Queen Victoria This Thorny Crown Michael Ledger Lomas All Chapter

Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown
Michael Ledger-Lomas
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SPIRITUAL LIVES
General Editor
Timothy Larsen
S P I R I T U A L LI V E S
General Editor
Timothy Larsen
The Spiritual Lives series features biographies of prominent men and

women whose eminence is not primarily based on a specifically religious
contribution. Each volume provides a general account of the figure’s life
and thought, while giving special attention to his or her religious con-
texts, convictions, doubts, objections, ideas, and actions. Many leading
politicians, writers, musicians, philosophers, and scientists have engaged
deeply with religion in significant and resonant ways that have often
been overlooked or underexplored. Some of the volumes will even focus
on men and women who were lifelong unbelievers, attending to how
they navigated and resisted religious questions, assumptions, and set-
tings. The books in this series will therefore recast important figures in
fresh and thought-provoking ways.
Titles in the series include:

W. T. Stead
Nonconformist and Newspaper Prophet
Stewart J. Brown
Margaret Mead
A Twentieth-Century Faith
Elesha J. Coffman
Theodore Roosevelt
Preaching from the Bully Pulpit
Benjamin J. Wetzel
Arthur Sullivan
A Life of Divine Emollient
Ian Bradley
Benjamin Franklin
Cultural Protestant
D. G. Hart
Queen Victoria
This Thorny Crown
MICHAEL LEDGER-LOMAS
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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First Edition published in 2021
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For Richa and Esther Libby

Acknowledgements
Tim Larsen asked me to write this book and has stuck with me
through my slowness in finishing it. His trust and advice have been
indispensable to me throughout. Tom Perridge at Oxford University
Press was not just similarly patient but was also wonderfully under-
standing in finding me some extra words at a late stage in the process.
It has been a pleasure to work again with the meticulous and efficient
Karen Raith on its production. I researched and wrote this book as a
Lecturer in the History of Christianity in Britain at the Department of
Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College, London where I
remain a Visiting Research Fellow. While at King’s I was particularly
grateful for the kind support of Paul Joyce and Marat Shterin as my
heads of department and for the collegiality of David Crankshaw, my
fellow lecturer in the history of Christianity. The grant of two periods
of research leave greatly advanced my work on the project, as did the
award of research funding. The German Academic Exchange Service
DAAD very generously made me a grant to support a research trip to
German archives.
I would like to thank Her Majesty the Queen for permission to
quote from the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, where I received a
good deal of expert assistance. I am greatly indebted also to the staff of
the following libraries and archives: the Argyll papers archive at
Inveraray Castle; the British Library; the Staatsarchiv Coburg and
the Landesbibliothek Coburg; the Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Darm-
stadt; the Archiv des Hauses Hessen, Schloss Fasanerie, Eichenzell;
Lambeth Palace Library; the National Library of Scotland, Edin-
burgh; and Durham Palace Green Library.
The convenors of seminars at the University of Oxford, the
University of Cambridge, and the Institute of Historical Research,
London invited me to give papers about this project. I am grateful for
the feedback I received on those occasions. I have also benefited from
the chance to talk about Queen Victoria at conferences and work-
shops in places as various as Cambridge, Gotha, Haifa, Kensington
Palace, Paris, Rome, and Waco, TX.
viii Acknowledgements
Jon Parry first introduced me to the Victorians as a third year
undergraduate and has been a great support to me in my scholarly
career ever since. The manuscript of this book has hugely benefited
from his reading of it. I long ago despaired of matching the rigour,
concision, and wry elegance with which Jon writes about the nine-
teenth century, but I hope this book nonetheless embodies some of the
many things he has taught me. My thinking about the Victorians
further developed as a member of two research groups in Cambridge:
the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group and the Bible and Antiquity
in Nineteenth-Century Britain project. Simon Goldhill, the animating
spirit of both groups, showed typical generosity in reading a first,
unwieldy draft of this book and in providing me with acute, challen-
ging thoughts about it. So too did Jos Betts and I have benefited
greatly from his typically shrewd analysis. My thinking about
nineteenth-century religion in this book also owes much to the con-
versation and friendship over the years of Gareth Atkins, Chris Clark,
Scott Mandelbrote, Brian Murray, and Rob Priest. I have tried to
write in what I take to be our shared conviction that the history of
religion is too important to be taken too seriously and that the spiritual
kinks of nineteenth-century people can be as revealing as they are
funny. I am grateful to Philip Williamson for sharing then unpub-
lished research on state prayers with me and to Alex Bremner, Joseph
Hardwick, Peter Hession, Meghan Kearney, James Kirby, Kate
Nichols, and Simon Skinner for discussions which pointed me towards
some sources and ideas. I have learned a lot about the importance of
emotion to religious history from discussions with my brilliant PhD
student Sam Jeffrey and with his second supervisor, Uta Balbier.
During my years of work on this book, I have counted on the
friendship of Piers Baker-Bates, Alderik Blom, James Campbell,
Rosanna Maria DaCosta, Simon Mills, Richard Payne, Rory Rapple,
Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Pernille Røge, Katherine Spears, Zoe
Strimpel, David Todd, and Nick Walach. Piers deserves special men-
tion for his willingness to chase memories of Queen Victoria with me,
from the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking to the tombs of Napoleon III
and the Prince Imperial at St Michael’s Abbey, Farnborough. While
working on the book, I began shuttling regularly between London and
Vancouver, before moving permanently to British Columbia. That
move proved to be an exciting, but often a stressful and disorienting
Acknowledgements ix
one, which I could not have pulled off without the love and support of
my parents Eileen and Nigel, my brother and sisters Stephen, Jen, and
Abby, their spouses Phoebe, Ben, and Simon, and my nieces India
and Matilda. For welcoming me over the years to Vancouver, I owe
everything to my parents-in-law Gila Golub and Mark Dwor, my
brother-in-law Yonah Dwor, as well as to Ania Korkh and Rachel
Laniado. Gila knows more than I ever will about the history of the
British monarchy but I hope that this book will nonetheless contain
some surprises for her. For making sure I could stay in Vancouver,
I am indebted to my immigration lawyer Sam Hyman.
This would be a very different book and I would be a very different
person had I not met Richa Dwor in the middle of writing it. Although
she is herself an eminent Victorianist, Richa has undoubtedly had to
live too long with Queen Victoria. Nonetheless, her love and encour-
agement, which never failed as we moved from Queen’s Road
Peckham to just off Victoria Park in East Vancouver, supplied me
with the impetus to finish this book. Just days after I completed the first
draft, we were joined by our dearest daughter Esther Libby, who has
spent her first months presiding quizzically over its final revisions. It is
to Richa and Esther that I dedicate this book.
Vancouver, British Columbia

August 2020
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: ‘Someone Tremendous’ 1

1. A New Reign 17
2. Meine zweite Heimat 42
3. Religion in Common Life 78
4. A Darkened Earth 108
5. The Supreme Head 139
6. Disunited Kingdom 169
7. The Crown of Sacrifice 205
8. Oecumenic Colonial Carnivals 231
9. A Completed Life 265
Selected Bibliography 293

Index 337
List of Abbreviations
AP Argyll Papers, Inveraray Castle, Argyll

BL British Library
CSA Coburg Staatsarchiv
DPGL Durham Palace Green Library
HHA House of Hesse Archive, Schloss Fasanerie, Eichenzell, Fulda
HSA Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Darmstadt
LPL Lambeth Palace Library
NLS National Library of Scotland
QVJ Queen Victoria’s Journals http://qvj.chadwyck.com/home.do
RA Royal Archives
RCIN Royal Collections Inventory Number
WAM Westminster Abbey Muniments Room
Introduction
‘Someone Tremendous’
Public life in Victoria, British Columbia, revolved around its namesake

when the painter Emily Carr grew up there in the 1880s. The Queen’s
birthday in May was the most impressive of civic events and images of
her were everywhere. When Carr first encountered pictures of Vic-
toria’s children she was puzzled, because she had known her as
someone tremendous, though to me she had been vague and far off like
Job or St Paul. I had never known she was real and had a family, only
that she owned Victoria, Canada, and the twenty-fourth of May, the
Church of England and all the soldiers and sailors in the world. Now
suddenly she became real – a woman like Mother with a large family.1
If Victoria was as much part of the young Carr’s settler cosmology as ‘Job or
St Paul’, then she was also a fragile person whose reported joys and sorrows
had tested her spiritual mettle. Victoria induced in the citizens of Victoria
the magical thought that glimpses into the life of an incredibly remote old
lady could help them situate themselves in relation to the Empire and the
world. ‘With almost none of us in this Province has she ever come into
contact’, mused Victoria’s Daily Colonist newspaper on the eve of her
Diamond Jubilee. ‘Yet all of us feel the better and are the better for her
strong and noble conduct . . . [her] sense of responsibility under God.’2
The integrative role of Victoria’s spiritual life in Victoria, British
Columbia mattered because religious fractures ran as deep at the
margins of her Empire as in its metropole. While Carr recognized
Victoria as the governor of the Church, her parents did not. On
Sunday mornings, she and her father worshipped with Presbyterians,
while in the evening she went with her mother to hear Edward
Cridge—an anti-popish renegade who had become bishop of the
Pacific Coast in the Reformed Episcopal Church of America.3 The
2 Queen Victoria
seat of Cridge’s diocese, a Carpenter’s Gothic church, was just one of
the town’s many non-Anglican places of worship. Dissenting chapels
proliferated, while the Roman Catholic St Andrew’s Cathedral was
consecrated in 1892. The city’s oldest religious building was not
Christian at all, but the Temple Emanu-El synagogue, whose congre-
gation said Kaddish for Victoria on the day of her funeral in February
1901.4 Colonials accorded First Nations a subordinate place in this
royal cosmos. After visiting Victoria in 1876, the Governor General
Lord Dufferin had sailed to Metlakatla, a mission village on the coast
ruled with despotic benevolence by William Duncan, who, like
Cridge, was a rogue evangelical who had rebelled against the Church.
Dufferin inspected Metlakatla’s wooden church and blithely assured
its Tsimshian residents that their ‘white mother’ would protect them
‘in the exercise of your religion, and . . . extend to you the benefit of
those laws which know no difference of race or colour’.5 Victoria was
then a symbol for people divided on ultimate questions. Cridge had
stormed out of the Church of England, but he still gave an address at
the pan-Protestant festival of thanks giving at Victoria’s Beacon Hill
Park on her Diamond Jubilee and pronounced the benediction at the
city’s open-air memorial service for her on 2 February 1901. On that
occasion, crowds had sung ‘Rock of Ages’, ‘Nearer my God to Thee’,
and ‘Abide with Me’ in front of the black-clad Parliament buildings
and under an azure sky—a ‘spontaneous scene of love and loyalty to
the deceased and devotion and reverence to the Almighty Father
which could scarcely be equalled anywhere on earth’.6
This spiritual life of Queen Victoria proceeds from the expectation
shared by her divided subjects across the Empire: that it belonged to
them. As the Bishop of London reminded Victoria at her coronation,
‘of no other individual members of the whole family of mankind can it
be said, with equal truth, that they live not for themselves alone, but
for the weal, or woe, of others’ than of monarchs. God might have
distinguished her, but expected much from her in return, because her
slightest failing could shake the ‘entire frame of society’.7 The desire to
find lessons in her life was the spring for the stream of contemporary
biographies which has since matured into an ever-widening flood.
The Canadian John W. Kirton’s True Royalty; or, the Noble Example of an
Illustrious Life as Seen in the Lofty Purpose and Generous Deeds of Victoria as
Maiden, Mother, and Monarch (1887) thus aimed to be no ‘mere
Introduction 3
biography’, but rather a ‘“guide, philosopher, and friend,” to those
who desire to make the most of their talents, opportunities, and
powers’.8 These lives often bent Victoria’s piety to their sectarian
commitments. The fanatically anti-Catholic Walter Walsh laboured
Victoria’s Protestantism in his Religious Life and Influence of Queen Victoria
(1902), lamenting or dismissing instances in which she had been soft
on Rome.9 Modern scholarly biographies may have left the piety and
sectarianism of the hagiographers behind them, but have often lost
their awareness that religion pervaded Victoria’s life and that it was
the medium through which her subjects thought about it. While there
are scholarly monographs aplenty which contain excellent evocations
of religion’s role in aspects of Victoria’s life, the discussion of Victoria’s
religion in even the most capacious recent biographies tends to be
spotty and lacking in contextualization.10
If existing biographies often skimp in their treatment of Victoria’s
religious life, then the bigger problem is that in their concentration on
her individual will and interests they are remote from the most incisive
recent studies of Victorian monarchy, which eschew a narrowly bio-
graphical approach. Building on Lytton Strachey’s claim that Victoria
was for Victorians ‘an indissoluble part of their whole scheme of
things’, historians rightly argue that ‘what happened around the
monarchy was more important than what the monarch herself did’
and that biographies alone cannot explain Victoria’s centrality to
Victorian culture.11 Recent studies of her role in political life, her
media image, her relationship with India and the peoples of her
Empire and her place in the imagination of suffragist campaigners
have refined and strengthened our sense of Victoria’s agency precisely
because they emphasize the structural supports and constraints on it.12
A religious biography of Victoria needs to place her within these
frameworks, which were not just British but European. The European
nineteenth century was an age not just of modernization but of
monarchy: its sovereigns were not just resilient in holding onto
power, but enterprising in finding new ways to express and
legitimize it.13 Like her crowned contemporaries, Victoria and her
advisers assiduously communicated perceptions of her life and char-
acter to her subjects, which were powerful although and because they
were often inaccurate. Even though historians often present royal ‘soft
power’ as a secular category, one tied up with the expansion of the
4 Queen Victoria
mass media and the cult of celebrity, religion remained central to it.14
In telling the story of Victoria’s religion, this book shows that, like her
life as a whole, it was idiosyncratic but never private.15 What Victoria
believed and how she worshipped reflected her ardent, partisan
absorption in debates about church–state relations in the United
Kingdom and the British Empire. At the same time, Victorians
demonstrated enormous confidence in discussing the innermost
secrets of her spirituality and appealing to them to vindicate their
own religious traditions and feelings.
Approaching Victoria then as both an individual and as a sover-
eign, the book presents her first of all as a churchwoman. On her
accession, she became supreme governor of the United Church of
England, Wales, and Ireland and was pledged by her coronation oath
to maintain the Church of Scotland. Like many of her predecessors on
the throne, she not only governed the Church but had learned her
personal piety from it and remained committed to it as an indispens-
able guarantor of social and political stability. Though she became
and remained an icon of British exceptionalism, Victoria was no
different to other European rulers in assuming that her authority
was tied up with the vitality of state religion. ‘Believe me, where
there is no respect for God—no belief in futurity—there can be no
respect or loyalty to the highest in the land’, she wrote to her daughter
Victoria in 1878 after an embittered socialist shot at Kaiser Wilhelm
I as he rode along Unter den Linden in Berlin.16 This book presents
Victoria as an important actor in controversies over church and state,
a ruler deeply concerned throughout her reign about how not only to
defend established churches but to remake them into more Protestant
and representative institutions. The portrait of Victoria’s piety there-
fore has as its background a detailed discussion of policy, embedding
her in the clerical and governmental networks which variously sup-
plied, encouraged, frustrated, and criticized her attempts to reform
national religion in a multi-national United Kingdom.
Established churches were central to Victoria’s religious life not just
because she cared about them, but also because they cared about her.
In his seminal, sardonic account of popular royalism in The English
Constitution (1867), Walter Bagehot suggested that a royal family made
government not only ‘intelligible’ to the common people, but almost
holy. Impressed among other things by popular fervour for the
Introduction 5
marriage of Victoria’s son the Prince of Wales, Bagehot argued that
monarchy ‘strengthens our government with the strength of religion’,
‘enlisting on its behalf the credulous obedience of enormous masses’.
Though confessing that ‘it is not easy to say why it should be so’,
Bagehot advanced a functionalist explanation: adulation for the mon-
archy worked like a religion among an ‘uneducated’ people which
‘wants every now and then to see something higher than itself ’.17
Bagehot, a disenchanted Unitarian, overlooked the role of the
churches in his discussion of religion. Yet, as Philip Williamson and
others have recently demonstrated, they were if anything more active
in the sacralization of the monarchy in the nineteenth than in previous
centuries.18 The Church of England organized national thanksgivings
for the health and longevity of Victoria and her family, with which
Protestant Dissenters and even Roman Catholics associated them-
selves both in Britain and throughout the world.19 Victoria thus relied
as much as any Habsburg or Romanov on her church to stage
‘scenarios of power’. Only a year after Victoria processed through
London to give thanks for her Diamond Jubilee on the steps of St
Paul’s Cathedral for example, the Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef
walked through Vienna in the Corpus Christi procession that marked
his golden jubilee.20
Although the book emphasizes Victoria’s ecclesiastical commit-
ments, it also suggests that her relationship with religious Victorians
became just as affective as it was institutional. The crusading Dissent-
ing journalist W. T. Stead argued at the time of the Diamond Jubilee
that she had become the head, not merely of the ‘narrow sect of
Anglican ecclesiasticism’, but of ‘the Civic Church—the Union of all
who love in the service of all who Suffer’ and the ‘head and Ideal
Exemplar’ of the ‘Family’, which was ‘the broadest and most catholic
Church of all’.21 Investigations into nineteenth-century ‘lived religion’
often discover that lay people engaged in practices or professed beliefs
not accounted for by clerical norms.22 Victoria’s life was of this kind.
Histories of Victorian religion often concentrate on the rise and fall of
church parties, the competition between orthodoxies or their erosion
through secularization. It is hard to fit Victoria’s life into such models:
she understood religion not as the performance of rites or as adher-
ence to doctrines about the supernatural, but rather as an immanent
faith that found its highest expression in romantic and domestic
6 Queen Victoria
emotions. The death of her husband Prince Albert on 14 December
1861, which biographers have always recognized as a decisive turning
point in her life, only deepened the emotional thrust of her religiosity
and its accessibility for her subjects. Victoria’s performance of grief
and resignation turned the spiritual and emotional burdens of the
sovereign into the justification of her rule: a potent source of soft
power and a powerful answer to the nagging question of what a
constitutional monarch, and a female one at that, did all day.23 It
allowed her hagiographers to represent her to congregations and
readers who might not belong to her church as their ‘Queen-mother
and friend’ and to cast republicanism as the failing of ‘callous’ people
who could not feel for this ‘large heart so full of compassion for
others’.24 In studying Victoria’s religious feelings, this book suggests
that they aligned the monarchy with the increasing tendency of
believers to regard feelings rather than true doctrines as the essence
of piety, and shared emotions as the bond of religious and national
communities.25
This book also argues that the expansion and ideological consoli-
dation of Victoria’s Empire made her religiosity not just nationally,
but globally significant. As settler colonies won greater political auton-
omy from Westminster but continued to feel part of Greater Britain,
they found in Victoria a fitting exemplification of the virtues which
they felt had contributed to its expansion.26 This cult, which reached
its apogee in her two Jubilees of 1887 and 1897 and her funeral in
1901, was not just a kind of civic religion but a manifestation of
imperial Christianity. The Church of England’s increasingly elaborate
colonial churches and cathedrals were natural venues for royal rites of
thanksgiving and sorrow throughout the Empire.27 Presbyterians,
Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics generally proved to be
no less avid in their royalism, which allowed them to assert their
prominence in colonial societies and their global solidarity alike with
other Britons and with their diasporic churches. We will see that
colonized peoples, both Christian and non-Christian, also accepted
that it was possible to enter into emotional community with Queen
Victoria. Settlers and their clergy loved to talk of the love of native
peoples for their ‘Great White Mother’, which handily obscured the
realities of white colonial violence and domination. Yet even if histor-
ians rightly suggest that imperial rule rested squarely on the exercise of
Introduction 7
terror, this book will show that it often suited colonized peoples, both
Christian and non-Christian, to use the religious rhetoric of love, not
least because it allowed them to demand action against the evils
inflicted on them by imperialism.28
In weaving together Victoria’s religious life with the development of
popular ideas about it, this book draws upon many sources. It rests
above all on a systematic reading of Victoria’s now digitized journal,
which she began in July 1832 and kept up daily until shortly before her
death in January 1901. Its limitations as a source are obvious. Most of
it exists only in her daughter Beatrice’s transcriptions, which doubtless
deleted some sensitive passages, while its shallowness can be even
more frustrating than its omissions. While Victoria was often stirred
to write voluminously about Highlands scenery, foreign travel, or
theatrical and musical productions, she was often reticent about her
encounters with the texts and ideas that excite religious historians. To
take just one example, she recorded on 8 August 1852 that ‘Albert
told me much about an interesting book he is reading, the “Life of
Jesus” by Strauss.—Dinner as yesterday.’ Yet if the diary’s coverage of
Victoria’s religious interests is not deep, then it is unusually extensive,
especially when read in full. If she seldom commented much on the
books she read, or which were read to her, she was assiduous in noting
their titles.29 She habitually recorded the names of those who
preached to her every Sunday and summaries of their sermons. This
makes it possible to reconstruct the clerical networks and texts which
mediated Victoria’s knowledge of the churches and national religion
and shaped her feelings about them. The book draws upon Victoria’s
published and unpublished correspondence with the churchmen
who inspired her and with her prime ministers and other statesmen
to flesh out its account of these networks. While Victoria could be
arbitrary, even cantankerous, in expressing her will in religious mat-
ters, these sources show that she depended closely on advice
from those she trusted, from household clergy such as the Deans of
Windsor Gerald Wellesley and Randall Davidson to such stalwart
servants as her private secretary Charles Grey and the men of letters
Arthur Helps and Theodore Martin. The book draws on their writ-
ings and unpublished papers and correspondence to evoke their
resolute liberal Protestantism, which mingled with and often strength-
ened Victoria’s own.
8 Queen Victoria
The book’s systematic reading of Victoria’s diary also generates an
inductive picture of what religion meant for her. Its entries show that
Victoria resembled many of her subjects in giving more importance to
spaces and things—from photographs and statues to tombs and per-
sonal relics—than to textual beliefs in the definition and expression of
religious feeling, especially when it came to mourning the dead.30 As
Lytton Strachey saw, Victoria was a woman of ‘innumerable posses-
sions’; a hoarder ‘not merely of things and of thoughts, but of states of
mind and ways of living as well’.31 The book therefore continually
attends to the religious spaces and objects that Victoria used, built, or
collected, from private chapels and mausoleums to portraits and
prayer books, evoking the associative sensibility that informed her
piety. Victoria’s correspondence also generates a wider vision of
what she defined as religious life. If this book has employed the thick
binders of letters at the Royal Archives labelled ‘Church’ and which
are primarily devoted to the conduct of ecclesiastical business, then it
also draws on her lifelong exchanges with female correspondents: her
daughters Victoria and Alice, her German sister-in-law Alexandrine,
her aunt Louise, the Queen of the Belgians, and many friends and
courtiers. The gentlemen editors of Victoria’s selected published
correspondence did not include many ‘Letters from Ladies’, as the
Royal Archives labelled much of this material, preferring to represent
her as an honorary statesman who was mainly intent on public
business.32 Yet although largely private and sentimental, rather than
political or ostensibly theological in scope, this correspondence is a
valuable source for Victoria’s religion. It shows how she and her
friends and relatives formed an emotional community whose spiritual
language of resignation before the trials of life often crossed national
and confessional boundaries.33
The book mobilizes different kinds of sources to show how Victoria
featured in the religious imagination of Victorians. Literary, cultural,
and gender historians have already demonstrated that the material for
such an investigation is huge, given the volume of writing about
Victoria, the quantity of engraved and then photographic images of
her and of commodities produced to mark her Jubilees and death.34
This book explores the religious meaning and use of such sources, but
also concentrates on another textual source: the Victorian sermon.
Every major event in Victoria’s life occasioned a salmon run of
Introduction 9
printed sermons and tracts, patterning her experiences on Scripture,
the master narrative for Christian lives.35 Because even ‘boilerplate’
language reveals the clusters of concepts and feelings that societies and
their leaders value, these productions are a vital source for this book,
even, and perhaps particularly when, they are repetitive and banal.36
Preachers saw themselves as charged with ensuring that the intense
emotions aroused by crises in Victoria’s life strengthened the hold of
their congregations on religious truth. This book asks not whether the
words of sympathy and veneration showered on Victoria were sincere,
but rather what preachers hoped to accomplish in uttering and then
publishing them. Although Anglican preachers asserted a proprietor-
ial relationship with the monarchy, Dissenting, Roman Catholic, and
Jewish preaching could be equally and just as revealingly royalist.
Beneath the consensus that Victoria incarnated virtue and religion—a
consensus that was remarkable in itself—sharp differences emerged in
what religious communities felt her rule meant for them. Although the
most confident speakers of royalist language were white Protestant
Christians, the book explores what other religions said about her too,
suggesting that their words of fealty were no mere acts of imitation but
attempts to advance their position within the Empire.
This book tells the story of Victoria’s religious life through a series
of interlinked essays, which are arranged in loosely but not strictly
chronological form, because while it is important to convey how time
and the accidents of life changed Victoria’s religion, many of her
preoccupations must be traced across decades. The first chapter of
this book (‘A New Reign’) sets out the religious expectations on
Victoria at her accession in 1837. If she inherited her dynasty’s
commitments to the maintenance of Protestantism and the established
church, then she was also subject to the new emotional intensity with
which religious people regarded their monarchs. This had been evi-
dent in the public reaction to the successive deaths which cleared her
way to the throne. Reactions to Victoria’s coronation and to assassin-
ation attempts against her early in her reign show that, as the last
Hanoverian, she too was a sacral, providential figure, although she
quickly distanced herself from the political Protestantism of her pre-
decessors. The next chapters trace the development of Victoria’s
personal religion and its divergence from the Hanoverian template.
The second (‘Meine zweite Heimat’) argues that Victoria’s marriage
10 Queen Victoria
to Albert instilled in her a Protestant identification with German
Lutherans. Dynastic ties not only opened Victoria to German influ-
ences, but became the medium through which she and Albert sought
to build religious and political affinities between Britain and Ger-
many. Having outlined the transnational parameters of Victoria’s
Protestantism, the third chapter (‘Religion in Common Life’) sketches
the development of her liberal Protestant commitment to lived lay
religion, which overlooked conventional distinctions between the
sacred and the secular. Victoria and Albert regarded family and
home, rather than the church, as the locus of religious faith and
practice, and sought to advance the identification of God with the
laws of his creation. The fourth chapter (‘A Darkened Earth’) shows
how the destruction of Victoria’s household through death tested her
faith, prompting an anguished search for spiritual and material
sources of consolation, which alarmed her friends and advisers but
also created a new template for popular attitudes to the throne.
Victoria’s insistence that she had a religious obligation to pile up
ever more baroque monuments to her husband’s virtues eventually
generated resistance and scepticism, although, as later chapters will
show, her widowhood became an enduring symbol of her soft power,
which allowed preachers to wax eloquent on her lonely suffering.
Domestic representations of Victoria as wife, mother and widow
became so important in the religious imagination that they can
obscure the degree to which she remained a fiercely engaged ecclesi-
astical politician. Historians increasingly return to Frank Hardie’s
seminal insight that Victoria not only reigned over Victorian Britain,
but remained determined to rule it, particularly where her patronage
powers were still more substantial than conventional emphases on the
development of a ‘democratic’ constitutional monarchy allow.37 The
fifth chapter (‘The Supreme Head’) discusses Victoria’s deep, fractious
relationship with the Church of England and Wales. She came to the
throne determined not just to maintain, but also to reform the Church
by promoting the liberal clergy who could make it a more charitable
and representative institution. Resistance to the royal promotion of
liberalism by Tractarians and Ritualists who loathed Protestantism
and Erastianism—state meddling in spiritual matters—made her
increasingly aggressive in her determination to broaden the Church,
as she pressed for legislation to stamp out liturgical experiments which
Introduction 11
hinted at a hankering after Rome. Victoria’s feeling that she could
defend the Church by making it more representative of the Protest-
ant nation not only set her against high church people, but blinded
her to the principled objections many Protestant Dissenters nursed
to its establishment. Her alarmed response to their talk of disestab-
lishment further narrowed Victoria’s understanding of liberalism.
The sixth chapter (‘Disunited Kingdom’) turns from Victoria’s
efforts to enforce Protestant consensus in England and Wales to
her record in coping with the religious diversity of the United
Kingdom. Even if Victoria’s vision of the Church of Scotland was
as parochial as her vision of Scotland itself, both being centred on
the Highlands parish of Crathie, it benefited her and the Union.
Although her friendships with Kirk ministers made her a biased
participant in disputes over its established status, impressions of
Victoria’s sympathy with Scottish religion sank deep in Scotland
and around the Empire. Victoria had hoped she might commend
herself to the Irish as she did to the Scots, by paying respect to their
different national religion, but the chapter shows that her estrange-
ment from Irish Roman Catholics mounted with her reluctance to
cross the Irish Sea. Though appreciative of Roman Catholicism as a
lived religion and friendly towards popes, not least because she
hoped they might bring the Irish Catholic hierarchy to heel, Victoria
could not translate these personal affinities into a constructive polit-
ical relationship with Catholic Ireland.
Lytton Strachey once wrote that Victoria’s biographer must agree
with her in seeing her long widowhood as ‘an epilogue to a drama that
was done’, shrouded in ‘darkness’ and deserving only a ‘brief and
summary relation’.38 Biographies have often tacitly endorsed that
judgement, seeing the forty years that followed 1861 as a time of
waning ambitions and vitality. By contrast, the last chapters of this
book present them as a period of religious innovation. The seventh
chapter (‘The Crown of Sacrifice’) suggests that while a crescendo of
bereavements made Victoria a gloomy and retrospective person and
sovereign, they bolstered her spiritual credentials. The lavish way in
which she buried and commemorated her male relatives made her the
Empire’s mourner in chief, aligning a feminine monarchy with the
increasingly militaristic and imperial character of elite culture as well
as with the softening of Christian eschatology. The eighth chapter
12 Queen Victoria
(‘Oecumenic Colonial Carnivals’) pursues this inquiry by presenting
her Jubilees as occasions that strengthened articulations of imperial
ideology, while allowing those outside the metropole, established
churches, or even Christianity to voice their hopes of the Queen. If
Victoria is present but not active in this chapter—except as an unco-
operative participant in rituals that sacralized her rule—then her sole
contribution to chapter nine (‘A Completed Life’) is to die. It examines
the global topography of emotion created by her death and funeral,
one thickly studded with church spires. Christian clergy were impres-
arios of the emotions unleashed on Victoria’s death, much as they had
been during her Jubilees. But if they confidently used Victoria’s death
to celebrate national and imperial solidarities, then voices for the
faiths which were coming to be classed as world religions also voiced
reverence for her as a way of establishing their claims to consideration
in her Christian but also cosmopolitan Empire.39
You understand & feel how very mingled my feelings must be on such a
day—Thankfulness for God’s help & protection through the many
years that I have worn this thorny crown, & carried a heavy cross &
thankfulness to my people & friends for their devotion & unexampled
loyalty . . . But also much sadness at missing Him to whom I & the
Country owe so much . . . and missing too dear children.40
Victoria’s reflections on her accession day in June 1886 supply this

book with its title. In a letter to her courtier Lady Waterpark, who, like
her, had long been a pious widow, Victoria inverted conventional
understandings of power. She was not strong but weak, broken by the
death of her husband and several of her children and reliant on God’s
assistance and the sympathy of her people to keep going. Her vocation
was not to exercise her will, but to bear her ‘heavy cross’. It was an odd
confession from a woman whose Golden Jubilee a year later cele-
brated her longevity and Britain’s global sway. Victoria had not
always regarded her reign as a mere via dolorosa; until the end of her
life, she was intent on bringing about change in Britain, Europe, and
the world. Yet these words do capture this book’s central contention:
because Victoria instinctively looked to God for support throughout
her life, a religious life of Victoria boosts our understanding of her
reign. A fitting metaphor for her private passion, the ‘thorny crown’
was also a powerful emblem of her spiritual sovereignty.
Introduction 13
Notes
1. Emily Carr, The Book of Small (1943; Toronto and Vancouver: Clark,
Irwin and Co., 1966), pp. 135–6.
2. Daily Colonist, 20 June 1897, p. 4.
3. Carr, Small, pp. 26–7.
4. ‘Memorial Services’, Daily Colonist, 3 February 1901, p. 5; Cyril Edel
Leonoff, Pioneers, Pedlars, and Prayer Shawls: The Jewish Communities in British
Columbia and the Yukon (Victoria, BC: Sono Nis Press, 1978), pp. 19–21.
5. Molyneux St John, The Sea of Mountains: An Account of Lord Dufferin’s Tour Through
British Columbia in 1876 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1876), pp. 319–21. For
Duncan see Peter Murray, The Devil and Mr Duncan (Victoria, BC: Sono Nis
Press, 1985) and Peggy Brock, The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah:
A Tsimshian Man on the Pacific (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011).
6. ‘Memorial Services’, Daily Colonist, 3 February 1901, pp. 5–6.
7. Charles Blomfield, Sermon Preached at the Coronation of Her most Excellent
Majesty Queen Victoria in the Abbey Church of Westminster, June 28 1838
(London: B. Fellowes, 1838), p. 12.
8. John W. Kirton, True Royalty; Or, the Noble Example of an Illustrious Life as Seen
in the Lofty Purpose and Generous Deeds of Victoria as Maiden, Mother, and Monarch
(London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1887), p. v.
9. Walter Walsh, The Religious Life and Influence of Queen Victoria (London: Swan
and Sonnenschein, 1902), p. 209.
10. For monographs, see e.g. Lynne Vallone, Becoming Victoria (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2003) on her education and Miles
Taylor, Empress: Queen Victoria and India (New Haven: Yale UP, 2018) on
India; for biographies see A. N. Wilson, Victoria: A Life (London: Atlantic
Books, 2014). Walter Arnstein, ‘Queen Victoria and Religion’, in Gail
Malmgreen, ed., Religion in the Lives of English Women (London, 1986),
pp. 88–128; Walter L. Arnstein, ‘Queen Victoria and the Challenge of
Roman Catholicism’, The Historian, 58 (1996), pp. 295–314; and Walter
L. Arnstein, Queen Victoria (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003) remain seminal
discussions of Victoria’s religion.
11. Richard Williams, The Contentious Crown: Public Discussion of the Monarchy in the
Age of Queen Victoria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), p. 265; Miles Taylor, ‘The
Bicentenary of Queen Victoria’, Journal of British Studies, 59 (2020),
pp. 121–35.
12. See Williams, Contentious Crown; Antony Taylor, ‘Down with the Crown’:
British Anti-Monarchism and Debates about Royalty Since 1790 (London:
14 Queen Victoria
Reaktion Books, 1997); David Craig, ‘The Crowned Republic?
Monarchy and Anti-Monarchy in Britain, 1760–1901’, Historical Journal,
46 (2003), pp. 167–85; Andrzej Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the
British Nation, 1780 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007); Jörg
Neuheiser, Krone, Kirche und Verfassung: Konservatismus in den englischen
Unterschichten 1815–1867 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010);
John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2003); Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent, eds, Mistress of Everything: Queen
Victoria in Indigenous Worlds (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016); Taylor,
Empress; Arianne Chernock, The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen
Victoria and the Women’s Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019).
13. Dieter Langewiesche, Die Monarchie im Jahrhundert Europas: Selbstbehauptung
Durch Wandel Im 19. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Universitātsverlag Winter,
2013), p. 5; Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens, eds, Royal Heirs
and the Uses of Soft Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016).
14. For Germany see for instance Hubertus Beuschel, Untertanenliebe: Der Kult
um deutsche Monarchen 1770–1830 (Goettingen: Max-Planck-Instituts für
Geschichte, 2006); Eva Giloi, ‘ “So Writes the Hand that Swings the
Sword”: Autograph Hunting and Royal Charisma in the German
Empire, 1861–1888’, in Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi, eds,
Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), pp. 41–51 and Eva Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and
Material Culture in Germany 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2011).
15. Adrienne Munich, Queen Victoria’s Secrets (New York: Columbia UP, 1996);
Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich, eds, Remaking Queen Victoria
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).
16. Roger Fulford, ed., Darling Child: Private Correspondence of Queen Victoria and
the Crown Princess of Prussia, 1871–1878 (London: Evans Bros, 1976),
p. 292.
17. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (1867) and ‘The Thanksgiving’
(1872?), in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St John-Stevas
(15 vols, London: The Economist, 1965–86), v: pp. 230, 232, 233, 440.
18. J. C. D. Clark, ‘The Re-Enchantment of the World? Religion and
Monarchy in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, in Michael Schaich, ed.,
Monarchy and Religion: The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-
Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), p. 43.
Introduction 15
19. See Philip Williamson, Alasdair Raffe, Stephen Taylor, and Natalie
Mears, eds, National Prayers: Special Worship since the Reformation: Volume 2,
General Fasts, Thanksgivings and Special Prayers in the British Isles 1689–1870
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017) and National Prayers: Special Worship since the
Reformation: Volume 3: Worship for National and Royal Occasions in the United
Kingdom, 1871–2016 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020).
20. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in the Russian
Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 2006); James Shedel, ‘Emperor, Church, and People:
Religion and Dynastic Loyalty during the Golden Jubilee of Franz
Josef ’, Catholic Historical Review, 76 (1990), pp. 71–92.
21. W. T. Stead, Her Majesty the Queen: Studies of the Sovereign and the Reign, etc.
(London: Review of Reviews Office, 1897), p. 92.
22. See e.g. David Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997).
23. Frank Lorenz Müller, ‘ “Winning their Trust and Affection”: Royal Heirs
and the Uses of Soft Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, in Müller
and Mehrkens, eds, Royal Heirs, pp. 1–19; Margaret Homans, Royal
Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–76 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. xix; Chernock, Right to Rule, ch. 4.
24. William Tulloch, The Story of the Life of Queen Victoria (London: James Nisbet
and Co., 1897), pp. 207, 241–2, 288.
25. From a growing literature see e.g. John Corrigan, Business of the Heart:
Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA and London:
University of California Press, 2002) and John Corrigan, Emptiness: Feeling
Christian in America (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2015) ; John Coffey, ed., Heart
Religion: Evangelical Piety in England & Ireland, 1690–1850 (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2016); Monique Scheer, ‘Feeling Faith: The Cultural Practice of
Religious Emotions in Nineteenth-Century German Methodism’, in
Monique Scheer et al., eds, Out of the Tower: Essays on Culture and Everyday
Life (Tübingen: TVV, 2013), pp. 217–47; Linda Woodhead and Ole Riis,
A Sociology of Religious Emotion (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010).
26. Duncan Bell, ‘The Idea of a Patriot Queen? The Monarchy, the
Constitution, and the Iconographic Order of Greater Britain,
1860–1900’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 34 (2006),
pp. 3–22.
27. G. Alex Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican
Culture in the British Empire, 1840–1870 (New Haven and London: Yale
16 Queen Victoria
UP, 2013); Philip Williamson and Joseph Hardwick, ‘Special Worship in
the British Empire: From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries’,
Studies in Church History: The Church and the Empire, 54 (2018), pp. 260–80.
28. See Kim Wagner, ‘ “Calculated to Strike Terror”: The Amritsar
Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’, Past and Present, 233
(2016), pp. 185–225 for Empire and terror.
29. See Michael Ledger-Lomas, ‘Rereading Queen Victoria’s Religion’, in
Josh King and Winter Jade Werner, eds, Constructing Nineteenth-Century
Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (Ohio: Ohio
State UP, 2019), pp. 139–54.
30. William Whyte, Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), ‘Introduction’; Deborah Lutz, Relics of Death
in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015),
‘Introduction’.
31. Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (1921; London: Chatto and Windus,
1924), pp. 253, 256.
32. See Yvonne Ward, Censoring Queen Victoria: How Two Gentlemen Edited a
Queen and Created an Icon (London: Oneworld, 2014) and William Kuhn,
Democratic Royalism: The Transformation of the British Monarchy, 1861–1914
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 79–80.
33. See Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (New
York: Cornell, 2006) and Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling:
A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015) for
‘emotional communities’.
34. See Chernock, Right to Rule for one recent example of this approach.
35. See Keith A. Francis and William Gibson, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the
British Sermon 1689–1901 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012).
36. Rosenwein, Generations, pp. 9–10.
37. Frank Hardie, The Political Influence of Queen Victoria, 1861–1901 (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1935). See Michael Bentley, ‘Power and Authority in the
Late-Victorian and Edwardian Court’, in Olechnowicz, ed., Monarchy,
pp. 163–87 and Taylor, Empress for the army and India.
38. Strachey, Victoria, p. 190.
39. See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: Chicago
UP, 2005).
40. Diary of the Life at Court of Eliza Jane Lady Waterpark between 1864
and 1893, BL Add MS MSS 60750, f. 148.
1
A New Reign
Shortly before Queen Victoria’s coronation on 28 June 1838, Canon

Sydney Smith preached on ‘The New Reign’ from the pulpit of
St Paul’s Cathedral. His preface to his published sermon coolly
advised Victoria that ‘if you follow the plain and honest advice it
contains, it will go some way to make you a happy woman, and a great
Queen’. The witty Smith was uncharacteristically solemn because, as
an old man, he counted on not seeing another coronation, even
closing his sermon with the Nunc Dimittis: ‘Lord, now lettest thou
thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation’. He
asked Victoria to reflect that ‘No vice, and no virtue are indifferent in
a monarch; human beings are very imitative; there is a fashion in the
higher qualities of our minds, as there is in the lesser considerations of
life.’ He directed her to emulate her predecessor William IV’s feeling
regime, one in which his ‘heart throbbed and beat for the land which
his ancestors had rescued from slavery, and governed with justice’. But
he also asked Victoria to embrace new responsibilities: to champion a
national education system and to ‘worship God, by loving peace’.
Smith congratulated Victoria on inheriting a Church of England
which, as a result of recent Whig reforms, was once more a ‘rational
object of love and admiration’. Yet preserving that love meant reach-
ing out further still to Dissenters and Roman Catholics. Not only must
their rights be respected, but there must be no ‘contemptuous disres-
pect of their feelings’. The Queen must steer clear of evangelical
churchmen, for if their ‘violent abuse’ of Roman Catholics prevailed,
then ‘he who is furthest removed from reason, will make the nearest
approach to distinction’. The carnival of bigotry would generate a
‘weariness and disgust at religion itself ’ and lead to ‘an age of impiety,
and infidelity’.1
18 Queen Victoria
Smith’s sermon shows us that the religious expectations on this
‘patriot Queen’ were a volatile blend of new and old. Victoria’s
contemporaries often pretended that she had begun not just a new
reign, but a new dynasty. ‘We might almost say that the house of
Hanover came to a conclusion in the family of George III’, wrote
Margaret Oliphant in her Personal Sketch (1900) of Victoria. ‘The
Hanover cortege swept away into the darkness, completing a record
not beautiful nor noble, though perhaps necessary. And the Maid of
England stepped forth.’2 Victoria herself cast her reign as a blessed
change. Although dutiful in her displays of family piety, hanging the
state dining room and grand staircase of Buckingham Palace for
instance with Hanoverian portraits, she looked back with distaste on
her immediate predecessors.3 She lent an ear to Sir Robert Peel’s
complaints that George IV had been ‘very false’ and William ‘weak, &
not clever, but honourable’.4 She felt ‘horror’ at George’s heavy
feeding and his brother the Duke of York’s boozing, and watched
her eldest son’s morals out of dread that he might revert to the
Hanoverian form of his ‘Wicked Uncles’.5 She completed William’s
eradication of George IV’s buildings in Windsor Great Park and sold
off the contents of the Brighton Pavilion. Her identification with the
monarchy’s history skipped over the Hanoverians—and before them
William and Mary—to fix on the Stuarts. Victoria had ‘relics’ of
Charles I returned to his vault at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, visited
the grave of his daughter at Newport Church on the Isle of Wight, and
had a monument erected to her at Carisbrooke Castle.6 She even took
pride in the Jacobite traditions of the region around her residence at
Balmoral, creating a tartan waiting room decorated with Jacobite
portraits.7
The notion that Victoria’s reign marked a clean break in the
religious character of the monarch may have become important to
her self-fashioning but it is misleading. As the cynosure of religious
eyes, Victoria was in many ways the last Hanoverian sovereign.8 The
accession of the Lutheran George I under the Act of Succession had
forged a connection between Protestantism and the Hanoverian mon-
archy, which his son George II strengthened.9 His grandson George III
initiated a narrower identity for his dynasty as protectors of the
Church of England against free thought and Dissent, although the
complexities of the United Kingdom and the British Empire,
A New Reign 19
especially the autonomous establishment of the Church of Scotland,
meant that he remained as much a Protestant as an Anglican mon-
arch. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 had triggered
George’s apotheosis as a defender of not just Protestantism but
national religion.10 Despite conceding Catholic Emancipation in
1829, his son George IV remained a strong supporter of the Church,
as did his brother and successor William.11 Yet although Victoria
inherited an expectation that she would uphold Protestantism and the
Church—overlapping, but hardly synonymous demands—ideas
about how a monarch should be religious were also changing mark-
edly as she grew up and prepared to take the throne. Monarchs across
Europe faced expectations which were not merely confessional, but
affective. Without exactly becoming bourgeois, they reaped political
rewards from demonstrating the Christian virtues and feelings dear to
bourgeois publics.12 In Britain as elsewhere, the mourning of the royal
dead became a particularly important way for dynasties to express
these virtues, and an occasion for religious communities to affirm a
relationship with the monarchy.13 As tears both real and rhetorical fell
for Victoria’s predecessors, Christian ministers articulated contrasting
expectations of how monarchs should be personally representative of
national religiosity. Having explored how Victoria prepared to meet
these expectations, the final section of this chapter argues that her
subjects greeted her as no less a sacral monarch than her predecessors,
although alongside the veneration came a strong expectation that she
would act in the interests of differing and often opposed religious
constituencies.
The ‘Tribute of Natural Tears’: Monarchy and Religious

Emotion
One Sunday in August 1836, a 17-year-old Princess Victoria went to
St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle for evening service and saw
Matthew Wyatt’s ‘monument of poor Princess Charlotte, which
I cannot say I like. The Cathedral [sic] made me rather sad. The
thought and knowledge that beneath the very stones we were walking
on, lay so many near to me, in eternal sleep, including my poor dear
Father . . . must make one pensive and serious and melancholy.’14
Thirty years later, she had another encounter with Charlotte, the
20 Queen Victoria
cousin she had never known, but whose memory had been kept before
her by her widower, Victoria’s uncle Leopold. Suffering from ‘tre-
mendous heat’ at Windsor as she awaited her daughter Helena’s
marriage, she took charge of a ‘most precious relic: the hair of poor
dear Pss Charlotte, cut off after her death, such fine thick long hair,
“Cela m’a donné l’émotion” in looking at it, fresh as yesterday, after
49 years!’15 Victoria owed her birth and reign to Charlotte, who had
died in the early hours of 6 November 1817, just hours after she had
delivered a stillborn son. As she was the Prince Regent’s only child,
her death aroused anxieties over the Protestant succession and had
provoked his brothers, including Victoria’s father the Duke of Kent, to
marry and produce legitimate issue. It also catalysed an intensification
in the popular emotional identification with royal persons. Charlotte’s
death had triggered unprecedented public mourning.16 A mutinous
crowd at St Paul’s Cathedral waited for hours for a memorial service
despite the Lord Mayor’s pleas to disperse.17 Where churches were
closed, congregations migrated to Dissenting chapels. Ministers in
Scotland bowed to ‘the irregular impulse of popular feeling’ and
held public funeral services despite Presbyterianism’s ban on this
practice.18 The numerous published sermons first delivered at these
services capture ministers struggling ‘to guide the confused emotions
of a sorrowful and swollen heart into the channels of piety’, distin-
guishing mere sentiment from the ‘permanent and holy’ feelings
‘which the afflicting visitations of Providence are designed to call
forth’.19 With Britain experiencing post-war demobilization, defla-
tion, and demands for political reform, preachers such as the Baptist
Robert Hall hoped that Christian sorrow for the dead might be a
‘plastic power’ to mould people into ‘a cheerful acquiescence in the
allotments of Providence’.20
Although freethinking critics condemned this mourning as servile
sentimentalism, these ministers insisted that this ‘tribute of natural tears’
was a ‘rational homage of respect and loyalty’.21 Dissenters were
among Charlotte’s most eloquent eulogists, because they understood
her to be one of themselves, whose corpse was, as the Baptist William
Newman mused, no different to the ‘body of the poorest young
woman in this congregation’.22 Though it was impossible for them
to know whether she had embraced the ‘inward religion’ prized by
evangelical Protestants, she and her husband had lived the domestic
A New Reign 21
23
life dear to Dissenters. Underlying evocations of their marriage as a
‘model for all ranks’ was a theatrical vision of monarchy, in which
subjects were ‘children of imitation’ who aped what they saw on
stage.24 Memorial sermons not only praised Charlotte’s life but
brooded on the ‘afflictive dispensation’ of her death. William Bengo’
Collyer, an Independent minister who had welcomed princes to his
aptly named Hanover Chapel in Peckham, South London, hoped that
the ‘warning voice, heard so often in vain in the temple of religion,
shall be effectual from the mausoleum of royalty’.25 The many reflec-
tions on the national sins for which her death was a punishment or a
warning reveal that this was still a culture of judicial providentialism,
braced for God’s lightning bolts.26 If evangelical Dissenters were
prone to reflect on God’s wrath, then Church people and rational
Dissenters shared their foreboding.27
The moralizing appropriation of Charlotte was streaked with pol-
itics. Dissenters remembered that she had entertained them at Clar-
emont House, and felt sure that she would have carried on her
dynasty’s defence of Protestant freedom against priestcraft and
Roman Catholicism.28 With Victoria still a twinkle in the Duke of
Kent’s eye, there was considerable anxiety that the Protestant succes-
sion might die out, leaving Dissenters to be sacrificed by a Roman
Catholic monarch ‘upon the altar of intolerance’ to ‘the bloody
Moloch of Popery’.29 Jews too fretted over the future of the royal
house, which they claimed as their protector.30 The sudden death of
Victoria’s father the Duke of Kent on 23 January 1820 further
exemplified the identification of religious minorities with the Han-
overians. A middle-aged military martinet, Kent was hardly a roman-
tic figure, yet Dissenting preachers were maudlin in dwelling on his
fate and that of his young daughter.31 Collyer read his sermon from a
script, because ‘I dare not trust myself to speak’, so bitter were his
feelings at the end of an ‘intimate, confiding, unbroken friendship of
twelve years’. He would not, though, shrink from the ‘uncontrollable
and heart-rending emotions’, which expressed his appreciation of
Kent’s ‘reverence for religion’.32 Both he and other Dissenters warmly
recalled Kent’s support for tract writers and philanthropists.33
This understanding of the royal house as a ‘city set on a hill’ which
served as a model for the moral energies of the people proved to be as
durable as it was vulnerable to scepticism and profane mockery.34
22 Queen Victoria
When George III died just a week after his son the Duke of Kent,
preachers were once more on hand to extort and explain the people’s
tears. The Church of Ireland clergyman Thomas Gilbart counselled
his parishioners to react neither with ‘stoical apathy’ nor ‘turbulent
sensibility’. ‘While we weep’, he counselled, ‘let us do so in the spirit of
our text’ (Psalm 51.1), requesting mercy for their sins.35 Anglican
clergy grieved a paladin of national religion, a humble Christian
who had doffed his crown before taking communion at his coronation
and staged a national thanksgiving after his recovery from mental
illness in 1789.36 They identified George with his coronation oath,
arguing that he understood that God’s favour on his dynasty
depended on the defence of the Protestant constitution against
Roman Catholic claims and the ‘fiend irreligion’.37 Even though
George had not been compos mentis for many years before his
death, evangelical preachers claimed him as a converted man, or
even a ‘Calvinist’.38 Yet although some Dissenters praised his toler-
ance of religious difference and his moral seriousness, they struggled
to justify his war against the American colonists.39 The Unitarian
Thomas Madge argued that George’s death was different to Char-
lotte’s, when there had been ‘no affected sorrows’, and claimed a duty
to speak out about the missteps of his reign, arguing that a ‘loyalty
which regards the will of one man as every thing, and the welfare of
millions as nothing’ should be as repugnant as it was alien to ‘the
Christian’s Statute-book, the New Testament’.40 George’s Queen
Charlotte had faced similar criticism—or as pious Tories had it,
‘slander’—after her death two years before his.41
The muted public reaction to the deaths of George’s sons and
successors George (1830) and William (1837) suggested that they
had frittered away his spiritual and emotional capital. George IV
was a sincere Anglican who could count on the prayers of the Church
when ill or menaced with assassination.42 Yet public disapproval of his
attempts to divorce his wife Caroline meant that his sumptuous
coronation in Westminster Abbey, which reflected the growing inter-
est of antiquarians in the history of this ‘most holy and awful’ rite,
aroused popular ridicule.43 The author of one squib, The One-Eyed
Coronation, imagined a chancer presenting oil made from Russian
bears for George’s anointing, which ‘their lordships, apostolic, /
By prayers devout could make angelic, / In following the papist fashion,
A New Reign 23
/ Of defunct transubstantiation; / And, by the same religious means, /
Absolve a man from all his sins, / And make all vices, dark as hell, /
Pleasant and comfortable.’44 Fiery Dissenters likened him to the cruel
King Rehoboam (1 Kings 12) and hinted at resisting tyranny.45
Caroline’s death shortly thereafter, which George hailed as a ‘bless-
ing’ from the ‘protecting hand of God’, occasioned popular demon-
strations in which mourning rituals articulated opposition to the King.
At Moorgate’s Albion Chapel, Alexander Fletcher pointedly pro-
moted ‘the sacred endearments of domestic relations, by exposing
the miseries which follow from a contempt of the most sacred engage-
ments’, before improbably representing the Hogarthian Caroline as
one who had looked to Christ ‘as the only Saviour of a lost world’.46
Despite these wobbles, George enjoyed support till the end from
Church people for whom his moral foibles mattered less than the
energy he had shown in squelching Napoleon and his firmess in
resisting Catholic Emancipation.47 When the King’s anti-Catholic
brother the Duke of York died in January 1827, Tory preachers had
praised his grasp of the dynasty’s anti-Popish credentials and worried
over the Protestant succession.48 When George himself ailed just three
years later, the Privy Council ordered special prayers to be said in
parish churches ‘to strengthen his soul by the consolations of Thy
Grace’. Yet news of his death in May 1830 aroused little emotion.
‘Nobody affected to be sorry’ and even his household treated his
night-time funeral at St George’s, Windsor as ‘a mere pageant’.49
William’s accession revived a contractual understanding in which
the monarch represented his people to God. Preaching the sermon at
his cut-price coronation, the Bishop of London reminded him that
‘the sovereignty of Jehovah’ was the only foundation ‘for the duties of
public society’. His people must make ‘earnest intercession’ that ‘he
may have grace to remember and abide by the solemn compact which
he this day makes with God, and with his people’.50 Despite having
supported the passage of Catholic Emancipation, William now
aligned himself with the Church’s remaining privileges on both sides
of the Irish Sea. As his eulogists later recalled, one of his first acts had
been to take the sacrament in the Chapel Royal and to make ‘a strong
declaration of his attachment to the Established Church’.51 William’s
marriage to Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen boosted his claims to good
churchmanship. Although she earned much unpopularity by
24 Queen Victoria
opposing the Reform Act, her defenders noted that she was a virtuous
architect of welfare monarchy. Despite being a Lutheran, she got
William to spend handsomely on Anglican church building.52 Angli-
can preachers would therefore remember William as a defender of the
Church and praised his firmness over Catholic claims.53 At the same
time, their association with the abolition of colonial slavery and the
reduction of Anglican social monopolies made the couple popular
among Dissenters both at home and in the colonies.54 William’s
brother the Duke of Sussex—a backer of Queen Caroline, a leading
Freemason, a supporter of non-denominational education, a patron of
natural theology and biblical criticism—would keep up the reputation
of the Hanoverians as genial friends of Dissenters into the early years
of Victoria’s reign.55
Reactions to William’s end showed that heightened religious
expectations could still be as much a liability as an asset for the
Hanoverians. William’s last moments had been an impeccable
rehearsal of loyalty to the Church, with Adelaide’s chaplain describing
in a widely read account how he had taken communion on his
deathbed at Bushy House and made a plaintive claim to be ‘a religious
man’.56 When the Archbishop of Canterbury arrived at Kensington
Palace in the early hours of 20 June 1837 with the news of William’s
death, he had been able to inform Victoria that ‘he had directed his
mind to religion & had died in a perfectly happy, quiet state of
mind’.57 Yet his last rites were muted. When the Privy Council met
to agree prayers for the ailing King, ‘there was no display of feeling’
and their action came too late for copies of the prayers to reach most
parishes in time. His nocturnal funeral at St George’s Chapel, Wind-
sor did not occasion a ‘tear in any eye’.58 Anglican sermons on his
death politely passed over his foibles, such as his fathering of illegit-
imate children with the actress Mrs Jordan, but Dissenting ones
imagined the severe judgement awaiting him in the ‘kingdom of the
worm’.59
‘The Principles of our Holy Religion’: Victoria’s

Preparation for the Throne
The Bishop of London and his clergy presented their new Queen with
an address, in which they took ‘consolation and encouragement from
A New Reign 25
reflecting, that William had been succeeded by a Princess, trained up
under the watchful care of her Royal Mother in the principles of our
Holy Religion, and accustomed to the observance of its duties’. They
relied on her to ‘protect the Church of this nation, as the appointed
instrument of diffusing, amongst all classes of your Majesty’s subjects,
a knowledge of those truths and precepts, which are the only sure basis
of individual happiness, and of national prosperity’.60 Victoria’s pious
girlhood would generate endless ‘fables’ of her immaculate goodness,
which her librarian Richard Holmes tersely dismissed when he came
to write her Diamond Jubilee biography.61 Victoria’s son-in-law
the Marquis of Lorne was more for giving in his history of her reign,
arguing that such tales were not ‘nursery tittle-tattle’ but ‘legitimate
domestic details’ of interest to ‘the Teutonic peoples’, disclosing ‘the
germs of that excellence which became afterwards apparent to all the
world’.62 But beyond the romance was a representative example of
female elite education, with her mother the Duchess of Kent adding
the distinctive concern to prepare Victoria for her future role as the
Supreme Governor of the Church of England which the London
clergy hailed in their loyal address.63
Victoria’s youthful religion was as Anglican as that of her uncles.
Every Sunday, she heard sermons, most frequently from her tutor
George Davys, the Dean of Chester, which extolled the ardent pursuit
of a Pauline faith in imitation of Christ. For a young Whig, she heard
many Toryish priests, such as William Langley Pope, an enemy of
working-class social organization who later opposed Jewish emanci-
pation.64 Alongside sermons, she applied herself to reading theo-
logical treatises. A diary entry from 12 August 1835 captures how
such reading went: ‘I read in Smith’s Theology when I came home
and also sang. At ½ past 11 came the Dean till 1. I read first in the
New Testament with him, then in Russell, and finished with Evans on
the Sects.’ These books were cumbrous defences of the Church’s
authority. The Reverend John Bainbridge Smith’s A Manual of the
Rudiments of Theology (1830) was for instance dedicated for ‘persons
preparing for holy orders’; it offered them copious extracts from old
divines and claimed that the Church’s articles were the best exposition
of the truth of Scripture. Victoria soon gave up on what was ‘more a
book to refer to, than to read all through’, but it was striking that she
should have tried it at all.65
26 Queen Victoria
Victoria naturally identified religion with the Prayer Book, a richly
bound copy of which she received from her mother in October
1836.66 She experienced confirmation as ‘one of the most solemn
and important events and acts in my life . . . I felt deeply repentant
for all that I had done which was wrong and trusted in God Almighty
to strengthen my heart and mind; and to forsake all that is bad and
follow all that is virtuous and right.’ On that morning, the Duchess
had given her John Kaye’s ‘An Address after Confirmation, Delivered
at Eton College’ (1830) to read, a pragmatic essay in Christian
manliness, which exhorted Etonians to go assiduously to Holy Com-
munion even if they could not quite say how the sacrament worked.67
Determined to be a ‘true Christian’, Victoria took communion for the
first time in ‘a very solemn and impressive ceremony’ on 2 August
1835. ‘When we recollect and think we take it in remembrance of the
death of our beloved Saviour, one ought, nay must feel deeply impres-
sive with holy and pious feelings!’68 Once again Victoria had prepared
herself by reading primers such as Mary Cornwallis’s Preparation for the
Lord’s Supper, her seriousness typical of how elite Anglicans approached
the sacrament.69 Her cousin George, having marvelled at the ‘awful
thoughts’ with which Victoria must have approached the ‘Altar of her
God’, faced the same trial a week later. After a two and a half hour
examination from Queen Adelaide and her chaplain before
approaching the ‘Altar of my Maker’ for the first time, he treasured
this ‘most Comfortable Sacrament’ for the rest of his life.70
Victoria’s religion was not just sacramental, but prized moral
conduct. She admired earnest evangelicals such as William Wilber-
force, whose biography she read, and the New Testament commen-
taries of John Bird Sumner, a rising bishop whose ‘plain and
comprehensible’ writings established Jesus as a paragon of unremit-
ting effort.71 She learned to regard philanthropy as the manifestation
of such seriousness. Her mother had kept up the Duke of Kent’s
Whiggish and charitable associations, patronizing about fifty charities,
and his former clerical associates expected Victoria to follow suit.72
From the mid-1830s, the Duchess took Victoria to towns and institu-
tions around the country. In August 1836, she went to Chiswick to
visit the Victoria Asylum or Children’s Friend Society, meeting
reformed girls like the black-eyed Ellen Ford, fresh from Newgate
Prison, who had ‘no idea whatever of a God’ and could steal
A New Reign 27
anything. The spirit of benevolence also caused Victoria to flinch
73
from the spiky Orangism of some of her uncles. Listening to the vicar
of Ramsgate in October 1835, she judged his tirade against Roman
Catholicism to be ‘a most impious, unchristian-like, and shocking
affair’.74
Victoria therefore took the throne with the reflection that ‘since it
has pleased Providence to place me in this station, I shall do my
utmost to fulfil my duty towards my country’.75 Nothing delighted
the public more than the story that she had asked the Archbishop of
Canterbury to pray for her when he brought news of William’s
death to Kensington Palace, an incident which caused popular bio-
graphers to claim that she had inaugurated her reign ‘like the young
king of Israel in the olden time’.76 The first meeting of her Privy
Council in the Red Saloon at Kensington Palace on 20 June 1837
was equally crucial in her legend. David Wilkie’s painting of the event
grouped the Privy Councillors around Victoria in poses that recall the
doctors listening to Christ in the Temple. To Victoria’s mortification,
he portrayed her in virginal white rather than the mourning black she
had actually worn for William.77 While early biographers treasured
Victoria’s apocryphal remark at the Council that ‘I resolve to be
good’, the proclamation she issued there defined her religious duties
in much more concrete terms. She declared that it would be her
‘unceasing study to maintain the Reformed religion as by law estab-
lished, securing at the same time to all the full enjoyment of religious
liberty’ and signed the oath to maintain the Church of Scotland.78 If
Victoria’s aura of youth and purity better suited her to an age of
emotional monarchism than her raddled uncles, she still inherited
their overlapping commitments to Protestantism and to establishment.
‘No Idle Pageant’: Victoria and Sacred Monarchy

Many of the attendees at Victoria’s coronation on 28 June 1838 were
blasé about it. Earl Fitzwilliam had bluntly informed Victoria that a
coronation in the nineteenth century was ‘quite useless’—even though
his daughters were keen to be train bearers—while the Privy Coun-
cillor and diarist John Cam Hobhouse found its longeurs tiresome.79
From the perspective of the early twentieth century, its ‘confusion’
seemed lamentable: the Archbishop jammed the ring onto the wrong
28 Queen Victoria
finger, Victoria inadvertently left her throne before he had dismissed
the congregation, and there was a picnic behind the altar for the
participants.80 Yet its precariously managed details were symbolic
enough to such observers as the evangelical Lord Shaftesbury, who
wrote that it had been no
idle pageant . . . As idle as the coronation of King Solomon, or the
dedication of his temple. The service itself refutes the notion; so solemn,
so deeply religious, so humbling, and yet so sublime! Every word of it
invaluable; throughout the Church is everything, secular greatness
nothing.81
The most celebrated visual record of the coronation labours its sacral
character. In Charles Leslie’s painting Queen Victoria Receiving the Sacra-
ment at Her Coronation, 28 June 1838, Victoria bows her white neck and
folds her hands upon her breast. A golden beam of sunlight penetrates
the Abbey and falls upon her golden robe, transmuting earthly power
into treasures in heaven. Leslie aptly rendered the emotion with which
contemporary witnesses remembered the ‘most touching part’ of the
ceremony. ‘Involuntarily my heart was raised to Heaven in supplica-
tion to the giver of all good’, wrote one American observer in the
Abbey, ‘that, the little head which then bowed down in such seeming
humility before the footstool of His mercy, might at last receive a
Crown such as no mortal hands could bestow upon her’.82 Having
closely followed Leslie’s work on the painting, Victoria quickly pur-
chased it.83
The considerable fervour with which the coronation was celebrated
throughout the country could not efface intense political and religious
divisions. Many newspapers were sceptical about cathedral services
and municipal celebrations on coronation day. The Birmingham Journal
shrugged that the world was ‘resolved on going mad’ but would not
condemn a ‘farce of state’ that gave joy to so many.84 Sectarian
disputes over the control of local government, much inflamed by the
Municipal Corporations Act (1835) passed by William’s Whig gov-
ernment, worked against consensual celebrations. Journalists con-
demned the ‘soi-disant loyal Tories’ in Leeds, Bristol, and
Portsmouth who avoided or sought to block celebrations organized
by their Whiggish, Dissenting opponents, while the relief in places as
various as Cambridge and Liverpool that ‘contending politicians’ had
A New Reign 29
85
suspended hostilities for the day was telling. If factions within the
political nation represented in Parliament squabbled over the coron-
ation, then the Chartist democrats shut out from local and national
government made their disbelief in its symbolism patent. In Newcas-
tle, the town corporation processed to St Nicholas’s Church for a
service and a sermon on Proverbs 24:21 (‘My son, fear thou the
LORD and the king: and meddle not with them that are given to
change’), but a crowd of 5,000 people gathered on the Town Moor to
hear a discourse from the Irish suffragist Feargus O’Connor, refusing
to be put off by the dragoons provocatively drilling nearby.86
For Tory preachers, the anointing of Victoria was the high point of
the coronation. It reminded citizens that their superiors enjoyed
‘natural authority’ over them in a fallen world, which was a ‘place of
discipline’.87 Evangelical Protestants, especially Dissenters, concen-
trated by contrast on Victoria’s coronation oath on the Bible, which
in their eyes contracted her to work against the ‘seven headed monster
Popery’.88 Reminding Victoria that her oaths to maintain the Kirk
and to defend the ‘protestant church of Britain’ were ‘registered in
heaven’, the Church of Scotland minister John Cumming hoped she
would advertise puritan mores, making ‘the voice of psalms, as widely
revered as the strains of a foreign cantatrice’.89 The emotional loyal-
ism of Dissenters, whose political leaders were becoming strident in
opposition to religious establishments, was nourished by an under-
standing that Victoria would fall in with their crusade against ‘ancient
monopolies’.90 A libertarian, Protestant contractualism was similarly
evident in public celebrations. Diners at the Turk’s Head in Newcastle
listened to James Montgomery’s coronation verses, which proclaimed
that ‘Not by the tyrant’s right—law of might, / But by the Grace of
God, we own / And by thy People’s Voice, thy right / To sit upon thy
Father’s throne’. Victoria was to be a missionary Queen, so that one
day ‘none shall name a God but thine’, and a ‘Queen of Peace’: ‘Rule,
Victoria, rule the Free, / And the Almighty rule o’er Thee’. The
Mayor, Aldermen, and Councillors of Gateshead similarly referred to
the ‘compact to be this day concluded between your Majesty and your
Subjects’ and asked the ‘Almighty Ruler of the Universe’ to preserve
her as the ‘protectress of the free’.91
If Victoria came to the throne as a sacral monarch, then her aura
was refracted through disagreements about which religious interests
30 Queen Victoria
she ought to serve. This became clear on the occasions early in her
reign when her life was threatened. On 10 June 1840, Edward Oxford
stepped out from behind a tree in Green Park and fired at Victoria’s
carriage. John Francis, John William Bean, and William Hamilton
made further attempts on Victoria’s life in that decade, a flurry of
violence that culminated in the former army officer Robert Pate
striking her on the head with a cane in June 1850.92 For mid-
nineteenth-century sovereigns, assassination attempts were tests of
divine and popular favour. ‘I do not know what is more striking, the
perseverance of crime, or that of God’s protection’, wrote her aunt
Louise to Victoria of an attempt on the life of her father Louis
Philippe, King of France.93 They were not just frightening but
depressing. As Louise’s husband Leopold brooded after Oxford’s
attempt, it was understandable that George IV had been a target for
violence, but a ‘very melancholy thing’ that the ‘extremely liberal’
Victoria should be too.94 With Victoria quick to thank ‘Almighty
Providence’ for the failure of Oxford’s attempt, the Privy Council
ordered thanks giving prayers for the safety of ‘Her sacred person’.95
Parliament again ordered special prayers to be said in the Church of
England for ‘the merciful interdisposition of providence’ which baffled
Francis in 1842. The Council would also order effusive prayers which
echoed Victoria’s private gratitude to ‘Almighty Providence’ for ‘sup-
porting her under the pains, and delivering her from the perils of child
birth’—as dangerous then as any assassin’s bullet.96 These orders not
only illustrated Victoria’s sacral status, but also the ways in which
political conflict could curb articulations of it. The Council had not
dared to order more disruptive days of thanksgiving, given the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury’s fear that ‘Radicals’ might preach ‘violent
sermons’ against them, while the Church of Scotland, whose evangel-
ical wing fiercely disputed the idea that it should take spiritual dicta-
tion from the state, merely suggested prayers to its members, without
describing them as orders.97
Anglican sermons after these assassination attempts laboured the
sovereignty of Providence.98 Preaching in St James’s Church, Isling-
ton, William Bell Mackenzie presented Oxford’s deflected aim as the
latest intervention of a Protestant God in British history, beginning
with the creation of ‘British and Saxon Churches, long before the
Romish missionaries came to corrupt the faith’. He warned that this
Another random document with
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A SMALL HOUSEBOAT
ON THE
YANGTZE KIANG.
If China cannot boast of its roads, it may claim to be a country of

waterways, rivers and canals forming the chief means of
communication. The country being so large, travellers have to spend
much time in going from place to place, and living accommodation
has to be provided on the boats. It is very rough. The illustration
gives a good specimen of a small boat which may be hired for a
journey. The mat roof is placed over the open part at night. In the
daytime this space is occupied by the rowers. In the night they roll
themselves up in their wadded quilts and sleep there. In China there
is no privacy, but much curiosity. No part of your boat, although you
have hired it, is sacred to you; the boatmen pass in and out of what
you may regard as your cabin without consideration for you. Mrs.
Bishop put up curtains around her cabin to shut out prying eyes, and
as far as they could the people respected her evident desire to be
alone.
A SMALL HOUSEBOAT
ON THE
YANGTZE KIANG
A FOOT BOAT FOUND
IN CENTRAL CHINA.
The oars are worked by the feet instead of the arms. The sides of
this one are beautifully carved and lacquered, and protection from
the sun and rain is provided by a roof of mats, the universal form of
shelter and protection on the water.
A FOOT BOAT FOUND
IN CENTRAL CHINA
HSIN TAN RAPID
ON THE
YANGTZE RIVER.
The rapids on the river give rise to a considerable amount of

occupation for men called Trackers, whose occupation is the
dragging of boats up-stream through the wild and dangerous waters
of the rapids. These men live in huts on the river banks as close to
the water’s edge as possible. A group of their huts is to be seen on
the left of the picture, and on the extreme left, almost too small to be
visible, are four hundred trackers dragging up a boat. At the top and
foot of every rapid on the Yangtze are to be found one or more Red
Lifeboats, which are most efficiently and admirably manned and
maintained at the cost of Benevolent Guilds—one of the many
charitable guilds in the country—for the purpose of assisting the
crews of boats which get into difficulties. Boats are frequently
wrecked in their passage, and the Red Lifeboat has saved the lives
of many foreigners in the accidents attendant upon their passage of
the Rapids.
HSIN TAN RAPID
ON THE
YANGTZE RIVER
A BOAT ON THE MIN
RIVER, USED FOR
RUNNING THE RAPIDS.
The Min River, called also the Fu, is a western tributary of the Upper
Yangtze, but a great river in itself. Of the boat’s four sails the lowest
is of bamboo, and is let down at night to protect the boatman and his
family. The feature of the boat is its high prow, for protection against
the rocks and rushing water.
A BOAT ON THE MIN
RIVER, USED FOR
RUNNING THE RAPIDS
PART OF A FRINGE
OF JUNKS OR RIVER BOATS
AT WAN HSIEN.
Illustrating the enormous traffic on the Yangtze. This fringe of

boats, closely packed, extends for two miles along the river bank,
and is an evidence of the great trade and prosperity of Wan Hsien.
PART OF A FRINGE
OF JUNKS OR RIVER BOATS
AT WAN HSIEN
THE BRIDGE OF
TEN THOUSAND AGES,
FOOCHOW.
A country of waterways must be a country of bridges, but the

beauty of the bridges in China is quite a surprise to the traveller. The
straight bridge of the illustration given here is built upon enormously
solid piers, which are often monoliths. The roadway is constructed of
single blocks thirty feet long. The balustrade, as well as the roadway,
is solid stone. This is the oldest form of bridge in the country, and the
bridge in the picture is one of the oldest bridges.
THE BRIDGE OF
TEN THOUSAND AGES,
FOOCHOW
A BRIDGE AT WAN HSIEN
OF THE
SINGLE ARCH TYPE.
One enters almost every town or village, when travelling by water,

under a bridge of one arch, which may be anything from fifteen to
thirty feet high and of a most graceful form. These bridges are
constructed of blocks of granite cut to the curve of the bridge, and a
flight of steps leads to the crown of the arch. In the illustration the
steps are clearly shown leading to the house at the top. A most
graceful and beautiful bridge.
A BRIDGE AT WAN HSIEN
OF THE
SINGLE ARCH TYPE

Queen Victoria This Thorny Crown Michael Ledger Lomas All Chapter

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Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown

The Spiritual Lives series features biographies of prominent men and

Titles in the series include:

For Richa and Esther Libby

Vancouver, British Columbia

List of Abbreviations xiii

Introduction: ‘Someone Tremendous’ 1

Selected Bibliography 293

AP Argyll Papers, Inveraray Castle, Argyll

Public life in Victoria, British Columbia, revolved around its namesake

Victoria’s reﬂections on her accession day in June 1886 supply this

Shortly before Queen Victoria’s coronation on 28 June 1838, Canon

The ‘Tribute of Natural Tears’: Monarchy and Religious

‘The Principles of our Holy Religion’: Victoria’s

‘No Idle Pageant’: Victoria and Sacred Monarchy

If China cannot boast of its roads, it may claim to be a country of

The rapids on the river give rise to a considerable amount of

Illustrating the enormous traffic on the Yangtze. This fringe of

A country of waterways must be a country of bridges, but the

One enters almost every town or village, when travelling by water,

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