later Lord Shaftesbury, to improve the conditions of children working in mines and factories were quite unnecessary and doomed to failure: since education of such children would never ‘do any good’; parents should be free ‘to send them under a certain age to work’.
One day the Queen mentioned that she had just read Oliver Twist and had been much affected by its ‘accounts of starvation in the Workhouses’. But Melbourne dismissed the book as one of Dickens’s own blinkered characters might well have done: ‘It’s all among Workhouses, and Coffin Makers, and Pickpockets…It’s all slang; just like the Beggar’s Opera…I don’t like these things; I wish to avoid them; I don’t like them in reality and therefore I don’t wish to see them represented.’19 As for railways, which were built by Irishmen – ‘who mind neither lord nor laws’ – and which he refused to have within fifteen miles of his house at Brocket, he didn’t ‘care about them’. ‘None of these modern inventions,’ he told the Queen, ‘consider human life.’20
‘What was called an Altar was covered with sandwiches, bottles of wine, etc.’
AFTER A DISTURBED NIGHT in which she had ‘a feeling that something awful was going to happen tomorrow’, the Queen was woken up at four o’clock in the morning in her bedroom at Buckingham Palace by the sound of guns in the Park, and ‘could not get much sleep afterwards on account of the noise of the people, bands etc. etc.’. It was Thursday, 28 June 1838 and she was to be crowned that day in Westminster Abbey. Thousands of people had travelled to London the day before until, as the diarist Mary Frampton told her mother, there were ‘stoppages in every street…Hundreds of people waiting…to get lifts on the railway in vain…Not a fly or cab to be had for love or money. Hackney coaches £8 or £12 each, double to foreigners.’1
‘The uproar, the confusion, the crowd, the noise are indescribable,’ Charles Greville confirmed. ‘Horsemen, footmen, carriages squeezed, jammed, intermingled, the pavement blocked up with timbers [for the spectators’ stands], hammering and knocking and falling fragments stunning the ears and threatening the head…The town all mob, thronging, bustling, gaping and gazing at everything, at anything, or at nothing. The Park one vast encampment, with banners floating on the tops of tents and still the roads are covered, the railroads loaded with arriving multitudes.’ He found the racket ‘uncommonly tiresome’, yet he had to concede that the ‘great merit of this Coronation is that so much has been done for the people [the theatres, for example, and many other places of entertainment were to be free that night]. To amuse and interest them seems to have been the principal object.’2
While not prepared to spend as much as the lavish sum of £243,000 which Parliament had voted for the coronation of King George IV, the Government were prepared to ensure that the ceremony in the Abbey and its attendant processions and celebrations were conducted with appropriate grandeur and an eye to the enjoyment of the people. £70,000 was deemed a reasonable sum, £20,000 more than had been spent on the coronation of King William IV.
Much attention was paid to the pretty dresses of the Queen’s eight young, unmarried trainbearers, the Queen’s own three different robes, the new uniforms of the Warders of the Tower and the Yeomen of the Guard, the regalia to be used in the various rites of the Abbey service, and the crown which had been used for the coronation of George IV but which had to be modified for Queen Victoria’s much smaller head before being reset with diamonds, pearls, rubies, emeralds and sapphires.
‘It was a fine day,’ the Queen, having been up since seven o’clock, wrote in her journal, recalling the long ride to the Abbey in the state coach drawn by eight cream horses, down gravelled streets lined with policemen and soldiers, up Constitution Hill to Hyde Park Corner, then down Piccadilly, St James’s and Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square and Whitehall, accompanied by the Duchess of Sutherland, her Mistress of the Robes, and the Earl of Albemarle, the Master of the Horse.
‘The crowds of people exceeded what I have ever seen,’ the Queen continued her account. ‘Many as there were the day I went to the City, it was nothing – nothing to the multitude, the millions of my loyal subjects, who were assembled in every spot to witness the Procession. Their good humour and excessive loyalty was beyond everything, and I really cannot say how proud I feel to be the Queen of such a Nation. I was alarmed at times for fear that the people would be crushed and squeezed on account of the tremendous rush and pressure.’3 But she kept smiling and bowing from side to side.
Preceded by the Royal Huntsmen, the Yeomen Prickers and Foresters and the Yeomen of the Guard, and followed by an escort of cavalry, the state coach drew up outside the Abbey door to be greeted by thunderous cheers. Inside the Abbey there were more cheers for the Queen and clapping, too, for Lord Melbourne and for the Duke of Wellington and for Wellington’s opponent in the Peninsular War, Marshal Soult, created Duke of Dalmatia by Napoleon and appointed French Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of St James’s by Louis-Philippe, King of the French. ‘Soult was so much cheered, both in and out of the Abbey,’ commented the dandiacal merchant, Thomas Raikes, ‘that he was completely overcome. He has since publicly said, “C’est le plus beau jour de ma vie. It shows that the English believe I have always fought loyally.” In the Abbey he seized the arm of his aide-de-camp, quite overpowered, and exclaimed, “This is truly a great people.”’4
Wellington was predictably not so pleased by his own reception, the ‘great shout and clapping of hands’. He looked down the aisle ‘with an air of vexation’, his friend, Lady Salisbury thought, as if to say, ‘This should be for the Queen.’5 She fully deserved the acclamation, the Duke considered: she carried herself with such charm, dignity and grace, never more so than when the frail and ancient Lord Rolle tripped up as he approached her to make his homage. ‘It turned me very sick,’ the writer, Harriet Martineau, recorded. ‘The large, infirm old man was held by two peers, and had nearly reached the footstool when he slipped through the hands of his supporters, and rolled over and over down the steps, lying at the bottom coiled up in his robes. He was instantly lifted up; and he tried again and again, amidst shouts of admiration of his valour.’6 ‘May I not get up and meet him?’ the Queen asked in anxious concern; and, since no one answered her, she outstretched her hand as he manfully rose to his feet and attempted to climb the steps once more as the congregation’s vociferous cheers echoed round the Abbey walls.7
Wellington’s high opinion of the Queen’s demeanour was commonly shared. As she caught her first glimpse of the brilliant assembly in the Abbey she was seen to catch her breath and turn pale, clasping her hands in front of her. One of her trainbearers, Lady Wilhelmina Stanhope, believed ‘her heart fluttered a little’ as they reached the throne; ‘at least the colour mounted to her cheeks, brow, and even neck, and her breath came quickly’;8 and there were those who regarded with some disapproval the smile she exchanged with Baroness Lehzen when, while sitting on the throne, she caught sight of that ‘most dear Being’ in the box above the royal box.
But to most observers she was a model of dignity and composure as she received the welcome accorded by the boys of Westminster School, whose traditional privilege it was to shout a Latin greeting to the monarch on such occasions. She was equally dignified as she turned from side to side to acknowledge the congregation’s shouts of ‘God Save Queen Victoria’, and as she undertook to ‘govern the people of this United Kingdom…according to the statutes in Parliament…to cause