The Public Life of Queen Victoria

The public life of Queen Victoria

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Her reign of 63 years and seven months was longer than that of any of her predecessors and is known as the Victorian era. It was a period of industrial, cultural, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire.

The public life of queen Victoria - John McGilchrist - Google Книги

She was the last British monarch of the House of Hanover. Her death in precipitated a succession crisis that brought pressure on the Duke of Kent and his unmarried brothers to marry and have children. In he married Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld , a widowed German princess with two children— Carl — and Feodora — —by her first marriage to the Prince of Leiningen. Her brother Leopold was Princess Charlotte's widower. The Duke and Duchess of Kent's only child, Victoria, was born at 4.

Additional names proposed by her parents—Georgina or Georgiana , Charlotte, and Augusta—were dropped on the instructions of Kent's eldest brother, George, the Prince Regent. The Duke of Clarence and the Duke of Kent married on the same day in , but both of Clarence's legitimate daughters born in and died as infants.

Victoria's father died in January , when Victoria was less than a year old. The Duke of York died in The Regency Act made special provision for Victoria's mother to act as regent in case William died while Victoria was still a minor. Victoria later described her childhood as "rather melancholy".

In , the Duchess of Kent and Conroy took Victoria across the centre of England to visit the Malvern Hills , stopping at towns and great country houses along the way. To the King's annoyance, Victoria was enthusiastically welcomed in each of the stops. Leopold arranged for Victoria's mother to invite her Coburg relatives to visit her in May , with the purpose of introducing Victoria to Albert. After the visit she wrote, "[Albert] is extremely handsome; his hair is about the same colour as mine; his eyes are large and blue, and he has a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth; but the charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful.

Victoria wrote to her uncle Leopold, whom Victoria considered her "best and kindest adviser", [30] to thank him "for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me, in the person of dear Albert He possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy. He is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable too.

He has besides the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you can possibly see. The parties did not undertake a formal engagement, but assumed that the match would take place in due time. Victoria turned 18 on 24 May , and a regency was avoided. I got out of bed and went into my sitting-room only in my dressing gown and alone , and saw them. Lord Conyngham then acquainted me that my poor Uncle, the King, was no more, and had expired at 12 minutes past 2 this morning, and consequently that I am Queen. Since , Britain had shared a monarch with Hanover in Germany, but under Salic law women were excluded from the Hanoverian succession.

While Victoria inherited all the British Dominions , her father's younger brother, her unpopular uncle the Duke of Cumberland , became King of Hanover. He was her heir presumptive while she was childless. At the time of Victoria's accession, the government was led by the Whig prime minister Lord Melbourne.

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The Prime Minister at once became a powerful influence on the politically inexperienced Queen, who relied on him for advice. Over , visitors came to London for the celebrations. Financially prudent, she paid off her father's debts. At the start of her reign Victoria was popular, [42] but her reputation suffered in an court intrigue when one of her mother's ladies-in-waiting, Lady Flora Hastings , developed an abdominal growth that was widely rumoured to be an out-of-wedlock pregnancy by Sir John Conroy.

In , Melbourne resigned after Radicals and Tories both of whom Victoria detested voted against a bill to suspend the constitution of Jamaica. The bill removed political power from plantation owners who were resisting measures associated with the abolition of slavery. At the time, it was customary for the prime minister to appoint members of the Royal Household , who were usually his political allies and their spouses.

Many of the Queen's ladies of the bedchamber were wives of Whigs, and Peel expected to replace them with wives of Tories. In what became known as the bedchamber crisis , Victoria, advised by Melbourne, objected to their removal. Peel refused to govern under the restrictions imposed by the Queen, and consequently resigned his commission, allowing Melbourne to return to office. Though Victoria was now queen, as an unmarried young woman she was required by social convention to live with her mother, despite their differences over the Kensington System and her mother's continued reliance on Conroy.

Lineage and early life

Victoria continued to praise Albert following his second visit in October Albert and Victoria felt mutual affection and the Queen proposed to him on 15 October , just five days after he had arrived at Windsor. She spent the evening after their wedding lying down with a headache, but wrote ecstatically in her diary:.

This was the happiest day of my life! Albert became an important political adviser as well as the Queen's companion, replacing Lord Melbourne as the dominant influential figure in the first half of her life. During Victoria's first pregnancy in , in the first few months of the marriage, year-old Edward Oxford attempted to assassinate her while she was riding in a carriage with Prince Albert on her way to visit her mother. Oxford fired twice, but either both bullets missed or, as he later claimed, the guns had no shot.

The Queen hated being pregnant, [65] viewed breast-feeding with disgust, [66] and thought newborn babies were ugly. Victoria's household was largely run by her childhood governess, Baroness Louise Lehzen from Hanover. Lehzen had been a formative influence on Victoria [68] and had supported her against the Kensington System. After a furious row between Victoria and Albert over the issue, Lehzen was pensioned off in , and Victoria's close relationship with her ended. On 29 May , Victoria was riding in a carriage along The Mall, London , when John Francis aimed a pistol at her, but the gun did not fire.

The assailant escaped; however the following day, Victoria drove the same route, though faster and with a greater escort, in a deliberate attempt to provoke Francis to take a second aim and catch him in the act. As expected, Francis shot at her, but he was seized by plainclothes policemen, and convicted of high treason.

On 3 July, two days after Francis's death sentence was commuted to transportation for life , John William Bean also tried to fire a pistol at the Queen, but it was loaded only with paper and tobacco and had too little charge. Bean was sentenced to 18 months in jail. As Victoria was riding in a carriage, Pate struck her with his cane, crushing her bonnet and bruising her forehead. Both Hamilton and Pate were sentenced to seven years' transportation.

Melbourne's support in the House of Commons weakened through the early years of Victoria's reign, and in the general election the Whigs were defeated. Peel became prime minister, and the ladies of the bedchamber most associated with the Whigs were replaced. In , Ireland was hit by a potato blight. By , Peel's ministry faced a crisis involving the repeal of the Corn Laws.

Many Tories—by then known also as Conservatives —were opposed to the repeal, but Peel, some Tories the "Peelites" , most Whigs and Victoria supported it. Peel resigned in , after the repeal narrowly passed, and was replaced by Lord John Russell. Internationally, Victoria took a keen interest in the improvement of relations between France and Britain. Russell's ministry, though Whig, was not favoured by the Queen. It was only in that Palmerston was removed after he announced the British government's approval of President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's coup in France without consulting the Prime Minister.

In , Victoria gave birth to her eighth child, Leopold , with the aid of the new anaesthetic, chloroform. Victoria was so impressed by the relief it gave from the pain of childbirth that she used it again in at the birth of her ninth and final child, Beatrice , despite opposition from members of the clergy, who considered it against biblical teaching, and members of the medical profession, who thought it dangerous.

For example, about a month after Leopold's birth Albert complained in a letter to Victoria about her "continuance of hysterics" over a "miserable trifle". In early , the government of Lord Aberdeen , who had replaced Derby, fell amidst recriminations over the poor management of British troops in the Crimean War.

Victoria approached both Derby and Russell to form a ministry, but neither had sufficient support, and Victoria was forced to appoint Palmerston as prime minister. Derby was reinstated as prime minister. On her return Victoria wrote to Derby reprimanding him for the poor state of the Royal Navy in comparison to the French one. They had been betrothed since September , when Princess Victoria was 14 years old; the marriage was delayed by the Queen and Prince Albert until the bride was In March , Victoria's mother died, with Victoria at her side.

Through reading her mother's papers, Victoria discovered that her mother had loved her deeply; [] she was heart-broken, and blamed Conroy and Lehzen for "wickedly" estranging her from her mother. In November, Albert was made aware of gossip that his son had slept with an actress in Ireland. He had been "killed by that dreadful business", she said. She avoided public appearances, and rarely set foot in London in the following years.

The Public Life of Queen Victoria

Victoria's self-imposed isolation from the public diminished the popularity of the monarchy, and encouraged the growth of the republican movement. In March a protester stuck a notice on the railings of Buckingham Palace that announced "these commanding premises to be let or sold in consequence of the late occupant's declining business". She agreed to visit the gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society at Kensington and take a drive through London in an open carriage. Through the s, Victoria relied increasingly on a manservant from Scotland, John Brown.

Palmerston died in , and after a brief ministry led by Russell, Derby returned to power. Victoria found Gladstone's demeanour far less appealing; he spoke to her, she is thought to have complained, as though she were "a public meeting rather than a woman". In republican sentiment in Britain, fed by the Queen's seclusion, was boosted after the establishment of the Third French Republic.

On the last day of February , two days after the thanksgiving service, year-old Arthur O'Connor, a great-nephew of Irish MP Feargus O'Connor , waved an unloaded pistol at Victoria's open carriage just after she had arrived at Buckingham Palace. Brown, who was attending the Queen, grabbed him and O'Connor was later sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment, [] and a birching.

After the Indian Rebellion of , the British East India Company , which had ruled much of India, was dissolved, and Britain's possessions and protectorates on the Indian subcontinent were formally incorporated into the British Empire. The Queen had a relatively balanced view of the conflict, and condemned atrocities on both sides.

In the general election , Disraeli was returned to power. He passed the Public Worship Regulation Act , which removed Catholic rituals from the Anglican liturgy and which Victoria strongly supported. On 14 December , the anniversary of Albert's death, Victoria's second daughter Alice , who had married Louis of Hesse , died of diphtheria in Darmstadt. Victoria noted the coincidence of the dates as "almost incredible and most mysterious". She felt "aged" by "the loss of my beloved child". Between April and February , she threatened five times to abdicate while pressuring Disraeli to act against Russia during the Russo-Turkish War , but her threats had no impact on the events or their conclusion with the Congress of Berlin.

On 2 March , Roderick Maclean , a disgruntled poet apparently offended by Victoria's refusal to accept one of his poems, [] shot at the Queen as her carriage left Windsor railway station. Two schoolboys from Eton College struck him with their umbrellas, until he was hustled away by a policeman.

On 17 March , she fell down some stairs at Windsor, which left her lame until July; she never fully recovered and was plagued with rheumatism thereafter. He was "the dearest of my dear sons", she lamented. Beatrice and Henry planned to marry, but Victoria opposed the match at first, wishing to keep Beatrice at home to act as her companion. After a year, she was won around to the marriage by Henry and Beatrice's promise to remain living with and attending her. Victoria was pleased when Gladstone resigned in after his budget was defeated.

Victoria marked the fiftieth anniversary of her accession on 20 June with a banquet to which 50 kings and princes were invited. The following day, she participated in a procession and attended a thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey. He was soon promoted to " Munshi ": Victoria's eldest daughter became Empress consort of Germany in , but she was widowed within the year, and Victoria's grandchild Wilhelm became German Emperor as Wilhelm II. Under Wilhelm, Victoria and Albert's hopes of a liberal Germany were not fulfilled.

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He believed in autocracy. Gladstone returned to power after the general election ; he was 82 years old. Salisbury remained prime minister for the remainder of Victoria's reign. The Queen requested that any special celebrations be delayed until , to coincide with her Diamond Jubilee , [] which was made a festival of the British Empire at the suggestion of the Colonial Secretary , Joseph Chamberlain.

The Queen's Diamond Jubilee procession on 22 June followed a route six miles long through London and included troops from all over the empire.

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