‘All this,’ she replied to the Archbishop of Canterbury in a clear and steady voice, ‘I promise to do.’9
She appeared undaunted by the solemnity of the occasion, the blaze of diamonds, the glittering gold plate on the altar, the splendid uniforms of foreign dignitaries, the magnificent robes of the peeresses, the hundreds of faces peering down at her from the specially erected galleries draped with red cloth fringed with gold, and the solemn moment when – as she sat in St Edward’s Chair with four Knights of the Garter holding a canopy of cloth of gold over her head – she was anointed by the Archbishop with holy oil, ‘as Kings, priests and prophets were anointed’.
She appeared equally composed when the crown was placed upon her head and the peers and peeresses put on their coronets and the bishops their caps to cheers and drum beats, to the notes of trumpets and the firing of guns at the Tower and in the royal parks. Indeed, although in doubt from time to time as to what she was expected to do, she seemed far more calm than the clergy, who, as Charles Greville said, ‘were very imperfect in their parts and had neglected to rehearse them’.10 She was also far calmer than Lord Melbourne who was, she noticed, ‘completely overcome and very much affected’ when the crown was placed on her head and who, kneeling down to kiss her hand, could not hold back his tears as she ‘grasped his with all [her] heart’.11
Lord John Thynne, who, as his deputy, took the place of the elderly, infirm Dean of Westminster, admitted that ‘there was a continual difficulty and embarrassment, and the Queen never knew what she was to do next’. She whispered to Thynne, who appeared to know more than his colleagues did, ‘Pray tell me what to do, for they don’t know!’ Certainly Edward Maltby, the scholarly, ‘remarkably maladroit’ Bishop of Durham, who had an important role in the ceremony, ‘never could tell [the Queen],’ so she complained, ‘what was to take place’. At one point he lost his place in the prayer book and began the Litany too soon. When the time came for the ring to be placed on her little finger, the Archbishop endeavoured to place it on her fourth. She told him it was too small; but he persisted, pressing it down so hard that she had ‘the greatest difficulty’ in getting it off again in the robing room afterwards and had to apply iced water to her fingers for half an hour. When she was given the extremely heavy orb she asked what she was meant to do with it. She was told that she was to carry it; but it then transpired that she had been given it too soon. By this time the Archbishop ‘(as usual) was so confused and puzzled and knew nothing’ that he went away. She, too, was sent away to St Edward’s Chapel and had to be summoned back from it when it was discovered that George Henry Law, Lord Ellenborough’s brother, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, had turned over two pages at once, thus omitting an essential part of the service.12
Nor were the lay peers and trainbearers any more adroit than the clergy. The peers gave the Queen a headache, so her Mistress of the Robes said, by ‘very unceremoniously’ knocking her crown instead of touching it gently in their act of homage. One of them ‘actually clutched hold of’ it, while others might well have knocked it off altogether had she not ‘guarded herself from any accident or misadventure by having it made to fit her head tightly’.13 As for the bearers of the Queen’s train, they carried it ‘very jerkily and badly’, one of them admitted, ‘never keeping step as she did, even and steadily and with much grace and dignity, the whole length of the Abbey’.14 Two of them could be heard chattering to each other throughout the service as animatedly as they might have done had they been at a ball.15 And, when the coronation medals were thrown about in the choir and lower galleries by Lord Surrey, the Treasurer of the Household, everybody scrambled ‘with all their might and main to get them, and none more vigorously than the maids-of-honour!’
All in all, Benjamin Disraeli, one of the recently elected Members of Parliament for the borough of Maidstone, told his sister, ‘the want of rehearsal’ was very obvious: ‘Melbourne [who, feeling ill, had dosed himself with laudanum and brandy] looked very awkward and uncouth, with his coronet cocked over his nose, his robes under his feet, and holding the great Sword of State like a butcher…The Duchess of Sutherland…full of her situation…walked, or rather stalked up the Abbey like Juno…Lord Lyndhurst [the former and future Lord Chancellor] committed the faux pas of not backing from the presence…I saw Lord Ward after the ceremony…drinking champagne out of a pewter pot, his coronet cocked aside, his robes disordered, and his arms akimbo.’16
Nor were Melbourne and Ward the only peers to appear dishevelled in their robes. Indeed, only two of them apparently knew how to wear them properly, both of these being practised performers in amateur theatricals. If Disraeli had gone into St Edward’s Chapel – ‘a small dark place behind the altar’, as the Queen described it – he would have seen what Melbourne represented as being ‘more unlike a Chapel than anything he had ever seen; for, what was called an Altar was covered with sandwiches, bottles of wine, etc.’
It was almost five hours before the ceremony was over; but conscious that she deserved Lord Melbourne’s words of praise – ‘You did it beautifully – every part of it, with so much taste; it’s a thing that you can’t give a person advice upon; it must be left to a person’ – the Queen did not yet appear to be tired. After an hour spent changing into her purple robe of state in the robing room, then waiting there until half past four, she was taken back through crowds as dense as ever, carrying her sceptre and, heavy as it was, the orb, her close-fitting crown on her head, and the people cheering her all the way to Buckingham Palace where she dashed upstairs to give a bath to her beloved dog, Dash.17
After dinner she went into the Duchess of Kent’s room; but it was not so much to see her mother – who had burst into tears at the sight of her daughter kneeling alone in the Abbey to receive the Sacrament – as to go out on to the balcony to watch the fireworks in Hyde Park where the next day a grand fair was to be held until the following Monday night. She remained on the balcony until after midnight, when she admitted at last to feeling rather weary. ‘You may depend upon it,’ Melbourne told her solicitously, ‘you are more tired than you think you are.’ She herself, she decided, would ‘ever remember this day as the proudest’ of her life.18
‘I at length expressed to her my uneasiness respecting her size, and requested that at my next visit, I might be permitted to lay my hand upon her abdomen with her stays removed.’
ONE DAY IN THE WEEK after the coronation the Queen recorded in her diary that she was ‘quite cross…annoyed and put out’. Irritated as she often was by other people’s illnesses, she was particularly exasperated by Lord Melbourne who had taken to his bed. He had obviously been exhausted by the service in the Abbey where he had appeared quite worn out by the weight of the Sword of State which it had been his duty to carry. ‘It was most provoking and vexatious’, the Queen complained, that she should be deprived of the ‘agreeable daily visit’ of her Prime Minister, who would talk to her so amusingly, sitting beside her so comfortingly and protectively, letting Dash, or another of her dogs, a Scotch terrier called Islay, lick his hand. ‘All dogs like me,’ he said complacently.
The Queen was also put out whenever he did not come to dinner. ‘Lord Melbourne dines with Lady Holland,’ she wrote after one of these Melbourneless evenings. ‘I wish he dined with me.’ She was jealous and admitted it. She was also jealous of the beautiful Duchess of Sutherland, who often sat next to Lord Melbourne at dinner and