20 June: Boreham on Queen Victoria

A Study in Queenliness
The anniversary of the accession of Queen Victoria naturally suggests, especially to those who can recall that stately lady's record reign, a comparison between the circumstances under which she ascended our ancient throne more than a century ago and those under which Queen Elizabeth the Second has recently done so.[1] In reality, no parallel exists. Queen Victoria ruled by candlelight. It was by candlelight that she was told of the death of William IV in 1837, and it was by candlelight that, as a very old lady, she sat late into the night in her gloomy sitting room at Osborne House, amusing herself with such feminine occupations as invited the skill of her nimble fingers.

As against this, Queen Elizabeth has but to touch a switch and a palace is flooded in dazzling light. She speaks, and the inflections of her voice are heard on all the continents. She smiles, and millions of her subjects, clustered around television sets, smile back. She takes a dozen steps, and the grace of her bearing is admired by newsreel audiences all the world over.

A Young Queen Inherits A Sinister Legacy
But the contrast between the two young queens strikes still more deeply. Miss Dormer Creston, whose work in this department of literary research has won for her the award of the Royal Society of Literature, has recently presented the world with a convincing portrayal of the early days of Queen Victoria.

The Court, she shows, was a witch's cauldron, seething with spite, pettiness jealousy, hatred, and revenge. The girl Queen was surrounded by statesmen skilled in the sinister art of making political or party capital out of the slightest royal indiscretion; by courtiers whose highest aim in life was to render one another supremely miserable; by ladies-in-waiting and mistresses-of-the-robes who made contemptuous grimaces behind each other's backs, and whose too-easy conversation was liberally spiced with venom. The palace swarmed with cats that did everything but purr.

Nor was Royalty itself by any means guiltless. During Victoria's girlhood, Queen Adelaide—wife of the king and sponsor of the South Australian capital—promulgated persistent rumours to the effect that she was soon to give birth to a direct heir to the Throne. For a month or two after the proclamation of the young Queen, she had Court and country in a state of jitters lest the long-promised baby should, at last, materialise.

A Nation Saved By A Sense of Knightliness
In his fine essay on "Chivalry," G. W. E. Russell maintains that, at that crucial moment, our destinies were preserved by the accession of a girl. All the conditions then obtaining tended to inflame a universal discontent and to feed the fires of revolution. Had a king succeeded, the storm must have burst.

But there was something unmanly, unnatural, and un-English in the notion of making war upon a youthful, innocent, and friendless queen. Fortunately for the world, the young monarch quickly proved that on personal grounds, she was worthy of the deference that had been paid to her sex and her youth. The beneficent results of her influence soon penetrated to the remotest outposts of her empire

In his "History of the Nineteenth Century," Robert Mackenzie insists that it is the outstanding glory of Queen Victoria that she set a new fashion in sovereignty, a fashion that, for many generations, her successors will aspire to follow. Miss Creston admits that her royal heroine was not consistently lovable. She had a mind of her own and liked other people to know it. She was sometimes a trifle unmannerly in correcting the bad manners of others. All through her long illustrious reign she was something of a termagant.

Perhaps she had to be. She had set herself a task that required a strong judgment and a resolute will. But if, on the one hand, we sometimes wish that Victoria had been a trifle more womanly and a trifle more human, we are compelled to admire the courage and pertinacity with which, in youth and in age, a lonely woman fought for a pure and lofty ideal.

F W Boreham

Image: Queen Victoria

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on November 29, 1952.