Behind the Palace Doors

by Michael Farquhar

  Victoria’s trainbearers certainly could have used some practice, for, as one of them acknowledged, “we carried the Queen’s train very jerkily and badly, never keeping step properly, and it must have been very difficult for her to walk, as she did, evenly and steadily, and with much grace and dignity, the whole length of the Abbey.”

  While the trainbearers were tripping over themselves in the procession, the peers of the realm, members of the highest social order, were doing the same as they paid ritual homage to their new sovereign. “The Queen complained of a headache, from having her crown very unceremoniously knocked by most of the peers,” recalled Lady Wilhelmina Stanhope—“one actually clutched hold of it, but she said she had guarded herself from any accident or misadventure by having it made to fit her head tightly.”

  One elderly peer, Lord Rolle, had an unfortunate accident as he tried to make it up the stairs to pay tribute to the queen. “It turned me very sick,” recounted Harriet Martineau, who was observing from a balcony. “The large and infirm old man was held by two peers, and had nearly reached the footstool when he slipped through the hands of his supporters, and rolled over and over down the steps, lying at the bottom coiled up in his robes. He was instantly lifted up, and tried again and again, amidst shouts of admiration of his valour.” Victoria managed to salvage the situation when she rose from the throne and walked down two or three steps to meet Lord Rolle as he continued his struggle up. The incident was recalled in a bit of verse by Richard Harris Barham:

  Then the trumpets braying, and the organ playing,

  And the sweet trombones, with their silver tones;

  But Lord Rolle was rolling;—’t was mighty consoling

  To think his Lordship did not break his bones!

  Another aspect of Queen Victoria’s coronation ceremony went wildly awry: the distribution of her coronation medals. “The noise and confusion were very great when the medals were thrown about by Lord Surrey, everybody scrambling with all their might and main to get them,” Greville reported. Surrey was “nearly torn to pieces in the universal excitement,” Lady Stanhope wrote, and “with his temper entirely gone,” he “looked as red and voluble as a turkey-cock.”

  After nearly five hours, the bumbling service mercifully came to an end. Victoria returned to Buckingham Palace and immediately went to wash her dog. Though her coronation was inelegant at times, she recalled it with pride. “It was a memorable and glorious day for me,” she wrote. “I likewise venture to add that people thought I did my part—very well.”

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  Victoria (1837–1901):

  The Queen’s Prince Charming

  I NEVER NEVER spent such an evening!!!

  —QUEEN VICTORIA

  Queen Victoria married her first cousin on her mother’s side, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, on February 10, 1840. The couple had nine children, many of whom married into the various ruling houses of Europe and produced, among others, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Queen Maud of Norway, Empress Alexandra of Russia, and Queen Marie of Romania.

  Now that she was queen, the last thing Victoria wanted was a husband. She was young, powerful, and, for the first time in her life, independent. Having been dominated her entire life by her widowed mother, the Duchess of Kent, she found the prospect of ceding any of her newly found freedom odious indeed. “I said I dreaded the thought of marrying,” the queen wrote, “that I was so accustomed to have my own way that I thought it was 10 to 1 that I shouldn’t agree with anybody.”

  Yet despite the queen’s most vigorous objections to the subject of marriage, no one expected she would remain, like her distant predecessor Elizabeth I, single forever. Even Victoria knew she would marry, just not right away. An early marriage, her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, assured her, was “not NECESSARY.”

  King Leopold I of Belgium, the queen’s maternal uncle (and Princess Charlotte’s widower), thought otherwise. He also had a definite idea who Victoria’s consort should be: his nephew, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Leopold had been encouraging the match for years, but nothing had come of his efforts. In fact, there had been very few sparks when Victoria briefly met her cousin Albert in 1836, the year before she became queen. He was a tad too delicate for her tastes, even if he was handsome. “I am sorry to say,” Victoria wrote to her uncle, “that we have an invalid in the house in the person of Albert.”

  Leopold was still pushing three years later when he suggested that Albert go to England again, as a prospective bridegroom. The queen was decidedly unenthused about the proposed visit, “which I am desirous should not transpire,” and expressed her feelings to her uncle. “First of all,” she wrote, “I wish to know if Albert is aware of the wish of his Father [Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha] and you relative to me? Secondly, if he knows that there is no engagement between us? I am anxious that you should acquaint Uncle Ernest, that if I should like Albert, that I can make no final promise this year, for, at the very earliest, any such event could not take place till two or three years hence. For, independent of my youth, and my great repugnance to change my present position, there is no anxiety evinced in this country for such an event, and it would be more prudent, in my opinion, to wait till some such demonstration is shown,—else if I were hurried it might produce discontent.”

  The queen was moody and irate in anticipation of Albert’s visit, with her prime minister stoically bearing the brunt of her pique. But then suddenly everything switched. Albert arrived on October 10, 1839, and Victoria was almost immediately sent swooning. “It is with some emotion that I beheld Albert—who is beautiful,” she wrote, beginning an avalanche of superlatives about Albert in her diary.

  “Albert really is quite charming,” she gushed in one entry, “and so excessively handsome, such beautiful blue eyes, an exquisite nose, and such pretty mouth with delicate mustachios and slight but very slight whiskers; a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist; my heart is quite going.” Everything Albert did, he seemed to do “beautifully.” “It is quite a pleasure to look at Albert when he gallops and valses, he does it so beautifully, holds himself so well with that beautiful figure of his … dearest Albert … dances so beautifully.”

  All the queen’s objections about marriage vanished instantly, and just five days after Albert’s arrival, she proposed to him. Both were trembling and uncertain before Victoria finally blurted out that it would make her “too happy” if he would consent to be her husband. She had barely finished before Albert took her hands in his and, while kissing and caressing them, whispered in German how pleased he would be to spend his life with her.

  “We embraced each other over and over again,” Victoria wrote in her journal, “and he was so kind, so affectionate; Oh! to feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel was too great a delight to describe. He is perfection; perfection in every way—in beauty—in everything!… Oh! how I adore and love him, I cannot say!! how I will strive to make him feel as little as possible the great sacrifice he has made.”

  Albert was keenly aware of what the great sacrifice would entail. He would not only have to leave his homeland and loved ones for an alien kingdom, but he would have to sublimate his very identity to that of the British sovereign. “My future position will have its dark sides and the sky will not always be blue and unclouded,” he confided to his brother Ernest. Nevertheless, he was prepared to do his duty and to love Victoria the best way he could. “How is it,” he wrote to her, “that I have deserved so much love, so much affection? … I believe that Heaven has sent me an angel whose brightness shall illume my life.”

  The young cousins, both twenty years old, spent many hours together after their engagement, kissing tenderly, reveling in each other’s company, and planning their future. But it was soon time for Albert to return to Germany, briefly, before making the permanent move to Britain. “We kissed each other so often, and I leant on that dear soft cheek, fresh and pink as a rose,” Victoria wrote the day Albert left. “It was ten o’clock and the time for his go
ing … I gave Albert a last kiss, and saw him get into the carriage—and drive off. I cried so much, felt wretched, yet happy to think that we should meet again so soon. Oh! How I love him, how intensely, how devotedly, how ardently! I cried and felt so sad.”

  On November 23, 1839, just over a week after Albert’s departure, Queen Victoria made her Declaration of Marriage before an assembly of privy councillors at Buckingham Palace. Her hands trembled terribly. “It was rather an awful moment,” she wrote to her fiancé, “to be obliged to announce this to so many people, many of whom were quite strangers.” Still, she admitted, the anxiety of publicly announcing that she had selected a mate for herself did not compare with the nervousness she had felt in anticipation of proposing to him.

  Not everyone was as ecstatic as Victoria over her choice of a spouse. “The ultra-Tories are filled with prejudices against the Prince, in which I can clearly trace the influence of Ernest Augustus of Hanover,” Baron Stockmar reported to King Leopold. “They give out that he is a Radical and an infidel, and say that George of Cambridge [Victoria’s first cousin], or a Prince of Orange, ought to have been the Consort of the Queen.”

  It was indeed the queen’s uncle, Ernest Augustus of Hanover*—the infamous Duke of Cumberland accused of killing his valet (see Chapter 22)—who worked most assiduously against Victoria’s wishes. She wanted Albert to take precedence over all members of the royal family, but that “old wretch,” as the queen called her uncle Ernest, absolutely refused to yield to what he termed a “paper Royal Highness” from an insignificant duchy. The matter was finally resolved when it was determined that the queen could grant Albert precedence by use of the royal prerogative, which was a constitutional right retained by the sovereign, a vestige of the vast powers English kings once possessed.

  Money was another matter, however. Only Parliament could approve of the fifty-thousand-pound income for Albert that the queen requested. And after years of funding the lavish lifestyles of Victoria’s debauched Hanoverian uncles, particularly George IV, the lawmakers were loath to indulge yet another royal parasite. Albert was given only a little more than half of what had been expected.

  “Everybody … thinks the allowance proposed for Prince Albert very exorbitant,” Charles Greville noted. “Fifty thousand a year given for pocket-money is quite monstrous, and it would have been prudent to propose a more moderate grant for the sake of his popularity.” A bit of satirical verse reflected the mood of some toward the penniless German prince Victoria intended to import:

  He comes, the bridegroom of Victoria’s choice,

  The nominee of Lehzen’s† vulgar voice

  He comes to take “for better or for worse”

  England’s fat Queen and England’s fatter purse.…

  Saxe-Coburg sends him from its paltry race,

  With foreign phrases and mustachio’d face,

  To win from Hymen, and a school-girl’s love,

  Treasures, his sire’s whole revenue above.…

  The hoyden Sovereign of this mighty isle

  Welcomes her German with enraptured smile,

  Telleth her “faithful Commons” to provide

  Supplies, to make him worthy of his bride;

  And thus transforms, by magic conjuring,

  A lucky beggar to a puissant king.

  The queen blamed the Tories for most of her troubles, including the “wicked old foolish” Duke of Wellington, who had voted down Albert’s subsidy and even dared question whether he was Protestant. “Poor dear Albert, how cruelly they are using that dearest Angel! Monsters! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!”

  Yet while the queen railed against all the indignities her beloved was made to suffer at the hands of those “abominable, infamous Tories,” she was herself thwarting Albert in a number of ways, lording her sovereignty over him. When, for example, he declared his wish to have a bipartisan household to reflect his political impartiality, “chosen from both sides—the same number of Whigs as of Tories,” as well as some German gentlemen, the queen sternly replied, “I must tell you quite honestly that it will not do.”

  Victoria’s refusal seemed to startle the prince. “I am very sorry,” he wrote to her from Coburg, “that you have not been able to grant my first request … for I know it was not an unfair one.… Think of my position, Dear Victoria, I am leaving home with all its associations, all my bosom friends, and going to a country in which everything is new and strange to me.… Except yourself I have no one to confide in. And it is not even to be conceded to me that the two or three persons who are to have the charge of my private affairs should be persons who already command my confidence.”

  The queen was not to be persuaded on the issue, and was similarly intransigent on the length of their honeymoon, which he hoped might last “at least a fortnight—or a week?” “My dear Albert,” she replied imperiously, “you have not at all understood the matter. You forget, my dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing.”

  Victoria adopted an entirely different tone as she rhapsodized about the honeymoon she had insisted upon keeping short: “When day dawned (for we did not sleep much) and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express! He does look so beautiful in his shirt only, with his beautiful throat seen.”

  It was a remarkably vivid account, particularly for a monarch whose name has become almost synonymous with rigid and repressed sexuality.‡ And it was just one journal entry. “I NEVER NEVER spent such an evening!!!” she gushed in another. “My DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert sat on a footstool by my side, & his excessive love & affection gave me feelings of heavenly love & 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 for such a Husband!

  * All of the Hanoverian monarchs of Britain were kings of Hanover as well, except Victoria. Salic law prohibited a woman from occupying the throne, so upon the death of William IV in 1837, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, became king.

  † Louise Lehzen had been Victoria’s governess and wielded great influence over her.

  ‡ It was actually Albert who was the prude.

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  Victoria (1837–1901): Paradise Lost

  Never do I enjoy myself more or more peacefully than when I can be so much with my beloved Albert—follow him everywhere.

  —QUEEN VICTORIA

  The love Victoria had for Albert turned to worship as the queen grew entirely dependent on her “beloved lord and master.” As she later recalled, “I … leant on him for all and everything.” Without his approval “I did nothing, moved not a finger, arranged not a print or photograph.” Accordingly, the retreat the couple purchased on the Isle of Wight was Albert’s own kingdom, where he held absolute dominion—even after death.

  The rains had been unrelenting that October day in 1844 as Victoria and Albert sailed across the Solent toward the Isle of Wight. There they hoped to purchase a private retreat for themselves—a place far from the suffocating court life and unhealthy air of London—that they could call their very own. There seemed to be no break in store from the abysmal weather when the couple arrived on the island just off England’s southern coast. But as they drove through the secluded Osborne estate on the outskirts of East Cowes, the sun managed to peek through the stormy skies and shine upon a large three-story home surrounded by stately trees, with grounds that sloped gently toward the sea. The queen was enchanted.

  “It is impossible to see a prettier place,” she told Lord Melbourne, “with woods and valleys and points de vue, which would be beautiful anywhere, but all this near the sea … is quite perfection. We have a calming beach quite to ourselves. The sea is so blue and calm and the prince said it was like Naples. And then we can walk about anywhere by ourselves without fear of being followed and mobbed.”

  Victoria and Albert had found their Eden; their “dear an
d lovely little domaine,” as the queen called Osborne. There they would spend some of their happiest days together, surrounded by their growing family, and completely at ease amid the estate’s bountiful pleasures.

  Albert immediately set about making improvements to the place where, he said, he could be “partly forester, partly builder, partly farmer and partly gardener.” There was certainly plenty of work to be done on the neglected property, and the prince worked intently to create his personal paradise. “It does one’s heart good to see how my beloved Albert enjoys it all, and is so full of the plans and improvements he means to carry out,” Victoria wrote. “He is hardly to be kept at home.”

  One of the prince’s first major projects was to replace the existing house on the estate, which he deemed too small, with a much larger structure in the style of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, complete with two belvedere towers that loomed over the landscape. Once completed, the new home was filled with Albert’s personal touches—from the furniture he designed to fit his wife’s tiny frame to the intertwined letters V and A over the doorways (except over the entry to the smoking room, where the letter A stands alone in deference to the queen’s strong dislike of tobacco).

  One of the most striking features of Osborne House (which is no longer a royal residence and is open to the public) is the number of nudes throughout—robust male and female nudes in paintings and sculpture that Victoria and Albert exchanged as gifts. This veritable celebration of naked human form is in vivid contrast to the popular image of a prudish queen who lent her name to an era of sexual repression. (Albert, who actually was a bit uptight about sex, did object to one sculpture that featured his bare legs and kept it hidden on a quiet cul-de-sac at the top of the house.)