Gresham College Lectures

Queen Victoria: Images of Power and Empire

February 23, 2023 Gresham College
Gresham College Lectures
Queen Victoria: Images of Power and Empire
Show Notes Transcript

This lecture will examine the images of power and empire projected by Queen Victoria over the course of her reign.

Beginning with her coronation, it surveys her depictions as a young queen. It looks at the transformation of her image after Albert’s death from devoted wife to grief-stricken widow. It examines portrayals of Victoria as grandmother of Europe and as Empress of India, and it concludes that the strongest image is that of the black-dressed Queen alone.


A lecture by Jane Ridley recorded on 15 February 2023 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/victoria-portraits

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(title swooshing)- What I'm going to talk about this evening is Queen Victoria's attempts to project an image which was supposed to tell people something about the power relations involved, perhaps in her family or her political life. Queen Victoria. We all know that Queen Victoria was a very prolific writer, and each night in her journal, she wrote 2,000 words, and it's estimated that she penned 60 million words in her journal over her entire lifetime. And she was also a prolific letter writer, and her letters, both public political letters and private family letters fill many, many volumes, and there are many more that are not published. So Victoria was certainly hugely aware of the importance of communication and writing and narrative, really. But she was also aware, I think, from a very early age, of the importance of projecting an image. We talk about the Elizabethan image going back to Queen Elizabeth I. There was also a Victorian image, the importance of images of power. If we look at Victoria at the time of her coronation, she came to the throne in 1837 and she was crowned the next year in 1838. And during that time, she sat for 15 artists. Imagine having to give sittings practically every day to these people. And one of the artists for whom she sat was the American painter Thomas Sully, and this is the painting that Sully produced of the Queen. And while Sully was painting her, they talked, and Sully said that the Queen was very interested in the correct, the pose that would be most appropriate for these paintings, and also that she was very anxious to dispatch, that was the Queen's word, her image abroad, and particularly in America. And so this is the painting that Sully produced after his discussions with the Queen. And you can see that it's a painting, it's not a formal painting. It's showing the Queen. She's wearing a crown and she's wearing robes, it's quite true, but the Queen is not sitting as she would have sat if she was having a conventional coronation portrait with lots of columns around her and the crown to one side. Well, it is to one side there, actually, but it's a much more informal image. And I think that what Sully is trying to do with this, is to show the Queen turning her back on the dark and turning her back on the days, the bad old days of her wicked uncles, William IV and George IV. And she's now, she's on the steps of the throne. It's a new dawn. It's a new reign. It's going to be innocent and it's going to be young, and it's going to be fresh after the decadent old kings who'd ruled Britain for too long. So we can see from this, I think, that at a very early stage of her reign, Queen Victoria has a very clear idea of what kind of image she wants to project, how she wants people to see her. Now, quite soon after the coronation, after the... Sorry, start again. We've got Queen Victoria then being seen with Sully in the coronation. But we've also got here a painting which was made in the following year, which is a very important piece of evidence about Queen Victoria's view of what her monarchy was about. Victoria married Prince Albert, her first cousin, in the year 1840, and very shortly after the wedding, Albert and Victoria had discussions about what they were going to, about getting somebody to paint them. They wanted a painting, big painting to commemorate their wedding, their marriage, and the painting that they commissioned was this. Now, the artist was Landseer, who was a favorite artist of the Queen. He was, in fact, her drawing master. The Queen was actually rather a talented watercolor artist. Here, this is one of Queen Victoria's sketches from a little bit later, about 10 or 15 years later from the marriage. These are her children at Osborne, and it's a very charming sketch. So Landseer had been teaching Queen Victoria. He was her drawing master, teaching her to draw, teaching her to paint. And this is the image that they asked him to produce. And it's rather a surprising picture, I think. It's called "Windsor Castle in Modern Times," painted between 1841 and 1843. So you have Victoria in her sort of court dress there, standing up in the white drawing room at Windsor, and Albert seated next to her is wearing, you'd have thought very unsuitable clothes to go shooting in. He's got very, very fashionable German boots, and he's also wearing, you can just see, I think here, the blue Garter ribbon, which is the smartest decoration, the most important order that you could get. Albert is wearing it to go out shooting and get dirty and wet. He's also obviously come back from a successful expedition and brought a bag full of dead birds, there, there, there, which his daughter here, this is the eldest child of Albert and Victoria, his daughter Vicky, is sort of playing with, and the dogs are trying to eat. So I'm sure that in real life, Albert would not have come in from shooting and dumped all these dead birds at the foot of his wife. But this tells us something, I think, about what the picture is trying to say. It's trying to say that this is, Victoria is in the sort of the woman's sphere. She is the angel in the house, if you like. She's wearing, she doesn't go out of doors, she's wearing smart court dresses, and this is that the woman's sphere. Albert has come from the man's world of sport and killing animals and mud and rain into the interior of the palace and is giving her as a kind of sort of tribute these birds that he's shot. But it is a rather strange image, I think, to have as a sort of wedding picture. Now, Albert, in fact, you might think that it was invention to paint Albert wearing his Garter ribbon, but in fact, it was the fact that he did go out shooting always, or hunting, always wearing his Garter ribbon. This is a picture of him shortly before he was, at the time he was married, and you can see he's showing off the Garter ribbon with its badge, there, and it was present to him from the Queen, and he clearly thought it was a very important promotion, as indeed it was. And it is true that when he went outside, he would wear it, if he was shooting or hunting. So Albert increasingly was, after the first year or two of the marriage, became discontented. Queen Victoria was determined to hang on to her power as much as she could. When Albert asked if he could help with the letters that she had to write, she said yes, he could blot them for her. And he said, well, could he have a task of his own? And she said yes, he could put on her stockings for her. So Victoria was very resistant to the idea of admitting Albert to the sort of mechanics of her role as Queen. But Albert, on the other hand, felt that he had been almost sort of, ever since he was a boy, trained to become Victoria's husband and also to take over the running of the English monarchy. Victoria was a woman. She was, in Albert's view, very poorly educated. This wasn't quite fair, but she certainly was less educated than Albert, who was a highly intelligent and extremely able man. And so there's always some kind of tension between Albert and Victoria. And Albert starts writing letters to his friends, rather complaining letters, saying,"I am only the husband and not the master in the house." In other words, he doesn't have as much power as he wants. He's just there as a sort of, almost a sort of ornament, and that was not what he expected at all. And Victoria for her part is conflicted. On the one hand, she certainly wants to be the perfect wife, and she is devoted to Albert. She wants to be the angel in the house, as we've seen. But on the other hand, she actually is incredibly bored, she has to admit, by the company of young babies. She really thought they were sort of, you know, she writes letters saying that babies, when you're bathing babies, they look like little frogs, and she felt that breastfeeding was absolutely revolting and something she was determined never to do. So Victoria is not comfortable as the angel in the home. This is not a role that comes to her naturally, and she always feels this pull to exercise her power as monarch and doesn't want to give it all over to Albert. On the other hand, increasingly she's forced to recognize that Albert has a much better understanding of ruling the country than she does. So this tension is certainly a major theme in their marriage. And if we look at this painting here, painted in 1846, we can see some of the ways in which the relationship between the King, sorry, creaky floor, some ways between the relationship between the Prince Consort and the Queen is playing out. Winterhalter, the artist, was an Austrian court painter, and Victoria was introduced to him by the Queen of the Belgians, and he was terrifically popular with all the courts of Europe at this time. So he would come to England, stay only a very few weeks in the summer to make sketches, and return with the completed pictures the following year. So 1846, this is called"The Royal Family in 1846," and here you can see we have Albert and Victoria, both of them seated on court chairs, both of them wearing their Garter ribbons, here and here. Victoria's wearing her court dress and Albert also is dressed for court with the garter around his leg there. And it seems perhaps a little bit stagey, this painting, this sort of velvet curtain behind them. Also the fact that these are their children. Of course, the children didn't play like that when it was at court. They weren't there at all. But the children here are playing and they're not making eye contact with the viewer. They're just playing with each other. So this is a court on show. This painting is meant to project a picture of the court being a sort of happy place for the Prince and the Queen and their children frolicking around on the floor. But I think that if we looked at it in another way, it is also, if you like, a diagram of the dynamics of the royal marriage, because Victoria is seated where she certainly should be as the most important person in the family and in the country, head of state. She's seated on the right of Prince Albert there, and there are also, you can see here that they have their hands, sort of their fingers permanently entwined, which indicates the strength of the marriage. But on the other hand, Victoria just sort of sits looking nowhere in particular, whereas Albert is much more sort of upright and strong and vigorous here, and he is looking at his eldest son and heir, Prince of Wales, Bertie, who's a major disappointment to Albert because he wasn't like Albert. And so it's quite clear that although Victoria is the sort of, you know, she's the ornamental part of the marriage, it is Albert basically who is in charge. That picture is a diagram of the sort of power structure of the role marriage at this time. Moving on. Victoria and Albert, it's true, they did have rows and they quarreled, and Albert couldn't bear it,'cause Victoria had a very bad temper, and so she would shout at him and then run through the palace, slamming the doors behind her, and Albert would sort of follow rather sort of sheepishly and then he would write her a little note telling her that her behavior was really unacceptable. (laughs) But he wasn't going to engage with... The doctors had told him that he mustn't engage with it or her temper would get even worse. So at same time, though, we shouldn't see the royal marriage as being entirely disastrous. They were very fond of each other and they gave each other presents. So this painting, also by Winterhalter, is a painting of sort of a harem of beautiful women without many clothes on, and this was a picture that Victoria bought and gave us a present to Albert,'cause she thought it would amuse him, (laughs) which, no doubt, it did. And then there is another famous painting which Victoria gave Albert, and that is this painting, which is a painting sometimes known as "The Secret Painting," sometimes known as "The Bedroom Painting," and the reason for those names is that it was a private, intimate painting. It was not a painting that was hung in a public place, you know, a place where people went in the palace. Victoria commissioned his painting for Albert's 24th birthday. They were so young, Victoria and Albert. We sort of forget. And so this is a painting of Victoria when she's 24 also, and Albert thought this was his favorite painting. Of all the paintings he'd seen of Queen Victoria, he loved it the the most. Now, people have thought that this was, you know, an incredibly sort of erotic painting. Well, erotic is not quite the right word, but you know what I mean, painting. Victoria has her hair down, she's wearing a sort of nighty or a very loose white dress, and it's clearly not her normal everyday image. But I think we need to remember something here that is not altogether apparent. You'll see that she has her mouth sort of half open, half parted, and you can see her teeth. Well, Victoria had rather large teeth and whenever she was painted, they'd sort of come in the paintings and she's rebuked for not shutting her mouth. Her sister writes, tells her she already ought to keep her mouth shut while she's being painted. But the fact was that, the reason, you know, up until very recently to this, it had been the normal practice that royal portraits, always the sitter kept their mouth shut. You didn't smile for a portrait if you were royal, and there was a very good sort of pragmatic reason for this, which was that royal people, like all other people at that time, had very bad teeth, black teeth and gaps, so you looked much nicer if you kept your mouth shut. But there was a sort of revolutionary in dentistry beginning in Paris at the end of the 18th century. Dentists began to be able to ensure that people's teeth remained white, and Victoria, we know by looking at her diary, actually visited her dentist before she sat for this painting by Winterhalter. So partly what this painting is about is about teeth. And she's got, her mouth is half-parted, not entirely because of sort of complete adoration of Albert, but partly 'cause she's very proud of her teeth.(audience laughing) So these sort of presents that go between Albert and Victoria, they also gave each other quite a lot of sculpture, which is at Osborne still today, and which we would think was something that Victorians would deeply disapprove of and cover in fig leaves. But Albert and Victoria were not like that. They were not prudish. So here we have another painting by Winterhalter painted in 1859. By this time, it seems that the quarrels in the royal marriage are slightly improved and that there has, some kind of arrangement has been made that Albert will be allowed to do the office work, do the paperwork, and Victoria with her nine children will try to recover. But here she is. This is a much more conventional painting than the paintings that we've been looking at before. Here is Victoria sitting, wearing robes of state, incredibly smart in robes with sort of fur in them. And she's wearing a crown. She's got the Imperial State Crown with the Maltese cross on the table beside her. She's surrounded by these columns, which always, you know, columns, the bottom of columns imply that you're at the beginning of a long, strong life, which Victoria certainly was, and out of the window here, you can see Big Ben, Westminster Hall. And the significance of that is it implies a partnership between the Monarch and Parliament. It implies a constitutional monarchy that is working properly on both sides. And the Queen is holding some papers, which are presumably political papers relating to Parliament. So this 1859 Winterhalter painting was intended to be the sort of official image of the Queen, and it was very much copied by people making prints, Victorian prints and etchings. It was frequently seen. And you get the impression from that painting that really everything is in control and going well and the Queen is on top of her job and everything is all right for the monarchy. But in fact, of course, that was not at all true. And in 1861, Albert died suddenly on the 14th of December, 1861 at Windsor after a short illness, possibly typhoid, which is what the doctors at the time thought. Certainly more likely to have been, either people think nowadays either Crohn's disease or possibly some kind of cancer. But anyway, Albert died very suddenly, and Victoria was absolutely devastated. She sunk into deepest grief. You know, her people of in her household worry about whether she's gone mad or not. She is refusing to do her job. She won't come out for ceremonial occasions like opening Parliament. In the second half of her reign from 1861 to 1901, she only opened Parliament seven times, and this, as we know, was something that the monarch was supposed to do every year. She shuts up Buckingham Palace and refuses to spend any time there, more than about a day or a night or two each each year, and she establishes retreats to Windsor, which becomes the sort of center for the court. Some joker wrote a notice which he posted outside Buckingham Palace, saying,"This commanding premises for sale, owing to the declining business of the occupant." People felt that they were not getting much value for money, that the Queen was taking money from the civil list and hoarding it for herself rather than spending it on the ceremonial that was supposed to be her duty. And you know, the Prime Minister, Gladstone at this time, 1871, becomes incredibly sort of concerned that the monarchy is going to somehow not survive, and he puts huge pressure on the Queen to appear in public, to be seen, even for the shortest period of time, and Victoria absolutely won't. There is even the beginning of a republican movement, which for Britain in 1870 was a very sort of unexpected development. In fact, the crisis of the monarchy after Victoria's retreat from public life in 1861, which culminates in 1871 with the republican movement, this is really as bad as the abdication had been or was to be, rather, in 1936. Now, once again, Victoria does attempt to use images to propose her point of view to her people. So we have this image here. This is another painting by Landseer, who, if you remember wrote that painting, sorry, painted that painting,"Windsor Castle in Modern Times." The title of this painting is "Her Majesty at Osborne, 1866." This is five years after Albert's death, and it is meant to convey the grief, but also the dutifulness of the widow Queen. So it's a study in mourning. Here we've got Queen Victoria riding sidesaddle on her black pony with her black habit. These are two of her daughters, Helena and Beatrice, the two youngest daughters, princesses wearing black round their necks, black ribbons on their hats. And there's also a lot of... Oh, yes, and sorry, the man holding the horse has black socks, black kilt, black everything. And there's a lot of emphasis, too, on the importance of obedience. This dog here sitting like that, extremely obedient. Queen Victoria was a great dog lover. She usually liked having collies, so the dogs have to be in the picture. And then these are her official, you know, her documents, her letters that she's been opening, and I don't if you can see from here,'cause this is very small, but they're covered in black edged, the envelopes, which was, when you were in mourning in the Victorian period, you had to write letters with black around the edges, and Victoria goes on writing black-edged letters for years after Albert died. So this is a painting about a woman who is incredibly, you know, still deeply grieving her dead husband, but also trying to do what she can for her people. So that you find, you know, the letters, the red box there, the gloves, which she'd thrown on the floor as a sort of also a part of the iconography of power. And so despite herself, the picture is supposed to say the Queen is just working away for her subjects, even though she's totally sort of devastated still by the death of Prince Albert. And so we have the stormy sky in the background and the beginning of some sunlight, perhaps at the beginning. There were two paintings of this, one in this dark, stormy background, and another with a much lighter background. Now, I don't know what you think about that as a sort of message to your people. You might be a bit surprised if that happened today, that the royal family did that, but it didn't produce the desired effect. A lot of people were very scornful of it. When the picture was hung in the Royal Academy in 1866, there was a great deal of criticism, and the main point that was criticized was not the painting of the Queen or anything like that. It was the fact that the Queen on her pony was being, you know, the man who was holding the reins, presumably therefore in control, was this very handsome Scot, the Queen's highland servant, John Brown. And you can see that he has got lovely legs.(audience laughing) He was a very statuesque figure of a man. Can you get statuesque men? I'm not sure, anyway. There was a great deal of gossip, and there were articles in the newspapers saying that really this was completely inappropriate, that the Queen should be in such close proximity to a servant, and that it implied a relationship that was entirely improper, and was something that should be condemned. So it doesn't really work. I mean, in a sense, I think the fact that Queen Victoria was prepared to allow her servant John Brown to be painted in that pose, you know, if there'd really been something going on with this relationship, she surely wouldn't have put out this picture to her people. It would have been a secret. But she was too naive to see how it might be interpreted, and she allowed this marvelous study of John Brown to dominate the picture, with just, you know, him holding the reins and her just reading the letters on the horse. So this painting is not a great success in doing what Victoria is trying to do, which was to project an image of power. It really projects, the person whose power emerges from this painting is actually John Brown, not the Queen. However, for Victoria, there was now a new way of going about things. This painting here, sorry, this is a photograph here by Downey, the royal photographer, and it's interesting because it's a study. Instead of doing a sketch of Queen Victoria on her horse, the painting we've just looked at at Osborne in 1866 in the Isle of Wight, what we have here is a painting, sorry, a photograph being used. And here, and this gives us also a sense, this is John Brown. This is one of the princesses. This is one of the dogs from the painting. And we perhaps get a bit of a sense that one of the reasons why Victoria was so anxious about appearing in public might have been that she had actually put on an enormous amount of weight, something like three stone, and as she was only four foot 11, she did look much stouter than she had before. And of course, if you're painting a painting, you can not show that. I mean, the painting is much more (laughs) flattering. But one thing, though, that Victoria realizes now is that a much better way and a much more sort of immediate way of controlling images of power is by using photography rather than oil paintings. Oil paintings take an awful long time to get into people's consciousness. You've got to be... You know, they've got to become prints, which are then bought, and they are still expensive. But photographs are a much better way of projecting an image, and in the Victorian period when photography begins in about the 1860s, there is something called the carte visite, which is a sort of postcard-sized image with sort of round corners with a photograph on. And these cartes visites, you could buy them at a corner shop. They weren't very expensive. It meant that you had a sort of set and you knew what the person looked like, the Queen looked like. And figures about cartes visites show that Queen Victoria's images were by far the most popular, followed by her daughter-in-law, Princess Alexandra. So there is a sense in which, you know, there's the beginnings of a communication in this way, and Victoria could, again, control the story. So for example, this is Victoria and Albert, a photograph taken just months actually before Albert died in 1861. And again, it's trying to sort of use the iconography of a painting with this sort of column here, and the royal couple, Victoria looking rather annoyed. I think people, particularly Victoria, looked annoyed in these paintings, these photographs, partly because they had to stand in the same pose for so long. So I mean, if we're going to hold a smile for 10 minutes, it's going to end up as a sort of grimace. And Victoria particularly didn't like being photographed, as you can tell from that photograph perhaps. But this is now the sort of thing that Victoria is able to do with photographs. This is a wedding photograph, and the people who are getting married are here, Princess Alexandra of Denmark and Bertie, Prince of Wales, Victoria's eldest, and disgraceful, as she thought, elder son. So they're getting married and this is 1863. Victoria has been a widow for two years, but she still thinks it's far too early to be happy. So all the wedding photographs are taken in front of, with the grieving widow Victoria in the middle, paying absolutely no attention to the married couple, but in a sort of completely adoring sort of connection with this bust of Prince Albert. That's Prince Albert there. And so the idea is that, by far, the most important person and the person who we should really care about here is the Queen, and the Queen cares about Albert, who dominates the painting. And these in the photograph, and these two, Alexandra and Bertie really don't matter at all. They're not, (laughs) even though it is their wedding. So Victoria allows her grief to become a tool, which means that she basically steals the show from her children. So that photography then is important. Now, the other thing that is happening at this time in the second half of Victoria's reign after 1861 is that the power, the political power of the monarchy is declining, and this is largely because of things which are totally outside Victoria's control. Basically the growth of the electorate, the two, the reform acts of 1867 and 1884, which mean that many, many more people are given the vote and that governments are now appointed, elected by the people, and perhaps you could say they're also appointed by Parliament, but they certainly are not appointed by the monarch. At the beginning of her reign, Victoria had thought she could influence the appointments of governments when she tried to keep out Robert Peel in the Bedchamber Crisis. But by the sort of second half of the reign, it's quite clear that the monarchy is just a formality without real political pull. But what is interesting is that Victoria develops new spheres of influence, new types of power, and one of these is the Empire, and particularly India. Victoria had a very strong affinity for India. She loved Indian people, and she, in exchange, was much loved by the Indians. Now, partly, I regret to say, Victoria's love for India was, you might call it plunder. I don't know if anybody knows what Victoria is wearing here. She's wearing such a magnificent diamond that she doesn't need to wear hardly any other jewelry. You know, this is the Koh-i-Noor, and this is a painting by Winterhalter, again doing his duty, a painting of the Koh-i-Noor made in 1856, just after the Indian Mutiny, actually. And here is the Queen defiantly wearing this amazing jewel. Victoria on the whole was not particularly greedy about plunder from her colonies, but the Koh-i-Noor was an exception. Victoria really wanted the Koh-i-Noor to be presented to her. It was taken from the Punjab at the time the Sikh Wars in 1850, and it was presented to Victoria, who allowed it to appear at the Great Exhibition in 1851, but otherwise it remained in Victoria's crown jewels. And Victoria here is the sort of the flagship for, at that time, the biggest diamond in the world. But I think that there was a much more sort of, well, extraordinary relationship, really, going on between Victoria and her Indian empire. Victoria never went to India, and I don't think we can criticize her there for that. It would have been unthinkable at that time, really, for a female monarch, I think, to go to India. But though she never went there, she was in a sense everywhere, all over India. The Indians were made to be, by the British, extremely conscious of Victoria. So, you know, she was on the stamps, she was on the coins, and India was covered, covered in statues of Queen Victoria. So she was very much a sort of presence to the Indians, even though she didn't really know what India was really like, and she was known as the Mother of the Indians. It's a very sort of emotional relationship between the Indian people and the absent Queen. And India also gave Victoria the opportunity to give herself a sort of, you know, a pay rise, and make herself an Empress, because in 1876, Victoria persuaded her Prime Minister, Disraeli, of whom she was very fond, because he did what she said, she persuaded Disraeli to agree to her proposal that she should be made Empress of India, rather than just Queen. And of course, there were some reasons quite close to home why she wanted to do that. Her daughter, Vicky, who we saw as a small child, right at the beginning, Vicki was married to the heir to the German throne, heir to the German Empire, so it would really not do if Vicki became an empress and was allowed to go through doors in front of her mother. That would be completely unacceptable. Victoria had to be an empress, too. And so Victoria from now on signs herself Victoria R et I, Victoria Regina et Imperatrix. And it meant, I think, an awful lot to her. Now, Victoria did have some Indian servants. In fact, Victoria's most sort of difficult and controversial and unpopular relationships are the relationships that she had with her servants, either with John Brown, who we saw a little bit ago, or now with this gentleman here, Abdul Karim, known to others as the Munshi. Abdul Karim was the Queen's Indian Secretary, Indian servant. He taught her how to cook curries. She became very fond of, very partial to curry. And he also taught her how to speak and write Urdu so that she could communicate and understand the language of her Indian people. He was treated very badly by the royal household, who thought that he was a sort of imposter and pretended that he was much grander than he was in India, and also disliked the fact that they couldn't get access to the Queen because the Munshi was her favorite. But here what's happening is that Abdul Karim is sort of getting his own back. This is a photograph that was commissioned by Abdul Karim at the time of the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and he set this photograph up, and then it was in a couple of newspapers, and then when the royal household realized what had happened, that this photograph had been published, it is pulled, and there's a major row about it. Why? Well, the reason is that this photograph is basically Abdul Karim rather cleverly getting his own back, because this, it subverts the way photographs of the Queen should be entirely. The person in control dominating the situation is Abdul Karim. The Queen is in the pose of a little old lady, doing what she's told by this towering figure here, and you know, writing letters, whatever, according to his instruction. So because the painting, so, I'm sorry, the photograph so completely reversed what was supposed to be the relationship between the Queen and her servant, when in fact it's really the Queen who's the servant almost, and he who's the boss. There is a major outcry, but I think we should say congratulations to Abdul Karim to think of such a witty joke. So India, then, for Victoria is a major source of influence and power and prestige, and even though she never went there, there is a genuine, rather strange virtual relationship, if you like, between the Queen and her Indian subjects. And the other sphere, new sphere of influence that Queen Victoria develops in the last two decades of her reign is the family. And the family now has become... Sorry, I can't look at this watch... Has become much greater. Victoria had 42 grandchildren, and she was known as the Grandmother of Europe, and here she is in a 1887 Golden Jubilee painting by Tuxen, a Danish artist, and Victoria is in the front, you might think playing with her grandchildren in a very charming family picture. And that's what Victoria said it was. It was a charming family painting, but it's actually also a painting about power, because the Queen, she may be small and she may be playing with the babies, but she is the woman who calls the shots within this enormous extended family. She is the person who keeps it together with her enormous correspondence to all her family painted here. She's the person who arranges the marriages. She's the person whose best entertainment was when one of her granddaughters were going into labor, Victoria would listen and come to the bedroom and watch it for hours on end. Can you imagine having Victoria watching you while you're in labor? But she keeps this whole dynastic situation, you know, she keeps it going, and it is her power base. She's enormously powerful as a result of that. So we have these two new types of power that Victoria develops, and we also have the sort of very simple narrative that she creates of herself as a widow. From the time of Albert's death until her own death, she always wore mourning clothes, black, black, black, and she posed, as you know, this is a carte visite of Victoria, she posed as a sad black-dressed old lady here, here, and here. Mourning, always in black, yeah, always being made to look rather thinner than she actually was. But I think there develops a sort of a narrative of Victoria as the sort of grandmother of her children and the grandmother of the nation, the Widow of Windsor, the woman who's had such a tragic life, but nevertheless continues to have a deep concern for the welfare of all her people. And so at the end of her life, this time, Victoria is really far more popular than she had ever been before. So with her skillful handling of images, as she does with this, I think Victoria is able to create a sort of a narrative about her, which enables her to be an incredibly powerful and popular monarch. Thank you very much.(audience applauding)- [Audience Member 1] Thank you. Nowadays royals and celebrities have their own image consultants to get advice on what sorts of image to project into the public sphere. Back then, I would imagine it would be courtiers, or would someone else step into that sort of role?- I think that's a really good question. I think it was Victoria herself, well, on her image, especially the black. I mean, her family endlessly was saying,"Oh, for goodness sake, lighten up." She was at a wedding or something, she insisted on wearing the black, and I think from the point of view of the narrative and the sort of character that was being portrayed, perhaps that was sensible. But I don't know of anybody who was advising her to do that. Albert would have, but I mean, he wasn't around.- [Audience Member 2] Victoria spent a lot of time lambasting poor Bertie for not being like his father. Did he do anything to influence how she was seen after she died?- You mean... Well, I think you mean... Yes, you mean to sort of affect her image? Well, I think he did do a bit. I think that he and his siblings were all a bit worried about how she was going to come across for the last years of her reign, I mean, you know, the last 40 years of her reign, when she really hadn't appeared hardly at all. So they started saying that this was a sort of holy period of Victoria's life, and nobody should really write about it. Bertie also was quite clear that there shouldn't be a biography of Victoria, and that she should be commemorated just by publishing letters, and the letters that were published were redacted to take out anything about the womanly side of her life. So anything about children or babies or any jokes, they all went out, and they just show a picture of Victoria as being extremely sort of fascinated by politics. (laughs) So, but I think, you know, when Victoria died, she was incredibly popular, and everybody wore black. The shops were all, you know, had black in their windows. People felt they'd... People were crying in the streets. They felt they'd lost their mother. And so I suppose that that was not something that Bertie was going to go against. That was something that he was going to support. And of course, there is the story of Bertie having this last-minute reconciliation with Victoria on her deathbed. When she cried out, she couldn't see, she was blind, but she cried out for Bertie and gave him sort of, and gave him a hug. So it's complex, this relationship.- [Audience Member 3] It seems that she was conscious of the power of the image from a very young age, but what's the origin of that? Was that something that came from her as an individual or was she a product of her time? Was she influenced by the fact she was a woman, or what? How was she aware of it from such a young age?- Well, I think that is an excellent question. I don't really know the answer. I mean, when I was preparing for this talk, I found that conversation between her and Sully, which show showed that she was obviously very alert to anything about her image. I don't know whether her mother, the Duchess of Kent, encouraged her to, you know, encouraged the idea of an image, you know, all those tours that they went around, her mother dragged her around, but Victoria hated doing that and stayed with people in visiting parts, you know, royal progresses all over the country. I don't think so. I think it was something that Victoria had worked out for herself, so far as, but that may be wrong, but that's what it seemed to me, looking at what was going on. And it's also true that very little has been written about this by historians, so there isn't a great literature on Victoria and her image. That that should be corrected, really.- [Audience Member 4] The period after Albert died was when she withdrew into herself. Is there a case for thinking that that might have been a clinical depression, and if so, I haven't seen very much written about it.- Yes, I think there are some people who thought that she was trying it on at the time, but I think that there is a school of thought amongst modern commentators that Victoria's grief was rather like the grief sometimes of mothers whose children had been killed in the First World War. It was sort of extreme grief, and it had become a sort of, you know, it had become a sort of psychological issue. It wasn't just part of the natural grieving process. She got sort of stuck in the grieving process. So I think that, I agree, I think there should be more work done about that,'cause there's an awful lot of material on Victoria's symptoms. A lot of people writing about her around her, and she herself was writing a lot how she felt, and you know, pathetic things, like you look at the watercolors that she did when she was after Albert's death, and they're completely gloomy and no people in them at all, and it's usually dark. I mean, I think she was depressed, definitely.- [Audience Member 5] Did Victoria have any real influence over her grandchildren, which included the German Kaiser and the Russians Tsarina?- Sorry, influence over her grandchildren?- [Audience Member 5] Yeah, which included the German Kaiser and the Russian Tsarina.- The sorry, the Kaiser of... Yes, yes, she had the Kaiser and the Russian empress, you mean those two? Yes, Aleki. Well, I think she was absolutely furious when her granddaughter Alexandrovna, or Aleki, she was known, of Hess married Alexandrovich, who became Nicholas II second of Russia. She thought Russia was an absolutely appalling country and dangerous, and never should anyone go there, and I suppose actually she was proved right from Aleki's point of view, who died a dreadful death, and from the Kaiser, her grandson, she actually got on rather well with him. And Queen Victoria was the only English person who the Kaiser would take seriously at all, only member of the English royal family. So because Victoria was able to sort of tell things to the Kaiser, which, if other people had told them, would have caused a sort of international incident, you know, she was used by the Foreign, well, not Foreign Secretary, but Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury as a kind of sort of messenger between the English government and the German government, and her influence with the Kaiser actually was quite important. She could calm him down. And of course, when she died after she died in 1901, Bertie, her successor, couldn't calm the Kaiser down at all. Whenever they met, there was a scene and difficulty, and you could argue that this was one of the sort of causes of the First World War, not high up on the cause list, but it certainly was a cause.- [Audience Member 6] Does narrative of herself rub off on other sort of eminent Victorians? Does a sense of Victoria's self become part of what becomes the Victorian era?- Yes, you mean sort of black and gloomy?(audience laughing) Black clothes. Yes, I think there is, and I think a lot of widows probably did follow. I don't how much they did, she was followed, but I think she would have been a bit. And I mean, I think, Victoria's famous for saying when somebody made a joke, "We are not amused," and she always looked very grumpy. But actually, when she was in her sixties and seventies and eighties, she was actually rather, she was far better and far easier to get on with and laughed a lot, made funny jokes, told funny stories. And it was only the public image that she got on the sort of, you know, all the black, got on all her blacks and looked like a frown and furious with everybody. This was not her. The Queen Victoria that her ladies in waiting talk about was this rather sort of witty character who they all loved,'cause she was so sort of friendly and funny, so.- Wonderful. I think reached seven o'clock, and I'd like to thank Professor Jane Ridley very, very much. It's been fascinating.(audience applauding)