The roots of the Royal Family’s public persona.

During the later decades of the 19th century, the British monarchy was fundamentally transformed into the one we know today: ceremonially splendid, but largely powerless in politics. In the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign it still possessed some political power, and its ceremonial was rather limited and meagre. But Prince Albert’s death in 1861 set in train a remarkable reinvention of the monarchy. This process is also interesting because it tells us much about Victoria’s relations with two of her most famous prime ministers: William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.

When her beloved husband Albert died, Victoria was utterly devastated and withdrew into seclusion. She refused to undertake ceremonial duties and in 1863 protested her “total inability, without serious injury to her health, to perform these functions of her high position which are accompanied by state ceremonials and which necessitate the appearance in full dress in public”. She shut herself away at Windsor, or at Osborne or Balmoral, to such an extent that in 1864 someone pinned a notice to the railings of Buckingham Palace that read: “These extensive premises to be let or sold, the late occupant having retired from business.” Around the same time, it was reported that some “London traders believe the Queen to be insane and that she will never live in London again”.

The longer the Queen remained in seclusion, the more the monarchy was damaged. The constitutional expert Walter Bagehot wrote in 1871 that “the Queen has done almost as much to injure the popularity of the monarchy by her long retirement from public life as the most unworthy of her predecessors did by his profligacy and frivolity”. Between then and 1874, no fewer than 84 republican clubs were founded, prompting the radical Frederic Harrison to observe that “in London and the great cities, the bulk of the working classes are republicans by conviction, unless where they are perfectly indifferent. There are a score of towns in the north and centre where the republican feeling has been at fever heat”.

For Gladstone and Disraeli, who alternated as Victoria’s prime ministers from 1868 to 1885, this was a major problem, but their attempts to resolve it were as strongly contrasted as their personalities and political styles. Gladstone sent lengthy memoranda to Victoria, full of serious points, like this in 1869: “The appearance of the sovereign in public from time to time upon occasions of great interest, while in exterior it is a mere form, is in reality among the substantial, and even in the long run, indispensable, means of maintaining the full influence of the monarchy”. The Queen was unimpressed and wrote a few years later that “she always felt in [Gladstone’s] manner an overbearing obstinacy and imperiousness (without being actually wanting in respect as to form) which she never experienced from anyone else and which she found most disagreeable”.

By contrast, Disraeli believed that “everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel”. When he first became prime minister, he wrote to the Queen: “Mr Disraeli with his humble duty to Your Majesty. He ventures to express his sense of Your Majesty’s most gracious kindness to him and of the high honour which Your Majesty has been graciously pleased to confer on him. He can offer only devotion”. One of his greatest acts of devotion was to make Victoria Empress of India in 1876.

Disraeli also proved far more successful than Gladstone in luring the Queen out of her seclusion and back into the public eye. He never put pressure on the Queen, but instead reassured her, such as in this letter of 1874: “However interesting to Mr Disraeli, it is a subject on which he had made up his mind never to press Your Majesty, as he knows a long and impending engagement harasses and disquiets. The gracious act, if it occurs, should be quite spontaneous”. This approach proved very fruitful: Victoria came to regard Disraeli as “her kind, good, considerate friend”, writing the following year that “his mind is so much greater, larger, and his apprehension of things great and small, so much quicker, than that of Mr Gladstone”.

The Queen’s preferences could, however, be of only marginal influence in the political sphere. Although in 1880 Victoria wrote that “she could have nothing to do with” Gladstone, when he defeated Disraeli in the general election of that year she had no choice but to accept him as her prime minister. When Gladstone lost the 1886 general election, Victoria thought the result “very satisfactory”, whereas when he was elected for the fourth time, in 1892, she wrote in her private journal: “It is rather trying and anxious to have to take as prime minister” someone “whose views and principles are somewhat dangerous”. In particular, she deplored what she regarded as his “disastrous policy of Home Rule” for Ireland.

By the 1890s, however, Victoria had fully emerged from her seclusion and was increasingly surrounded by the kind of lavish ceremonial and public pageantry that we associate with today’s monarchy. Above all, the processions and services of thanksgiving for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (1887) and then her Diamond Jubilee (1897) provided the prototypes for the great state occasions and celebrations that have marked the milestones of the present Queen’s reign: the Silver Jubilee in 1977, the Golden Jubilee in 2002, the Diamond Jubilee in 2012, and the Platinum Jubilee in 2022. It was the late Victorian period that ushered in the modern British monarchy, ceremonially splendid but largely powerless politically.

In guiding the monarchy along this path, much of the credit must go to Disraeli for his skilful handling of the ‘widow of Windsor’. Whether one regards it as sycophancy or sensitivity, Disraeli succeeded where Gladstone failed. He won the Queen’s trust and by coaxing her back into public life, Disraeli managed both to defuse the potentially dangerous republican sentiments of the early 1870s and to pave the way for the reinvention of the Victorian monarchy.