Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  That this was his – and his mentor Stockmar’s – ambition is the central fact about Prince Albert’s existence. It is sometimes suggested that Albert somehow oversaw the diminution of the power of the monarchy, its demotion from being an institution which had possessed some measure of power but which, by the time he had died, was no more than a figurehead, an emblem, a ‘focus of unity’. Almost the opposite was true. He and his Coburg backers – principally Stockmar and King Leopold – had a passionate interest in power, in the day-by-day exercise of political influence. No monarch, or monarch’s consort, can ever have worked harder than Prince Albert. It was not pointless work, or work for its own sake: it was work with a purpose: to establish monarchy as a workable modern political institution, strong enough to resist the forces of revolution which, since 1789, had threatened Europe. In the first part of the marriage, the work was devoted to his role in Great Britain. When the children grew to marriageable age, the work branched outwards; the clear idea was that Albert and Stockmar’s brand of German liberalism, based on a particular reading of the British Constitution, should become the template by which the whole of Europe could be governed.

  The marriage took place on 10 February 1840, at 1 pm: it was a break with tradition, royal marriages having previously been solemnized at night. The ceremony was held in the Chapel Royal, St James’s, and despite torrents of rain, violent gusts of wind and extreme cold, there were some crowds to watch the Queen leave Buckingham Palace, with twelve train-bearers wearing white dresses adorned with white roses. One member of the public noted it was ‘a quietish affair, creating none of the excitement as at her son’s in later years’.2 The Queen was given in marriage by her old uncle, the Duke of Sussex, who wore a black skullcap, perhaps against the cold – the fashion for wigs, except among the more old-fashioned bishops and barristers and judges in court, being now all but obsolete. Victoria, less than five feet in height, wore a white satin gown, with a deep flounce of Honiton lace, a diamond necklace and earrings and the magnificent sapphire brooch which Albert, who was ever fascinated by jewellery, had had made for her. Albert, at five feet ten inches3 towering above his bride, wore the uniform of a field marshal in the British Army.

  The guests were nearly all Whigs. Out of 300 people in the congregation, there were only 5 Tories of note – the Lord Great Chamberlains Willoughby and Cholmondeley were there ex officio; Ashley – whose name in history is the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury – was asked, as Lord Melbourne’s nephew-in-law; Lord Liverpool was an old friend; and she could scarcely avoid inviting the Duke of Wellington, who was a national institution almost as venerable as the monarchy. Although she said, ‘It is MY marriage and I will only have those who can sympathize with me’, it was generally thought to be tactless to choose such a day to proclaim her political affiliation, but she felt she had been provoked.

  In the short period since she had announced her engagement, the Tories in Parliament had made trouble for her. First, the proposal, made by Melbourne’s Government, that Albert be granted the same income as Prince Leopold – £50,000 – was done without consulting the Opposition in advance. There was therefore an unseemly debate in which the radical Joseph Hume proposed reducing the grant to £21,000, and Colonel Sibthorp, in his top boots and wide-awake hat, the Ultra of the Ultras, proposed to fix it at £30,000. Sibthorp’s motion was carried by a humiliating 262 votes to 158. ‘From the Tories, good Lord deliver us,’4 she had written in her journal on New Year’s Day. More embarrassing than the reduced grant was the fact that Melbourne’s Government, in proposing Albert’s naturalization as a Briton, also tried to accord him precedence for life over the princes of the blood. Cumberland (King of Hanover) violently objected and persuaded Cambridge to do likewise, and this stirred up yet more hatred from the Tories. The Duke of Wellington himself opposed the measure in the Lords on the simple ground that such powers could only be granted by Parliament, and not by the Queen herself – she had wanted to make Albert King Consort, until Melbourne talked her out of it. So things did not start propitiously.5

  After a wedding breakfast at Buckingham Palace, they went – in ‘one of the old travelling coaches’, complained Greville, who hoped for something more spectacular – to Windsor.

  The wedding night was nervous, but evidently delightful. ‘We had our dinner in our sitting room; but I had such a sick headache that I could eat nothing, and was obliged to lie down in the middle blue room for the remainder of the evening on the sofa; but, ill or not, I never, never spent such an evening!! My dearest dearest dear Albert sat on a footstool by my side, and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness, I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, and we kissed each other again and again! His beauty, his sweetness and gentleness, – really, how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband! At 1/2 p.10 I went and undressed and was very sick, and at 20 m. p. 10 we both went to bed; (of course in one bed), to lie by his side and in his arms, and on his dear bosom, and be called by names of tenderness, I have never yet heard used to me before – was bliss beyond belief! Oh! this was the happiest day of my life!’6

  The next morning, after walking on the terrace – ‘Eos our only companion’ (Albert’s greyhound) – it was Prince Albert’s turn to feel queasy. ‘Poor dear Albert felt sick and uncomfortable, and lay down in my room, while I wrote to Uncle Leopold.’7

  As far as Leopold of Belgium and Baron Stockmar were concerned, it was to be business as usual. What had been so tragically interrupted by the death of Princess Charlotte in 1817 would now be resumed and set to rights in February 1840. A male Coburger would in effect rule England. ‘He is the King to all intents and purposes,’ Greville could write in 1845, and both Albert and Leopold would have agreed.

  This was not how Queen Victoria herself viewed matters, and there was a paradoxical sense in which, the deeper she fell in love with Albert as a sexual partner, and the more she admired him as a human being, the more she regretted the surrender of her political power to him. In time, a harmony would develop. And from the perspective of widowhood, of course, Albert became a saint whose every view she always echoed. The reality was very different in the early stages of their marriage.

  For a start, Albert felt terribly lonely. ‘Think of my position. I am leaving my home with all its old associations, all my bosom friends, and going to a country in which everything is strange to me – men, language, customs, modes of life. I have no one to confide in.’8 This had been his response when told by Melbourne that he was not to be allowed to bring a German secretary or companion with him, but must accept George Anson as his private secretary. Anson, a young man who had been working as Melbourne’s secretary and was a scion of the Earls of Lichfield’s family, can scarcely have been cheered up, in his first month of working with the prince, to receive the memo, ‘Wished to have an opportunity of telling you that I was determined not to appoint you. I felt that it was committing myself by taking one who was confidentially placed about the Prime M. The Q. insisted upon your app. – & resented my opposition.’9

  A year later, on 19 February 1841, Anson had a conversation with Melbourne in which he said, ‘the prince is indolent, & it would be better if he was more so, for in his position we want no activity. I replied the prince may be indolent, but it results from there being no scope for his energy. If you required a cipher in the difficult position of Consort of the Queen you ought not to have selected the prince, having got him, you must make the most of him, & when he saw the power of being useful to the Queen, he will act. He is not ambitious, he wishes for no Power, except such as will enable him to support & assist the Queen’.10

  Anson had really misread Albert, in this ‘indolent’ first year. It is true that he wanted to support Victoria, but he also wanted to direct her, and to have political influence. And this he could not do in the early stages of the reign; partly because she continued to rely on Melbourne for political advice a
nd support, until he was voted out of office; and partly because of the influence of the Baroness Lehzen, who resented the power of Stockmar, and did all she could to thwart Albert’s path.

  This suited the Queen to begin with because, while Melbourne remained in office, and while Lehzen was still at her side, she could resist the pressure from Albert to share political influence with him.

  The history of the monarchy in the Victorian age could really be defined as the history of the Queen’s Private Secretaries. There were no formal revolutions in nineteenth-century Britain, as there were in nineteenth-century France and Germany; no moments when the Royal Family had to pack its trunks and leave – although Prince Albert did suppose such a moment might be reached in 1848, and withdrew the family to the Isle of Wight. What there was, however, from the earliest years of the Queen’s reign to the end, was a series of movements backwards and forwards in which the elected representatives and the Cabinets saw the degree to which they valued the monarchy – even the degree to which they depended upon it; and the monarch worked out how far she could or could not go in the assertion of powers and privileges. There was no specific Act of Parliament, or crisis, after which it could be said that from then onwards the power of the monarchy had diminished or changed. It was more a matter of testing the water, becoming tactful to the atmosphere. And in this matter, the go-between, the private secretary, played a pivotal role. In her widowhood, this man, first General Grey, then General Ponsonby, had a formally acknowledged role. From his arrival in England until his death, the role of secretary, of political adviser to the monarch, was played by Prince Albert, with King Leopold and Stockmar ever anxious to offer their sometimes intrusive advice.

  The Queen became pregnant almost at once after she married, and the 1840s were dominated by childbirth. Victoria, the Princess Royal, was born on 21 November 1840; Albert Edward, 9 November 1841 – almost immediately declared Prince of Wales; Princess Alice, 25 April 1843; Prince Alfred in 1844; Princess Helena in 1846; Princess Louise in 1848; Prince Arthur in 1850; with the two youngest following in the next decade – Prince Leopold in 1853 and Princess Beatrice in 1857. Even when we allow for the fact that the Queen was a strong woman, who lost none of her children in infancy, and, fairly obviously, had every possible assistance in the way of nurserymaids, governesses and the like, this was still a mighty distraction. From the first pregnancy, Prince Albert became an effectual political secretary to the Queen. Although his own private secretary, George Anson, was a Whig, Albert, guided by Stockmar, took a view which was absolutely different from his wife’s partisan politics. He believed it was essential that the Crown should be above politics. ‘The Whigs seek to change before change is required,’ he wrote solemnly in a memorandum to himself, preserved in the Royal Archives. ‘The love of change is their great failing. The Tories on the other hand resist change long after the feeling and temper of the times has loudly demanded it and at last make a virtue of necessity by an ungracious concession. My endeavour will be to form my opinions quite apart from politics and party, and I believe such attempt may succeed.’11 This was a clumsy – and inaccurate – picture of the political parties and their situations. It showed that he, like his Queen, had much to learn.

  Victoria wanted life to go on as before, only with the addition of Albert as her lover. The happy moments of the journal concern not merely sex (‘Albert still complained of weakness in his knees’; ‘My dearest Albert put my stockings on for me. I went in and saw him shave, a great delight for me’), but also fun, especially musical fun. ‘I danced several Quadrilles and Valses, finishing up with a Gallop with Albert’, she wrote from Claremont in March 1841. But too much of the time was taken up with pregnancy and childbirth, which she never enjoyed. She would later confide in her firstborn, Vicky, that ‘what made me absolutely miserable was to have the first two years of my married life utterly spoilt by this occupation’ – childbearing. 1841 was a low point. ‘Lord Melbourne entreats Your Majesty to pick up your spirits,’ Melbourne wrote after the first baby, when she was evidently suffering from severe post-natal depression. On the first Christmas after the birth of the Princess Royal, Anson noted, ‘The Q. was not at all well again yesterday – being again troubled with lowness . . . The Baroness [Lehzen] lets no opportunity of creating mischief & difficulty escape her – to keep an influence over the Nursery underlings is one of her great aims.’

  The Queen wrote of Vicky’s arrival, ‘alas! a girl and not a boy as we both had so wished and hoped for.’ A wet nurse was employed for the baby, ‘a Mrs Ratsey, a fine young woman, wife of a sail maker at Cowes, Isle of Wight’.12

  Albert and Victoria spent Christmas quarrelling. Clearly, Mrs Ratsey, however fine a young woman, was less than satisfactory as a wet nurse, and on 16 January, when the Queen and the baby were both ill, Albert wrote to his wife, ‘Dr Clark has mismanaged the child and poisoned her with calomel and you have starved her. I shall have nothing more to do with it; take the child away and do as you like and if she dies you will have it on your conscience’. On the same day, he wrote to Stockmar that Lehzen was a ‘crazy, stupid intriguer, obsessed with the lust of power, who regards herself as a demi-God, and anyone who refuses to recognise her as such is a criminal. I declare to you, as my and Victoria’s true friend, that I will sacrifice my own comfort, my life’s happiness to Victoria in silence, even if she continues in her error. But the welfare of my children and Victoria’s existence as sovereign are too sacred for me not to die fighting rather than yield them as prey to Lehzen.’13

  Two days later, he told Stockmar, ‘Victoria is too hasty and passionate for me to be able often to speak of my difficulties. She will not hear me out but flies into a rage and overwhelms me with reproaches of suspiciousness, want of trust, ambition, envy etc etc. There are, therefore, two ways open to me: (1) to keep silence and go away (in which case I am like a schoolboy who has had a dressing down from his mother and goes off snubbed); (2) I can be still more violent (and then we have scenes like that of the 16th, which I hate, because I am so sorry for Victoria in her misery, besides which it undermines the peace of the home).’14

  There was further trouble ahead, since the Whig administration of Lord Melbourne was about to be voted from office, and both the Queen and Lord M. were to begin their painful separation. The semi-tragic situation outlined at the end of the last chapter, in which Lord M. could scarcely pass Buckingham Palace without a pang, did not come into being overnight. It was a slow matter – a lingering sorrow for Melbourne personally, a frustrating dawdle for Stockmar and Albert, who were anxious that Victoria should learn the ways of a constitutional monarch.

  The character of the new Prime Minister did not help. Sir Robert Peel is widely, and rightly, seen as a statesman of great integrity and vision, who had the courage to change his mind. In Ireland, the diehard ‘Orange Peel’ became a man who saw the absurdity of trying to impose Protestantism on the largely Catholic Irish, and who saw the point of allowing the Irish a greatly increased grant towards training the Catholic clergy at Maynooth. The economy was a matter of much more widespread application. As things had panned out since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Tories had been the party which opposed the idea of Free Trade, and which defended the imposition of tariffs on foreign corn, thereby keeping the price of bread high in a hungry, unhappy country; but the rents and revenues of the landed classes high too. Peel, with Hamlet-like slowness, changed his mind about this matter and came to see that the Corn Laws had to be repealed. His change of mind was seen as a betrayal of Tory values, especially by the vociferous Lord George Bentinck and his brilliantly devious Commons colleague Benjamin Disraeli. Bentinck and Disraeli led the rebellion against Peel and, when the vote came in 1846, this would cause a split in the Tory Party and make it unelectable for another thirty years.

  So, Peel, however you viewed him, was a politician of first importance in the scheme of things. Yet this Harrow-educated son of a cotton- and calico-manufacturer w
as a dull dog, and the Queen liked to be amused. With his slight Lancashire accent and his red hair, Peel was a shock to her system after the amusing conversations, and the warm affection, she had enjoyed with Lord M. By contrast, Peel was everything of which Stockmar, and hence Prince Albert, most approved. He was, like both of them, moderate, hard-working, principled and clever.

  It took a while for the Queen to come round to her husband’s love of Sir Robert, but she did so. This was one of the things which softened the blow of losing Lord M. Another factor which made life much easier between Albert and the Queen was that she tearfully consented to the banishment of Lehzen. Albert had not exaggerated Lehzen’s love of intrigue, and as soon as she had been dispatched to Germany, never to return, relations improved – between him and his wife; between the Duchess of Kent and the Queen; between the Duchess of Kent and the Queen Dowager, all of whom Lehzen had succeeded in putting at odds with one another.