by Lucy Worsley
Inside the castle, waiting at the top of the Grand Staircase beneath the lofty lantern roof rising far above, stood a pale young woman of twenty. Windsor tradition demanded that Victoria stand ‘in the entrance at the head of her family and household’ to receive important visitors, the stairs below lined with her red-clad Yeoman Warders (or ‘Beef Eaters’, as she called them).15 Albert and Ernest now had to climb up this immense flight of steps, built by the architectural magician George IV, beneath the pressure of the gaze of Victoria and her court. The theatrical setting put extra weight upon this reunion of the three cousins after three years, and made it strikingly clear that one of them was now a queen.
Victoria herself was feeling uncharacteristically nervous and lethargic. She had no insight into Albert’s current state of mind. They’d once exchanged cousinly letters, but after her accession the correspondence was broken off on the grounds of propriety.
And now she was very anxious that he should like her and, despite her own earlier equivocation, marry her. Once she had come around to the idea that she needed a husband, there really was no other option for her. She told Melbourne that she ‘heard Albert’s praises on all sides, and that he was very handsome’.16 She’d grown impatient for his arrival, which she’d expected much earlier. She considered that Albert hadn’t shown ‘much empressement to come here, which rather shocks me’.17 For his part, Melbourne was secretly jealous. ‘I do not like the Duke of Coburg,’ he grumbled in private, and ‘we have Coburgs enough.’ But then, he was resigned to what must happen. Victoria unmarried had become such ‘a troublesome commodity’.18
Standing there at the head of the stairs, flanked by beefeaters, Victoria was feeling cold, and headachey, and was worried about the ‘unwholesome’ effects of the previous day’s pork.19 She’d been out that afternoon, touring the park in a pony carriage and visiting her castle’s piggery, followed, as always, by a crowd of courtiers.20 She was growing bored of this sort of thing, which had once amused her so much after the ‘System’. Victoria believed that she was ready for a change, a more serious mode of life.
When her ‘dear cousins’ at last reached the top of the Grand Staircase, she found her hopes confirmed. They might very well be able to save her from herself. They were ‘looking both very well, and much improved’, she thought, far better than three years ago.21 ‘It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert,’ she later confided to her journal, ‘who is beautiful.’22 Perhaps everything would be all right. She took them through to meet her mother, their aunt, who understood exactly what was in play. ‘My heart felt very anxious when I looked at V & Albert,’ she wrote in her diary that evening, ‘they are both still so young.’23
The boys were spared the agony of a late and formal dinner of the kind that Albert hated, having the excuse that their formal court uniforms had not yet been unpacked. They went off to the ‘three charming rooms’ they’d been given, overlooking the park.24 But Victoria insisted that they come into the drawing room and join the court after dinner in their travelling clothes.25 This was a mistake, for the evening was deeply disappointing. Melbourne thought the two boys ‘very sleepy’, while he himself drank more liquor than Victoria thought good for him.26
And all this time, Albert seemed strangely chilly. In reality, he was simply trying to find the right moment to explain to Victoria that their match was off. He braced himself for ‘telling her … she must understand that he could not now wait for a decision, as he had done at a former period, when this marriage was first talked about’.27 His coldness left her in a quandary. How could she show suitable maidenly modesty, yet also signal to this beautiful man that her feelings had changed, and that she no longer saw him as just a cousin? He wasn’t going to make it easy.
Victoria had to discover some means of getting a message to him. She felt it necessary to write to Uncle Leopold to tell him how the reunion was progressing. Albert’s ‘beauty’ is ‘most striking’, she informed her uncle, but in the letter the ‘cousins’ were still just ‘cousins’ to her: a pair, companions, whose presence was ‘amiable’ and ‘delightful’ but in no way romantic. The two of them, she told Leopold, were together at the piano ‘playing some Symphonies of Haydn under me at this very moment’.
You can almost imagine Victoria pausing, at that point, with her pen in the air. Haydn. Music. Silent Albert could only make stilted conversation, but he was ‘passionately fond’ of music.28 This was something they still had in common. Perhaps she should employ the piano. On the second evening, she arranged dancing and stood up with him, twice, in a quadrille. As she clasped his hand, released it, seized it again as the dance required, he began to understand that something was different, and that he was wanted after all.
In the end, Albert never found the correct opening to explain that he wasn’t going to marry her. Three days after her cousins’ arrival at Windsor, on 13 October, Victoria felt it was going well enough to tell those around her of her intentions. She admitted to Melbourne that she had ‘a good deal changed [her] opinion (as to marrying)’.29
Melbourne, perceptive as ever, could see exactly what was up. The courtship was ‘evidently taking the course which I expected’, he wrote, ‘he seems a very agreeable young man, he is certainly a very good looking one.’30 Along with writing his essays, Albert had also been polishing up his manners in the drawing rooms of Europe. He’d ‘become more lively than he was, and that sits well on him’.31 As they danced, and sat, and talked, Victoria was eyeing up every feature, assessing his ‘beautiful blue eyes’ and ‘exquisite nose’; his ‘pretty mouth with delicate mustachios’ and his ‘beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist’.32 It really was as if she were measuring him up as the father of her children.
But Albert was still a little slow to respond to what Victoria was saying with her heartfelt playing and her speaking looks. She found the whole business ‘agitating’, and a cause of growing anxiety. ‘It makes you ill,’ said Melbourne, ‘very naturally’. He could see that she was suffering, sick with suspense. A woman, he told her, ‘cannot stand alone for long’. He advised her just to get on with it, and to propose.
Her mentor’s approval set the final seal on the matter for Victoria. For his own part, the old premier was quietly devastated. He told her, in the same conversation, that he was ‘quite a monogamist’.33 For a long time, now, he had been monogamous with her, giving her all his time, his energy and his late-life love.
That very evening of her conversation with Melbourne, Victoria sent a more explicit message to Albert. She got Lehzen (still the person Victoria trusted the most) to tell Albert’s equerry, Baron von Alvensleben, that she had almost decided to choose him as her future husband, and would ‘probably make her declaration’ to him in person very soon.34 Victoria knew the message had been received. That evening, as they said goodnight in the drawing room, Albert pressed her hand with ‘particular significance’.
Despite that special squeeze of the hand, Victoria was still uncharacteristically jittery on Tuesday 15 October. After all, it was possible to misinterpret a handshake. It was, as she put it, ‘a nervous thing’ to propose to a man. But Victoria had come to realise that even if Albert was gradually thawing, he ‘would never have taken such a liberty as to propose to the Queen of England’.35
She steeled herself with the thought that if she had done this a year ago it would have prevented the unpleasant business of having to watch Flora die. ‘Had she been engaged to the Prince a year sooner,’ Victoria explained in later life, ‘she would have escaped many trials.’36 Victoria often used the third person like this to describe her own actions as queen.
That Tuesday morning Albert went out hunting. Once again, she had to wait for him, unable to settle to anything until he came back to the castle. At last she spotted him from her closet window, charging ‘up the hill at an immense pace’ on horseback. As was customary on important days in her life, Victoria wrote to her sister Feodore. Then she sent a message summoning Albert to her roo
m.
In public, Victoria would be very careful to indicate that she was greatly troubled by the indelicacy of taking the initiative like this. In a book about Albert’s life, which Victoria essentially wrote herself although it did not appear under her name, she described how readers could ‘well understand any little hesitation and delicacy she may have felt’ in proposing. Her position was painful, she suggested, as it was ‘the privilege and happiness of a woman to have her hand sought in marriage’.37
But that was Victoria writing for public consumption. In her private journal, she did not beat around the bush. When talking the previous day to Melbourne, she’d asked him ‘if I hadn’t better tell Albert of my decision soon?’38 (I love the ‘tell’ in that sentence.) ‘My mind is quite made up,’ she informed Uncle Leopold, ‘and I told Albert this morning of it.’39 The one concession she made was to prepare a speech in German, ‘since she knew Albert was at a disadvantage in English.’40 She even, contrary to expectation, gave him a ring.41
But once Victoria had taken the plunge and committed herself, and after Albert of course had said ‘yes’, she transformed herself into the socially acceptable, blushing maiden of romantic fiction:
we embraced each other over and over again, and he was so kind, so affectionate; oh! to feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel as Albert, was too great delight to describe! he is perfection; perfection in every way, – in beauty – in everything! I told him I was quite unworthy of him and kissed his dear hand.42
It was a passage fitting for a Victorian heroine, submitting herself to the greater goodness of her man. She made herself comfortable with the unwomanliness of her actions by convincing herself that it was Albert who was making a sacrifice. Subsuming herself to him was how she justified, in her mind, the two opposing roles of queen and wife.
Over time Albert would come to believe this too; that he was the giver, not the receiver. But now, in that Windsor Castle closet, he was bewildered. It had all been so quick. The interview was over in twenty minutes. Albert was commanded to go to tell Lehzen, and his brother. And just one hour later, Victoria recorded in her journal, she was discussing the whole business in a much longer conversation with Melbourne. Her engagement wasn’t even the first topic they discussed. First of all, she made sure that her Prime Minister ‘was well and had slept well’, and then, with wonderful British sangfroid, they ‘talked of the weather’. Only then did she break it to him that she was engaged. He approved, if for characteristically worldly reasons. ‘You can then (when married),’ he said, ‘do much more what you like.’
An hour later Victoria was lunching with her mother, who, they all agreed, was not to be told of the engagement until the public announcement. That night the queen sat next to Melbourne as usual. It is devastating to read in her journal her record of his reaction to events, although she herself was blind to his pain. He was realising that she had, in effect, at long last broken up with him, and complimented her on her engagement ‘with tears in his eyes’. And then he pointed to a brooch she had given him, depicting a little golden hand. As Victoria explains:
I told him if the little gold hand I gave him broke, I would give him another; ‘It won’t break,’ said Lord M. He always wears it.
So the heart of Lord M. was broken, and Victoria’s overflowed, and, then, to cap it all, Lord Palmerston talked boringly of peasants, and ‘dear Albert was obliged to go away for a moment as his nose bled’.43 With bathos and with bleeding, thus Victoria concluded her entry in her journal for the day she made her proposal.
But how did Albert experience the same day? His own account tells how ‘Victoria declared her love for me, and offered me her hand, which I seized in both mine and pressed tenderly to my lips.’44
Despite all this tender pressing and kissing, Albert felt out of his depth. ‘I ought to be gay and carefree at this joyful event,’ he told his father, ‘and yet I feel sad. I don’t myself know why.’45 He understood that he was not of a ‘demonstrative nature’, and he now found himself ‘at a loss to believe that such affection should be shown to me … seriously … I am too bewildered.’46 But he was moved by the strength of Victoria’s obvious passion and ‘the joyous openness of manner’ with which she told him of it. ‘I was quite carried away by it,’ he explained.47 Dr Clark was asked his opinion on whether Albert was in love. His conclusion was negative. In Clark’s view, everyone at Windsor Castle could see that Victoria was ‘doting and attached to him, and cannot bear him out of her sight’. In return, though, Clark believed that Albert only ‘liked her’.48
The evening of the engagement, both Coburg princes, Albert and Ernest, put on ‘Windsor Uniform’ for the first time. This was a suit of dark blue with red facings, worn only by those connected to the royal family, and to be invited to wear it was a particular privilege. The dinner consisted of lamb cutlets, and a wonderful dessert course of marrons glacés, jelly, blancmange, gâteau à la Russe, vanilla biscuits, peach cake and Macedonian flan. But even so, the meal was muted, for Albert was feeling guilty about the decision not to tell his future mother-in-law.49 ‘She cannot keep her mouth shut,’ he justified himself, ‘and might even make bad use of the secret.’50 So there were no toasts to the engaged couple. Indeed, Albert probably looked askance at the wine in his intended’s glass. People had already started to notice that she liked alcohol. Stockmar had taken it upon himself to warn Victoria that ‘a Queen does not drink a bottle of wine at a meal’.51 This is not quite as debauched as it sounds as the wine would have been much weaker than its modern equivalent, but Albert, with his fear of losing control, was always extremely temperate.
There were other early signs, for those who took the trouble to see them, that Victoria and Albert had very different temperaments. He knew already that she was ‘fearfully obstinate’, and found it disturbing.52 He also hated the English habit of ‘quizzing’, or teasing. One of the maids-of-honour described Albert as having a ‘complete absence of that frankness which was such a charm’ in Victoria’s own manner when she was relaxed, and his ‘jokes were heavy and lumbering’.53
Historian Marina Warner correctly identifies a significant difference between their two characters. Victoria’s greatest gift was transparency, honesty and communication: hence her journal. Albert, on the other hand, was a private person.54 Keeping most of his thoughts to himself, he’s hard to come to know, and harder still to like, although it’s easy to admire his logical, cerebral qualities.
So what did Albert see in his future wife? He clearly felt a certain amount of physical attraction. He found her ‘very much improved’, and she was rounder and more shapely than she had been when he had last seen her at seventeen.55 The young queen’s bust came in for particular paeans of praise. One American observer found it to be very good, ‘like most Englishwomen’s’, while another complimented her ‘neck and bosom – plump but not fat … I should say decidedly that she was quite pretty.’56 ‘I am come back quite a courtier & a bit of a lover,’ wrote one gentleman, after meeting Albert’s future wife. ‘Though not a beauty nor a very good figure she is really in person and face & especially in eyes & complexion a very nice girl – & quite such as might tempt.’57
Albert also thought he would be marrying into money. Uncle Leopold had been rewarded for marrying Victoria’s deceased elder cousin Charlotte with a wildly generous income of £50,000 a year, and Albert probably expected something similar. When Parliament in due course only voted him £30,000 annually, his fiancée was furious. ‘I cried with rage,’ Victoria told her diary, ‘Monsters!’58 Yet even £30,000 a year equated to the entire income of Albert’s father’s duchy.
But there were still many anomalies to his situation that Albert would have to work hard to swallow. Even as a very little boy, he had shown a ‘great dislike to being in the charge of women’.59 He liked ‘above all things’, wrote one of his friends, ‘to discuss questions of public law and metaphysics’.60 He continued to find it easier to talk to his betrothed of music, or art, or books, th
an feelings. Even holding hands was something of a challenge. Her ‘hands were so little’, Albert thought, ‘he could hardly believe they were hands.’61 As one artist observed, Victoria’s hands were ‘very pretty, the backs dimpled, and the fingers delicately shaped’.62 But Albert’s physical strength and her physical softness seemed only right. They were well briefed about the respective roles of a lady and her knight by their jointly admired Sir Walter Scott. ‘The fine delicate fragile form’ of the female, as Scott put it, required ‘the support of the Master’s muscular strength and masculine character’.63
And when it came to money, Victoria would in fact be the only married woman in the whole country who’d retain control over her own income and property.64 This was important. The reason Albert had nearly given up on the courtship was because it placed him ‘in a very ridiculous position’.65 Even now, everyone would know that he wouldn’t really be master in his own household. Albert would also have to deal with the uncensored British press, which would depict him as a stud bull, good merely for the process of reproduction. And then again, there was the distressing fact that she’d been the one to speak first. ‘Since the Queen did herself for a husband “propose”,’ ran a London ballad,
the ladies will all do the same, I suppose;
Their days of subserviency now will be past,
For all will ‘speak first’ as they always did last!66
In other words, it was a complete inversion of the natural order. It was a man’s job to worry about wealth and worldly success, and a woman’s merely to adorn him. A contemporary advice book said that ‘a contented mind, an enlightened intellect, a chastened spirit, and an exemplary life’ were all that a lady was required to bring to the altar.67 The printers of London would mock Albert merrily while making as much money as they could. ‘Vill you buy the poortreat,’ was one particular print-seller’s cry that assaulted the ears of Londoners, ‘of the wonderful furriner vot’s to have our beautiful Queen for his loving and confectionery wife?’68
