Queens of Courage
CLEAVER, CAROLE
Queens of Courage Queen Victoria By Cecil Woodham-Smith Knopf. 486 pp. $10.00. The Lady Mary By Milton Waldman Scribners. 224 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Carole Cleaver Co-author, "Horace...
...As a girl, Victoria liked a "spirited horse," was quite capable of dancing until dawn, and was warned that her love of rich food would make her obese...
...butchering thousands for a cause she believed just...
...Early in her reign, when a collapse of the Whig government threatened her with the loss oi a beloved adviser, Lord Melbourne, she fought for four days until the Whigs were reinstated...
...The Lady Mary makes one feel that less pedantic detail and a more perceptive imagination would bring one closer to the truth...
...Greater than her passions was Victoria's strength...
...His increased involvement in her royal duties was also fostered by Victoria's forced indispositions-The Queen was almost continually pregnant, producing nine children in 17 years...
...It is my duty to keep you calm," he wrote her, "and I mean to do so...
...Years later, she still had sufficient backbone to "get rid of Lord Palmer-ston when he "exceeded his authority...
...and that "my dearest Albert has made me so, so happy...
...In fact, it had been feared that Prince Albert, who was by nature a student, given to quiet pastimes and early hours, would not please the princess (if anyone was the Victorian he was), and before the marriage he was sent to Brussels for a year to be "broken in and styled...
...No doubt her book's most significant contribution is to dispel the stereotyped image of Queen Victoria as the straight-laced eponym of 19th-century England...
...She might well be a heroic figure-Standing up to her father, King Henry VIII, though it could have meant her head...
...But Milton Waldman's portrait is too vague...
...fleeing across the country when a rebellious army questioned her right to rule...
...She can sum up a man's entire character and fife in one lucid paragraph, and she can capture the flavor of an era in a few pointed sentences...
...Cecil Woodham-Smith writes with a style and wit that make even trivia intriguing...
...It is hard," Albert wrote "to be only the husband, and not the master in the house...
...Since Woodham-Smith's study ends with Prince Albert's death in 1861, one hopes that a second volume, on the Queen's years alone, is in the offing...
...No Victorian matron there...
...Behind this great woman was a man...
...The Prince's function was to act as a moderating agent: It was he who elevated the Monarchy above partisan politics and convinced his Whig wife to deal fairly with the Tories...
...Reviewed by Carole Cleaver Co-author, "Horace Pippin, The Artist as a Black American' These biographies of Queen Victoria and the Lady Mary are as different as the queens themselves -one is very good indeed, the other is not...
...As a woman, she could write that her wedding night was "bliss beyond belief...
...Queen Mary?Bloody Mary" of the history books-is in need of a sympathetic reevaluation...
...Yet Albert's influence over his wife grew slowly through long years of love and understanding...
...The scene is constantly being stolen by her flamboyant, better-known father...
...And in the tender days of her engagement to Albert, she told him that she was the monarch and that she would choose the gentlemen of his household...
...He never explores the sources of her vision, never delves into her zealot's heart...
Vol. 56 • June 1973 • No. 13
