Upon her accession to the throne in June 1837, eighteen-year-old Victoria
was able to throw off the influence of her mother Victoire and
Sir John Conroy, who had formerly exercised so much control over
her young life. Conroy was at the time still in the pay of the Queen's
mother, but he resigned his post and left the country in 1839 after
allegedly impregnating Flora Hastings, one of Victoria's ladies-in-waiting.
Hastings, in fact, was a virgin, and what had appeared to be the
symptoms of pregnancy were in fact those of an unusual fatal illness.
The Queen treated the young lady harshly before she died, and the
whole business scandalized the public. Later on, Victoria regretted
her behavior in the Hastings affair deeply.
The most important figure early in Victoria's reign was
William Lamb, Second Viscount Melbourne, who was the first Prime
Minister of her reign. Lord Melbourne was a charming, attractive
figure, and Victoria came to rely on his guidance heavily. The
two often spent hours a day in conversation. He taught her a great
deal about constitutional government, lessons which served he well
throughout her long reign. Victoria's affection for and reliance upon
Lord Melbourne increased her support of the Whig party to which
he belonged, and Melbourne made sure that she was surrounded by
ladies-in-waiting from good Whig families. The other major influence
on her politics in these years was her first Foreign Secretary,
Henry John Temple, Third Viscount Palmerston. Lord Palmerston was
the chief architect of Victorian foreign policy in the early part
of the reign.
In October 1839, Victoria's cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha
visited England once again, and this time the Queen fell very much
in love with him. The feeling was mutual. She proposed marriage
to him, and he accepted. The two were married on February 10, 1840.
Victoria desired that Albert receive the title King Consort, but
British officials would have none of it, not wishing to see a German
prince assume any part of the sovereign power. Indeed, despite
Victoria's desire to give her husband a higher title, she herself
was at first reluctant even to discuss political matters with him, refusing
him access to her state papers. Melbourne convinced Victoria gradually
to allow Albert a hand in her political business. With Albert's
growing political influence, she came to share his fondness for
the Conservatives in the government, such as Sir Robert Peel, Prime
Minister from 1841–1846, a man she initially disliked immensely,
in part because he had tried (though failed) to get her to replace
some of her Whig ladies-in-waiting with Conservative ones.
While Victoria's early years as queen were spent learning
and developing her understanding of British politics—not to mention adapting
to her new life not only as a sovereign but also as a new bride—her
kingdom was undergoing great political and social changes. One
of the great political concerns of the day was the role of the
monarchy itself. When she bacame queen, there was some agitation
among political liberals to divest the monarchy of all power and
institute a republican form of government. The 1830s and 1840s
saw the rise of the Chartist movement, radically liberal for its
day, which pushed for universal male suffrage and for the reform
of Parliament, and defended the working class interest in an increasingly
industrialized and urbanized British society. Chartist riots and
workers' strikes occurred around Great Britiain for several yeras,
until the movement petered out in 1848. Victoria herself was sympathetic
toward, if not actually supportive of, liberal reform efforts,
and the Chartists themselves often demonstrated affection toward
the Queen, as these lines from one of their songs indicate: "While
her affections we do win, And every day fresh tidings bring, Ladies
help me for to sing, Victoria Queen of England."
A chief economic point of contention in the early Victorian administrations
was free trade and what should be done about the Corn Laws, which
penalized foreign imports of grain in order to help domestic British
agricultural interests. There was a severe trade depression between
1839 and 1843, and two years later, feeling that the Corn Laws
were partially to blame, Prime Minister Peel repealed them. Peel
and the Conservatives subsequently lost control of Parliament in
1846. This was also the worst year of the great potato famine in
British- controlled Ireland, a disastrous event which caused the
death of a million Irish and the emigration of a million and a
half more—in total a full quarter of the country's population.
The new Whig government in Britain was largely to blame for the
length of the famine, as its trade policies encouraged continued
exports of grain to other nations while Ireland was starving. The
Queen made a brief visit to Ireland during the famine years; the Irish
problem would prove a great agitation in British politics later in
her reign.
Queen Victoria was the first British monarch to travel
her country by train. Indeed, the first decades of her reign were
marked by the advent of railways and steam-power all over Britain.
Victoria's kingdom was fast becoming the most advanced industrialized nation
in the world, and in 1848 Britain was producing half the pig iron
in the world, possessed a booming shipbuilding industry, and was
home to a greatly expanding and prospering middle class. Towns and
cities such as London and Glasgow in Scotland were growing exponentially
in population, and Britain was increasingly a country of town-dwellers,
factory workers, and shop-keepers as it had once been a nation
of farmers. Workers living in the new industrial towns often lived
in appalling slum conditions, and had to face the problem no political
organization or power in the face of powerful factory owners and
an increasingly cut-throat, competition-driven economy.
