Monarchy was as characteristic of the 19th century as nationalism and revolution. The Almanach de Gotha was a better guide to power than the Communist Manifesto. Constitutional monarchy, in particular, was considered the panacea of the age. On the first morning of her reign, Queen Victoria announced: ‘I have promised to respect and love the constitution of my native country.’ The Times declared her ‘steeped in the spirit of the constitution’. Gladstone said: ‘All the principles of the constitution have been observed by the Queen… in a manner more perfect than has ever been known.’

In reality, as Anne Somerset’s magnificent, disturbing and innovative history of Queen Victoria and her prime ministers shows, this was untrue. In private, Gladstone called her ‘an imperious despot’. For, as Somerset shows, the Queen loved power. In 1837 she wrote to her mistress of the robes: ‘Far from being fatigued with signatures and business, I like the whole thing exceedingly.’ Somerset estimates that she wrote 2,500 words a day and believes that she was ‘saved by work’ after Prince Albert’s death in 1861. Gender did not limit her authority. In royal courts, unlike parliaments, women regularly gave orders to men. Victoria’s relations with her prime ministers reveal her will of iron, her indefatigability and what Lord Clarendon called her ‘absurdly high notions of her prerogative and the amount of control which she ought to exercise over public business’.  

The Queen often wrote in secret to the leader of the opposition to undermine the prime minister: to Melbourne against Robert Peel, to Disraeli or Salisbury against Gladstone. She was, as she later admitted, a party queen. Gladstone even called her ‘the leader of the opposition’. Britain remained a court society and Victoria’s court provided her with agents, from secretaries to ladies-in-waiting (Baron Stockmar, Charles Grey, Henry Ponsonby, Lady Ely and many more) to try to enforce her wishes. Within the limits imposed by parliamentary elections, the Queen was a royal spider at the heart of the web of power running the United Kingdom. She wrote to Disraeli, one of her favourite prime ministers, ‘hurricanes of words’, often several times a day.

‘Ministerial crises must not happen in Ascot weeks and during Balmoral times,’ Victoria stipulated

Her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, was also a royal favourite, constantly at court. He made Victoria laugh, sitting beside her night after night at dinner, and he received money from her privy purse for election expenses. In 1839, with his encouragement, she refused to dismiss her Whig ladies of the bedchamber. So important was this sign of royal confidence that the Tory leader, Peel, despite a majority in the Commons, refused to ‘kiss hands’ and become prime minister. When obliged to dismiss Melbourne and ‘send for’ Peel, the Queen ‘sobbed and cried convulsively’.

Gladstone is the hero of the book. A more ruthless politician might have exploited the Queen’s hostility for party purposes. Instead, he opposed her policies but popularised her monarchy. Against her will, he arranged the 1872 thanksgiving service for the Prince of Wales’s recovery from typhoid. There were deafening cheers during her procession through London, when she held ‘dear Bertie’s hand’ and pressed it to her lips. Her self-confidence was matched by her ministers’ deference, or servility. Somerset tells the story of a Golden Jubilee garden party in 1887 when Gladstone, aged 79, reluctantly invited by the Queen, stood for half an hour outside the tea tent to try to get her to speak to him. She avoided him by leaving by another exit. He moved ahead and positioned himself along her route through Buckingham Palace. There she was obliged – not to speak – but to ‘give him her hand’. ‘Too provoking,’ she wrote. Gladstone moaned: ‘The Queen is enough to kill any man’.

The monarchy remained so influential that the Queen’s residences, as well as her ladies of the bedchamber, became political factors. Osborne and Balmoral both advertised and weakened her power. The exhausting 500-mile journey to Balmoral or crossing of the Solent to Osborne caused ‘huge inconvenience’, and wasted what the constitutional expert Walter Bagehot called ‘precious hours and still more precious strength’. Nevertheless, Victoria insisted that ministers, whatever their age or schedules, came there for audiences and signatures. Her wilfulness, worthy of her grandson the Kaiser, is suggested by this remark in 1885: ‘Ministerial crises must not happen again in Ascot weeks and during Balmoral times.’ If she had stayed in London or Windsor, despatches could have been rewritten, and ministers summoned, more easily. Despite the ‘woeful dullness’ of evenings at Windsor, ministers obeyed the royal commands to ‘dine and sleep’. One lady-in-waiting struggled so hard to suppress her yawns in the Queen’s presence that she almost dislocated her jaw.

The limits on Victoria’s power were far greater than those on Somerset’s previous subjects, Elizabeth I and Queen Anne. Learning that Lord Clarendon called her ‘the missus’, and ‘spread tales’ about her friendship with her handsome Highland servant John Brown, she wanted to veto him as foreign minister: ‘The Queen will not have him. She could not stand it.’ In the end, however, she had to stand it. Despite loathing Gladstone and his policy of Irish Home Rule, and preferring Lord Hartington, she had to accept the ‘elect of the people’ as prime minister – ‘merely on account of the number of votes’, she wrote indignantly. By 1885, in contrast to the Bedchamber Crisis of 1839, popular votes mattered more than royal wishes. At the end of her reign, Victoria could not appoint her favourite son Arthur, Duke of Connaught, commander-in-chief of the army, despite relentless pressure on her ministers. ‘As my ministers think otherwise, I suppose I cannot object,’ she concluded.

Nevertheless, she read despatches – a far higher proportion than Napoleon III read – and remained ‘extraordinarily politically active’. Lord Granville gave her, in secret, details of cabinet discussions which Lords Derby and Palmerston withheld. More European than the ministers, benefitting from information provided by their numerous foreign relations, Victoria and Albert softened Britain’s domineering attitude towards other powers – France in 1840; Portugal, Naples and Greece constantly; and the United States in 1861. If they had spent less time at Balmoral in autumn 1853, the ‘cruel and unnecessary’ Crimean War, which they opposed, might have been delayed. In 1864, after Albert’s death, Victoria helped to stop ‘the horrors of war’ with Prussia over Schleswig-Holstein – ‘a war in which no English interest is involved’ – although the prevention of Prussian expansion was already considered by her prime minister to be an ‘English interest’.

In India, the Queen tried to mitigate British brutality, opposing the ‘vandal destruction of towns’ after the uprising in 1857, rewriting the proclamation making India ‘so bright a jewel in her crown’. As a result of her initiative, supported by Disraeli in the face of cabinet and parliamentary opposition, she was granted the psychologically unifying title of Empress of India in 1877 – a clear example of royal influence on events. Less prejudiced than many of her contemporaries, she deplored the contempt for Indians shown by ‘snobbish, vulgar officials’, and included Indian servants in her household. 

Perhaps because her mother’s odious favourite Sir John Conroy was Irish, however, she feared and disliked Ireland. She spent only five weeks there compared with a total of seven years in Scotland. ‘The abominable Irish… they really are a dreadful people… shocking, abominable people’ are characteristic remarks. During the reign of the ‘famine queen’, as some Irish called her, approximately two-and-a-half million Irish died or emigrated. Out of jealousy or prejudice, she prevented the Prince of Wales acquiring a residence there, which in Gladstone’s opinion would have had ‘very powerful effects on the popular mind in Ireland’ – as Balmoral presumably did on ‘the popular mind’ in Scotland. Another example of royal influence on events.

Time made her, like many of her subjects, increasingly jingoistic, a word invented in her reign. In contrast to 1853, in 1877 she was described as ‘very Turkish’. She supported war with Russia to defend Turkey, as she did the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 and of Burma in 1885, and the war against the Boers in 1899.

Lord Salisbury deplored the ‘desire to take everything we can, to fight everybody’. The Queen, however, believed that Britain’s mission was ‘to protect the poor natives and to advance civilisation’. No other country was fit to have colonies. By the end, Cecil Rhodes assured her, ‘the whole world would come under my rule’. She did not agree with the politician Henry Labouchere or the writer Wilfred Blunt that British imperialists were ‘the greatest robbers and marauders that ever existed on the face of the globe’ or ‘great white thieves’. She enjoyed the loot of empire, adding treasures from India, Beijing and Burma to her extensive collections.

This wonderful book is the result of immense research in ministers’ private papers as well as in the royal and national archives. Despite the tragic living conditions of many of her subjects (Victoria saw with her own eyes the ‘painfully unhealthy and sickly population’ of Manchester and crippling poverty in Ireland and Scotland), the Queen remained popular – thanks to British patriotism, British successes and what she called the ‘deep devotion and loyalty of my people’. Cheers followed her from her first carriage ride on 14 July 1837, from her mother’s residence in Kensington Palace to the glorious freedom of Buckingham Palace, until her last triumphant drives through London after the relief of Lady-smith, on 8 and 9 March 1900.

As it did in Germany, Italy and Austria, the monarchy remained hugely effective in uniting the country and strengthening the political system. ‘Quite deafening cheers’ greeted the Queen even in Ireland on her last visit in April 1900. In the 19th century, most people wanted more monarchy, not less.