Asa Briggs

THE POSITION OF THE MONARCHY IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

By living so long, longer than any other English monarch, Queen Victoria gave continuity -- and identity -- to an age of unprecedented change. In the words of her contemporaries her reign became an "era", an eventful era that would stand out in history. It certainly stood out in the history of monarchy. When her immediate predecessor, her uncle William IV, died in 1837 after a short reign, not lacking in events, The Times stated dismissively that "the events of his life offered no fit material for the biographer: they partake so much of the commonplace of history". The Victorian contrast was striking. When Queen Victoria died in 1901 more than one commentator claimed that there had been no greater sense of loss since the death of King Alfred more than a thousand years before in 899.

The fact that Victoria's long reign and a "wonderful century" had come to an end almost together sharpened the popular sense of a great break on her death. "What a series of changes political and social this event will produce", a man at the heart of the royal court, Lord Esher, wrote on the accession of her oldest son, Edward VII, as her successor in January 1901. "It is like beginning to live again in a new world". Esher was writing of the Court and of the monarch at the centre of it. For most people the same might have been said, however, about the country as a whole. The Queen was mourned, and her subjects found it difficult to believe that they now had a King, not a Queen.

One aspect of monarchical change in the reign of Victoria was the emergence of a new public dimension. Few of her subjects had ever seen the Queen. Yet newspapers and periodicals focused on her. In 1901 a "blaze of reverence" surrounded the throne. This was the memorable phrase of the author of an unsigned and remarkably analytical obituary of the Queen which appeared in the Quarterly Review almost immediately after her death -- in the spring of 1901.

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