Sunday, October 23, 2011

Fact of the Day

Fact of the Day : How long after meeting Albert did Queen Victoria propose marriage? (from A Dictionary of British History)


Victoria ( 1819 – 1901 ), queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland ( 1837 – 1901 ) and empress of India ( 1877 – 1901 ). Victoria would have agreed that her life fell into three parts—before Albert , with Albert, after Albert. The death in childbirth in November 1817 of Princess Charlotte , only daughter and heir to the prince regent, prompted a famous ‘rush to the altar’. The duke of Cambridge married in May 1818 .

His elder brothers, the dukes of Clarence and Kent, were married in a joint ceremony a month later. Clarence's two daughters died as infants, leaving the probable succession to the duke of Kent's daughter the Princess Victoria, born 18 May 1819 , christened Alexandrina, and known at first as ‘Drina’. Eight months later her father was dead, taken off by pneumonia in winter at Sidmouth, leaving her to be brought up in a household almost totally female and totally German.

Her mother, Princess Victoria of Leiningen, was of the house of Saxe‐Coburg: recently arrived in England, she found the language difficult. The other person in constant attendance was Fräulein Lehzen, brought over as governess and companion from Hanover when the princess was 6 months old. They lived at Kensington palace, Victoria sleeping in her mother's room until she came to the throne. The centre of the princess's life was her 132 dolls, given imposing names and elaborate costumes.

Victoria grew up intelligent and self‐possessed. Her upbringing, though sheltered, endowed her with an artlessness and directness—a lack of introspection—which is rare, and never left her. Inevitably the duchess of Kent was on bad terms with George IV and even worse with his successor William IV , to whose demise she looked forward with ill‐concealed relish. A clash over precedence meant that the duchess and the young princess boycotted William's coronation in 1831 , the princess writing that not even her dolls could console her.

‘I longed sadly for some gaiety’, she wrote to her uncle Leopold at 16, ‘but we have been for the last three months immured within our old palace.’ As news of the gravity of King William's illness emerged in 1837 she wrote to Leopold: ‘I look forward to the event which it seems is likely to occur soon with calm and quietness: I am not alarmed at it.’ At her first council, Charles Greville wrote that ‘she appeared to be awed, but not daunted’.

Victoria's education for life started with her first prime minister Melbourne , whom she liked from their first audience, and who stood for father‐figure and first love. His kind and pleasant manner, mellow and relaxed, eased her into her new duties: after five days she wrote to Leopold, ‘I do regular, hard, but to me delightful work.’ Greville wrote, not unkindly, in 1839 when the queen's affection for Melbourne had dragged her into the Bedchamber crisis , ‘Melbourne is everything to her…her feelings are sexual, though she does not know it.’

She told Melbourne that she might not marry at all: ‘I don't know about that,’ replied Melbourne, sensibly. In October 1839 Leopold played his trump card, sending Victoria's cousin Albert over from Saxe‐Coburg on approval. In the event, one look was enough. ‘It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert,’ she wrote, ‘who is beautiful…so excessively handsome.’ Two days later, even disconcerting the urbane Melbourne, she declared that no time should be lost, and the following day she sent for Albert to propose marriage. The second phase of her life had begun.

Victoria took to matrimony con brio. ‘We did not sleep much,’ she confided to her journal after the wedding night. Then, to her dismay, within six weeks there were signs of pregnancy. Victoria was quite unsentimental about babies—‘nasty objects’—but after the birth of the princess royal in November 1840 , eight more arrived in rapid succession.

Her life became a strange juxtaposition of public and private. April 1841 found her with Princess Victoria 6 months old and at war with China: ‘Albert is so much amused at my having got the Island of Hong Kong, and we think Victoria ought to be called Princess of Hong Kong in addition to Princess Royal.’ Albert's influence grew with the years, particularly after the success of the Great Exhibition in 1851 , and in 1857 Victoria gave him the unprecedented title of prince consort. But pressure of work and his own sense of duty took its toll. In December 1861 , he caught typhoid and died at the age of 42.

Victoria faced a widowhood of 40 years. To some, even in her own day, her grief seemed excessive. There was a touch of morbidness and some gestures were repeated when the estimable John Brown , her Scottish manservant, died in 1883 . For several years, her disappearance from public life was total. But slowly the family took over as it grew inexorably—such ‘swarms of children’, wrote Victoria without enthusiasm.

Life became a welter of match‐making, weddings, christenings, teething, mumps, visits, and birthdays (remembered or missed)—and, the penalty of advancing years, of deaths. Disraeli , once detested for his unkindness to Sir Robert Peel , long a dear friend, died in 1881 , ‘the Queen bowed down with this misfortune’. In 1892 a terrible shock when ‘Eddy’, the prince of Wales's eldest son, succumbed to pneumonia at Sandringham. And gradually the courts and thrones of Europe filled up with Victoria's relatives and descendants. The tiny lady in the wheelchair was ‘the matriarch of Europe’.

Her political influence as queen has been much debated and analysed, but the more extravagant claims should not be entertained. The two politicians she most distrusted were Palmerston (‘Pilgerstein’) and Gladstone (‘half‐crazy’), but this did not stop the former being prime minister for nearly ten years and dying in office at the age of 81, nor the latter being prime minister on four occasions. Her importance lies in her role, with Albert, in restoring the dignity and reputation of the monarchy. Victoria's standing rose with the years, and she enjoyed memorable triumphs at her Golden and Diamond Jubilees in 1887 and 1897 . Much of it, of course, was illusion.

The queen mother and empress was a tiny, fat old lady, painfully short‐sighted, gobbling her food and eating too much. But nobody took liberties. The ribald jokes about John Brown had bounced off her. Though the queen herself did not fit the stereotype of ‘Victorian England’ (she never quite got over the dislike she had taken to bishops as a toddler), the phrase took hold so firmly that one wonders how other countries manage without the adjective. She remained to the end a mass of contradictions—self‐centred yet considerate and dutiful; homely yet grand; excitable and passionate but with shrewd judgement. She died at Osborne on 23 January 1901 and was buried alongside Albert in the mausoleum at Frogmore.

How to cite this entry:
" Victoria " A Dictionary of British History. Ed. John Cannon. Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 23 October 2011