Victoria - 1840 - Marriage to Prince Albert
The troublous events of the Bedchamber Plot had the effect of hastening the queen's marriage. Lord Melbourne ascertained that the queen's dispositions towards her cousin, Prince Albert, were unchanged, and he advised King Leopold, through M. Van der Weyer, the Belgian minister, that the prince should come to England and press his suit. The prince arrived with his brother on a visit to Windsor on 10 October 1839. On the 12th the queen wrote to King Leopold: "Albert's beauty is most striking, and he is so amiable and unaffected — in short, very fascinating." On the 15th all was settled; and the queen wrote to her uncle, "I love him more than I can say."
The queen's public announcement of her betrothal was enthusiastically received. But the royal lovers still had some parliamentary mortifications to undergo. The government proposed that Prince Albert should receive an annuity of £50,000, but an amendment of Colonel Sibthorp— a politician of no great repute — for making the annuity £30,000 was carried against ministers by 262 votes to 158, the Tories and Radicals going into the same lobby [which was how votes were counted in those days], and many ministerialists taking no part in the division. Prince Albert had not been described, in the queen's declaration lo the privy council, as a Protestant prince; and Lord Palmerston was obliged to ask Baron Slockmar for assurance that Prince Albert did not belong to any sect of Protestants whose rules might prevent him from taking the Sacrament according to the ritual of the English Church. He got an answer couched in somewhat ironical terms to the effect that Protestantism owed its existence in a measure to the house of Saxony, from which the prince descended, seeing that this house and that of the landgrave of Hesse had stood quite alone against Europe in upholding Luther and his cause. Even after this certain High Churchmen held that a Lutheran was a "dissenter," and that the prince should be asked to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles.
The queen was particularly concerned by the question of the prince's future status as an Englishman. It was impracticable for him to receive the title of king consort; but the queen naturally desired that her husband should be placed by act of parliament in a position which would secure to him precedence, not only in England, but in foreign courts. Lord Melbourne sought to effect this by a clause introduced in a naturalization bill; but he found himself obliged to drop the clause, and to leave the queen to confer what precedence she pleased by letters-patent. This was a tame way out of the difficulty, for the queen could only confer precedence within her own realms, whereas an act of parliament bestowing the title of prince consort would have made the prince's right to rank above all royal imperial highnesses quite clear, and would have left no room for such disputes as afterwards occurred when foreign princes chose to treat Prince Albert as having mere courtesy rank in his wife's kingdom.
The result of these political difficulties was to make the queen more than ever disgusted with the Tories. But there was no other flaw in the happiness of the marriage, which was solemnized on 10 February 1840 in the Chapel Royal, St James's. It is interesting to note that the queen was dressed entirely in articles of British manufacture. Her dress was of Spitalfields silk; her veil of Honitoo lace; her ribbons came from Coventry; even her gloves had been made in London of English kid — a novel thing in days when the French had a monopoly in the finer kinds of gloves.
From the time of the queen's marriage the crown played an increasingly active part in the affairs of state. Previously, ministers had tried to spare the queen all disagreeable and fatiguing details. Lord Melbourne saw her every day, whether she was in London or at Windsor, and he used to explain all current business in a benevolent, chatty manner, which offered a pleasant contrast to the style of his two principal colleagues, Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston. A statesman of firmer mould than Lord Melbourne would hardly have succeeded so well as he did in making rough places smooth for Prince Albert. Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston were naturally jealous of the prince's interference — and of King Leopold's and Baron Stockmar's — in state affairs; but Lord Melbourne took the common-sense view that a husband will control his wife whether people wish it or not.
Ably advised by his private secretary, George Anson, and by Stockmar, the prince thus soon took the place of the sovereign's private secretary, though he had no official status as such; and his system of classifying and annotating the queen's papers and letters resulted in the preservation of what the editors of the files of Queen Victoria describe as "probably the most extraordinary collection of state documents in the world " — those up to 1861 being contained in between 500 and 600 bound volumes at Windsor. To confer on Prince Albert every honor that the crown could bestow, and to let him make his way gradually into public favor by his own tact, was the advice which Lord Melbourne gave; and the prince acted upon it so well, avoiding every appearance of intrusion, and treating men of all parties and degrees, with urbanity, that within five months of his marriage he obtained a signal mark of the public confidence. In expectation of the queen becoming a mother, a bill was passed through parliament providing for the appointment of Prince Albert as sole regent in case the era, after giving birth to a child, died before her son or daughter came of age.
The Regency Bill had been hurried on in consequence of the attempt of a crazy pot-boy, Edward Oxford, to take the queen's life. On l0 June 1840, the queen and Prince Albert were driving up Constitution Hill in an open carriage, when Oxford fired two pistols, the bullets from which flew, it is said, close by the prince's head. He was arrested on the spot, and when his lodgings were searched powder and shot was found, with the rules of a secret society, called "Young England," whose members had pledged to meet, "carrying swords and pistols and wearing crape masks." These discoveries raised the surmise that Oxford was the tool of a widespread Chartist conspiracy — or, the Irish pretended, of a conspiracy of Orangemen to put the duke of Cumberland on the throne. And while these delusions were fresh, they threw well-disposed persons into a paroxysm of loyalty. Even the London street dogs, as Sydney Sath said, joined with O'Connell in barking "God save the Queen."
Oxford seems to have been craving for notoriety; it may be doubted whether the jury who tried him did right to pronounce his acquittal on the ground of insanity. He feigned madness at his trial, but during the forty years of his subsequent confinement at Bedlam he talked and acted as a rational being, and when he was at length released and went to Australia, he earned his living there as a house painter, and used to declare that he had never been mad at all. His acquittal was to be deprecated as establishing a dangerous precedent in regard to outrages on the sovereign. It was always Prince Albert's opinion that if Oxford had been flogged the attempt of Francis on the queen in 1842 and of Bean in the same year would never have been perpetrated.
After the attempt of Bean — who was a hunchback, really insane — Parliament passed a bill empowering judges to order whipping as punishment for those who molested the queen; but somehow this salutary act was never enforced. In 1850 a half-pay officer, named Pate, assaulted the queen by striking her with a sick, and crushing her bonnet. He was sentenced to seven years transportation; but the judge, Baron Alderson, excused the flogging. In 1869 an Irish lad, O'Connor, was sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment and a whipping for presenting pistol at the queen, with a petition, in St James's Park; but this time it was the queen herself who privately remitted the corporal punishment, and she even pushed clemency to the length of sending her aggressor to Australia at her own expense. The series of attempts on the queen was closed in 1883 by Miclean, who fired a pistol at her majesty as she was leaving tit Great Western Railway station at Windsor. He, like Bean, was a genuine madman, and was relegated to Broadmoor.
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