On May 1, 1851, tens of thousands of people lined the
streets of London along the way to the Crystal Palace, a monumental
iron and glass building which housed 100,000 exhibits of modern
art, science, and technology. Queen Victoria was present in all
her regalia to open up this unique Great Exhibition. Of the nearly
14,000 exhibitors present to show their wares, almost half of them
were foreign—inventors and artisans from the United States, Germany, and
many other countries. London became the focus of the whole world
that May.
The Great Exhibition was largely the result of Prince
Albert's vision, and it is the event for which he is most remembered.
The profits from it were directed toward the establishment of the
South Kensington museums complex in London. The Crystal Palace exhibit
successfully advertised British supremacy in manufactures and the
nation's booming trade. Prince Albert gained tremendously in popularity
after this event, and the remembrance of it aided the popularity
both of Victoria's reign and of the British monarchy generally.
The Crystal Palace stood as a monument for proud Victorians pleased
with their nation's achievements. Unfortunately, it perished in
a fire in the 1930s.
Not long after the Great Exhibition, Victoria had to contend with
her first major foreign policy crisis: the Crimean War. In 1853, the
Russians moved into Turkish-owned areas of the Balkans, effectively
taking control of the Dardanelles, an important eastern Mediterranean
trade route. The Turks went to war with Russia, and many in Britain
desired to enter the war on Turkey's side. Prime Minister Lord
Aberdeen, urged by Lord Palmerston, prepared a British fleet to
enter the Black Sea without consulting the Queen. Prince Albert
was furious, but eventually he and the Queen sanctioned the increasingly
popular call for war. As Britain had not fought a war since the
defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815, war fever was spreading throughout
the country, particularly in the newspapers and among the middle
classes. The British fleet entered the Dardanelles in October 1853,
and the Crimean War lasted through 1856. The Russians eventually
pulled out of the Balkans.
The Crimean War gained Britain no real advantage except
to postpone the break-up of the Turkish empire. The war was famous for
the suicidal Charge of the Light Brigade, during which a brigade of
600 lightly armed cavalry, after mishearing their command, charged
over an open plain against heavy Russian artillery. This disaster,
along with the loss of 16,000 men to cholera and starvation, demonstrated
that the British Army badly needed reform and to be modernized.
The Crimean War was also the war where Florence Nightingale revolutionized
the care taking of hospitalized troops near the front, and essentially
invented the modern nursing profession.
At home in Britain during the Crimean War, great changes
were occurring as far as religious toleration was concerned. Between 1854
and 1856, dissenters of all creeds were admitted to the universities
at Oxford and Cambridge. Dissenters were members of radical religious
groups—such as the Unitarians and the Deists—who rejected the dominant
Protestant faiths of Great Britain. Queen Victoria herself, who
grew up as a pious Lutheran, was very tolerant in her attitudes
toward different faiths. Many in her husband's family were Roman
Catholic, and the Queen was not averse to employing men of dissenting
creeds for the education of her children. She was not fond of the
Church of England or its bishops, and occasionally complained about
their formalities in her diaries.
In 1860, the breakout of the American Civil War affected
British politics. The chief issue debated among Victoria's ministers
was whether or not to recognize the Southern Confederacy or to
side with Lincoln's Union by issuing no formal recognition. The
working classes of Britain were very much in favor of the Northern
cause to abolish slavery, but many in the ruling classes—especially
cotton mill owners and merchants—sympathized with the South and wished
to establish formal trading relations with the Confederacy. Britain's
basic diplomatic problem during those years was whether or not to
recognize the Confederacy. Queen Victoria's sentiments were generally
with Lincoln, as were those of Lord Palmerston, who urged his fellow
ministers to hold out on recognizing the Confederacy. Recognition
was never granted, as the Union victory seemed assured as time
went on.
As the push toward the Crimean War attests, Queen Victoria's influence
on policy matters was neither very direct nor strong. The nineteenth
century was marked in Britain by the rise to authority of the Parliament
over the monarchy. However, the Queen's personality and her relations
with her ministers were not unimportant factors in the shaping
of policy. Indeed, after the Crimean War, she used her influence
greatly to avoid further conflicts in the European continent while
some of her ministers were eager to get involved. In 1864, she urged
her ministers not to get involved in the Austro-Prussian war. Later
on in 1874, after Otto Von Bismarck had consolidated the German
Empire, a personal letter of the Queen's to the German Emperor
Wilhelm I helped to avert a war between Germany and France. The
Queen's eldest daughter the Princess Royal Victoria, in fact, had
married the Emperor's son, the future Emperor Friedrich III, in
1858. Such marriages of her children were sometimes crucial in the
shaping of international relations.
