1837–1910: The Shadow of a Paternalistic Queenship

Abstract

The age of Victoria, especially in a book on a female monarch, has the potential to become that yet untraveled world whose margin fades forever and forever as one writes. Mercifully, the general outlines of both the history and the cultural climate of this period are essentially clear to the general public. My focus, therefore, is not upon the specifics of events that would parallel the Spanish Match, but rather upon characteristics of the era that gave rise to new venues for making and using images of Queen Elizabeth. Ironically, the most obvious point of comparison — two unmarried young women being crowned as queens regnant — is rendered largely unavailable by the circumstances of both the Hanoverian succession and Victoria’s own background. The Protestant Reformation, the militant Catholicism of Mary Tudor, the threat of England becoming an annex of Spain through that queen’s marriage to an heir to a foreign throne, even the undignified shadow cast over the House of Tudor by Henry VIII’s infamous search for the womb that he could fill to his will — all these circumstances constitute serious affairs of state on the stage that the problematic heir, Elizabeth, must enter. Furthermore, before she could claim the crown, Elizabeth had had to survive more political intrigue and theological hair-splitting than Victoria ever had occasion to read about, let alone experience.