Abstract
The final chapter of this study confronts a sort of monarch entirely different from the female rulers discussed in previous chapters. Mary I, Elizabeth I, and Anne were all mature, experienced women whose careers took place in the context of a politically powerful regal office. During the periods 1553–1603 and 1702–1714, these women had successfully accomplished a gendered transformation of the practical and symbolic authority of English kingship. In particular, the ability of Mary I and Elizabeth I to create a viable model of female sovereignty within male dominant political structures formed a permanent part of the fabric of English political evolution. This became clear following the Glorious Revolution, as a number of factors, discussed in the previous chapter, allowed Queen Anne recognition as an autonomous female ruler despite her married state.
and the Queen felt this was an attempt to see whether she could be led and managed like a child.1
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Notes
See The Nineteenth Century Constitution, ed. A. J. Hanham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). In the introduction, Hanham wrote, “Queen Victoria made it virtually impossible for Peel to form a government by refusing to change the Whig ladies of her household—a matter of minor importance,” p. 29. Similarly, G.H.L. Le May observed that “The Bedchamber Crisis was much less a constitutional landmark than a contest of personalities.” The Victorian Constitution (London: Duckworth, 1979), p. 43.
Charles Greville, Greville Memoirs, vol. 4, ed. Henry Reeve (London: Longmans, 1896), p. 166. The brackets are Greville’s.
Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (New York: Blue Ribbon Press, 1921), p. 115.
See Richard Francis Spall, Jr., “The Bedchamber Crisis and the Hastings Scandal,” Canadian Journal of History, 22 (April 1987), pp. 19–39. Spall’s examination of the press war surrounding the Flora Hastings affair, in which one of the Duchess of Kent’s ladies was falsely accused of pregnancy, argued that accusations of immorality leveled at Victoria’s chief ladies extended into and affected the Bedchamber Crisis itself. See also Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, “‘I Never Saw A Man So Frightened’: The Young Queen and the Parliamentary Bedchamber,” Remaking Queen Victoria, ed. Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 200–218. Chase and Levenson, for the first time, subject the Bedchamber Crisis to a gender analysis, calling attention to the contested male and female spaces that constituted the obviously gendered aspects of the Crisis. While both of these studies demonstrate the complexity of the Bedchamber Crisis, they are not concerned with the Crisis’s place or significance in modern British political evolution, or its relationship to the reigns of other female rulers. In her own work on Victoria’s relationship with the evolution of nineteenth-century British culture, Margaret Homans offered a brief gender analysis of the Bedchamber Crisis. Homans identified Victoria’s insistence that the bedchamber constituted a private female sphere distinct from public politics. See Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 14–15.
See Stanley Weintraub, Queen Victoria: An Intimate Memoir (New York: Truman Talley Books, 1987), p. 123. Weintraub saw no gendered distinctions between male and female household officers, discounting Victoria’s assertion that bedchamber ladies were her “own affair,” as he stated, “By custom, however, they were not, and court appointments reflected the power balance in parliament.”
Barbara J. Harris, “Women and Politics in Early Tudor England,” Historical Journal 33, 2 (1990), pp. 259–281.
For a discussion of the Medieval evolution of the royal household, see Chris Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England, 1360–1413 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
See David Loades, The Tudor Court (Totowa N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1987), pp. 32–36, 54–59, and Pam Wright, “A Change in Direction: The Ramifications of a Female Household, 1558–1603,” The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Starkey (London and New York: Longman, 1987), pp. 147–160.
Quoted in Carolly Erickson, The First Elizabeth (New York: Summit Books, 1983), p. 350.
See John Christopher Sainty and R.O. Bucholz, Officers of the Royal Household, vol. 1 (London: University of London, Institute of Historical Research, 1997). The second of these works provides a complete listing of household officers from the reigns of Charles II to William IV, two years before Victoria’s accession.
See Anne Somerset, Ladies In Waiting (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), p. 192.
Ibid., pp. 193–195.
See E. Neville Williams, The Eighteenth-Century Constitution, 1688–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 67–135.
See J.H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmonsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1950), p. 138, and John Cannon, The Fox-North Coalition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 1–64.
See Philip Ziegler, William IV (London: Collins, 1971), pp. 149–157. Ziegler quoted a letter from Whig prime minister Lord Grey, from the Lieven-Grey correspondence in the Howick MSS, which stated, “Queen Adelaide does needlework, talks a good deal, but never about politics,” p. 156.
For more discussion of the concept and ideology of separate spheres for men and women in Victorian society, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 357–396. Davidoff and Hall’s analysis of separate spheres ideology has been subject to critical analysis; see Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” Historical Journal 36, 2 (June 1993), pp. 383–414. For an analysis of the male role that emerged in the private and domestic space of the family and home, see John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
Dorothy Thompson, Queen Victoria: Gender and Power (London: Virago, 1990), p. 23. Thompson quoted a contemporary observation that “Coming after a an imbecile, a profligate, and a buffoon, as the three kings that preceded her have been described, she had much in her favor.” For a still useful and entertaining study of Victoria’s immediate predecessors, see Roger Fulford, The Wicked Uncles (London: Duckworth, 1933).
For a comprehensive work on visual representations of Victoria, see Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, Victoria R (New York: G.N. Putnam’s Sons, 1959).
C.R. Sanders, “Carlyle’s Pen Portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert,” Carlyle: Past and Present, ed. K.J. Fielding and Rodger L. Tarr (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), p. 216.
Letter from Lord Palmerston to Sir Frederick Lamb, cited in C.K. Webster, “The Accession of Queen Victoria,” History, 22 (June 1937), p. 22.
For descriptions of Victoria’s education, see Dormer Creston, The Youthful Queen Victoria (New York: G. P Putnam and Sons, 1954), Monica Charlot, Victoria the Young Queen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), Webster, “The Accession,” 17, and Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, pp. 87–138.
See Lynne Vallone, Becoming Victoria (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 62–72. Vallone’s work emphasized the political nature of Victoria’s education, and the Duchess of Kent’s efforts to win support for the curriculum she provided for Victoria.
Letter from Leopold to Victoria, 1834, The Letters of Queen Victoria, I (afterward referred to as Letters), ed. Viscount Esher and Christopher Benson (London: John Murray, 1908), p. 48.
In 1880, more than forty years following the Bedchamber Crisis, Liberal prime minister William Gladstone feared Victoria might dismiss his government. See Frank Hardie, The Political Influence of Queen Victoria (London: Frank Cass, 1963), p. 172.
Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (Ithiaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966, orig. pub. 1867), p. 168.
See Anna Clark, The Struggle For the Breeches (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihood: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), Frank Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981), and Vickers, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?,” pp. 383–414.
Girlhood of Victoria: A Selection From Her Majesty’s Diaries, ed. Viscount Esher (New York: Longman, Grenn, and Co., 1912) pp. 103–104.
See W.M. Torres, Memoirs of Lord Melbourne (London: Ward, Locke and Co., 1890), p. 438. Melbourne noted that Victoria “was disposed to think that the establishment of a queen consort would be sufficient for her.”
See Michael Brock, The Great Reform Act (London: Hutchinson, 1973).
Lord Brougham, Recollections of a Long life (New York: AMS Press, 1968, orig. pub. 1910), p. 194.
See L.G. Mitchell, Lord Melbourne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 232.
The standard study of Peel remains Gash. Recent studies have attempted to qualify Gash’s analysis of Peel as the central figure of the first half of the nineteenth century, see Ian Newbould, “Sir Robert Peel and the Conservative Party, 1832–1841: A Study in Failure?”, English Historical Review, 98 (July 1983), pp. 529–538, Donald Read, Peel and the Victorians (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), and T.A. Jenkins, Sir Robert Peel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999)
Later in her reign, the one exception the mature Victoria made to the exclusion of women from formal political functions were her daughters, some of whom married German monarchs, while her youngest daughter Beatrice served as an unofficial private secretary with access to government documents. See E.F. Benson, Queen Victoria’s Daughters (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1938), and Jerrold Packard, Victoria’s Daughters (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998).
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© 2008 Charles Beem
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Beem, C. (2008). “What Power Have I Left?” Queen Victoria’s Bedchamber Crisis Revisited. In: The Lioness Roared. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09722-4_5
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