Victoria: A Life by A N Wilson

Author:A N Wilson [Wilson, A N]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nonfiction, history, biography, kindle
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2014-09-03T23:00:00+00:00

PART FIVE

SEVENTEEN

A PEOPLE DETACHED FROM THEIR SOVEREIGN

ON 5 JULY, taking up his duties as the Foreign Secretary after the death of Lord Clarendon, Lord Granville was informed by the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office that ‘he had never had during his long experience known so great a lull in foreign affairs’.1 It was a remarkable misjudgement: not one that Lord Clarendon himself would have made – his journals of the 1860s are full of foreboding about the machinations of Bismarck and the advancement of Prussian military power. Nor would the Queen, ever-conscious of the tensions between Prussia, Russia, Denmark, Austria and France (both as political events and as rifts within her own family), have considered the late 1860s to have been a ‘lull’.

Gladstone, in one of the strangest manifestations of detachment ever perpetrated by a Prime Minister, wrote an anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review denouncing the foreign policy of his own Government. That oddly divided personality was a different person, as he sat in his ‘Temple of Peace’, the study at Hawarden Castle, from the devious politician of Westminster. Scratching with his steel-nibbed pen on the page, and looking like a mad clergyman, this scholarly recluse could attack the very Government of which the politician Gladstone was the leader. He described France as ‘motivated by a spirit of perverse and constant error’, he questioned Bismarck’s ‘scrupulousness and integrity’, and concluded by talking of ‘Happy England’ endowed by God with ‘a streak of silver sea to separate it from the conflicts of less fortunate peoples’. Lord Kimberley confided to his diary when he read the article that Gladstone ‘could not guide safely the foreign relations of this country’.2

When Gladstone had formed his First Cabinet in December 1868, a new world, beyond the shores of the United Kingdom, was waiting to be born. The war between France and Prussia, which broke out in 1870, would result in the abject defeat of France, a period of appalling civil violence and the arrival of the Paris Commune. The spectre of communism, which had been ‘haunting’ Europe, according to Marx and Engels in 1848, would be a living political reality in Paris by 1871. Prussia, triumphant, militarized and led by Bismarck, pushed onwards to the creation of the new nation of Germany, which absorbed all the former princedoms, duchies and kingdoms of Victoria and Albert’s youth, including Saxe-Coburg. By September 1870, the troops of Victor Emmanuel would enter Rome and the new united nation of Italy would be a reality, after the long dreams of Italian patriots.

So, it was a changing world to which a radically altered Britain, now with an extended franchise, must respond. Not least of the new Government’s worries were the precarious situation in Ireland and an uncertain peace in Afghanistan, with a worry that Russia was extending its power following the fall of Tashkent (1865) and Samarkand (1868) into Russian hands. At home the expansion of the urban population in the previous two decades had led to acute housing shortages, the spread of epidemics and the urgent need for programmes of education.

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