Was Queen Victoria a Papistical Fifth Columnist?

Jeremy Brock, whether ill-informed or over-ruled by producers, directors or editors of the film Mrs Brown, puts these words into Queen Victoria's mouth, 'Should the good Lord see fit to spare my son, I will order a mass [l.c. in the scenario as published on the Internet] to be celebrated [thank the same good Lord the verb is not 'given'] at St. George's. The people must share with their Queen her prayers and hopes for their future King.'

Here we find ourselves in the second half of the nineteenth century when the Oxford or Tractarian Movement was growing stronger and stronger in its influence, and generating an even more powerful counter-surge of evangelical reaction. The situation was taken so seriously that a Parliamentary Commission was set up to report on the extent and legality of ritualising tendencies in the Church of England. That report was duly published, and reprinted some decades ago by the Irish University Press. Various High Church clergy were investigated as to their legal culpability in performing Popish rituals in Anglican churches. In that controversy Queen Victoria was firmly on the side of the Evangelicals, then usually called the Low Church party, and, so, was opposed to Catholicising tendencies in the Church of England. Thus, when during the course of the drama, the health and survival of the future Edward VII were in question, we are led to let flee a loud, spontaneous guffaw at the notion of the Queen ordering a Mass, something which would have been entirely alien to her instincts.  She would have been more likely to order a Service of Thanksgiving, which would have been devoid of a Eucharistic element.