The seminar takes place on 17 February 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The mid-Victorian artistic decoration of the Palace of Westminster, the home of UK Parliament, has long been understood as a fundamentally masculinised scheme. This ambitious art project was overseen by the Royal Commission on the Fine Arts (1841-1863), and was part of the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster after the 1834 fire.

The new interior in the Palace of Westminster offered an opportunity to promote British art and cultivate national political identity through carefully constructed imagery. My paper for the Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on 17 February demonstrates that female visual representation was a central concern of the commission.

The 1841-1863 Fine Arts Commission made a conscious effort to include and increase imagery of women throughout the Palace of Westminster’s principal chambers. In doing so, the commissioners conceptualised women as integral to the development of the British political constitution. Their choice of artworks also reflected Queen Victoria’s position as monarch, foregrounding women as religious and military leaders, and as channels and sometimes exercisers of political power.

CG

Dr Cara Gathern is a heritage professional with a PhD from the University of Brighton. She works as a Researcher and Curatorial Assistant for UK Parliament Heritage Collections, where she has an academic interest in the 19th-century scheme under the Commission of Fine Arts, and the 20th-century mosaics. Her Oxford DNB entry on Master Mosaicist Gertrude Martin was published in December 2024 and her journal article on early female contributions to Parliamentary art, co-authored with Caroline Babington, is due to be published in Women’s History Review in July 2026.

The seminar takes place on 17 February 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The 19^th century is traditionally seen as a key period of ‘democratisation’ in British politics. The reform acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884 vastly expanded the number of people who could vote in elections (with the glaring exception of women) and created a constituency system based on similarly sized electoral districts. By the end of the century, a recognisably modern and almost democratic voting system had emerged, underpinning the legitimacy and authority of the elected House of Commons. But where did all this leave the ‘other place’, the unelected and hereditary House of Lords?

The traditional assumption has been that as the electoral system ‘democratised’, so too the Commons became the superior body in Parliament. The constitutional stand-off between the two Houses over the reform bill in 1831-2 is widely seen as a pivotal moment in this process. Under the threat of new pro-reform peers being created, the Lords were eventually forced to surrender to the Commons and agree to pass the 1832 Reform Act. And with a new electoral system in place after 1832, which limited the former ability of many members of the Lords to control elections, the Commons now had an even greater claim to be dominant and implement its policies without opposition.

The leader of the Tory anti-reformers in the Lords, the Duke of Wellington, had little doubt about the significance of the Reform Act, famously declaring that it would ‘destroy the House of Lords’. The constitutional theorist Walter Bagehot, writing 30 years later, agreed, arguing that the Reform Act had fundamentally altered the ‘function’ of the Lords, effectively making it a temporary ‘revising’ or ‘suspending’ chamber. Writing in 1908 the legal expert Lawrence Lowell noted how the ‘Great’ Reform Act had drawn ‘attention to the fact that an hereditary body, however great the personal influence of its members, could never … be the equal … of a representative chamber’. Chris Ballinger in his recent magisterial work on the 20^th century Lords has also suggested that ‘the power of the Lords diminished throughout the nineteenth century’.

One problem with this narrative though is that it does not capture the whole story. One of the most striking features to emerge from our ongoing research on the post-1832 House of Commons is the continuing role of the Lords in actively shaping and even deciding many aspects of the political agenda. Some of this occurred behind the scenes, but there was also a significant amount in terms of policy and procedural initiatives that have been overlooked.

An assertive Lords

Only a few months after the first reformed election of 1832 returned a huge majority for the Whig-Liberals, for instance, the Lords successfully managed to block the Whig ministry’s controversial Irish Church ‘appropriation’ reforms, in what the Ultra-Tory Lord Ellenborough gleefully termed a ‘triumph’. Emboldened, they then went on to modify the terms of the bill to abolish slavery in favour of slaveowners, before proceeding to throw out major reforms granting the admission of Dissenters to Oxford and Cambridge Universities and allowing Jews to sit in Parliament. The Lords would continue to reject bills for Jewish emancipation – reforms that had passed the elected Commons – on another eight occasions before 1858.

The Lords became even more assertive after the 1835 election reduced the Whig government’s majority, rejecting or amending an all-time record number of Commons bills over the next two Parliaments. One of the most significant of these was the Whig ministry’s 1835 municipal corporations bill, replacing the old corporations that had governed English towns with newly elected town councils. Drawn up by the radical election agent Joseph Parkes, the bill that originally passed the Commons proposed abolishing all the freemen voters who had been admitted by the old corporations, despite their ‘ancient right’ privileges having been preserved under the terms of the 1832 Reform Act.

Latching on to this controversial clause, the Lords drastically amended the bill out of all recognition, arguing that disfranchising these freemen voters was not only grossly unfair, but a modification of the settlement of 1832 by stealth, which went way beyond the remit of a local council bill. Appalled by the attack on their ancient rights, freemen voters across the nation rallied behind the Lords’ amendments, in what became a popular and successful campaign. Sensing this was not the best issue on which to make a stand, the Whig leadership in the Commons reluctantly accepted most of the Lords’ changes, including the preservation of freemen voters. As Joseph Parkes later admitted, ‘we committed a great mistake in the bill. It was absurdly foolish … to attack the freemen … Nor was it exactly fair to attempt it through the municipal bill. We were clearly … causing unpopularity among a large class of the people’.

On this issue, as on many others that followed, the Lords had clearly managed to gauge and represent public opinion in a way that challenged the authority of the Commons. The results of the next general election seemed to vindicate their actions. In 1837 the Whig government’s majority was almost completely wiped out, with most freemen voters supporting anti-Whig candidates.

This notion of the House of Lords being able to articulate the ‘will of the people’ more accurately than the Commons is most famously associated with the extraordinary theories developed later in the 19^th century by the 3^rd Marquess of Salisbury. The leader of the Conservatives in the Lords from 1881-1902, and three times Conservative prime minister, Salisbury did more than anyone else to fashion a ‘doctrine’ of the Lords being a genuinely representative assembly, untainted by party diktats and the ‘demagoguery’ of election cycles. As Salisbury put it in June 1869:

We must try to impress upon the country the fact that, [just] because we are not an elective House, we are not a bit less a representative House … It may be that the House of Commons in determining the opinion of the nation is wrong; and … does not represent the full … convictions of the nation.

After 1885 Salisbury and other Tory peers even began to suggest that owing to the representative deficiencies of the new first-past-the-post system – a system which ironically Salisbury himself had helped to implement in 1885 – the Lords could be a better interpreter of public feeling than the Commons, with its ‘crude’ non-proportional election system based on simple ‘bare majorities’.

The most striking example of Salisbury’s ‘doctrine’ in action was the Lords’ rejection of Gladstone’s second Irish Home Rule bill by 419 votes to 41 in 1893, incidentally the largest Lords vote of the century. Salisbury insisted that Irish Home Rule had not been sufficiently mandated at the previous general election and needed clearer national support, as part of what became known as his ‘referendal theory’. In 1894 the Lords threw out other Commons bills on similar grounds, dealing with employers’ liabilities and arbitration for evicted Irish tenants. The result of the 1895 general election then rewarded Salisbury and the Conservative-Unionists with a substantial majority, seemingly vindicating Salisbury’s claims about the Lords being more representative than the Commons and the ‘conscience of the nation’.

Opposition to the Lords

Not everyone accepted the idea that the Lords enjoyed this representative function. The Lords’ steady rejection of bills approved by the Commons – whether it was the civil and religious reforms of the 1830s, financial measures such as the repeal of paper duties in the 1860s, military reforms in the 1870s, electoral reforms in the 1880s, and almost every bill relating to Ireland – triggered regular calls for reform of the Lords in the popular press, on the hustings and eventually in the Commons itself.

Earlier demands for change in the mid-1830s by radicals such as George Grote and John Roebuck and the Irish agitator Daniel O’Connell included plans to replace all hereditary peers with elected delegates, and to deprive the Lords of their ability to completely reject bills. Removing the bishops also became a standard demand. These under-studied proposals, many of which resemble today’s arguments, provided a field-day for satirists but rarely made it to the floor of the Commons, let alone a vote.

By the 1850s, however, a number of leading Whigs and Liberals had also begun to contemplate changes to the Upper House. Faced with likely opposition in the Lords on major policies such the repeal of navigation laws, for example, the prime minister Lord John Russell repeatedly considered introducing life peerages for distinguished men from outside the Commons, only to be dissuaded by his Cabinet warning that this could lead to the ‘packing’ of the Lords by the government of the day, again a familiar modern argument. In the end Russell, like other party leaders, was forced to fall back on the use of ‘proxy votes’ – voting rights transferred by absent peers to other Lords – to get his government’s agenda through. The abolition of these proxies in 1868 by a standing order undoubtedly made it more difficult for some later governments to manage the Lords, increasing the calls for reform.

In 1856 a solitary ‘trial’ life peerage was eventually created with the approval of the Queen, to bolster the legal expertise available to Palmerston’s government. Sir James Parke, a noted jurist, was ennobled as Baron Wensleydale. When it came to it, however, the Lords refused to let him take his seat, arguing that his life peerage would dilute the hereditary honour of the House and establish a dangerous precedent. Wensleydale was quickly upgraded to a hereditary peerage. It would not be until 1876 that two senior judges were admitted to the Lords on a temporary basis, and not until 1887 that these new ‘law lords’ were then made into peers for life.

More substantive proposals for Lords reform eventually emerged in the last two decades of the 19^th century, against the backdrop of Salisbury’s increasingly bold assertions about the Lords’ representative mandate. In 1884, 1886 and 1888 the radical MP Henry Labouchere introduced motions to abolish the Lords, each time increasing his Commons support. In 1894 he won a vote in the Commons calling for the removal of the Lords’ ability to reject bills. No legislation was prepared, however, before the 1895 election brought Salisbury back into power.

Meanwhile in the Lords itself the future Liberal leader Lord Rosebery moved for a committee to look at life peerages and restrictions on hereditary peers in 1884. Four years later he proposed bringing in elections for a limited number of hereditary peers, who would serve a fixed term, and life peerages for delegates representing local councils and some overseas colonies. None of these initiatives was successful. The idea of life peerages, and making hereditary peers undertake some form of public service before they qualified to sit, was later taken up by a group of young, dashing aristocratic MPs in the Commons, famously led by the Liberal Unionist William Palmer and the Conservative George Curzon (later viceroy of India and leader of the House of Lords). As their campaign showed, by the 1890s even some Conservative-Unionists were also beginning to advocate change, not to restrict the Lords’ powers – the policy increasingly favoured by most Liberals and the National Liberal Federation – but instead to enhance the Lords’ legitimacy and authority.

Why wasn’t the Lords reformed during the 19^th century?

This takes us back to the question of why the Lords, unlike the Commons, avoided being constitutionally reformed during the 19^th century? The traditional argument that the Lords adopted a more submissive role following the 1832 Reform Act, accepting the superior status of the Commons, is clearly not the answer. Both in terms of the number of bills the Lords blocked or amended after 1832, and in terms of developing its own distinct claim to reflect the will of the nation, it remained a highly assertive and influential body. The number of public petitions that continued to be sent to the Lords provides yet another indicator of its importance as a national forum for drawing parliamentary attention to all sorts of political causes, and as a useful arbiter of local grievances.

Linked to this, the Lords also performed a crucial but much overlooked role in managing private legislation. The latest edition of How Parliament Works notes that the ‘vast majority’ of laws passed by Parliament ‘and by far the more important, are public’. Throughout the 19^th century, however, exactly the opposite was true. Not only did ‘private’ acts of Parliament (not to be confused with private members’ bills) completely transform the physical environment and create Britain’s modern infrastructure – legalising the construction of railways, canals, tramways, docks, sewers, roads, bridges, museums, parks, and essential utilities such as water, gas and electricity (to name but a few) – but they also outnumbered ‘public’ acts by a factor of more than two to one well into the 20th century. The sheer volume of private bill work undertaken by the Lords, particularly from the 1840s, eventually forced them to develop new, streamlined legislative procedures, many of which went on to be copied or adapted by the Commons and transferred to the handling of public business as well.

The fact that so many prime ministers sat in the Lords rather than in the Commons also helped to bolster its status and legitimacy. Over half the twenty prime ministers of the 19th century, including the two longest serving (Liverpool and Salisbury), formed their governments as peers, while two more (Russell and Disraeli) started out in the Commons but later served as premier in the upper house. For just over half the entire nineteenth century, the government was led by a prime minister sitting in the Lords. 

Underpinning this, rather than being separate or even rival institutions, as is sometimes assumed, the Victorian Commons and Lords were deeply integrated in terms of their practical business, politics and personnel. Family ties and patronage networks ensured a very close working relationship between members of both Houses, with many MPs either succeeding or being promoted to peerages. Behind the scenes, both the membership of the Lords and the Commons also began to adapt, reflecting new types of wealth associated with industrialisation and the professions such as banking and commerce. Over 40% of the new peers created after 1882 were from non-landed backgrounds.

Most significant of all, the Lords certainly didn’t oppose every progressive measure sent up from the Commons, instead passing many reforms that are now viewed as key milestones in Britain’s political development. It granted Dissenters equal civil rights in 1828, finally agreed to pass Catholic emancipation in 1829 and allowed the Catholic college of Maynooth to be state funded in 1845, despite so many Lords (and bishops) being staunchly Protestant Anglicans.

In 1846 the Lords even backed Peel’s highly controversial repeal of the corn laws, despite its membership being overwhelmingly landed and major beneficiaries of agricultural protection. Significantly, the rebellion of the Conservative party on this issue against Peel was actually lower in the Lords than it was in the Commons. In 1867, despite huge misgivings, the Lords also agreed to pass Disraeli’s second Reform Act, the greatest extension of voting rights of the 19^th century, only eclipsed in its scope by the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

The fact that it was Tory / Conservative governments that proposed so many of these major reforms of the 19^th century clearly helped to reduce the number of conflicts between the two Houses during this period. Despite years of Liberal peerage creations, the Lords always remained a Tory chamber, with Liberal membership peaking at 40% in 1880. The dominance of the Tory peers combined with their loyalty to party – ironically the very thing that Salisbury liked to criticise the Commons for – ensured that most Tory bills, even highly controversial ones, nearly always passed the Lords.

This partisan bias of the House of Lords is of course often viewed as the cause of its undoing in the early 20^th century, when its veto over legislation was finally reduced to a delaying power of two years by the 1911 Parliament Act. But for most of the 19^th century this same partisan Tory bias also helped the Lords to survive. For as long as Conservative ministries continued to enact progressive reforms in the national interest, the number of dramatic ‘peers versus people’ moments remained limited, keeping the Lords on the right side of history.

PS

Further reading:

A. Adonis, Making aristocracy work: the peerage and the political system in Britain 1884-1914 (1993)

C. Ballinger, The House of Lords 1911-2011 (2012)

R. Davis, A political history of the House of Lords 1811-1846 (2008)

R. Davis (ed.), Lords of Parliament. Studies, 1714-1914 (1995)

R. Davis (ed.), Leaders in the Lords 1765-1902 (2003)

R. Davis, ‘Wellington, Peel and the House of Lords in the 1840s’, in C. Jones, P. Salmon & R. Davis (eds.), Partisan politics, principle and reform in Parliament and the constituencies, 1689-1880 (2005), 164-82

R. Davis, ‘House of Lords, 1801-1911’, in C. Jones (ed.), A Short History of Parliament (2009), 193-210

J. Hogan, ‘Party management in the House of Lords, 1846-1865’, Parliamentary History (1991), x. 124-50

D. Large, ‘The decline of the “party of the crown” and the rise of parties in the House of Lords, 1783-1837’, English Historical Review (1963), lxxviii. 669-95

G. Le May, The Victorian Constitution (1979), 127-51

Lord Longford, A history of the House of Lords (1988)

A. Lowell, The government of England (1908), i. 394-422

P. Salmon, ‘Parliament’, in D. Brown et al (eds.), The Oxford handbook of Modern British political history, 1800-2000 (2018), 83-102

E. A. Smith, The House of Lords in British Politics and Society 1815-1911 (1992)

R. Smith (ed.), The House of Lords: a thousand years of British tradition (1994)

A. Turberville, ‘The House of Lords and the Advent of Democracy, 1837-67’, History (1944), xxix. 152-83

C. Comstock Weston, The House of Lords and ideological politics. Lord Salisbury’s referendal theory and the Conservative party, 1846-1922 (1995)

C. Comstock Weston, ‘Salisbury and the Lords, 1868-1895’, Historical Journal (1982), xxv. 103-29

Like the impending coronation of King Charles III, the coronation of Queen Victoria took place in the year after her accession to the throne. The ceremony was held at Westminster Abbey on 28 June 1838. Naturally this major national event was attended by members of both Houses of Parliament. Although it was members of the House of Lords who performed key roles in the ceremony, with peers paying homage to the new queen, MPs also had a privileged view of proceedings, with two of the three galleries above the altar being reserved for them. (The third gallery housed the trumpeters of the orchestra.)

On the morning of the coronation around 500 MPs assembled in the Commons chamber. One newspaper report recorded that

Some excellent scenes took place on the entrance of Members noted for carelessness in their dress on ordinary occasions, but who appeared upon this instance in splendid attire. Mr Fector and Mr Campbell, the former of whom wore a peach-coloured velvet Court dress, while the latter was attired in the plaid of his clan, were assailed with loud cries of Hear, hear, and as they advanced up the House, the assembly of the first gentlemen in the world stood up, and with one accord shouted their acclamation.

John Fector was the House’s newest member, having been re-elected for Maidstone at a by-election less than two weeks earlier. After prayers, the Speaker announced that there would be a ballot to determine the order in which MPs would take their seats in the Abbey, and the names of counties were drawn from a glass by the Clerk of the House. The representatives of those counties and of the boroughs which lay within them then left the House in turn, the Irish county of Meath being the first to be drawn.

The need to dress appropriately meant that Fector’s fellow Conservative MP for Maidstone, Benjamin Disraeli, had initially decided against attending, writing to his sister that

I must give up on going to the coronation, as we go in state, and all the M.P.s. must be in court dresses or uniforms. As I have withstood making a costume of this kind for other purposes, I will not make one now, and console myself by the conviction that to get up very early (eight o’clock), to sit dressed like a flunky in the Abbey for seven or eight hours, and to listen to a sermon by the Bishop of London, can be no great enjoyment.

However, Disraeli changed his mind, writing on 29 June that

I went to the coronation after all. I did not get a dress till 2.30 on the morning of the ceremony, but it fitted me very well. It turned out that I had a very fine leg, which I never knew before! The pageant within the Abbey was without exception the most splendid, various, and interesting affair at which I ever was present… I had one of the best seats in the Abbey, indeed our House had the best of everything… The Queen looked very well, and performed her part with great grace and completeness, which cannot in general be said of the other performers; they were always in doubt as to what came next, and you saw the want of rehearsal.

He noted that the Duke of Wellington ‘was loudly cheered when he made his homage’, but was disdainful of the performance of the Whig Prime Minister, Viscount Melbourne, who ‘looked very awkward and uncouth, with his coronet cocked over his nose, his robes under his feet, and holding the great sword of state like a butcher’. Disraeli also commented on Fector’s ‘gorgeous dress’ and the fact that the Irish parliamentary leader, Daniel O’Connell, had bowed to convention and ‘looked very well’ in his court dress, although he was ‘hooted greatly… by the mob’. The Radical MP Joseph Hume refused to wear court dress, and was therefore prevented from sitting in the gallery reserved for MPs, but found a place elsewhere in the Abbey. A month later, motivated by his customary desire for retrenchment, Hume asked questions in the Commons about the expense of the coronation.

Also present at the coronation was another figure who, like Disraeli, would become a major political force during Queen Victoria’s reign: William Gladstone. The coronation took place on his sister Helen’s birthday. Unlike Disraeli’s gossipy account to his sister, Gladstone’s diary entry recorded tersely that ‘The service is noble. The sight magnificent’. After attending at the Abbey, he went to the Carlton Club to see the coronation procession, and then to Bath House to see the fireworks, before returning home at 1:30 a.m.

Disraeli and Gladstone were certainly not alone in enjoying the coronation festivities. It was thus perhaps hardly surprising that when the Commons met the following day at 4 p.m., it was found to be inquorate, and the Speaker duly adjourned the House.

K.R.

This post was originally published on the Victorian Commons website.

Read more blogs from our coronation series here.

Here Dr Kathryn Rix, Assistant Editor of our Commons 1832-1868 project and voice behind the VictCommons twitter page, explores Queen Victoria’s approach to parliamentary ceremony…

On 17 July 1837, less than a month after becoming Britain’s first reigning queen in over a century, Queen Victoria visited Westminster to prorogue Parliament. She had been persuaded by the Whig ministry to perform this duty in person, rather than delegating it to commissioners. The presence of the youthful new monarch generated widespread interest, with an unprecedented number of applications for tickets to view the ceremony. The St. James’s Chronicle recorded that ‘at an early hour all the avenues leading to the galleries of the House of Lords were crowded with ladies, anxiously awaiting the hour for admission’. In contrast with the limited facilities usually provided for women to access parliamentary proceedings, this was an occasion on which there was a strong female presence; indeed the number of peeresses within the Lords chamber was such that ‘it was not without difficulty that many of their lordships procured seats’.

This chamber had undergone some hasty renovations ahead of the prorogation. Since the catastrophic fire of October 1834, which destroyed much of the old Palace of Westminster, the peers had been using the Painted Chamber, having surrendered their previous chamber for the temporary accommodation of the House of Commons. The diarist Charles Greville considered the temporary home of the Lords a ‘wretched dog-hole’ in comparison with the ‘very spacious and convenient’ temporary chamber occupied by MPs. The changes made in preparation for Victoria’s visit included fitting ‘a new door under the archway’ in place of ‘the old wooden planks that hitherto blocked up the entrance’, raising the level of the floor between this entrance and the throne, and replacing the previous temporary throne with ‘a splendid new one, with the words “Victoria Regina” in gold letters, surmounted with the Royal arms, also in gold’. However, the canopy behind the throne, bearing the initials ‘W.R.’, was unaltered.

As Victoria had not yet been crowned, the imperial crown was ‘borne at her side, on a cushion’, by the Duke of Somerset, while she wore ‘a circlet, or open crown, of diamonds’. She read the prorogation speech in ‘a clear and musical voice, that was heard distinctly in the parts of the house most remote from the throne’. Victoria recorded that she had ‘felt somewhat (but very little) nervous before I read my speech, but it did very well, and I was happy to hear people were satisfied’. One press report noted that ‘her spirits were evidently improved’ as she left the House, ‘and there was an elasticity in her manner that showed the removal of a heavy anxiety’.

Among the subjects referred to in her speech – drafted for her by the prime minister Viscount Melbourne in discussion with his Cabinet, but subject to the queen’s approval – were recent amendments to the criminal code, notably the removal of the death penalty for a number of offences. In expressing ‘peculiar interest’ in these reforms as ‘an auspicious commencement of my reign’, Victoria identified herself with the qualities of justice and mercy with which female rulers were often popularly associated.

Parliament was dissolved on the same day as the prorogation, and a general election took place that summer, returning Melbourne’s Whig ministry to power. Victoria appeared at Westminster for the second time that year for the state opening of Parliament on 20 November 1837. Whereas the ladies present had still been in mourning dress for the prorogation, for the state opening they wore ‘silks and velvets, of all hues of the rainbow’. The parliamentary reporter James Grant recorded that the demand for seats was so great that some of them ‘took forcible possession of the front seat in the gallery’, usually reserved for ‘the gentlemen of the press’, with the result that only three reporters were able to find seats.

It was not only the peeresses who were keen to witness proceedings. When MPs were summoned to attend by Black Rod, there was a great rush along the narrow corridors from the temporary Commons chamber into their allotted space in the Lords, and ‘two or three Members … were thrown down and trampled’. The jostling for position, during which MPs ‘squeezed each other, jammed each other’ and ‘trod on each other’s gouty toes’, according to Grant, was so rough that one of the members for Sheffield, Henry Ward, dislocated his shoulder ‘in the violent competition to be first at the bar’. In contrast with this fracas, there was ‘the most perfect stillness’ in the chamber while Victoria read her speech.

Victoria continued to open and prorogue Parliament in person throughout the late 1830s and 1840s, being absent on only a handful of occasions, mostly when she was pregnant. There were, however, various changes to the setting of these ceremonies during this period. After an initial dispute about Prince Albert’s role in proceedings following their marriage in 1840, he rode in the carriage alongside her to Westminster and had his own chair in the temporary Lords chamber and its successor. From 1842 a seat was also provided for the infant Prince of Wales.

On 14 April 1847, Victoria and Albert were given a tour of the new House of Lords chamber by its architect Charles Barry. This was used for the first time by the peers the following day. The queen’s verdict was that ‘the building is indeed magnificent … very elaborate & gorgeous. Perhaps there is a little too much brass & gold in the decorations, but the whole effect is very dignified & fine’. The lavish throne designed by Barry in collaboration with Augustus Pugin was the key feature of the new chamber, and was far grander than its predecessors in the old Palace or the temporary Lords.

The queen prorogued Parliament in the new Lords chamber for the first time on 23 July 1847, but it was not until February 1852 that she was able to use the full processional route designed by Barry with the aim of putting royal ceremonial centre stage within the new Palace of Westminster. Entering through the covered entrance under the Victoria Tower (named in her honour), the queen then ascended the Royal Staircase to the Norman Porch. From there she went to the Robing Room, and then walked in procession through the Royal Gallery to the House of Lords.

In 1854 Victoria prorogued Parliament in person for the last time, apparently because she disliked sitting through the Speaker’s end of session summary, which she felt was like ‘receiving instructions in public’. However, she continued to perform her duties at the state opening until 1861, missing it only four times between her accession and Albert’s death that year. Her husband’s demise prompted a shift in her involvement with parliamentary ceremonial. She did not attend again for several years, explaining to Lord Russell in 1864 that she ‘was always terribly nervous on all public occasions, but especially at the opening of Parliament, which … she dreaded for days before’, but had at least previously had ‘the support of her dear husband’.

However, in 1866 an impending parliamentary vote on a £30,000 dowry for her daughter Princess Helena helped to persuade Victoria out of her seclusion. In contrast with the diamonds and bright ceremonial robes she had worn at Westminster at the beginning of her reign, she opened Parliament in 1866 dressed in black, with a widow’s cap and a long veil, and delegated the duty of reading the queen’s speech to the lord chancellor. The new Palace of Westminster, which put the monarchy to the fore in its layout, its decoration and its symbolism, only hosted the queen for the state opening on six further occasions during the rest of her reign: 1867, 1871, 1876 – when the ‘throng’ of MPs from the Commons to the Lords to see the queen was ‘so tumultuous, and so violent’ that the prime minister Benjamin Disraeli was nearly trampled on while trying to keep the Speaker safe, – 1877, 1880 and, finally, in 1886.

K R

Further reading:

W. Arnstein, ‘Queen Victoria opens Parliament: the disinvention of tradition’, Historical Research, 63 (1990), 178-94

J. Grant, Random recollections of the Lords and Commons (2 vols., 1838), i. 9-26

H. C. G. Matthew & K. D. Reynolds, ‘Victoria (1819-1901), queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and empress of India’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

C. Riding & J. Riding (eds.), The Houses of Parliament. History, Art, Architecture (2000)

C. Shenton, Mr Barry’s War (2016)

M. Taylor, ‘The bicentenary of Queen Victoria’, Journal of British Studies, 59 (2020), 121-35

A. Wedgwood, ‘The throne in the House of Lords and its setting’, Architectural History, 27 (1984), 59-73

Follow the work of the Commons 1832-1868 project at the Victorian Commons blog site.

Two events this May 2019 provide an interesting light on the history of the royal succession. We are expecting (or may just have seen) the birth of the first child of the duke and duchess of Sussex. This further secures the succession to the crown down to the generation of the queen’s great-grandchildren. British history, though, shows that a smooth succession, with numerous candidates waiting in reserve, should never be taken for granted. For example, this month we also celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Queen Victoria, on 24 May 1819. The birth of this symbol of the security and longevity of the British monarchy was actually the result of a major succession crisis.

Despite his own prolificacy, for much of George III’s reign only one of his seven sons, the eldest, George, Prince of Wales, fathered a legitimate child. Princess Charlotte was born on 7 January 1796 and for over 20 years she was the only heir in the next generation, with the responsibility to take the Hanoverian dynasty further into the 19th century. The deaths in child-bed in November 1817 of both the princess and her stillborn son were seen as a national catastrophe. Suddenly, intense pressure was placed on the royal dukes, to produce heirs, or, as Peter Pindar put it more poetically:

Agog are all, both old and young
Warm’d with desire to be prolific
And prompt with resolution strong
to fight in Hymen’s war terrific.

However almost all the dukes were involved in domestic arrangements which acted against their producing another legitimate heir. The two eldest, George, Prince Regent from 1811, and Frederick, duke of York and Albany, and the fifth, Ernest August, duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, were already in childless marriages. The marriage of the sixth son, Ernest Augustus, duke of Sussex, had been annulled in 1794 as it was in contravention of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, and his two children were ineligible for the succession.

Attention turned to two of the middle sons, who had entered into unmarried unions with partners who similarly would never have received the paternal approval required by the Act. From 1791 the third son, William, duke of Clarence and St Andrews, had lived with an Irish actress, Dorothea Philips (better known by her stage name ‘Mrs Jordan’) with whom he had ten children. Clarence separated from her in 1811, as Parliament would not grant him an increased pension unless he married. He made unsuccessful proposals, but at the crisis of 1817, ‘Mrs Jordan’ was dead, and he was still unmarried. His next brother Edward, duke of Kent and Strathearn, was in an equally difficult position. In 1791 he had been sent to lead the forces in the British territories in Canada. There he met Madame Alphonsine Thérèse Bernardine Julie de Montgenet de St Laurent, who, as ‘Madame de St Laurent’, remained his companion for almost 30 years. The union was childless, but happy, and he found it painful consigning the Roman Catholic Madame de St Laurent to a convent when dynastic duty called. Adolphus, duke of Cambridge, the youngest brother, pipped his elders to the post, as on 1 June 1818, aged 44, he married the 21-year-old Princess Augusta of Hesse. She had originally been intended for Clarence, but in his mid-50s and with nine surviving ‘Fitzclarence’ children in tow, he was at last able to secure the 25-year-old Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen instead. The age difference was not so extreme in Kent’s marriage. Only 19 years separated him from the 31-year-old Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, sister of Princess Charlotte’s widower Prince Leopold. Clarence and Kent were both married to their German princesses on the same day, 11 July 1818.

Immediately, the somewhat indecorous race to produce an heir commenced. Within a week in March 1819, barely nine months after the marriage celebrations, a daughter was born to Clarence and a son to Cambridge. Clarence’s daughter died a few hours after birth, and Cambridge’s son George was for a few weeks the only representative of the next generation in the line of succession. However, in the space of three days in late May, Cambridge’s elder brothers ruined Prince George’s chance of ascending the throne. First, on 24 May 1819 Kent’s wife gave birth to a daughter, named Alexandrina Victoria, and three days later, a son was born to Cumberland. Kent’s daughter was at birth fifth in the line of succession, but during her first two years her status changed several times. Important life events among George III’s family appear to have often come in close proximity – deaths as well as births. On 23 January 1820, the duke of Kent died of a sudden cold, followed six days later by the demise of George III himself. Alexandrina Victoria was suddenly third in the line of succession after York and Clarence. Clarence continued to try to secure the succession for his own line, but of his wife’s further four pregnancies, all were either stillborn or lived only a few weeks. The death of York in January 1827, promoted Alexandrina Victoria to second in the line of succession, and she ascended the throne as Queen Victoria (dropping the Alexandrina) at the death of her uncle William IV on 20 June 1837.

Queen Victoria, for many people the iconic British monarch, did not have an obvious route to the throne. She was female, the 18-year-old daughter of the largely undistinguished fourth son of the king, and was not even the eldest among the three surviving legitimate grandchildren of George III. Had Salic Law been in force her uncle Cumberland would have been king of Britain, as he was from 1837 of Hanover. The reactionary Cumberland had long been widely unpopular in Britain for his ultra-Tory views, which he often expressed in the House of Lords. What would 19th-century Britain have been like if the elderly Cumberland  had sat on the throne instead of the young Victoria, joined by the liberal Prince Albert? As we celebrate the birth of the duke and duchess of Sussex’s child and prepare to commemorate the bicentenary of the birth of Queen Victoria, it is salutary to ponder on the important, and sometimes decisive, roles younger brothers can play.

CGDL

Further reading:

Roger Fulford, Royal Dukes: the father and uncles of Queen Victoria (rev. edn. 1973)

Mollie Gillen, The Prince and his Lady: The Love Story of the Duke of Kent and Madame de St Laurent (1970)

Alan Palmer, Crowned cousins: the Anglo-German royal connection (1985)

Elizabeth Longford, Victoria R. I. (1964)

Philip Ziegler, William IV (1973)

In 1863 Queen Victoria refused to open parliament, citing her ‘total inability…to perform these functions of her high position which are accompanied by state ceremonials, and which necessitate the appearance in full dress in public’.  Fortunately, the only comparison that can be made with today’s State Opening was the absence of the Imperial Crown and its associated regalia – the ‘full dress’ to which Victoria referred. Today’s ‘dressed down’ ceremony will lack much of the grandeur of previous state openings, a result of the snap election. This is the first time in 43 years that the normal ceremonial programme will be altered, the last, ironically, also a result of an unexpected general election. For, as wonderful as it is to witness the spectacle and splendour of a full State Opening, the event is a well-oiled machine: reliant on the seamless interaction of all those involved, managed only through meticulous planning and relentless rehearsals. With the State Opening falling days after Trooping the Colour it was deemed logistically impossible to accommodate both ceremonies of state.

Today’s ceremony was delayed further, after it emerged on the 12th June that the Queen’s Speech, printed on goatskin paper, would take days to dry, thus pushing the original date of the 19th back to the 21st June. It made for a great story, sadly, the image of a piece of paper more akin to medieval velum than our more common A4 plain white sheet, was wrong. The name instead referring to a special archival paper, said to last 500 years, which due to its thickness does take longer for print to dry. Whilst it captured the public’s imagination, it merely served as a cover for the broader issue: a Queen’s Speech hadn’t been written because the terms of the confidence and supply agreement, between the Conservatives and the DUP, were unconfirmed.

The State Opening of Parliament – an occasion steeped in tradition, ritual and ceremony, but sadly lacking in any paper made from goatskin – is one of the only occasions within the political calendar where the three parts of the parliamentary Trinity (Queen, Lords and Commons) come together, and for this reason, it remains a unique occasion. The pomp and circumstance accompanies the day often obscures the event’s main purpose: to hear the Queen’s Speech and hear the Government’s aspirations for this parliamentary term.

Parliaments have, broadly speaking, been opened in the same way since 1852, when the new Palace of Westminster was completed. The choreographed manner in which history, ceremony, ritual, and drama are seamlessly blended is, therefore, an invention of the Victorians. At a time when the future of the monarchy was uncertain a systematic programme of rejuvenating the ceremonial of state was undertaken in order to increase the broader appeal of royalty (expertly explored in David Cannadine’s essay listed below). Victoria, it is said, felt uncomfortable with the performative elements of monarchy that were being thrust upon her. Prominent ministers, such as Gladstone, realised the greater social importance for both the wellbeing of the country and stability of the throne. When possible, he would remind her of the ‘vast importance’ of the ‘social and visible functions of the monarchy’. In many ways, the ceremonial duties that the monarch undertakes today fulfil the same social function. State occasions serve as moments that induce patriotic fervour, uniting members of the public whilst, at the same time, confirming the hierarchal foundations of the establishment.

The current composition of the state opening can be dated back to 1852, but many of its elements have much older origins. Acts of pageantry and state theatre predate the Victorians. Charles Farris has traced the robes worn by peers, along with the robes of the monarch, back to the medieval period. The involvement of Black Rod dates back to the Civil War and the famous five members’ case. Lastly, Jason Peacey has demonstrated that the act of royal procession, in the context of The State Opening of Parliament, has seventeenth-century roots.

The State Opening of Parliament, therefore, serves as a good example of the manner in which history can be appropriated and repurposed within a ceremonial context. Acts of ritual do not need to draw from the same historical moments. In fact, it could be argued that this is one of their virtues: the ability to piece unconnected moments of history together in such a way to engender a sense of patriotic nostalgia. However, within this context, the history that the State Opening of Parliament evokes and re-enacts, is less of the establishment, but rather of dissidence and protest.

Much of the parliamentary proceedings of the State Opening revolve around Black Rod making his way from the Lord’s chamber to the Commons. As he approaches the Commons’ chamber, he is greeted by having its doors firmly slammed in his face. Using the rod, he deliberately knocks three times on the door (a physical indentation is left from this tradition), before it is opened. The office of Black Rod dates back to medieval times. However, the important ceremonial function that Black Rod undertakes during the state opening of parliament, dates back to January, 1642, and the attempted arrest of the Five Members. Set within the context of the Long Parliament and wider parliamentary struggles – that would ultimately lead to Civil War – Charles I, accompanied by armed soldiers, burst into the House of Commons and attempted to arrest five MPs. The King was ultimately unsuccessful. Realising his error Charles fled to Oxford. His actions were considered to be an abuse of his monarchical authority and proved to be the catalyst for the first Civil War.

The act of slamming the door in Black Rod’s face is used to signify the independence of the House of Commons from that of the Lords and Crown. Black Rod, in this context the monarch’s representative, can only enter the Commons’ chamber because they have been granted access. The Five Members case, and the tradition of Black Rod that has emerged from it, is, in its simplest form, an act of dissidence. The Commons visibly demonstrate both their independence from, and rejection of, the authority of the monarch within their chamber.

Once Black Rod has invited the Commons to the House of Lords to hear the Queen’s speech, its members are in no rush to get to the other side of the palace. Although not widely talked about or acknowledged, members of the Commons take as long as possible to make their way to the Lords, sharing in jokes with each other along the way. This is once again an action of dissent. They do not hurry because they would like to demonstrate they are not members of the inferior house. This is an unspoken truth, mainly because of its potential political ramifications and a broader lack of respect towards the monarch. However, unspoken as it might be, it nonetheless forms an integral part of the ceremony.

It is easy to assume that state ceremonies merely support and reinforce the establishment. In many ways this is exactly what they are, and indeed do. As has been briefly demonstrated traditions and ceremonies of state, by very virtue of their invented and choreographed nature, can fold historical moments of dissent and protest into much broader narratives of the establishment. Magna Carta, and its sealing in 1215, serves as another poignant reminder of the state’s ability to appropriate an act of dissent to its advantage. In both instances these moments of dissent have been valued because ultimately they have been viewed as morally triumphant. Unspoken or not, moments such as these serve to remind us of an often uncomfortable relationship that exists between our democratic heritage and the institution of the monarchy.

SF

Further Reading:

• Peacey, J., ‘The Street Theatre of State: The Ceremonial Opening of Parliament, 1603-60’, Parliamentary History, 34: 1 (2015), pp. 155-172
• Cannadine, David, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”’, c.1820-1977) in Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition
• BBC clip, ‘Black Rod’, available here