‘Affairs go on, and all will take some shape or other, but it keeps one in hot water all the time.’
LETTER FROM VICTORIA TO LEOPOLD, KING OF THE BELGIANS, 15 JUNE 1841 
VICTORIA AND ALBERT were domestic figureheads for the nation but also international figureheads for the British Empire, which grew immensely during the course of the Queen’s reign. But in an era before photography, Victoria often went unrecognised when on her travels. In 1843, when she first visited the King of France, Louis-Philippe I, she was strolling on the deck of the royal yacht Victoria and Albert in her black travelling gown and bonnet when she was handed a parcel by a Frenchwoman. ‘Take this, they are cakes for the Queen. Take care of them. Now mind, don’t fail to give them her,’ the bemused Queen was told. On another occasion she was greeted by the elderly Lord Portarlington with ‘I know your face quite well, but I cannot put a name to it.’ Victoria took these episodes in good humour – given the pressures of the job, it might even have been a relief for this lively young girl to feel like an ordinary person once in a while.
HMY VICTORIA AND ALBERT was a twin-paddle steamer launched on 25 April 1843, built at Pembroke Dock in West Wales and designed by naval reformer Sir William Symonds. It was owned and operated by the Royal Navy and kept exclusively for royal use, replacing the HMY Royal George , which was decommissioned. Victoria and Albert weighed 1,034 tons, carried two guns and was the first royal yacht to be steam powered – it was fitted with a huge 430-horsepower engine.
Victoria and Albert used the yacht for their trip to Le Tréport, France, in 1843. Victoria recorded in her diary that she woke early, ‘there being nothing as proper curtains to keep out the light’ in her cabin. However, the couple enjoyed the small yacht and took it out over twenty times during its lifetime, mainly staying in British coastal waters around the south coast of England.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert arriving at the Royal Dockyard on HMY Victoria and Albert , Woolwich, 1843.
ALBERT UNDERSTOOD THAT entertainment was vital to keep his young wife happy, so while childbearing took its toll on Victoria, he dedicated himself to looking after the Queen, organising holidays to get her out of London. It was good for Victoria to take these breaks from her duties and enjoy some private time, but she couldn’t stay away for long. London was the flagship of all things British, and back at home in Buckingham Palace she and Albert set about establishing themselves – both determined to work hard and do their best in the business of representing the country, not only at home, but on the world stage, too.
ALBERT:
Liebes , it is too soon after your confinement.
The reality was that, internationally, Britain’s fortunes were on the wane in the 1840s. George III, Victoria’s grandfather, had ‘lost’ the thirteen American colonies in 1776 during the American War of Independence and, taking over from Lord Melbourne, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel was presiding over a straitened economic policy. Britain was poor and Victoria herself was not as wealthy as many of her aristocratic counterparts. There were genuine concerns about handing over huge amounts of public money to royalty while the country’s economy was failing and the majority of British people were living in filthy, grinding poverty.
‘Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings … fed by different food … ordered by different manners and not governed by the same laws. The Rich and the Poor.’
POLITICIAN BENJAMIN DISRAELI IN HIS NOVEL SYBIL , DESCRIBING ENGLAND, 1845
FOR MANY RICH people in the Victorian era, the only time they came into protracted contact with the poor was on the pages of Charles Dickens’s novels. Poverty was considered by many to be a ‘natural condition’ of anybody who worked with their hands. As improvements were made to farming yields through new methods and machinery, the working class moved in a wave from the countryside to the town, where often there simply wasn’t enough work for them, especially if they didn’t have a trade.
The term ‘ working class’ did not always mean a person was poor; class could be quite distinct from earnings. A coachmaker in London, for example, would be considered working class, but earned five pounds and five shillings a week, as his skills were in demand. This was considerably more than many middle-class clerks might bring home. At the bottom of the working-class barrel were the labourers, who earned only twenty to thirty shillings a week – an amount on which it would have been difficult to meet the most basic needs. There was very little employment legislation at the beginning of Victoria’s reign, and the working poor had to put in unspeakable hours.
In London, those in need did their best. ‘Mudlarks’ waded into the filthy waters of the Thames to retrieve anything they might sell. Boys might hold a horse’s reins for a gentleman or collect dog pooh for sale in the tannery industry. Some earned a meagre living sweeping the filthy streets to clear a path for rich pedestrians. Begging was illegal but that didn’t stop it going on, with many men, women and children simply asking for money on the streets, especially if they had an obvious disability.
Many of the poor were willing to work but they were dependent on jobs being available. The docks in London, for example, kept few standing staff and simply took on men at a low rate of pay as they needed them. Crowds would form at the gates of the yard each morning in the hope that a big order had come in. If the weather was bad the men and their families would simply not have a wage coming in that week. Women who worked in factories or sweatshops were in a similar situation; if there were no orders, there was no pay.
If their situation became truly unbearable, the poor could admit themselves to the workhouse. This was the only comprehensive public help available, and it was seen as a way of controlling the poor and keeping them off the streets. For the poor it was a last resort, as families were split up on entry to the house, the work was backbreaking, the food dreadful and the conditions hard.
Unsurprisingly, this grim state of affairs took its toll and death rates for the poor were extraordinarily high. There was hardly any medical care available and most suffered from malnutrition, so if they became ill they stood a much lower chance of survival than their well-fed social superiors.
THE CHEF AT Buckingham Palace, Charles Elmé Francatelli, had a strong social conscience and helped to set up soup kitchens. He declared he ‘could feed every day a thousand families on the food that was wasted in London’ and wrote A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes , which was published in 1852 and included cheap recipes using offal and foraged food.
LOUIS PHILIPPE:
What do you say in English, the iron fist in the velvet glove? You look so mignonne and yet underneath you are Boadicea!
VICTORIA AND ALBERT were determined to work together to build a vision of the monarchy that not only represented the country, but also promoted it abroad. They had a lot to prove. At the start of Victoria’s reign, France was seen as the major imperial power in the world, and it was also Britain’s main enemy. Victoria and Albert’s 1843 trip to visit the King of France (who had been a close friend of Victoria’s father) marked the Queen’s first royal visit overseas. Victoria relished her time in France and as she was welcomed for the first time on foreign soil she declared that ‘the cheering of the people, and of the troops, crying “Vive la Reine! Vive le Roi! ” – well nigh overcame me.’
Map of the British Empire during the 1800s.
1 SEPTEMBER 1843
Left Plymouth on HMY Victoria and Albert , passing Falmouth and Pendennis
2 SEPTEMBER 1843
Passed by Cherbourg, greeted at the rock known as the Pluton, passed Dieppe and went on to Eu, where they were greeted by the King’s Barge and taken to the château at Le Tréport
3 SEPTEMBER 1843
At the château – riding, etc.
4 SEPTEMBER 1843
At St Pierre en Valle along the Route Clementine
5 SEPTEMBER 1843
At Le Tréport
6 SEPTEMBER 1843
Picnic in the forest at St Catherine
7 SEPTEMBER 1843
Sailed back to Brighton on the HMY Victoria and Albert to meet with their children at the Pavilion
‘The make-up was obviously very minimal; it was mostly trying to make everyone feel comfortable in their skin on set. The challenges for the team were to create that many hairstyles and different looks.’
NIC COLLINS, MAKE-UP DESIGNER
Make-up had been common at court during previous eras, but in Victoria’s day it was associated with ‘show’ girls and prostitutes, and respectable women did not wear any (though some privileged women cheated and wore a light dusting of rouge). Victoria herself never wore make-up at all – except, as is shown in the series, when she experimented during her state visit to the French court in 1843.
The make-up truck for series two of Victoria is peppered with historic pictures of Victoria and Albert, their family and associates – drawings, paintings and even some very early photographs. The fact that make-up was looked down upon by aristocrats of the era means that, for the most part, it is kept to a minimum in the series, though the Duke of Cumberland’s scar is of course fitted whenever he appears – even though in real life he refused to allow it to be painted and recorded for posterity.
When it came to Victoria’s visit to France, however, the team realised that this was a golden opportunity to showcase period make-up, which was accepted more readily at the French court. Nic Collins, the make-up designer, researched products from the period and decided to make powder and rouge from the original recipes, including a beetroot-stained balm for use on the cheeks. There is a downside to this historical experimentation, however. ‘These make-up products don’t last,’ Nic confides. ‘The beetroot balm can only be kept for a few days – women freshly made their make-up for each special occasion.’
Make-up in the early nineteenth century was not a subtle affair, with products like tapioca ‘pearl’ powder easily noticeable on the skin. It certainly doesn’t go down well in the series, with Albert commenting disapprovingly when Victoria experiments with make-up for the first time. To get the look just right, make-up is touched up on set to achieve the best effect for the light, and it can also be adjusted in post-production to increase the red and purple tones.
The team also created all the hair looks for the series, so the trailer is home to a treasure trove of wigs made of human hair. Many of the styles are ‘baked’ in an oven so they will last for the twelve-hour filming day – a trick that is particularly effective for ringlets. Hairstyles of the period were very complex – Baroness Lehzen’s signature nine-stem basket-weave plait, for example, was copied exactly from pictures of the day. When the team discovered that Albert’s uncle, Leopold, wore a toupee, they made one for the actor even though he wasn’t balding – along with a fine pair of sideburns. ‘Victorian men grew as much hair as they could and then combed it forward to cover bald patches,’ Nic explains. ‘Wigs were looked on as frivolous. At one stage they were actually taxed.’
Prosthetics are also a team speciality, with the leeches used to bleed Lord Melbourne made on set, including a ‘puppet’ leech, which was able to ‘pulse’ to replicate the action of real-life leeches sucking blood. A gruesome gallery of injuries caused by the explosion at the armoury that occurs in the series is also posted on the wall at one side of the truck. One thing’s for sure: make-up certainly isn’t all about making the actors look pretty.
MORE INTERNATIONAL TRIPS followed in time, with a visit to Germany, Britain’s great ally, as well as Belgium and France again in 1845. Victoria and Albert also welcomed distinguished international visitors at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace. When the Tsar of Russia visited in June 1844, the young Queen was keen to give a good impression and toured the Tsar’s rooms daily in the run-up to his arrival, ensuring that the paintings she’d chosen to entertain him were hung as she’d instructed and the soft furnishings were draped correctly.
ALBERT:
That is just the beginning. Uncle Leopold would have a Coburg on every throne in Europe if he could.
Victoria, a proud imperialist, was unashamedly ambitious for her country. As the British Empire expanded, she welcomed its gains and her subsequent sprawl of international dominions, upon which it is famously said ‘the sun never set’. British manufacturing was getting ready to take over the world and the British Army and Navy were spearheading the way in what has been described as the biggest land grab in history. The British Raj would shortly take its place in India, with Victoria very firmly at its head, while British gains worldwide would include lands all over Africa and the Middle East.
One of the most enduring myths about Victoria, a so-called fact that I encountered many times during the broadcast of the first series for Victoria , was that the queen spoke with a German accent. This is emphatically not the case. In fact, at the age of four Princess Victoria told her mother that she wanted to speak English at home, not German. Like the children of immigrants everywhere, she spoke with the accent of her native country, not that of her mother’s. Of course she did speak German fluently and she and Albert definitely spoke German together privately, but there is no doubt that Victoria thought in English. Her diary – her most personal document – was always written in English, even though it was larded with German phrases. The notion that Victoria spoke English with a German accent seems to have come from a Monty Python sketch where one of the Pythons played her as a German hausfrau. If nothing else, I can lay that one to rest. It’s important because, in England, the charge of being a bunch of Germans is still hurled at the royal family. Indeed, during the First World War, Victoria’s grandson George V changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor, as anti-German feeling was so intense. But in many ways there could be no more English a queen than Victoria. Although her mother and her governess were German, she herself always thought of herself as English and adored stories of her ancestors. She was particularly fond of the Stuarts and used to call herself a Jacobite, which was ironic given that it was her Hanoverian ancestors who had deposed the glamorous Stuarts.
But Victoria did not share the widespread xenophobia of her subjects. She had no qualms about taking a foreign husband, even though the Germans were widely regarded as slow-on-the-uptake sausage-eaters by the British and their press. There would have been a real outcry if Victoria had chosen a French husband as large swathes of the population still remembered the long and bloody Napoleonic wars. (I have tried to show that resentment in the attitude of the Duchess of Buccleuch to France, her brother having been killed at Trafalgar.) The Germans may have been bad but the French were seen as very much worse. So it was a very significant step when Victoria decided to visit France in 1843. She was the first monarch to have left England for nearly a century, and the first to set foot on French soil since Henry VIII. Personally it must have been a revelation; this was the first time she had entered a country of which she was not the monarch, so it must have seemed very strange to her. There is a wonderful story about how she went out incognito one day during her French visit, and was rather put out when nobody recognised her.
One thing I feel quite sure of is that Victoria would have been appalled by Brexit. Victoria and Albert tried to create their own informal European union through strategic marriages of their children. Victoria may have been English to her fingertips, but she understood the value of a family of nations.
BUILT AT THE Royal Dockyard at Woolwich in London and launched in 1841, HMS Trafalgar was an enormous 120-gun sailing ship that weighed over 2,500 tons. At Victoria’s request the ship was named by Lady Bridport, niece of Lord Nelson, the famed naval commander of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The wine used to launch the Trafalgar had come from Nelson’s ship, HMS Victory , when it returned from battle.
The launch, in June 1841, was a huge event. Five hundred people were aboard the ship when it hit the water – a hundred of them veterans of the battle. In addition, it is estimated that over half a million people turned up to watch from the crowded riverbank or the small boats that peppered the water. Victoria and Albert attended together, and the event was seen at court as a way to restore British public pride despite the ongoing military situation in Afghanistan, where British interests were faring poorly. The painter William Ranwell produced a commemorative painting, and several woodcuts and prints depicting the launch were hastily turned out and sold well. The HMS Trafalgar went on to serve at Sebastapol in the Crimean War.
Launch of HMS Trafalgar at Woolwich, London, 21 June 1841.
THE HISTORIAN JOHN SEELEY, who was born and died within Victoria’s reign, said that the British Empire was ‘acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness’ and, indeed, there was no over-arching plan. This meant that sometimes disastrous actions were undertaken, like the British intervention in a succession dispute in Afghanistan in 1839, which eventually led to their defeat in 1842 and slashed national pride to pieces. Victoria’s salve to the nation was to launch HMS Trafalgar , as the Navy was key to Britain’s sense of itself as a country and contributed hugely to the empire in an opportunistic fashion. British ships simply proved adept at capturing strategic toeholds that provided jumping-off points for the expansion of British territories. These were captured in different ways and for different reasons, and came under different forms of rule, but what united them was that colonists in all of them sang ‘God Save the Queen’ in English, in honour of the same woman. Thus Victoria herself became the uniting force of the empire, and British industry was free to make the most of these new markets. Even when some of these countries chose to divest themselves of British rule later in the Victorian era, the changes were largely made by civilised agreement. Australia and Canada both left Victoria on the throne when they gained their independence – indeed, many citizens of those countries are staunch royalists to this day.
LOUIS PHILIPPE:
These handsome Coburg Princes cannot be allowed to found an empire by snapping up all the Queens of Europe.
Victoria was a contradictory kind of queen. She loved jewels, for example, but was the original aristocrat who was ‘too posh to wash’. She enjoyed the company of men, but flew into a rage if her husband so much as chatted to another woman. She loved sex, but was unforgiving in her views on love outside marriage. When Sir Samuel Baker, the great British explorer, naturalist and engineer, returned to London with his Hungarian wife, Florence, Victoria refused to accept Lady Baker at court because she was rumoured to have had sex with her husband before they were married. Given that Sir Samuel had rescued his wife from a slave market, this seems a particularly harsh stance. On the other hand, Victoria’s kindness and generosity towards the rescued African slave Sarah Forbes Bonetta (see also here–here) stands in sharp contrast.
‘A gift from the King of the Blacks to the Queen of the Whites.’
KING GEZO OF DAHOMEY
WHEN 30-YEAR-OLD English naval commander Frederick Forbes dropped anchor on the coast of Africa in October 1849, he was on a mission to rid the region of slavery. Slavery had been illegal in British dominions since 1833, but the practice continued in many African states and the British Navy worked against it, ‘policing’ the seas to stop trafficking wherever possible. Forbes was welcomed at the court of King Gezo, where he witnessed a ritual sacrifice ceremony. One of the slaves to be slaughtered was a small girl of about six years of age. The ritual markings on the child’s face signified that she was from a royal line.
Horrified that the child was to be killed, Forbes challenged King Gezo. It is unclear whether he asked for Aina as a gift for his Queen or if Gezo offered her, but the girl left on Forbes’s ship, bound for England. In Nigeria she was baptised as ‘Sarah Forbes Bonetta’. When Forbes returned to Gravesend, Sarah went to live with his family and the Captain wrote to Queen Victoria, who later met with the little girl at Windsor Castle, where Sarah herself told the Queen about her capture and ordeal.
‘I feel myself in duty bound to request their Lordships to lay the offer before Her Majesty, if they should approve thereof. She now passes by the name of “Sarah Bonetta’”and is an intelligent, good tempered (I need hardly add Black) girl, about six or seven years of age.’
LETTER FROM CAPTAIN FORBES TO QUEEN VICTORIA, 3 AUGUST 1850
Sarah continued to live with Forbes’s family, though Victoria paid for her education and the little girl came to play at the palace with the royal children. By eight years of age she could speak English well and was learning music. Sarah made friends with Victoria’s daughter, Princess Alice, with whom she was particularly close.
‘Since her arrival in the country, she has made considerable progress in the study of the English language and manifests great musical talent and intelligence of no common order. Her hair is short, black and curling, strongly indicative of her African birth; while her features are pleasing and handsome, and her manners and conduct most mild and affectionate to all about her.’
LONDON STANDARD OF FREEDOM , 23 NOVEMBER 1850
In 1851, Sarah’s health began to suffer and Victoria decided to send her back to Africa, where it was hoped the warm weather would improve her condition. When she left, the Queen ensured that she travelled with adequate and proper clothing and also donated a large cheque to the missionary into whose care Sarah was entrusted. Victoria sent presents regularly to the little girl in her new home and Sarah wrote letters to Victoria and to Alice. In 1855 Sarah returned to England. Later, Victoria would become godmother to Sarah’s daughter, though sadly, Sarah died in August 1880 at the age of thirty-seven from tuberculosis.
Top: Sarah Forbes Bonetta in 1862. Bottom: Sarah, god-daughter of Queen Victoria, with her husband, James Davies.
ALBERT:
Can you be so naïve that you don’t realise that everything you do is political?
ALBERT, FOR HIS part, craved both his wife’s attention and her trust, and desperately wanted to be the most important influence in her life to prove himself worthy of sharing her power. Both he and Victoria were diligent in their duties, taking an active part in advising and influencing British politics both at home and abroad, and slowly, Victoria – who had always been quite selfish in getting what she wanted – came to realise how difficult their marriage sometimes was for Albert. After he died she said sadly, ‘Will they accept him now?’ It is unclear if she meant her aristocratic friends, her subjects or simply the British press, who had vilified the Prince no matter what he undertook. She saw him as a massively talented man who was never really accepted and, loving him as she did, she became his unrelenting champion.
‘Never permit people to speak on subjects concerning yourself or your affairs, without your having yourself desired them to do so. The moment a person behaves improperly on this subject, change the conversation.’
~LETTER FROM LEOPOLD, KING OF THE BELGIANS, TO VICTORIA, 12 july 1837
The face that Victoria and Albert presented to the world together, however, was pristine. With their close family life, their dedication to each other and their unprecedented commitment to high culture, technological advancements, philanthropic causes and national life, they projected a powerful image not just as a couple, but as an emblem of Britain. Their subjects knew what they represented both at home and abroad, and Victoria’s image (and Albert’s too to a lesser extent) became the face of the burgeoning British Empire. When the soon-to-be novelist Charlotte Brontë was in Brussels during the early and mid 1840s, she spotted the Queen, who was also visiting, ‘for an instant flashing through the Rue Royale in a carriage and six, surrounded by soldiers. She was laughing and talking very gaily. She looked a little stout, vivacious lady, very plainly dressed, not much dignity or pretension about her.’
THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON, military hero of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, remained the British Army’s Commander-in-Chief until 1852 – right through the first decade and a half of Victoria’s rule. During his time in office, conditions for ordinary soldiers were greatly improved. The Army had historically been a brutal occupation: it would often mete out harsh penalties for minor infractions, and soldiers received just a shilling a day in pay, but might be charged ‘stoppages’ for food and clothing. In 1847 a new rule meant that a soldier had to receive at least a penny a day for his service regardless of these ‘stoppages’. And a maximum of fifty lashes as punishment for any one soldier was set in 1846 (in 1829 the maximum had been 500 lashes – an astonishing number to endure).
When Lord Howick became Secretary of War in 1835 a new regime also introduced new incentives – good conduct badges and good conduct pay. Howick encouraged investment in rank-and-file soldiers, so, for example, military libraries were set up in many barracks, and for soldiers drawn from the working classes this was a huge incentive – many learned to read during their army service as a result. However, Howick’s reforms were not universally popular – he banned free rations of spirits and in place of the daily shot of grog he instituted more hot meals. This improved the well-being of serving soldiers tremendously, even though there was an outcry at being deprived of their drink.
The design and appearence of uniforms changed over Victoria’s reign, too. The commonly used ‘redcoat’ was swapped for a darker uniform, which – like Prince Albert’s newly designed helmet (see here) – would be less of a target on the battlefield. Changes were also afoot to the kind of weaponry available. The expertise of the Industrial Revolution was not only directed towards factory equipment – new and more efficient guns were important innovations, too.
Despite these developments, Britain in the early Victorian era was less militarised than other powers, including Prussia, Austria and Russia. That said, when combined with the private army of the East India Company, which represented the Crown in India and Southeast Asia, British military might was impressively large. It had little function at home in Britain, though, and as a result did not have as much influence as the armies of other powers.
The British Royal Navy (or ‘Senior Service’) was larger and more influential than the Army. It was based in Portsmouth and Chatham dockyards and had significant holdings overseas, including Gibraltar, Malta and Bombay. The Navy was key in combating the slave trade and ‘policed’ seas worldwide, safeguarding Britain’s trade routes. The British Empire could not have grown, or indeed functioned, without it. The ‘Bombay Marine’ was the East India Company’s equivalent service and the two forces worked together in the interests of the British Crown.
Internationally, France was viewed as Britain’s main enemy and the grudges that had been formed during and after the Napoleonic Wars still lingered. Given the close ties between the British and German royals, Germany was considered an ally (an assumption that would prove disastrous in the early twentieth century after Victoria’s death). Still, Britain was not involved in any European wars during the early part of Victoria’s reign. Military activity was restricted mainly to keeping the peace and to disastrous interventions in Afghanistan and the successful war against China, which was waged solely to promote Britain’s interests in the opium trade.
