Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria, by Cecil Woodham-Smith (Knopf, 479 pp., $10). An experienced and diligent, though not inspired or witty, chronicler of mid-nineteenthcentury British history and anecdote, Cecil Woodham-Smith gives us in her newest work a detailed portrait of the young Queen. Lytton Strachey fifty years ago attributed defects in the Queen’s personality (her character had few) to the absence of close male companionship or influence in her earliest years. Today’s reader will wonder that the girl’s sanity at all survived her youth. The “short, vulgar-looking child” (as Greville put it) was not only fatherless but grew up amid vicious court intrigue and unseemly if regal family quarrels in a dilapidated and buginfested palace presided over by her rather awful mother and by her mother’s evil genius (some thought paramour), the ambitious and thieving Irish adventurer, Sir John Conroy. But all bad things must come to an end, and felicity finally arrived with the Queen’s marriage to Albert (“so excessively handsome,” she thought). If his bride adored him, the Prince had his problems: He found that his sovereign lady grew ever more nervous and cantankerous as years went by; even theirs was a marriage with painfully rough edges. Politics, fortunately, kept them both busy. Albert wished an active role for the crown, especially in foreign affairs; and a spirited contest ensued between the august couple and Palmerston. It was the throne’s last move in the direction of something more than ceremonial splendor.

With the Prince Consort’s premature death this duel ended, as does Mrs. Woodham-Smith’s volume. In her second volume she must turn, deftly no doubt, to the Victoria most of us think of now: the little old lady of Disraeli’s heyday and of the Jubilees. As to the aging Queen and her Scot John Brown—we shall see, we shall see.

JF

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J. D. Futch

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Queen Victoria, by Cecil Woodham-Smith (Knopf, 479 pp., $10). An experienced and diligent, though not inspired or witty, chronicler of mid-nineteenthcentury British history and anecdote, Cecil Woodham-Smith gives us in her newest work a detailed portrait of the young Queen. Lytton Strachey fifty years ago attributed defects in the Queen’s personality (her character had few) to the absence of close male companionship or influence in her earliest years. Today’s reader will wonder that the girl’s sanity at all survived her youth. The “short, vulgar-looking child” (as Greville put it) was not only fatherless but grew up amid vicious court intrigue and unseemly if regal family quarrels in a dilapidated and buginfested palace presided over by her rather awful mother and by her mother’s evil genius (some thought paramour), the ambitious and thieving Irish adventurer, Sir John Conroy. But all bad things must come to an end, and felicity finally arrived with the Queen’s marriage to Albert (“so excessively handsome,” she thought). If his bride adored him, the Prince had his problems: He found that his sovereign lady grew ever more nervous and cantankerous as years went by; even theirs was a marriage with painfully rough edges. Politics, fortunately, kept them both busy. Albert wished an active role for the crown, especially in foreign affairs; and a spirited contest ensued between the august couple and Palmerston. It was the throne’s last move in the direction of something more than ceremonial splendor.

With the Prince Consort’s premature death this duel ended, as does Mrs. Woodham-Smith’s volume. In her second volume she must turn, deftly no doubt, to the Victoria most of us think of now: the little old lady of Disraeli’s heyday and of the Jubilees. As to the aging Queen and her Scot John Brown—we shall see, we shall see.