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‘Every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy’
THE NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD VICTORIA regards the viewer with a combination of calculation and hesitancy in her portrait by William Fowler, a middling practitioner, for which she sat on 10 August 1838: crowned with a diadem, snowy shoulders wrapped in folds of ermine, Garter-starred, erect in her bearing, her lips characteristically parted. According to the Court Circular, the portrait received a royal viewing on 14 August 1840, when it was shown to King Leopold at Claremont. His verdict was positive.1
Leopold, that cautious Svengali, had reason for approbation. In the two years since Fowler’s sitting, Victoria’s uncle had brought to fruition a scheme very close to his heart. If Fowler’s image – at least the third he had painted of Victoria since 1825 – suggests anticipation and expectancy, its promise had been fulfilled by the time of its unveiling. An engraving of the portrait, undertaken by B. P. Gibbon, had already been published on 10 February. It was the day of Victoria’s wedding.
Like her uncle George IV, Victoria married her first cousin. Unlike that earlier marriage, Victoria’s was to be one of surpassing devotion, full, she claimed, ‘of the friendship, kindness and affection which a truly happy marriage brings with it’.2 Her choice was limited; it was an eventuality for which she had been prepared in advance. Leopold lay behind it, as in her father’s marriage. As in her father’s marriage, Leopold chose as spouse a member of his own family.
‘Uncle’s great wish – was – that I should marry my Cousin, Albert,’ Victoria told Melbourne on 18 April 1839,3 in a conversation broached, after some prevarication, with the aim of postponing just that ‘schocking alternative’ to her single state (the description – and the spelling – are her own). Albert was the younger son of Leopold’s reprobate eldest brother Ernest, a man of easygoing loucheness who, since 1826, had ruled over the newly united duchies of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. These insignificant territories in Thuringia and Saxony had a population twice that of the Isle of Wight, but granted their duke an assumption of droit du seigneur which he exploited with vigour; even in his portrait by the fatuously benign Sir George Hayter, he betrays a shifty opportunism. As if to suggest a theme, Albert’s mother had been banished for adultery when Albert was five. He was twelve at the time of her death from cancer, with a passion for forming orderly collections, a dreamy engagement with the countryside of his homeland, a deep attachment to his flawed and fissured family and, as he frequently complained, a weak stomach. This combination of idealism, administrative efficiency and lack of physical robustness would persist. He was a curious product of so thrustingly sexy and gossip-riddled a provincial court. The sensitive child of an insensitive and boisterous father and a tragic if fallible mother, a poor relation whose intellectual life was richer than that of the woman he married, his contemplative life both more resourceful and more deliberate, like Leopold before him Albert would be welcomed warmly by his new wife and coldly by his adopted country. By inclination he was an outsider: friendlessness would form an aspect of his life in England.
For a time Victoria herself had permitted her emotions to fluctuate. It was neither dilatoriness nor callousness which held her back; nor was she heedless of Leopold’s plan – she had been party to the latter’s supervision of the final stages of Albert’s education. Rather she baulked at her own accurate assessment that her obstinate and intractable nature was ill suited to the submissiveness which she recognised as part of marriage. (At the age of thirteen she had been so forcefully impressed by Katherina’s speech of surrender to her husband Petruchio at the end of a performance of The Taming of the Shrew that she sketched the scene from memory.4) After their first meeting, in June 1836, Victoria admitted to Leopold the good impressions she had formed of Albert: ‘I must thank you, my beloved Uncle, for the prospect of great happiness, you have contributed to give me, in the person of dear Albert. Allow me, then, my dearest Uncle, to tell you how delighted I am with him, and how much I like him in every way. He possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy. He is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable too. He has besides, the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance, you can possibly see.’5 From the vexed fastness of Kensington Palace, the seventeen-year-old princess, stifled by her mother, found in her uncle a welcome ally and, in his plans for her, release from her confinement. Three years later, the prospect of such an escape was regarded with less relish by a headstrong Queen of England at the centre of a silly, if spirited, court which could be set rocking with laughter, for example, by the tomfoolery of the Lord Chamberlain’s sons when waltzing. Anticipating a second visit by Albert, Victoria was at pains to deny that she had made either him, or Leopold, any sort of promise. Decidedly she would not commit herself to marriage in a hurry: ‘at the very earliest, any such event could not take place till two or three years hence’.
This miss-ish self-importance and arbitrary schedule of avoidance were soon overcome. In Victoria’s eyes, the intervening three years had ‘embellished’ Albert’s ‘pleasing and delightful’ exterior to devastating effect. His hair had grown darker, though something of his resemblance to the elfin, vanished mother remained, distinguishing him from his swarthier, heartier-looking brother with whom he travelled. His shoulders were broader; breathlessly Victoria noticed the shapeliness of his limbs in white cazimere pantaloons with ‘nothing under them’; his waist was narrow (waistlines were much on Victoria’s mind: for the first time she was wrestling unsuccessfully with her own expanding girth). It was the same verdict which Lady Granville confessed that she, Lady Sandwich and Lady Clanricarde had all reached;6 so, too, Melbourne’s sister Lady Cowper, who noted ‘a good figure and well built’.7 On 10 October 1839, before any such observations could be put into words, Victoria fell in love. It was a coup de foudre – instantaneous – and it washed over her unannounced and unanticipated as she waited at the top of a staircase at Windsor Castle for her cousins’ arrival and beheld the seraphic vision. Hanoverian effusiveness and a keenly physical excitement demolished all her prosy resolve. Despite her best intentions she was ever impulsive and hot-blooded.
To herself she did not trouble to dissemble. She confided to her journal, ‘It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert – who is beautiful.’ In that spirit of fairness which was among her most appealing qualities, she wrote to Leopold to reassure him and to recant her earlier objections. Five days later, having confirmed her extraordinary feelings in her own mind, Victoria proposed to her cousin. ‘Ordinarily it is not what a woman would wish to say herself. She would rather – he said it,’ Laurence Housman’s Victoria tells Albert in Woman Proposes.8 Royal etiquette forbade an alternative. It was an undertaking sufficiently quaint to inspire cartoons and lithographs when the news was made public. To her aunt Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, Victoria acknowledged that the experience of playing the man’s part had been an awkward one. It was not a sensation on which she had previously much reflected and yet it applied to so many aspects of her position as queen regnant. Following her marriage to Albert, she would brood on it frequently. Beneath that ‘beautiful’ exterior, Albert was set on mastery.
In the nation at large, Victoria’s choice was not a popular one: in that respect Melbourne had found it impossible to advise her accurately, voicing by turns the Coburgs’ adverse reputation for go-getting and Albert’s own recommendations. That this should be so was also partly attributable to Leopold. For the ambitious King of the Belgians, himself once a threadbare prince of Saxe-Coburg, continued to meet his English expenses, including the upkeep of his estate at Claremont, from the generous pension provided him by Parliament as the widower of Princess Charlotte. Such evident self-serving outraged Parliament and influenced its grant to Albert of an annuity of £30,000 against the customary £50,000 which Leopold had been voted. Uselessly Victoria seethed. Her anger was divided between the Tories, whom she suspected of scoring points off Lord Melbourne and paying her back for
her part in the Bedchamber Crisis – both at Albert’s expense; and her own helplessness: no matter how often she invoked the precedent of Queen Anne’s ‘very stupid and insignificant’ husband, George of Denmark, she could not empower Melbourne to wave a magic wand. Cartoons and doggerel cheerfully labelled Albert a fortune-hunter: ‘He comes to take “for better or worse”/ England’s fat Queen and England’s fatter purse.’9 Victoria’s proposal inspired many emotions in Albert, who had yet to fall in love with his cousin: pleasure in his material good fortune does not appear to have been uppermost. In the four months which elapsed before his wedding, continuous setbacks and petty humiliations – over his title, his rank and precedence, and the composition of his household, whose members he would not be allowed to nominate for himself – did much in Albert’s own mind to counter the argument that it was he who benefited from the alliance. ‘As to your wish about your gentlemen, my dear Albert,’ Victoria wrote in response to his request that he choose his own private secretary in place of Melbourne’s cast-off, George Anson, ‘I must tell you quite honestly that it will not do.’ He would retain the services of Isaac Cart, the valet he had shared with his brother Ernest; his only other souvenir of home was his greyhound Eos. Little wonder Albert confided to a boyhood friend that his future, though ‘brilliant’, was ‘plentifully strewn with thorns’.
Inequalities in their relationship notwithstanding, what both cousins gained was an assurance of companionship. Granted, Victoria had put behind her on her accession the loneliness of her secluded childhood: at the centre of her pleasure-loving court, she was seldom alone. Yet she lacked fulfilling relationships and had few close friends among the aristocracy whose members made up her attendants and ministers. While she clung to the warm familiarity of Lehzen and Melbourne, her heart was ripe for plucking: she needed the company of those of her own age. Her sketchbooks prove her susceptibility to a handsome face: a Count Waldstein distantly related to the Duchess of Kent, the glamorous exile Charles, Duke of Brunswick and his companion Count d’Anglau, and the Tsarevitch Alexander all had her pulse and her pencil racing.10 All were men with whom Victoria’s engagement was overwhelmingly imaginative, shaped by her cultural, rather than her emotional, exposure: she did not even meet Brunswick, her second cousin, but glimpsed him, dark and artfully dishevelled, across a crowded theatre and riding in the park. And in her imagination, these identikit young men had more in common with the heroes of the Italian opera or contemporary fiction than the flesh and blood offshoots of the Almanach de Gotha. With his combination of physical perfection and sensitivity, his love of art, music and history, his skill at fencing and skating and his bravery on the hunting field, and those intimations of physical ardour of a different sort which she discerned in his kisses and fond endearments, Albert embodied all the cravings Victoria had transposed upon these two-dimensional lotharios. In addition, like Victoria, he was steeped in the fiction of Sir Walter Scott, which his step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, had read to him as a child: its rosy and hot-blooded historicism, embraced by husband and wife, inspired the fantasy that became Balmoral, a glittering granite castle far from London, like Ellen’s Isle in The Lady of the Lake a place where courtly formalities gave way to a simpler idyll.11 The landscape of Victoria and Albert’s childhoods differed physically and emotionally: the imaginative perimeters of their formative years overlapped in significant ways.
In the aftermath of her proposal, Victoria commissioned Albert’s portrait from miniaturist William Ross. On 29 October she described herself as ‘very anxious’ about it, presumably on account of her habitual impatience and her pressing desire that Ross, who, she told Melbourne liked to make his sitters look worse rather than better than their everyday selves,12 do justice to his subject.13 To that near impossible challenge, the artist apparently rose. On 7 January 1840, Victoria recorded delivery of the finished image: ‘[it] is now and always standing before me. It is quite speaking and is my delight.’14
Ownership of Albert’s image, created in accordance with her own instructions, was a form of emotional possession, measure of the force of Victoria’s love and the nature of her emotional need; the language the image spoke was that ascribed to it by Victoria. On so many different levels Albert was her subject. Like those pristine wooden dolls dressed and catalogued in Lehzen’s company, Ross’s Albert – the first of myriad representations of this paragon among princes – was endowed by Victoria with attributes of her own devising and her own requirement.
For Victoria Albert was an ‘Angel’: the label adhered during those first perfervid weeks of their engagement never to be discarded. Repeatedly she hailed him as her superior in almost every way. And yet, although she acted unconsciously, she was powerless to resist the urge to cut her ‘Angel’ down to size and refashion him according to her own lights – the heavenly being whose portrait in miniature she wore in a bracelet. For Victoria the Queen, stubborn, hot-blooded and autocratic, this painted Albert became a talisman of love, a trinket caught in a jewelled embrace firmly within her own control. She was apparently unaware that she had blundered into a contradiction. Albert, by contrast, devoted the weeks the couple spent together following their betrothal to indulging Victoria. Only afterwards did he sedulously embark on the process of forging his own improved ‘Albertine’ Victoria. That process, which he undertook with rigour in the early years of marriage, consisted of breaking and remoulding his wife’s character in pursuit of an ideal of the rational, sensible, unselfish public servant partly shaped by Leopold and Stockmar. Unlike Victoria’s unwitting appropriation of a romanticised, fictionalised Albert, this process was deliberate.
The wedding took place in the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, after a morning of persistent rain, which only belatedly gave way to sunshine. Guests noted the surprising combination of Victoria’s remarkably firm answers and the trembling of her orange blossom headdress; Victoria herself, from the evidence of her journal, noted everything. The service was followed by the briefest of honeymoons, Victoria having reminded Albert that she was ‘the Sovereign and that business can stop and wait for nothing’. It was a prim assertion, which expressed strikingly her inability to reconcile the public and private spheres of her fragmented and multiple existence. The implications were not lost on Albert, who ought not to have been surprised.
On 15 November 1837, Victoria had made the first visit of her reign to Drury Lane Theatre. Her subsequent account outlines the nature of the challenge Albert faced. ‘I alone was seated in the box which was quite on the stage … The house was immensely full, quite crammed, and I was splendidly received, with the greatest enthusiasm and deafening cheering. When God Save the King was sung, the whole audience joined in the Chorus.’ No one, not even Victoria, appeared to notice that the National Anthem had not been emended to suit the new reign.15 It scarcely mattered. As the embodiment of national spirit and focus of national pride, the sovereign embraced a degree of sexlessness. To the full house at Drury Lane that night, ‘Queen’ Victoria was also ‘King’: it was the lustiness of the singing that counted. But it boded badly for Albert, who received no public role on marriage or any unofficial function behind closed doors. Victoria saw her ministers alone and entrusted supervision of her personal expenses to Lehzen, whom Albert would shortly come to loathe. His own purpose was purely reproductive, idleness his apportioned lot outside the bedroom – as Punch depicted him in 1843 in a sketch entitled ‘Cupid Out of Place’, in which he appears physically sated but otherwise listless.16 It was a stark and unwelcome revelation to this passionate auto-didact who, at the age of eleven, had recorded his intention ‘to train myself to become a good and useful man’.17
Leopold endeavoured to broker a solution. During the same visit on which he viewed Victoria’s portrait by Fowler, he expressed his belief that Albert ‘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 enab
led her to answer’.18 Victoria had delighted in Albert helping her with the blotting paper when she signed papers, regarding his assistance as a parry in their extended loveplay, almost a physical intimacy: this shadowy imprint of officialdom was as much as she intended to share with him. Such a stricture was none of Melbourne’s doing. The elderly statesman who continued to enjoy Victoria’s confidence and her affection – albeit this wistfully worldly man recognised the signs of her coming withdrawal – saw clearly Victoria’s deficiencies. To his former private secretary, now Albert’s assistant, he wrote, ‘I told Her Majesty … that there was no objection to her conversing with the Prince on any subject she pleased. My impression 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.’19 Victoria was resolute in her determination to have her own way: she did not pause to consider that it was precisely by attempting to avoid differences that she threatened domestic harmony. ‘I am only the husband,’ Albert complained, ‘and not the master of the house.’ If the statement included a note of lament, it did not amount to resignation: their arguments would be frequent and fierce.
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