by Julia Baird
Inside the lovers’ cocoon, though, all was sunlit. Albert was charmed by the queen’s euphoric proposal and her lack of guile. He wrote to his grandmother:
The Queen sent for me alone to her room a few days ago, and declared to me in a genuine outburst of love and affection, that I had gained her whole heart, and [that it] would make her intensely happy if I would make her the sacrifice of sharing her life with her, for she said she looked on it as a sacrifice; the only thing which troubled her was that she did not think she was worthy of me. The joyous openness of manner in which she told me this quite enchanted me, and I was quite carried away by it. She is really most good and amiable, and I am quite sure heaven has not given me into evil hands, and that we shall be happy together.
It was Victoria’s passion that had hurtled the pair forward, but Albert’s slower yet certain devotion would follow soon after. They behaved like besotted lovers. He took her hands in his, warming them, marveling at how small they were. He sat near her as she worked, blotting her ink when she asked. Victoria crept up behind him and planted her lips on his forehead, and chased him as he left, for one last kiss. Albert had a clinical, pragmatic mind, and he struggled to match Victoria’s passionate pronouncements, responding by demurring: “Liebe Kleine, Ich habe dich so lieb, ich kann nicht sagen wie” (Dear Little One, I love you so much, I cannot say how). He was genuinely delighted and surprised by the magnitude of her love, which had sprouted so swiftly. In mere weeks, Victoria had pivoted from being a woman who relished being and ruling alone, to one who was entirely consumed with passion for her beloved. At times Victoria overwhelmed him with barely concealed lust: “I said to Albert we should be very very intimate together, and that he might come in and out when he pleased….Oh! how happy I shall be, to be very very intimate with him!”
Albert was floored, telling Stockmar he was “often at a loss to believe that such affection should be shown to me.” But his happiness was checkered; he was distraught at the thought of leaving Germany. Even when the queen, his Vortrefflichste (incomparable one), spent hours describing the glorious future they would share, he was preoccupied by what he would be losing. He wrote to his grandmother: “Oh, the future! does it not bring with it the moment when I shall have to take leave of my dear, dear home, and of you! I cannot think of that without deep melancholy taking possession of me.” Albert was conscious that he was not just getting married but accepting a job, and that his work would be “decisive for the welfare of so many.” Albert had spent years contemplating the possibility of marrying into great power. He wrote to his brother just months earlier, on his twentieth birthday, that they should strive for general education and “elasticity of the brain,” which he believed was what gives “great men such power to rule over others.” Albert was aiming for greatness.
Because Victoria modeled an orthodox marriage for her age, with a large clutch of children, and was photographed looking up adoringly at her husband, or placing her hands on his shoulders as he read, it is easy to forget how unconventional her relationship was. She was the most famous woman in Britain, with palaces, a large staff, and immense responsibility. He was relatively unknown, and from a small, poor German duchy. Victoria had been advised by her prime minister to seek a consort she could control, who would bend in obedience to her plans. Albert could see how stubborn and strong his fiancée was. In the three years since he had last seen her, he observed that she had barely grown an inch, “but she has acquired much greater firmness.” In many ways Victoria’s role was that of the man; she was the one to propose, to give Albert a ring first and ask for a lock of his hair. She was not obliged to take his name, just as women who married kings were allowed to keep theirs. The affectionate words she used to describe him were often womanly; he was her beautiful, “dearest Angel.”
In the most conventional of senses, Victoria had procured herself a wife. Melbourne was her intellectual companion and Albert was her object of desire. In the days after the proposal, she continued to record her lengthy conversations with Melbourne, while “dearest” Albert flitted through scenes as a beauty, a fine dancer, and a dinner companion. His words and ideas were not given the same weight as Melbourne’s, although she did briefly touch on his great dislike of Russians, the French, and, alarmingly, Jews. Lord Melbourne dismissed this anti-Semitism—which Victoria did not share—as typically German. Victoria did not linger on it. She confessed twice to Lord Melbourne that falling in love had made her quite stupid. Yet while the young queen may have admired Albert’s athletic physique—especially when he wore tight white pants “with nothing under them”—it was his constantly whirring, polymathic mind that would endear several generations to the serious German prince who liked going to bed early.
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Albert was a curious boy: after he uttered his first cry at birth, he “looked about him, like a squirrel.” As a child, he was confident and certain in his views; when he was a teenager, he met Pope Gregory XVI and discussed art with him in Italian. He created a natural history museum with his brother, wrote poetry, collected donations for a poor family in his village whose house burned down, and composed music. When he was eleven he wrote in his journal: “I intend to train myself to be a good and useful man.” He instinctively adhered to a code of honor from an early age: When he was a boy, playing a game of knights, his group was attacking an old ruined tower that others were hiding in. One friend suggested sneaking in through the back entrance, which would have meant easy victory; Albert objected, saying it would not be the right thing to do and “most unbecoming in a Saxon knight.”
While he was droll and had a gift for mimicry, Albert was also delicate, asking to be carried upstairs even at the age of four. The fair-haired, cherubic child tired easily, and would sometimes slip off his chair after falling asleep at the table. His mother, Princess Louise, adored him, describing her son as “superb, an extraordinary beauty, with large blue eyes…and always jolly.” Albert inherited his mother’s gaiety, sense, and wisdom, but he never really knew her. His father, the Duke Ernst of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was a notorious philanderer and was blatantly unfaithful to his vivacious wife—who called him her “master.” Eventually, when she began to have flirtations of her own—and began spending a lot of time with an equerry four years her junior—he accused her of similarly immoral behavior. Duke Ernst threw her out in a rage, and he retained full custody of their children.
Louise, who was then only twenty-three years old, was bereft. Her sons, only five and six years old, were sick with whooping cough on the night she left; they thought she was crying because they were sick. She pined for her sons, once disguising herself as a peasant woman so she might go unnoticed at a local harvest festival and gaze at them from afar. Duke Ernst never sent her any news of them, despite her repeated requests, and cruelly intercepted the letters she sent.
The fact that Albert so strongly resembled his mother, not his father or brother, has prompted some to suggest Duke Ernst was not his father—rumors that are unfounded. The press occasionally aired incorrect claims, fueled by anti-Semites, that Albert’s real father was a Jewish baron, the court chamberlain. Duke Ernst’s own suspicions were that Albert’s father was his childhood friend Alexander Graf zu Solms. He sent Louise back to live with her family for some time as punishment, exiled zu Solms, and conducted a bogus official inquiry that went on for years. In a clear example of the glaring double standards of the time, Louise was accused of many scandalous, fictitious liaisons, called a harlot and a “shameless little sinner.” The biographer Hector Bolitho examined the divorce papers in the archives of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and found “there was not even a hint in the documents that the Duchess had been unfaithful, with either Jew or Christian, until at least four years after Prince Albert was born; he was already in the schoolroom when his mother was divorced, in 1826. Seven months later she married Alexander von Hanstein, named in the proceedings as a co-respondent.” Louise was treated exceedingly unfairly, given her husband’s own conduct. It was
the woman who was cast out, not the man, and it was the children who suffered.
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In 1831, Albert’s mother died of uterine cancer in Paris, just months before the riots against the monarchy that Victor Hugo described in Les Misérables. She was only thirty years old. Her wish was to be buried with her second husband, the man who had loved her despite her scarlet reputation. Albert and Ernest refused to accept this; once their father had died, in 1846, they dug up her coffin from St. Wendel in western Germany and reburied it in the ducal tomb in Coburg next to their father. They shifted the coffins again in 1860 into a grand mausoleum they built especially for their parents in Coburg. Though it may have been wrong to overrule the wishes of their mother, the brothers were trying to achieve what had escaped them when their mother and father were alive—united parents. For the rest of his life, Albert would be viscerally horrified by infidelity, the behavior that tore his own family apart and took his mother from him. Albert always spoke of Louise “with tenderness and sorrow” and was tortured by accounts of her painful illness. In a tellingly gentle gesture, one of the first gifts he gave Victoria was a little turquoise star pin that had belonged to her. His determination to be faithful was so deeply held that it never appeared to be a struggle for him; it created a cocoon in which Victoria always felt safe. Both had lost parents at an early age, and while Albert did not have a rift with his father as Victoria did with her mother, both ached for an idyllic domesticity they had dreamed of as children.
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Victoria sat in front of the Privy Council on November 23, 1839, wearing a simple morning dress. Dangling from her wrist was a bracelet with Albert’s tiny face peering up from it. Eighty-three peers sat in a room on the ground floor of Buckingham Palace, staring at her expectantly. Victoria felt slightly ill. She lowered her head, tried to still her trembling hands, and read out a declaration Melbourne had written the night before:
I have caused you to be summoned at the present time, in order that I may acquaint you with my resolution in a matter which deeply concerns the welfare of my people, and the happiness of my future life. It is my intention to ally myself in marriage with the Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Deeply impressed with the solemnity of the engagement which I am about to contract, I have not come to this decision without mature consideration, nor without feeling a strong assurance that, with the blessing of Almighty God, it will at once secure my domestic felicity and serve the interests of my country. I have thought fit to make this resolution known to you at the earliest period, in order that you may be fully apprised of a matter so highly important to me and to my kingdom, and which I persuade myself will be most acceptable to all my loving subjects.
Victoria then walked out as soon as it was polite to do so, leaving a tearful Lord Melbourne behind. She was still shaking the following day. In a letter to Albert, who had returned to Germany two weeks before, she described it as “an awful moment,” to have to declare such intimate news to strangers.
After the meeting had ended, the Duchess of Gloucester—formerly Princess Mary—asked Victoria if she had been nervous. “Yes,” Victoria responded, “but I did a much more nervous thing a little while ago.”
“What was that?” asked the duchess.
“I proposed to Prince Albert.”
The news was greeted with muted enthusiasm. Albert was considered a decent choice as a bridegroom. Critics pointed out that he was young, inexperienced, and poor, while others spoke favorably of his musical and poetic skills. The public had many questions about their queen’s fiancé. Beyond a superficial curiosity, most people wanted to know how much power he might wield, the amount he would be paid, and what could be done to ensure that a foreign prince would not exert too much influence over the queen.
The Spectator was dismissive. The husband of a great British queen, they wrote, must surely be emasculated:
A gilded puppet, who can perform no action becoming in elevated birth and exalted station; who can follow no pursuit worthy of a warrior or a statesman; whose entire importance is reflected; and who can avow no opinion (except perhaps on an article of dress, a piece of furniture, or a horse), even though the fate and character of his wife be at stake, without violating the Constitution of the country that has adopted him!
Historically, husbands of queens had not been widely loved in England. And they had been spectacularly unsuccessful at siring their wives. Philip II of Spain was not particularly attached to Queen Mary I, the titian-haired Roman Catholic daughter of Henry VIII who executed more than 280 Protestants and was known as Bloody Mary. It was a political marriage of convenience, and they ruled jointly, although Philip could not make decisions without his wife’s consent and his reign ended with her death. Mary, who was thirty-eight when they married, had no offspring, and died at forty-two. When the Protestant Mary II was told she had to marry her Dutch cousin William, she cried for two days. She grew fond of him, but she, too, was unable to bear children. After invading England, they demanded co-regency for pragmatic reasons: Mary had a stronger claim to the throne, but William provided strength through his Protestantism, following the Glorious Revolution and the overthrow of her Roman Catholic father, James II. They reigned together from 1689 to 1694; William ruled alone after she died when she was only thirty-two. Mary II’s younger sister, Anne, who was queen of Great Britain from 1702 to 1714, was devoted to her husband, Prince George of Denmark, but she had a torturous time trying to bear children. Obese and lame with gout, she had seventeen pregnancies, twelve of which ended in miscarriages. Four of her remaining children died before their second birthdays, and her last son died when he was eleven. In Victoria’s case, there was no obvious reason for a dual monarchy—she was popular, and was old enough to rule on her own—especially given that Albert was a foreign prince.
Underpinning much of the grumbling about Albert were certain subterranean prejudices: against Germans, and against marrying cousins. The latter practice was common at the time in bourgeois circles, and aristocratic families often encouraged it, to keep their family close. In 1874, George Darwin wrote to his father, Charles, citing statistics from the registrar general that showed cousin marriages to be “at least three times as frequent in our rank as in the lower!” It was especially common among the great family clans, such as the Darwin-Wedgwoods, where about 10 percent of marriages were with first or second cousins. Those who married cousins were in esteemed company, including the writer Margaret Oliphant, the daughters of Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, the poet laureate Robert Southey, Anthony Trollope’s aunt, the parents of Lewis Carroll, and John Ruskin. Cousins married in the novels of Dickens, Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Thackeray, and Trollope. Even characters in children’s books fell in love with their cousins: “When Benjamin Bunny grew up,” Beatrix Potter wrote, “he married his Cousin Flopsy. They had a large family, and they were very improvident and cheerful.”
In his book Fertilisation of Orchids, published in 1862, Charles Darwin criticized “perpetual self-fertilisation” and suggested that marriage between near relations was “likewise in some way injurious.” For four decades, he had struggled with a host of mysterious illnesses that made him dizzy, nauseous, bloated, exhausted, anxious, faint, and depressed. He passed many of these symptoms on to his children, and fretted about heredity; how much of all of this was a consequence of the fact that his own parents were cousins, and that he had married his own cousin? Following an increasingly heated debate on the subject in the mid-1800s, his son George decided to determine whether inbreeding was bad and began collecting data with the help of his father. (Florence Nightingale had raised similar concerns; she wrote in 1852 that “intermarriage between relations is in direct contravention of the laws of nature for the well-being of the race; witness the Quakers, the Spanish grandees, the royal races, the secluded valleys of mountainous countries, where madness, degeneration of race, defective organization and cretinism flourish and multiply.”)
The Darwins found no evidence to substan
tiate the belief that consanguinity caused blindness or deafness; only a small percentage of inhabitants of mental asylums were the offspring of cousins (3 to 4 percent). The only troubling discovery was that a low percentage of men who had rowed for Oxford or Cambridge were the offspring of cousins. Yet, reflecting the prejudice of the age, George Darwin concluded there were few risks in cousin marriage for aristocrats and the bourgeoisie, but greater risks for the poor. But by the end of the Victorian age, despite the successful marriage between Victoria and Albert, most people condemned the practice. By then, the medical establishment was unanimous in their opposition. Modern studies have established that children whose parents are cousins are at greater risk of cognitive defects, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and being stillborn.
But perhaps the more serious issue was Albert’s German heritage. Lord Melbourne had harsher things to say about marrying Germans—who he said never washed their faces, and smoked too much—than he did about cousins. In the mid-nineteenth century, Germany was disparaged as an untamed, backward place, even though it was a popular tourist destination. Author Henry Mayhew said in 1864 that Germans were uncivilized, “starving, cringing, swaggering” people who lived “in an offensive state of dirt and slovenliness.” Germany then consisted of a group of states in a loosely configured federation formed after the Napoleonic Wars, which were under pressure from reformers who wanted a united country with popular elections and a single emperor. Far from filthy peasants, the most refined and sophisticated German intellectuals, composers, and poets of Victoria’s age were beginning to infiltrate British intellectual circles. In the 1800s, while there was lingering hostility toward France, the great foe of the Napoleonic Wars, there was a great revival of interest in German philosophy, writing, and thought, led by Madame de Staël, as well as, later, writers such as Thomas and Matthew Arnold, Dickens, Goethe, Carlyle, Coleridge, and George Eliot. The anti-German sentiment was partly due to the fact that German consorts and spouses were thought to have an insidious influence on the monarchy: between the years 1714 and 1901 every single British monarch had married a German. Victoria, who was half German, contentedly followed this tradition.
