Great Britain, Victoria, Crown 1889, aVF

History

By 1889, Britain had a queen it could not quite agree on how to depict.

The Jubilee Head – the portrait on the obverse of this coin – had arrived in 1887 to mark Victoria’s fifty years on the throne, and it had been controversial from the moment it appeared in circulation. The sculptor Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm had spent a decade on the commission, sitting with the queen in her private apartments, producing model after model. What he eventually placed on the coinage was an honest portrait of a woman of seventy: veiled, mature, wearing a small diamond crown of her own commissioning, the faint heaviness of age visible beneath the precision of the engraving. It was, by the standards of royal portraiture, almost shockingly truthful.

The public was not certain it approved. The small crown, perching above the mourning veil, drew immediate mockery – it was too slight, too domestic, unworthy of an empress. The sixpence from the same Jubilee issue had already been withdrawn after fraudsters gilded it to pass as a half sovereign. The double florin, nearly indistinguishable in size from the crown, was being successfully passed off in dimly lit public houses across the country for more than its worth, earning the immortal nickname the Barmaid’s Ruin. Victoria herself, reviewing the coinage in September 1889, wrote that she disliked the new coins very much and wished the old ones could be restored. Her own government quietly began making arrangements for a replacement portrait.

None of which changed the fact that over a million and eight hundred thousand of these crowns were struck that year and sent into the commerce of an empire at the absolute apex of its power. The reverse carried Benedetto Pistrucci’s St George and the Dragon – the same design first cut in 1817, still the most enduring image in the history of British coinage, the armored saint wheeling his horse above the writhing serpent with a violence that no amount of repetition had yet diminished.

The empire whose currency this coin was in 1889 was a thing of almost incomprehensible extent. The Scramble for Africa was dividing an entire continent at conference tables in Berlin and drawing rooms in London. India was generating revenues that underwrote half the government’s ambitions. The Royal Navy ruled every ocean. And at the centre of it all – formally, constitutionally, on the obverse of every sovereign coin – a seventy-year-old widow in a veil, whom the country alternately revered and complained about, and who had by this point largely stopped caring what anyone thought.

The Jubilee Head coinage lasted only until 1893, when a new portrait – the Old Head, more severe and more imperial in its bearing – finally replaced it. Boehm did not live to see the change. He died in 1890, in circumstances that London society found quietly scandalous, at the studio of Princess Louise, the queen’s daughter.

This coin belongs to the brief, contested, oddly human interlude between two more formal portraits – a moment when British coinage showed, perhaps more honestly than it intended, exactly who was really on the throne.