Queen Victoria: the waning of power (2)

Queen Victoria's official
Diamond Jubilee photograph
Public domain
The matriarch of Europe -
but how much political power did she hold?

The loss of Albert

In the last years of Victoria's relatively short married life, Albert’s dominance had become total. He had personally drafted all her official correspondence and she simply copied it out. In 1857 she wrote to King Leopold, 

You cannot think … how completely déroulee I am and feel when he is away, or how I count the numerous children as nothing to me when he is away. 

She had now convinced herself that women were not meant to rule and that she could not be able to fulfil her duties without him. 

Her whole life had been one long pattern of reliance on others. Deprived of Albert, she gave way to unending grief. This was almost certainly a form of clinical depression, but it was also an escape from responsibilities she did not wish to shoulder alone. She punished her children by making them share in her grief. They were not allowed to mourn their father in their own way.

A recluse on the throne

When the Privy Council met, the Queen sat in one room, the councillors in another, with Arthur Helps, the secretary to the council, acting as intermediary. The Times chose 1 April 1864 to write a spoof leader asserting that the Queen would soon resume her public duties. Doctors kept a constant watch on her mental health, fearing that she might go mad like her grandfather, George III.

At the end of 1864 The Times stated: 

It is impossible for a recluse to occupy the British throne without a gradual weakening of that authority which the Sovereign has been accustomed to exert.

By 1867 republican sentiment was mounting. She was hissed and booed on the way to the state opening of Parliament.


However, Victoria won back some of her popularity by publishing book about her life in the Highlands. In this she oversimplified her complex character, presenting herself as a simple private woman, whose energies were spent in revering her husband and capering round the Highlands disguised as a commoner. Refusing to fulfill so many of her political responsibilities, she presented herself to her people as an 'ordinary' wife and mother.

But the political problem continued. In 1870 her Prime Minister, Gladstone, wrote, ‘the Queen is invisible and the Prince of Wales is not respected’. However, when Bertie survived a severe typhoid attack in 1871 and the Queen survived what looked like an attempted assassination the monarchy dramatically recovered its popularity.

Walter Bagehot and the 'English' Constitution

The English Constitution by the journalist, Walter Bagehot, was published from 1865 in the Fortnightly Review over eighteen months. It appeared in book form in 1867 and was the most important discussion of the nature of the monarchy to appear in the nineteenth century and continues to be extremely influential.

Bagehot defined the rights and role of a monarch in relation to the government as threefold:

1. The right to be consulted; 
2. The right to encourage;
3. The right to warn.

He also divided the constitution into two components: the ‘dignified’ (that part which is symbolic) and the ‘efficient’ (the way things actually work and get done).

The quotations below illustrate some of the main points of his argument:

The use of the Queen, in a dignified capacity, is incalculable. Without her in England, the present English Government would fail and pass away. Most people when they read that the Queen walked on the slopes at Windsor - that the Prince of Wales went to the Derby - have imagined that too much thought and prominence were given to little things. But they have been in error; and it is nice to trace how the actions of a retired widow and an unemployed youth become of such importance.

The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other. …  When you put before the mass of mankind the question, ‘Will you be governed by a king, or will you be governed by a constitution?’ the inquiry comes out thus—’Will you be governed in a way you understand, or will you be governed in a way you do not understand?’

A FAMILY on the throne is an interesting idea also. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life. No feeling could seem more childish than the enthusiasm of the English at the marriage of the Prince of Wales. They treated as a great political event, what, looked at as a matter of pure business, was very small indeed. But no feeling could be more like common human nature as it is, and as it is likely to be. The women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry. … A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.

So long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.

The Queen and Disraeli

When she came out of retirement, Victoria’s best spin-doctor was Benjamin Disraeli, Conservative Prime Minister from 1874-80, who flattered her shamelessly and used her for his own political purposes. Victoria, who had begun as a fierce Whig, was, in the last decades of her reign, unable to disguise her partisanship for the Tories. Once she resumed her public role, the old personality that Albert had suppressed returned. She became once more a violent political partisan – only this time she was a Tory.

John Tenniel,
'New Crowns for Old'
Disraeli offers the crown of
India to the queen
Public domain

Disraeli cultivated a public image of himself as an imperialist with grand gestures such as conferring on Queen Victoria the title ‘Empress of India’ in 1876. He was positioning the Conservatives as the party of patriotism and empire against the ‘unpatriotic’ Liberals, who had opposed the granting of the title, and he was using the queen in this project. 

The Queen and Gladstone

Victoria's relationship with the Liberal, William Ewart Gladstone, was quite different! She was outraged in particular by the populist politics he espoused in his campaign in the Midlothian election. The Liberals won the election, increasing their seats from 243 to 351, with a Conservative loss from 352 to 239.

The Queen told her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, 

She will sooner abdicate than send for that half-mad fire-brand who wd ruin everything & be a Dictator. Others but herself may submit to his democratic rule but not the Queen.

But when Hartington, the Liberal party leader, was summoned to Windsor he recommended that Gladstone be sent for. Victoria reluctantly agreed.  Monarchs could no longer make or break prime ministers.

But she wrote to her daughter, the Crown Princess of Germany 

You say I am worried! God knows I am – and disgusted. I have warned and tried to do all I can but in vain and I now feel disheartened and disgusted.  The mad passion of one half-crazy enthusiast is ruining all the good of 6 years of peaceful, wise government, and I often wish I could retire quietly and let people work out their own policy and reap its fruits.

When in the general election of 1892 Gladstone defeated Lord Salisbury, she wrote to Vicky, 

It seems to me a defect in our much famed Constitution to have to part with an admirable Government like Lord Salisbury’s for no question of any importance, or any particular reason, merely on account of the number of votes.

The Diamond Jubilee

On 23 September 1896, Victoria surpassed George III as the longest-reigning monarch in British history. She  requested that any special celebrations be delayed until 1897, to coincide with her Diamond Jubilee, which was made a festival of the British Empire at the suggestion of Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.

The prime ministers of all the self-governing dominions were invited, and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee procession through London included troops from all over the empire. 

Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee procession
Public domain

The parade paused for an open-air service of thanksgiving held outside St Paul's Cathedral, throughout which Victoria sat in her open carriage. The celebration was marked by great outpourings of affection for the septuagenarian Queen though one German princess was horrified: ‘After 60 years Reign, to thank God in the Street!!!’.

A changing image

Victoria's accession in 1837 was welcomed, though there were anxieties that she would be manipulated by Lord Melbourne.
During her middle years she was criticised for her income, her large family, and her neglect of her public duties. By the time of her Golden and Diamond Jubilees, however, she had come to symbolise the nation. Most of her subjects had never known another monarch and she represented stability in a rapidly changing world.

Conclusion: the decline of monarchical power

Victoria's reign saw a decline in the power of the monarch - something that she herself recognised. She wrote, ‘It is a miserable thing to be a constitutional queen and to be unable to do what is right’. In 1834, William IV, had sacked his Prime Minister, Melbourne. In 1839 Victoria managed to secure the temporary removal of Peel from office during the Bedchamber Crisis but when the Conservatives won the 1841 election she was forced to have him back as Prime Minister. 

By this time she had accepted Albert’s favourable opinion of Peel and became his strong supporter. When Peel was struggling for his political life in January 1846, Albert went to the Commons to lend him moral support – retrospectively, a very partisan gesture. 

Had Albert lived, his political role might have created problems for the monarchy.

Such was her dislike of Gladstone that after he won the election of 1880, she did all she could to prevent him becoming Prime Minister.  On her meeting with him she told him that on no account should he change the foreign policy of his defeated Conservative opponent, Disraeli. However, the growth of political parties meant that it was much more important for a prime minister to have a majority in the Commons than to have the monarch’s favour. 

There is no decisive moment when power slipped away from the monarch. It was a slow development, but one that can be spotted through certain key moments in nineteenth-century politics. The monarchy survived, more popular perhaps than it had ever been, but no longer politically powerful.