Queen Victoria: Proclamation concerning India

About the Author

The proclamation was issued in the name of Queen Victoria, who was born on May 24, 1819. She ascended the throne of England on June 20, 1837, and reigned until her death on January 22, 1901—the longest reign in British history. In 1840 she married her first cousin, Prince Albert, and the marriage proved to be a happy one. When Albert died in 1861, Victoria went into mourning and never really emerged from it. She dressed in black for the remainder of her life and lived almost entirely in seclusion. Although she was popular, particularly in the early decades of her reign and in her final years, she survived several assassination attempts. On May 1, 1876, the title Empress of India was added to her many royal titles. She took the role seriously, for in the late 1860s she had begun to learn the Hindi and Punjabi languages.

By the nineteenth century the British monarch lacked the power that kings and queens in earlier centuries had wielded. Victoria, though, was a dominating figure, to the extent that the era in which she reigned is still referred to as the Victorian era. Her uprightness and that of her family elevated middle-class values and is responsible in part for the age's reputation for prudishness and middle-class conformity. Under her reign, England evolved into a constitutional monarchy, and with her reign and that of her successors the British monarch retained the rights only to advise and, in some instances, warn. At her death, flags in the United States were lowered to half staff, the first time in U.S. history that this honor had been given to a foreign ruler (and one that the British reciprocated later that year when the U.S. president, William McKinley was assassinated).

The actual author of Queen Victoria's proclamation was Edward Stanley, the fourteenth Earl of Derby. Lord Derby, who served as British prime minister three times (1852, 1858–1859, and 1866–1868), was born in 1799. He attended Oxford University but never took a degree. His career in politics began in 1822, when he became a member of Parliament. Throughout his political career, Lord Derby advocated positions that were remarkably tolerant for the times and in some instances unpopular. For example, as chief secretary of Ireland, he tried to improve education in Catholic Ireland and to make religious affiliation irrelevant in admission to state-run schools. Later, he introduced legislation calling for the emancipation of all slaves in the British Empire, and during his second stint as prime minister his ministry ended the practice of excluding Jews from Parliament. The chief accomplishment of his second term as prime minister, though, was passage of the Government of India Act. During his third term he supported a reform bill that extended the franchise to a greater number of voters. He died on October 23, 1869.