Disraeli, Gladstone and the later years
Six years later the Queen's misery was much alleviated by the appointment of the Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. From the beginning Disraeli set out to woo and flatter her with an infallible instinct for the phrase, the gesture, the compliment, the overture that would most delight her. He was later to tell a colleague who had asked for advice how to handle the Queen, 'First of all, remember she is woman'.
He never forgot this himself. 'The present man will do well', she told her eldest daughter. 'He is very peculiar, thoroughly Jewish looking ... but very clever and sensible ... He is full of poetry, romance and chivalry. When he knelt down to kiss my hand, he said "In loving loyalty and faith."'
All this was in marked contrast to Disraeli's great rival, the Liberal, WE Gladstone, who, she said, addressed her as though she were a public meeting. She could not bear Gladstone, that 'mischievous firebrand, arrogant, tyrannical and obstinate', a 'half-crazy and in many ways ridiculous, wild and incomprehensible old fanatic'. She had to put up with him intermittently from 1868 until 1894; and when he died in 1898 she could not - truthful and obstinate as ever - bring herself to say that she was sorry.
'From the beginning Disraeli set out to woo and flatter her...'
Her final years were far more tranquil. The Tory Lord Salisbury, who formed his first cabinet in 1885, was infinitely more understanding than Gladstone, and well understood that Victoria 'was not to be overpressed, never dictated to'. Lord Rosebery, Salisbury's Liberal rival, was equally amenable, although not always reliable: he required, and was given, frequent lectures as though he were a schoolboy.
A criticism by him of the House of Lords, for instance, provoked a stern rebuke: he should never have spoken in a manner calculated 'to flatter useless Radicals' without first consulting the queen and obtaining her sanction.
Throughout Victoria's reign she had held to the belief, inculcated in her by Prince Albert's German mentor, Baron von Stockmar, that the Prime Minister was merely the 'temporary head of the Cabinet', while the monarch was the 'permanent premier'. It was a supposition that the monarchy in the next century was obliged to abandon.
Published: 2001-01-01
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