We Two: Victoria and Albert (53 page)

Prince Albert had a more complicated response to what he regarded as the foreign secretary’s lack of principle and sins of protocol. If Sir Robert Peel came close to making an English statesman out of Prince Albert, Lord Palmerston brought out the “true German, Coburger, and Gothaner” in him. On the one hand, the prince assumed a lofty and philosophic view. High principle and clearly enunciated goals were, Albert believed, essential in diplomacy. Hence he condemned Palmerston’s foreign policy as unclear, wavering, and immoral. But fundamentally Prince Albert’s response to the foreign secretary was visceral, just as it had been with Baroness Lehzen. Palmerston was distasteful to the prince, and he also blocked the prince’s path. He was ipso facto an obstinate and disrespectful servant to the Crown and deserved to be dismissed. Such servants did not last a week in Berlin or even Lisbon.

Albert was convinced that the survival of the Saxe-Coburg dynasty in Britain depended on other kings and queens abroad retaining their thrones. That most of those monarchs—like Victoria herself—were of German origin was to the point, since Prince Albert was as ardent a Germanophile as Palmerston was an Anglophile. Albert had been fed from infancy on the Coburg legend and on the glorious history of the German Holy Roman Empire. Thus when Lord Palmerston seemed to favor the republican factions in Portugal, Albert ignored the manifold tribulations of the oppressed Portuguese people and leaped to the defense of his first cousin King Ferdinand. When Austria brutally crushed the forces of the king of Sardinia, setting back the cause of Italian unification by decades, Prince Albert was jubilant and sent a letter of personal congratulation to the Austrian emperor. While giving lip service to constitutional restraints and political reform, he found reasons to explain why the Austrian emperor reneged on all his promises of internal democratic reform once he had the army at his back again. That the Mensdorffs, Albert’s favorite uncle and cousins, were high officials in the Austrian army and diplomatic service reinforced Prince Albert’s pro-
Austria tendencies and facilitated his seductively intimate communication with the Austrian imperial family.

Prince Albert claimed to have political principles, but, in fact, he veiled monarchical self-interest and Coburg dynastic ambition in lofty rhetoric. In principle, Albert was the champion of the small, independent kingdom, especially if the ruler of that kingdom was his distant cousin Otto in Greece. But Albert’s overriding international mission was the reunification of Germany under Prussia, so he did not come to the defense of little Denmark when Prussia made moves to swallow up the Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. And when the Germans met in an ill-fated parliament to debate how best to unify the country, the dynastic Albert was horrified at the suggestion that smaller states like Coburg and Gotha might lose their independence in a new Germany. That would mean that he himself would lose his revenues and privileges as Prince of Coburg and that his son Alfred would lose the succession to his brother Ernest’s throne. Albert was ready to fight with old Stockmar as well as with his wife’s brother Charles Leiningen, who had surprisingly changed into a radical democrat, to maintain the independent sovereignty of tiny Coburg.

IF THE FIGHT FOR
foreign policy supremacy between the foreign office and the Crown was rooted in ideology, it was waged mainly on procedural grounds. Her Majesty complained over and again to Lord Palmerston about his failure to observe the established protocol in his diplomatic correspondence. The following note is typical. “Osborne, 20
^th
August 1848. The Queen has received an
autograph
letter from the Archduke John (in answer to the private letter she had written to him through Lord Cowley) which had been cut open at the Foreign Office. The Queen wishes Lord Palmerston to take care that this does not happen again. The opening of official letters even, addressed to the Queen, which she has
of late
observed, is really not becoming, and ought to be discontinued, as it used never to be the case formerly.”

When Lord Palmerston failed to comply with Her Majesty’s requests, the Queen and the prince took the prime minister, Lord John Russell, to task for his failure to assert his own statutory right to direct foreign affairs and keep his foreign secretary in line. Lord John was intelligent, principled, and ambitious, but he was also a ditherer who deferred to his wife at home and to his foreign secretary in cabinet. The prime minister was well aware that Palmerston had strong support in parliament and was the most popular politician in England. Russell had important measures that he wanted to
get through parliament, notably a new Reform Bill to widen the franchise. Without Palmerston, the Russell ministry was doomed, and so for several years Lord John bobbed and weaved in a vain attempt to keep his Queen and his colleagues happy.

Dissatisfied by the prime minister’s evasions, the royal couple summoned Lord John for grueling personal interviews as if he were an errant schoolboy. The Queen and the prince pointed out, quite accurately, that Lord Palmerston was conducting key aspects of foreign policy without consulting the Crown, and they repeatedly asked for his dismissal. The Crown’s displeasure with Lord Palmerston and efforts to get rid of him are well captured by the long memorandum signed “Victoria R” of September 19, 1848, that records the Queen’s conversation with her prime minister at Balmoral. It begins: “I said to Lord John Russell, that I must mention to him a subject, which is a serious one … namely about Lord Palmerston; that I really felt I could hardly go on with him, that I had no confidence in him, and that it made me seriously anxious and uneasy for the welfare of the country and for the peace of Europe in general.”

In an all-out attempt to get Palmerston dismissed, in July 1850 the prince dug up the old issue of Palmerston’s attempted rape of Mrs. Brand ten years earlier. According to the memorandum Prince Albert composed after his private meeting with Russell: “How could the Queen consent to take a man as her chief advisor and confidential counsellor in all matters of state, religion, Society, Court, etc. who as her Secretary of State and while a guest under her roof at Windsor Castle had committed a brutal attack upon one of her Ladies? had at night by stealth introduced himself into her apartment, barricaded afterwards the door and would have consummated his fiendish scheme by violence had not the miraculous efforts of his victim and assistance attracted by her screams saved her?” Russell, taken aback, agreed that this was all very bad, and that he had heard other similar stories.

The purple prose of the memorandum in Albert’s own hand reveals how important a part sexual morality played in determining the prince’s attitude toward the British foreign secretary. The Palmerstons in their youth had not played by the rules of premarital chastity and conjugal fidelity that Albert lived by. The prince was sure that his higher standards of morality entitled him to lead the nation. Lord John Russell showed his weakness as a statesman and as a friend when he failed to tell the prince that Palmerston’s behavior ten years earlier, however reprehensible, had no bearing on his current competence as foreign secretary. That Russell kept Palmerston in the cabinet indicates that this was what he thought but dared not say.

Exasperated by Palmerston’s obduracy and Lord John’s shilly-shallying, the royal couple took another tack and sat down at their adjoining writing desks to compose a letter. In August 1850, the Queen specified to Lord John exactly what she wanted from Lord Palmerston
“in order to prevent any mistake in the future”
[QV’s underlining]. She required “(1) that he will distinctly state what he proposes in a given case so that the Queen may know as distinctly to
what
she has given her Royal sanction; (2) Having
once given
her sanction to a measure, that it be not arbitrarily altered or modified by the Minister; such an act she must consider as failing in sincerity towards the Crown, and justly to be visited by the exercise of her Constitutional right of dismissing that Minister. She expects to be kept informed of what passes between him and Foreign Ministers before important decisions are taken … to receive the Foreign Despatches in good time … The Queen thinks it best that Lord Russell should show this letter to Lord Palmerston.”

Cornered, and never happy to be out of favor with the Queen of whom he was paternally fond, Palmerston agreed to abide by the terms of the letter. In so doing, he conceded the Crown’s constitutional right to dismiss a minister. This concession infuriated Palmerston’s allies and weakened him in the cabinet, where, in fact if not in theory, ministers no longer considered that they served at the Queen’s pleasure.

In late 1850, the Don Pacifico affair hit the headlines, and the Crown was sure that at last Lord Palmerston had overplayed his hand. The house in Athens of the merchant David Pacifico was burned down by a mob, and the Greek government of King Otto scornfully refused to consider his rather exorbitant claims for restitution. Pacifico was of Portuguese Jewish origins, but he had been born in the British possession of Gibraltar, and he appealed to the British government to defend his interests. Lord Palmerston, without consulting Lord John Russell or his cabinet colleagues, ordered a British naval squadron to sail to the Mediterranean, where it captured Greek vessels and blockaded the port of Piraeus. After two months, the Greek government capitulated and settled Pacifico’s claims.

France and Russia, Britain’s treaty allies in support of the fragile new monarchy of Greece, howled in protest at this bullying. The foreign secretary was formally censured in the House of Lords. But when Palmerston stood up before the Commons to defend his actions, his five-hour speech carried the day, and the motion of censure against the government was defeated. In words that have been quoted by British historians ever since, the foreign secretary declared: “As the Roman in days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say
Civis Romanus sum
[I am a Roman citizen], so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident
that the watchful eye and strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong.” To the horror of the Queen and the prince, Lord Palmerston stayed on at the foreign office.

But then the foreign secretary got careless. When in December 1851 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the president of the French republic, staged the famous coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire and declared himself emperor of the French, the British government was taken aback, and the Queen and the prince were appalled. The name Bonaparte was anathema to every European monarch, and in 1848 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte himself had helped to topple the Orléans dynasty with whom the Coburgs were closely linked. With characteristic impulsiveness, Palmerston telegraphed off a letter of congratulations to the new French head of state, without any prior consultation with his prime minister or his sovereign. It was not that Palmerston personally approved of Napoleon III—or, indeed, any other French head of state—but rather that he was sure that Britain would be dealing with the new emperor for the foreseeable future, whether or not they liked him.

As events would prove, Palmerston was perfectly right, but his congratulatory note was a blatant contravention of the terms he had agreed to abide by in his relations with the Crown. Queen Victoria rose up in holy wrath. Injured in his amour propre, Lord John Russell lost his temper, and the rest of the cabinet was now fed up with Lord Palmerston. The foreign secretary was asked to return the seals of his office and retired crestfallen to the backbenches. The Queen and the prince were jubilant. Victoria wrote to her uncle Leopold: “My Dearest Uncle,—I have the greatest pleasure in announcing to you a piece of news which I know will give you as much satisfaction and relief as it does to us, and will to the
whole
of the world.
Lord Palmerston is no longer Foreign Secretary.”

But no one was better at playing the underdog than Palmerston, and, unlike Prince Albert, he knew how to manage the press and manipulate public opinion. The word got out that Prince Albert, after years of trying, had at last managed to sack good old “Pam,” which was pretty much the truth. At court and in government circles, it had long been known that the prince habitually carried on the business of state in his wife’s name, but it suited all the power sharers to keep that news to themselves. But once a respected statesman like Palmerston was sent off like a whipped schoolboy just because he would not let the prince dictate to the foreign office, then the gloves were off as far as the English political establishment, Tory and Whig, was concerned. The whispering campaign against the prince as a foreign traitor began, and British politics entered a period of dangerous weakness.