Two books explore the reigns, legacies of Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft    Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers: Her Life, the Imperial Ideal, and the Politics and Turmoil That Shaped Her Extraordinary Reign  

Author: Anne Somerset

Publisher: Knopf

Pages: 630

Price: $45 

Q: A Voyage Around the Queen  

Author: Craig Brown

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Pages: 672

Price: $35

“There is a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government,” said Benjamin Franklin, and if they might seem unlikely words from such a pen, much of history confirms them. Most lands in most continents have usually been ruled by kings and queens, perhaps nowhere more so than in Europe.

 

When war began in 1914, no fewer than eight countries were ruled by descendants of Queen Victoria. Three of her grandsons waged a war whose consequence saw two of them (Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and Czar Nicholas of Russia) lose their thrones.

 

One monarchy survived — and as remarkable as that survival is the fact that for 133 of the last 200 years England has been ruled by two queens regnant, women who inherited the throne in their own right. Queen Victoria’s reign of more than 63 years was overtaken by Queen Elizabeth II, who had reigned for 70 years when she died in 2022. They have now inspired two books, completely different in kind, both truly fascinating.

 

Anne Somerset has had the excellent idea of looking at Victoria’s relations with her prime ministers in Victoria and Her Prime Ministers while in Q: A Voyage Around the Queen, Craig Brown has produced another collage of the kind he’s more or less invented, following “Ma’am Darling,” on the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, and another on the Beatles.

 

When Victoria succeeded her uncle William IV in 1837, she was nervous and pliable. She was smitten with Lord Melbourne, her first prime minister, and was at first deeply dependent on him, although not as dependent as she would be on another man.

 

In 1840 she married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. They were both only 20, and it was an arranged marriage, but remarkably successful. Albert had liberal sympathies — only months after their wedding he presided over a meeting of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade — and was unusually intelligent for a princeling.

 

Albert’s influence was obvious. Although at first “strongly prejudiced” against Melbourne’s successor, Sir Robert Peel, Victoria grew to admire him. She and Albert also hated Lord Palmerston — “Pilgerstein,” as they called him — while Albert was dismayed when he became prime minister during the Crimean War.

 

But no war affected Victoria as much as the death of Albert in 1861. It left her almost paralyzed with grief: For years she could barely face official duties or appearing in public. Shedding much of his liberalism, she now abhorred “reform for the sake of alteration and pulling down what exists,” but had no power to prevent it.

 

At times Victoria found the strain of her duties so great that she declared herself “dreadfully disgusted” with politics and “tempted to go off to Australia — there to ignore all.” But she stayed, though helpless to prevent the re-election of her liberal nemesis Gladstone, openly — sometimes shockingly — siding with his adversaries.

 

What a contrast between the reigns of Victoria and Elizabeth! The one saw England ascend to an unparalleled position, with the greatest empire the world had ever seen. But Elizabeth’s reign was a long story of coming to terms with the end of empire, and a much reduced place in the world.

 

And Elizabeth herself remains a cipher. Brown describes his grandmother’s meeting with the queen, and his own, and her identical exchanges with people who met her: “Have you come far?” and “How interesting” figure prominently.

 

As a result, the book might be called an exercise in reception history. People who met her saw what they wanted to see, and felt what they wanted to feel, not least presidents and first ladies. After Ronald and Nancy Reagan dined on the Royal Yacht Britannia in 1983, Nancy described the encounter as “two mothers and wives talking about their lives, mostly our children.” Hillary Clinton recalls the queen wearing “a sparkling diamond tiara that caught the light as she nodded and laughed at Bill’s stories.”

 

Elizabeth was always courteous, with tyrants like Idi Amin as well as leaders of friendly countries, but she couldn’t conceal her dislike of one: Donald Trump, she complained, was always looking over her shoulder, presumably for someone he considered more important.

 

“Apart from horses and racing I could not discover anything that interested her,” said Lady Gladwyn, the wife of a British ambassador, and Elizabeth comes alive with her four-legged friends. Brown’s pages on her corgis, those rather unpleasant little Welsh dogs, are a comic masterpiece.

 

Even if Queen Elizabeth remains a mystery, perhaps this isn’t a bad time to recognise the virtues of constitutional monarchy, with a head of state selected randomly by inheritance who stands above the squalor of politics.

 

Over the years American friends have asked me in a slightly condescending way, “Would you really rather have Queen Elizabeth as your head of state than” whatever president was in power at the moment? —Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton or George W Bush — to which I would reply, “Since you ask, yes, actually.”

 

Funnily enough, no one has asked me this recently.

 

  The reviewer is the author of Bloody Panico!: Or, Whatever Happened to the Tory Party?