Abstract
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 .
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Including the Duke of Wellington and, rather incongruously perhaps, his old adversary Marshal Soult, now French Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of King James. Overcome by the warmth of the applause which greeted his entry to the Abbey, Soult recorded that ‘C’est le plus beau jour de ma vie’. Wellington, it was reported, looked around ‘with an air of vexation’ (Hibbert 2001, 71–2).
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He took a similarly sanguine view on the occasion of the Prince of Wales’s equally under-rehearsed and chaotic marriage to Princess Alexander in 1863. Such was the shortage of seats on the train that was specially arranged to transport dignitaries back from Windsor to London that Disraeli was obliged to sit on his wife’s knee.
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According to Cannadine, ‘during the first half of the twentieth century Trevelyan was the most famous, the most honoured, the most influential and the most widely read historian of his generation’. In 1927, Trevelyan accepted the Regius Chair in Modern History at Cambridge (Cannadine 1992, xii, 26–9, 126). According to Blair Worden, Trevelyan was the ‘twentieth century’s most influential inheritor of the moderate Whig tradition’ (Worden 2001, 18). Amongst his most influential and commercially successful works can be included his 1922 British History in the Nineteenth Century, his 1926 History of England and the rather later 1944 English Social History. Respective sales figures for these three texts, during his lifetime, were in the order of 70,000, 200,000 and 500,000.
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The four monarchs riding in attendance were Edward VII, George I of the Hellenes, Carlos of Portugal and Kaiser Wilhelm who, needless to say, shamelessly upstaged his fellow kings by riding a conspicuously overdressed white stallion. By tradition, the cortege was to be carried by the Royal Horse Artillery. But someone had misjudged the effect of recent rainstorms and miscalculated the necessary wheel gauge.
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In his seminal The Age of Improvement, Briggs further noted the danger of trying to make ‘ages’ too neatly, confirming that in terms of social and political morality at least ‘Victorianism’ arrived long ‘before Victoria’, and lasted long after (Briggs 1959, 1, 72). The same argument is made by John Gardiner (2002, 5–6).
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An intriguing example of the latter is Frank Prochaska’s recent The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot (2013).
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Lytton Strachey was less so, suggesting that Gardiner ‘could absorb facts, and he could state them; but he had no point of view’ for which reason his writings invariably resemble ‘nothing so much as a very large heap of sawdust’ (Strachey 1931, 169–70).
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Ward, I. (2018). Introduction: The Written Constitution. In: Writing the Victorian Constitution . Palgrave Modern Legal History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96676-2_1
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