Abstract
During the first few years of her reign, from 1837 to 1839, the young Queen Victoria spent hours discussing English literature, history, and politics with her senior statesman, Lord Melbourne. She recorded these conversations in some detail in her diaries, thus giving us a window into the developing mind of a young woman whose schooling had been above the standards for a female of the period, but hardly scholarly. Several times, Lord M., as she called him, touched on the personalities around the time of Henry VIII, including Henry’s first queen, Catherine of Aragon.1 Victoria recounts Lord M. as saying that Catherine was always troubled by the fact that her first marriage to Prince Arthur depended on the “inhuman murder” of the Earl of Warwick—”that Catherine felt this all along and observed that it dwelt upon her and ‘that it did not go well with her in the world’ for this reason.”2 On a later occasion when Lord Melbourne declared that “we owed the Reformation” to Henry VIII, Victoria writes, “I said his motives for that were not the best; but Lord M. said that didn’t signify. Talked of Henry VIII Lord M. said, ‘Those women bothered him so.’ I observed he had ill-treated Catherine of Aragon so. ‘That was his conscience,’ said Lord M. funnily; ‘he thought he was living in a state of concubinage, not of marriage’” (2: 158).
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Notes
Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–1876 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 16.
Nicola J. Watson, “Gloriana Victoriana: Victoria and the cultural memory of Elizabeth I,” in Remaking Queen Victoria, ed. Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 79–81.
Louisa Stuart Costello, Memoirs of Eminent Englishwomen (London: Bentley, 1844), pp. iii–vi.
See John Ruskin, “Of Queens Gardens,” in Sesame and Lilies (London: Smith, Elder, 1865; reprint London: Allen, 1904), pp. 87–143.
Sharon A. Weltman, “‘Be no more housewives, but queens’: Queen Victoria and Ruskin’s domestic mythology,” in Remaking Queen Victoria, pp. 111, 117–18. Ruskin, 132. See also Sharon A. Weltman, Ruskins Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998), chapter 5.
Albert’s exact position in relation to Queen Victoria was conflicted throughout his lifetime. See Stanley Weintraub, Victoria: An Intimate Biography (New York: Dutton, 1988), chapters 6 and 7.
Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 40–41.
Rohan Amanda Maitzen, Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 33, 35. Maitzen points out that “the didactic, public role of the historian was not one easily appropriated by women; during the nineteenth century the past came to be seen as the key to the present, particularly the political present—and this was man’s business” (p. 33).
See also Billie Melman, “Gender, History and Memory: The Invention of Women’s Past in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” History and Memory, 5 (1993), pp. 5–41.
William Hepworth Dixon, History of Two Queens. I. Catharine of Aragon. II. Anne Boleyn, 2nd edn., vol. 1 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1873), p. vii.
James A. Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, 12 vols. (London: Parker, 1856—70). All references are to vol. 1 (1856).
John F. Smith and William Howitt, John Cassells Illustrated History of England, 8 vols, in 5 (London: W. Kent, 1857–64). All references are to vol. 2.
See Siddonss letter describing the event to her friend Mrs. Fitz Hugh, January 26, 1813 as printed in Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons (1839; reprint New York: Blom, 1972), pp. 348–51.
The Trial scene was painted by Westall in 1790, Harlow in 1817, and Cattermole in 1827, then picked up again at century’s end by John L. Pott in 1880 and Edward Austin Abbey in 1900. Fuseli painted the vision in 1781 and Westall portrayed Catherine’s death without the vision in 1796. Not surprisingly, William Blake found the vision particularly compelling as a subject and produced four drawings, dating from around 1807–09 (Shakespeare in Art: Paintings, Drawings, and Engravings devoted to Shakespearean Subjects [London: Arts Council, 1964], pp. 21–22). See the listing of nineteenth-century British history paintings in Roy Strong, “And when did you last see your father?” The Victorian Painter and British History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978).
Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, ed. Edward Wakeling, vol. 1 (Luton: Lewis Carroll Society, 1993), pp. 105–06.
Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 30–31.
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© 2003 Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, Debra Barrett-Graves
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Ziegler, G. (2003). Re-imagining a Renaissance Queen: Catherine of Aragon among the Victorians. In: Levin, C., Carney, J.E., Barrett-Graves, D. (eds) “High and Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10676-6_13
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