ROYALTY AS A SOCIAL FORCE
The general power and usefulness of the English Crown strengthened,
and not weakened, by the constitutional transfer of political power to
Parliament and Ministers. The national aims of Queen Victoria and
Queen Elizabeth contrasted. Possibility of the Sovereign more
correctly than Parliament or Ministers interpreting indications of
national will. What happened under Queen Anne may conceivably occur
under some of her successors. The facts concerning the monarchy as
they are to-day. Posthumous recognition of the soundness of the Prince
Consort's views on the sphere of Royal duties, and the legitimate
field of the Crown's activities. His influence still a living force.
Court offices, and reforms attributable to him. The present Prince of
Wales exactly follows his father's example.
Whatever of power may have been resigned by the Crown in the way of
political authority has since that resignation abundantly been recompensed
to it in the direction of social authority. The latest predecessor of her
own sex upon the English Throne correctly interpreted as against
periodical parliamentary majorities the loyalty of the nation to the
Anglican Establishment; then a synonym for High Church Toryism. The Legion
Memorial,[59] probably drawn up by Daniel Defoe, marks the lowest point of
unpopularity ever reached by the House of Commons. No one would venture
to say that a repetition of such an experience, however unlikely, is more
impossible under Queen Victoria, than at one time it might have seemed
under Queen Anne. The chances of a revival, with the national consent, of
the personal prerogative of the Sovereign in Church and State affairs,
though far from being inconceivable towards this changeful close of the
century are too problematical for serious calculation. Like Queen
Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, from her accession to the Throne, proposed to
herself as an ideal the affection of her people. The Tudor Sovereign,
however, amid all her desire for the personal attachment of her subjects,
bated no jot of her queenly dignity or hereditary pretensions. The
Hanoverian Sovereign who blends the lines of Tudor and Stuart in her own
person has always kept before her an object equally distinct, but far more
congenial to the graciousness of her sex. An Elizabeth never willingly
allowed the tenderness of the woman to eclipse the majesty of the Queen. A
Victoria has never, consciously or unconsciously, veiled the motherhood of
her people by the pomp of their ruler. The stages by which the conception
of English sovereignty that is to-day a national possession has attained
its present completeness, must now be examined. From her sex, and the
circumstances of her life, it has long been inevitable that some of the
social functions (in the sense in which that epithet is now used) of the
Sovereign should be discharged vicariously by other members of the
reigning House. Whether it be Prince and Heir Apparent, or Royal Duke
makes no difference to the present argument. The idea of the monarchy
actually operative among us to-day whether in its constitutional,
ceremonial, or social attributes is at all points stamped with the impress
of one systematizing and controlling mind.
That beneficent intelligence is in human shape no longer with us. Never
was there man whose works and projects have lived after him more
vigorously and usefully than the Prince Consort. To the generation that
has grown up since his death, the notions which he was the first to apply
to the Court usages of England, the ends to which, before him, no member
of the reigning family had employed the opportunities of the Crown are so
familiar; they seem so essential a part of the Kingly office; a Sovereign
or a Prince not discharging such duties is so inconceivable by nineteenth
century Britons, as to make many persons forget the existence of a time
when this portion of the Royal duties was disliked as a novelty, or
resented as an impertinence. It is not too much to say that the Victorian
England of these later years is that which, more than any other uncrowned
individual, the Prince Consort was the instrument of making it. He it was
who set the example of that many-sided, almost ubiquitous, assistance in
the extra-political occasions of English life which to-day are more
conspicuously associated with the representatives of the kingly principle
in England than the attendance at levees, or the opening of drawing rooms.
Nor must it ever be forgotten that the future husband of the Queen from
earliest youth, not less than her future Majesty herself, was trained with
an eye to the possibilities of the alliance and the duties that the
accident of birth might have in store. Writing in July 1821 to the Duchess
of Kent, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg says of the young Prince Albert:
'The little fellow is the pendant to the pretty cousin' (the Princess
Victoria).[60] Prince Leopold, who married the Princess Charlotte
naturally supplied the first link of cousinly association between his
nephew and niece. Other and more highly placed suitors were not of course
wanting. But it needed no great experience in the tactics of matrimonial
diplomacy accurately to conjecture the relations tolerably certain to be
developed between the second son of Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Saafeld and
the niece of William IV., heiress to the English Crown. It is well that
the august contingencies of the future should sometimes have been forecast
by those around the young Prince. Otherwise it might have proved more
difficult than subsequently it did prove, or perhaps have been found
impracticable to rear on the foundations of boyish education the fabric of
a genuine knowledge of English character, of English life and
institutions. Hence it was that the disappointment of Lord Melbourne's
over sanguine anticipations of the reception of the Prince by his adopted
countrymen was borne with the equanimity which he showed on hearing that
the proposed allowance of L50,000 a year, though not, as Colonel Sibthorp
suggested, reduced to L21,000, was to be fixed at L30,000. All he
regretted was that his ability to help artists, men of learning and of
science would be necessarily more restricted than he had hoped.[61]
Naturally the economy of the Court system was the first to feel the
reforming influence of the man who afterwards helped profoundly to modify
the whole system of English life at large. The first opposition was
encountered at the hands not of an Englishman, but of a fellow
countrywoman of his own, the Baroness de Lehzen, who, from being the young
Queen's governess, had become the head of her household. The abuses and
extravagance of the Royal establishment shocked, as they well might have
done, the frugal Prince. Nor was it only that the money expended yielded
no proportionate return of comfort and convenience. The very rudiments of
domestic supervision were found to be wanting. Windsor Castle was only one
degree better than Buckingham Palace. Those employed about the Royal
dwelling not only had themselves free ingress into the living rooms of the
family, a nondescript gathering of camp followers, loafers and errand boys
also contrived to pass in and out unchallenged. On one occasion a boy was
found, with no felonious intent, to have passed the night under a sofa in
a parlour next to the Queen's bedroom. The lad had no wish to have done
so. He was simply shut in, unperceived by those whose business it was to
lock up.[62] In this work the Prince Consort was confronted by the
opposition which the reformer of inveterate abuses never fails in any
department of life to encounter. The administration of the Palace
household below stairs in a less wantonly wasteful manner was held to
threaten the dignity of those about the Throne. A check upon weekly bills
in the basement was suspected of veiling a sinister design on the
constitution of Church and State. Sir Robert Peel in 1841 had dwelt on the
difficulty of domestic reforms in the Palace. In 1843 he acknowledged the
economy and efficiency with which the Queen's Household was now conducted.
The Minister was vilified in the cheap weekly papers as a joint
conspirator with those foreigners who christened their treason by the fair
names of retrenchment and order. He was even attacked in clubs and drawing
rooms by fine and fashionable people for being ready to compromise the
dignity and disturb the equilibrium of the British Crown. The chief point
of the Prince Consort's Court improvements was concentration of
responsible power upon a single individual in the place of its confused
distribution among mutually conflicting understrappers. In this task he
was aided by Baron Stockmar who had all the national aptitude of the
German for the details small and great in the domestic routine of palaces
and princes. The ultimate result of these operations was to invest a
Master of the Household identical in all respects with that functionary as
he exists to-day, with supreme jurisdiction over the domestic arrangements
of the Sovereign, able directly to communicate with the departments for
executing the different repairs. Other duties gradually gathered round
this personage. To-day, as the Prince Consort had always purposed, it is
upon him that there devolves the duty of issuing at the Royal command,
invitations to guests to sleep and dine beneath the Queen's roof.
The composition of the Queen's immediate entourage is now practically the
same as that decided upon by Her Majesty in conjunction with the Prince
Consort. The ladies of the Court, that is, consist of the Mistress of the
Robes, the Ladies of the Bedchamber, the Women of the Bedchamber, and the
Maids of Honour. The first named of these, the Mistress of the Robes, is
in her way, a State official. She must not be below the rank of a Duchess.
She changes with the Government of the day. Her attendance on the Queen is
limited to State occasions. The Ladies of the Bedchamber, all of them
peeresses, are in number eight. One of them is invariably waiting upon the
Queen. These are the ladies who in 1839 Sir Robert Peel, when forming his
Administration, thought should be changed. The Women of the Bedchamber are
also eight. These generally are only in attendance when the Mistress of
the Robes is present. One of them is always near the Sovereign. The Maids
of Honour are also eight in number. These must be either the daughters or
grand-daughters of peers. They have the courtesy title of 'Honourable.'
Two of them are always in waiting for a month at a time. The Prince
Consort also in selecting the officers of the Household, showed special
care and judgment in his choice of the person who discharges the duties of
Privy Purse. From the days of Colonel Phipps, or Colonel Anson, to Sir
Fleetwood Edwards; these have been men of first rate financial and
administrative capacity. Misled by a similarity of terms, some persons
seem to fancy there exists a vital association between the gentleman who
fills that position in the Queen's Household and the nobleman who, as Lord
Privy Seal, has a seat in the Cabinet of the day, and who in 1896-7 was
Viscount Cross. Hence the recurrent announcements in the newspapers that
this statesman has been summoned to Windsor or Balmoral to assist Her
Majesty with her business papers. The present opportunity therefore may
usefully be taken to contradict the construction placed upon the character
of the visit of that Minister to the Court. This the present writer has
the very highest authority for doing. The connection between the Cabinet
and Court offices whose names so closely resemble each other is in no
sense organic. Lord Cross, now spoken of, is eminent for his knowledge of
business of all kinds. He is a man of the widest and most varied
experience in every department of civil and political affairs. He had a
seat in Lord Beaconsfield's last Cabinet. Than him the Queen possesses
to-day few older servants, or more trusty friends. In that capacity, not
in virtue of his Ministerial position, it is that Lord Cross finds
himself so frequently the guest of his Sovereign.
The Prince Consort's reforms in the economy and administration of the
Court itself, though not the least valuable or necessary of his labours,
naturally appealed less directly to the popular interest than his other
activities, by the results of which the land of his adoption is to-day the
gainer. Not a moment had been lost by the Prince in beginning to realize
his early idea of associating for the first time since the days of the
Stuarts the Sovereign with the promotion of letters, science, and art. The
Court of Henry VIII. had been visited by Erasmus, and by other men of
letters of the Protestant connection. If the story of Shakespeare's
presence in the group that surrounded Elizabeth be apocryphal, Edmund
Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Walter Raleigh undoubtedly paid their
homage to the Virgin Queen. Charles I. was the patron of Van Dyck and an
admirable connoisseur as well as encourager of true art wherever it could
be found. Charles II., after his restoration, was less interested in
painters and poets than in science.
Before Queen Victoria, the Hanoverian Sovereigns had not identified the
new dynasty with any special affection for the accomplishments which gild
and refine life. The Prince Consort, at the outset of his career mastered
two facts. First, he discerned, that, even in the absence of a national
scheme of education, the taste for reading and culture bred not only by
improved intelligence, but by the growth of material prosperity and the
humanizing influences of foreign travel, must before long result in a
marked improvement of the appreciation among the countrymen of Reynolds,
of Byron, of Wordsworth, and of Southey, of all that sweetens and
brightens daily existence. The Prince perceived, too, that the lines on
which English social intercourse was developing must involve a demand for
amusements and for recreations upon a larger scale than family reunions
beneath the domestic life could provide. The theatre in England had not
become then a considerable force. It would have been premature to
anticipate the later advice of Mr Matthew Arnold to organize the stage.
The demand for good music in public places and on reasonable terms; the
growing interest in the works of English artists; above all the newly
awakened interest among the whole community in the welfare of their least
fortunate members;--these are the features of the time which in his survey
of the domestic situation chiefly impressed the Prince.
So early as 1840 his knowledge of musical science and his skill in musical
execution were well known to all with whom he had been brought into
contact. By this time it was generally perceived that a mistake had been
made in not, from the first, establishing the Prince as the Queen's
private secretary, and in delaying to entrust him with the control of the
whole Household. The Prince's remarkable aptitudes had impressed the
leading statesmen of both parties and through them the general public.
Thus, in 1840 there existed a growing desire to turn to national account
the special knowledge and exceptional talents of the accomplished husband
of the Queen. On the 9th of October 1840 Lady Lyttelton, then in
attendance at Windsor, has recorded that 'there arose from the room below
hers sounds of an instrument which she did not at first recognize, played
with such master skill, modulated so learnedly, winding through every kind
of bass and chord, finally culminating in the most perfect cadence, then
off again, louder first and afterwards softer. I only heard,' she adds,
'the harmony, being too distant to catch the tune, or perceive the
execution of the small touches. It was Prince Albert playing on the
organ.' April 29 of the year now mentioned was, from the point from which
it is now looked at, a memorable date in this blameless and beneficent
career. Then it was that the Prince having been appointed one of the
directors of the Ancient Concerts, discharged these duties for the first
time. All the music had been selected by himself. He had attended the
rehearsal with the Queen. Experts in this matter have dated from that day
the revival of the public taste for classical music in this country.
Nearly simultaneous with this was his appearance upon a public platform on
one of those non-political occasions that his example has specially
appropriated to the representatives of English Royalty. In the same year,
too, at the very height of the London season, the Prince took the
initiative in a function of a graver kind, but not less specially adapted
for energies and knowledge to which under a Constitutional monarchy
political life is not held to afford a proper outlet. The most important
public meeting of the summer of 1840 was that convened for the purpose of
encouraging the legislature to complete the machinery for the removal of
the last traces of the slave trade. Technically the abolition had already
taken place. Well grounded apprehensions, however, existed that the new
'apprenticeship' which was to educate the emancipated negro for the
blessings of freedom might sometimes be too much like the old servitude
which it was designed to supersede. This occasion produced the first
speech delivered on an English platform by the Prince Consort at a time
when platform eloquence was less common than it has since become. The
address pointed, pithy, without an ambiguous or superfluous word, was the
model by which the speaker may well have shaped his subsequent utterances.
Its terse felicities of phrase have since often been reproduced by his
son, the Prince of Wales. As a corrective to the innate nervousness of a
highly organized temper, he had carefully prepared these remarks, writing
them out and rewriting them, so that nothing might be left to the chance
inspiration of the moment.
This was the first of a series of princely appearances on non-political
occasions. To-day, and in the case of his descendants, these things are
taken as a matter of course. During many years no great movement for the
improvement by politically unsectarian agencies of human life has been
considered complete without the active participation in it of the Crown,
or, which comes to the same thing, a nominee of the Crown. That in its
popular aspects the artistic movement which fills so large a space in the
second half of this century was practically the creation of the Prince
Consort's discriminating taste and patriotic industry would, if by
nothing else be shown by the course of preparations for the Hyde Park
Exhibition of 1851. Sir Robert Peel, at the time, repeatedly stated that
without the collaboration and counsel of the Queen's husband, the
Commission for the promotion and encouragement of the fine arts in the
United Kingdom could scarcely have got through its work. On the other
hand, while the public has accustomed itself to regard Lord Melbourne as
the nearly exclusive influence for training the Sovereign and her husband
in the tasks of Royal routine, one may point out that the Prince himself
never failed to emphasize his personal obligations to Sir Robert Peel as
his first trainer in the duties of an English public man. Nor from these
associations did he acquire only a correct insight into the official ways
of his new country. In his tastes and appreciations, the Prince Consort
became as patriotic as any of the great men by whom he was surrounded.
Some have questioned whether the patronage of a not unmixed English Court
has been entirely favourable to the development of native genius in
certain branches of the fine arts. The historic facts enumerated by Sir
Theodore Martin on this point are worth mentioning.[63]
On December 2, 1841, the Prince met on the official business of the
Commission the Secretary, then Mr, afterwards Sir Charles, Eastlake. The
latter entered upon the interview with an idea of resigning his post,
should the Prince insist on the introduction of foreign artists. His Royal
Highness anticipated his visitor by volunteering the remark that to him
there appeared no necessity for so much as the employment of a single
foreign artist even among those entrusted with the management of
considerable works. 'In all that related to practical dexterity (the
department in which it was assumed that some instruction for fresco would
be necessary), the English were particularly skilful.' Such were the
Prince's words as recorded by Sir Charles Eastlake. The same narrator adds
that His Royal Highness volunteered many instances of English superiority
over all other nations in everything concerned with artistic mechanism.
'Even to the varnish on coaches,' said the Prince, 'it is surprising how
much more perfect the English practice is than that of the Continent.' The
talk then turned on the encouragement of fresco painting in England. The
words of the Queen's husband are especially noticeable showing as they do
his just appreciation of the conditions of artistic prosperity in England.
Two great auxiliaries in this country seldom fail to promote the success
of any scheme. Of the forces thus alluded to, fashion was one, high
example was another. Hence the Prince inferred that if the Queen and
himself set the example of having works of this kind done, the taste would
extend itself to wealthy individuals. The English country seats which are
the most beautiful in the world would acquire additional effect from the
introduction of such a style of decoration. With such occupation the
school would never languish, and would at least have time fully to develop
itself. When on one occasion Mr Eastlake, in reference to the necessary
limitation of frescoes compared them to sculpture in which nothing could
be concealed, and in which this necessity involved the necessity of beauty
also, the Prince replied: 'You have expressed in a few words what I would
have said in many.'[64]
This (1842) was the year, too, in which the first steps, both in the
direction of officially identifying the representatives of the English
Crown with the encouragement of popular culture, and of continuing the
work begun by Sir Walter Scott, of popularizing Scotch scenery with
English visitors, was taken by the Prince Consort. The opening of the Art
Exhibition in Edinburgh; the addresses made by the Prince, with the minute
and exact study of artistic and scientific subjects which they showed, not
only satisfied experts, but delighted the general public, and practically
placed the Queen's husband in the van of the new movement for the
encouragement of popular knowledge, then beginning to advance more rapidly
than it had previously done. The whole country was agitated with the
premonitory risings of Chartism. The Prince's opportunities of good were
increased by the proof he afforded of combining manly courage with a
technical knowledge then new to the English people. For us to-day the
importance of these incidents is not merely biographical. They illustrate,
as nothing else could, the growth and the development of the popular
conception of the duties outside the Court that Englishmen connect to-day
with the Sovereign or the Sovereign's social and ceremonial vicegerents.
Since then the rapidity of the movements of the Heir Apparent as the
deputy of the Queen excite admiration mingled with some perplexity
concerning the means by which so near an approach has been made to solving
the secret of perpetual motion. In all this, for the first time by anyone
living within the Royal circle, the initiative was set by the Prince
Consort. Now the Prince was visiting with the Queen an English statesman,
for example Sir Robert Peel, at his country seat. A few days before, the
Royal visitors had been the guests of Louis Philippe in France. On landing
at Portsmouth, they at once started for Tamworth. Their visit at the
statesman's country house was scarcely concluded when the Prince Consort
was due at Cambridge for his installation in the Chancellorship of the
University. As the years went on these activities were multiplied. All the
great centres of English trade and manufacture, one day Birmingham, the
next Liverpool or Glasgow, Leicester or Leeds, were in turn, and upon the
same scale of ceaseless celerity, visited. When therefore, the Queen's
eldest son first entered upon public life and began to dazzle his
countrymen by the speed of his movements, or to gratify them by the
ubiquity of his presence, and indifference to fatigue of body or mind, it
is well to see these manifestations of princely energy in their historical
perspective, and to realize that in this transformation of Royal force,
which the present reign has witnessed, the Heir Apparent has not so much
created a precedent as fulfilled a tradition.
The obliging information of Sir Arthur Bigge, of Viscount Cross, and
of Sir Francis Knollys, has enabled the writer accurately to state
such facts of Court organization as are legitimate matters of interest
to Her Majesty's subjects.