CHAPTER 1
C R O W N A N D C O M PA N Y
‘H
er Majesty seems to take a deep interest in Indian Affairs and . . . is not ill-informed on the subject.’ So wrote John Hobhouse, president of the Board of Control to Lord Elphinstone, governor of Madras, shortly after Victoria came to the throne in 1837. The news was double edged. It was rumoured that Elphinstone, a courtier to William IV, had been exiled to India as the young princess had grown too fond of him.1 It was about as close a connection that Victoria had to India in the early years of her reign. For Victoria was a ‘Whig’ queen, tutored in the realities of constitutional monarchy by Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, and his Whig colleagues. They managed the choice of her husband, they supplied the staff of the royal household, and Lord Melbourne himself guided the eighteen-year-old queen through her first meetings of the Privy Council, initiating her in her new responsibilities in domestic and foreign policy.2 Not that there were too many of these. For Queen Victoria was also a ‘Whig’ queen in that she was the first new monarch of the era ushered in by the Whigs’ 1832 reform act, her crown prerogative substantially limited by the powers of Parliament and an expanded electorate keen to root out the excesses of royal rule which had dominated the later years of her Hanoverian predecessors. 12
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