The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home by Natalie Livingstone

Author:Natalie Livingstone [Livingstone, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781473505971
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2015-07-01T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

CRISIS IN THE BEDCHAMBER

‘ALL ALL MY happiness gone!’ Victoria mourned in her journal. ‘That happy peaceful life destroyed!’1 In the spring of 1839, the young queen faced the biggest crisis of her reign. Events had unfolded at an alarming pace. On 7 May, her beloved Lord Melbourne was forced to resign due to insufficient parliamentary support. The next day, Victoria reluctantly summoned Robert Peel to form a new ministry. Under Peel’s leadership, the Tory party had taken steps away from the reactionary politics of the Duke of Wellington and was increasingly referred to as the Conservative Party. But their disagreements with the Whigs were still significant and Peel was only willing to form a ministry on the condition that Victoria dismiss her ladies of the bedchamber, in particular her Mistress of the Robes. If Victoria acquiesced, she would lose Harriet, her dearest and most loyal ally. If she refused, she would appear truculent and spoilt at best, at worst autocratic and absolutist. Overwhelmed with a mixture of fear and fury, the 20-year-old queen agonised over the decision. ‘I felt too wretched; the change; the awful, incomprehensible change that had taken place, drove me really to distraction,’ she noted in her journal, ‘and with the exception of walking up and down the room… I could do nothing.’2

Peel had made a convincing case for Victoria to dismiss her ladies. It would be impossible, he argued, to head a new Tory ministry without the complete support of the queen. Although a monarch was expected to keep a dignified distance from political partisanship, it was widely known that Victoria had Whig sympathies. The Times of 15 May 1839 highlighted this by listing each Lady of the Queen’s Bedchamber and their political allegiance: Victoria was demonstrably surrounded entirely by Whig appointees. Aware of the Whig dominance in the royal household, Peel insisted that Victoria replace her Whig attendants with the wives of Tory politicians.

At the core of Peel and Victoria’s disagreement lay a constitutional question concerning the role of the bedchamber.3 It had been over a century since there was last a queen regnant, Queen Anne, so the precedent for who controlled appointments to the queen’s bedchamber was unclear. While Peel viewed the bedchamber patriarchally as an extension of the political sphere, and therefore the rightful domain of the current prime minister, Victoria saw it as a domestic space. ‘Was Sir Robert so weak,’ she taunted him, ‘that even ladies must be of his opinion?’4 She even argued, rather tenuously, that they never discussed politics – only ‘music and horses’. The public responded sceptically to these claims, and Victoria’s protestations of neutrality were widely perceived as a ploy by Melbourne to maintain influence over the queen during Peel’s ministry. In one cartoon a satirical parallel was drawn between the bedchamber crisis and the taking of Zhoushan, in what is now known as the First Opium War (1839–42). It was reported in The Times that when British troops took the port of Zhoushan, they found

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