Modern Domestics: Conclusion

To the layman at the dawn of the twenty first century, Queen Elizabeth I would appear the more modern of the two great English Queens.  She was the more independent and powerful of the two, certainly.  However, it was Victoria’s odd mixture of domestic wife and monarch that could ultimately be truly defined as modern.

Elizabeth became Queen in an era in which the monarch was still the ultimate leader of the nation.  She had no political rivals, no Minister that could make policy decisions without her express approval.  In many ways, her court was not unlike that of Edward IV, her medireview predecessor.  Though money was beginning to replace land as the accepted social marker of wealth, the shift from the hereditary nobility to the middle class and beyond had not yet become noticeable.  If anything, Elizabeth helped move the court back to the completely sovereign dominated place it had been under her father, Henry VIII, a powerful king but certainly no modernist.  Although Elizabeth was to remain popular among the members of Parliament, they were not highly important in the broad scheme of things, doing little more than holding the royal purse strings.  The king was not yet limited in the manner he would be once modernity began dissolving class barriers, and decentralizing political power.

In addition, Elizabeth was not quite as limited by her gender as Victoria.  Although Elizabeth certainly was an anomaly in the government at the time, she quickly turned her gender from a liability into an asset.  She used her feminine virtues to cultivate the myth of the Virgin Queen, but at the same time rejected the conventions of marriage that bound the women of the era.  This was partially because the rise of industrialism, and the separation of home and work, had not yet irrevocably bound the wife into the domestic sphere. 

Victoria, on the other hand, was able to construct a more private, personal monarchy, precisely because society demanded no less from her.  At the time of her accession, the cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood had become firmly entrenched in the nation’s psyche.  It was more than simply odd for a woman to play a major role in public affairs; it was unnatural.  As a result, Victoria had to constantly define her existence by her relations to men in order to give her some social justification.  Victoria was more than just Queen; she was wife to Prince Albert, and mother to her children, particularly her sons.  She could not, like Elizabeth, pretend to be a man in a woman’s body; she could merely pretend to be a domesticated female of the epoch.

However, her familial monarchy would not have been possible had the country not changed politically since the days of Elizabeth.  Since she was no longer the sole source, or even the main one, of political power, Victoria had the option to remove herself so thoroughly from the public sphere.  As social prestige became attainable for all people, regardless of birth, so too did political power.  Instead of Elizabeth’s sole controlling hand, Victoria’s England was governed by Parliament and its charismatic leaders.  Many of those leaders chose to circumvent the Queen by withholding information about the true state of her citizens, or by even ignoring her wishes, such as Prime Minister Palmerton did in the early stages of his career.  The transition from monarchy to a republic merely headed by a king was nearly complete by the end of Victoria’s reign. 

Victoria’s reign was uniquely modern in its adoption of novel social trends.  Her intense emphasis on family life, and her ability to retire from the pressures of governing (as she did for ten years following Albert’s death), were not just personal choices of the nineteenth century Queen.  Rather, they were characteristic of the modern era, with its broadening of political power and its subjugation of women to suit the rise of the workplace.  Elizabeth may seem closer to the archetype of the ‘modern woman’ from today’s standards, but it was Victoria who was the modern Queen.