Social Transformations of the Victorian Age: A Survey of Court and Country

CHAPTER XX
ROYALTY AS A SOCIAL FORCE

The general power and usefulness of the English Crown strengthened, and not weakened, by the constitutional transfer of political power to Parliament and Ministers. The national aims of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth contrasted. Possibility of the Sovereign more correctly than Parliament or Ministers interpreting indications of national will. What happened under Queen Anne may conceivably occur under some of her successors. The facts concerning the monarchy as they are to-day. Posthumous recognition of the soundness of the Prince Consort’s views on the sphere of Royal duties, and the legitimate field of the Crown’s activities. His influence still a living force. Court offices, and reforms attributable to him. The present Prince of Wales exactly follows his father’s example.

Whatever of power may have been resigned by the Crown in the way of political authority has since that resignation abundantly been recompensed to it in the direction of social authority. The latest predecessor of her own sex upon the English Throne correctly interpreted as against periodical parliamentary majorities the loyalty of the nation to the Anglican Establishment; then a synonym for High Church Toryism. The Legion Memorial,⁵⁹ probably drawn up by Daniel Defoe, marks the lowest point of unpopularity ever reached by the House of Commons. No one would venture to say that a repetition of such an experience, however unlikely, is more impossible under Queen Victoria, than at one time it might have seemed under Queen Anne. The chances of a revival, with the national consent, of the personal prerogative of the Sovereign in Church and State affairs, though far from being inconceivable towards this changeful close of the century are too problematical for serious calculation. Like Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, from her accession to the Throne, proposed to herself as an ideal the affection of her people. The Tudor Sovereign, however, amid all her desire for the personal attachment of her subjects, bated no jot of her queenly dignity or hereditary pretensions. The Hanoverian Sovereign who blends the lines of Tudor and Stuart in her own person has always kept before her an object equally distinct, but far more congenial to the graciousness of her sex. An Elizabeth never willingly allowed the tenderness of the woman to eclipse the majesty of the Queen. A Victoria has never, consciously or unconsciously, veiled the motherhood of her people by the pomp of their ruler. The stages by which the conception of English sovereignty that is to-day a national possession has attained its present completeness, must now be examined. From her sex, and the circumstances of her life, it has long been inevitable that some of the social functions (in the sense in which that epithet is now used) of the Sovereign should be discharged vicariously by other members of the reigning House. Whether it be Prince and Heir Apparent, or Royal Duke makes no difference to the present argument. The idea of the monarchy actually operative among us to-day whether in its constitutional, ceremonial, or social attributes is at all points stamped with the impress of one systematizing and controlling mind.

That beneficent intelligence is in human shape no longer with us. Never was there man whose works and projects have lived after him more vigorously and usefully than the Prince Consort. To the generation that has grown up since his death, the notions which he was the first to apply to the Court usages of England, the ends to which, before him, no member of the reigning family had employed the opportunities of the Crown are so familiar; they seem so essential a part of the Kingly office; a Sovereign or a Prince not discharging such duties is so inconceivable by nineteenth century Britons, as to make many persons forget the existence of a time when this portion of the Royal duties was disliked as a novelty, or resented as an impertinence. It is not too much to say that the Victorian England of these later years is that which, more than any other uncrowned individual, the Prince Consort was the instrument of making it. He it was who set the example of that many-sided, almost ubiquitous, assistance in the extra-political occasions of English life which to-day are more conspicuously associated with the representatives of the kingly principle in England than the attendance at levees, or the opening of drawing rooms. Nor must it ever be forgotten that the future husband of the Queen from earliest youth, not less than her future Majesty herself, was trained with an eye to the possibilities of the alliance and the duties that the accident of birth might have in store. Writing in July 1821 to the Duchess of Kent, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg says of the young Prince Albert: ‘The little fellow is the pendant to the pretty cousin’ (the Princess Victoria).⁶⁰ Prince Leopold, who married the Princess Charlotte naturally supplied the first link of cousinly association between his nephew and niece. Other and more highly placed suitors were not of course wanting. But it needed no great experience in the tactics of matrimonial diplomacy accurately to conjecture the relations tolerably certain to be developed between the second son of Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Saafeld and the niece of William IV., heiress to the English Crown. It is well that the august contingencies of the future should sometimes have been forecast by those around the young Prince. Otherwise it might have proved more difficult than subsequently it did prove, or perhaps have been found impracticable to rear on the foundations of boyish education the fabric of a genuine knowledge of English character, of English life and institutions. Hence it was that the disappointment of Lord Melbourne’s over sanguine anticipations of the reception of the Prince by his adopted countrymen was borne with the equanimity which he showed on hearing that the proposed allowance of £50,000 a year, though not, as Colonel Sibthorp suggested, reduced to £21,000, was to be fixed at £30,000. All he regretted was that his ability to help artists, men of learning and of science would be necessarily more restricted than he had hoped.⁶¹

Naturally the economy of the Court system was the first to feel the reforming influence of the man who afterwards helped profoundly to modify the whole system of English life at large. The first opposition was encountered at the hands not of an Englishman, but of a fellow countrywoman of his own, the Baroness de Lehzen, who, from being the young Queen’s governess, had become the head of her household. The abuses and extravagance of the Royal establishment shocked, as they well might have done, the frugal Prince. Nor was it only that the money expended yielded no proportionate return of comfort and convenience. The very rudiments of domestic supervision were found to be wanting. Windsor Castle was only one degree better than Buckingham Palace. Those employed about the Royal dwelling not only had themselves free ingress into the living rooms of the family, a nondescript gathering of camp followers, loafers and errand boys also contrived to pass in and out unchallenged. On one occasion a boy was found, with no felonious intent, to have passed the night under a sofa in a parlour next to the Queen’s bedroom. The lad had no wish to have done so. He was simply shut in, unperceived by those whose business it was to lock up.⁶² In this work the Prince Consort was confronted by the opposition which the reformer of inveterate abuses never fails in any department of life to encounter. The administration of the Palace household below stairs in a less wantonly wasteful manner was held to threaten the dignity of those about the Throne. A check upon weekly bills in the basement was suspected of veiling a sinister design on the constitution of Church and State. Sir Robert Peel in 1841 had dwelt on the difficulty of domestic reforms in the Palace. In 1843 he acknowledged the economy and efficiency with which the Queen’s Household was now conducted. The Minister was vilified in the cheap weekly papers as a joint conspirator with those foreigners who christened their treason by the fair names of retrenchment and order. He was even attacked in clubs and drawing rooms by fine and fashionable people for being ready to compromise the dignity and disturb the equilibrium of the British Crown. The chief point of the Prince Consort’s Court improvements was concentration of responsible power upon a single individual in the place of its confused distribution among mutually conflicting understrappers. In this task he was aided by Baron Stockmar who had all the national aptitude of the German for the details small and great in the domestic routine of palaces and princes. The ultimate result of these operations was to invest a Master of the Household identical in all respects with that functionary as he exists to-day, with supreme jurisdiction over the domestic arrangements of the Sovereign, able directly to communicate with the departments for executing the different repairs. Other duties gradually gathered round this personage. To-day, as the Prince Consort had always purposed, it is upon him that there devolves the duty of issuing at the Royal command, invitations to guests to sleep and dine beneath the Queen’s roof.

The composition of the Queen’s immediate entourage is now practically the same as that decided upon by Her Majesty in conjunction with the Prince Consort. The ladies of the Court, that is, consist of the Mistress of the Robes, the Ladies of the Bedchamber, the Women of the Bedchamber, and the Maids of Honour. The first named of these, the Mistress of the Robes, is in her way, a State official. She must not be below the rank of a Duchess. She changes with the Government of the day. Her attendance on the Queen is limited to State occasions. The Ladies of the Bedchamber, all of them peeresses, are in number eight. One of them is invariably waiting upon the Queen. These are the ladies who in 1839 Sir Robert Peel, when forming his Administration, thought should be changed. The Women of the Bedchamber are also eight. These generally are only in attendance when the Mistress of the Robes is present. One of them is always near the Sovereign. The Maids of Honour are also eight in number. These must be either the daughters or grand-daughters of peers. They have the courtesy title of ‘Honourable.’ Two of them are always in waiting for a month at a time. The Prince Consort also in selecting the officers of the Household, showed special care and judgment in his choice of the person who discharges the duties of Privy Purse. From the days of Colonel Phipps, or Colonel Anson, to Sir Fleetwood Edwards; these have been men of first rate financial and administrative capacity. Misled by a similarity of terms, some persons seem to fancy there exists a vital association between the gentleman who fills that position in the Queen’s Household and the nobleman who, as Lord Privy Seal, has a seat in the Cabinet of the day, and who in 1896-7 was Viscount Cross. Hence the recurrent announcements in the newspapers that this statesman has been summoned to Windsor or Balmoral to assist Her Majesty with her business papers. The present opportunity therefore may usefully be taken to contradict the construction placed upon the character of the visit of that Minister to the Court. This the present writer has the very highest authority for doing. The connection between the Cabinet and Court offices whose names so closely resemble each other is in no sense organic. Lord Cross, now spoken of, is eminent for his knowledge of business of all kinds. He is a man of the widest and most varied experience in every department of civil and political affairs. He had a seat in Lord Beaconsfield’s last Cabinet. Than him the Queen possesses to-day few older servants, or more trusty friends. In that capacity, not in virtue of his Ministerial position, it is that Lord Cross finds himself so frequently the guest of his Sovereign.

The Prince Consort’s reforms in the economy and administration of the Court itself, though not the least valuable or necessary of his labours, naturally appealed less directly to the popular interest than his other activities, by the results of which the land of his adoption is to-day the gainer. Not a moment had been lost by the Prince in beginning to realize his early idea of associating for the first time since the days of the Stuarts the Sovereign with the promotion of letters, science, and art. The Court of Henry VIII. had been visited by Erasmus, and by other men of letters of the Protestant connection. If the story of Shakespeare’s presence in the group that surrounded Elizabeth be apocryphal, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Walter Raleigh undoubtedly paid their homage to the Virgin Queen. Charles I. was the patron of Van Dyck and an admirable connoisseur as well as encourager of true art wherever it could be found. Charles II., after his restoration, was less interested in painters and poets than in science.

Before Queen Victoria, the Hanoverian Sovereigns had not identified the new dynasty with any special affection for the accomplishments which gild and refine life. The Prince Consort, at the outset of his career mastered two facts. First, he discerned, that, even in the absence of a national scheme of education, the taste for reading and culture bred not only by improved intelligence, but by the growth of material prosperity and the humanizing influences of foreign travel, must before long result in a marked improvement of the appreciation among the countrymen of Reynolds, of Byron, of Wordsworth, and of Southey, of all that sweetens and brightens daily existence. The Prince perceived, too, that the lines on which English social intercourse was developing must involve a demand for amusements and for recreations upon a larger scale than family reunions beneath the domestic life could provide. The theatre in England had not become then a considerable force. It would have been premature to anticipate the later advice of Mr Matthew Arnold to organize the stage. The demand for good music in public places and on reasonable terms; the growing interest in the works of English artists; above all the newly awakened interest among the whole community in the welfare of their least fortunate members; – these are the features of the time which in his survey of the domestic situation chiefly impressed the Prince.

So early as 1840 his knowledge of musical science and his skill in musical execution were well known to all with whom he had been brought into contact. By this time it was generally perceived that a mistake had been made in not, from the first, establishing the Prince as the Queen’s private secretary, and in delaying to entrust him with the control of the whole Household. The Prince’s remarkable aptitudes had impressed the leading statesmen of both parties and through them the general public. Thus, in 1840 there existed a growing desire to turn to national account the special knowledge and exceptional talents of the accomplished husband of the Queen. On the 9th of October 1840 Lady Lyttelton, then in attendance at Windsor, has recorded that ‘there arose from the room below hers sounds of an instrument which she did not at first recognize, played with such master skill, modulated so learnedly, winding through every kind of bass and chord, finally culminating in the most perfect cadence, then off again, louder first and afterwards softer. I only heard,’ she adds, ‘the harmony, being too distant to catch the tune, or perceive the execution of the small touches. It was Prince Albert playing on the organ.’ April 29 of the year now mentioned was, from the point from which it is now looked at, a memorable date in this blameless and beneficent career. Then it was that the Prince having been appointed one of the directors of the Ancient Concerts, discharged these duties for the first time. All the music had been selected by himself. He had attended the rehearsal with the Queen. Experts in this matter have dated from that day the revival of the public taste for classical music in this country.

Nearly simultaneous with this was his appearance upon a public platform on one of those non-political occasions that his example has specially appropriated to the representatives of English Royalty. In the same year, too, at the very height of the London season, the Prince took the initiative in a function of a graver kind, but not less specially adapted for energies and knowledge to which under a Constitutional monarchy political life is not held to afford a proper outlet. The most important public meeting of the summer of 1840 was that convened for the purpose of encouraging the legislature to complete the machinery for the removal of the last traces of the slave trade. Technically the abolition had already taken place. Well grounded apprehensions, however, existed that the new ‘apprenticeship’ which was to educate the emancipated negro for the blessings of freedom might sometimes be too much like the old servitude which it was designed to supersede. This occasion produced the first speech delivered on an English platform by the Prince Consort at a time when platform eloquence was less common than it has since become. The address pointed, pithy, without an ambiguous or superfluous word, was the model by which the speaker may well have shaped his subsequent utterances. Its terse felicities of phrase have since often been reproduced by his son, the Prince of Wales. As a corrective to the innate nervousness of a highly organized temper, he had carefully prepared these remarks, writing them out and rewriting them, so that nothing might be left to the chance inspiration of the moment.

This was the first of a series of princely appearances on non-political occasions. To-day, and in the case of his descendants, these things are taken as a matter of course. During many years no great movement for the improvement by politically unsectarian agencies of human life has been considered complete without the active participation in it of the Crown, or, which comes to the same thing, a nominee of the Crown. That in its popular aspects the artistic movement which fills so large a space in the second half of this century was practically the creation of the Prince Consort’s discriminating taste and patriotic industry would, if by nothing else be shown by the course of preparations for the Hyde Park Exhibition of 1851. Sir Robert Peel, at the time, repeatedly stated that without the collaboration and counsel of the Queen’s husband, the Commission for the promotion and encouragement of the fine arts in the United Kingdom could scarcely have got through its work. On the other hand, while the public has accustomed itself to regard Lord Melbourne as the nearly exclusive influence for training the Sovereign and her husband in the tasks of Royal routine, one may point out that the Prince himself never failed to emphasize his personal obligations to Sir Robert Peel as his first trainer in the duties of an English public man. Nor from these associations did he acquire only a correct insight into the official ways of his new country. In his tastes and appreciations, the Prince Consort became as patriotic as any of the great men by whom he was surrounded. Some have questioned whether the patronage of a not unmixed English Court has been entirely favourable to the development of native genius in certain branches of the fine arts. The historic facts enumerated by Sir Theodore Martin on this point are worth mentioning.⁶³

On December 2, 1841, the Prince met on the official business of the Commission the Secretary, then Mr, afterwards Sir Charles, Eastlake. The latter entered upon the interview with an idea of resigning his post, should the Prince insist on the introduction of foreign artists. His Royal Highness anticipated his visitor by volunteering the remark that to him there appeared no necessity for so much as the employment of a single foreign artist even among those entrusted with the management of considerable works. ‘In all that related to practical dexterity (the department in which it was assumed that some instruction for fresco would be necessary), the English were particularly skilful.’ Such were the Prince’s words as recorded by Sir Charles Eastlake. The same narrator adds that His Royal Highness volunteered many instances of English superiority over all other nations in everything concerned with artistic mechanism. ‘Even to the varnish on coaches,’ said the Prince, ‘it is surprising how much more perfect the English practice is than that of the Continent.’ The talk then turned on the encouragement of fresco painting in England. The words of the Queen’s husband are especially noticeable showing as they do his just appreciation of the conditions of artistic prosperity in England. Two great auxiliaries in this country seldom fail to promote the success of any scheme. Of the forces thus alluded to, fashion was one, high example was another. Hence the Prince inferred that if the Queen and himself set the example of having works of this kind done, the taste would extend itself to wealthy individuals. The English country seats which are the most beautiful in the world would acquire additional effect from the introduction of such a style of decoration. With such occupation the school would never languish, and would at least have time fully to develop itself. When on one occasion Mr Eastlake, in reference to the necessary limitation of frescoes compared them to sculpture in which nothing could be concealed, and in which this necessity involved the necessity of beauty also, the Prince replied: ‘You have expressed in a few words what I would have said in many.’⁶⁴

This (1842) was the year, too, in which the first steps, both in the direction of officially identifying the representatives of the English Crown with the encouragement of popular culture, and of continuing the work begun by Sir Walter Scott, of popularizing Scotch scenery with English visitors, was taken by the Prince Consort. The opening of the Art Exhibition in Edinburgh; the addresses made by the Prince, with the minute and exact study of artistic and scientific subjects which they showed, not only satisfied experts, but delighted the general public, and practically placed the Queen’s husband in the van of the new movement for the encouragement of popular knowledge, then beginning to advance more rapidly than it had previously done. The whole country was agitated with the premonitory risings of Chartism. The Prince’s opportunities of good were increased by the proof he afforded of combining manly courage with a technical knowledge then new to the English people. For us to-day the importance of these incidents is not merely biographical. They illustrate, as nothing else could, the growth and the development of the popular conception of the duties outside the Court that Englishmen connect to-day with the Sovereign or the Sovereign’s social and ceremonial vicegerents.

Since then the rapidity of the movements of the Heir Apparent as the deputy of the Queen excite admiration mingled with some perplexity concerning the means by which so near an approach has been made to solving the secret of perpetual motion. In all this, for the first time by anyone living within the Royal circle, the initiative was set by the Prince Consort. Now the Prince was visiting with the Queen an English statesman, for example Sir Robert Peel, at his country seat. A few days before, the Royal visitors had been the guests of Louis Philippe in France. On landing at Portsmouth, they at once started for Tamworth. Their visit at the statesman’s country house was scarcely concluded when the Prince Consort was due at Cambridge for his installation in the Chancellorship of the University. As the years went on these activities were multiplied. All the great centres of English trade and manufacture, one day Birmingham, the next Liverpool or Glasgow, Leicester or Leeds, were in turn, and upon the same scale of ceaseless celerity, visited. When therefore, the Queen’s eldest son first entered upon public life and began to dazzle his countrymen by the speed of his movements, or to gratify them by the ubiquity of his presence, and indifference to fatigue of body or mind, it is well to see these manifestations of princely energy in their historical perspective, and to realize that in this transformation of Royal force, which the present reign has witnessed, the Heir Apparent has not so much created a precedent as fulfilled a tradition.

The obliging information of Sir Arthur Bigge, of Viscount Cross, and of Sir Francis Knollys, has enabled the writer accurately to state such facts of Court organization as are legitimate matters of interest to Her Majesty’s subjects.