His influence in every aspect of her life was enormously felt. Although he was not a tactful man, Albert was able to reform the royal household, coordinating departments, eliminating redundancies, and cutting waste. Caricaturists lampooned him counting scrub brushes at Windsor Castle, because it was rumored that Albert had told servants to provide their own soap, brushes, and mops. Candles were restricted to two per room; even the consumption of toilet tissue was restricted, as Sir Arthur Ellis discovered, observing that the lavatories at Windsor were supplied with newspaper.
Throughout their marriage Victoria lamented that the natural order of things had been reversed. She firmly believed that man was meant to master woman. And as Queen of England, she was answerable to no man. She had probably heard the popular quip about her and Albert that made the rounds during their engagement: She is lovely, she is rich,
But they tell me when I marry
That she will wear the britsch.
To find a way of rectifying this anomaly, after sixteen years of marriage, in May of 1856, the queen issued a formal Memorandum, declaring, “It is a strange omission in our Constitution that while the wife of a King has the highest rank and dignity in the realm after her husband assigned to her by law, the husband of a Queen regnant is entirely ignored by the law. This is the more extraordinary, as a husband has in this country such particular rights and such great powers over his wife, and as the Queen is married just as any other woman is, and swears to obey her lord and master, as such, while by law he has no rank or defined position. . . .”
The following year, after Parliament refused to grant Albert the title of Prince Consort through legislative channels, Victoria angrily overrode them by issuing letters patent awarding the title to her husband.
In his diary Charles Greville—Clerk of the Council in Ordinary under three successive sovereigns, including Victoria—wrote: “The Prince is become so identified with the Queen that they are one person, and as he likes business, it is obvious that while she has the title he is really discharging the functions of the Sovereign. He is King to all intents and purposes. I am not surprised at this, but certainly was not aware that it had taken such definite shape.”
Albert’s intrusion into every aspect of English life had won him many enemies, particularly among the aristocracy. The prince’s talents—his horsemanship, his grace as a dancer and ice skater, his strengths as a swimmer and sportsman, his musical gifts and most certainly his prudery and his awkwardness around all women other than his wife—earned him contempt rather than praise. Even the cut of his coat and the manner in which he shook hands was derided as being too arrogantly German.
As a result, Albert became homesick, once to the point of tears. Victoria found him weeping in a hallway after he’d said good-bye to his father, who had paid them a visit. Moved by her husband’s rare display of emotion, the queen wrote in her journal, “God knows how great my wish is to make this Beloved being happy and contented.”
For such a happily married woman, Victoria harbored highly negative views of wedlock—at least as it affected her own brood. The queen’s matchmaking efforts for her nine children would earn her the nickname “grandmother of Europe,” but it nonetheless broke her heart when she had to sacrifice one of them, particularly a daughter, on the matrimonial altar. On May 16, 1860, having been Albert’s wife for a little more than two decades, and having recently wed their eldest child, Vicky, to Prince Frederick Wilhelm of Germany, she admitted, “All marriage is such a lottery—the happiness is always an exchange—though it may be a very happy one—still the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat. When I think of a merry, happy, free young girl—and look at the ailing, aching state a young wife is generally doomed to—which you can’t deny is the penalty of marriage.”
The year 1860 also marked the beginning of a decline in Albert’s health. That November he was seriously ill with violent shivers he called the “English cholera.” For the past couple of years he’d been gloomy and irritable, with premonitions of a premature death. By 1861 he was suffering from frequent headaches and pains in his limbs.
Victoria would always insist that their eldest son, the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward (known as Bertie) was responsible for hastening her husband’s demise. Bertie had been sent to Dublin, attached to the Grenadier Guards at the Curragh Military Camp. Just for kicks and giggles one night his mates installed a vivacious and willing young actress, Nellie Clifden, in the young prince’s bunk. So Bertie spent the night with her. The scandal engendered by the Nellie Clifden affair sent the already ailing Albert rushing up to Cambridge to smooth things over with the university dons. Compounding matters, discussions were already under way with the King of Denmark to wed Bertie to his daughter, Princess Alexandra, which compelled Albert to do some damage control with the Danish royal family.
On November 25, father and son trudged through the Cambridge rain as Albert endeavored to sort Bertie out. Albert was nursing a cold he had caught three days earlier, which had taken a turn for the worse, manifesting itself as neuralgia (acute nerve pain) and catarrh (an upper respiratory inflammation). Within a few days’ time he was gravely ill, and became bedridden at Windsor Castle.
Victoria’s daily journal entries and her letters to Vicky express her immense concern for Albert’s health, and chart both the progress and the relapses of his illness, expressing joy at the tiniest signs of improvement. She melted when he was pleased to see her and uttered German terms of endearment, such as “Fraüchen” (little woman) and “gütes Weibchen” (excellent wife).
On December 14, 1861, the queen paid her customary seven a.m. visit to her husband’s sickbed. In her journal, she wrote, “Never can I forget how beautiful my darling looked lying there with his face lit up by the rising sun, his eyes unusually bright gazing as it were on unseen objects and not taking notice of me.” The doctors viewed it as a “decided rally” and gave the queen permission to take a very brief walk as long as she remained close at hand. Victoria stepped out onto the terrace with their daughter Alice, but soon burst into tears and reentered Albert’s room.
“The breathing was . . . so rapid . . . I think 60 respirations in a minute. I bent over him and said to him ‘Es ist Kleines Fraüchen’ [it is your little wife] and he bowed his head; I asked him if he would give me ‘ein Kuss’ [a kiss] and he did so. He seemed half dozing, quite quiet . . . I left the room for a moment and sat down on the floor in utter despair . . . Alice told me to come in . . . and I took his dear hand which was already cold, though the breathing was quite gentle and I knelt down by him. . . . Two or three long but perfectly gentle breaths were drawn, the hand clasping mine and . . . all, all was over. . . . I stood up, kissed his heavenly forehead and called out in a bitter and agonizing cry, ‘Oh! My dear darling!’ ”
The official cause of Albert’s death was listed as typhoid fever, but given his symptoms, some twentieth-century historians have posited that he had suffered from stomach cancer for some time and the disease had weakened his resistance to the catarrh he contracted that November.
When Albert died at the age of forty-two, “cut off in the prime of life,” in Victoria’s words after twenty-one years of marriage, part of the queen died with him. Stricken to the point of collapse, she slept with his coat on top of her, clutching his nightshirt like a lover. The Blue Room at Windsor where Albert spent so much time became a shrine, his personal effects maintained exactly the way he had left them. Victoria turned the entire kingdom into a memorial to her late husband, declaring, “His wishes—his plans about every thing, his views about every thing are to be my law! And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished.”
Everyone at court wore black mourning for a full year. After 1864 the queen permitted her maids of honor to wear shades of purple, mauve, gray, and white. Victoria’s mourning remained permanent. For the first few years after Albert’s death, her only desire was to sit and weep or erect various shrines to hi
s memory. According to Lord Clarendon, “She believes that his eye is now constantly upon her, that he watches over every action of hers and that in fact, she never ceases to be in communication with his spirit.” Although she’d gained everyone’s sympathy at the outset, by 1864 Victoria’s ongoing absence from public life was severely criticized by her subjects, her ministers, and the press, as was her appearance at Parliament only when she needed to request treasury money for her expanding family.
Lord Halifax, the Lord Privy Seal, told the queen’s private secretary Henry Ponsonby, “It is impossible to deny that H.M. is drawing heavily on the credit of her former popularity, and that Crowned Heads as well as other people must do much that was not necessary in former days to meet the altered circumstances and altered tone of modern times . . . the mass of the people expect a King or a Queen to look and play the part. They want to see a Crown and Sceptre and all that sort of thing. They want the gilding for the money. It is not wise to let them think . . . that they could do without a sovereign who lives at Osborne and Balmoral as any private lady might do.”
During these semi-reclusive years, Victoria’s intimate friendship with a Scottish gillie, John Brown, created a national scandal. Brown was a connection to Albert, someone who had known her husband well in happier times. Blunt and outspoken, the devoted Brown saw to her every need, and never took a single day off in eighteen and a half years of service. By 1866, word had gotten out that Victoria and her personal Highland servant had a special relationship, leading to a crop of salacious and unchecked rumors about the queen’s inappropriate affection for John Brown, including the intimation that Victoria and her gillie were secretly married, thus inspiring her nickname, “Mrs. Brown.” Proof of a sexual affair remains elusive, although Victoria once told a granddaughter, “do you know my dear, I sometimes feel that when I die I shall be just a little nervous about meeting Grandpapa for I have taken to doing a good many things that he would not quite approve of.” However, she was more likely referring to the séances she attended in an effort to commune with Albert’s spirit.
Brown died on March 27, 1883, at the age of fifty-seven. Victoria, now sixty-three, was distraught. As she wrote to Henry Ponsonby on April 3, it was like losing Albert all over again. She would endure many more years of life without them.
Victoria was the longest-reigning monarch in British history, lending her name to an era that spanned two-thirds of the nineteenth century. During her sixty-three years, seven months, and two days as queen, the British Empire reached its zenith, covering a quarter of the world. But imperial expansion exacted its price, notably the 1857 Sepoy Massacre in India and the two South African Boer Wars.
Trade was so extensive, and the available goods so exotic, that the English became an acquisitive population, packing as much bric-a-brac into their gaslit homes as humanly possible. The Industrial Revolution, the steam engine, and the invention of the telegraph changed the way people lived, worked, communicated, and traveled, transforming the British economy.
And yet Victoria hated change. She was unnerved by the numerous shifts of government during her reign—twenty prime ministers, although some of the same men went in and out of office over the years. The modifications to her household, with her daughters eventually wedding and moving far away from home, put her off balance as well. During her own marriage she had secretly wished to retreat from the world to enjoy a normal, untrammeled life; and after Albert’s death she might have become a permanent recluse and abdicated the throne, but she did not trust the Prince of Wales to rule responsibly.
In her final years, Victoria’s eyesight began to fail. She complained of the ailments of aging—sciatica, neuralgia, lumbago, insomnia, indigestion, gastric pain, and trouble with her false teeth. On January 16, 1901, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. On January 22, with a crucifix resting in her hands, Queen Victoria died at the age of eighty-one, marking the end of the House of Hanover. Examining her postmortem, her physician, James Reid, noticed that she had a ventral hernia and a prolapsed uterus. According to generally observed medical protocol of the era governing male doctors and their female patients, he had never physically examined her while she lived, but had treated her purely through verbal communication.
Her coffin reposed in the Albert Memorial Chapel at Windsor, and on February 4, 1901, it was placed in their mausoleum at Frogmore in Windsor Great Park. Above the door was inscribed, “His mourning widow, Victoria the Queen directed that all that is mortal of Prince Albert be placed in this sepulcher A.D. 1862. Vale desideratissime [Farewell most beloved]. Hic demum conquiescam tecum, tecum in Christo consurgeam [Here at length I shall rest with thee, with thee in Christ I shall rise again].”
Victoria was succeeded by their eldest son, Bertie, the Prince of Wales, who was crowned Edward VII at the age of fifty-nine.
FRANZ JOSEPH I 1830-1916
RULED AUSTRIA: 1848-1916
and
ELISABETH AMALIE EUGENIE,
DUCHESS IN BAVARIA, PRINCESS OF BAVARIA
1837-1898
married 1854-1898
“I cannot understand how people can look forward to marriage so much and expect so much good to come of it. It is a ridiculous institution.”
—Elisabeth (Sisi), Empress of Austria
“MARRY IN HASTE, REPENT AT LEISURE” WOULD BE an apt way to describe the relationship between Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and his child-bride, his Bavarian cousin Elisabeth.
“Sisi” was one of eight children born to Duke Max in Bavaria, a charming bohemian eccentric, and his pragmatic wife, Ludovica, whose family, the Wittelsbachs, had long ruled Bavaria.
From childhood, it was her father who Sisi most resembled, enjoying such decidedly unroyal activities as excursions to circuses and country fairs, where they would disguise themselves as strolling players. Sisi inherited Max’s peripatetic streak and his passion for horseback riding. Both of them chafed at the regimented lifestyle expected of a royal, where their poetic natures were suffocated and stifled by centuries-old etiquette and protocol.
In 1853, Ludovica’s sister, Archduchess Sophia, the mother of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, decided to pay her a visit for the purposes of inspecting the Wittelsbach girls as potential marriage material for the emperor. Sophia quickly settled on Sisi’s slim, dark, and serious older sister, Helen, determining that the girl possessed the proper temperament to become an empress. The only problem with the eighteen-year-old “Nené” was her lack of interest in riding, because “there was nothing the Emperor admired more in a woman than an elegant seat on a horse.”
The astonishingly beautiful fifteen-year-old Sisi, with her sweet round face, almond-shaped eyes, and masses of wavy auburn hair that grazed the backs of her knees, was already an accomplished equestrienne, but Sophia didn’t even pause to consider her. The archduchess could tell in a heartbeat that Sisi was not the right candidate—not only too young, but too emotionally sensitive.
Sophia extended an invitation to Ludovica, Max, and Nené to visit her summer home, Villa Eltz, in Bad Ischl in August—the only time her busy son could take a vacation from his imperial duties. But Duke Max, who disliked his sister-in-law as much as he disdained court etiquette, took a pass, which left an empty seat in the carriage. There was no reason to deny it to Sisi, with her perennial thirst for travel.
Once everyone was formally introduced at Bad Ischl, however, it became abundantly apparent that Archduchess Sophia had misjudged her son. Franz Joseph evinced no interest in Nené’s moribund demeanor and chiseled features. Instead, opposites attracted. Guided by his hormones, the twenty-two-year-old emperor was immediately smitten with Sisi, a girl whose temperament could not have been further from his own. Franz Joseph was critical, punctilious, and detail-oriented, a stickler for etiquette and a slave to duty. His long hours of paperwork, far from being a tedious chore, gave him something to focus on. As things eventually transpired, just about the only thing that Sisi and Franz Joseph shared in common was a natural shyn
ess that was often mistaken for aloofness or arrogance. And the emperor would soon discover that Sisi suffered from a strange psychosomatic ailment, becoming physically ill when she grew restless or bored. In stark contrast to Franz Joseph’s solidity, Sisi was an elusive, ethereal will-o’-the-wisp.
Additionally, Sisi’s childhood seemed not to have an expiration date; while from boyhood, the rigid and disciplined Franz Joseph had been educated in statecraft, and therefore never had much of a chance to be a kid. By the age of eighteen, the tall, mustachioed ruler with his soft, full lips and Hapsburg high forehead reigned over an empire of 38 million people. At seventeen he had gone to war and experienced its carnage, crushing the 1848 uprising in Italy under Field Marshal Radetzky. Fearless in battle, the young emperor wore a uniform every day for the rest of his life, unless he was out hunting.
The emperor’s intense gazes made Sisi blush. His envious younger brother Charles Ludwig assured their mother that “Franzl likes Sisi better than Nené. You will see, she is the one he will want to marry.” Sophia dismissed the comment: “What utter nonsense! As if he would look at that little monkey!”
But the following morning, an uncharacteristically cheerful Franz Joseph burst into his mother’s boudoir and peppered her with questions about Sisi. How did she like her? Wasn’t she enchanting?—“So modest and yet so completely at ease—so gay and yet so touching in her simplicity—as fresh and unspoilt as a green, half-opened almond, with such a sweet look in her eyes, and lips as soft and inviting as ripe strawberries. Even that dreary black dress couldn’t spoil her pretty figure. . . .”
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 41
