Reginal Politics

By ROBERT HUGHES

QUEEN VICTORIA by CECIL WOODHAM-SMITH 486 pages. Knopf. $10.95

Victoria: even today the name conjures up a glacial and portly figure swathed in black mourning, the aged face set in its pale exophthalmic stare of hauteur as she proceeds (for monarchs do not walk) across some shaven lawn at Balmoral. She is a living monument, testy, imperious, not amused. When the old die we remember them as old, and so it has been with Queen Victoria.

The Victorian stereotype alone does not explain the woman's extraordinary fascination for biographers. Kings and queens are not, as a rule, very interesting people--the house of Hanover, in particular, had a flair of dullness, except when its sons were deranged by porphyria or brandy--and Victoria was one of the few British monarchs to be a wholly singular creature. "She not merely filled the chair. She filled the room," remarked the Duke of Wellington, a man not easily impressed, when he saw her after she had received the news of William IV's death and her own accession to the throne.

In time the room became the world.

The personality was so intriguing, the life so long (by her death in 1901, Victoria had reigned for 64 years and been served by no less than ten Prime Ministers), the power so great, the politics so convoluted and the documentation so rich that Victoria became the subject of 19th century biography.

Cecil Woodham-Smith's Victoria is the first of two books. It takes the sovereign's life as far as the death of Albert, her prince consort, in 1861. The author had access to the Royal Family Archives at Windsor, and her rich effort at historical reconstruction is one of the finest biographies in English since George Painter's classic Marcel Proust. It is also an engrossing love story. Woodham-Smith is a historian, not a Crawfie. Her romance, moreover, is told without sentimentality and is set against the forbidding complexities of 19th century European politics.

Victoria took the throne at a time when it seemed the English monarchy could be either liked or respected, but not both. "Notwithstanding his feebleness of purpose and littleness of mind, his ignorance and his prejudices," the Spectator editorialized after her uncle's death, "William the Fourth was to the last a popular sovereign; but his very popularity was acquired at the price of something like public contempt."

Victoria gave the crown its prestige again. An iron toughness of spirit enabled her to do so. Indeed without such a will, even her childhood would have been insupportable. Her father, one of the brutish Hanoverian dukes, died when she was only one year old. The widowed duchess then came under the influence of an Irish swindler named John Conroy. It was he who set up the famous "Kensington system" for rearing Victoria. Its aim was to make her totally dependent upon her pathetic mother and so, by remote control, upon Conroy. Little Victoria had to sleep in her mother's room. She could never be alone. But she rarely had company of her own age--except Conroy's daughter, Victoire, whom she loathed.

In the drafty isolation cell of Kensington Palace, with only her beloved governess Lehzen to moderate Conroy's schemes, Victoria was the object of endless political intrigue between court factions who wanted to influence the future monarch. "I will be good," the 11-year-old Victoria exclaimed with fervor when Lehzen revealed to her that one day she would be Queen. But life, meanwhile, was cruelly tedious. "I am very fond of pleasant society," she complained when 16, "and we have been for the last three months immured within our old palace. I longed sadly for some gaiety." The princess was a creature of exuberant vitality. As a diarist, for example, she tried to practice total recall, scribbling and underlining 2,000 words a day. Her journal eventually filled 122 volumes, an unparalleled historical document that, probably for reasons of Victorian prudery, was mostly destroyed by her daughter Princess Beatrice after the Queen died.

Victoria was incapable of compromise and deceit. Her honesty made her a formidable queen-empress. She was prone to take any political maneuver as a personal slight and made no secret of her dislike for such figures as Sir Robert Peel whom she once described as a "cold, unfeeling and disagreeable man" with a smile "like a silver plate on a coffin." Others benefited from Victoria's longing for a father: notably her first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, a charming Whig and absolutist to whom she was deeply attached. Melbourne's indifference to reform may well have atrophied Victoria's own social conscience. But her will to be loved, confined but not reduced by the palace schedules, finally descended on one man and produced the most celebrated marriage of the 19th century.

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was a careerist whose training and education had for years been directed toward one end: marriage with Victoria. How the union proceeded forms one of the most entertaining strands in Mrs. Woodham-Smith's book. Victoria had seen him before, but she first fell in love with this blue-and-blond Parsifal in 1839. "It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert--who is beautiful," she observed in her diary. Their correspondence from the beginning was a model of Victorian decorum and devotion ("Never, never did I think I could be loved so much"). Their engagement was long and set about with squabbles over precedence and income that Victoria, as was her custom, eventually resolved with regal finality. Albert seems to have been sexually tepid, as Victoria apparently was not. His priggishness and diffidence, however, were compensated for by his immense marital devotion.

Victoria's impulsive reach for a gunboat was as quick as Lord Palmerston's whenever the empire's prerogatives were challenged. Although Albert tried to assert the principle that the crown should be above politics, she remained, as one expects queens to be, a natural Tory. Thus she ignored the Chartist riots of 1839, largely because no minister could persuade her that the rabble mattered. Albert and Victoria concurred on one political principle, that a sovereign's duty was to save "her" people from the blunders of their elect ed representatives. By custom, the Queen ruled her consort. In practice he eventually tamed and directed her. "I treasured up everything I heard," she wrote, "kept every letter in a box to tell & show him, & was always so vexed & nervous if I had any foolish draft or dis patch to show him, as I knew it would distress & irritate him and affect his poor dear stomach."

Victoria was related to most of the crowned heads of Europe. She was also the last great British monarch presiding over the largest empire in history. Her personality--dominated by Albert--affected nearly all the great events of the 19th century, from the revolutions of 1848 to Britain's brave bungling in the Crimea. But when Albert died in 1861--of typhoid fever, from the fetid drains of Windsor Castle--she was left in an almost unimaginable isolation. "The words on all lips," runs the last sentence of Woodham-Smith's book, "the feelings in all hearts were: 'What is going to happen now to the poor Queen?'" One waits for Volume 2.

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