The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Illustrated Edition). Robert Thomas Wilson

Table of Contents

      The Queen’s Administrative Work—The “Condition of England” Question—The Court and the Working Classes—Royal Plans for Ameliorating the Lot of Labour—Threatened Attacks on the Queen—The Demagogues Abashed—A Royal-Hearted Speech—The Queen’s Private Correspondence—A Pension Fund for the Working Classes—Pauperism among Domestic Servants—Prince Albert’s Relief Plan—The Court at Osborne—Birth and Christening of the Princess Louise—Removal to Balmoral—The Queen at Kirk—A Royal Geologist—Sir Charles Lyell’s Anecdotes of the Royal Family—An Accident in the Solent—Prince Albert as a University Reformer—Death of Lord Melbourne and Lord George Bentinck.

      To the Queen and the Prince Consort the year of the Revolution brought many domestic anxieties which the Court newsman of the day could not chronicle. We have seen, from some expressions in her Majesty’s own letters, how sharply her heart was touched by the misfortunes of her French friends and her German kinsfolk. But the public business connected with the distressing and alarming state of affairs abroad condemned both the Queen and her husband to the severest toil. Twenty-eight thousand despatches were received by or sent out from the Foreign Office during 1848, and most of these had to be studied closely, and annotated and advised on either by her Majesty or Prince Albert. Lord Palmerston’s irrepressible restlessness and boyish imprudence kept the Queen in a state of feverish anxiety, for she never knew when some fresh freak of the Foreign Secretary might not make her appear ridiculous to Continental Courts.

      Moreover, it occurred to the Royal pair that the troubles at home might perchance be smoothed if the influence of the Crown were judiciously and delicately applied to promote a peaceful solution of many alarming social problems. Mr. Carlyle was then thundering forth anathemas against the governing orders of England for neglecting what he called “the Condition of England Question,” and accusing them of abdicating their natural position as leaders and guides of the people. Had he suspected what was going on in the Royal circle, he would have known that this charge did not at all events lie against the highest of all the governing orders in the State. The “Condition of England Question,” in fact, had now become a subject of engrossing interest to the Queen and her consort.

      Prince Albert’s letters to Baron Stockmar indicate that he over-estimated the power and significance of the Chartist organisation. But they show that he did not under-estimate the disastrous effect of popular discontent on the commerce and industry of the nation. Her Majesty and the Prince seemed to have arrived at a very clear idea as to how far they could either of them affect the crisis. Personally, the Sovereign at such a time could not with propriety mingle in the social warfare waged between rich and poor. But much might be done through Prince Albert to show that the Crown was not unmindful of the claims of Labour, and to indicate that her Majesty bated not one jot or tittle of her sympathy for that class of our community, which, as Prince Albert pithily said, in a speech he delivered on the 18th of May, “has most of the toil, and least of the enjoyments, of life.”

      As far back as 1844 he had become President of a Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Working Classes. This apparently was an organisation somewhat of the dilettante type, but it now occurred to the practical mind of the Prince that it might be turned at such a crisis to a useful purpose. He seized the opportunity afforded by an invitation to preside at one of its public meetings, for carrying out the cherished design of the Court, and it is curious to note that when this intention was bruited about, the strongest objections were made to it. Violent demagogues, he was told, would attend and say rude things about the Sovereign. Lord John Russell sent him a copy of a book containing a ribald attack on the Royal Family; and it is not pleasing to recollect that if the Court had permitted itself to be overruled by the Government, this golden chance of conciliating contending classes would have been lost at a critical moment in the history of the English people. But neither the Queen nor the Prince was to be daunted. These attacks, they said, merely convinced them all the more that the time had come when they should put themselves in touch with the great interests of Labour, and show that the Royal Family was not, as was alleged, living on the earnings of a people, for whose sufferings it had no sympathy, and to whose welfare it was indifferent. What the Prince called “a tangible proof” of the desire of the Queen and her family to co-operate in any scheme for lightening and brightening the lot of her poorer subjects was needed, and he meant to give that proof.

      A sour critic would perhaps say that in analysing the Royal ideas on the “Condition of England” Question a good deal of State Socialism lurked in them. They suggest undoubtedly the influence of many German writers on State Socialism; but Prince Albert, so far as he was the exponent of her Majesty’s thoughts, seems to have been careful to burn much incense on the altar of Voluntaryism, before which all the prominent economic writers of the day bowed down. If he roused their suspicions by denying that the people should be let alone, and left to help themselves in what Mr. Carlyle calls “the desolate freedom of the wild ass,” he deferred to their prejudices by proposing that the help and guidance which they needed should come not from Government, but from voluntary combinations of individuals. It is possible that he might have gone farther if he had dared. As it was, the position of the Court in relation to the social question at this time seems to have been midway between that of the younger school of sociologists in our day, and the almost defunct school whose principle and shibboleth were laissez faire.

      According to the Prince’s speech at the meeting of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Working Classes, on the 18th of May, two objects should be kept in view. Firstly, Society, through individual and associated effort, should show what can be done by model lodging-houses, improved dwellings, loan funds, allotments, and the like, to ameliorate the lot of the poor. Secondly, the poor must be taught that all the work of amelioration cannot be done by Society—that, in fact, they must, by their cultivation of the homely virtues of thrift, honesty, diligence, and self-denial, help themselves into the condition in which it is possible for others, either by individual or associated effort, to help them. He implored the country to think more of the identity than the rivalry of class interests, and contended that it was the imperative duty of the rich, each one in his sphere, “to show how man can help man, notwithstanding the complicated state of Society.” Self-reliance in the individual, and confidence between individuals—these were the moral forces which Prince Albert seems to have thought it was the mission of all good citizens to evoke. It has been hinted that such utterances are mere platitudes, and hardly worth recording. As David Hume observed, the truths that are prized as discoveries by a few philosophers in one generation become the commonplaces of their grandchildren. Had the ideas of the Queen and her husband on the Social Problem been platitudes among statesmen in 1848, Revolution would not have fallen on Europe like “a bolt out of the blue,” nor would the panic-stricken kings and princes of the Continent have been flying, as Mr. Carlyle put it, “like a gang of coiners when the police had come among them.”112 Nothing could be more gratifying to the Queen than the universal approval that greeted this address. It struck the true note of sympathy with Labour that should ever ring through “the sad, sweet music of Humanity.” Her Majesty said, in a letter to Stockmar, “the Prince made a speech on Thursday which has met with more general admiration from all classes and parties than any I can remember;” and it

      THOMAS CARLYLE. (After the Medallion by T. Woolner, 1855.)

      is in truth impossible to give a juster idea of the effect which it produced all over the English-speaking world.

      It is curious to observe that all through the Queen’s correspondence during the most alarming year of her reign, there is expressed a feeling of proud confidence in the stability of the British Monarchy, and an abiding certitude that under her rule no effort will be spared to minimise the sufferings or better the lot of the poor. Bolingbroke’s “patriot King” could not have more completely identified Sovereignty with national life and national yearning. That the Revolution had no perceptible effect on England, one can now see was mainly due to the fact that alike in the repeal of the Corn Laws, and in the encouragement of schemes for social improvement, the Monarchy