“There is a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government,” said Benjamin Franklin, and if they might seem unlikely words from such a pen, much of history confirms them. Most lands in most continents have usually been ruled by kings and queens, perhaps nowhere more so than in Europe.
When war began in 1914, no fewer than eight countries were ruled by descendants of Queen Victoria. Three of her grandsons waged a war whose consequence saw two of them (Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and Czar Nicholas of Russia) lose their thrones.
One monarchy survived — and as remarkable as that survival is the fact that for 133 of the last 200 years England has been ruled by two queens regnant, women who inherited the throne in their own right. Queen Victoria’s reign of more than 63 years was overtaken by Queen Elizabeth II, who had reigned for 70 years when she died in 2022. They have now inspired two books, completely different in kind, both truly fascinating.
Anne Somerset has had the excellent idea of looking at Victoria’s relations with her prime ministers (VICTORIA AND HER PRIME MINISTERS, 630 pp., $45), while Craig Brown (Q: A VOYAGE AROUND THE QUEEN, 664 pp., $35) has produced another collage of the kind he’s more or less invented, following “Ma’am Darling,” on the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, and another on the Beatles.
When Victoria succeeded her uncle William IV in 1837, she was nervous and pliable. She was smitten with Lord Melbourne, her first prime minister, and was at first deeply dependent on him, although not as dependent as she would be on another man.
In 1840 she married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. They were both only 20, and it was an arranged marriage, but remarkably successful. Albert had liberal sympathies — only months after their wedding he presided over a meeting of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade — and was unusually intelligent for a princeling.
Albert’s influence was obvious. Although at first “strongly prejudiced” against Melbourne’s successor, Sir Robert Peel, Victoria grew to admire him. Then came the great crisis of Peel’s conversion to free trade and the opportunity to destroy him taken by “that detestable Mr. Disraeli,” as Victoria called him. She and Albert also hated Lord Palmerston — “Pilgerstein,” as they called him — while Albert deplored what later might have been called his policy of liberal interventionism, and was dismayed when he became prime minister during the Crimean War.
But no war affected Victoria as much as the death of Albert in 1861. It left her almost paralyzed with grief: For years she could barely face official duties or appearing in public. Shedding much of his liberalism, she now abhorred “reform for the sake of alteration and pulling down what exists,” but had no power to prevent it. After the Third Reform Act of 1884, six of 10 adult Englishmen were enfranchised.
The 1850s to the 1870s saw the great personal duel between W.E. Gladstone and Disraeli. Only one of them knew how to deal with the queen. “Mr. Gladstone addresses me as if I were a public meeting,” Victoria said, which aggravated her dislike of his increasingly radical politics. But Disraeli won her heart with what the biographer Jane Ridley has unimprovably called his “camp sycophancy.” When Prince Albert died, “Dizzy” wrote to her that “there was in him an union of the manly grace & sublime simplicity, of chivalry, with the intellectual splendor of the Attic Academe.” The queen declared it “the most striking and beautiful letter” she had received.
At times Victoria found the strain of her duties so great that she declared herself “dreadfully disgusted” with politics and “tempted to go off to Australia — there to ignore all.” But she stayed, though helpless to prevent the re-election of her liberal nemesis Gladstone, openly — sometimes shockingly — siding with his adversaries.
What a contrast between the reigns of Victoria and Elizabeth! The one saw England ascend to an unparalleled position, with the greatest empire the world had ever seen, the Royal Navy ruling the seas and the City of London the hub of the first great age of financial and commercial globalization. But Elizabeth’s reign was a long story of coming to terms with decline, the end of empire, and a much reduced place in the world — or sometimes not coming to terms with it.
There is also a marked contrast between the two women, and in the character of these two books. “Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers” is all politics and personalities, while “Q: A Voyage Around the Queen,” has neither.
And Elizabeth herself remains a cipher. Brown describes his grandmother’s meeting with the queen, and his own, and her many thousandfold identical exchanges with people who met her: “Have you come far?” and “How interesting” figure prominently.
As a result, the book might be called an exercise in reception history. So much of it is about how the rest of the world responded to the queen, using the same words again and again, as in “The queen looked quietly radiant” (Sylvia Plath after a royal visit to Cambridge in 1955). The queen has appeared in many people’s dreams, including rather too many of Brown’s (full disclosure, I have never in my life dreamed about Queen Elizabeth).
People who met her saw what they wanted to see, and felt what they wanted to feel, not least presidents and first ladies. After Ronald and Nancy Reagan dined on the Royal Yacht Britannia in 1983, Nancy described the encounter as “two mothers and wives talking about their lives, mostly our children.” Hillary Clinton recalls the queen wearing “a sparkling diamond tiara that caught the light as she nodded and laughed at Bill’s stories.”
Elizabeth was always courteous, with tyrants like Idi Amin or Nicolae Ceausescu as well as leaders of friendly countries, but she couldn’t conceal her dislike of one: Donald Trump, she complained, was always looking over her shoulder, presumably for someone he considered more important.
“Apart from horses and racing I could not discover anything that interested her,” said Lady Gladwyn, the wife of a British ambassador, and Elizabeth comes alive with her four-legged friends. Brown’s pages on her corgis, those rather unpleasant little Welsh dogs, are a comic masterpiece. They were forever biting people’s ankles, palace footmen or distinguished visitors, but no one could complain. When one corgi died and someone who knew the queen well wrote a letter of condolence, she received a six-page reply detailing and extolling the wretched pooch’s life and character.
Brown highlights one utterly discreditable episode in the queen’s life, in which she sacked her racing trainer, and evicted him from a house she owned — when he was undergoing heart surgery and had not long before broken his neck. This incomprehensible decision was intensely unpopular, and was generally attributed to the malign influence of her crony Lord Carnarvon, to whom she seemed nearly as close as to the Duke of Edinburgh, her cantankerous consort.
The “annus horribilis,” as the queen called it, of 1992 saw marital breakups of the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of York, along with attendant scandals. Prince Philip was chancellor of Cambridge University. That year an honorary degree was conferred on Jacques Derrida, and when somebody described him as the exponent of deconstruction theory, Brown relates, Prince Philip was overheard muttering that his own family seemed to be deconstructing pretty well.
Even if Queen Elizabeth remains a mystery, and if some of the mawkish devotion once showered on her was cloying, perhaps this isn’t a bad time to recognize the virtues of constitutional monarchy, with a head of state selected randomly by inheritance who can be respected by the public and stands above the strife and sometimes squalor of politics.
Over the years American friends have asked me in a slightly condescending way, “Would you really rather have Queen Elizabeth as your head of state than” whatever president was in power at the moment? — be it Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush — to which I would reply, “Since you ask, yes, actually.”
Funnily enough, no one has asked me this recently.
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