‘Enough to kill any man’: the trials of serving Queen Victoria

Monarchy was as characteristic of the 19th century as nationalism and revolution. The Almanach de Gotha was a better guide to power than the Communist Manifesto. Constitutional monarchy, in particular, was considered the panacea of the age. On the first morning of her reign, Queen Victoria announced: ‘I have promised to respect and love the constitution of my native country.’ The Times declared her ‘steeped in the spirit of the constitution’. Gladstone said: ‘All the principles of the constitution have been observed by the Queen… in a manner more perfect than has ever been known.’

In reality, as Anne Somerset’s magnificent, disturbing and innovative history of Queen Victoria and her prime ministers shows, this was untrue. In private, Gladstone called her ‘an imperious despot’. For, as Somerset shows, the Queen loved power. In 1837 she wrote to her mistress of the robes: ‘Far from being fatigued with signatures and business, I like the whole thing exceedingly.’ Somerset estimates that she wrote 2,500 words a day and believes that she was ‘saved by work’ after Prince Albert’s death in 1861. Gender did not limit her authority. In royal courts, unlike parliaments, women regularly gave orders to men. Victoria’s relations with her prime ministers reveal her will of iron, her indefatigability and what Lord Clarendon called her ‘absurdly high notions of her prerogative and the amount of control which she ought to exercise over public business’.  

The Queen often wrote in secret to the leader of the opposition to undermine the prime minister: to Melbourne against Robert Peel, to Disraeli or Salisbury against Gladstone. She was, as she later admitted, a party queen. Gladstone even called her ‘the leader of the opposition’. Britain remained a court society and Victoria’s court provided her with agents, from secretaries to ladies-in-waiting (Baron Stockmar, Charles Grey, Henry Ponsonby, Lady Ely and many more) to try to enforce her wishes.