The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
A ‘spoilt child’ with an imperial crown
This fascinating study shows how Queen Victoria locked horns with practically everyone around her
QUEEN VICTORIA AND
HER PRIME MINISTERS by Anne Somerset
576pp, William Collins, T £25 (0808 196 6794), RRP£30, ebook £16.99
A biographer’s task is not always an earnest one. More than once, researching my own short life of Queen Victoria, I found myself laughing out loud in archives and libraries. Queen Victoria may or may not have been amused, her sense of humour was undoubtedly limited, but she possessed an inadvertent talent to amuse unsurpassed by any other of Britain’s monarchs.
Her great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth II once described herself as “like Queen Victoria, a believer in moderation in all things”. As Anne Somerset demonstrates in this masterly account of Victoria’s relationship with the 10 men who served as her British prime ministers, Victoria was frequently far from moderate. Her dislike of vivisectionists, Russians and fourtimes prime minister William Ewart Gladstone was violent. A foreign secretary who ignored her advice provoked a response one observer described as of “the utmost vehemence and bitterness”.
Even Disraeli, who deployed skittish flattery to manage his exacting sovereign with marked success, found her “very wilful and whimsical, like a spoilt child”, once dismissing her behaviour as “very mad”.
Victoria’s voice, preserved in her letters and memoranda, ripples through Somerset’s account, undimmed by the passage of time. It is her occasional lapses of selfawareness that amuse, like her description of Gladstone in 1872 as “so very arrogant, tyrannical and obstinate”, the very complaint he might have levelled at her.
Yet it would be wrong to dismiss Victoria as a termagant with an exaggerated view of her own political clout. Vehement and forthright, intensely patriotic and unswervably convinced of her right to intervene in government appointments and policies, she was as capable of admirable common sense as of silliness, wonderfully compassionate (save in her dealings with the hapless Gladstone, who was too honest for Disraelian unctuousness), an assiduous desk worker with an instinct for demagoguery: her responses frequently aligned with those of the bulk of her subjects. Sometimes commonplace in her thinking, she also demonstrated sound judgment and pertinent conclusions, increasingly, over time, informed by long experience. Her written style could
be homely and pithy, like her warning in 1886 that her government not underestimate the strength of antiBritish feeling in Ireland: “the snake is only scotched not killed”. Only with considerable effort did she bring herself to mince her words. She was at all times, as she described herself in the third person with emphatic capitalisation, “The Queen”.
So well known is the assessment of Victoria’s contemporary Walter Bagehot that the monarch’s role within Britain’s executive is confined to the right to be kept informed, to advise and to warn, that it’s easy to assume that Victoria herself accepted these restrictions. Far from it. Victoria considered Bagehot a radical who inspired mistrust. In Victoria’s understanding, her powers and areas of responsibility were extensive and wideranging, including, as she put it, “the unfettered right to approve or disapprove the choice of a Minister for [an] office”. On occasion she resorted to threats. Consumed by her horror at Palmerston’s conduct of foreign affairs, she told the prime minister that the day might come when “I could not put up with Lord Palmerston any longer”. Throughout her reign Victoria expected Cabinet ministers to truckle to her whims. Any attempt by MPs to alter her travel plans would, she announced, be met with “a firm high tone of reproof”. Nevertheless, in 1885, government problems forced Victoria to postpone her departure for the Highlands. She did not conceal her irritation, issuing a diktat that, in future, “ministerial crises must not happen again in Ascot weeks and during Balmoral times”. On another occasion this constitutional monarch spelled out that she would consider it impossible to remain queen if she were “to become the servant of Parliament”. No wonder Gladstone told his wife “the conduct of the Queen… weighs upon me like a nightmare”.
Somerset has written an exhilaratingly impressive account. Her view, for example, that Prince Albert’s indefatigable inquisitiveness about every aspect of British political life, which Victoria maintained after his death, prevented the crown from losing ground politically in a period of significant political reform is a persuasive one. For some readers, uninterested in the minutiae of Italian unification or Balkan upheavals in the 1870s, the present survey may be too exhaustive; others will share my delight.
“I think of nothing but the country,” Victoria once wrote. Since the security of her throne and the nation’s fortunes were so closely interwoven, she may well have been telling the truth.
Victoria declared that ‘ministerial crises must not happen in Ascot weeks’