Even in this period, Victoria did not attend all Drawing-Rooms, and when she did attend, she usually stayed only for an hour before retiring and leaving one of her daughters or daughters-in-law to receive the curtseys of the rest of the debutantes. Events attended by the queen, however, drew far larger crowds than those held by the younger generation: more than sixty years old, Victoria was fast becoming an icon to her people, who rapidly forgot the causes of her unpopularity. The 'Grandmama of Europe', as her extensive family connections caused her to be known, the matriarch of empire, who could be seen by her subjects, and who was at last seen to be carrying out the public duties that she had in fact been performing without publicity throughout the seclusion, was apotheosised as the 'Dear Queen', beyond party, beyond politics, the symbol of Britain's imperial splendour and domestic pride, at whose court the heads of the other states, from Wilhelm II to the Queen of Hawaii, all paid homage. The queen had become a symbol of the nation, and her court was once more at its centre.

But behind the domestic image of the old lady surrounded by her family, behind the rhetoric of nation and empire, of constitutional monarchy and political impartiality, Victoria's court had reverted to its origins. No longer a Whig cabal, the court became a bastion of Conservatism and Unionism, with the queen the most vehement of the partisans. This tendency had developed during the seclusion, when the first Liberal ministry of William Ewart Gladstone (1868-1874) alarmed the queen by its radicalism and disregard of what she viewed as the paramount issues of Britain's empire and international status, and contrasted, unfavourably from her perspective, with the imperial ambitions and personal flattery of the Conservative prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (1874-1880). By the 1880s, the issue of Home Rule for Ireland fanned the flames of the queen's dislike, and there followed an extraordinary situation of virtual warfare between the queen and her Liberal governments. Victoria's personal household -- her ladies in waiting, her doctors, and most of her permanent courtiers, with the notable exception of her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby -- shared her opinions and reinforced them.