Victoria

Conflicts with Palmerston.

The fall of Peel in 1846 and the return of the Whigs brought Lord Palmerston to the Foreign Office and led to the severest struggle between the Crown and its ministers since the day when George III. had dismissed the Coalition of Fox and North in 1783. Palmerston had passed his 6oth birthday and could look back on a career of high office which began ten years before the royal couple were born. Con fident in his parliamentary skill and in his capacity to solve every problem of foreign policy on the spur of the moment, shrewd, bold, instinctive, casual, contemptuous of foreign potentates and diplomatic amenities, he was in every respect the antithesis of Albert. Albert distrusted Palmerston's character, disapproved of his methods, disliked his policy, and, prompted by Stockmar, dis agreed with his conception of the British constitution. In the contests that ensued Victoria was the disciple of Albert, a dis ciple whose zeal and vehemence outran that of her husband and master ; for Albert was never vehement. The fundamental issue was the interpretation of the British constitution—a consti tution notoriously flexible and elusive. Lord Clarendon, after dining with the royal pair at the height of the conflict, declared that they "laboured under the curious mistake that the Foreign Office was their peculiar department, and that they had the right to control, if not to direct, the foreign policy of England." It is impossible here to follow the struggle through all its phases. Suffice it to say that the royal pair secured an ally in the prime minister, Lord John Russell, himself, for Palmerston often treated his colleagues as casually as he treated the sovereign, and took important decisions and sent off important despatches without consulting either the one or the other. In 1850 the queen delivered a kind of ultimatum in the form of a memorandum drawn up for her use by Stockmar. "With reference to the conversation about Lord Palmerston which the queen had with Lord John Russell the other day, and Lord Palmerston's disavowal that he ever intended any disrespect to her by the various neglects of which she has had so long and so often to complain, she thinks it right, in order to avoid any mistakes for the future, to explain what it is she expects from the foreign secretary. She requires: (I) That he will distinctly state what he proposes in a given case, in order that the queen may know as distinctly to what she has given her royal sanction; (2) Having once given her sanc tion to a measure, that it be not arbitrarily altered or modified by the minister." Lord Palmerston accepted the rebuke with apparent meekness, but his conduct continued unchanged. At the end of 1851 he expressed to the French ambassador, without having consulted either Russell or the queen, his approval of Napoleon's coup d'etat. Russell immediately dismissed him and used the occasion to make public the queen's memorandum quoted above. But in a few months Palmerston secured his "tit for tat" by overthrowing Russell's administration.

It was unfortunate for Victoria and Albert that Palmerston was the most popular statesman in the country. At the beginning of 1854, when the country was visibly drifting into the Crimean War, it was announced that Palmerston (at that date home secre tary in Aberdeen's coalition Government) had resigned office. At once an extraordinary storm of popular fury burst forth against the royal pair whose machinations, it was supposed, guided by the hidden hand of the alien Stockmar, had brought about the downfall of the one statesman in whom the nation felt confidence. There were rumours that both the queen and the prince had been committed to the Tower. "Thousands of people," wrote Albert to Stockmar, "surrounded the Tower to see the Queen and me brought to it." It was supposed that Albert was in the pay of the Russians. Palmerston's resignation was, however, withdrawn, and the gross absurdity of the charges brought against the prince, coupled with the unmistakable patriotism of his conduct through out the war, produced a marked revival of royalist sentiment.

The queen personally superintended the committees of ladies who organized relief for the wounded, and eagerly seconded the efforts of Florence Nightingale ; she visited crippled soldiers in the hos pitals, and instituted the Victoria Cross. The alliance with France led to a visit from the French emperor, whom the queen found very attractive, and in 1856 the visit was returned, this being the first occasion that a British sovereign had visited Paris since the coronation of Henry VI. in the days of Joan of Arc.

The Crimean War made Palmerston prime minister, and he retained the office, with one short interval, until his death in 1865. From 1859 onwards Russell was foreign secretary and his conduct was not found much more satisfactory than that of Palmerston. Palmerston and Russell supported, while Victoria and Albert disliked, the actions of Cavour and Garibaldi which led to the union of Italy. In 1861 the American Civil War broke out. A vessel of the "Northern" navy improperly arrested two "Southern" envoys on a British steamer, and a typically unwise and peremp tory despatch of Russell's might have involved Great Britain in an unforgivable war with Lincoln's Government, had not Albert secured its alteration. It was the last act of his life. His health had long been unsatisfactory and his spirits depressed. His constitution, never robust, was undermined by overwork and political adversity. At the end of 186i he was smitten with what was probably typhoid fever and died on Dec. 14.

Widowhood.—Victoria was only 42 at the date of her tragic bereavement ; 39 years of life remained to her, nearly half her life, and much more than half her reign. The queen's life during her long widowhood lacks the variety of the earlier years ; crowded with events it may in a sense be said to be, but those events are the political history of the nation and empire over which Victoria was called to rule, and it is no easy task to disentangle biography from history. Yet it is on this latter part of the queen's life that a judgment of her character and statesmanship should be principally founded. Until her marriage she had been little more than a child; during her married life she had accepted wholeheartedly the guidance of her adored husband; after 1861 she stood alone and, ably as she was served by a succession of devoted secretaries, her conception of her duties and her policy was her own. "I am determined," she wrote to her uncle Leo pold, "that no one person—may lie be ever so good or ever so devoted among my servants—is to lead or guide or dictate to me. I know how he would disapprove of it. . . . Though miserably weak and utterly shattered, my spirit rises when I think any wish or plan of his is to be touched or changed, or I am to be made to do anything." There were many, and among them both the editor of the Times and the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, who assumed that the prince of Wales, who was already somewhat older than his mother had been at her accession, would be admitted, either at once or by degrees, to a partnership with the queen like that which her husband had enjoyed. But Victoria would have none of it. Though she groaned under the labours of her self-imposed isolation, and expressed again and again a longing for a release from them by death, she rigidly excluded her heir from all share in her political duties, and maintained that exclusion to the end. Perhaps if "Bertie" (as he was always called in the family) had been more like Albert, her decision might have been otherwise, and the lives of both mother and son, we cannot doubt, would have been happier. But the prince was of a Hanoverian rather than a Coburg type. He had not proved amenable to the educa tion so carefully provided for him. He might have ideas of his own, and Victoria was determined that the royal policy should continue to be Albert's and that she alone knew what that policy would be.