Sons, Servants and Statesmen

by John Van der Kiste

  Melbourne had considerable sympathy for Albert and the Queen’s reluctance to share authority with anyone – even her husband. ‘My impression’, he wrote to George Anson, ‘is that the chief obstacle in Her Majesty’s mind is the fear of difference of opinion and she thinks that domestic harmony is more likely to follow from avoiding subjects likely to create difference.’29

  Moreover, Albert had formidable allies in King Leopold and his confidential adviser, Baron Stockmar, both of whom were determined that he should be her right hand in her constitutional functions. On a visit to Windsor in August 1840, the King declared that the prince ‘ought in business as in everything to be necessary to the Queen, he should be to her a walking dictionary for reference on any point which her own knowledge or education have not enabled her to answer’.30

  Albert’s patience, and a gradual recognition of his abilities by others, soon brought about a change for the better. Melbourne had initially been sceptical of this shy, unworldly young German prince. Though deeply devoted to the Queen himself, he was concerned for her future happiness, and never a trace of jealousy entered his soul. He readily knew that it would be to the benefit of all if she was able to find a husband worthy of her and act as her support in governing the kingdom. To the elderly Prime Minister, who knew his political career would soon be over, Albert’s qualities of calm, intelligence and conscientiousness were evident. He began talking political matters with Albert and urged the Queen to do likewise, telling her that he understood everything so well and should be involved more in the regular business of the monarchy. When he left office for the last time in 1841, he advised her to put her trust in her husband.

  The advice was well received. Soon Albert was reading despatches, being asked for his advice and making important decisions. He was given the keys to the boxes of confidential state documents. At ministerial meetings he was always by the Queen’s side, ready to make his contribution when asked, and without exception all her prime ministers during his lifetime appreciated and valued his opinions, though at least one – the redoubtable Lord Palmerston – might not have been prepared to admit it, preferring instead to regard him as a royal busybody meddling in affairs beyond his station. When Albert encouraged Victoria to take a greater interest in European affairs and insist on the right to be consulted on them at all times, the ministers might disagree, wondering whether he was exceeding his brief as the consort of a constitutional monarch. But they soon realised that they were dealing with a man of intelligence whose grasp of affairs at home and abroad was always scrupulously well-informed and generally impartial. Before her marriage, she had been a somewhat partisan Whig, until Albert convinced her that it was the duty of the Crown to stand above party politics; she must give allegiance to neither Whigs nor Tories.

  Like her Hanoverian predecessors, the Queen did not shrink at first from openly showing her support for ‘our party’. Until then, it had been accepted as common practice that in Windsor the monarch could control the election of members of parliament. Under Stockmar’s tutelage, and with Peel’s ready endorsement, Albert decided that the Queen should no longer do so. There was no question of the Crown withdrawing completely from involvement in political questions; but it was important that the Queen was seen to respect the integrity of the elected government and its party, just as she demanded that they respect her power as sovereign.

  Within two months of his wedding, Albert had already formed his own view of the two-party system and the fundamental differences between each. The Whigs, he had decided, sought change ‘before change is required’, and ‘their 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’.31

  Yet Queen Victoria never completely recognised the limits imposed on a constitutional monarch. At various times throughout her life, she submitted to a change of government with ill-concealed bad grace. Albert may have been better in masking his feelings, but it is doubtful whether he appreciated such limits himself. In this he was taking his lead from Baron Stockmar’s ill-advised opinion that the prime minister of the day was merely the temporary head of the cabinet, with the monarch as ‘permanent premier’.32 Lord John Russell once called the monarch ‘an informal but potent member of all Cabinets’.33 On the fall of his Conservative administration in 1852, Lord Derby recommended that Her Majesty should send for Lord Lansdowne; Lord John Russell maintained that his own claim should be considered; but the Queen chose the more amenable, if ineffectual, Lord Aberdeen instead. In 1858 the Queen and the Prince Consort, on whom this title had been conferred by letters patent the previous year, wanted Lord Granville to head an administration in order to avoid calling Lord Palmerston a second time, but in vain. As will be examined later, their relations with the maverick Palmerston had been very variable, and they opposed his Italian policy at a crucial time for Anglo-European relations, but their reservations about making him head of government counted for little.

  Albert initially saw it as his role to broaden his wife’s education and undertake a certain amount of character-forming. She was painfully aware of her intellectual and cultural shortcomings, and she tended to avoid the company of clever people. He encouraged her to take a more intelligent interest in everything around her, introducing her to the wonders of art and science, and encouraging her to read more serious books. With his passion for music, and skill as a musician and composer himself, he extended her interest in and knowledge of music. She had been brought up to enjoy concerts and the ballet, but as in so many other artistic matters, she knew very little about them until he imparted his own grasp of and enthusiasm for the subject, particularly the work of Handel, which until then had never meant anything to her.

  Gradually he became the dominant partner, the one who made the decisions. Where he had initially assumed the role of her unofficial secretary, in time the positions became reversed. In effect, she became his deputy in dealings with the ministers.34 After their eldest daughter Victoria, Princess Royal, married Prince Frederick William of Prussia in January 1858, she wrote regularly to her mother about personal matters, but always discussed political business with her father. Such letters were not generally shown to the Queen.

  It is unlikely that she would have been more than momentarily piqued if she had known. During the days of Melbourne’s tutelage, her instruction in the matter of politics and government had been very enjoyable. In later years, thanks to Disraeli, the subjects would once again become interesting, in presentation if not in substance. However, while she was married, they were strictly for the male of the species, not for her. ‘Albert grows daily fonder and fonder of politics and business,’ she wrote to King Leopold in 1852, ‘and is so wonderfully fit for both – such perspicacity and such courage – and I grow daily to dislike them both more and more. We women are not made for governing – and if we are good women, we must dislike these masculine occupations; but there are times which force one to take interest in them mal gré bon gré, and I do, of course, intensely.’35 There spoke a reluctant political figure. How she would have viewed the election of women to parliament, let alone a woman prime minister, one can only speculate, but she would probably not have welcomed the concept.

  In public and in private, the Queen became more serious and more dignified, less impulsive and impetuous. Before her wedding, she had been a high-spirited young woman, ready to tease and given to outbursts of almost uncontrollable laughter. With marriage to Albert, these high spirits were not extinguished altogether, but they were certainly dampened. In one sense, he taught her to be a queen, by assuming an appropriate sense of regal dignity. More than once, she admitted to him that it was he who ‘entirely formed’ her.

  TWO

  ‘My father, my protector, my guide and adviser’

  It has sometimes been argued that Prince Albert was the true architect of Victorianism, rather than the Queen who gave the
era its name. Had she lived and reigned as a virgin queen like Elizabeth I, Victoria might have remained true to her Hanoverian instincts – hard-working, but with her virtues of industry tempered somewhat by an easy-going nature, a tendency to self-indulgence and a total lack of prudery. Marriage to the straitlaced, methodical, ever-earnest Albert ensured that the opposite happened.

  In this, he was doing no more than following the precepts laid down during his early years by the dour, high-principled Baron Stockmar. Albert’s intense prudery can probably be ascribed correctly in part to the distress he suffered when his mother was banished from his life for adultery while he was still only a small boy, never to see him again, and by his concern with (bordering on disgust at) the infidelities of his father, a pattern which would be repeated by his brother Ernest. Stockmar’s influence had some effect on the industrious if ever-philandering Ernest as well, particularly with regard to liberal and political leanings, but in the unimpeachably clean-living Albert he found a ready disciple in all aspects.

  Even before marriage, Albert was making his moral standpoint clear to one and all. When the Queen was choosing her bridesmaids, he proposed that she should take into account the reputation of their parents, a view which amazed the easy-going Lord Melbourne. He argued that it was one thing to demand previous employers’ references for stableboys and housemaids, but quite another ‘for persons of quality’. Though Melbourne had his way on this occasion, Albert continued to make a stand wherever he could. In 1852, when Lord Derby (who was twenty years his senior) became Prime Minister, Albert treated him to a homily on prime-ministerial duties. These, he declared, included the responsibility of being ‘Keeper of the King’s (or Queen’s) Conscience’, and observing the Queen’s insistence that the moral character of the Court must be beyond reproach.1 One might say that Albert was even more Victorian than Victoria herself.

  In his letters to the Queen, the Prince addressed her as his ‘own darling’, or his ‘little wife’, his Fraüchen. On the rare occasions when they were apart, such letters were full of endearments to her. She hated the moments of separation, and when he had to go to Coburg for his father’s funeral in 1844 she missed him bitterly. It was the first time they had been apart for even just a night, and as she told King Leopold, ‘the thought of such separation is quite dreadful’.2

  The married life of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert may have been idyllic but, like any other marriage, it had its stormy moments. In January 1842 their eldest child, Vicky, then aged fourteen months, suddenly fell ill, though the problem was nothing much more than indigestion – certainly no life-threatening condition. When they returned home from a visit to Claremont, they found the infant very white and thin. Understandably anxious, Albert made some impatient remark which drew forth a sharp comment from the nurse, Mrs Roberts. ‘That is really malicious,’ he muttered under his breath to the Queen, who immediately lost her temper.

  For some time he had been alarmed about the slapdash attitudes of some of the nursery staff. The main offender was the Queen’s old governess and confidante, Baroness Lehzen, and his months of frustration with her and the over-mighty role she played in the royal household came to a head. The Queen accused him of wanting to drive Mrs Roberts away from the nursery while he as good as murdered their child. Horrified that his wife could ever say such a thing, he murmured to himself, ‘I must have patience,’ and went downstairs to cool off. When they met again there was a violent quarrel, the Queen retreating in floods of tears while her husband, seething with anger, wrote her a note claiming that their physician-in-ordinary, Dr James Clark, had ‘mismanaged the child and poisoned her with calomel’. Calling her bluff, he declared that he would 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.’3

  Needless to say, Albert meant nothing of the kind. As the Queen would have been the first to know, he adored their daughter dearly and would never have done anything to jeopardise her health, or indeed that of any of their other children. Clark had been in royal service ever since being appointed the Duchess of Kent’s physician while Victoria was still heir to the throne. Though a kindly man, his medical competence was questionable. In later years Lord Clarendon, Queen Victoria’s plain-speaking Foreign Secretary, branded the royal doctors as unfit to attend a sick cat, Clark being the main butt of his verdict.

  Albert wrote to Baron Stockmar that the Queen was ‘naturally a fine character but warped in many respects by wrong upbringing’.4 Lehzen, who has been acknowledged as ‘the last irresponsible favourite’ in British history,5 was prevailed upon to retire from royal service and return to Germany, and with her departure a barrier between husband and wife was removed. Later the Queen would admit ruefully that Lehzen, like her arch-enemy Conroy, was one of those ‘wicked people’ who had estranged her from her mother.

  Queen Victoria had a fiery temper, and with a quiet, less outgoing husband whose inclination was to reason with her on paper rather than argue face to face, there were inevitably difficult scenes throughout their married life. Albert was melancholic by nature and to those who did not know him well often gave an impression of utter world-weariness. This should not be taken as the sign of an unhappy marriage. There is no reason to doubt that they did not enjoy an extremely good marriage. Any European prince who was marrying the Queen of England would have been aware at the outset that such a matrimonial union would not always run smoothly, but Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha was uniquely well-qualified in terms of temperament and intellect to make as successful a job of it as any of his contemporaries, had they been given the opportunity instead.

  They knew that there would always be testing times. Another arose in 1853, when the Queen was suffering from postnatal depression and anxious about the condition of their newly born son, Leopold, who was puny and evidently not at all well. One evening, the Queen and Albert were compiling a register of prints, when Albert rebuked her for not paying attention to what they were doing. She lost her temper and was in hysterics, shouting and weeping, oblivious to his reasoning. When he tried to speak to her calmly about it, the result was another session of regal sulks, snapping and tantrums. Nonplussed, he sat down and wrote her a long letter, saying how astonished he was at the effect one or two hasty words from him could produce.

  What the Queen needed was a man who would argue back, answer strong words with more of the same, shout her down, reduce her to tears, clear the air and then make it up with her. It was as if his reasonableness and his analytical turn of mind was counterproductive. Her tears unnerved him, probably undermined his self-confidence and made him fearful of losing his temper. The practice of writing notes to her was one he had learnt from Baron Stockmar as a means of cooling tempers. Regrettably, where Queen Victoria was concerned, it generally had the opposite effect and simply prolonged quarrels instead of having a short, sharp shouting-match which dealt with the matter at once. If such episodes emphasised Albert’s father-figure role, the Queen could not have failed to find them unduly patronising, notwithstanding the fact that he acted with the best of intentions.

  Stockmar’s earnest analytical approach to such problems was responsible for Albert’s sometimes misguided solutions to the quarrels. The old Baron, in whom Albert confided more freely about his marital problems than anybody else, always dreaded – perhaps excessively – the possibility of incipient madness in the Queen. As a result, he advised his young protegé that tempers must always be kept calm and face-to-face confrontations avoided at all costs. Had Albert been able to confide in other men (or women) sufficiently to seek their advice, he might have received a very different answer.

  Nevertheless, such scenes between husband and wife were always quickly made up. These arguments were no more common than in most happy marriages, and they never did anything to undermine the closeness of their relationship.

  Three years into their marriage, with a growing family, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert decided that they needed a ho
me of their own. Buckingham Palace, their state residence in the capital, was hardly private, and Albert’s regular requests for more funds from the public purse for rebuilding and improving it met with consternation from their ministers. Brighton Pavilion, so beloved by Victoria’s uncle, King George IV, was ugly, inconvenient and even less private. Windsor Castle was comfortable and imposing, but not homely enough.

  In 1843 they visited the Isle of Wight and briefly considered buying Norris Castle, but they soon discovered it was beyond their means. Not long afterwards, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel learnt that the adjoining Osborne House and its estate were soon due to be sold. Within two years they had rented it, and eventually they were able to buy it outright. Here they had a place of their own, within sufficiently easy reach of the mainland for visiting ministers and dignitaries, but in a suitably unspoilt setting. Here Albert could indulge his passion for farming and planting ‘free from Departments, Crown, Woods & Forests etc’, and they could bring the children up in pleasant rural surroundings close to the seaside.

  ‘Here we are at the Whitsun holidays,’ Albert wrote to Baron Stockmar, ‘when the weary combatants in Parliament and the tired-out epicureans fly from town for a little fresh air. We do the same, exhausted partly by business, partly by the so-called social pleasures, and are off at noon to-day to the Isle of Wight . . . . Osborne is bought, and, with some adjoining farms, which we have also bought, makes a domain of 1,500 acres in a ring fence.’6 Two days later, the Queen noted in her journal that ‘It does my heart good to see how my beloved Albert enjoys it all, and is so full of admiration of the place, and of all the plans and improvements he means to carry out. He is hardly to be kept at home for a moment.’7