Queen Victoria - Professor Vernon Bogdanor

ladies and gentlemen this is the first of a series of six lectures on British sovereigns at since Queen Victoria and it would conclude next summer with a lecture on the Queen and my aim in these lectures is to try to answer two questions the first is how our system of constitutional monarchy has evolved since the 19th century and the second is what is the role of constitutional monarchy in a modern democratic state now this first lecture is on Queen Victoria but first I have a confession to make because I fear I can't possibly compete with the television series which seems to have transfixed the nation and soon we will know every detail of the Queen's private life in the early years of her reign but I cannot help feeling that the television series is not really about Victoria Queen of England and Empress of India but about an entirely different character Victoria the tele star and indeed I sometimes felt as if I had intruded upon an episode of Downton Abbey by mistake I suspect that Queen Victoria would have responded to the series by using words often attributed her but which she never in fact used the words being we are not amused but whether that is right or not I fear there will be nothing in this lecture on the Queen's love life about which I know nothing instead I will concentrate on a theme which I am sure you will all find much more exciting namely the Constitution now in June 1837 a young girl of eighteen was woken at Kensington Palace and told by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain that her uncle William the fourth was dead and that she was to be queen of Britain or England as the Victorians used to call it ignoring the susceptibilities of the Scots Welsh and Irish by the end of the 19th century Victoria would be ruling over nearly one-quarter of the world's population she was born in 1819 and named Alexandrina Victoria and at her Proclamation she was called Alexandrina Victoria queen of the United Kingdom but at her first Privy Council meeting she signed herself as Victoria and the name alexandrina was withdrawn at her wish she was the only child of the fourth son of George the third so at her birth it seemed unlikely she would succeed to the throne but there were no other surviving sons of George the third son's there were no surviving grandsons and her three the three older brothers of her father had no surviving daughters or rather I should say they had no surviving daughters born in wedlock William the fourth in fact had no fewer than ten children the result of his liaison with an actress mrs. Jordan who was his mistress for twenty years but his Queen Adelaide had no children and at the age of ten Victoria was told she might succeed to the throne and she responded characteristically perhaps I will be good had she been under 18 when she came to the throne there would have been a Regency she just was just over 18 she later told the official biographer of the Prince Consort the Queen was not overwhelmed on her accession rather full of courage she may say and then she uttered a remark that is perhaps characteristic of her reign she said she took things as they came as she knew they must be and she was incidentally the first sovereign to live in Buckingham Palace and from the first she showed a certainty of touch which sometimes degenerated into willfulness being so young some thought she could easily be influenced and after her father's early death her mother had fallen under the influence of her secretary Sir John Conroy but the new Queen banished koan Roy from the court and when her uncle King Leopold of Belgium wrote to her offering policy suggestions her Queen was scrupulous in showing all letters to her prime minister and refusing to reply on policy matters except on the advice of her Prime Minister and this shows that the time Victoria came to the throne the principle of ministerial responsibility for advice which is fundamental to constitutional monarchy was already well established it had been partially established after the Civil War in the 17th century now of Charles a second who was king after the restoration from 1660 to 1685 which had said that he never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one but Charles responded that is very true for my words are my own but my actions are those of my ministers but by the 19th century it was generally accepted that our sovereigns actions and her words were those of her ministers now Victoria's firmness sometimes had less happy results Queen Victoria like her father was a sympathizer to the Whigs the predecessor of the Liberals and rather suspicious of the Conservatives when she came to power and in 1839 the conservative leader Sir Robert Peel became prime minister and asked her if she would replace some of the ladies of her bedchamber who were all Whigs and some of whom were related to Whig ministers and Peale sought an expression of confidence Queen Victoria's and said she never talked politics with the ladies and wouldn't move them but Peele insisted and Peele refused to take office and the Whig leader Lord Melbourne remained in power for two more years the Queen told Lord Melbourne they wish to treat me like a girl but I will show them that I am queen of England critics said that Melbourne had returned to power and I quote behind the petticoats of the ladies-in-waiting and the Queen became very unpopular in conservative circles where the royal toast was received in silence in later life the Queen admitted she had been mistaken and she told her private secretary in 1897 yes I was very hot about it and so were my ladies as I had been brought up under Lord Melbourne but I was very young only 20 and never should have acted so again yes it was a mistake and the mistake came about because Lord Melbourne the Whig leader and prime minister was also serving as Queen Victoria's private secretary thus allowing a clear conflict of roles and this conflict ended when Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840 and Albert replaced Melbourne as her private secretary after Albert's death in 1861 Victoria appointed private secretaries who were not involved with politics and were expected to serve the interests of the sovereign which need not necessarily coincide with those of her prime minister and that was an important step in the development of modern constitutional monarchy now Victoria came to the throne after a period in which the role of a monarchy had been radically altered though it had not yet reached its modern form the old theory of monarchy held that the sovereign was responsible for government legislation and the government therefore needed the confidence of the sovereign to survive defeat of the government in the House of Commons was therefore a defeat for the sovereign the response of the sovereign would then be to dissolve Parliament and the party in power would appeal to the country on the basis it had the sovereigns support and partly for that reason by no government between the years 1715 and 1835 was defeated in a general election but all that had been changing or his views of it had been changing during the 18th century now dr. Johnson had said that the first Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole had been chosen by George the 1st for the people but the younger Pitt had been a prime minister chosen by the people for George the 3rd but in fact Pitt was also chosen by George the 3rd though one factor in his favor was that he was popular with the people now in 1841 the Whig government favoured by the Queen led by Lord Melbourne was defeated at the polls after losing a vote in the Commons the voters then chose a prime minister Sir Robert Peel against the wishes of the sovereign Melbourne did not understand that in future the government would be decided by the people not by the sovereign he told the Queen that the return of a majority in favour of the opposition would be an affront to the crown but in 1841 for the first time in British history it happened the opposition won a general election and the Queen said she made a mistake in dissolving she said the result has been a majority returned against her of nearly 100 votes and she was forced to accept Sir Robert Peel whom she didn't actually care for though later she came to revise her judgment and she supported the policy by which he is most remembered that of free trade later in her reign she was also forced to accept Gladstone and she also disliked but with Gladstone by contrast with Peel the Queen did not revise her judgment and her dislike if anything increased in intensity during Gladstone's for administration's now in 1846 Peale resigned following the controversy over the Corn Laws and after that politics entered a kind of twilight period between the decline of royal power and the development of the modern party system instead of a two-party system the House of Commons dissolved into different party groups none of which was particularly cohesive and none of which could come on no real majority this enabled Victoria to exercise a genuine influence on government and miss she was aided by Prince Albert who became in 1857 the Prince Consort one government minister said rightly I think princes are strong when ministers are weak now I've mentioned Prince Albert became in effect her private secretary but in fact his role was much greater than that he became in effect a co sovereign with Victoria after the birth of her first child in late 1840 he was given full access to cabinets and other state papers and from 1841 he attended audiences which the Queen held with her ministers he became ineffective joint sovereign but in my view there's no constitutional provision for such a concept because it's only the sovereign and not her consort who is required to act under advice and therefore protected by the principle of ministerial responsibility of Parliament the consort is not under parliamentary control and therefore cannot act a sovereign in 1852 the Queen's influence was decisive in my view when she assisted in the creation of a coalition government led by Lord Aberdeen and this was the last in our history to be brought about by royal influence except for the national government of 1931 but the Aberdeen government could not be sustained by royal favour when it came to be accused of incompetence during the Crimean War and in fact royal power was coming to be limited even in the mid Victorian period of multi-party politics because following the fall of the Aberdeen coalition in 1855 took Queen try to avoid calling on Palmerston whose foreign policy she disapproved of but she could not do so and in 1859 she again tried to avoid both Palmerston and the new wig leader Lord John Russell whom she called too dreadful old men but she was again forced to turn to Palmerston now a basic objection to Palmerston was as much constitutional as political her views on foreign policy were very different from his but she gave his policies backing when they were supported by United cabinet what she objected to and with some reason was his failure to keep her informed upon seas which she was required to sanction she also resented the fact but after she had given her approval to politics he then arbitrarily altered or modified them without informing her but what was unconstitutional in her conduct even then was a method by she and Albert intrigued with the cabinet against Palmerston behind his back now the Queen did in fact also disagree with Parma Stone's policies which involved she thought interference with the affairs of other countries to help secure liberal regimes in other countries and the Queen's influence on foreign affairs was generally exercised in the interests of reconciliation in 1861 during the American Civil War Albert on her behalf toned down a government draft onto the northern states which could have involved Britain in war with the northern states in 1863 she pressed ministers not to intervene in the rebellion in Poland and in 1864 not to intervene in the war between Prussia and Denmark the German minister in London said the victory of the peace party is the victory of the Queen during the middle part of her reign she was also a force for conciliation in domestic affairs in 1869 on the Irish Church disestablishment bill and in 1884 the reform bill now she was broadly opposed to both but on at the Irish Church she wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury begging him not to reject it out of hand and not to allow the House of Lords to reject it and she did the same in 1884 on parliamentary reform in 1861 Albert died and Israeli paid him the rather ambiguous compliment that if he had outlived some of our old stages he would have given us while retaining all constitutional guarantees the blessings of saluté government and what he meant by that was that albert believed that only the sovereign could move beyond the partial interests of politicians and comprehend the true interests of the people and so acquiring a dispassionate view of the public good and the truth is to my mind that Albert did not really understand the British constitution because it is not for the sovereign in a constitutional monarchy to form a view of the public good independently of ministers who have been chosen by the people the sovereign cannot be as Albert thought an independent power in the state now the death of Albert was a shattering blow to the Queen from which he never fully recovered she mourned him for the rest of her life and used writing paper from then onwards with black borders her health deteriorated and she refused to appear in public in the last 39 years of her reign she opened Parliament just seven times and for over two years she made no public appearance in London at all she came to be known as the widow of Windsor and this led to a brief but significant growth of Republican sentiment on the third anniversary of Albert's death the Times commented the living have their claims as well as the dead it is impossible for a recluse to occupy the British throne without a gradual weakening of that authority which the sovereign has been accustomed to expect in September 1865 the satirical magazine punch printed a cartoon of the Queen as her Maya knew in The Winter's Tale and paulina was depicted as Britannia and the bottom of the cartoon was Paul's comment from the last act of the play tis time descend be stone no more but the criticism of the Queen was not in essence Republican the public demand was in essence for more monarchy not for its abolition the mass of the people one peer told the Queen's secretary expect a king or queen to look and play the part they want to see a crown scepter and all that sort of thing they want the gilding for their money and that no doubt remains true today now in 1867 the second reform act extended the franchise to urban householders and this helped to restore a two-party system and limited the possibilities of royal influence but it was during the last part of her reign that the Queen became most blatantly partisan she became as is well known and devoted admirer of the conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and a critic of his liberal opponent William Gladstone and this arose in part for personal reasons which can best be explained by an anecdote there was a lady who had the good fortune to dine on successive evenings with Gladstone and Israeli and she said mr. Gladstone spoke so brilliantly that he made her feel that he was the cleverest person in the land but she said the next evening mr. Disraeli spoke even more brilliantly and made her feel that she was the cleverest person in the land in 1868 the Dean of Windsor told Gladstone that everything depends upon your manner of approaching the Queen her nervous susceptibility as a much increased since you had to do with her before and you cannot show too much regard gentleness I might even say tenderness towards her the Gladstone never succeeded in following this advice Gladstone so does Rayleigh said treats the Queen like a public Department I treat her like a woman and Disraeli was able to penetrate the stiff formality of court life and the Queen found his letters to her witty and amusing which indeed they were and he flattered her quiet outrageously his first met at the Queen after being appointed prime minister in 1868 set the tone and I think is worth quoting extensively he can only offer devotion it will be his delight and duty to render the transaction of affairs as easy to your majesty as possible and in smaller matters he hopes he may succeed in this but he ventures to trust that in the great affairs of state your Majesty will deign not to withhold from him the benefit of your Majesty's guidance your Majesty's life has been passed in a constant communion with great men and the knowledge and management of important transactions even if your majesty were not gifted with those great abilities which all must now acknowledge this rare and choice experience must give your Majesty an advantage in judgment which few living persons and probably no livin Prince can rival he whom Your Majesty has so highly preferred presumes to trust your Majesty's condescension in this behalf the Queen returned israelís affection when the Conservatives unexpectedly won a by-election in Southwark in February 1880 he sent him a Valentine saying I'm greatly rejoiced the great victory at Southwark it shows what the feeling of the country is it is Rayleigh replied characteristically that his and I quote life of anxiety and toil has its romance when he remembers that he Labor's for the most gracious of beings it seemed that Disraeli gave of Queen false view of her powers telling her in 1878 that she had the clear constitutional right to dismiss her ministers and when the Conservatives were in opposition in 1881 the Queen asked him quite unconstitutionally whether it was true as the Liberals had said that the Queen's speech was not hers but her ministers and he replied that such a principle and I quote was not known to the British Constitution it is only a piece of parliamentary gossip on one occasion the Queen told you Israeli but if the cabinet did not fulfill its promises to her she and I quote lay down the thorny crown ie abdicate Victoria was devastated when Disraeli as conservatives were defeated in the general election of 1880 she told her private secretary she cannot deny she liberal as she has ever been but never radical or democratic thinks is a great calamity for the country and the Peace of Europe she was faced with a necessity of summoning Gladstone but told her private secretary she will sooner abdicate than send for or have any communication without half-mad firebrand who would soon ruin everything and be a dictator others but herself she went on may submit to his democratic rule but not the Queen however she found she had no alternative and she had to summon Gladstone but she comforted herself by writing to Disraeli mr. Gladstone looks very ill very old and Haggard and his voice feeble he said twice he looked to his not being long in office as it was too much for him she would not have been amused had she known that Gladstone would remain leader of the Liberals for another fourteen years and would take office twice more on the last occasion in 1892 at the age of 82 [Music] but perhaps constitutional purists have taken all this a little too seriously indeed they did so even at the time Lord Darby Disraeli as foreign secretary asked him in 1874 is there not just a risk of encouraging her in two large ideas of her personal power and to great indifference to what the public expects I only ask it is for you to judge the truth is that both the Queen and Disraeli were elderly lonely and bereaved Prince Albert had died in 1861 Disraeli his wife in 1872 they sought solace in each other's company and enjoyed a rather romantic conception of the relationship between Queen and Prime Minister what they said to each other about their constitutional powers must be taken with a large pinch of salt much of it was harmless play-acting and both of them knew it Disraeli had no more intention of being dismissed by the Queen than she had and abdicating and pax the personal element in the Queen's attitudes to Disraeli and Gladstone has been overestimated perhaps more important was the Queen's dislike of Gladstone policies and in particular Irish Home Rule which she feared would break up the kingdom the Queen was just as much opposed to Gladstone's liberal successor Lord Rosebery even though she personally had chosen him and even though he was almost a chivalrous gallant and flattering in his method of approached the Queen as Disraeli had been and she was just as sympathetic to Disraeli as conservative successor Lord Salisbury as she and Bender Disraeli indeed she declared at the end of her life that contrary to what is often supposed she regarded not Disraeli but Lord Salisbury as the best Prime Minister of her reign and her asked you to the radical Joseph Chamberlain changed completely when Chamberlain rejected Home Rule and became no longer a left-wing radical but a unionist and an imperialist the Queen was more of an irritant to liberals and a real hindrance she could achieve little against a strong United liberal government under an agreed leader she could do nothing against a government with a secure majority in the Commons she could not force a solution against the wish of her Prime Minister and could not veto policies to which we belong sympathetic she could only initiate policies when the Prime Minister agreed with her her influence could be exerted only when the Liberals were divided and politics was in a state of flux as in 1885 86 / home rule or whereas between 1892 and 1895 a weak minority Liberal government found itself dependent on support of the Irish nationalists now after Gladstone's can home rule in 1885 the Queen sought to bring together a coalition of conservatives and so-called moderate liberals who were unionists and she communicated with the conservative opposition as to how this might best be achieved in 1886 she pressed the unionist leader Lord Hartington to support Lord Salisbury's Conservative government she was accused in 1894 of using her prerogative of appointing a prime minister by choosing as Gladstone's successor a liberal of the right the liberal imperialist Lord Rosebery rather than Sir William Harcourt who would probably have been the choice of Liberal MPs or Lord Spencer who would have been glad since choice and she did not ask Gladstone for his own view before appointing Rosebery but in the Queen's defence it could be argued she was under no obligation to consult Gladstone who was resigning because he had been repudiated by his cabinet on the question of naval expenditure and who had perhaps therefore lost the authority which gave him the right to be consulted Lord Spencer in any case later declared he would not have accepted appointment of Prime Minister and the cabinet was opposed to Sir William Harcourt whom they regarded as an impossible colleague and the bowel group of Harcourt admits that Lord Rosebery was already emerging at the choice of the cabinet had ministers wished to serve under someone other than roseberry they could refuse to serve under him so compelling the Queen to choose someone else so the Queen was working with the grain of politics exercising a casting vote as it were rather than a purely personal preference now Lord Rosebery was less willing to pursue home ruled in Gladstone and home rule had been defeated heavily in the House of Lords in 1893 but partly for that reason he favored constitutional reform to widen the composition of the House of Lords by diluting the hereditary element to this - the Queen was vehemently opposed seeing it as tantamount by abolition of the Lord's Lord Salisbury and opposition provided her with a novel doctrine but on a matter of this vital importance the Prime Minister has no constitutional right to announce a totally new policy without first asserting your Majesty's pleasure on the subject and if he's unable to convince your majesty it is his duty to tender his resignation the Queen then told roseberry that Lords reform was not a mere question of policy but as he himself said a question of enormous importance a question of the revision of the entire Constitution and as such she maintains her sanction that her sanction for its public declaration should have been obtained and the implication of this doctrine was it on what you might call constitutional matters Herve defined the prime minister needed the confidence of the crown as well as that of the House of Commons but as rose be told the Queen this would tend to make the sovereign a party in all controversies of the hour and would hazard the neutrality of the sovereign now the roseberry government being a week's it was could it seem be forced to go to the country at any time as a result of the defeat in Parliament and the Queen then asked the opposition leader Lord Salisbury what would be the most suitable time for dissolution from his point of view and Salisbury said she would be within her rights to insist upon such a dissolution the Queen men asked through her private secretary a shadow law officer whether she was constitutionally entitled to order a dissolution and failing consent a Roseberry to dismiss the government the reply was tactful saying that while the Queen undoubtedly had such a right in a constitutional theory it would be in expedient to exercise that right at least at the present time since if Rose breed is old he would say he was dissolving at the Queen's and systems if on the other hand as was more likely he refused his old the Queen would have to dismiss him the shadow law officer later wrote I could scarcely express myself as strongly as I felt for my view was it would be a most dangerous act of folly if any premature interference of the crown took place now the reign of Queen Victoria transfer form the monarchy rather against her wishes in fact she was the first sovereign to arouse popular enthusiasm and affection she had altered the image of the monarchy from that of her dissolute predecessors George the fourth and William her fourth whom she called her wicked uncles and we think by contrast of the respectability of a Victorian age on the Queen's death in 1901 her prime minister Lord Salisbury said that her reign bridged over that great interval which separates Old England from New England other nations may have had to pass through similar trials but a seldom passed through them so peaceably so easily and with so much prosperity and success as we have and I think that future historians will look to the Queen's reign as the boundary which separates the two states of England who are right on the Victorian age in 1936 the changes which the Victorian period saw appeared greater than anything that had been witnessed before or since I am speaking of changes in men's minds and I cannot in my own time observe anything of greater consequence than the dethronement of ancient faith by natural science and historical criticism and the transition from oligarchic to democratic representation the paradox is the Queen was quite out of sympathy with these changes she deprecated anything which appeared to cast doubt on revealed religion and insisted she could never be queen of a democratic state she cannot she wrote to a liberal Minister in 1880 and will not be the queen of a democratic monarchy in 1892 after the Conservatives had been defeated in general election she wrote her daughter the empress frederick of prussia it seems to me a defect in our famed constitution to have to part with an admirable government like Lord Salisbury's for no question of any importance or any particular reason merely on account of the number of votes but Lord Salisbury said she had an extraordinary knowledge of what her people would think extraordinary because it could not have come from any personal intercourse I have said for years I always thought that when I knew what the Queen thought I knew pretty certainly what view her subjects would take and especially the middle classes of her subjects the Queen had become the symbol of British pride and prosperity and her personality had come to be associated with the beneficent changes of the era even though she was opposed to them she was also by contrast with her predecessors an exemplar of the domestic virtues with a close and affectionate family life and by the end of her reign to degree uh approached by any of her predecessors she had become a national talisman the role of the monarchy was also transformed by the development of the self-governing colonies in Canada Australia New Zealand South Africa who were in the words of the leader of the House of Commons Arthur baltha constitutionally linked to her through the person of the sovereign the living symbol of Imperial unity and where development of responsible government in the colonies parliamentary government balford believed the importance of the crown in our Constitution is not a diminishing but an increasing factor and that was shown in the two Jubilees the golden jubilee of 1887 and the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 at which the self-governing colonies were represented by their prime ministers and all this was to be recognized by an amendment to the royal titles Act passed in 1901 after Queen Victoria's death so that following the words queen or king of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland they was inserted and of the British dominions beyond the seas and in 1998 odo Rock told a royal confident but during the latter half of Queen Victoria's reign and more than ever now Great Britain means a British Empire our people overseas do not care a rush for Asquith or me they hardly know our names for them the symbol of empire is the king the Monarchs role in India had also been transformed when in 1876 Disraeli added Empress of India to the Queen's title which which she had long wanted indeed she wanted to be called Empress of Great Britain Ireland and India but Israeli said that would be unwise and is what Disraeli understood was an India with an empire of its own and therefore needed a head of state of its own and in his view the Queen would have become Empress of India the Indian people would see her not as a sovereign of a distant country but as their own sovereign Empress of their own country and liberal opposition to this innovation annoyed the Queen and perhaps strengthened her conservative sympathies Prince of Wales was also displeased because he hadn't been consulted and whereas Queen Victoria would sign her dispatches v RI Victoria Regina at empirics Victoria Queen Emperor it will sense simply scientist dispatches e hours of protest but the most fundamental changes in the monarchy were at home Queen Victoria was in fact the first sovereign of a new type and Arthur Balfour told the House of Commons in moving an address on the accession of Edward assemble that she had been the first of all constitutional monarchs whom the world has yet seen in constitutional monarchy was in fact a British invention in 1867 Walter Badgett wrote his classic work the English Constitution and he said if we look at history we shall find that it is only during the period of the present reign that in England the duties of a constitutional sovereign have ever been well performed Britain during her reign had changed from being a country ruled by the crown with the assistance of ministers who task force to secure a parliamentary majority for the crown its policies to a country ruled by one of the two party leaders the Queen ceased to be a political force in her own right now this growing impartiality of the crown was due of course less to the wishes of the Queen and the growth of party but as her power declined largely because of that the symbolic role of the monarchy in Britain and the Empire greatly increased as Badgett had foreseen the magic of monarchy what he called its dignified element depended upon the withering away of what he called the efficient element because a queen with power was bound for fend that part of the nation which did not agree with her with her power withering away she could become head of the whole nation as well as head of state now many believe the growth of parliamentary government would reduce the Queen to a cipher that she would become in the words of one advisor to Prince Albert nothing but a Mandarin figure which has the nod its head in assent or shake it in denial as his Minister pleases but Victoria show this need not be so that she would not become a mere piece of constitutional machinery because powers replaced by influence and magic famously laid down the three constitutional rights which are sovereign enjoyed the right to be consulted the right to encourage and the right to warn but he said there was no easy road to monarchical influence the details of political affairs Badgett said were vast disagreeable complicated and miscellaneous a king to be the equal of his ministers and discussion must work as they work he must be a man of business as they arm in a business Victoria was the first sovereign prepared to master the endless boxes of state papers sent to her with monotonous regularity by her private secretary it had been her great aim she said to follow the Prince Consort plan which was to sign nothing until he had read it and made notes upon what he signed alphab alpha referred to her life of continuous labour noticing during her final illness an accumulating mass of untouched documents which waited her attention quote I quote marveled at the unostentatious patience which for 63 years through sorrow through suffering in moments and weariness in moments of despondency had enabled her to carry on without break or pause her share the government of this great Empire for her there was no holiday to her there was no intermission of toil domestic sorrow domestic sickness made no difference in her Labor's and they were continued from the hour at which she became our sovereign - within a few days I had almost said a few hours of her death now when Badgett described the rights of the monarchy in 1860 in the 1860s he wrote as if he were describing accepted constitutional conventions but in fact as we've seen the idea of a constitutional monarch was comparatively new and there was no authoritative guidance as to what the Queen coral cannot do she was often blamed for not acting more like George the fifth when the only precedent she knew but those her uncle's George the fourth and William the fourth there was no real precedent for a constitutional monarchy of the modern type and badge 'it's account of the monarchy was more prescriptive than descriptive it's known that George v read Padgett it's not clear whether Queen Victoria read the English Constitution but she'd applaud Badgett whom she thought of as a dangerous radical and she was much displeased when she found a grandson reading his economic essays and when Victoria's letters were published after her death it became clear that Badgett had seriously underestimated the extent of the Queen's influence Disraeli had been more perceptive in 1872 he said I know it will be said that however beautiful the theory the personal influence of the sovereign is now merged in the responsibilities of the minister I think you will find there is a great fallacy in this view the principles of the English Constitution do not contemplate the absence of personal influence on the part of the sovereign and if they did the principles of human nature would prevent the fulfillment of such a theory the sovereign is entitled and indeed has a duty to express her views on government policy as long as this is done in private in the last resort of course a constitutional sovereign must give way to responsible ministers but it does not follow from this that a sovereign has no influence now as we have seen Queen Victoria exerted her influence in a blatantly partisan way during the last 25 years of her reign in favour of the Conservatives against the Liberals she wrote incessantly to Gladstone Andros brew to complain about their policies and she regularly complained of the speeches of liberal ministers which she believed were too extreme if you said that Gladstone used to begin cabinet meetings by saying he had just received a critical letter from the Queen which he then proceeded to read out after reading the letter he said and now let us proceed to business in 1885 the Queen acted unconstitutionally by sending Gladstone a public telegram deploring his failure to rescue General Gordon who had been killed in Khartoum by a Sudanese nationalist leader who called himself the Mahdi which means the Messiah the Queen's view no doubt correspond with that of a man in the street but it should not have been made public and the Queen's private secretary wondered if Gladstone could remain in office after being publicly condemned by the Queen now electing commentator in 1926 summed up the Queen's influence in the following way he said that her interpretation of the right to be consulted to encourage and to warn was a wide one as exercised by her it in though the right to harass to delay to reprimand and indeed as one who suffered much from her remarked the right to bully her ministers in the last resort both in home and foreign affairs a prime minister could of course get his own way but often only at the expense of the lengthy and delicate combat if a sum has said have said it is the duty of the English monarch to be passive and impartial the Queen was certainly the least constitutional sovereigns that she retained the reputation of a model monarch were due to the fact that though she strained the Constitution almost a breaking point her prejudices and her conventions was so exactly those dominant in her age that she seemed to embody its very nature within herself her infants moreover was almost always in the direction on which middle-class sentiment would have approved June last part of her reign the Queen like the House of Lords was a source of difficulty to every Liberal government and a source of encouragement every conservative one but her partisanship was not known to the public since neither Gladstone no Rosebery nor indeed a Liberal Minister publicly revealed it liberal reticence therefore is as important a factor in maintaining the prestige of the monarchy as conservative celebration of it the strength of the monarchy was much to Gladstone as it does to Israeli had Gladstone publicly revealed the Queen's partisanship her popularity would have been severely dented and the throne might have been in danger and it was largely because the Queen appeared so little in public after the death of the Prince Consort but it was generally assumed she played little part in politics it's a paradox that the Queen was regarded by the vast mass of her subjects as a divine institution without flaw at the very moment when she was behaving more unconstitutionally than ever before but as we have seen she had little real scope for altering the policy of her governments following the expansion of the franchise the development of party and a responsible government both in Britain and the corners and settlement all developments to which she was skeptical if not downright opposed so she was perforce and despite herself more of a constitutional monarch than her predecessors and by the end of her reign it had come to be generally accepted that the sovereign ought to be impartial between the parties but the monarch as I said is not only a head of state she's also a head of the nation and that role increased an important during her reign justice have powers went into decline indeed the monarchy reached a new peak of prestige in the Victorian age this could not have been predicted when Victoria came to the throne the three previous sovereigns have been in the in the words of Sidney Li the official barber head with the seventh the previous three previous sovereigns had been an imbecile George the third a prophet George the fourth and a buffoon William the fourth in 1830 Peale had thought the monarchy so unpopular that only a miracle could save it and when George the fourth died in 1830 the time said there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased King during the agitation over the 1832 reform bill will in the fourth said he'd felt the crown tottering on his head and as far as monarchy was accepted it was merely as a useful institution part of the machinery of government the monarchy enjoyed no emotional rap or the people of a sort that it has enjoyed almost continuously since the reign of Queen Victoria the element of magic sometimes associated with a monarchy the idea of a magical monarchy began with her but I end by repeating the paradox but although the Queen was skeptical if not downright hostile to the main political developments of the Victorian age and in particular to the idea of popular government the opening up of government the people never less to prestige the monarchy at the end of her reign owed much to its association with the idea of parliamentary and responsible government in which the sovereign was required to be nonpartisan and politically neutral it is to my mind a striking and remarkable paradox that constitutional monarchy arose as a result of political forces of which Victoria the first modern constitutional monarch largely disapproved thank you you you

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Published: Fri Dec 30 2016