She loves him! She loves him NOT!
Queen Victoria was very fickle towards her ten prime ministers, switching from devotion to detestation – and sometimes back again – in the blink of an eye
Queen Victoria had ten prime ministers, all of whom she loved and loathed in equal measure. When meeting a new one, she was invariably hostile: Robert Peel, for instance, was a ‘nasty wretch’ who was wearing a hideous coat clearly designed to annoy her.
Fast forward a few years, though, and the Queen was gushing that the ‘wretch’ was actually a ‘nobleminded, very fair, very liberal, straightforward & very able man’.
The same wild extremes were evident when it came to Disraeli and Palmerston. And with Gladstone, who was prime minister on four occasions during Victoria’s 64-year reign, there was time to squeeze in an extra U-turn. Having once cooed he was ‘so agreeable… and such a good man’, in 1898 she refused to acknowledge Gladstone’s death in the Court Circular. It was his punishment for being ‘monstrous and wicked’.
Such intensity was only possible because, as historian Anne Somerset explains, Victorian Britain was one of the very few constitutional monarchies in the world. Unlike in most of Europe, the Queen did not have absolute power to do what she pleased, but was obliged to listen to her ministers who were, in turn, answerable to Parliament.
In practice, as Somerset demonstrates superbly, Victoria insisted on her right to meddle and interfere on everything from who was to command the British Army (she wanted her favourite son to have the job) to whether she should be forced to appear at her own Jubilee.
In 1878 she lamented: ‘it is a miserable thing to be a constitutional Queen and be unable to do what is right.’ What she meant was that it was miserable not being able to do what she wanted, although that never stopped her trying.
The situation wasn’t helped by the Queen’s tendency to micro-manage. Even in her most retiring ‘Widow of Windsor’ phase, when she refused to be seen in public, she thought nothing of rewriting official documents before they were sent out. Somerset reckons she wrote 2,500 words a day.
It got to the point where Palmerston, the bossiest of all the PMs, simply ignored her alterations and, when she asked furiously what had happened to them, he blamed it vaguely on ‘some inadvertence & mistake’. She in turn accused him of treason.
Victoria’s fretful dependence on her prime ministers had started in 1837 when she came to the throne aged just 18. Fatherless since birth, she developed an intense crush on Lord Melbourne, who was 50 years her senior. Her diaries, on which Somerset leans heavily, show her positively agog for the older man’s approval. In return, Melbourne knew to keep the compliments coming. When Victoria declared ‘it was exceedingly ugly having such hairy arms as I have’, her PM returned the gallant (and surely untrue) answer, ‘No, very pretty.’
Victoria ‘sobbed and cried compulsively’ when Melbourne’s Whig administration crumbled. She sulkily refused to be nice to his Tory successor Robert Peel, whom she described as ‘very cold and stilted’. However, she soon became so fond of the new man that when, in January 1843, Peel’s private secretary was assassinated in a case of mistaken identity, she was utterly distraught at how close she had come to losing him.
What Victoria most valued about Peel was the sure-footed way he steered Britain away from the revolutions that engulfed Europe during the ‘hungry 1840s’. She even agreed to his suggestion that she pay income tax and credited his decision to repeal the Corn Laws, which allowed the price of bread to drop, for saving her from being forced to abdicate to an angry mob.
With Benjamin Disraeli, Victoria once again entered the flirtatious zone that she had so enjoyed with
Melbourne. By this time, though, she was a middle-aged widow rather than a giddy girl. Flamboyant Disraeli nonetheless ploughed on, dishing out the blandishments.
He called her ‘The Faery’ (an allusion to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and crooned that he could think of nothing nicer than crossing the sea to visit her on ‘Your Majesty’s Faery Isle’ (aka The Isle of Wight) in the chilly spring.
His cleverest move, though, was to make her Empress of India, which meant that she had access to all the jewellery stored up in the local palaces, including the Koh-i-Noor diamond which she had long had her eye on.
Still, Victoria was no one’s idea of a pushover. As her large family multiplied – there were 42 grandchildren in all – she insisted that they should continue to be supported by the public purse. This was hard for any prime minister to sell to the House of Commons, especially when so many of this younger generation were now kings and queens in their own right.
Victoria also had strong feelings about Ireland, especially when it started to make noises about wanting to break away from the mainland. She might not care for ‘the abominable Irish’, but she had absolutely no plans to let them out of her clutches.
Irish Home Rule quickly became a sore point with Gladstone. Victoria had started out crossly declaring that he ‘addresses me as if I were a public meeting’. Yet it wasn’t long before she was gushing how wonderful he was. This rapprochement didn’t last. The middle-aged Queen was still capable of the vitriolic rages that had made Prince Albert wonder if she was tainted with the madness that had decimated her grandfather George III.
From his point of view, Gladstone would bitterly comment that, after serving the crown for 52-and-ahalf years, he was dismissed as coldly as if he had been a tradesman presenting his final bill.
Two years following his final departure, the prime minister was still waking from a nightmare in which the Queen invited him to breakfast alone with her at Windsor but, when the hour came, was nowhere to be found.
Anne Somerset tells the story of Victoria and her prime ministers with great empathy and sense of fairness. While acknowledging how badly the Queen could behave towards the ten men who were only trying to help, Somerset also emphasises how much experience and insight the Queen was able to bring to the table. Lord Salisbury, who was prime minister when the elderly monarch died in the early weeks of 1901, found it extraordinary that she always seemed to have such a grip on what the nation was thinking, especially the middle classes, ‘such was the extraordinary penetration of her mind’.
He recalled the late foreign secretary Lord Clarendon saying, when faced with a thorny problem, ‘Well, let us have the Queen’s opinion. The Queen’s opinion is always worth hearing even if you do not agree with it.’