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The British monarchy is by far the oldest of all the constitutional monarchies. Its origins can be traced back to before the Norman Conquest. The influence of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights are discussed. Cabinet government and the expansion of the suffrage in the nineteenth century affected the monarchy profoundly. It was during the reign of Queen Victoria that the monarchy took on its recognizably modern form. This was noticed and analysed by the most brilliant journalist of the age, Walter Bagehot, and by its most imaginative politician, Benjamin Disraeli. Bagehot laid down various constitutional precepts to which sovereigns after Queen Victoria sought to adhere.

With the outbreak of the Russo‐Turkish war, Disraeli began to make ever‐more radical moves. His policy of deterrence was interpreted by Derby, however, as a deliberate provocation of conflict. Simultaneously with his distancing from Derby, Disraeli sought to draw closer to the queen and Salisbury. He prioritized secret diplomacy through informal emissaries (Corry, the Rothschilds, Colonel Wellesley, Butler‐Johnstone) over formal channels. Following the fall of Plevna and the Adrianople Armistice, public opinion began moving his way, while a militant jingoism came to life. With the queen fully won over, a firm majority in Parliament and favourably inclined public opinion, following his successful manoeuvres to drive back Carnarvon and Derby, Disraeli gained dictatorial control over Britain's foreign policy.

It is one of the British political system's many paradoxes that the monarchy, with the hereditary principle at its heart, should have shown itself since the 1860s to be at least as flexible an instrument as any so far discussed. Despite the mythology, Edward VII lacked the energy, connections, and experience required for significant foreign policy initiatives of his own, and George V, even in his personal relations with other monarchs, had to defer to the politicians. Running in parallel with the monarchy's new imperial role was a further novelty: its ceremonial function. This was not welcomed by Queen Victoria, who disliked ceremony, regretted its cost, and feared assassination. Its combination of distance from and familiarity with aristocracy equipped the monarchy for the first of its class-integrating roles: stabilising relations between the aristocracy and the middle class in Britain. After the Second World War the monarchy changed again, this time accommodating itself (despite the personal inclinations of individual monarchs) to the modest installment of socialism and egalitarianism that the government of Clement Attlee entailed.

Chapter one examines the conceptual space between the projection of Queen Victoria as a symbol of empire and nineteenth-century royals often ambivalent attitude toward the empire and, particularly, the royal tours. It also describes the experiences of royal tourists of empire between the first royal tours of 1860 and the coronation durbar of 1911. Using correspondence to, from, and about travelling royals – including two future kings – the chapter examines Victorian and Edwardian royals’ encounters with the empire from their daily routines to their participation in Mughal-inspired durbars with Indian princes.

This chapter demonstrates that Queen Victoria had a talent for interpreting and manipulating history, adopting national identities and evoking a significant response. It also discusses the English reaction when the ‘Stone of Destiny’ was (briefly) taken from Westminster Abbey in 1950 by nationalist students from Glasgow University. It specifically explores Scottish perceptions of the monarchy as part of a wider British identity in Scotland. It begins by briefly outlining the ways in which Victoria re-established the notion of monarchy in Scottish society. The contrast between the popular perception of Victoria and her heir, Edward, is examined to illustrate how notions of Scottishness were significant in identifying the attitudes towards the monarchy. It then addresses the period surrounding the coronation of Queen Elizabeth as it took place in 1953, the 350th anniversary of the Union of the Crowns. It further evaluates some of the reasons why the effect of monarchy as a unifying factor in British identity has decreased in Scotland over the last twenty years. There has been a steady decline in the number of Scots who served in the armed forces in the period after 1945.

This chapter discusses the ways in which Aboriginal people in southeastern Australia since the 1880s have incorporated Queen Victoria as a narrative device into the stories they tell and the statements they make about their situation under British colonisation. By tracing the contexts and occasions on which references to Queen Victoria are made, the chapter examines how Aboriginal people in Australia’s south-east implicated the figure of Queen Victoria in their lives and predicaments, and the ways in which each new generation recycled and reworked inherited stories about her according to their own times and situations. It concludes that the name of Queen Victoria served multiple “memory-making” uses, not least of which was remembering Aboriginal people’s own histories of political activism as they sought redress for their dispossession.

This chapter explores the nature and scope of Queen Victoria’s own interest in and engagement with her Empire. It begins with the observation that in the vast scholarship and popular literature on Queen Victoria there is remarkably little on the “question of empire,” including the monarch’s own ideas about and relations with her imperial “subjects.” This chapter challenges the conventional view that Victoria has little interest in empire and its colonies, and when she did her attention was only fleeting and intermittent. This chapter complicates that simplistic and superficial view by considering evidence in Victoria’s diaries along with the records of indigenous people with whom she had close relationships, including Pomare (Maori) and Cetshwayo (Africa). Victoria expressed both enthusiasm for imperial expansion, and a measure of sympathy for the victims of that expansion.

The introduction explains the objective of the collection, which is to plumb the ideas and interpretations which Indigenous people of the British settler colonies have formulated and articulated about or through Queen Victoria in response to the colonial encounter. Essays also consider how the representatives of the Crown employed the figure of the monarch in their interactions with Indigenous people. The introduction explains the scope of the collection, why the focus is on the settler colonies. It describes how this is an innovative, original, timely and significant contribution. It brings together scholarship that has been isolated within the confines of national histories, and contributes to understandings of comparable colonial cultures and networks and webs of empire. It is explained why the collection is divided into three parts, and the themes and issues that link the chapters. Each chapter is summarized. It concludes with the hope that this will generate further interdisciplinary scholarship.

This chapter discusses chronic and obsessive grief that was rare among 19th century families. These reactions to deaths are seen as extreme responses to death which took place in extraordinary and distressing circumstances, including suicide, and sudden or premature deaths. In this chapter, the cases of Queen Victoria's response to Prince Albert's death, Lady Frederick Cavendish's reaction to the assassination of her husband, and Emma Haden's prolonged grief after her daughter's death are analysed.

As moving pictures became a reality during 1895–6, Europe’s crowned heads discovered the new medium and what it could do for their image. The earliest royal films made in Britain showed Victoria’s extended family with a new informality, and were eagerly viewed by their subjects. However, it was the staging of Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee as a vast procession through London, filmed by 18 companies whose products were distributed throughout Britain and the distant territories of the Empire, that showed how powerfully film could project the monarchy in a new way–immediate, accessible and impressive. Victoria’s successors, her sons Edward and George, came to the throne having grasped the potential of film. Meanwhile, two of her relations Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas, were also the subjects of early filming Nicholas’s coronation in 1896 was the first such event to be recorded on film, but a record of the disaster that followed, when thousands were killed in a crowd panic, was quickly suppressed. Nicholas would remain suspicious of film as a mass medium, while enjoying it as a private family record, until he gave permission for a film to celebrate the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913–the same year that a full-scale acted tribute to Victoria, Sixty Years a Queen, appeared.

There has been a recent surge of interest amongst historians in the relationship between the British monarchy and the empire. Despite its novelty, however, this new historiography rests on some familiar foundations, tending to see the imperial monarchy as an exercise in spectacle and 'invented tradition', and a product of the 'new imperialism', c. 1870–1914. This chapter places the topic of crown and colonies in a different, longer-term perspective. It argues that the English (then British) Crown, much like its continental counterparts, had a significant influence over the expansion of empire from the sixteenth century onwards. By the nineteenth century, the royal prerogative over the church and army in the colonies had extended as dominion grew, and the court and royal family exercised influence over colonial administration. One reason for this was the extent of indigenous forms of kingship and native monarchy in many parts of the empire. Especially as a female monarch, Queen Victoria was seen as offering the cloak of protection, exemplified here by case-studies drawn from New Zealand and India. When rival European empires consolidated their realms after 1860 -- notably Italy and Germany -- Queen Victoria and her advisors attempted to do the same for the overseas colonial empire. By focusing so much on charting the origins of the modern twentieth century Commonwealth, historians have overlooked the deeper roots of Britain's monarchical empire before 1870.

This chapter traces the democratic fascination with both the sacred rituals of state and the personalized authority of the British monarchy, while attempting to make sense of the symbolic value of such prepolitical attachments. It considers not only the comparative aesthetics of governmental power but also how such psychic projections onto the forms and practices of a monarchy elsewhere helped to address the political moment at home. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, Americans indulged in a cult of reverence toward Britain's monarchy not to express their loyalty to Queen Victoria but to experience a compensatory and archaic sense of attachment to the idea of a state unlike their own. Redefining allegiance as a felt response to dignity and grandeur (as embodied in a queen), Americans who loved Victoria found new ways to love America: they conceived of a different sort of patriotism than that enacted by the rational bonds of democratic ideology.

This chapter discusses this transformation Queen Victoria in Māori thought from the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to her death in 1901. It argues that she would remain throughout an ambiguous and ambivalent figure. For many Māori, she would be a distant guarantor of rights denied. Many tribes maintained an intense loyalty to the Queen, pledged their military support to suppress the supposedly rebellion of others. Some saw no inconsistency between fighting Imperial troops, maintaining loyalty to a Māori King, and accepting an overarching authority of the Queen. While yet others rejected the Queen every bit as much as they rejected the missionaries, the governor and constitutional control by a settler parliament. This chapter explores these complexities and contradictions.

This chapter discusses a number of visits to Queen Victoria in England by a number of southern African kings or their envoys. It argues that in nearly every case, the warm reception by the queen was contradicted by the cold refusal of the Colonial Office to consider the indigenous viewpoint. It briefly discusses the resonances of nineteenth century experiences and ideas, showing that up to the 1960s Queen Victoria remained for many a symbol of the more beneficent aspects of British imperialism by contrast with the rapacious colonialism of white settlers. It ends with reference to one statue of her has been defaced in the opening years of the twenty-first century, reminding us that elite attitudes do not necessarily reflect mass opinion.

Before the First World War, two pioneers of the British film industry, WG Barker (Ealing Studios) and GB Samuelson, injected an unprecedented level of investment into a feature length docudrama on the life and times of Queen Victoria. Apart from a small fragment the film is lost, but a luxury souvenir book containing production stills survives. Sixty Years a Queen was released at the end of 1913 and toured the UK in the early part of 1914, to tremendous box office success. A majestic piece of national cinema, it was perfect for the point in the British market when the new purpose built picture palaces were opening all around the UK. Yet its legacy has dwindled to a footnote in histories of the feature film. Using production stills and information from trade magazines to recreate its construction, this chapter looks at tableaux from the film and discusses its debt to Victorian media, particularly the illustrated news. It will reveal Sixty Years a Queen as the most lavish example of a British film on a national theme before the First World War, the creation of an optimistic, forward thinking industry and an emotionally memorable experience for those in its audience.

Queen Victoria has been depicted on the screen on over a hundred occasions, by some of our leading actors. Her film depictions, while ostensibly about history, may also help to “reorganise the present”, in Pierre Sorlin’s description. This chapter will assess the changing–and not so changing–ways in which Victoria has been represented on the screen. Victoria the Great (1937) and (the second version of) Sixty Glorious Years (1938) show the Queen as embodying the imperial consensus of the time. Yet those made after the outbreak of the People’s War–such as The Prime Minister (1941) and The Mudlark (1950)– present the monarch as more concerned with her people’s economic welfare, as the social democratic consensus emerges. Recent examples have pushed politics into the background and focused on Victoria’s emotional life–as in Mrs. Brown (1997) and The Young Victoria (2009). Such works present the Queen as a victim ofbi1ih, tradition, politicians and popular expectations–and explore the personal tensions inherent in being the national figurehead. Yet, while increasingly portraying the personal dilemmas of a monarch caught within an unforgiving institution, these films also stress the central importance of the monarchy to the nation. Such dramatic licence might annoy historians, but it suggests a vigorous faith in a monarchy that allegedly transcends petty party politics and enjoys direct communion with the people. As such, film representations of Victoria bolster the continuing popularity of an inherently undemocratic institution.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the history of the British constitution in the twentieth century. In the beginning of the twentieth century, doubts started to emerge concerning the function of the uncodified constitution and the role of the sovereign in such a system. In the later part of the century it became accepted that the sovereign could perform a valuable role as mediator, and Queen Victoria had not hesitated in exercising this role. The chapter also discusses the role of other government agencies under an uncodified constitution, including the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and the civil service.

Through a focus on the Saulteaux of the St. Peter’s settlement in western Canada, this chapter explores the mobilization of Queen Victoria by both the colonized and the colonizers in a series of “contact zones” over the nineteenth century. The Saulteaux confronted fur traders, missionaries, soldiers, settlers, and government officials, and in these encounters they produced, developed and honed a tradition of oratory that incorporated references to Victoria. They called on the monarch’s representatives to act with honour, justice, and integrity, and to defend them against settler pressure and oppression. Declarations of fealty to the Queen were accompanied by sharp criticism of the failure of her representatives to provide the just and humane treatment promised. In dialogues with Indigenous people, settler authorities represented Victoria as a benevolent maternal monarch, particularly at treaty negotiations where the equality and kinship ties of the parties was emphasized. Settlers also deployed the image of a compassionate Queen and her loyal Indigenous subjects as this was at the heart of the myth of Canada’s reputation as humane and benign colonizers.

In 1863, a group of thirteen Māori, led by Wesleyan lay preacher William Jenkins, arrived in England to present illustrated public lectures on New Zealand. This visit offers a rare and interesting insight into Māori and European encounter in the nineteenth century through the words of the protagonists themselves in the form of their surviving letters and diaries, coupled with a plethora of visual images. The tour culminated in an audience with Queen Victoria at Osborne House. In this particular encounter the “performance” of identity is aptly expressed through the medium of dress. The visit offers a unique view of not only how she observed them and how they saw her, but also more importantly, how they perceived themselves.