Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire (Julia Baird 2016) writes about the lifestyles of the rich and royal back in the old days:
King George IV [Victoria’s predecessor] was not a popular ruler. The Duke of Wellington considered him the worst man he had ever met, without a single redeeming quality. A reactionary Tory, the king fought the ongoing reform movement and had to be forced to assent to a bill allowing Catholics to stand for Parliament in 1829. William Makepeace Thackeray dismissed him as “nothing but a coat, and a wig, and a mask smiling below it.” The extravagant king had also become a symbol of the gross excess of Britain’s rich, as he drained public funds when the country was crippled by the cost of a war with France that had ended in 1815. When he became king at age fifty-eight, he weighed 245 pounds, had a fifty-inch waist, and was addicted to opium. His belly hung to his knees.
Bertie, the future King Edward VII, was fond of gambling, horseracing, and brothels. Even as she grew old, Victoria was loath to hand over any official duties to her oldest son.
It was hard to get good help back then:
Up to two-thirds of palace servants were unsupervised at any given time, so they did much as they pleased, disappearing at will. The staff was known for rudeness. Rarely was anyone available to show guests to their rooms; many got lost in the labyrinthine corridors. Albert identified a series of scams and perks that servants had abused for decades: people outside the palace often forged the signatures of the queen’s ladies when ordering carriages, charging the cost of their ride to the royal household; fresh candles were put out each day while the footmen pocketed the previous day’s, many unlit; and expensive staff dinners were offered to those with only tenuous connections to the royal court. Albert slashed salaries, sometimes by as much as two-thirds, to account for the fact that many servants worked in the palace for only half the year. Last on Albert’s agenda was what he called the “moral dignity of the Court.” The gambling tables disappeared from Windsor. No one was allowed to sit down in the queen’s presence—or in Albert’s. (The wife of Lord John Russell—who was later prime minister—was allowed to rest in a chair after she had just given birth, “but the Queen took care when the Prince joined the company to have a very fat lady standing in front of [her].”) Ministers had to back out of the room when visiting the queen, as it was considered poor etiquette to show a monarch your backside. Court dress was obligatory. (If a woman did not want to wear the appropriate styles she needed to get a doctor’s certificate explaining how it would be injurious to her health, and then seek permission from the Lord Chamberlain’s department.)
One had to remember that the throne was not secure:
Friedrich Engels were producing The Communist Manifesto, urging the working class to “arise ye starvelings from your slumbers.” As Buckingham Palace was being enlarged and beautified, European royalty were pushed off their thrones. While Albert was surveying with pleasure his own tranquil abodes, angry hordes swarmed through palaces in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and Budapest.
There were live threats:
One of the greatest threats to public safety came from the Fenian Brotherhood, which was founded in America in 1858 with the aim of overthrowing British control of Ireland and establishing an Irish republic. In 1866, the Brotherhood unsuccessfully tried to invade Canada from America. In 1867, they began a campaign of terror in Britain, blowing up a prison wall and killing a policeman.
Three months later, on a trip to Australia, a Fenian shot Victoria’s twenty-three-year-old son Prince Alfred in Sydney. He was on his way to Cabbage Tree Beach to “see the aboriginals, as they were then ready for some sports,” when he was shot in the back and fell on his hands and knees. The bullet lodged in his abdomen. For three days, he later told his mother, he could not breathe. The Irish assailant, who was about thirty-five, fair, and well dressed, was later executed.
Victoria had nothing like the modern-day Secret Service to protect her. Baird describes multiple assassination attempts that failed due to good luck.
Maybe we should be more grateful to Richard Nixon for signing the Environmental Protection Agency into law. Even the royals were not isolated:
A century earlier, the river named Tamesis by Caesar was clean. But when the water closet replaced the cesspool in the mid-1800s, channeling the city’s sewage to the river in large murky pipes, the water turned to black in less than half a century. At the same time, the capital’s population ballooned. In 1801, there were 136,000 houses in London. By 1851, there were 306,000. Those living near the river noticed an increasing acidity and murkiness in the water. By the mid-1850s, eighty million gallons of human waste from more than three million Londoners was draining down the Thames each year. The problem seemed insurmountable. In 1852, the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Sewers Commission, Frank Forster, died, and his death was attributed to “harassing fatigues and anxieties of official duties.” The next year, a cholera epidemic raged through the city, killing almost twelve thousand. This finally convinced scientists that disease was not borne by foul air, but by water. Yet the government, crippled by inertia and lack of will and urgency, failed to act. The royal family was insulated, but not exempt. Buckingham Palace often reeked of leaking excrement and crawled with rodents. Victoria watched her dogs chasing rats around her bedroom at Windsor, praising one for “valiantly” triumphing; “the rat made an awful noise, though he was killed right out pretty quickly.
By June 1858, the smell was so bad that lime was scattered in the river beneath the Houses of Parliament, and sheets soaked in bleach hung from ceilings inside so the gentlemen could speak without having to hold handkerchiefs over their noses. In the early summer, a long dry spell had dwindled the supply of fresh water coming from upland areas, and the water temperature was at a record high. A thick mass of black sewage stretched for eighteen miles. The resulting crisis became known as the Great Stink. Much of the city business ground to a halt; the courts rushed through cases to avoid prolonged exposure to the fumes.
(The above may explain Victoria’s fondness for Scotland!)
War concentrated a monarch’s mind:
Gladstone preached a gentler colonialism, supporting the principles of local autonomy and self-government—the same position he favored for Ireland. Gladstone even vowed to give independence to the South African Transvaal, which had been annexed by Britain in 1877. He was wary of further expansion in Africa and the Pacific, and called brutally obtained new swaths of land “false phantoms of glory.” Victoria was furious: she saw wars as a necessary means of protecting her empire.
On October 11, 1899, the Second Anglo-Boer War broke out. Few things concentrated Victoria’s mind as much as military conflict. She bade many of the troops farewell in person, and recorded details of the battles in her journal with a palpable anxiety. She was now eighty years old, but she maintained a keen interest in her army and continued to argue for more resources and men. While she did not see herself as a natural imperialist—writing of China, for example, that the world at large should not have the impression that we will not let anyone but ourselves have anything—she was eventually persuaded of the case for war in Africa. She believed that Britain should protect its subjects and territory. Her caveats were that the poor not be disproportionately burdened by a war tax and that the horses sent to fight be well treated.
Throughout the book, Baird’s main criticism of Victoria is that she did not advocate for a modern American- or European-style Welfare state. Examples:
At a time when most working-class people lived in misery, Victoria was more readily stirred by compassion for individuals she met than by reform movements. She worried about whether widowed women had enough money to live on and whether dwarves who performed for her were well treated. She worried about the well-being of orphans, wounded military veterans, and victims of sexual assault. When she saw how “lonely” child offenders jailed on the Isle of Wight spent months in solitary confinement, she was troubled by their sad existence.
The English had a deep, enduring belief in the importance of laissez-faire. The government was loath to intervene, ostensibly on the grounds that those suffering should be able to hoist themselves out of their misery and poverty without requiring aid. Kindness, it was feared, would corrupt them.
As Victoria grew older, she gradually leaned more toward conservatism. In her youth, she had taken a keen interest in the life of the poor as described by Charles Dickens, but she had not gone on to take an interest in the causes of poverty and frequently blamed those protesting against it.
For the rest of her life, she would fail to concertedly champion attempts to alleviate poverty or improve basic living and working conditions. Victoria’s problem was not lack of concern about social ills but lack of exposure to them
More: read Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire
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