But she was reserved for a very different fate.
The outburst of republicanism had been in fact the
last flicker of an expiring cause. The liberal
tide, which had been flowing steadily ever since the
Reform Bill, reached its height with Mr.
Gladstone’s
first administration; and towards the end of that
administration the inevitable ebb began. The
reaction, when it came, was sudden and complete.
The General Election of 1874 changed the whole face
of politics. Mr. Gladstone and the Liberals were
routed; and the Tory party, for the first time for
over forty years, attained an unquestioned supremacy
in England. It was obvious that their surprising
triumph was pre-eminently due to the skill and vigour
of Disraeli. He returned to office, no longer
the dubious commander of an insufficient host, but
with drums beating and flags flying, a conquering
hero. And as a conquering hero Victoria welcomed
her new Prime Minister.
Then there followed six years of excitement, of enchantment,
of felicity, of glory, of romance. The amazing
being, who now at last, at the age of seventy, after
a lifetime of extraordinary struggles, had turned
into reality the absurdest of his boyhood’s dreams,
knew well enough how to make his own, with absolute
completeness, the heart of the Sovereign Lady whose
servant, and whose master, he had so miraculously
become. In women’s hearts he had always
read as in an open book. His whole career had
turned upon those curious entities; and the more curious
they were, the more intimately at home with them he
seemed to be. But Lady Beaconsfield, with her
cracked idolatry, and Mrs. Brydges-Williams, with
her clogs, her corpulence, and her legacy, were gone:
an even more remarkable phenomenon stood in their place.
He surveyed what was before him with the eye of a
past-master; and he was not for a moment at a loss.
He realised everything—the interacting
complexities of circumstance and character, the pride
of place mingled so inextricably with personal arrogance,
the superabundant emotionalism, the ingenuousness
of outlook, the solid, the laborious respectability,
shot through so incongruously by temperamental cravings
for the coloured and the strange, the singular intellectual
limitations, and the mysteriously essential female
elements impregnating every particle of the whole.
A smile hovered over his impassive features, and he
dubbed Victoria “the Faery.” The name
delighted him, for, with that epigrammatic ambiguity
so dear to his heart, it precisely expressed his vision
of the Queen. The Spenserian allusion was very
pleasant—the elegant evocations of Gloriana;
but there was more in it than that: there was
the suggestion of a diminutive creature, endowed with
magical—and mythical—properties,
and a portentousness almost ridiculously out of keeping
with the rest of her make-up. The Faery, he determined,
should henceforward wave her wand for him alone.
