy as an ideology that rendered any man equal to another—“Judas Iscariot to Jesus Christ … and Bedlam and Gehenna equal to the New Jerusalem”—could only see out-and-out disaster as the immediate consequence of the Act’s passage, a national smash-up that he likened to being carried in a boat through the rapids and over a mighty waterfall. The title of his essay is “Shooting Niagara: And After?”—a title that balances nicely Carlyle’s dual concern with the disaster itself, and with the consequences of that disaster.
And after? Carlyle could see light after the coming darkness, restoration after the imminent collapse. His faith in his fellow human beings to do right may have diminished over the years. But his belief in an order-loving, chaos-abhorring divinity remained unshaken, and Carlyle proclaimed with certainty that a new and greater social order lay ahead—a new order that would come that much more quickly because of his own society’s foolhardy and impetuous actions.
Shooting Victoria, as one would shoot rapids and plunge over the falls: taking on the Queen with a single, desperate, life-changing and world-changing action, leaping into the chaos with no way of knowing or telling what the consequences might be—shooting in this sense more precisely sums up the shape and movement of this narrative, with its dual focus on the disasters themselves, and the consequences of those disasters. For the consequences of the eight attempts unite seven separate stories into one grand epic. As each epic has a hero, so does Shooting Victoria: the Queen herself. For it was the Queen who repeatedly wrestled out of the chaos forced upon her by her would-be assassins a new and a greater order. Victoria, with unerring instinct and sheer gutsiness, converted each episode of near-tragedy into one of triumphant renewal for her monarchy, each time managing to strengthen the bond between herself and her subjects. Shooting Victoria thus documents the important if unwitting parts the Queen’s seven assailants played in the great love story between Victoria and the Victorians. Their seven stories have, until now, never been brought together in one book. Victoria’s story, on the other hand, has been told innumerable times; no woman of modern times has been more written about. And yet I believe that Shooting Victoria, in presenting Victoria’s life for the first time in the context of the attempts upon her life, does contribute something new to our understanding of this truly great queen: Victoria, it becomes clear, was a canny politician who inherited a tainted monarchy and made it her life’s work to create anew the stable, modern monarchy that endures to this day. Shooting Victoria traces that course to its triumphant conclusion: a turbulent ride down the rapids—and, I hope, an exhilarating one.
Victoria’s seven would-be assassins were all shooting stars: they came from nowhere, burst into the light of public attention for a short time following their attempts, and disappeared back into obscurity, all of them living on, anonymously, for years after their attempts. Penetrating the obscurity of their lives before and after their attempts, therefore, presented quite a challenge and involved a great deal of digging through records in England, Australia, and in the United States. Without a great deal of help with these, I could not have written this book. Much of my research I conducted in Colorado, and I am greatly indebted to the staff at Norlin Library, University of Colorado—and especially Norlin’s Interlibrary Loan department—for bringing the world of the seven to me in Boulder. I am grateful as well to the amazingly efficient staffs of the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, and the Public Record Office at Kew. Thanks to Colin Gale at the Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and Museum, and Mark Stevens at the Berkshire Record Office, who enthusiastically provided insight about the Bethlem and Broadmoor Hospital records for Edward Oxford and Roderick Maclean. Thank you to Ruth Roberts, who provided valuable information on Robert Pate, and to Beatrice Behlen, archivist at the Museum of London, who allowed me the wonderful opportunity to hold and examine Victoria’s curious chain-mail parasol.
I’m grateful as well to Pam Clark and the diligent and efficient archival staff at Windsor, and for the kind permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to quote material from the Royal Archives. I cannot let this acknowledgement pass, by the way, without noting that Queen Elizabeth showed a great deal of her great-great-grandmother’s pluck, and her own instinctive faith in the goodwill of her subjects, when on 13 June 1981 seventeen-year-old Marcus Sergeant fired six blanks at her while she was Trooping the Colour on the Mall, not far from Buckingham Palace. The Queen stopped to calm her horse, and, as Victoria would have done, rode on, refusing absolutely to seek safety or curtail her participation in the ceremony.
I owe thanks as well to those in Australia who assisted me in fleshing out the antipodean afterlives of the five of the seven who were transported—or transported themselves—to Australia in the wake of their attempts. Jenny Sinclair freely shared her abundant knowledge of Edward Oxford’s fascinating later life in Melbourne under the alias of John Freeman—knowledge that she is putting to good use in a forthcoming book on the subject. And Carole Riley did a truly amazing job at uncovering the story of Arthur O’Connor’s decades in Sydney asylums under the alias George Morton.
I cannot adequately express my gratitude to my good friends in London, who made each research journey to England a joy, and who have been the strongest supporters of this project from the very start. Thanks to Peter Burgess, Tracy Ward, Steve Terrey, Michael Guilfoyle, Nana Anto-Awuakye, John Watts, and—especially—Steve and Nina Button and Linda Gough. Thanks to Charlie Olsen, my agent at Inkwell; his unflagging enthusiasm sustained mine. Claiborne Hancock and the folks at Pegasus have been a pleasure to work with. Thank you Paul Levitt and Elissa Guralnick for giving me whatever ability to write I now have. And thank you Lawrence Goldman for teaching me to think about history. Finally, I am infinitely grateful to my wife Tory Tuttle, who read and commented upon every page of this book before anyone else did, and who for years now has patiently put up with my freeform articulations of the undigested results of my research—enduring all of that chaos before it was wrestled into some kind of order. Thank you. Love you.
Part 1
1
On the morning of 4 May 1840, Edward Oxford stepped out of his lodgings in West Place, West Square, at the Lambeth (border of Southwark, and set off eastwards into the heart of that densely populated, proletarian district south of the Thames. He was eighteen, though his diminutive stature and baby face made him look much younger. He was—unusually for him—) suddenly prosperous, with £5 in his pocket. And, for the first time in ages, he was free: unemployed by choice, and finally able to pursue the ambition that had been driving him for some time. He set off into what Charles Dickens called the “ganglion” of Southwark’s twisted streets, his destination a small general goods store on Blackfriars Road.
Behind him lay one of the very rare green expanses within the gritty boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark. West Square, where Oxford, quitting his job in the West End, had moved four days before to be with his mother, his sister, and her husband, was one of the very few gardened squares on that side of the river. The square was meticulously maintained and gave this neighborhood an unusual air of gentility. And directly to the west of the square, a stone’s throw away, a bucolic English-style garden relieved the area from the surrounding urban sprawl. This greenery, however, was not part of a public park—no such thing existed in Southwark at the time—but rather the connected grounds of two institutions. Directly adjacent to West Square stood the Bridewell House of Occupation, a home and school to indigent children. And behind this rose the cupola of an immense neoclassical building: Bethlem Hospital for the Insane.
Southwark had been for the last twenty-five years the latest location of Bedlam, or Bethlem Hospital, which had held many of London’s insane since the fourteenth century. Behind Bethlem’s walls operated a carefully structured world within a world designed to deal with different degrees and classifications of insanity. And, at the extremities of the hospital, segregated from the rest of the hospital and, with high walls, from the world outside, lay the feature that made Bethlem unique: it housed England’s only purpose-built facility for the criminally insane. Communication between the worlds inside and outside the asylum was largely restricted to sound: the occasional shrieks of the patients might have carried as far as West Square; the clanking and clattering of industrial South London must have intruded upon the disturbed thoughts of the patients.
But on this day, if Edward Oxford was even aware of Bethlem’s world within a world, he was headed away from it, literally and figuratively. He had his entire life largely kept himself—his dreams and his plans—to himself. Today, however, that would change. Today, Oxford would take a major step toward recognition by all of London—by the world. Today, he would buy his guns.
Back in his room at West Square, Oxford kept a locked box. When, five weeks later, the police smashed its lock and opened it, they found the cache of a secret society: a uniform of sorts—a crepe cap tied off with two red bows—and, neatly written on two sheets of foolscap, a document listing the rules and regulations of an organization optimistically named “Young England.”* The documents revealed Young England to be a highly disciplined insurrectionary body. All members were expected to adopt an alias and to be well armed and prepared for covert military action: “every member shall be provided with a brace of pistols, a sword, a rifle, and a dagger; the two latter to be kept at the committee room.” Every member, as well, was expected when necessary to be a master of disguise—ready to play “the labourer, the mechanic, and the gentleman.” And, apparently for mutual recognition on the day of the insurrection, every member was to keep “a black crape cap, to cover his face, with the marks of distinction outside.” These marks of distinction denoted rank in the organization, and the two red bows on Oxford’s cap made him a captain, a position of true command, as captains were members “who can procure an hundred men.” Oxford had chosen the rather transparent alias of “Oxonian,” one of the four captains named in this document.
It was, on paper, an organization of over four hundred armed members. And when this document became public, many believed Oxford to be a part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to overthrow the Queen’s government. But Young England was entirely Oxford’s own creation, and this manifesto, though signed by a fictitious secretary Smith, was in Oxford’s own handwriting. His hundred troops and the generals existed only in his own mind. This fantasy was to Oxford a compelling—now, controlling—one, for that fantasy gave him a stature wholly denied him in everyday life, as well as a profound sense of self-worth and purpose in a life that heretofore lacked both.
He was in the process of creating and collecting the props with which to support this fantasy. He had the cap. The sword would come. Today he would buy what he needed most to perform fully the role of a Captain of Young England: a matching brace of pistols. The shop selling the pistols was a short walk through Southwark, up the London Road, past the obelisk at St. George’s Circle and the philanthropic institutions for the blind and for repentant prostitutes. Oxford likely knew nothing of what went on inside these places, but he did know the streets and the shops of Southwark well. Although he had just moved in with his family, he had lived here as a child, attending school in Lambeth; and, until the age of fourteen, he assisted his mother with a coffee shop she had run on the Waterloo Road. Oxford slipped into the human press traveling up Blackfriars Road, the bustling thoroughfare leading to Blackfriars Bridge and to the City, and ducked into Hayes’s general goods store.
He wanted guns that would make an impression, that befit the important plans of Captain Oxford. Style was everything to Oxford, accuracy secondary. Hayes had exactly what he needed: a pair of dueling pistols with handsomely carved stocks. These pistols incorporated the very latest advance in firearms—the percussive cap. For the past two hundred years, most firearms had been flintlocks, on which a snapping, grinding flint would ignite loose powder, which ignited the powder in the barrel of the gun, firing the ball. By the 1830s, and because of refinements in percussive gunpowder—that is, gunpowder that would explode not upon ignition, but upon impact—flintlocks became increasingly obsolete, more and more likely to be found in pawnshops. Newer, flintless pistols fired when a cocked hammer engaged and struck a percussive cap. Like flintlocks, however, these percussive pistols were muzzle-loaded. The pistols Oxford was buying could each be fired only once; to fire again, he would have to reload powder, wadding, and ball through the front of the gun, and replace the percussive cap.
Although dueling was technically illegal, the practice was carried on, Wimbledon Common being a favorite venue. Indeed, just two months before, Prince Louis Napoleon, then in exile in London, was involved in a duel there with his cousin, the Comte Léon—a contest broken up before it started by Inspector Pearce of the Metropolitan Police (whom Oxford would soon meet). Dueling pistols, then, were still available for purchase. But these particular pistols hardly suited the purpose of the duelist, unless that purpose was to miss: they were not weapons of quality. They were priced at two guineas, or 42 shillings—overpriced, according to one gunmaker, who later valued them at less than 30 shillings. Certainly, there were cheaper pistols to be had, but a guinea apiece hardly suggested fine workmanship. Experts would later describe them as “coarsely and roughly finished,” designed more for show than effect. They were manufactured in Birmingham, the center of the British firearms industry at the time, but they bore no maker’s mark—an obvious sign of their shoddiness. When Charles Dickens later described Oxford’s pistols as “Brummagem firearms,” he intended to emphasize their utter worthlessness as weapons, virtually guaranteed to miss their targets. Oxford was certainly no expert on firearms, but he must have had some sense of the limitations of these pistols when he asked the young clerk assisting him how far a bullet would carry from them: twenty or thirty yards, he was told.
That was enough for his purpose. What was important was that he look the part: Captain Oxonian, standing steadily as he took one shot, and then another; like a duelist, a highwayman, a bravo—a dashing, handsome, romantic figure, a gentleman worthy of the world’s attention. The guns were perfect for that effect. And they were guns that he could afford. With typical Victorian haggling, he bargained down the price of the pistols from 2 guineas (or £2 and 2 shillings) to £2. With the two shillings he saved, he bought a powder-flask and two bags for the pistols. The clerk took Oxford’s money and entered the transaction on a slate, which his employer, Mr. Hayes, logged into his account book the next day.
Oxford made his way back past the obelisk and through the warren of side streets, to 6 West Square. Though the lodgings, kept by Mrs. Packman, were new to Oxford, his mother, his sister, and his brother-in-law had been living there for some time. Their choice of residence suggests a position of some comfort in the upper ranks of the working class, at least. A clergyman lived there, as did some of the professionals who staffed Bethlem. Oxford’s mother, Hannah, had attempted a number of businesses of her own—a public house, a coffee shop—but all had eventually failed. Others in her family were more successful, however, and helpful to her: she apparently supported herself with a legacy. Oxford’s brother-in-law, William Phelps, husband of his older sister, Susannah, was a baker who worked at a local soda-water factory but was on the verge of a major career change: he was days away from joining the Metropolitan Police. Oxford’s family, then, fit the upscale proletarian precincts of West Street. Oxford himself, however, was far less comfortably situated. He had engaged with Mrs. Packman for a separate room, and for a separate rent. Oxford had no legacy, and no employment. The rent would quickly prove too much for him to pay, and he would very soon fall into arrears.
Oxford found his mother Hannah at home and lost no time showing her his pistols. While she knew nothing of his locked box of secrets, she did know of his childhood obsession with gunpowder and weaponry, remembering his fascination with toy cannons and remembering the arm injury he suffered as a boy, nearly blowing himself up while playing with fire and gunpowder, burning his eyebrows off and keeping him up for two nights screaming with pain. She knew, as well, that her child ached to be somebody. He had often spun out for her grandiose plans to rise in the world. A favorite dream of his came straight out of Captain Marryat’s then-popular novels—the very sort of fiction Oxford loved to read. He would join the Royal Navy and move quickly up the ranks. “He said he would allow me half his pay,” Hannah would later say in court, “and how proud I should be of my son when I saw his name in the papers, Admiral Sir Edward Oxford!” All he needed to realize that ambition, he told her, would be a midshipman’s place, which he could obtain for £50. He had begged her to return to her family in Birmingham to get it for him. On this day, he proudly showed her his pistols as a sign of his higher stature and a promise of his coming renown.
She was not pleased. Her son had just given up his job as a barman at the Hog in the Pound, a popular public house on Oxford Street across the river. Hannah had been exhorting him to find a job since he moved in, but he made it clear to her that he was in no hurry to do that: “He said nothing was stirring, and he should rather wait till a good place offered itself than answer advertisements.” And now he had wasted a huge portion of his £5—a full quarter’s pay for a barman—on these pistols. “How could you think of laying your money out in such folly!” she cried out, exasperated. Oxford, humiliated, lied to her. He had not paid for these new pistols, he explained; he was simply holding them for a friend.
And then, as often happened, the shame and inadequacy he felt turned to a blind rage, the sort of rage that had previously manifested itself in his breaking anything that he could grab hold of. His mother simply could not understand how important these pistols were to him, could not understand that he was not just a barman and was not destined to live a barman’s life. He was not a servant; he was Oxonian, Captain of Young England!
He raised one of the pistols and pointed it, cocked, at his mother’s face.
That same day—4 May 1840—a diminutive young woman sat quietly a mile and a half across the River Thames in her home in the very greenest part of London, while an artist sketched her face. Queen Victoria was only two years older than Edward Oxford, a few weeks away from her twenty-first birthday. For the last three years she had sat on the British throne. The artist was her current favorite, George Hayter, who, as her official portrait painter, had depicted many of the important events in her short life. He had, at the request of her Uncle Leopold, painted her when she was a thirteen-year-old princess and heir apparent. He had painted her with her court in full pomp at her 1838 coronation. And, most famously, he had in 1838 depicted her as every inch a queen, yet very much an innocent, in her state portrait: she sits, enthroned and crowned, in a flowing, virginal white dress bedecked with the heavy robes of state, gazing to the side and upwards beyond her scepter with a hint of a wide-eyed surprise interrupting her placidity, as if she contemplated the many coming years of her reign with wonder and confidence.
And now, Hayter was sketching her for another commemoration of an important event in her reign—indeed, a turning point: Victoria’s marriage to Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, which had taken place just three months before. Hayter was this time intent on capturing a very different Victoria than he had in the state portrait. In the finished wedding portrait, Victoria and Albert stand together, surrounded by and yet apart from the crowd. Victoria is dressed in white satin, a circlet of white flowers in her hair; Albert is dressed in the brilliant red uniform of a British field marshal. To Victoria’s other side stands her beaming uncle, the Duke of Sussex, who gave her away, and to Albert’s side stands Victoria’s mother (and his aunt), the Duchess of Kent, staring intently forward. The rest of the guests form a semicircle around the wedding party, the men generally in red uniforms and the women in white, imperfectly reflecting the colors of the royal couple: Victoria and Albert literally shine in the spotlight created by the rays of the sun as they pour through an upper window of the Chapel Royal of the Palace of St. James. Victoria’s expression is very much as it was in the state portrait, gazing upward in surprise and wonder. But the object of her gaze has changed completely: instead of contemplating an unseen and solitary future, it is Albert alone who is the object of her attention.
Victoria was in love with Albert, deeply and wholly, and she had no doubt whatsoever that the marriage to him was good, and right, not only for herself but for the nation as well, elevating her and it into something greater. The day after her wedding, she wrote from Windsor to her (and Albert’s) Uncle Leopold, to proclaim as much:
I write to you from here the happiest, happiest Being that ever existed. Really, I do not think it possible for any one in the world to be happier, or as happy as I am. He is an Angel, and his kindness and affection for me is really touching. To look in those dear eyes, and that dear sunny face, is enough to make me adore him. What I can do to make him happy will be my greatest delight. Independent of my great personal happiness, the reception we both met with yesterday was the most gratifying and enthusiastic I ever experienced; there was no end of the crowds in London, and all along the road.
Her new attachment, however, did not come without its confusions and potential problems. Albert was her husband and, by the domestic ideals of the time, her master, but she was Queen, with a powerful and jealous sense of her royal prerogative, as well as the firm resolve of her royal uncles and her grandfather, George III. Albert, too, could be inflexible about principle. How much authority would he have over her? What authority would he bring to the monarchy? Could he rule the household while she ruled the nation? These were questions that the young couple was to wrestle with, at times with great tension, over the coming years.
On this day, Albert was away, at the Royal Dockyard at Woolwich, reviewing the Royal Artillery, leaving Victoria alone with Hayter. The subject for which she was posing offered the perfect occasion to consider how much things had changed over the past three years—and how much she had changed since she became Queen. Now, Albert was everything to her; but on the day she came to the throne, Victoria finally knew what it was to be alone, and she relished the feeling. Victoria’s childhood had been an unceasing struggle for personal autonomy and, with the death of her uncle King William IV, she had finally achieved it. Her childhood experience had instilled within her a hardened resolve that she would keep the monarchy entirely to herself.
She had been locked in that bitter battle for autonomy since before she could remember, and it had rendered her privileged childhood utterly miserable. Her father, the Duke of Kent, had died when she was eight months old, leaving her in a direct line of succession to the throne. If her three uncles George IV, Frederick Duke of York, and William Duke of Clarence did not bear any legitimate children, she would become Queen. Victoria’s widowed mother, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg, Duchess of Kent, inherited her husband’s debts along with the general disdain her royal brothers-in-law had shown him: she was a foreigner and an outsider, and very much wished to return to Saxe-Coburg. Her brother Leopold persuaded her not to for her daughter’s sake. She stayed, and found much needed support in the man the Duke of Kent called “my very intelligent factotum,” Sir John Conroy, late captain of His Majesty’s army. Before long, Conroy, wildly ambitious, deeply unscrupulous, and with the tongue of an Iago, had rendered the Duchess wholly dependent upon him. As time passed, the likelihood of Victoria’s becoming queen grew. George IV would never have another child with his estranged wife, Caroline, and was unlikely to remarry. The Duke of York resolved to remain unmarried and, in any case, died in 1828. The Duke of Clarence—who had ten illegitimate children—rested all of his hopes of an heir in his wife, Adelaide, who seemed unable to produce anything but stillbirths or sickly infants who soon died. George and William were by now old men, quite likely to die before Victoria had attained her majority. To Conroy, then, a glittering political prospect became more and more likely: he could rule Britain through the Duchess, who would almost certainly become Regent. That prospect became even more likely when, soon after the Duke of Clarence became King William IV in 1830, the Duchess of Kent was legally designated Regent in the event that William died before Victoria’s majority.
In order to realize his dream of power, however, Conroy needed to monitor, manipulate, and control Victoria, rendering her wholly dependent upon her mother. He created, to this end, a carefully-thought-out plan for the sensitive child’s upbringing that was nothing less than an oppressive internment. The Duchess would have complete control over Victoria’s acquaintances, her finances, her whereabouts, and her course of study. Moreover, Victoria would be presented to the public as a complete contrast to her royal uncles: as young and virtuous in comparison to them, who with their mistresses and their excesses epitomized aging vice, the moral darkness of an earlier age. The contrast was a political as well as a moral one: Victoria’s uncles were, for the most part, uncompromising Tories, while the Duchess sympathized with the Whigs. Conroy devised to present Victoria as the embodiment of a new hope and a new age.
This system under which Victoria suffered became known as the “Kensington System.” Conroy and the Duchess hand-picked Victoria’s teachers, companions, and observers. Their choice for Victoria’s governess turned out to be a grievous disappointment to them: the Hanoverian Baroness Lehzen. As Victoria grew, she and Lehzen formed an emotional bond that triumphed over Conroy’s colder manipulation: Lehzen became totally devoted to the child—at times, it seemed to Victoria, her sole ally in her struggle against her mother and Conroy. For companions, Conroy imposed his two daughters upon her; Victoria despised them. A later companion forced upon her was the Duchess’s Lady-in-Waiting, Lady Flora Hastings, thirteen years older than the Princess. Victoria was never allowed to be alone; she slept in a small bed in her mother’s room, and could not walk down a flight of stairs without taking the hand of another. Victoria would have no money of her own; when, as Victoria approached her eighteenth birthday, the King attempted to put £10,000 a year “entirely in her power and disposal,” the Duchess responded with rage, on Conroy’s advice drafting a letter rejecting the offer, which she forced Victoria to copy and send to the king. (“Victoria has not written that letter,” William realized.)
When Victoria was thirteen, Conroy began to build Victoria’s image—in part, at the expense of her uncles’—in a new way: he sent her out on a number of “journeys” throughout the country. Conroy proposed to have her interact with the British public on all levels. Victoria visited towns and traveled throughout England, with all the trappings of royal visits—crowds of well-wishers, welcoming bands, floral decorations, addresses to and from the Princess and the Duchess—and in one case a royal salute by cannon, a practice King William quickly put a stop to. Conroy hoped to provide a connection between Victoria and the people—a connection between public and monarch that had largely been severed over the past few decades, with the madness and isolation of George III and the notorious disdain to the public shown by George IV as Regent and as King. Her predecessor, William IV, began his reign by resisting this seclusion, habitually strolling through the streets of London and mingling with passersby. The tension between monarch and public over the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, however, encouraged William, too, to isolate himself from the public for the rest of his reign.
These journeys taught Victoria much more about her country and its people than she could learn in the isolation of her Kensington Palace classroom. She was able to experience first-hand the wide social range of the 1830s, from the fox-hunting and country-house world of the gentry in whose homes she stayed, to the middle-class ceremonial of the towns, to the hard social reality of the poor tossed in the tempest of industrial upheaval. Victoria began her lifelong journaling during the first of these journeys, and, in one of her earliest entries, she writes of the mining district outside of Birmingham:
We just passed through a town where all coal mines are and you see the fire glimmer at a distance in the engines in many places. The men, women, children, country and houses are all black…. The country is very desolate every where; there are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black. I just now see an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines flaming, coals, in abundance, every where, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.
A perceptive observer, Victoria as Queen always demonstrated her greatest empathy for her subjects when she could be among them.
Victoria did not like the journeys; she suffered from bad health for much of these years, and found them extremely fatiguing. Though she was affectionate and inquisitive, her sensitivity and shyness rendered the progressions painful. It certainly did not help that Conroy maintained an oppressive control over her every movement. However selfish and despicable Conroy was in thrusting the young girl before the public, however, he taught her the key lesson for creating and preserving popularity for the tainted monarchy she would inherit: a regular, open, and completely trusting interaction with every level of her public. Encouraging her daughter to embark on a tour in 1835, the Duchess of Kent revealed more, perhaps, than she realized: “it is of the greatest consequence that you should be seen, that you should know your country, and be acquainted with, and be known by all classes.”
Victoria’s uncle William resented the journeys immensely, knowing very well that their object was to separate in the public eye the young child from the old man. He resented as well Conroy’s and the Duchess’s removing the child from Court whenever possible: William and his wife Adelaide had a great deal of affection for Victoria (and she for them), but Conroy intended his Kensington System to strain the relationship between present and future monarch—and it did. Matters came to a head at the King’s seventy-fifth birthday party, at which the seventeen-year-old Victoria and her mother were guests, along with Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence, one of William’s many bastard sons, who recorded the scene. William turned venomously upon the Duchess, chastising her publicly for isolating the Princess from him—and vowing to ruin the Duchess’s and Conroy’s plans:
I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer, after which period, in the event of my death, no Regency would take place. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that Young Lady (pointing to the P[rince]ss), the Heiress presumptive of the Crown, and not in the hands of a person now near me, who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which She would be placed.
The King was as good as his word: he lived for a month after Victoria’s eighteenth birthday. As it became clear to Conroy that there would be no regency, he attempted desperately to maintain his hold over the Princess beyond her majority by forcing her to take him on as her confidential private secretary. Both Conroy and the Duchess browbeat Victoria, their efforts growing in intensity as William grew more and more ill in the weeks after Victoria’s birthday. Victoria, supported by her staunch ally Lehzen, as well as by another supporter sent her by her uncle Leopold—Baron Stockmar—stood her ground.
On 20 June 1837, William died, and with him died the oppressive Kensington System. When, that morning, the Lord Chamberlain and Archbishop of Canterbury came to Victoria with the announcement of her accession—when, soon after, she met the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne—when she then saw the Privy Council, she did all, as she pointedly notes in her journal, “alone.” By the end of her first day as Queen, she had removed her bed from her mother’s room and had dismissed Conroy from her household.
With her mother (and her mother’s comptroller) relegated to a distant suite in Buckingham Palace, the young Victoria reigned according to her own will and her own whims. Her beloved Lehzen, whose loyalty to the Queen’s interests was beyond question, now occupied her mother’s former position: Lehzen and the Queen had adjoining bedrooms. And in political and social matters, the Queen very quickly developed a very close bond with her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who succeeded where Conroy failed because his personality was antithetical to Conroy’s: warm and affectionate, rather than cold and overbearing; a considerate and thoughtful adviser, not an impulsive tyrant. When Victoria took the throne, Melbourne was everything the politically inexperienced Queen could want in her most trusted advisor: a canny political operative with a wealth of political wisdom, able to guide her through the confusions of political etiquette and party strife. She depended upon him from the first day, when, meeting with the Privy Council for the first time, she looked over to him for cues about her behavior. Her dependence grew in the first years of her monarchy, and her affection for him grew apace—as did his for her. Melbourne spent much of his time over the next few years as a fixture of her domestic world: dining regularly at the Palace, playing chess and cards with the Queen’s ladies during the evenings; riding with the Queen in Hyde Park in the afternoons. All this time, he contributed to her political education and, as their friendship developed, so Victoria developed a political outlook that reflected her mentor’s: Melbourne was a Whig, of course. Victoria, the daughter of one of the few Whigs among the royal Dukes, and who grew up in a Whig atmosphere—the Duchess of Kent being at the center of the Whig opposition of the past few years—had always seen herself a Whig. But Melbourne’s Whiggism was a distinct variety: Melbourne was hardly a reformer, and his government sought no major changes, indeed seeing resistance to change, and to any parliamentary struggle, as a positive end in itself. Moreover, Melbourne demonstrated to the Queen an innate cynicism in their everyday conversation that she found charming, recording in her journal with approval his cutting comments about women, about the poor, about the Irish. She drank in his adherence to laissez-faire economics, any violation of which—say, to improve the dire lot of the overworked factory child—was anathema. Surrounded by her Whig ladies in waiting, and in constant communication with her Prime Minister, Victoria became a thorough political partisan in her first years: a Whig, or more accurately a Melbournian.
Her first year, from ascension to coronation, had been a giddy one, in which the nation seemed to share her joy in emerging into a new world—free of the old uncles, the unsullied reign of a young woman. Her eldest surviving uncle, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, had left Britain to take up the throne of Hanover, which, as a woman, Victoria was denied by Salic Law. Good riddance to him; he was the most reactionary of all her uncles: one of his first acts at Hanover was to abolish its constitution. The fact that he was Victoria’s heir only served to cause the overwhelming majority of her subjects to wish her a long life, and a fruitful one in every respect. Her popularity during this time was unparalleled, and Parliament testified in its own way to this royal excitement by voting the Queen £200,000 for her coronation, fully four times what had been spent on the coronation of William IV. It was very much a public affair, designed to represent her physical contact with her people, foregoing a closed coronation banquet (as had been the tradition before William IV) for a state procession through the streets of London. The procession echoed Princess Victoria’s journeys on a much larger scale, and once again brought home to Victoria the fundamental role that simply being among her subjects would play in the success of her reign:
It was a fine day, and the crowds of people exceeded what I have ever seen; many as there were on the day I went to the City, it was nothing, nothing to the multitudes, the millions of my loyal subjects, who were assembled in every spot to witness the Procession. Their good humour and excessive loyalty was beyond everything, and I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation.
That idyllic relationship could not last forever, of course; and in 1839, in the second year of Victoria’s reign, she was personally and politically disturbed by two interrelated scandals at court, as her adamant partisanship and her innate stubbornness together worked to diminish her popularity.
From the start, Victoria preferred to surround herself with sympathetic and loyal ladies—which, in her mind, meant Whig ladies. With Melbourne’s encouragement and in the face of Tory protests, she kept her household free of Tories. One exception to this—one that Victoria had little control over—was the Duchess of Kent’s Tory lady-in-waiting, the now 32-year-old Lady Flora Hastings, whom Conroy had attempted to impose upon the Princess as a companion years before. Though the Duchess was relegated to a distant part of the Palace, and Conroy effectively banished from the royal presence, Lady Flora Hastings was by her position a part of Court life—and therefore a living reminder to the Queen of the despised Kensington System. Moreover, there were rumors at court that Hastings and Conroy were romanticallywithchild!!
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Melbourne met with Whig leaders and—encouraged by the Queen’s stalwart accounts to Melbourne of her interviews with Peel—agreed to form another ministry. The Queen, then, held her ground and kept her Ladies and her beloved Melbourne—for another two years, as it turned out; Melbourne was still her Prime Minister as she sat for Mr. Hayden on this day in May. She would later admit that her partisanship was a mistake, but for now she was happy at the outcome, even though what became known as the Bedchamber Crisis further tarnished her public image and perpetuated a weak, unpopular, do-nothing Parliament.
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By the time Albert left the Court, on 14 November, in order to spend two months in Germany before the wedding, the two were very much one.
Here comes the bridegroom of Victoria’s choice,
The nominee of Lehzen’s vulgar voice;
He comes to take “for better or worse”
England’s fat Queen and England’s fatter purse.
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Then, there was the question of Albert’s precedence: a serious question, given the many official appearances that Albert would be expected to make, with and without the Queen, over the next decades. Victoria felt deeply that her husband should take over all except for herself, as monarch: take precedence, in particular, over her living royal uncles. While her uncles Cambridge and Sussex at first agreed with her, her wicked uncle Cumberland would have none of it—and he bullied his royal brothers into taking his side. The Tories, and particularly the Duke of Wellington, also objected—holding that the consort had precedence over all except the monarch and princes of the Royal Blood. Victoria responded with partisan, Jacobean rage: “this wicked old foolish Duke, these confounded Tories, oh! May they be well punished for this outrageous insult! I cried with rage…. Poor dear Albert, how cruelly are they ill-using that dearest Angel! Monsters! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!”
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He did find ways to take on a greater role in the monarchy. For one thing, there were the personal appearances as Victoria’s representative; this was the reason he was in Woolwich now. He would soon be involved in non-partisan, charitable organizations: he had accepted the presidency of the Anti-Slavery Society; he was slated to give his first public speech in England for that organization on the first of June. And, of course, there was the coming event that would change the nation and reform his relationship with Victoria: within weeks of the wedding, Victoria knew she was pregnant; now, at three months, her “interesting condition” was becoming more obvious to the world, and certainly to the perceptive artist who sketched her.
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“Young England” happens to be the same name that young Benjamin Disraeli and his companions would choose for their quasi-feudalistic movement within the Tory party, two years after this. The correspondence is almost certainly a complete coincidence, unless one of the Tory Young Englanders recalled news accounts of Oxford’s society when formulating his own.