Antiques

Magazine Antiques, March, 2004 by Wendell Garrett

Queen Victoria was like a great paper-weight that for half a century sat
upon men's minds, and when she was removed their ideas began to blow all
over the place haphazardly.
H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 1934

Victoria occupied the throne longer than any monarch in British history. She became queen at the age of eighteen in 1837 and died sixty-three years later in 1901. In 1840 her marriage was arranged to her first cousin Albert, a German princeling, with whom she produced nine children in twenty years. There was a sharp contrast between their tranquil, even middle-class domestic life and the ambitious nature of their descendants, who assumed the thrones of Germany, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Britain.

Victoria and Albert came to love each other with a strong physical passion, yet she hated pregnancy, childbirth, babies, and children. Despite the carefully projected image of a large, happy family, Victoria showed little warmth for her children, who predictably turned out to be unhappy, delinquent, or both.

Albert died of typhoid in 1861 at the age of forty-two, the first of a number of deaths in the family that Victoria endured with increasing gloom over the course of more than twenty years. She became so withdrawn that she alienated the politicians who had to deal with her. Overwhelmed with grief, she largely withdrew from public life, spending months at Balmoral, her retreat in the Scottish Highlands, or at Osborne on the Isle of Wight. She limited herself to consulting her ministers by mail and erecting memorials to her late husband.

During the last phase of her reign, from about 1886 onward, she resumed her interest in governing, with the consequence that her wayward son and heir, Edward VII, was not permitted to read important state papers until 1892. By this time she had become fat, half blind, and something of an invalid. Obsessed with her health, she traveled with a retinue of surgeons, physicians, oculists, and apothecaries in addition to servants, courtiers, and all available members of her family. Her health went from bad to worse in tandem with her disposition. She became callous, obstinate, outspoken, capricious, and bigoted. She was so possessive of her courtiers that she took any of their decisions to marry or resign as a personal affront, only rarely forgiven.

She hated London, never read a newspaper, and knew almost nothing of the lives of her subjects. Increasingly reactionary, she disapproved of improved education for the working classes lest they should be tempted to rise above their station. In politics, as in everything else, she was incapable of seeing any other viewpoint but her own, dismissing those with whom she disagreed as agitators seeking to overturn the God-given order of society.

By the time Victoria died, one person in four on earth was her subject. She had become the most obvious symbol of the world's greatest empire. However, in a country frequently held to be rational and democratic, the monarchy remained a secretive and arguably corrupt institution. Indeed, by the end of Victoria's reign, the gap between the public perception and private reality of the royal family had probably never been wider.

Her reign marked the end of Britain's sovereign self-assurance. Thirteen years after her death, in 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany declared war on his grandmother's country.

Wendell Garrett