Richard Williams - The Contentious Crown: Public Discussion of the British Monarchy in the Reign of Queen Victoria

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The Contentious Crown

To my parents
Jean and Peter Williams

The Contentious Crown

Public Discussion of the British Monarchy in the Reign of Queen Victoria

RICHARD WILLIAMS

First published 1997 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright Richard Williams, 1997

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Publisher s Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 96051681

Typeset in Sabon by Manton Typesetters, 5-7 Eastfield Road, Louth, Lincolnshire

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-34126-5 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-429-44020-5 (ebk)

Contents

This book is an expansion and updating of my 1989 Cambridge PhD thesis, Public discussion of the British monarchy 183787. I would like to thank Professor David Cannadine, who first excited my interest in the subject when I was an undergraduate, supervised my thesis and renewed his advice and encouragement during preparation of the book. I would also like to thank Professor Derek Beales who was my initial PhD supervisor when David Cannadine was on sabbatical.

I am grateful to several people for the fact that the thesis has now become a book. Dr Miles Taylor encouraged me to return to the subject three years ago. Alec McAulay at Scolar Press has shown the patience necessary to obtain a book from someone working outside the higher education system. I could not have carried out the extra research without the help of the Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge who elected me to a Schoolteacher By-Fellowship in Easter Term, 1994, and my then employers, Gorseinon College, who gave me leave of absence to take it up. Mary, my wife, has generously put up with three book-dominated Summer holidays.

My most long-standing debts are acknowledged in the dedication.

Richard Williams

Until recently nineteenth-century history was written mainly in terms of the rise of the middle class and the making of the working class, while what might be called the survival of the upper class the monarchy and aristocracy was neglected. The work of EM.L Thompson began to redress the balance as far as the aristocracy is concerned

Yet a major study of the institution and caste at the very apex of Victorian society the monarchy and Royal Family has yet to be produced, despite the new historical interest in the monarchy resulting from the renewal of debate about the institution in the 1990s. here I am less concerned with what Victoria did and what sort of Queen she was than with what people thought she did and what sort of Queen they thought she was.

I cannot pretend to be making an analysis of national public opinion, except in so far as newspapers and speech-makers reflect and shape the opinions of their readers and audiences. Readers letters to newspapers, figures of attendance at republican meetings or of participation in celebrations of royal events hint, in descending degrees of certainty, at popular attitudes, but, while a sociologist undertaking a study of attitudes to the current monarchy and Royal Family would make a mass observation survey, the historian cannot interview the dead. Local studies, ransacking surviving diaries and other such sources, will be needed before anything more precise can be deduced about the opinions of the silent majority.

What I can provide, however, is a view over the shoulder of the makers of public discourse in Victorian England as they observe and comment on the monarchy. I have largely confined myself to public rather than private writings as I feel that the former are more important in that they show how much public discussion of the monarchy there was and how rigorous and varied was that discussion. The private diaries and letters of important people were read by only one or two contemporaries, even if the writer had an eye on posterity, but newspaper articles, speeches and pamphlets were read and intended to be read by large numbers of people and therefore it is these sources that are so significant in reconstructing how those in the informed, literary and political society presented the monarchy to the sections of the public whose opinion they believed they reflected and moulded. W.R. Fox Bourne, erstwhile editor of the Examiner, wrote in 1887 of the interaction between newspapers and opinion only in the past few years had the increase in the intelligence of the readership of newspapers definitely tipped the balance and made the leading article less the stentorian director of opinion than its mirror.

This was pre-eminently a literate society, a print-culture in which the vehicle of public debate was the written word.

The newspapers that I have read can be divided into different categories which illuminate the views of the monarchy being received by different sections of society. The London dailies were read by the better-off middle class in the capital and, thanks to the railways and the enterprise of newsagents such as W.H. Smith, in the provinces. Before the removal of stamp duties in 1855 the cost of a daily paper was prohibitive and circulation was low, with The Times figure of 50,000 in the early 1850s putting it ahead of the others such as the Standard, Morning Post, Morning Herald, Globe, Morning Chronicle and Morning Advertiser.

Until the advent of cheap dailies in the late 1880s and 1890s, the working class and lower middle class could only afford to buy cheap weekly newspapers.

There were also weeklies catering for the middle class. The Illustrated London News enjoyed great success because of its pictorial representation of events, boasting a circulation of 41,000 in 1843 rising to 123,000 on the removal of stamp duty;

As well as examining these and other national and provincial newspapers and periodicals, I have looked at the special newspapers of various bodies and movements the trade unions journal the Bee-Hive, the Free Press, the mouthpiece of the Foreign Affairs Committees of David Urquhart, and, of course, the republican newspapers of the late 1840s and 1850s and of the 1880s and Charles Bradlaughs secularist organ, the National Reformer, which was the main vehicle of the republican movement of the early 1870s. All these, together with parliamentary debates, political pamphlets, books on the Queen and Royal Family and the popular ballads printed and hawked around London streets, enable me to furnish the first concrete, detailed and multi-layered study of Victorian attitudes to the monarchy as displayed in public discourse upon it.

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