KING LOUIS XVI OF FRANCE was executed on 21 January 1793 on the guillotine, the revolutionary killing machine which had just been introduced to humanize – and industrialize – the process of execution.
The night before, Louis read David Hume’s account of the execution of Charles I. But the French king was prevented from recreating any of the poignancy of the death of that English king. Instead, in his execution, everything was done to rob Louis of his dignity, both as a king and a human being. He was condemned as a mere errant citizen, Louis Capet; his hair was roughly cropped on the scaffold and he was ignominiously strapped to the movable plank before having his head and neck thrust into the guides for the twelve-inch, heavily weighted blade. Once severed, the bleeding head was held up to the mob before being thrown between the legs of the body, which was then buried ten feet deep in quicklime.
Not since the St Bartholomew Day Massacre had a foreign event provoked such horror in England. Audiences demanded that the curtain be brought down in theatres and performances abandoned; the whole House of Commons wore mourning dress; and crowds surrounded George III’s coach, crying ‘War with France!’ In the event, the French Republic took the initiative by declaring war on Britain on 1 February.
Nothing would be the same again. The war, with only brief respites of short-lived peace, was to last eighteen years; it cost more in men and money than any before; and it rewrote the rules of politics. Henceforward, monarchies would be measured by their ability to respond to the new, post-revolutionary world. Those that could adapt survived; those that could not died, usually bloodily. Which the British would do was by no means a foregone conclusion.
I
Only four years earlier, in 1789, when the French Revolution broke out, nothing seemed less likely than this cataclysmic struggle. Much of the English elite welcomed the Revolution, which they saw in terms of France belatedly catching up with England’s own benign and Glorious Revolution of exactly a century before in 1688–89. And, in any case, they took for granted that the revolutionary turmoil would cripple France as a great power for a generation.
Most confident of all was the Prime Minister, William Pitt. Son of the great mid-century Prime Minister of the same name, and known as Pitt the Younger, he had a meteoric career. Barely out of Cambridge, where he had excelled at mathematics, he became Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of only twenty-four in the aftermath of the American War of Independence, and quickly proved as great a peace minister as his father was a war leader.
This was because his qualities were almost the mirror-image of his manic-depressive father’s. He was an optimist, a long and deep sleeper, and excelled as a financier, a fiscal reformer and a manager of his party and cabinet. He inherited few of the volatile passions of his father – he was somewhat rigid in demeanour and dry in speech – but was a relentless workhorse. Thus, under his sober guidance, Britain shrugged off the effects of the American War of Independence and even enjoyed a trade boom with her former enemies, France and America.
Pitt’s best qualities were on display in the Budget speech he made in the Commons in February 1792. ‘Unquestionably’, he told the House, ‘there never was a time in the history of this country when from the situation of Europe we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace, than we may at the present moment.’
Not even he could predict that the outbreak of the greatest war in which England had ever been involved was a year away.
One man who did not join in the cheers was Edmund Burke MP. Of a modest, half-Catholic Irish background, Burke had forged a remarkable career for himself in London as a writer, wit and politician. His maiden speech – a furious assault on the Stamp Act – brought him instant fame and he became a leader of the extreme Whigs, attacking, in classic Whig style, royal power and the king’s influence in government. Indeed, his continued passionate defence of the American revolutionaries cost him his seat in populous Bristol, forcing him to seek re-election from a handful of compliant voters in the ‘rotten borough’ of Malton.
But – despite the famous mock epitaph, which accused Burke of giving to party the talents that were intended for mankind – he never lost his original love for literature or the imaginative powers that went with it. These were now powerfully excited by the tremendous spectacle of revolutionary France.
Crucial was Burke’s interest in the ‘Sublime’. This he had defined as a young man, in a notable, pioneering essay, which is the turning point in the whole history of the taste of eighteenth-century Europe, as ‘a sort of delightful horror, … a tranquillity tinged with terror’, which we get from the contemplation of darkness, danger and death. It was this insight which enabled him to perceive, long before anyone else, the enormity of the passions unleashed by the French Revolution. In doing so, it turned him from a mere politician into a prophet whose words echo down the generations.
Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. The Revolution, though he already called it ‘the most astonishing [thing] that has … happened in the world’, was then barely a year old. Absolutism and feudalism had been abolished; Church property confiscated; the Bastille had fallen; the new Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man had been promulgated; and the king and queen marched from Versailles to Paris.
But the Terror, the abolition of the monarchy and the execution of the king, the revolutionary wars that convulsed Europe for more than a decade and a half and led to the deaths of millions, still lay in the future. Burke, however, prophesied them all.
Burke did so because he correctly identified – from the beginning – that the operating principle of the Revolution was inhuman, abstract Reason, which thought that it could and should remodel politics, society and humanity itself from scratch. This levelling Reason saw history, habit and tradition as mere obstacles to progress that like any human opposition were to be destroyed in the joyous, all-consuming bonfire of the vanities: ‘The Year One’ of human history.
For Burke, on the other hand, history and tradition were the foundation of civilization and habit the thing that made us human. From time to time, they might need reform. But reform should preserve, not destroy, their essence. Monarchy, as the supreme embodiment of history and tradition, thus became a test case. Was it the key obstacle to the new world, as the French quickly came to see? Or was it the guarantor of stability and freedom, as the British had decided (on Burke’s reading) in 1689, and would again, Burke predicted, once more?
Yet again, Burke was to be proved right. When he wrote the Reflections in 1790, his was a voice crying in the wilderness. But, over the next few years, public opinion swung, increasingly strongly, in his direction.
As in everything else, George, Prince of Wales, the king’s eldest son, was the barometer of fashion. Handsome (before he ran to fat), intelligent, charming, sensual and a brilliant mimic, his relations with his father followed the normal Hanoverian pattern of mutual loathing and contempt. He thought his father mean and puritanical; his father thought his son a wanton and a wastrel. The Prince of Wales also followed the traditions of his dynasty by putting himself at the head of the opposition party of radical Whigs, of which the pre-Revolutionary Burke had been the leading ideologue.
The prince’s first reaction to the Reflections was thus, to Burke’s immense hurt, to dismiss it as ‘a farrago of nonsense’ and the work of a turncoat. But, with the Terror, he changed his mind. The execution of Louis XVI, he wrote to his mother, Queen Charlotte, had filled him with ‘a species of sentiment towards my father which surpasses all description’. He made his peace with the king (though it didn’t last long); broke with the opposition and declared his enthusiastic support for Prime Minister Pitt. He even toyed with the idea of serving as a volunteer in the war against France.
And where the prince led, much of the Whig Party followed, joining Pitt in a coalition to wage war ‘under the standard of an hereditary monarchy’ against Republican France and all that she stood for. This increasingly ideological war irretrievably split the Whigs, and condemned them to the wilderness for a generation. The more conservative members, who believed that opposition to the war and calls for constitutional reform would culminate in the destruction of the constitution and the monarchy, as they had in France, soon followed the logic of their position and joined the government. This left only a rump of radicals in opposition, who were not only easily outvoted but were also tainted with republicanism and treason.
Once it was Jacobitism which had done for the Tories and left them in the cold; now it was Jacobinism (as the creed of the French ultra-Republicans was known) which dished the Whigs.
The great beneficiary was the monarchy. For much of his reign, as radicalism flourished in the cities and his American subjects rejected his authority, George III could do no right. Now he could do no wrong. Indeed, the less he did the better, as he turned (in the popular imagination at least) from a meddlesome would-be absolutist into the benign father of his people: uxorious, modest, moral, frugal and the very embodiment of a modern, eighteenth-century king. He liked to live simply, far removed from the formal ceremonies of monarchy, as an ordinary country squire. Those subjects who encountered him on his frequent walks found a man who conversed with them as equals. He enjoyed pleasant holidays in English seaside resorts, and when he was in Weymouth a year before Louis XVI was put to death, a lady of that town remarked on how wonderful it was to have George in their town, ‘not so much because he was a King, but because they said he was such a worthy gentleman, and that the like of him was never known in this realm before’.
Thus, during the tumult of revolution and the recurring threats of French invasion, George III stood out as a reassuring symbol of stability who represented British virtues of simplicity, sincerity and good old-fashioned common sense. Indeed, he was the exact opposite of hot-headed Continental rulers or luxurious despots surrounded by the flummery of ceremony. He had the common touch without doubt. ‘The English people were pleased to see in him a crowning specimen of themselves – a royal John Bull’, in the words of the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt. The result was the astonishing popular success of his Golden Jubilee on 25 October 1810. There were illuminations, fireworks, dancing in the streets and celebratory verse:
A People, happy, great, and free;
That People with one common voice,
From Thames’ to Ganges’ common shores rejoice,
In universal jubilee.
But that very day, George, who had already had two mysterious episodes of apparent mental illness, began his permanent and irreversible descent into a twilight world of madness, blindness and senility.
II
At the time of his father’s collapse in 1810, the Prince of Wales (disrespectfully known as ‘Prinny’ to his cronies) was already forty-eight and, under the combined influences of drink, drugs (like many of his contemporaries he took an opium compound known as laudanum) and a gargantuan appetite, his youthful good looks were fading fast and his skin had turned a deep coppery hue.
He spent gigantically too, and his own treasurer declared that his debts were ‘beyond all kind of calculation whatever’. The contrast with his prudent and down-to-earth father could not have been greater and his profligacy and debauched antics had made him as deeply unpopular as the King was loved and respected. But worst of all was his disastrous marriage.
The marriage began hopefully as part of the closing of ranks within the royal family in the wake of the French Revolution. In return for the payment of his debts, the prince agreed to his father’s urgent wish that he should marry and father an heir. German custom, however, dictated that his bride should be royal too. Best of a bad bunch of available Protestant princesses seemed to be his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick.
But when she arrived in England it was loathing at first sight. She was coarse, ill educated and none too clean. After his marriage in the Chapel Royal in St James’s, George knocked himself out with brandy and spent his wedding night passed out on the bedroom floor with his head in the hearth. The following morning he recovered sufficiently to get Caroline pregnant, but only after he had steeled himself with more alcohol ‘to conquer my person and overcome the disgust of her person’. A daughter, christened Charlotte, was born in January 1796. It was the first and last time the couple slept together, and they soon separated.
Such was the man who became Prince Regent of the United Kingdom. He got a bad press at the time, particularly from the great cartoonists like Gillray and Cruikshank, who had a field day with his shape and his private life. And posterity, on the whole, hasn’t been much kinder.
But there’s another side to the story. The Prince Regent wasn’t much good at the business side of monarchy, which he found altogether too much like hard work. ‘Playing at king’, as he sighed shortly after becoming regent, ‘is no sinecure.’ On the other hand, few more imaginative men have sat on the British throne, and none has left more tangible results: in London, the royal palaces and the strange, hybrid concept of British identity itself.
Once again, it all goes back to the French Revolution. Burke’s final prophecy and warning to the French had been that ‘some popular general’ would arise and become ‘the master of your whole Republic’. This prediction too was fulfilled by the meteoric rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the young, impoverished Corsican nobleman who became in quick succession France’s most successful general, First Consul and finally, in 1804, self-proclaimed Emperor of the French.
Napoleon was self-crowned too in an extraordinary ceremony held in the hastily patched-up cathedral of Notre-Dame. Drawing on a range of royal and imperial symbolism, Napoleon and his stage designers came up with new rituals and regalia, a new imperial court, thickly populated with ‘Grand’-this and ‘Arch’-that, each in his own lavish new uniform, and a new imperial family, quarrelling as bitterly as any ancient dynasty.
Above all, the event, carefully recorded on canvas and in print, set new standards both for pomp and precision which the established monarchies rushed to copy. Not only, it seemed, could Napoleon beat kings and tsars on the battlefield, he could beat them at ‘playing at king’ as well.
The Republic had been bad enough for the Prince of Wales. But this upstart emperor was worse, and doing him down and outdoing him became – insofar as his easy-going personality allowed – an obsession. The Prince Regent had over a decade to wait. But at last the day arrived and on 18 June 1815, at Waterloo, to the south of Brussels, Napoleon engaged with a British army commanded by Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. Each side played to their strengths: the French attacked with brio; the British doggedly resisted in defensive formations. ‘Let’s see who can pound longest,’ said Wellington. In the event, the British did and held out until the arrival of the Prussian allied army gave them an overwhelming advantage.
The French retreat turned into a rout. On 3 July an armistice was agreed; on the 6th the allies entered Paris and on the 13th Napoleon wrote the most remarkable letter of his life. It was addressed to the Prince Regent. ‘Altesse Royale [Royal Highness],’ it began, ‘I have terminated my political career … I put myself under the protection of British laws, which I entreat of Your Royal Highness as from the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of my foes.’ In this contest of the imperial eagle against the royal popinjay, the popinjay, it seemed, had won.
But even in defeat and exiled to the British possession of St Helena – a tiny, remote Atlantic island – Napoleon continued to fascinate his enemies. And none more so than the Prince Regent. It began with the contest of capitals: London versus Paris.
Napoleon, like many despots, was a megalomaniac builder, who started to refashion the then largely medieval warren of Paris into the worthy capital of an empire which, at its height, stretched from the Bay of Biscay to the gates of Moscow. This was to throw down the gauntlet to Britain, since London, fattened by overseas empire and trade, already dwarfed Paris in size and wealth. But it was a rather dingy world capital, shrouded in fog and coal smoke and traversable only by rutted and narrow streets and lanes. St James’s Palace, it was said by sophisticated European visitors, looked like a workhouse and Parliament like a coffee house.
Now, ‘Prinny’ decided, the city must look like the capital of a victorious empire. The man charged with realizing his dreams was John Nash. Nash’s brief was simple: he must outdo Napoleonic Paris. And, thanks to his unusual combination of qualities – as both visionary architect and shrewd property developer – he largely succeeded.
His scheme, which involved both landscaping and town planning on a heroic scale, created a grand processional route from the newly laid-out Regent’s Park in the north, through Regent Street, to Pall Mall and the gates of the prince’s then London residence in the south. Nash worked in sweeping curves and artful vistas; while his buildings, which were really terraces of middle-class brick houses, were covered in stucco plaster and painted to look like a succession of noble palaces. This was architecture as urban stage-set: as theatrical as Napoleon’s coronation and as successful.
Then, in 1820 there arrived a day for which the prince had waited almost as eagerly as he had Napoleon’s downfall. For almost a decade after he became regent, his father, George III, had lived the life of a recluse in a little three-room apartment at Windsor. Dead to the world, he spent hours thumping an old harpsichord. But his condition suddenly deteriorated and he died on 29 June.
The regent was king at last. And he was determined that everybody should know it. But there was unfinished business with an enemy who stood equal in his eyes with Napoleon. One of his first decisions as king was to order his government to pass a Bill in Parliament dissolving his marriage to his hated wife, who now exulted in her position as Queen Caroline. She had been in voluntary exile in southern Europe, where she had enjoyed herself to the utmost with a succession of male admirers. It was the government’s duty to present evidence of the queen’s outrageous behaviour to the House of Lords, and secure a divorce for thenew king. The ministry, on the other hand, saw that depriving a queen of her rights was politically impossible and attempted to make George see reason. But the king would not be deterred.
In the end, the cabinet was proved right. The country rallied behind Caroline, whom it saw as a wronged woman and the embodiment of female purity. (If she was, it was only in comparison with her estranged husband.) The monarchy slipped to the depths of unpopularity, and even the Lords found it hard to stomach George’s hypocrisy. The government dropped the Bill.
George’s coronation finally took place on 19 July 1821. He had delayed it for over a year in the hope that the longed-for divorce would mean that he would not have to share the greatest day of his life with Caroline. Thwarted by the half-hearted efforts of his government and the truculence of his people, George got what he wanted by stationing prizefighters dressed as pages outside the doors of Westminster Abbey to exclude uninvited guests, with the queen top of the list.
Partly in compensation for the horrors of the past year it was, George resolved, to be the best-organized and most magnificent coronation in British history. It was certainly the most expensive, costing almost a quarter of a million pounds, while his father’s had been staged for less than ten thousand.
For George IV was not measuring himself against a king but the Emperor Napoleon. Indeed, he was measuring himself literally, since his tailor was sent to Paris to copy Napoleon’s coronation robe. The result imitates the form of Napoleon’s robe and, being even more thickly embroidered and befurred, it took eight pages to carry it, and it was said that, had they let go, the king would have toppled on to his back.
George also copied Napoleon in demanding a precise and exhaustive record of the event in a series of coloured lithographs that preserved every detail of every costume for posterity. And, once again, the emulation was conscious and explicit. Sir George Nayler’s The Coronation of His Most Sacred Majesty King George the Fourth was ‘Undertaken by His Majesty’s Especial Command’, and Nayler received a £3,000 royal subsidy. For it had to be the best – or at any rate, better than Napoleon’s: ‘This work will excel any of the kind in the known world; and the folio History of Bonaparte’s Coronation, the most important and perfect yet published, will sink into nothing by contrast,’ the Preface boasts.
Eventually, but only a decade after George’s death, the ambition was fulfilled with the appearance of a set of splendid volumes, with their hand-coloured plates, lavishly heightened in gold, which captured more than a little of the magnificence of the day.
One of the spectators at the coronation was the Scottish historian, poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott, who was bowled over by the combination of ‘gay, gorgeous and antique dress which floated before the eye’. If the coronation was supposed to bewitch, the magic certainly worked on Scott. And he tried to transmit the wonder of the day in a newspaper article, which asked his readers to imagine the Abbey lit by the
sun, which brightened and saddened as if on purpose, now beaming in full lustre on the rich and varied assemblage, and now darting a solitary ray, which catched, as it passed, the glittering folds of a banner … and then rested full on some fair form … whose circlet of diamonds glistened under it influence.
Conjure up, he enjoined them, the ‘sights of splendour and sounds of harmony’.
Scott, born in 1771, belonged to the generation that had grown up with the French Revolution and had reacted strongly against it. Profoundly influenced by Burke and by Burke’s German disciples, he lived history and tradition and gave them life in his poetry and novels.
One of the most famous was Kenilworth, which focused on the great revels presented at Kenilworth Castle for Good Queen Bess by her favourite, the Earl of Leicester. Published in 1821, the novel plugged into the same fashion for all things Elizabethan and Shakespearean that was tapped by costumes George devised for his coronation. Now Scott, who had first met George in 1815, was given the opportunity to devise his own grand historical pageant when he was put in charge of organizing the king’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822.
The visit – the first to Scotland by a reigning monarch since Charles II’s coronation in 1651 – began on 14 August with the king’s ceremonial landing at Leith and continued for a fortnight with balls, receptions and a grand procession from Holyrood Palace to Edinburgh Castle. There the king inspected the Scottish royal regalia, which had recently been unearthed by Scott himself.
Throughout, at Scott’s insistence, all the gentlemen wore Highland dress, including the king, whose ample figure was compressed into something like the necessary shape by corsets and flesh-coloured tights. The climax came in the great banquet held in the Parliament House, where, a century earlier, Scotland’s separate political existence had been extinguished by the passage of the Act of Union. The king called for a toast to the ‘Clans and Chieftains of Scotland’, to which the chief of the Clan Macgregor replied with one to ‘The Chief of Chiefs – the King!’
It was all, as the hard-headed have not ceased to point out from then till now, nonsense. But, as befits Scott’s genius as impresario, it was inspired, romantic nonsense. Above all, it was successful nonsense. It gave Scotland a proud cultural identity that, for over a hundred years, dwelt in a sort of parallel universe alongside the political subordination required by the Union. And, as the ardently Tory Scott intended, it firmly anchored this renewed Scots national identity to the Hanoverian monarchy.
For nationalism had played a part in the downfall of Napoleon’s empire second only to British arms. The British monarchy instead, thanks in the first place to George IV’s taste for theatrical pageantry, was able to harness the wild horses of nationalism, geld and domesticate them and turn them into the gaily decked palfreys pulling the royal state coach. Or, in the case of the Highland regiments, its foot-soldiers, marching alongside and winning the empire’s battles under the Union Flag.
For that, parading through the streets of Edinburgh in a kilt was a small price to pay.
III
But George IV was unable to keep up the flurry of activity that marked the beginning of his reign. His health and mobility declined and his self-indulgence grew, as he washed down vast amounts of food with even larger quantities of alcohol and dulled what little sense remained with ever more frequent doses of laudanum. He died, unlamented, at Windsor on 26 June 1830 and, having been predeceased by his daughter and only child, was succeeded by his eldest surviving brother, William, Duke of Clarence.
At first sight, William IV, who was already aged sixty-four, was not a promising prospect as king. He had been sent to sea at the age of thirteen as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, where he had spent a few happy years drinking and womanizing around the world; on his return he shocked his staid parents and polished brothers with his compulsive swearing. Deprived of the chance to further his career, he had then spent most of his life as a relatively impecunious younger son. It was an empty existence with no meaningful role, and he filled his time fathering a numerous progeny of grasping bastards. And he had been cashiered from the only senior post he had (briefly) held – that of Lord High Admiral – for refusing to submit to the Prime Minister’s orders. He was also personally ridiculous, with a strange, pineapple-shaped head and a tendency to talk at length and at some distance from the point.
On the other hand, he was a moderate Whig in politics, in contrast to the rabid Toryism of other members of the royal family, while his naval service had given him both a common touch and robust common sense. He was described as ‘A little old, red-nosed, weather-beaten, jolly looking person with an ungraceful air and carriage’, rather like a retired sea captain. He was also – in striking contrast to his predecessor – completely indifferent to ceremony and pomp and circumstance.
Testimony to this is Clarence House, the elegant but comparatively modest London residence built for William while he was still heir to the throne. The king continued to live there after his accession and showed no wish at all to move into the neighbouring Buckingham Palace, George IV’s last, grandest, most expensive and still embarrassingly incomplete building project. Instead, he asked whether the palace could be converted into barracks.
William was equally unexcited about his coronation. Indeed, he suggested doing away with it entirely as a mere occasion ‘for useless and ill-timed expense’. Could he not simply take the oaths to the constitution and the Protestant religion prescribed by the Bill of Rights and have done with it? When he was in the robing room of the House of Lords preparing to dissolve Parliament, he snatched the crown from a startled courtier and, placing it askew on his head, said to Lord Grey, the Prime Minister, ‘Now, my Lord, the Coronation is over.’
Horrified Tory protests forced him to go through with the real ceremony. But it was done on the cheap (costing less than a fifth of George IV’s, it was nicknamed the ‘Half-Crownation’), while the ancient ritual was ignorantly butchered and abbreviated. And ever the boisterous and laid-back sailor, William conspicuously mocked the gravity of the occasion during the service.
All this was of a piece with his usual behaviour. Early in his reign he would walk up St James’s Street unattended, but had to give up when he was mobbed. On another occasion, society was shocked when William took the King of Württemberg for a drive round London and ‘set down the King (“dropped him”, as he calls it) at Grillon’s Hotel. The King of England dropping another King at a tavern!’ And again, impatient at the delays in getting the state coach ready for the dissolution of Parliament, he threatened to go in a hackney coach (the ancestor of the modern taxi) instead. Never, in short, has Britain come nearer to a bicycling – or at least a taxi-ing – monarchy than under William IV. But would these decent, unpretentious qualities be enough?
Barely a month after William’s accession there was a brutal reminder of the fate of unsuccessful sovereigns. Paris once again rose in anger: the ‘Days of July’, when the King of France, whose monarchy had been restored after the fall of Napoleon, was ignominiously driven from the throne. Now, news came, he was on his way to seek refuge in Britain.
He was packed off to Edinburgh, where he spent a miserable winter in unheated and unfurnished rooms at Holyrood, protected from a hostile mob only by Sir Walter Scott.
Just how secure was the throne of his reluctant and ungracious English host? For, despite forty-odd years of almost uninterrupted Tory rule, from the 1780s to the 1820s, the ideas of the French Revolution had taken root in Britain. But was it to be full-blown revolution? Or reform?
In the hard days after victory in 1815, when the economy had taken a serious downward turn and aberrant climatic conditions caused the harvests to fail, radical agitation had reached a peak. In 1819, for instance, a great demonstration took place in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, as 60,000 men, women and children marched on the town. The town magistrates panicked and ordered the local yeomanry cavalry to disperse the peaceful throng. The charge killed eleven and wounded about four hundred in what, in a savage parody of Waterloo, became known within days as the Peterloo Massacre.
But the demonstrators had not threatened violence. The huge crowd was carefully marshalled, with the brass bands accompanying each division playing patriotic tunes, like ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’. And when it was the turn of the national anthem most members of the crowd respectfully took their hats off. In 1820 the pro-Caroline demonstrators focused their anger on political corruption, not anti-monarchism. And the radical leaders paid court to the scorned queen, like any ardent royalist basking in the light of majesty.
Back in the heady days of the early 1790s, a minority had hoped for revolution red in tooth and claw. But this revolutionary group was quickly eclipsed by another, who wanted reform, not revolution. They thought change could be brought about within England’s existing institutions, and by peaceful means, not revolutionary violence. They also differed from the ardently pro-French revolutionaries and their undercover, quasi-treasonable followers in that they paraded their John Bull British patriotism, as the Manchester and Caroline demonstrators had done. Finally, the striking thing is that the target of the reform agitation was not the monarchy, as it was in contemporary France and had been in seventeenth-century England, but Parliament.
In the early nineteenth century Parliament met, as it had done for centuries, in the medieval royal palace of Westminster, which had been long abandoned by the monarchy and handed over instead to Parliament and the Law Courts. Over the centuries, the ancient structure had been repeatedly hacked around and refurbished, the Commons most recently by Sir Christopher Wren in the eighteenth century and the Lords by James Wyatt at the beginning of the nineteenth.
The result was a kind of physical embodiment of Burke’s ancient constitution, in which the antique buildings had been slowly and almost imperceptibly altered and adapted over the ages. They were also ramshackle, jerry-built and prone to fire.
Much the same could be said, by its critics, of the House of Commons itself. Many important and fast-growing towns had no MP at all, while tiny, half-abandoned villages with a handful of inhabitants returned two MPs each at the command of the owner of the rotten borough, as such constituencies were known. A handful of rich and powerful noblemen owned a dozen or more rotten boroughs each and could make or break governments.
It was William’s misfortune that the pressure for parliamentary reform suddenly intensified at the beginning of his reign. For, five months after his accession, the Tory government fell and a Whig administration took office for the first time in almost fifty years.
The new government also looked to a different geographical constituency. For the capital was not the only town to undergo radical change in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The noble townscape of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, for instance, is the equal of anything created by the Prince Regent in London. But its grand terraced main street and monumental column are a memorial not to a king or prince, or a general or admiral, but to Charles, Earl Grey, the Prime Minister of the Whig government of 1830 and a local Northumbrian grandee.
Grey’s father was a successful general who was raised to an earldom. He first became an MP at the age of twenty-two and quickly established a reputation as a brilliant, if reckless, speaker and an accomplished adulterer, who numbered Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, among his conquests.
In the Whig split during the French revolutionary wars Grey remained with the rump in opposition. But he disagreed with the leadership over their pro-French defeatism. Instead, he argued, the Whig Party must renew itself by discovering its earlier radicalism and joining – or rather leading – the movement for parliamentary reform.
For Grey was, and remained, a natural aristocrat, who saw himself acting on behalf of the people, and not at their command. Now, as Prime Minister, with nine out of thirteen cabinet ministers drawn from the Lords, he had the opportunity to put his ideas into practice. Over the next three years, three Reform Bills were submitted to Parliament each to much the same effect: fifty-six rotten boroughs to be abolished; forty-four seats to be given to large towns, and then the most modest property holders to be enfranchised. The first was defeated in the Commons and provoked a general election that, even on the unreformed franchise, produced a Whig landslide. The second was defeated in the Lords. And it looked as though the intransigent Tory majority in the Lords would do the same to the third.
The only way – it seemed – to break the deadlock was for William to create enough peers to give the Whigs a majority in the Lords as well.
So far, William had given Grey unstinting support. He had done so on practical grounds, since he recognized that reform was the only alternative to revolution. He also acted on principle, since he saw it as his duty, whatever his personal wishes, ‘to support the Prime Minister until Parliament by its vote determines that the Prime Minister no longer possesses the confidence of the nation’. But a creation of up to fifty peers, which would radically dilute the composition of the Lords, was a step too far. William refused; Grey resigned and, on 9 May 1832, the king invited the Tories to form a government.
England now had its ‘Days of May’, when it looked as though London, Newcastle and the rest would follow in the steps of revolutionary Paris. There were mass demonstrations and strikes; newspapers whipped up the frenzy with provocative headlines like ‘The Eve of the Barricades’, while in Birmingham a speaker at a rally of 100,000 people proclaimed Tory ‘incompetency to govern’ and invoked the people’s ‘Right to Arm’ in the face of oppression from the Bill of Rights.
When the American rebels had used that language, George III had dug his heels in; William IV instead sought compromise.
The Tories, he suggested privately, should simply cut their losses, bury their pride and abstain. Reform was inevitable, and that way at least they would retain their inbuilt majority in the Lords. It was a bitter pill to swallow and they resisted as long as possible. But finally they had to admit that they couldn’t form a government. William now had no choice but to recall Grey and to agree – in writing – to his demand for the mass creation of peers.
It was the most humiliating document a king had signed since the Civil War. But William turned it to his advantage by informing the Tory leaders of what he had done. Certain now that they would be swamped even in the Lords, they abandoned their resistance and the Reform Bill went through.
The key figure in these behind-the-scenes negotiations was the king’s private secretary and long-serving courtier, Sir Herbert Taylor. Taylor wrote all William’s letters (up to thirty or forty a day) and the suspicion must be that he helped shape much of their contents as well. If so, it was a job well done. For, by their joint actions in the ‘Days of May’, William and Taylor had invented, more or less at a stroke, both the modern constitutional monarchy and the role of the private secretary as the principal cog in the royal machine.
On 7 June the Reform Act received the royal assent by commission. Grey had wanted William to give it in person. But, because he disapproved of the popular clamour, the king refused. It was perhaps his only false step in the whole affair. The new House of Commons, elected under the new franchise, was unencumbered by such fear of public opinion.
Two years later, on the night of 16 October 1834, the chambers of both Houses of Parliament and all the rest of the Palace of Westminster apart from the Great Hall were consumed by a raging fire. Reconstructing Parliament from scratch now ceased to be a disputed metaphor and became a practical necessity instead.
IV
William himself, now in his late sixties and beyond hope of legitimate children of his own, would not long survive the Reform Act. His health was declining and his tetchiness increasing. But he was determined to live long enough for his heir presumptive, Princess Victoria, to inherit the crown in her own right. For if he died before she reached her eighteenth birthday, a regent would have to rule in her name. And that person would be William’s detested sister-in-law and Victoria’s mother, Marie Louise Victoria, Duchess of Kent. Contemplating the prospect of power, the duchess had become overbearing and nakedly ambitious. Outraged in turn, nine months before the young princess’s birthday, William made an extraordinary speech to the court. He did not mince his words, saying that he was determined to prolong his life for a few months longer, for ‘I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that young lady … and not in the hands of the person now near me, who is surrounded by evil designs and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed’.
William made it with days to spare. Victoria celebrated her eighteenth birthday (her royal coming of age) on 24 May 1837 and William, his goal achieved, died on 20 June.
Victoria was at Kensington Palace when her uncle died. And it was here that she had been brought up and educated. Her education was strong in foreign languages and traditional female accomplishments like drawing and music. But it had neglected the male curriculum of classics and mathematics.
On the other hand, her governess, Baroness Lehzen, whose ideal monarch was Queen Elizabeth I, had made sure that, despite the bias of her education, Victoria would be no meekly submissive woman. Lehzen brought her up to rule, and Victoria had the appetite and will to do so. She was also prepared for the necessary hard work. During the king’s illness, her lessons had been cancelled. ‘I regret rather my singing lesson,’ she said, ‘though it is only for a short period, but duty and proper feeling go before all pleasures.’ Just eighteen, she was showing the qualities that would define her reign.
The news that she was queen was brought at six o’clock in the morning by the Lord Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who were received by Victoria in her dressing gown. And the contrast between the glowing young queen and the sombrely dressed, elderly male political establishment was only underscored by her Accession Council, which was held later in the day. The next day she presided over another council meeting ‘as if she had been doing it all her life’. All who saw her were bowled over by her confidence.
Particularly susceptible was the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. And the attraction was mutual. Charming, worldly wise and with the faint whiff of the danger of an ex-roué, Melbourne was the perfect mentor for the inexperienced young queen. He was also of the right political colour, since Victoria had been brought up as an ardent Whig.
The result was that the Tories soon called foul. But worse was to come when, only two years after her accession, Victoria displayed blatant partisanship during a ministerial crisis and wrecked a Tory attempt to form a government. Melbourne had won a crucial vote in the House of Commons by just five votes and resigned the premiership. Victoria, still under the sway of the paternal old politician, grudgingly offered the premiership to first the Duke of Wellington and then Sir Robert Peel. Peel, not feeling it the right moment to take power, would accept only on the condition that the queen replaced the ladies of her household, who were all aristocratic Whigs. Victoria took great pleasure in refusing this disrespectful order, and Melbourne, against his better judgement, was reinstated as the queen’s pet Prime Minister. Even Whigs now had to acknowledge that a young, unmarried girl on the throne was a loose cannon.
But who was to be the husband? The front-runner was Prince Albert, a younger son of the Duke of the little German principality of Saxe-Coburg. The connection between the houses of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg was already strong, as both Victoria’s mother and her cousin by marriage were Coburgs. Moreover, when Victoria (who was highly susceptible to male beauty) had first met Albert some years previously she had been very taken by his excellent figure and rather ethereal good looks. But she noted his tendency to tire easily, in contrast to her own boundless energy.
Albert was exactly of an age with Victoria. But otherwise their early experiences had been very different. Albert’s father was an inveterate womanizer and, in revenge, his wife had taken a lover of her own. The result was divorce and Albert’s loss of his mother at the age of only five. His own upright morality was a reaction to this loss and to the loneliness of a motherless child.
The gap left by his mother had eventually been filled by Albert’s tutor, who discharged his duties with a rare zeal and thoroughness. He had also benefited from formal instruction, both in Coburg and later at the university in Bonn, which was then at the height of its academic fame. All this added mineralogy and science, anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism and music to the basic curriculum he had learnt at home. And, despite his rather weak constitution, he was no milksop either: he was a competent fencer and an excellent shot. In short, he was the very model of an accomplished, modern prince for the nineteenth century. All that he lacked, as a penniless younger son, was a wife.
Victoria was in no hurry to oblige: she was enjoying the delicious freedom of being a young Queen Regnant far too much for that. Nevertheless, despite her conspicuous lack of encouragement, Albert was sent over to England to be inspected a second time. He arrived at Windsor on 10 October 1839. Victoria was watching from the top of the stairs and confided her feelings to her diary: ‘It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert, who is beautiful,’ she wrote with a characteristically heavy underlining. It was love at second sight, but none the less profound for that. And it lasted for both their lives.
In view of the disparity in their status it was Victoria who had to propose. They were married at the Chapel Royal at St James’s on 10 February 1840 and departed for a two-day honeymoon at Windsor. ‘We did not sleep much,’ Victoria noted of their wedding night. They revelled in each other’s sensuality. Albert helped Victoria pull on her stockings; she watched him shave. Unsurprisingly, then, Victoria conceived within days and gave birth to a daughter in November. A son, Edward, Prince of Wales, came just eleven months later, followed by seven more children, with never more than two years between them.
And it was this uxorious bliss which began to alter the relationship between them. From the beginning, they had had adjacent desks. But Victoria had made it clear that, as was constitutionally proper, the business of queening was hers alone. Albert was allowed to blot her dispatches, but only as a concession.
But her repeated pregnancies, regularly followed by intense post-natal depression, began to swing the balance of power. And the change was completed by Albert’s increasingly psychological dominance. She was tempestuous; he coldly rational. And he soon turned her temperament against her by making her ashamed of her uninhibited behaviour. The result was that Victoria not only became a submissive wife in private; she even surrendered public business to her husband, who acted as her private secretary with more power than any private secretary ever had. Once he had meekly blotted dispatches; nowhe dictated them.
This gave Albert a free hand to shape his own vision of monarchy. He had arrived in an England transformed by the Reform Act, which had created a new, predominantly middleclass electorate. And he had quickly attached himself to the most intelligent politician of the mid-century: the Tory leader, Sir Robert Peel. Peel, himself the son of a cotton manufacturer, saw it as his mission to adapt the Tory Party to the new world of industry and railways, powerful manufacturing cities and bourgeois morality which we call the Industrial Revolution.
In pulling it into the modern world, Peel split the Tory Party, sending it into the political wilderness for two decades. But Albert succeeded in adapting the monarchy to the same forces beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. He began at home.
The young royal family would spend their summers at Osborne House, which Albert built on the Isle of Wight. Victoria’s uncle, George IV, true to his decadent nature and the flamboyance of the time in which he ruled, had summered in his holiday home, the Brighton Pavilion. With its exotic minarets and domes, it appeared to be the home of a fairy-tale oriental despot. At Osborne the contrast could not have been greater. In place of the fantastic architecture – and fantastic expense – all was sobriety and efficiency. The site was bought at a bargain price and building works completed to time and to budget.
But most innovatory was the layout. For Osborne is really two buildings in one. There was the Family Pavilion and the Household Wing. Servants and the business of state were shunted off into the latter, while the former provided the setting for ‘The Home Life of Our Own Dear Queen’ – which was really Albert’s creation – and was a model of modern, almost bourgeois, privacy and respectability.
‘That damned morality would undo us all,’ snorted Victoria’s first, old-school Prime Minister. Albert, on the contrary, saw the ‘moral monarchy’ as the one means by which royalty could appeal to the middle classes, perhaps even lead them.
And central to this was the mid-nineteenth-century faith in progress and entrepreneurial zeal. In the previous century, the monarchy had been at the forefront of innovation, patronizing nascent industry and sponsoring scientific experiments. But many of the great advances of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century had been spurred by private effort. The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce had been established by George III, but had slumped into dozy inactivity before Albert took over as president. Under his active patronage, it was revived with a successful programme of annual exhibitions of British manufactures.
Then it was suggested that the exhibition should become international to reflect the fact that one quarter of the world’s population was now ruled by Britain. Albert took up the idea enthusiastically. But it required all his drive and determination to overcome the obstacles and objections. The projected event was riddled with impracticalities and dangers. For it to work, suitable space in central London would have to be found and all the international exhibitors would have to be carefully managed. The pessimistic predicted that it would be a Great British farce. The unruly lower orders would riot; the fine elms trees on the Hyde Park site would be damaged; none of the 245 submitted designs for the exhibition building would work.
The day was saved by Joseph Paxton’s scheme for a prefabricated ‘Crystal Palace’ of iron and glass, like a gigantic conservatory. Albert took only nine days to get ‘the most advanced building of the nineteenth century’ accepted; seven weeks later the concrete foundations were laid and four months later it was finished. The statistics are staggering. The palace was 1,848 feet long, 108 feet high (easily accommodating the threatened elms) and covered by 300,000 panes of glass. Inside, 1¾ miles of exhibition space displayed 100,000 exhibits from 14,000 exhibitors drawn from Europe and the world. Machines hummed and whirred; telegraphs and cameras showed what the future might be like; both finely crafted and mass-produced artefacts were proudly on display; and the produce of the world – the fruits of empire and free trade – were brought together under the glass. All this was seen by 6 million people, or a third of Britain’s entire population.
And it was all Albert’s work. In a speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, Albert said that the Exhibition pointed to the future of mankind – unity through communication and mutual understanding. ‘The Exhibition of 1851’, he said, ‘is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.’
On 1 May 1851, Victoria, wearing silver and pink and with Albert at her side, opened the Great Exhibition. ‘It was the greatest day in our history’, she wrote, ‘and the triumph of my beloved Albert.’ The crowds came, but they were not disorderly; they were decent and respectable. The Exhibition, true to its commercial origin, turned a handy profit, which was put towards founding the Victoria and Albert, the Science and the Natural History museums.
Eight months later, on 3 February 1852, Victoria and Albert opened another, very different, building. Indeed, at first sight it looks as reactionary as the Crystal Palace was progressive. For when the rules were announced for a competition to rebuild the Palace of Westminster after the fire of 1834, it was specified that the design must be in ‘the Gothic or Elizabethan style’. The winner, Charles Barry, and his assistant, Augustine Pugin, responded enthusiastically, combining the native English Gothic with the resonantly patriotic Elizabethan; every inch of the building, inside and out, is a riot of medieval and Tudor-inspired ornament.
It is especially rich and colourful – a sequence of magnificent spaces, designed as a stage-set for the state opening of Parliament and used for the first time by Victoria and Albert in 1852. Albert was heavily involved here also, as chairman of the committee that chose the artists and the subjects for the wall-paintings, which were likewise exclusively historical and allegorical. The enormous Norman Porch has a stained-glass window showing Edward the Confessor. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are painted on the walls of the Robing Room, where the monarch assumes the royal parliamentary robes and imperial state crown prior to the state opening. Paintings of the victorious death of Nelson at Trafalgar and the triumph of Wellington at Waterloo line the Royal Gallery. From here the sovereign processes to the Lords’ Chamber, which was intended not only as a debating chamber, but as the magnificent climax of the state opening of Parliament. Stained-glass windows depicting the kings and queens of England and frescos with allegorical representations of Chivalry, Religion and Justice overlook the gold canopy and throne, upon which the monarch sits to open Parliament. Everything is crimson and gold and solemn splendour.
The result has been described and denounced as backward looking and Tory. Albert would have been astonished. He considered himself to be liberal, progressive and constitutionalist. He saw no contradiction between history and progress, or between the Crystal Palace and the Palace of Westminster. And he regarded the state opening of Parliament as the perfect reconciliation of medieval and modern, in which the institutions of English government showed themselves at once durable and flexible.
And the monarchy, as guided by his hand, was all of these things.