Today is Queen Victoria’s 201’st birthday. So let’s talk about her most recent bio-drama TV show by ITV: Victoria.
Pretty costumes, watchable actors, and, uhh.. okay that’s about it. For the most part, the show is a sickeningly ahistorical mess written like a bad romance paperback. This version of Queen Victoria may be cute, but it’s selling a story that never happened.
The show starts with her becoming queen, which skips what would have been her most sympathetic years. Isolated by her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, Sir John Conroy, they constantly conspired to take her crown via a regency. At one point they refused her medical attention for days while she was gravely ill to attempt to force her to make Conroy her private secretary. Victoria refused despite her failing health, and eventually a doctor was called.
Some would have been broken by the abuse, but she remained obstinate and clung to the hope that she would be free when the crown reached her. The Coburgs were already attempting to push Albert onto her as a husband, but she refused an engagement, insisting she was too young to be thinking of marriage.
The show begins one month after her 18th birthday, having just avoided a forced regency on the death of her uncle. And this where in real life, Victoria’s independent nature begins to crumble.
The first monstrous mischaracterization in the show is that of Lord Melbourne. (And I am not one to complain about Rufus Sewell on my TV screen in many cases.) He’s written as a lovely, charming dude. While he was lovely and charming to Victoria, he was no one anyone should have looked up to.
The real Lord Melbourne was a Whig by name but not my nature. He didn’t care for reforms of any sort, saying of slavery that he “would have done nothing at all”. Yikes. He had no care for the poor, or really anyone. It was by his urging and continued gossip-mongering that Victoria promoted the rumors of Lady Flora’s pregnancy that turned out to be a fatal illness.
And to add to this mess of a man, he had a flogging fetish. He supported not only beating children, but also maids and any other women who were subservient to him. He was even documented having liaisons with a young orphan girl he reportedly whipped.
“A few twigs of a birch applied to the naked skin of a young lady produces with very little effort a very considerable sensation.”
— Lord Melbourne
There’s also the question of what his wife, Caroline Lamb, meant when she wrote to her mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne, about Lord Melbourne in the beginning of their marriage: “(he had) amused himself with instructing me in things I need never have heard of or known – & the disgust that I at first felt for the world’s wickedness I till then had never heard of”. Caroline and Lady M both became lovers of the notorious Lord Byron, the former once sending him a letter with a clipping of her bloodied pubic hair. Wickedness abounds.
So look, Lord Melbourne wasn’t exactly the ideal candidate to mold the young Queen. But she longed for a father figure, and he was just in the right place at the right time to be that for her.
And then along comes Albert.
Manipulative, puritanical, controlling, sexist, racist, antisemitic Albert. There has to be so much removal of who Albert actually was for him to be a “likable” character on TV that I question what even is the point of telling this story?
It’s true that they were one of the happiest royal marriages in history. But their happiness didn’t come out of mutual respect or an equality of care. Instead, Victoria grew less and less sure of herself as Albert whittled away her confidence with his beliefs that women were quite simply not fit to rule or do anything outside of having babies and being subservient to their husbands. He manipulated her into believing she was stupid so that he could control her and take as much power for himself in his role as the husband of the Queen. At times he was just plain mean to her, withholding affection or care until he got his way. It was an abusive relationship, one that was masked by her assumed dominance due to her crown.
They loved each other to be sure, but theirs was no sort of fairy tale romance for the ages.
There is plenty for Victoria to take responsibility for. For all the virtues she claimed to have, she believed herself appointed by god to rule people and live in castles being served. That’s not someone who is going to make good choices. So to tell the actual story of Victoria would make for a very different show, but it would have been much more enjoyable than the weird nonsense they ended up writing. (Should I even mention the Christmas episode? Holy fuck no.)
And I would be remiss if I did not mention the actor who plays Lord Palmerston, who turned out to be a racist, woman-hater in real life. Fucking yikes. (I’m not even going to link to it, I believe in your internet search skills and frankly it would be infuriating for me to have to look at it again.) So it is with some relief I can report that so far the show is on hiatus and has no signs of being picked up for another season. I don’t want that guy getting any more work. Ever.
The big problem with the show ‘Victoria’ is the same with most every British historical drama: it’s usually based on the lives of rich, powerful people. And rich, powerful people are not good people. There are no lovable royals, no aristocrats you’d want to have a beer with. These people were awful, and thrived on poverty, slavery, and every other ill of society because it’s the only way for them to exist.
So when will we have historical dramas that aren’t about making shitty people look cool and sympathetic? I think the closest we have come was Harlots, though that again has rich aristocrats and royals being on the side of good, just not mostly as the main characters.
It’s true that most of our well documented history is that of the rich, but that doesn’t mean we have to turn them into good people to tell their stories. There’s plenty of other angles to take, and I’m desperate for someone to take them.
If you are interested in the story of Queen Victoria’s life, I suggest Victoria: The Queen by Julia Baird.
