Shooting Victoria Read Online Free PDF Page B

constitution of the households of earlier queens—did not apply in this case for the simple reason that Victoria was a reigning queen, and for the monarch to surround herself completely with Whig ladies—who, after all, amounted in a sense to her most intimate advisors—during a time of Tory government would signify to the world that the Queen had no confidence whatsoever in that government. Victoria and Peel reached an impasse: unless she replaced the Mistress of the Robes, and some senior Ladies of the Bedchamber, with Tories, he simply could not form a government. Victoria was adamant: as she wrote in her Journal,
    Sir Robert said, “Now, about the Ladies,” upon which I said I could not give up any of my Ladies, and never had imagined such a thing. He asked if I meant to retain all. “All,” I said. “The Mistress of the Robes and the Ladies of the Bedchamber?” I replied, “All.”
    Melbourne met with Whig leaders and—encouraged by the Queen’s stalwart accounts to Melbourne of her interviews with Peel—agreed to form another ministry. The Queen, then, held her ground and kept her Ladies and her beloved Melbourne—for another two years, as it turned out; Melbourne was still her Prime Minister as she sat for Mr. Hayden on this day in May. She would later admit that her partisanship was a mistake, but for now she was happy at the outcome, even though what became known as the Bedchamber Crisis further tarnished her public image and perpetuated a weak, unpopular, do-nothing Parliament.
    Criticism of the Queen from the Flora Hastings scandal continued into the fall of 1839. But by that time, Victoria found acomplete distraction from the scandal: her cousin Albert came to England.
    During the first two years of her reign, Victoria, freed from Conroy’s oppression and intoxicated with the autonomy that came with the throne, buttressed with the affectionate support of Lehzen and by “dear” Lord Melbourne, was cool to the idea of marriage, and indeed had made up her mind to delay marriage by two or three years. Her sentiments shifted in an instant, however, when she stood at the top of the staircase on the evening of 10 October 1839 to welcome her cousin from Coburg. She had met him three years before, as Princess, when a number of her cousins had been brought before her for her consideration. He had been shorter, stockier—a boy, then: now, he was tall, very handsome—a man, and in an instant, he was the paragon of men to her. “It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert—who is beautiful ,” she wrote; she was in love with an intensity far greater than she would ever feel for any other mortal. She was, she felt from the start, unworthy of his greatness, and her new object in life was, as she put it, to “strive to make him feel as little as possible the great sacrifice he has made.” Over the next three days, she sent encouraging messages to him, via Lehzen; on the 15th, she proposed to him. (Her proposing to him was a bit awkward, of course, but, as she was monarch and he was not, she realized it had to be that way: though overwhelmed by love for him, she could never, and would never, forget the prerogatives and responsibilities of her position.)
    Albert accepted, the more enthusiastically as he too had very quickly developed a genuine affection for his cousin. His own emotions aside, he was eager to accept her hand; since the time he was an infant, he had been groomed by his family to be consort to Victoria. His cosmopolitan and rigorous education, coupled with his innate and powerful sense of duty, prepared him for this, and for nothing besides this. Indeed, he had caught wind of the Queen’s plan to delay the marriage, and had come to England with the intention of putting an end to that notion, one way or another.The simple sight of him convinced Victoria that her marriage to Albert—and marriage quickly—was