The morning of 28 June 1838 began well. Light showers gave way to bright sunshine. Awakened at four by a gunnery salute, the nineteen-year-old Princess Alexandrina Victoria was understandably excited. Eventually, at ten she clambered into the Gold State Coach for the short journey from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey . The coach was pulled by six cream ponies especially brought over from Hannover, and escorted by a company of the Royal Huntsmen and the Yeoman Prickers. No expense was spared, on Prickers, ponies or anything else. Parliament had decided to make a bit of a splash on this coronation, the sum of £80,000 which it put aside being over twice that spent on the coronation of her predecessor William IV , though rather the less than the colossal £240,000 wasted on George IV. But hopes were up. In her diary, Victoria supposed that ‘millions’ had turned out to cheer. More sober chroniclers estimated nearer to 400,000 jostling around the Mall and adjoining streets; still enough, as the courtier diarist Charles Greville recorded, to be ‘uncommonly tiresome’ (Hibbert 2001, 70–1). Ten thousand waited inside Westminster Abbey .1 Victoria, it was reported, looked awed. She certainly looked tiny, even tinier than usual in the finery of her parliamentary robes, dressed ‘like a girl on her birthday’ according to one contemporary. The formalities of the coronation followed a strict precedence of medieval origin, refined most notably perhaps at the coronation of William III in 1689. Victoria first took an oath to maintain ‘the Protestant reformed religion as it is established by law’. Having removed the parliamentary robes in a side-chapel, she then returned to take her seat on King Edward’s Chair and be crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. After which the Queen descended from her throne, removed the crown and took the Sacrament. She was then invested with the Orb and Sceptre, before proceeding back down the nave. In her diary, Victoria recorded ‘I shall ever remember this day as the proudest of my life’.
Or at least she did when she was able to write again. The evening of the 28 was passed with the royal hand dipped in a bucket of ice, the consequence of a short-sighted Archbishop trying to ram the ruby ring on the wrong figure. The Archbishop did not have a good coronation. Shortly after giving his Queen her Orb he tried to give it to her again and panicked when he could not find it. Eventually, he retired, very ‘confused’ as Victoria recorded, and visibly distressed. It had become evident, not least to Victoria, that far too many of those officiating were similarly lost. At one point, sensing that things were going awry, she had asked the sub-Dean ‘Pray tell me what I am to do, for they don’t know’. Unfortunately neither did the sub-Dean, nor the Bishop of Durham who was stood nearby. It transpired that the Litany had begun too soon, for which reason pretty much everything that followed was out of synch. Towards the end of the service a flustered Bishop of Bath and Wells had turned over two pages by mistake; for which reason Victoria had to be called back from St Edwards Chapel to do that bit of the service again. To the last man ‘imperfect in their parts’ a thoroughly unimpressed Greville concluded of the officiating clergy (Hibbert 2001, 73). The formidable Harriet Martineau was likewise appalled, observing that the very idea of investing a monarch with divine powers was anyway ridiculous. The behaviour of the attendant peerage was worse still. Lord Melbourne, entrusted with the sword of state, had clearly over-indulged and wobbled around alarmingly. When the ninety-year-old Lord Rolle fell over during the homage and tumbled down the steps the Abbey erupted in cheers; a foreign visitor was informed that it was part of the droit de seigneur for the most aged peer to roll down the stairs before his newly enthroned monarch. Shortly after, assorted generals and peers wrestled gamely on the floor to collect the medals which the Treasurer of the Household had, as custom demanded, tossed in their direction. Everyone cheered again. Victoria, it was reported, just kept smiling amidst the chaos.
It had all, as Lytton Strachey later recorded, resembled a very ‘curious dream’ (Strachey 1971, 64). Sat in the congregation was the new Member for Shrewsbury, Benjamin Disraeli. His chronicle of events, written it can be imagined with a distinctively wry grin, acknowledged that whilst Lord Melbourne had indeed held ‘the great sword of state like a butcher’ and the appearance of inebriated peers staggering about was hardly edifying, it had all the same been a ‘splendid’ day out (Hibbert 2004, 118–9; Kuhn 2006, 207–8).2 Walter Bagehot was only twelve in June 1838. But as we shall see in due course it was exactly the kind of event, part ‘dignified’ part the precise opposite, about which he wrote with such delicious irony in his celebrated English Constitution. It was fun and it was ridiculous. But it was also, and for much the same reason, of huge significance. The coronation was more than just a day out. It said something about the Victorians, and in its writing, it became a part of their history. Bagehot knew this because he wrote this kind of history.
Writing History
It is only relatively recently that historians have started to think more seriously about how history is written. The practice has even assumed a generic identity. Historiographers write ‘histories of history’. This is especially pertinent for historians of nineteenth-century England because there is here, to adopt terminology familiar to Jungian psychologists, a series of ‘meaningful coincidences’. First, the Victorians evinced a peculiar fascination with the past. Walter Scott’s historical novels sold in their thousands, as did Tennyson’s Idylls and Ruskin’s books on medieval art and architecture. ‘Gothick’ churches sprung up all across the country. The Public Record Office opened in 1838. The Historical Manuscripts Commission began publishing its first volumes in 1869. And more and more historians started writing histories. Second, and this was certainly no real coincidence, the historiographer and the ‘professional’ historian arrived more or less together in the second part of the century. Disciplinary awareness led in turn to an increasingly urgent debate as to the nature of historical writing. How much might history still be considered a ‘literary art’? At the beginning of the century, there was little doubt; by the end there was plenty. Third at much the same moment the more particular historian of the English constitution began to think more closely about how that was being written too. Victorian historians and jurists recognised that there was a ‘special responsibility’ which attached to writing about the constitution; not simply chronicling events, but accounting for the building of a nation and an Empire. An intellectual storm was brewing over the practice of historical scholarship, and the writing of the Victorian constitution would lie at its heart (Tosh 1984, 7, 95–7; Howsam 2004, 525).
Whigs and Sceptics
Back at the beginning of the century, the storm was still in its depressive stage, a more familiar squall of Whig and Tory historians venting their intellectual spleens. The political nomenclatures were suggestive. Each wrote to a larger political prejudice. In essence, Whig historians made much of the consequences of the seventeenth-century revolutions, most especially the ‘great and glorious’ Revolution of 1688. The defining consequence was ‘improvement’. As Lord Acton , one of the greatest of nineteenth-century Whig historians averred, ‘We have no thread through the enormous intricacy and complexity of modern politics, except the idea of progress towards more perfect and assured freedom’ (Burrow 2007, 405). Tory antagonists, commonly rather more sober in tone, preferred to laud the stability of Church and Crown and ‘interests’. Whig historians tended to brush over 1649; a tragic but necessary prequel to the events of 1688. Tory historians lingered longer on regicide and its consequence and ensured that both were painted in shades of regret. We will revisit these alternative histories in the chapters which follow, and we will see that the delineation was never absolute. Back in 1984 Raphael Samuel suggested why; despite their evident differences both traditions ‘shared’ the essential ‘Burkean notion of an organic constitution and a living continuity between past and present’ (Mettam 1984, 7). Samuel was right. Both sides admitted merit in the Revolution of 1688, and to an extent in the place of Church and Crown too. The differences were of degree and tone. In simple terms, they wrote about it differently. There was an ‘eternal breeziness’ about the Whig version of English history which Tory historians found hard to emulate (Bentley 1999, 68).
To a considerable extent then much of the rest of the book will move around shifting perceptions of what has become known as the ‘Whig constitution’. There are not supposed to be any Whigs now. Identifying the ‘last’ of the Whigs is a popular pass-time amongst historians of the nineteenth century. A recent biography of Lord Hartington is precisely entitled The Last of the Whigs (Jackson 1994). Other commonly presented candidates include Lord Palmerston, Walter Bagehot and the novelist Antony Trollope; a triumvirate whose peculiar relationship we will revisit in due course. Historiographers have invested just as much energy in trying to identify the ‘last’ of the Whig historians. David Cannadine suggests George Macaulay Trevelyan , whose various histories of all things English dominated college curricula for much of the first half the twentieth century (Cannadine 1992, 54; Carr 2001, 17).3 It is a reasonable suggestion. Trevelyan had only just begun publishing when Victoria died in 1901, but he was shaped by a tradition of writing that was as Victorian as it was Whig. An entire generation of historians was shaped in much the same way, and as a consequence wrote much the same kind of history.
Edward Hallett Carr was born into this generation. Commonly esteemed as one of the most influential of modern historiographers, Carr famously held that history should be seen as an ‘unending dialogue’ between past and present (Carr 2001, 24). Here he followed Collingwood’s insight, that the ‘past which a historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present’ (Carr 2001, 16). Carr was thus a relativist. He was also a historian who had, in his own words, grown up ‘in the afterglow of the great Victorian age of faith and optimism’. It is for this reason that he retained a firm conviction as to the ‘proper’ purpose of history, which is to discover meaning in this past (Carr 2001, lii). It is also why, as John Burrow has more recently concluded, it is impossible to read his history as anything other than ‘emp...