QUEEN VICTORIA’S EMPIRE
The Moral Crusade/The Scramble for Africa
SUNDAY, AUGUST 11 @ 6:00PM & 10:00PM
The Moral Crusade
The puritan sides of their personalities clashed with Victoria’s and Albert’s livelier natures, and their need to maintain acceptable public postures for their fishbowl lives. Victoria, a true Hanoverian, enjoyed the sensual delights of matrimony, making it prudent for Albert to have a mechanical lock for their bedroom door at Osborne House installed within reach of his pillow. Albert had little need to persuade Victoria that her Court, its recent past tarnished, had to earn respect by example and be impenetrable to scandal. Since upper-class life ignored the middle-class morality promoted by aggressive Evangelicalism, Lord Melbourne declared to the royal couple that “damned morality would undo us all.” Albert noted in a memorandum in 1852, approvingly, “We had found great advantage in it and were determined to adhere to it.”
