A New Reign

This chapter sets out the religious expectations on Victoria at her accession in 1837—a blend of the new and the old. While she inherited her dynasty’s commitments to the maintenance of Protestantism and the established church, she was also subject to the new emotional intensity with which religious people regarded their monarchs. The chapter’s survey of religious responses to the deaths of Victoria’s immediate predecessors illustrates how this intensity took hold. It argues that reactions to Victoria’s coronation and to early assassination attempts against her show that she remained, in the eyes of her new subjects, not just a moving, but also a sacral, providential figure. If, in these ways, Victoria was the last Hanoverian, then she quickly distanced herself from the political Protestantism of her predecessors.

The Supreme Head

This chapter discusses Victoria’s deeply fractious relationship with the Church of England. She came to the throne determined not just to maintain but also to reform the Church by promoting the liberal clergy who could make it a more charitable and representative institution. Resistance to the royal promotion of liberalism from Tractarians and Ritualists who loathed Protestantism and Erastianism—state meddling in spiritual matters—made her increasingly aggressive in her determination to broaden the Church, as she pressed for legislation to stamp out liturgical experiments which hinted at a hankering after the spiritual authority of the Church of Rome. Victoria’s feeling that she could defend the Church by making it more representative of the Protestant nation not only set her against high church people, but blinded her to the principled objections that many Protestant Dissenters nursed to its establishment. Her alarmed response to their talk of disestablishment, especially in Wales, further narrowed Victoria’s understanding of liberalism.

A Completed Life

This chapter examines the global topography of religious emotion created by Victoria’s death and funeral, one which was thickly studded with church spires. It begins with the efforts to create a moving liturgy for Victoria after her death, showing that while her funeral was centred on London and Windsor Castle, it served as the template for memorial services around the world. It demonstrates that Christian clergy were impresarios of the emotions they unleashed, showing how they confidently used grief at Victoria’s death to celebrate national and imperial solidarities. The next section goes beyond the imperial rhetoric of the ‘Great White Mother’, supposedly universally mourned by natives, to argue that representatives of world religions voiced reverence for her as a tactical way of establishing their claims to greater consideration in her Christian but also cosmopolitan Empire. The chapter ends with a summary of the book’s key findings.

Oecumenic Colonial Carnivals

Although historians have long recognized the importance of Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees as occasions that strengthened articulations of imperial ideology, they have not always been understood as distinctively religious events. This chapter begins by tracing the growing expectation that Victoria should become the centre of national religious occasions, which ran against her wishes but proved impossible to deny. It then moves on to discuss the ways in which, with the telling exception of Irish Roman Catholics, different Christian denominations celebrated enthusiastically but distinctively during the Jubilees. It shows how Jubilee sermons constructed Victoria as a godly sovereign and called for a restoration of the British Empire’s Christian ideals. The chapter also argues, though, that the meaning of the Jubilees cannot be reduced to Christian chauvinism. The homages of Jews, Hindus, and Muslims were not merely sycophantic acts of imitation, but attempts to align Victoria with their distinctive religious positions and the hopes they held of Empire.

Disunited Kingdom

This chapter assesses Victoria’s efforts to cope with the religious diversity of the United Kingdom. Although Victoria’s admiration for the Church of Scotland, which was centred on the Highlands and a small circle of eloquent preachers, made her a biased participant in disputes over its established status, impressions of Victoria’s Presbyterian sympathies sank deep in Scotland and around the Empire. Victoria had hoped to commend herself to the Irish as she had to the Scots, by paying respect to their different kind of national faith, but the chapter shows that her estrangement from Irish Roman Catholics mounted with her reluctance to cross the Irish Sea. Though increasingly appreciative of Roman Catholicism as she encountered it during travel or in the lives of friends and relatives, and friendly towards popes, who she hoped might bring the Irish hierarchy to heel, Victoria could not translate these affinities into a constructive relationship with Catholic Ireland.

Meine zweite Heimat

This chapter argues that Victoria’s marriage to Albert instilled in her a Protestant identification with the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and with German Lutherans. Although Coburgers could be flexible about Protestantism when it came to making dynastic alliances, Victoria and Albert nonetheless regarded marriage as a medium through which they could build religious and political affinities between Britain and Protestant Germany, and especially with Hohenzollern Prussia. The chapter highlights the importance of her children Victoria and Alice’s marriages as attempts to bring about spiritual and political reform in Germany, before explaining why thesyts were ultimately unsuccessful.

Religion in Common Life

This chapter sketches the development of Victoria’s liberal Protestant commitment to lived lay religion, which overlooked conventional distinctions between the sacred and the secular. Victoria and Albert regarded family and the home rather than the church as the locus of religious faith and practice, and sought to advance the identification of God with the laws of His creation. This chapter accordingly discusses Victoria’s relationship to the Christian sacraments, her creation and use of sacred space within royal homes, and her views of God and the natural world. It highlights the appeal of her and Albert’s godly domesticity to a broad Protestant public, while also indicating that Victoria’s hostility to Sabbatarianism and disdain for efforts to avert disease and war through prayer could set her at odds with religious, and particularly with evangelical, opinion.

Introduction

The introduction explains the central importance of Victoria’s religious life to Victorian religion and politics. Not only have existing biographies of Victoria given insufficient attention to her religion, but they have also failed to incorporate the modern historiography of the Victorian monarchy, which emphasizes the structural rather than the personal causes of Victoria’s power and influence. The introduction sets out how this biography portrays Victoria both as an individual and as a European and global sovereign, and discusses the manuscript and printed sources which serve as the basis for the project. It ends with an outline of the following chapters and describes how the book interweaves close attention to Victoria’s strong personal piety with analysis of what religious communities claimed to feel about it and why they did so.

A Darkened Earth

This chapter shows how the destruction of Victoria’s household through the deaths of her mother and husband in 1861 tested her faith, prompting an anguished search for spiritual and material sources of consolation. While this alarmed her friends and advisers, it also created a new template for popular attitudes to the throne, as preachers encouraged their congregations to feel emotional community with the mourning Queen. Victoria’s insistence that she had a religious obligation to pile up ever more baroque monuments to her husband’s virtues, ranging from the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore and the Albert Memorial Chapel to a series of pious memoirs, eventually generated resistance and scepticism. Nonethelessas later chapters will show, her widowhood became an enduring symbol of her soft power, which allowed preachers to wax eloquent on her lonely suffering.

The Crown of Sacrifice

While a crescendo of bereavements later in life undoubtedly turned Victoria into a gloomy and retrospective person and sovereign, this chapter suggests that they also bolstered her spiritual credentials with her people. The chapter concentrates on the lavish way in which she buried and commemorated a series of male relatives—her son Leopold, the Duke of Albany; her grandsons Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence and Christian Victor; and her son-in-law Henry of Battenberg—suggesting that this made her the Empire’s mourner in chief. The martial flourishes of their funerals aligned a feminine monarchy with the increasingly militaristic and imperial character of male elite culture. Changes in Christian eschatology meant that concern with death in late Victorian culture focused on the feelings of the living rather than the postmortem fate of the dead, and as such there was much discussion of and identification with Victoria’s feelings. In this way, royal deaths secured Victoria’s position as the head of what historians have termed an ‘empire of sentiment’, whose Christian advocates claimed it was based on sacrifice rather than power.