<strong><em>Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers: a Personal History</em></strong>
<strong>Anne Somerset</strong>
<strong>William Collins, £30, 630 pages</strong>
For two-thirds of the last two centuries the United Kingdom had a female head of State. The general perception would be that the nation was greatly blessed during those long reigns. With Elizabeth II, that is indisputable. This hefty volume may give cause for a reassessment in relation to the Queen-Empress, Victoria.
It will surprise many how politically active Victoria actually was. It is important, however, not to read the events of the early 19th century through a 21st-century lens. Just three years before her accession, her uncle, William IV, had dismissed a Whig ministry commanding a majority in the House of Commons – the last time a monarch exercised this power. Although contentious, few disputed the King’s right to do so. Even at the time of her death, Britain was still far from being a fully representative democracy. Victoria was firmly of the opinion that it should not become one.
Tutored first by her uncle Leopold and Lord Melbourne, then by her beloved Albert, Victoria exercised soft power, away from the scrutiny of public accountability, but that power was no less real. She held firm views as to whom she wanted to see in her Cabinet and who was unacceptable to her. Although she did not always get her way, often she did. In 1859 she surprised everyone by asking Lord Granville to form a government, rather than the obvious candidates Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell. Poor Lord Rosebery reluctantly accepted the premiership in 1894 to save her from more radical options.
As her reign progressed, Victoria’s political views aligned more firmly with the Conservative Party. Her behaviour often left much to be desired, passing confidential information received from the Liberal Government to the leaders of the opposition for their political advantage. Her antipathy towards Gladstone is relatively well known, but, making judicious use of correspondence with Victoria’s eldest daughter, “Vicky”, and with her private secretaries, the author exposes the sheer vehemence of those feelings. “She would sooner abdicate than send for or have any communication with that half-mad firebrand who would soon ruin everything and be a Dictator.”
That such views did not produce significant, and potentially disastrous, political consequences was due to the fact that Victoria would generally allow herself to be persuaded that the public good should prevail over her personal opinions. Her views were also capable of change. Gladstone, a paragon of moral and administrative virtue, had once been a royal favourite. There was very real affection for both Peel and Disraeli by the end of their premierships, but in neither case had it begun that way.
Anne Somerset has given us a work that is based on meticulous research and which is elegantly written. It is to be highly commended both as a biography of Victoria and as a political and diplomatic history of her reign; social and economic matters feature less prominently because they were of less interest to Victoria herself.
Does the book, however, achieve what the title and subtitle proclaim? Is this a personal history of Victoria’s relationship with her 10 prime ministers? With some (Melbourne and Peel, Disraeli and Gladstone), one gains a real sense of the personal dynamic of that relationship; with others, far less so.
One understands the reasons for adopting a purely chronological structure, but it means that politicians like Gladstone, whose career spanned almost the entire reign, have episodic walk-on appearances, rather than the relationship being analysed in depth in one place. The context can assume a certain priority over the characters. There are long passages, concerning, for example, the Schleswig-Holstein crisis and the Boer War, when the prime ministers almost disappear from view for protracted periods.
It is entirely understandable that the book focuses on domestic politics and foreign affairs. Given her ancestry and marriage alliances, Victoria felt herself to be eminently qualified to advise on the latter. There is, however, a dimension which is lacking: religion. The work touches upon religious issues which became politically contentious, for example, the debates surrounding the disestablishment of the Protestant Church of Ireland in the late 1860s and the legislation enacted against Anglican Ritualists in the following decade.
There is nothing, however, on religion as part of the personal relationship between sovereign and premier – and surprisingly little on the monarch’s exercise of ecclesiastical patronage, which Victoria took extremely seriously. She insisted that all major Anglican appointments – not just episcopal – were submitted to her for approval, which she was more than capable of withholding.
Religion was profoundly important to Victoria and was frequently the subject of conversation and, not infrequently, conflict with her prime ministers.
The cynical and witty Lord Melbourne was a survivor from the era of Regency laxity, who bemoaned the consequences of a religious revival: “that damned morality…would be the destruction of everything”. Few would have suspected that he devoured theological tomes, but he did – and he saw it as part of his tutelage to pass his learning and prejudice on to his young Queen, a willing protégé, but simultaneously disparaging of Melbourne’s sporadic church attendance. Her diaries from the early part of her reign are full of such talk.
Victoria was an uncomplicated, undogmatic Protestant. Although fiercely protective of the Establishment in each part of the United Kingdom, her Protestantism was not confined to the Church of England. To the alarm of the younger Gladstone, she was surprisingly open to Nonconformity, her husband’s Lutheranism, and Presbyterianism; when required to stay at Balmoral, he would read the Book of Common Prayer service in his room, rather than contaminate himself with Church of Scotland worship at Crathie Kirk next door.
Yet the Queen’s simple Protestant faith formed a bond with Peel. It threatened her otherwise good relationship with Lord Aberdeen when fairness, rather than personal preference, led him to propose Tractarian bishops and to suggest a measure of self-government for the Church of England.
In the 1840s and ’50s Victoria’s churchmanship underwent a degree of refinement, influenced by Albert. Both wanted Broad Churchmen for ecclesiastical preferment, arguing that the Church of England required bishops who were scholars and gentlemen of moderate views. This led them to favour those who in later parlance might even be suspected of Modernism. It also led to tension with the prime ministers.
Victoria doggedly resisted the High Church nominations of Gladstone and Salisbury, but equally she could be censorious of the Low Churchmen proposed by Palmerston and Disraeli. Her insistence upon the appointment of Archibald Tait as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1868, against the very decided wishes of Disraeli, arguably decisively breached the defences of orthodoxy within the Anglican hierarchy.
If her premiers had to tread carefully with respect to Victoria’s understanding of her role in the political sphere, the same was also true with respect to her position within the Church of England. Disraeli had to correct her – Our Lord was in fact its “Supreme Head”; she was its “Supreme Governor”. Courtiers reassured her that the distinction was insignificant.
Notwithstanding the unfortunate omission of religion, the book remains an important contribution to the canon of 19th-century political history. Refreshingly honest as to Victoria’s foibles and failings, it nevertheless paints a portrait that is warm and sympathetic. Despite withdrawing from public duties after the death of Albert, Victoria remained extraordinarily industrious and dutiful in dealing with her government papers.
No great intellect, her prime ministers generally recognised her political knowledge and wisdom – something they ignored at their peril. Her prejudices were generally the right prejudices – with the notable exception of her desire to push Britain into war with Russia in the 1870s. There were surprising instances of her being in advance of her time, for example in her rejection of racial prejudice.
“It is a miserable thing to be a constitutional Queen and to be able to do what is right,” Victoria wrote to Vicky. Her bark was worse than her bite. There were times when she pushed the understanding of what was constitutional, but few occasions when she did not attempt to do what was right according to her own understanding of that.
The fact that Britain enjoyed political stability in such a lengthy period of transition was not without thanks to Victoria. The great outpouring of affection at the jubilees of 1887 and 1897 was witness to her subjects’ appreciation of that.<br><em><br>Photo: Statue of Queen Victoria in her role as Queen-Empress.</em>
<em>Fr Mark Vickers is the author of 'God in Number Ten: The Personal Faith of the Prime Ministers, from Balfour to Blair' (SPCK, 2022).</em>
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