crisis known as the “Bedchamber Plot” occurred. The Whig ministry had introduced a bill suspending the Constitution of Jamaica because the Assembly in that colony had refused to adopt the Prisons Act passed by the Imperial Legislature. Sir Robert Peel moved an amendment, which, on a division (6th May), was defeated by a majority of five only in a house of 583, and ministers thereupon resigned. The duke of Wellington was first sent for, but he advised that the risk of forming an administration should be entrusted to Sir Robert Peel. Sir Robert was ready to form a cabinet in which the duke of Wellington, Lords Lyndhurst, Aberdeen and Stanley, and Sir James Graham would have served; but he stipulated that the mistress of the robes and the ladies of the bedchamber appointed by the Whig administration should be removed, and to this the queen would not consent. On the 10th of May she wrote curtly that the course proposed by Sir Robert Peel was contrary to usage and repugnant to her feelings; the Tory leader then had to inform the House of Commons that, having failed to obtain the proof which he desired of her majesty’s confidence, it was impossible for him to accept office. The ladies of the bedchamber were so unpopular in consequence of their behaviour to Lady Flora Hastings that the public took alarm at the notion that the queen had fallen into the hands of an intriguing coterie; and Lord Melbourne, who was accused of wishing to rule on the strength of court favour, resumed office with diminished prestige. The Tories thus felt aggrieved; and the Chartists were so prompt to make political capital out of the affair that large numbers were added to their ranks. On the 14th of June Mr. Attwood, M.P. for Birmingham, presented to the House of Commons a Chartist petition alleged to have been signed by 1,280,000 people. It was a cylinder of parchment of about the diameter of a coach wheel, and was literally rolled up on the floor of the house. On the day after this curious document had furnished both amusement and uneasiness to the Commons, a woman, describing herself as Sophia Elizabeth Guelph Sims, made application at the Mansion House for advice and assistance to prove herself the lawful child of George IV. and Mrs Fitzherbert; and this incident, trumpery as it was, added fuel to the disloyal flame then raging. Going in state to Ascot the queen was hissed by some ladies as her carriage drove on to the course, and two peeresses, one of them a Tory duchess, were openly accused of this unseemly act. Meanwhile some monster Chartist demonstrations were being organized, and they commenced on the 4th of July with riots at Birmingham. It was an untoward coincidence that Lady Flora Hastings died on the 5th of July, for though she repeated on her deathbed, and wished it to be published, that the queen had taken no part whatever in the proceedings which had shortened her life, it was remarked that the ladies who were believed to have persecuted her still retained the sovereign’s favour. The riots at Birmingham lasted ten days, and had to be put down by armed force. They were followed by others at Newcastle, Manchester, Bolton, Chester and Macclesfield.
These troublous events had the effect of hastening the queen’s marriage. Lord Melbourne ascertained that the queen’s dispositions towards her cousin, Prince Albert, were unchanged, and he advised King Leopold, through M. Van der Weyer, the Belgian minister, that the prince The queen’s marriage. should come to England and press his suit. The prince arrived with his brother on a visit to Windsor on the 10th of October 1839. On the 12th the queen wrote to King Leopold: “Albert’s beauty is most striking, and he is so amiable and unaffected—in short, very fascinating.” On the 15th all was settled; and the queen wrote to her uncle, “I love him more than I can say.” The queen’s public announcement of her betrothal was enthusiastically received. But the royal lovers still had some parliamentary mortifications to undergo. The government proposed that Prince Albert should receive an annuity of £50,000, but an amendment of Colonel Sibthorp—a politician of no great repute—for making the annuity £30,000 was carried against ministers by 262 votes to 158, the Tories and Radicals going into the same lobby, and many ministerialists taking no part in the division. Prince Albert had not been described, in the queen’s declaration to the privy council, as a Protestant prince; and Lord Palmerston was obliged to ask Baron Stockmar for assurance that Prince Albert did not belong to any sect of Protestants whose rules might prevent him from taking the Sacrament according to the ritual of the English Church. He got an answer couched in somewhat ironical terms to the effect that Protestantism owed its existence in a measure to the house of Saxony, from which the prince descended, seeing that this house and that of the landgrave of Hesse had stood quite alone against Europe in upholding Luther and his cause. Even after this certain High Churchmen held that a Lutheran was a “dissenter,” and that the prince should be asked to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles.
The queen was particularly concerned by the question of the prince’s future status as an Englishman. It was impracticable for him to receive the title of king consort; but the queen naturally desired that her husband should be placed by act of parliament in a position which would secure to him precedence, not only in England, but in foreign courts. Lord Melbourne sought to effect this by a clause introduced in a naturalization bill; but he found himself obliged to drop the clause, and to leave the queen to confer what precedence she pleased by letters-patent. This was a lame way out of the difficulty, for the queen could only confer precedence within her own realms, whereas an act of parliament bestowing the title of prince consort would have made the prince’s right to rank above all royal imperial highnesses quite clear, and would have left no room for such disputes as afterwards occurred when foreign princes chose to treat Prince Albert as having mere courtesy rank in his wife’s kingdom. The result of these political difficulties was to make the queen more than ever disgusted with the Tories. But there was no other flaw in the happiness of the marriage, which was solemnized on the 10th of February 1840 in the Chapel Royal, St James’s. It is interesting to note that the queen was dressed entirely in articles of British manufacture. Her dress was of Spitalfields silk; her veil of Honiton lace; her ribbons came from Coventry; even her gloves had been made in London of English kid—a novel thing in days when the French had a monopoly in the finer kinds of gloves.
From the time of the queen’s marriage the crown played an increasingly active part in the affairs of state. Previously, ministers had tried to spare the queen all disagreeable and fatiguing details. Lord Melbourne saw her every day, whether she was in London or at Windsor, Public affairs. and he used to explain all current business in a benevolent, chatty manner, which offered a pleasant contrast to the style of his two principal colleagues, Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston. A statesman of firmer mould than Lord Melbourne would hardly have succeeded so well as he did in making rough places smooth for Prince Albert. Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston were naturally jealous of the prince’s interference—and of King Leopold’s and Baron Stockmar’s—in state affairs; but Lord Melbourne took the common-sense view that a husband will control his wife whether people wish it or not. Ably advised by his private secretary, George Anson, and by Stockmar, the prince thus soon took the de facto place of the sovereign’s private secretary, though he had no official status as such; and his system of classifying and annotating the queen’s papers and letters resulted in the preservation of what the editors of the Letters of Queen Victoria (1907) describe as “probably the most extraordinary collection of state documents in the world”—those up to 1861 being contained in between 500 and 600 bound volumes at Windsor. To confer on Prince Albert every honour that the crown could bestow, and to let him make his way gradually into public favour by his own tact, was the advice which Lord Melbourne gave; and the prince acted upon it so well, avoiding every appearance of intrusion, and treating men of all parties and degrees with urbanity, that within five months of his marriage he obtained a signal mark of the public confidence. In expectation of the queen becoming a mother, a bill was passed through parliament providing for the appointment of Prince Albert as sole regent in case the
