Queen Victoria’s Disastrous Coronation
President Joe Biden’s inauguration as president this week went off without a hitch. But the same cannot be said for the ‘botched’ coronation of Victoria as Queen in 1838…
On Thursday 28 June 1838, a nineteen-year-old Victoria was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom and ruler of an expanding global empire. But the grand event itself, supposedly steeped in history and timeless tradition, was filled with mistakes, long delays, and slip-ups (literally), leading historian John Guy to call it ‘the last of the botched coronations’.
Problematic coronations were nothing new and Westminster Abbey had seen plenty in its time. In 1547, the nine-year-old Edward VI was too distracted by a juggler to pay any real attention to the service, whilst his sister Elizabeth I walked out halfway through her 1558 coronation so not to hear the catholic mass. More recently, Victoria’s uncle, George IV had locked his own much-disliked wife, Caroline of Brunswick, out of his coronation in 1821 and the service was interrupted by occasional bangs on the abbey doors and shouts of “I am the Queen of England!” These are nothing, however, compared to Victoria’s coronation, which proved a disaster from start to finish.
Problems began early in the planning stages. Victoria’s predecessor, her uncle William IV, hated ceremony and ritual, choosing to spend only £30,000 on his coronation (£2 million today but still frugal for a coronation). He also stripped a whole bunch of religious litany and symbolic acts going back centuries, including removing endless ceremonies about land tenure, restricting anointing with holy oil to only the head and hands, and scrapping coronation music. This meant the rituals for Victoria’s coronation were put together by those who had no knowledge of its evolution, nor had any idea of correct liturgy. The ceremony was therefore virtually thrown together, combining modern reforms with medieval ritual in an awkward patchwork quilt of a service.
Worse still, nobody seemed to think that such a prestigious occasion required any kind of rehearsal. No instructions were issued to the hundreds of lords attending, nor the staff of Westminster Abbey who would be undertaking the service itself. Not even Victoria saw fit to visit the abbey until the evening before so she could ‘know exactly where I am to go, and be’; but some doubt even this happened. This lack of rehearsal showed, as will be clear, especially to a young MP Benjamin Disraeli (who would later become Victoria’s favourite Prime Minister), who commented those involved ‘were always in doubt as to what came next, and you saw the want of rehearsal’.
The day itself began badly, with the young Queen complaining, ‘I was awoke at four o’clock by the guns in the Park, and could not get much sleep afterwards on account of the noise of the people, bands, etc.’ Indeed, thanks to the new technology of railways, 400,000 visitors had descended on London, with its parks said to resemble military encampments. Luckily for the crowds, they saw the only part of the day that went not only well, but exemplary. On the advice of the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, who was wary of public opinion in an age of reform and revolution, much of the £70,000 coronation budget (approx. £5 million today) was spent on a great coronation procession through London. The longest coronation procession since Charles II’s in 1660, Victoria’s went from Buckingham Palace, through Piccadilly, Charing Cross, down Pall Mall to Whitehall, and on to Westminster Abbey; it included the Lifeguards, two bands of the Household Brigade, carriages bearing members of the royal family, and a hundred Yeomen of the Guard, better known as ‘Beefeaters’. There was scaffolding along every road, packed with people cheering and waving as the Queen passed.
The true disasters occurred within the Abbey itself. Firstly, the entire ceremony lasted for five hours, with many of its participants like bishops, heralds and ladies-in-waiting having to standing throughout; little wonder, then, that Sir Robert Peel, Leader of the Opposition, reportedly fell over after falling asleep. There also remained an intense feeling of stuffiness, with thousands of aristocrats, soldiers, priests, and royals crammed into the relatively small abbey. The writer and social theorist, Harriet Martineau (watching the coronation from the gallery) described the duchesses, countesses and ladies as ‘old hags, with their dyed or false hair drawn to the top of the head, to allow the putting on of the coronet, had their necks and arms bare and glittering with diamonds’ and saw the ceremony itself as ‘highly barbaric’ and ‘worthy only of the old Pharaonic times in Egypt.’
From the moment she entered the Abbey, Victoria was put through an ordeal. Her train bearers were themselves provided with dresses with small trains, which they couldn’t control whilst holding hers, so they kept falling over. This, in turn, meant ‘we carried the Queen’s train very jerkily and badly, never keeping step as she did.’
The aged bishops were no better and were definitely hampered by the lack of rehearsal. Victoria complained that the Bishop of Durham was ‘hopeless and never could tell me what was to take place'. The Bishop of Bath and Wells, meanwhile, turned over two pages of the service by mistake and so the Queen had to be brought out of St Edward’s Chapel, where she was halfway through changing, to complete the liturgy. Even the great Archbishop of Canterbury was ‘(as usual) was so confused and puzzled and knew nothing’, he forcefully rammed the coronation ring on Victoria’s finger, very much hurting her in the process, only to find that it was the wrong finger.
Then came the homage, where the priests and lords of the land swore fealty to the young Queen by kneeling, swearing an oath, and kissing her hand. Whilst paying his homage, the 82-year-old Lord Rolle certainly lived up to his name. As Victoria recalled, ‘Poor old Lord Rolle who is…dreadfully infirm, in attempting to ascend the steps, fell and rolled quite down, but was not the least hurt; when he attempted to re-ascend them, I got up and advanced to the end of the steps, in order to prevent another fall.’ What was later known as ‘Lord Rolle’s Accident’ was recorded in Richard Harris Barnham’s satirical poetic account of the coronation:
Then the trumpets braying, and the organ playing,
And the sweet trombones, with their silver tones;
But Lord Rolle was rolling; — t’was mighty consoling
To think his Lordship did not break his bones!
After this ordeal and finally having been crowned, Victoria retired to St Edward’s Chapel to change. But even this sacred haven (St Edward the Confessor is buried there) hadn’t escaped the madness. Victoria found it ‘more unlike a Chapel than anything [she] had ever seen; for, what was called an Altar was covered with sandwiches and bottles of wine’! She then had ‘the greatest difficulty’ in taking off the coronation ring the Archbishop had rammed on the wrong finger, which she ‘at last did with great pain’ by bathing it in a bowl of freezing water. On top of this, the Archbishop then entered to give Victoria the orb, only to find she’d already been given it and so bashfully departed. The already exhausted young queen and her retinue were then forced to wait in the tiny chapel for nearly an hour whilst the procession from the abbey was prepared. It’s little wonder then that Prime Minister Melbourne ‘took a glass of wine, for he seemed completely tired.’
The coronation music also did little to improve the mood of the service. An orchestra of 80, a choir of 157 vocalists and numerous military bands were squeezed into the nave, but only because an organ that had been there since the coronation of George II in 1727 was demolished to make room. Even then the music was deplored by many in the press as badly coordinated, most probably because the director of music, Sir George Smart, attempted to conduct the orchestra and play the organ at the same time. In addition, the Master of the Queen’s Music, Franz Cramer, was lampooned for not contributing any new music for the occasion, leading to an overdependence on the out-of-fashion music of Handel, then already 100 years old.
The ceremony was then brought to a fitting conclusion as the coronation procession left Westminster Abbey. The Treasurer of the Household, instead of offering them, decided to throw the silver medals commemorating the coronation into the thronging crowd, causing an instant stampede as onlookers scrambled to collect the precious (and profitable) mementos, and several people were injured.
So ended the most ridiculous and disaster-filled coronation in British history. The young Queen, however, looked back on it as a triumph. She found the ‘whole Ceremony…most impressive & a very fine sight’, the ‘enthusiasm affection, & loyalty’ of the crowds ‘really touching’, and stated she ‘shall ever remember this day as the proudest in my life’. Indeed, this disastrous coronation began one of the most celebrated reigns in British history, lasting sixty-three years and overseeing huge advances in political reform, social care, education, invention and industry. It also provided time for historians and churchmen to brush up on coronation procedure and history, and when Victoria’s son, Edward VII, was crowned in 1902, the service went much more smoothly, even if it had to be delayed by a month because his appendix burst the day before the original date.
Bibliography
Queen Victoria’s Journals, 28 June 1838, vol.4, pp.75–85. Queen Victoria’s Journals — Journal Entry
Richard Harris Barham, ‘Mr. Barney Maguire’s Account of the Coronation’ (1838) in A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895 (London, 1895)
Sir Roy Strong, ‘Queen Victoria’s Coronation’, Queen Victoria’s Journals. Royal Archives. Queen Victoria’s Journals — Queen Victoria’s Coronation — an essay by Roy Strong
Lucy Worsley, Queen Victoria — Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 2018)
