The early court of Queen Victoria

by Clare Jerrold

And I’ll form a new Administration.’”

Melbourne spent the day in inducing his Monarch to alter his letter so that it should cause no more heart-burnings than could be avoided, and he talked the matter over with Palmerston that night. Lord Brougham came in late, and, under a promise not to divulge until the next day what had happened, he also heard the story. Brougham kept his promise in a way, for he waited until after midnight and then communicated the whole matter to the Times. So the next morning the keepers of this grave secret found a flourishing announcement in the leading Tory paper. “The King has taken the opportunity of Lord Spencer’s death to turn out the Ministry, and there is every reason to believe that the Duke of Wellington has been sent for. The Queen has done it all.”

This caused a series of convulsions in every stratum of society. The King accused Melbourne of having published a matter which should have been kept secret until correctly announced at the correct moment; the Government blamed Melbourne all round. Everyone believed that the whole thing had been preconcerted, but of them all the consequences fell heaviest upon Queen Adelaide. The sentence, “The Queen has done it all,” was placarded all over London, and the people believed that now there was no doubt but that they had a real grievance against the Queen, and they hated her bitterly. Yet it is fairly certain that the Queen was as astonished as everyone else; no one but the King knew what the King had planned, and it is probable that he did not know until he suddenly made up his mind after seeing Melbourne that evening. He appointed the Duke of Wellington First Lord of the Treasury and Secretary of State, and he had to send someone off in a hurry to Italy to find Sir Robert Peel; but the new Government only lived until April of the following year, when it was defeated, and Melbourne came back to office.

William took this as well as he could, but he grew to hate the Whigs. There were times when he would neither see nor speak to one of them, when he treated his Ministers with open insult. Over and over again in the last two years of his reign one reads of the way in which he refused to acknowledge them. At the Queen’s birthday dinner-party in 1836 not one of the Ministry nor a Whig of any sort was invited; and at his own birthday party no one at all connected with the Government, except the members in his household, was asked to be present. He was evidently resolved that, if he had to see them in London, the gates of Windsor should be closed to them. On the other hand, he chose his guests deliberately from the Tories, the men he liked best being Lord Winchilsea and Lord Wharncliffe, both holding violent views, and the Duke of Dorset, who was an extreme Tory. It was said that for the Tories stood the King, the House of Lords, the Church, the Bar and all the law, a large minority in the House of Commons, the agricultural interest, and the monied interest generally; while for the Whigs stood a small majority in the Commons, the manufacturing towns, and a portion of the rabble. Of course, those who triumphantly asserted this blinked the fact that the majority of the whole country stood for the Whigs, as the Tories could not, with all their interest, form a Government which would be acceptable.

Greville notes in 1836: “To-day we had a Council, when His Most Gracious Majesty behaved most ungraciously to his confidential servants, whom he certainly does not delight to honour.”

Sometimes the King made a very special effort to hurt his Ministers. Lord Aylmer had been recalled from Canada by the Whig Government for some irregularities, and he was introduced at the reception of the Bath in 1837. As he approached the throne William called up Palmerston, Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and Lord Minto, First Lord of the Admiralty, making them stand one on either side of Aylmer, that they might hear every word that was said. He then announced that he wished to take that, the most public opportunity, of telling him that he approved most entirely of his conduct in Canada, that he had acted like a true and loyal subject towards a set of traitors and conspirators, and behaved as it became a British officer to do in such circumstances. In fact, he mortified his Ministers as much as he could, and gratified Aylmer to the same extent.

It is not to be supposed that the Ministers liked to be treated with such rudeness, nor to be ignored, but they took it quietly, made no public grumble, went on with their work, and left such insults to be forgotten; only the King’s attitude made this difference, they began to look upon themselves as Ministers to the House of Commons rather than to the Crown, which tended to lessen the kingly power. A little later, when Victoria sat on the throne, and, being a Whig, paid honour to her Ministers, but showed dislike to the Opposition and indifference to the nobles of Tory tendencies, the outcry was loud and deep. Her inexperience, her sex, her age, were blamed as the reasons; open disloyalty was shown her, and sometimes marked rudeness. Yet she was but following the ways of her predecessor in somewhat milder fashion. She was one of a family which never hid its preferences, and she had learned the lesson—bad as it was—at the Royal board of a man whom she loved.

Victoria had been bred a Whig. Her father and mother were Whigs, and all her mother’s counsellors and friends held the same views; Lord Durham went further even, being regarded as the leader of the Radicals. Lord Ashley once gave it as his opinion that from her earliest years the Princess had been taught to regard the Tories as her personal enemies. “I am told that the language at Kensington was calculated to inspire her with fear and hatred of them.”

Through the years of King William’s reign, when he, poor man, was in a constant state of ebullition with his Ministers, his people, or members of his family, the Princess Victoria changed from a child to a woman. She listened quietly, as children did listen in those days, to the politics talked in her mother’s circle, and became imbued with very strong views; she visited, and played at Royalty like a well-made automaton; she studied music, French, English, singing, and dancing under various tutors, and thought a great deal about the time when she would be England’s Sovereign.

Leopold, who, it is said, was soon deadly sick of his Belgian crown and wishful to abdicate, thinking it better to be an English Prince with fifty thousand a year and uncle to the Queen, than to be monarch of a troublesome little kingdom which all its neighbours regarded with an evil or a covetous eye, still kept Claremont in good order, having given the mastership of the house over to Sir John Conroy. And there Victoria was taken when she seemed to flag. She loved the place, for were not the happiest moments of her girlish life spent there? It was there that she met her grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who, on seeing her, made the first suggestion that she might do worse than marry into the Saxe-Coburg family, and she had definitely in her mind her grandson Albert. The gardens at Claremont were well cultivated, and all that the Duchess of Kent did not use was sent to Leopold, a thing which caused many a joke at his expense.