In 2001, on the hundredth anniversary of Victoria's death, historians were more interested in how she was constituted by nineteenth-century culture than in how she shaped her own times. David Cannadine's groundbreaking essay of 1983 on the reinvention of royal ritual in the Victorian era loomed large in all of this, as did the work from the mid-1990s of Adrienne Munich and Margaret Homans on ways that Queen Victoria was invoked in a variety of feminist and post-colonial readings.Footnote 1 Biographies there were aplenty. Mostly, however, they kept their distance from the cultural turn.Footnote 2 With a few notable exceptions, political historians gave the throne a wide berth too. In a series of essays, Walter Arnstein did point up Victoria's influence on matters of church and state, while Michael Bentley insightfully depicted court politics toward the end of her reign.Footnote 3 By and large, however, as she passed her first centenary, it was the era that Queen Victoria eponymized that drew enquiry, not the queen herself.Footnote 4
Almost two decades later, a new version of Queen Victoria is beginning to emerge. She has found her voice. The year of the bicentenary of her birth finds Victoria back nearer the center of her reign. Three factors have given her a new lease of life. In the first place, historians have been able to make more use of the queen's own testimony and correspondence. In 2012, her journals were made available online. Although censored after her death by overcautious editors (including her own daughter), they are nonetheless a remarkable record, quite unlike anything that exists for other British monarchs since 1760.Footnote 5 The Royal Archives at Windsor Castle have also opened their doors more readily to researchers. One or two well-reported controversies aside, access to the private papers of the royal family has improved, supplemented by the publication of archives from Coburg in Germany relating to Albert, Queen Victoria's consort.Footnote 6 There is now an opportunity to know more than ever before with greater ease about the couple on the throne. Secondly, modern royalty is back in fashion as a topic in its own right, attracting attention from historians in other fields, notably the history of international relations, of empire, and of the women's movement. In this way in recent years, the role of kings and queens, consorts and princes, past and present, in the making of the nineteenth-century world has been argued for in a series of monographs and edited collections.Footnote 7 Finally, and perhaps less obviously, Queen Victoria and the Victorian age no longer hang so heavily over our own modernity. On 9 September 2015, the present queen, Elizabeth II, overtook Victoria as the longest-reigning British monarch. There is less need now to explain the entirety of Queen Victoria's long reign. Scholars can be more selective and concentrate on different phases, as they do with other monarchs. Similarly, since 2001 the Victorian epoch itself has begun to look less unified. There is no longer a consensus around what was distinctive about the Victorians, in terms of both the chronological coherence of the years 1837–1901 and what constituted Victorian culture. New departures in the field of Victorian studies—for example, the journals Neo-Victorian Studies and Victoriographies—problematize the discipline rather than adhering to an agreed-upon agenda about the topic under study.Footnote 8 Freed from the age that she supposedly embodies, Queen Victoria is no longer a relic but a subject of study in her own right.
To varying extents, the books under review reflect this new phase in the historiography of the Victorian monarchy. Inevitably, biography remains the preferred medium for books about Queen Victoria. Since 2001 there have been at least a dozen “new” lives of the queen, including those discussed here, as well as reprints of classic biographies such as Elizabeth Longford's and Lytton Strachey's.Footnote 9 With its emphasis on narrative and personality, the biographical approach brings a cozy familiarity, and publishers work hard to persuade readers that fresh biographies have some new secret about Victoria to reveal. At the same time, biography can be a restrictive discipline, lacking the wider perspectives that come from considering monarchy from the outside looking in.Footnote 10 None of the biographies considered in this review uncover new nuggets about their subject. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any significant new information about her life that has come to light since 2001. However, there are plenty of new contexts for understanding Queen Victoria. The survey that follows considers these books within this wider historiography of monarchy in the nineteenth century. Three themes are developed in particular: Queen Victoria as a female icon, as a dynastic and imperial monarch, and in relation to her constitutional role at the helm of church and state power in Britain.
FEMALE MONARCHY
Lytton Strachey has much to answer for. Around the time of the last major anniversary of Queen Victoria's death, he produced a biography that cast her as equally anxious, doubtful, and prudish as her subjects, whose lack of modernity he had savaged so severely in his Eminent Victorians (1918).Footnote 11 Strachey mixed in a large pinch of misogyny, too, arguing that the queen grew up entirely in a world of females; having lost her father early on, hers was a world of governesses, female servants, and courtiers, devoid of the masculine touch that would have prepared her properly for serving the nation. Queen Victoria as the epitome of “separate spheres” is a tag that has stuck. Her own attitude toward the rights of women seems clear, revealed in a letter written to Theodore Martin, the biographer of Prince Albert, in 1870: “I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women's Rights,’ with all its attendant horrors … Were women to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen, and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.”Footnote 12 An influential study of 1990 by the late Dorothy Thompson commented on this contradiction between Victoria's own power and status as a female monarch and her lack of sympathy for the emancipation of women.Footnote 13 Both Jane Ridley and Susan Kinglsey Kent follow this orthodox interpretation in their recent books. It is one that is open to question.
Indeed, Queen Victoria had iconic status as a woman who empowered other women seeking civil and political rights. Surprisingly, perhaps, this can be seen in the case of women's right to vote. From the early years of Victorian campaigns for a female franchise down to the Women's Social and Political Union before the First World War, Queen Victoria was often evoked as encouragement. For example, in 1869, John Stuart referred to the fact of there being a woman on the throne as pointing up the absence of civic and personal rights for ordinary women. Similarly, later in the century, the veteran women's suffrage advocate Millicent Fawcett wrote an approving biography of the queen.Footnote 14 During the suffragette campaigns of the 1900s, Victoria joined other heroines, such as Boudicca, Florence Nightingale, and Joan of Arc, on the banners of the women protesting against the male polity.Footnote 15
By the time of the Women's Social and Political Union's agitation, Queen Victoria had actually become a contested figure. Her anti-suffrage letter to Theodore Martin was published in 1908 and widely noticed. While the National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage seized on the letter as evidence of her opposition to the women's vote,Footnote 16 there were as many progressives claiming her as their own. Frederick Pethick Lawrence and Keir Hardie, for example, continued to emphasize the significant precedent created for all women by a female monarch.Footnote 17 Suffragette meetings were held around memorial statues of the queen, as in Nottingham in 1908, and in 1913 the Women's Social and Political Union journal Votes for Women claimed that Victoria had always supported women having the vote on the Isle of Man.Footnote 18
Queen Victoria's posthumous appearance at the heart of the women's suffrage campaign before the First World War suggests that we need to reappraise certain aspects of her reputation. If we can put to one side our instinctive desire to assess her according to the standards of modern sexual equality, then we may read into her life other ways in which she proved an ideal woman. Without marginalizing the dominant Victorian ideology of patriarchy, it is relevant to note alternative versions of the queen's femininity that registered at home and abroad throughout the nineteenth century. One metric that speaks volumes about Victoria's global celebrity is the wide range of memorials, addresses, and gifts that she received for her golden jubilee anniversary in 1887. In the United Kingdom, pride of place went to the Women's Jubilee Offering, a venture that gathered three million female signatures, the largest women-only address of that era, and possibly since, pledging contributions to a fund that raised money for the training of nursing and other schemes of female education. In 1887, addresses prominently featuring women memorialists were also sent to the queen from around the British Empire, for example, from Burma.Footnote 19
In these loyal addresses in 1887 (and those that came ten years later in 1897), three facets of Victoria's status as a female monarch emerge very clearly. First, she symbolized the strength and girth of Britain as a global superpower. Until her death in 1901, associating Queen Victoria with the rise and preeminence of the British Empire was a commonplace. Although her reign started with rebellion in Canada and ended with war in South Africa, she came to represent the “pax Britannica,” on occasion even displacing the classic image of “Britannia,” the female personification of the nation.Footnote 20 The biographies under review all register the imperial backdrop to Victoria's life in ways in which previous generations of biographers have not, although in the new version her role is largely symbolic. Despite her subtitle, Baird, for example, only has room for a couple of pages on Victoria as empress. That is reasonable, for often the queen was simply a cipher invested with pacific qualities in order to soften the harder edges of colonialism. However, as Walter Arnstein has reminded us, she could also be a “warrior queen,” in the same way that Queen Elizabeth I was during the second half of the sixteenth century. From the first opium wars with China in 1839 through to the European great-power rivalry of the late 1870s and 1880s, Queen Victoria was celebrated as much for her martial prowess as for her preference for peace. Her image as a “warrior queen” was backed up by a constitutional reality. She retained patronage over senior appointments in the army, and for two-thirds of her reign (1856–1895), her cousin Prince George, the Duke of Cambridge, was commander-in-chief of the armed forces (that is, the military head of the British army).Footnote 21 As yet, historians do not know enough about how Queen Victoria wielded her military command, despite the extent to which Parliament complained about royal overreach, especially during Gladstone's governments of 1868–1874 and 1880–1885. The few studies that exist emphasize her maternal, not her martial tendencies.Footnote 22
Secondly, Queen Victoria stood for justice and benevolence. As a female ruler, she was popularly associated with older traditions of mercy, charity, and equity that dated back to the time of Dante and John of Salisbury, classic proponents of benign monarchy. Sometimes these attributes were to be found in all good rulers, but they were identified particularly with queens, dowagers, and empresses.Footnote 23 Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent's excellent collection foregrounds recent work on Victoria's reputation amongst the Indigenous peoples of the British Empire during the nineteenth century, demonstrating how this belief in the royal touch persisted into the modern period, no matter how distant the monarch.Footnote 24 The Maori iwi of New Zealand, Inuit and other “bands” of British North America (modern-day Canada), Pacific islanders, and tribal groups of southern Africa looked to Queen Victoria to soften the harsh colonialism practiced by her governments. In India under the British Raj, reform movements such as the Indian National Congress (est. 1885) latched onto the Queen's Proclamation of 1858 as an assurance that they would be treated as equal subjects under the crown, a royal promise that lingered on after Victoria's death in the tactics used by Indian National Congress leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi.Footnote 25 In this way, Queen Victoria inspired both loyalism and aspirations for reform and change.
Thirdly, and finally, many memorialists of the jubilee years (1887 and 1897), both at home and abroad, lauded the queen for being a widow. This side to her reputation was hard to avoid, and all the biographies under review give it due focus. After the death of her consort, Prince Albert, in 1861, Queen Victoria dressed in mourning for the rest of her life (as did her court) and seldom lost an opportunity to revere publicly Albert's memory. For example, her own choice of a suitable jubilee memorial in 1887 was another statue of her late husband (an equestrian monument in Windsor Great Park). However, her fame as the best-known widow in the world goes further than the at times maudlin devotion to Albert. Widowhood was a much more common feature of society in the nineteenth century than it is today. Around 15 percent of the female population of western Europe were widows, a figure that rose as life expectancy lengthened.Footnote 26 In parts of the British Empire, notably India, where child marriage was the norm, widowhood was deeply ingrained in social and religious culture.Footnote 27 Despite the attentions of her Scottish manservant John Brown (a topic of enduring interest, not least because of the 1997 film Mrs Brown), Queen Victoria chose to remain a widow and recommended it forcefully to others. Her own mother had remarried after the death of her first husband, yet Queen Victoria was known to oppose the remarriage of any of her female courtiers. At a time when widowhood was so prevalent, yet the hardships endured by widows seemed to go so unnoticed, at least until the extension of military widows’ pensions after the South African war, the sight of a widow on the throne was as significant as the unmarried status of the “virgin queen” Elizabeth during the Tudor era. Victoria's behavior as a royal widow surely developed and enhanced her status as a model monarch, yet historians, unable to move beyond their fix on her personal life, have yet to tell us how.
DYNASTIC RULE
Not only was Queen Victoria's reign one of the longest in British history, but she also possessed one of the largest royal families of her era or any other. This aspect of her monarchy is another that is never invested with the historical significance that it deserves. “A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life,” noted Walter Bagehot in his famous English Constitution (1867), and many commentators tend to follow this dictum. Five daughters and four sons of her own, followed by thirty-eight grandchildren and eighty-nine great-grandchildren (including those born after her death) is usually sexed up in popular culture as demonstrating the unbridled passion of Victoria and Albert's love match and talked up by historians as evidence of the royal couple's aspiration for bourgeois respectability.Footnote 28 Victoria and Albert are seen as the embodiment of “Victorian values” of domesticity and parenting. Their commitment to the rituals of family life—births, baptisms and nuptials, holidays, Christmas, homeschooling—were played out in the full glare of the newspapers and magazines, as they became the first “media monarchy.”Footnote 29 Again, some of the books under review rely heavily on these tropes. But as Deborah Cadbury's book brings out well, and as Jane Ridley shows, too, this picture is somewhat unbalanced. While Victoria and Albert worked hard to evade the dysfunctional relations that characterized their own childhood and youth, we should not attribute to them too much of a twentieth-century mentalité when it comes to family life. In fact, there is an altogether different way to read this phenomenon of the large royal family: as a sustained exercise in dynastic statecraft.
Victoria and Albert's own marriage in 1840 is a case in point. The courtship between the two was arranged through the diplomacy of Victoria's uncle, Prince Leopold of Belgium, and his physician Baron Christian Stockmar. By making an alliance between the British royal family and the small Duchy of Coburg, Leopold aimed to release the young queen from the clutches of the Hanoverian monarchy, so tainted by the excesses of the Regency years and the reign of George IV, and by the notoriety of his brothers, in particular Ernst Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland. Leopold and Stockmar also sought to associate the new reign of Queen Victoria with the spirit of constitutional reform emerging in Europe in the 1820s and 1830s.Footnote 30 In turn, Victoria and Albert plotted the marriages of their own children with strategic imperatives uppermost, seeking alliances with the smaller Protestant royal houses of Europe, mainly those in Germany. Two big fish were caught as well: Prussia, through the marriage of Princess Victoria (Vicky) to Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia in 1858, and Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, to the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, daughter of the Russian tsar, in 1874. In these ways, by the 1880s the British royal family was connected by marriage with most of the non-Catholic dynastic rulers of Europe. When historians have noticed this, they have tended to attribute it to Victoria's mission for “matchmaking” (Cadbury cannot resist the phrase), as though she were a dating agency for royals. Or they have assigned this spreading influence through arranged marriages to a “Coburg conspiracy,” in which Prince Albert's own family spun a web of power out of all proportion to its status as a minor court on the margins of the German confederation.Footnote 31 This interpretation rather misses the point. Monarchies had behaved as marriage brokers over many centuries, making alliances via wedlock to secure the succession and, in many cases, to bolster a confessional state, be it Catholic or Protestant. Queen Victoria's Hanoverian forebears were spectacular failures at this kind of diplomacy. When George III died in 1820, not one of his seven sons who survived infancy had produced a legitimate male heir, and the regime's hopes of continuity were delivered a stunning blow when Princess Charlotte, his granddaughter, died in childbirth in 1817.Footnote 32 In contrast, Victoria and Albert proved accomplished builders of a dynasty that endured. True, some of their choices seem questionable in retrospect. Marrying their children into the smaller German courts looked like bad business when Prussia forced them all into reunification under the Kaiserreich in 1871. In the 1840s and 1850s, however, Prince Albert, encouraged by Leopold and Stockmar, had aspired to a looser arrangement in which the small princely states would enjoy power in a new German confederation, with its Parliament at Frankfurt.Footnote 33 This wider continental context is seldom touched upon in biographies of Queen Victoria—A. N. Wilson's Victoria: A Life (2014) is a notable exception—despite all the work that Victoria and Albert did in extending their influence in this way.Footnote 34
Interestingly, when it came to dynastic relations, Queen Victoria had an expansive notion of who constituted the royal family. From the early 1850s, her court stretched to include a number of overseas royal exiles whom she considered to be of royal blood and therefore entitled to a place at court alongside her own immediate family. The most famous example of a royal “adopted” in this way was the maharajah Duleep Singh, the deposed heir to the Sikh kingdom of Punjab, who became a regular part of the court retinue at Windsor and Buckingham Palace after 1854. There were others, too, as essays in Carter and Nugent's volume describe, some of them among Queen Victoria's sixty godchildren: for example, Princess Gouramma of Coorg, the Maori Albert Victor Pomare, and Prince Albert Edward Kauikeaouli Leiopapa a Kamehameha of Hawai'i.Footnote 35 There was something undoubtedly maternal on the queen's part in these episodes, and her evangelical zeal was at its strongest. However, we can also see here a determination to make monarchy meaningful.
In addition to the international and colonial dimension in her own court, the queen viewed other imperial dynasties at first hand as well. From Tsar Nicholas I's visit to London in 1844, through the trips exchanged with Louis Napoleon of France in the 1850s, down to the state visits of the sultan of Turkey in 1867, the shah of Persia in 1873, and the emperor of Brazil in 1877, the queen became a regular stop on the royal tour, a ceremonial that drew her into the diplomacy of the era.Footnote 36 Some of this dynastic influence is touched upon in older studies of the queen and foreign policy: for example, when she and Prince Albert intervened over Anglo-French diplomacy in 1851–52 during the Crimean war, and when she tried to influence the Schleswig-Holstein crisis of 1864.Footnote 37 Moreover, there is now a growing literature on how the so-called “concert of Europe” between 1815 and 1914—the absence of war on the continent—owed much to the behind-the-scenes influence of royal houses linked together in transnational kinship that went beyond the rivalries of individual states.Footnote 38 To his credit, Chassaigne does position Queen Victoria closer to the diplomatic action, particularly over India. Mostly historians have not included the British monarchy in this new analysis of foreign policy and international relations, and neither do the biographies discussed here, despite their aspirations to situate Victoria in a global context. Queen Victoria was positioned at the heart of British foreign policy. Her prerogative extended to oversight of all the workings of the Foreign Office and the India Office (after 1858). Ambassadors and ministers from other countries were officially accredited to her, to the “court of St. James.” A member of her royal household, the “Master of Ceremonies,” liaised with all overseas diplomats. For much of her reign, this office was occupied by two protégés of Prince Leopold, Sir Edward Cust and Sir Francis Seymour; the role of both men merits further study.Footnote 39 In this way throughout the nineteenth century, the court was part of the normal routine of the Foreign Office, not simply its ceremonial aspects.
Into this system of royal diplomacy, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were keen to send members of their own family. As the queen recalled after his death, her consort “had often thought of the Colonies for our sons.” She suggested making Prince Arthur “Duke of Canada” in 1865 and again in 1876, when she also thought of making Prince Alfred “Duke of Australia.”Footnote 40 Neither appointment came about, but her elder sons were sent on missions overseas as well. The phenomenon of the royal tour—visits to overseas colonies and other parts of the British Empire by junior members of the queen's family—are now beginning to receive the attention they deserve.Footnote 41 These visits frequently involved diplomacy as well as pomp and theatre. In 1870, Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, met with Maori chiefs still fighting with white settlers, in an attempt to broker peace. In 1875 the Prince of Wales altered his itinerary in India to visit the Gaekwar of Baroda (a boy), recently installed by the British after a failed coup.Footnote 42 In 1885, Prince Arthur, the Duke of Connaught, joined Lord Dufferin, the viceroy of India, at a summit with the emir of Kabul, at Ambala, reinforcing efforts to forge an alliance with the Afghan leader.Footnote 43 Such quasi-diplomatic roles extended to the queen's daughters. Princess Louise, Victoria's sixth child and fourth daughter, spent five years in Canada as vice-regal consort to her husband, the Marquis of Lorne, who was governor general there.Footnote 44 Prince Albert's vision of a working monarchy was fulfilled in these ways. Then the baton passed onto the queen and her eldest daughter, Vicky. Two of Vicky's daughters were suggested as consorts for new regimes in the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans: one successfully (Princess Sophie in Greece), and one unsuccessfully (Princess Viktoria in Bulgaria), while another of the queen's granddaughters was married into the new royal family of Romania. If there was a “concert of Europe” that endured from 1815 to 1914, conducted by statesmen, from Talleyrand and Metternich through to Bismarck and Disraeli, then the members of its orchestra were supplied by the British monarchy.
ROYAL PREROGATIVE
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the new wave of work on Queen Victoria is its tacit acceptance of a historiography that emphasizes her political quiescence. Politics and the constitution were a sphere of activity in the nineteenth century from which it has been easy to exclude Queen Victoria. Again, in this view Walter Bagehot led the way, famously observing in his English Constitution (1867) that the duties of the monarch were limited to the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn. Beyond these, the monarchy was hedged in by protocols that gave the cabinet and Parliament the real power. In the first part of her reign, Queen Victoria found that even her own female courtiers were chosen by the government of the day, and she struggled to gain recognition for Prince Albert as her consort.Footnote 45 Such conventional orthodoxy has taken quite a battering in the past three decades, as study after study has revealed how large parts of the royal prerogative remained in place. In an important article of 1989, David Cannadine showed how Bagehot was wrong, how Queen Victoria wielded power more like a Hanoverian than a modern monarch. Recent work has taken this insight further, showing the ways in which “the royal prerogative was much less altered than might have been expected,” as H. C. G. Matthew and K. D. Reynolds described her reign in their illuminating entry on Queen Victoria for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.Footnote 46 Prince Albert, too, has reemerged as a far more dominant force in early Victorian politics than previously recognized, although some studies overstate the case.Footnote 47 Of the books considered here, only Ridley engages with this sea change in the secondary literature, and even then she signs off on Queen Victoria's role in politics as “partisanship and meddling” (104).
Historians need to work harder on reevaluating how Queen Victoria played a significant role in the political life of the nation. She had her own council of ministers, the Privy Council, and attended its meetings on a regular basis. A famous painting by David Wilkie depicts her first-ever Privy Council meeting on 21 June 1837, immediately after she acceded to the throne on the death of William IV. Wilkie's picture of 1838 captures her feminine vulnerability in the presence in a roomful of elderly male politicians. Over time, however, she proved anything but timid in the face of successive governments. She rarely missed chairing a session of the Privy Council. Her last meeting was in November 1900, just two months before she died. While these meetings were formal reporting of government business, the occasions were surrounded by consultation and discussion between Victoria and her ministers, as her own journals make clear. As her court rotated around the royal palaces, from London (Buckingham Palace) to Windsor and to Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands, her ministers accompanied her (their visits to Osborne House, her summer residence on the Isle of Wight, were less common), and Privy Council meetings followed her too. When she decamped overseas—to Germany and later to Tuscany and to the French seaside—some of her senior government ministers also went. Such itineraries suggest a monarch who was constantly in, not out of, touch with the cabinet proceedings of the day.
An additional function performed by the queen through the Privy Council was the dispensation of justice. Until the development of the “supreme court” through the granting of appellate powers to the House of Lords in 1876, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, nominally chaired by the monarch, heard all final appeals in legal matters. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the business of the Judicial Committee increased as it heard more matters relating to the colonies and to India.Footnote 48 Although the queen did not attend its meetings, the Judicial Committee's expanded role enhanced the monarch's reputation for justice, especially outside Britain. Back home, she also retained discretionary powers of mercy; that is, only the words of the queen could save a condemned felon from capital punishment by hanging, or could commutate to a less severe sentence. Here again, Queen Victoria was an active monarch. She showed clemency toward those who tried to assassinate her, and intervened regularly in other cases.Footnote 49
When it came to Parliament, Queen Victoria was busy as well. The new Palace of Westminster, opened in 1852 and designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin to replace the old one destroyed by fire in 1834, celebrated the role of the monarch in parliamentary ritual. At one end of the new complex was the Victoria Tower, with a separate entrance and suite of rooms set aside for the monarch when she came to open and close the parliamentary session. The ways in which Queen Victoria used her ceremonial task of opening and proroguing Parliament to emphasize her physical presence at Westminster (and that of Prince Albert) has been well described by Walter Arnstein.Footnote 50 Less attention has been focused on the convention of the “Queen's speech,” the words read by the monarch on the occasion of the state opening of Parliament, in which the forthcoming legislative program of the government was set out. Normally, historians see this act as one of monarchical ventriloquism, in which Queen Victoria would simply read out what had been written down by her ministers. In fact, at various times she intervened to put things into the speech (for example, over the Indian famine in 1875) or keep announcements out (for example, over the war with Afghanistan in 1881).Footnote 51 Much more research needs to be undertaken into such behind-the-scenes maneuvers in which the queen actually authored the words uttered in her name.
Another area of royal prerogative under-studied by historians is Queen Victoria's status as head of the Church of England.Footnote 52 Formally responsible for the appointment of all Anglican bishops, Victoria took her powers of approval and veto seriously, with favorites and those she disliked across the spectrum of church leaders. Her current biographers do not say much about this vital part of her monarchy, yet there is a lot to cover, especially in relation to empire. In the early part of her reign, she and Prince Albert were associated with the evangelical wing of the Church of England. Albert served as president of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the oldest and busiest supporter of missionary Protestant activity around the world and especially in the empire.Footnote 53 Some of the studies in Mistress of Everything do show Victoria on a journey from staunch religious orthodoxy to greater toleration and ecumenicalism, in which she often proved to be ahead of the ideas and attitudes of her ministers and close advisors. After the Indian rebellion of 1857–58 (attributed to, among other factors, overzealous missionaries), as well as in the aftermath of the Maori wars in New Zealand and unrest in the West Indian colonies, Queen Victoria turned against the work of missionaries. She came to the defense of John Colenso, the bishop of Natal, whose time amongst the Zulu led him to criticize Christian orthodoxy.Footnote 54 She also sanctioned the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in the colonies, including (after some resistance on her part) in Ireland. She ended her reign knowing more about Islam, Hinduism, and African tribal religions than did most of her subjects.
CONCLUSION
As the life and times of Queen Victoria retreat further into the distant past, scholars are better placed than ever to research her role and her impact. Through her own correspondence and her journals, it is possible to reconstruct a lifetime of direct engagement with the real world throughout her reign. And as the digitized nineteenth century is transforming our awareness of the visual and material past, Queen Victoria, probably the most famous and recognizable personality of her age, seems omnipresent. She lived through an exponential expansion of print and visual media, especially the new medium of photography, and her last years saw the invention of moving film.Footnote 55 Moreover, with British studies in the nineteenth century becoming ever more global, the iconography of Queen Victoria overseas provides endless material for studying her impact outside Britain. At the same time, a cautionary note needs sounding. Biography is not best suited to take advantage of so many of the new ways of conceiving the role of monarchy in the nineteenth century. Biography often lags well behind changing trends in scholarship. Royal biographies bear the additional burden of dealing with a subject who occupies a parallel universe in the realm of popular books and the news media. As this survey has suggested, even the best biographies of Victoria, by opting for narrative over analysis, for anecdote over theme, end up as fairly orthodox fare, no matter how much they are pitched as cultural or global history. “Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory,” declared Benjamin Disraeli, Victoria's favorite prime minister. On the contrary, it is only by posing wider historical questions about Queen Victoria that the significance of her royal life comes more clearly into view.
