The Contentious Crown

Public Discussion of the British Monarchy in the Reign of Queen Victoria

Richard Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429802317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

First published in 1997, The Contentious Crown is a study of comment on the monarchy in Victorian newspapers, journals, pamphlets and parliamentary debates. It examines radical and republican criticism, reverence and sentimentality, perceptions of the Crown's political role, the relationship between the monarchy and patriotism and attitudes to royal ceremonial.

Williams shows that discussion of the monarchy throughout the reign was of a far greater volume and complexity than has hitherto been realized. Two strands of discussion, one critical, one reverential, co-existed from Victoria's accession to her death. Criticism was overwhelmed by reverence by the 1880s since the Crown's most controversial features, especially its political influence and foreignness, were seen to have receded, allowing the monarchy and Royal Family to appear in their ceremonial, domestic and philanthropic roles as the ideal family and the figurehead of the nation and Empire.

The book gives a historical context to the current problems of the British monarchy by showing that controversy and debate are by no means novel and that the secure position achieved in the late nineteenth century was the product of circumstances which no longer exist.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Until recently nineteenth-century history was written mainly in terms of the ‘rise of the middle class’ and the ‘making of the working class’, while what might be called ‘the survival of the ‘upper class’ – the monarchy and aristocracy – was neglected. The work of EM.L Thompson began to redress the balance as far as the aristocracy is concerned¹ and the 1980s were marked by a reaction, possibly not unconnected with political developments, against the ‘history from below’ which dominated the 1960s and 1970s and the substitution of a revisionist ‘history from above’. That the aristocracy survived and prospered in the nineteenth century has been demonstrated by David Cannadine, W.D. Rubinstein, Lawrence Stone and J.V. Beckett.²

Yet a major study of the institution and caste at the very apex of Victorian society – the monarchy and Royal Family – has yet to be produced, despite the new historical interest in the monarchy resulting from the renewal of debate about the institution in the 1990s.³ Biographies of Queen Victoria abound but they have not on the whole been written by professional historians concerned with the relationship of the Crown and royalty to the wider Victorian world while one that does purport to do this⁴ was not, as the author acknowledges, a work of fresh research. Such contextualized work as has been produced has either focused narrowly on one event⁵ or, in bold, broad exploratory essays, has of necessity been too superficial and schematic.⁶ This book is not an internal study of the Queen and court but an analysis of attitudes to the monarchy. What did Victorians make of the archaic, hereditary institution which stood atop a society priding itself on progress, political reform, middle-class energy and self-made success? Until now we have known of Victorian attitudes to work, religion, sex and drink, but not of attitudes to the institution whose incumbent gave to the society and epoch their name. My key sources are not the Queen’s own letters and journals but contemporary writings – in newspapers, journals, pamphlets and popular ballads – and parliamentary and public debates on the monarchy. There are already accounts, based on the Queen’s private writings, of her relations with ministers and of her political and social outlook:⁷ here I am less concerned with what Victoria did and what sort of Queen she was than with what people thought she did and what sort of Queen they thought she was.

I cannot pretend to be making an analysis of national public opinion, except in so far as newspapers and speech-makers reflect and shape the opinions of their readers and audiences. Readers’ letters to newspapers, figures of attendance at republican meetings or of participation in celebrations of royal events hint, in descending degrees of certainty, at popular attitudes, but, while a sociologist undertaking a study of attitudes to the current monarchy and Royal Family would make a mass observation survey, the historian cannot interview the dead. Local studies, ransacking surviving diaries and other such sources, will be needed before anything more precise can be deduced about the opinions of the silent majority.

What I can provide, however, is a view over the shoulder of the makers of public discourse in Victorian England as they observe and comment on the monarchy. I have largely confined myself to public rather than private writings as I feel that the former are more important in that they show how much public discussion of the monarchy there was and how rigorous and varied was that discussion. The private diaries and letters of important people were read by only one or two contemporaries, even if the writer had an eye on posterity, but newspaper articles, speeches and pamphlets were read and intended to be read by large numbers of people – and therefore it is these sources that are so significant in reconstructing how those in the informed, literary and political society presented the monarchy to the sections of the public whose opinion they believed they reflected and moulded. W.R. Fox Bourne, erstwhile editor of the Examiner, wrote in 1887 of the interaction between newspapers and opinion – only in the past few years had the increase in the intelligence of the readership of newspapers definitely tipped the balance and made the leading article less the stentorian director of opinion than its mirror.⁸

This was pre-eminently a literate society, a ‘print-culture’ in which the vehicle of public debate was the written word.⁹ Politicians and their literary propagandists attempted to influence opinion on the great issues through the reproduction in print of speeches, through the publication of pamphlets and, above all, through the newspapers. For much of the period under my examination editors such as Fox Bourne felt justified in regarding their newspapers as ‘thrones and altars’ from which ‘to control and reform the world’.¹⁰ Popular movements needed newspapers to propagate their beliefs. Chartism, the greatest working-class movement of this period, had the Northern Star as its organ. A particular concern of mine, republicanism, a school of thought in the late 1840s and 1850s and an organized movement in the early 1870s, spoke through newspapers – a series of short-lived, specifically republican ones in the former period, and through established weeklies, the National Reformer and Reynolds’s Newspaper, in the latter.¹¹ A recent historian of the Victorian press, Lucy Brown has written, ‘In the second half of the nineteenth century the newspaper became established as part of the normal furniture of life for all classes’.¹²

The newspapers that I have read can be divided into different categories which illuminate the views of the monarchy being received by different sections of society. The London dailies were read by the better-off middle class in the capital and, thanks to the railways and the enterprise of newsagents such as W.H. Smith, in the provinces. Before the removal of stamp duties in 1855 the cost of a daily paper was prohibitive and circulation was low, with The Times’ figure of 50,000 in the early 1850s putting it ahead of the others such as the Standard, Morning Post, Morning Herald, Globe, Morning Chronicle and Morning Advertiser.¹³ Provincial weeklies and bi-weeklies were bought by the same people who took the dailies from the capital – the Leeds Mercury had a circulation of 9,000 in 1845.¹⁴ With the removal of duties and of the paper tax in 1861, The Times’ circulation rose to around 68,000 in 1871 and 100,000 by 1882 but it was outstripped by the newer, cheaper dailies, the Daily News which reached 150,000 by 1871 and the Daily Telegraph, which, starting in 1855, sold a daily average of 200,000 in 1870 and 250,000 in 1882 – these two papers put most of the other London dailies out of business.¹⁵ The repeal of the stamp prompted many provincial papers to publish daily – the Manchester Guardian had attained sales of 30,000 by 1880.¹⁶ While the London and provincial dailies must, through the public newsrooms, have reached a broader readership, their purchasers remained middle class.¹⁷

Until the advent of cheap dailies in the late 1880s and 1890s, the working class and lower middle class could only afford to buy cheap weekly newspapers.¹⁸ Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper had the largest circulation, rising from 90,000 in the early 1850s to 600,000 by 1890, with a predominantly metropolitan, old artisanate and lower middle class, small shopkeeping clientele, and also with readers among women working in the clothing industry. Reynolds’s Newspaper, with a mainly artisanate readership extending from the capital to the industrial areas of the North and Midlands, had a circulation of 50,000 on the eve of the removal of the stamp and maintained a steady 300,000 from the 1860s on.¹⁹ During the pre-repeal, Chartist years, the Northern Star had easily undersold its bourgeois rivals such as the Leeds Mercury and Manchester Guardian and had a circulation variously reported at between 35,000 and 60,000 in the late 1830s.²⁰ The ‘new journalism’ of the late 1880s/1890s brought new popular dailies such the radical Star, whose largely working-class circulation was 300,000 in 1893²¹ and the conservative Daily Mail, founded in 1896, which built up a mainly lower middle-class readership of around a million by 1900.²²

There were also weeklies catering for the middle class. The Illustrated London News enjoyed great success because of its pictorial representation of events, boasting a circulation of 41,000 in 1843 rising to 123,000 on the removal of stamp duty;²³ while the Sunday Times and Observer were at the smaller, more ‘respectable’ end of the Sunday market, dominated by Lloyd’s and Reynolds’s,²⁴ Punch, having begun in 1841 as a somewhat disreputable lower middle-class comic print moved upmarket throughout the 1840s and 1850s, its circulation at around 40,000, as its humour became less ribald and critical.²⁵ Sophisticated political weeklies such as the Spectator, Saturday Review, Examiner and Pall Mall Gazette and periodicals such as the Fortnightly Review, Quarterly Review, Edinburgh Review, Westminster Review and Nineteenth Century were the preserve of well-informed political and intellectual milieux.²⁶

As well as examining these and other national and provincial newspapers and periodicals, I have looked at the special newspapers of various bodies and movements – the trade unions’ journal the Bee-Hive, the Free Press, the mouthpiece of the Foreign Affairs Committees of David Urquhart, and, of course, the republican newspapers of the late 1840s and 1850s and of the 1880s and Charles Bradlaugh’s secularist organ, the National Reformer, which was the main vehicle of the republican movement of the early 1870s. All these, together with parliamentary debates, political pamphlets, books on the Queen and Royal Family and the popular ballads printed and hawked around London streets,²⁷ enable me to furnish the first concrete, detailed and multi-layered study of Victorian attitudes to the monarchy as displayed in public discourse upon it.

Victoria’s reign can be seen as a turning-point in the history of the modern British monarchy in that throughout it two basic strands of discussion of the monarchy, one reverential, the other critical, coexisted, with the latter superseding the former conclusively – at least for the time being – by the end of the reign.

This statement begs an explanation of how my work represents an advance on the exploratory essays on the Victorian monarchy referred to earlier. In a pioneering historical account of attitudes to the Crown, Kingsley Martin postulated a linear progression of royal popularity. In the first half of Victoria’s reign, the Crown was held in low esteem, ...