by Lucy Worsley
On the same day that his Private Secretary noticed that Albert was now handling the confidential locked boxes of government business, much happier and more comfortable with his role, there was a death in the household.90 Victoria’s little dog Dash passed away in his ninth year. It seems symbolic of a change in the order. On the day of her coronation, Victoria had rushed home to bathe Dash; now she rushed home to bathe her baby. On the day of her coronation, Victoria had delighted in her new role of queen; now she began to shrug it off, and pass it onto her husband if she could. It was almost as if Victoria’s early delight in her reign had ended. A baby had been born but, alongside Dash, something else had died.
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Christmas at Windsor: 25 December 1850
Once Victoria and Albert discovered a working model for their marriage, the years seemed to speed up and blur into each other. Within a decade, Vicky had six siblings. In 1850, at a wintery Windsor Castle, her tenth birthday in November was quickly followed by preparations for her tenth Christmas. By Christmas Eve, George IV’s white-and-gold state apartments, hung even in normal times with red silk, were all dressed up for one of Albert’s epic celebrations.
On a table stood a fir tree, its branches laden with lighted tapers. Around its base were the artistic presents Albert always chose for his wife: paintings, four bronze statuettes, vases and a bracelet he’d designed especially for her. He led her into the room, as their custom was, to see the spectacular spread. Christmas, for the Victorians, was no longer simply one more religious holiday among many others. It had by now taken on its firmly nineteenth-century form as a super-holiday, an annual blowout with the giving and receiving of presents at centre stage. It had become, in fact, an occasion to warm both the hearts and the balance sheets of a nation of shopkeepers.
‘My beloved Albert,’ Victoria recorded in her journal, ‘took me to my tree & table, covered by such numberless gifts, really too much, too magnificent.’1 Albert certainly excelled at choosing things both beautiful and meaningful. The bracelet contained a miniature of Princess Louise, now two. Now that they had seven children, the royal family was nearly complete. Its youngest member, baby Prince Arthur, was just eight months old. Victoria was full of gratitude for her family and their continued health. ‘The return of this blessed season must always fill one,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘with the deepest devotion to our Lord & Saviour!’2
It was Albert who masterminded Windsor Castle’s astonishing Christmases, partly out of nostalgia and regret for his birthplace. ‘I must seek in the children an echo of what Ernest and I were in the old time,’ he once wrote.3 As a foreigner in a strange land, it was almost as if he hadn’t been truly happy since then. But it wasn’t Albert who introduced the ancient German custom of celebrating Christmas with a tree; that had been Victoria’s own German forebears. Her grandmother Queen Charlotte, for example, had kept the Christmas of 1800 at Windsor Castle with ‘an immense tub with a yew tree placed in it’, its branches hung with ‘sweetmeats, almonds and raisins in papers, fruits and toys’.4
But Albert’s trees became celebrated, and much emulated. According to the London News, he set up his first one at Windsor Castle in 1841, a year after Vicky’s birth: ‘a young fir, about eight feet high’, with ‘six tiers of branches’. Each tier was decorated with a dozen wax tapers, and hanging from the boughs were ‘elegant trays’ for holding sweets. ‘Fancy cakes, gilt gingerbread and eggs filled with sweetmeats’ were also suspended straight from the branches by ribbons, while ‘toys and dolls of all descriptions’ lay on the white damask tablecloth that covered the table upon which the tree stood. And at the very summit stood ‘the small figure of an angel, with outstretched wings’. Over the next twenty years, the trees of Windsor Christmases would grow ever more lavish: by 1860, they were ‘of immense size’, and ‘made to appear as if partially covered with snow’.5 Victoria liked to help Albert to dress the tree ‘with her own hands’.6
Decorating the tree was an annual ritual to calm and cheer. And it was a welcome change from a family life that was increasingly complex and stormy.
The following morning, Christmas Day of 1850, Victoria woke up much earlier than she’d done before her marriage. Now that she was thirty-one, she spoke ‘with such regret’ of those ‘late hours in the morning’ of her youth that she’d wasted lolling in bed, before Albert came along with his reforming ways.7
Albert, in fact, got up earlier still. The wardrobe maid called them both at seven, opening the shutters and very often the bedroom window as well. Albert then leapt out of bed at once, in his characteristically German long ‘white drawers made with feet’. Putting on his dressing gown and, in winter, an additional shawl, he went into the next room. In the darker months a green oil lamp, imported from Germany, always illuminated his desk. There he read or wrote letters.8
Meanwhile Victoria stayed in bed and dozed. ‘Her Majesty interests herself less and less about politics,’ Albert’s secretary noted.9 Over the ten years since Vicky’s birth, her growing number of children, and her responsibilities towards them, had squeezed all that out of her mind. Instead, she deferred to Albert. Politically, domestically, she ‘leant on him for all and everything … didn’t put on a gown or bonnet if he didn’t approve it’.10
If Albert was away from home for any reason, Victoria could hardly bear it. ‘I feel lonely without my dear Master,’ she admitted, ‘I pray God never to let me survive him.’11 She loved to be ‘clasped and held tight in the sacred hours at night when the world seemed only to be ourselves’.12 Other people noticed how ‘he is King to all intents and purposes … while she has the title he is really discharging the functions of the Sovereign.’ ‘Formerly the Queen received her Ministers alone,’ reported ‘The Gruncher’, but now husband and wife did it together, and ‘both of them always said We – “We think, or wish, to do so and so”.’13
The man writing away by lamplight in the hours before dawn was no longer the dashing young hero who’d won Victoria’s heart. He was growing portly, and careworn, and looked older than his years. He was never quite comfortable in the Arctic temperatures his wife preferred. ‘The weather cold and stormy,’ he once wrote to a daughter in one of these early-morning correspondence sessions, ‘Mama will be much hurt when she gets up and finds I have had a fire lit.’ Sometimes, to keep his head warm, he would wear a wig.14
Albert had created a Sisyphean task for himself in becoming king-in-all-but-name. Under his guidance, the Crown now ‘constantly desired to be furnished with accurate and detailed information about all important matters’.15 That way, Albert felt, he could hold ministers to account in an unprecedented manner. Where he really excelled was arts administration; a subject that he loved, understood well and where he won the trust of senior people. He could discuss painting, for example, with a man like Charles Eastlake, President of the Royal Academy, so engagingly that, as Eastlake recalled, ‘two or three times I quite forgot who he was – he talked so naturally and argued so fairly’.16
For Albert’s system to work, though, the reports sent by government departments had to be kept and filed, so that progress could be checked against them. Historian Jane Ridley explains how Albert devised a complicated system of filing the queen’s papers by subject, not sender. It was both genius and madness. It meant that an important report might need to be copied out several times, as it could have several relevant homes in the system. Because the reports of government ministers were confidential, Albert believed that he could not delegate this work to anyone else. So, he spent his days copying, writing; writing, copying. The work dominated the time when he wasn’t with his wife and children. Over the last decade, since he had first got his hands on the keys to the government boxes, he’d gradually begun to sink under the weight of his self-imposed burden.17 ‘His foreign correspondence alone,’ thought one of Albert’s friends, ‘would have been thought sufficient occupation for one who had nothing else to do.’18
And Albert also ran his family as tightly as he ra
n the nation. ‘At a little after eight,’ Victoria wrote of their daily routine at Windsor, he’d come back to the bedroom ‘to tell me to get up’. She would then check the letters he’d written, correcting the spelling mistakes he still sometimes made in English, while he went to dress.
In his dressing room, Albert kept a caged finch. The original bird, yet another German import, had been stuffed upon its decease, then replaced in turn by numerous successors. One of the birds was successfully trained to say ‘Guten Morgen.’19 Albert probably said ‘Guten Morgen’ right back at it. When he’d arrived at Windsor he’d also been a German bird in a cage, but now he was king in the castle. His children often came in to watch their papa dress, and to play with his pet. ‘What a pity!’ said Beatrice, the baby of the family, if she arrived too late and found him fully clothed. ‘To see his “drawers” & “trousers” put on was her great delight.’
Albert generally finished his outfit off with the blue ribbon of the Order of the Garter. His wife thought his trousers, checked or otherwise, ‘made him look so nice and gentlemanlike’, and she records that he ‘always wore straps to them’.20 But Victoria was not particularly fashion-conscious – to have been fashionable would have indicated a moral weakness inappropriate in a queen – and was in any case blind to any fault in her husband. Albert’s funny trousers were one of the more visible signs of why he would never quite be accepted by Victoria’s subjects. Even those who knew him well, and admired him, would say ‘he is an excellent, clever, able fellow, but look at the cut of his coat, or look at the way he shakes hands’. He could do nothing – not even sit on a horse – in ‘the true orthodox English manner.’21
But one of Albert’s unorthodox habits – and indeed, his great redeeming feature – was his love of playing with the children whose births he had witnessed. He spent much more time with them than many an aristocratic father, as if taking on some of the mothering that his overburdened wife hadn’t time to do. ‘He is so kind to them,’ Victoria observed, ‘& romps with them delightfully.’22 The castle’s nurseries were ruled by Sarah, Lady Lyttelton, or ‘Laddle’, who was beloved by her charges. She had initially been surprised by Albert’s hands-on approach. She admired his ‘great dexterity and gentle manner’ as he managed to get a little glove onto ‘Princey’s’ hand after the nursery staff had given up on the offending article as being too small. ‘Princey’ was the much-wanted son who’d finally been born a year after Vicky. ‘It is not every Papa,’ Sarah Lyttelton noticed, ‘who would have the patience and kindness’ to do such a thing.23 On Christmas Day, during breakfast, ‘the little children would beg to go to the “Presentroom” to fetch a toy to play with’, but Albert would not let them go until the meal was finished.24
The flipside of the attention Albert paid to his children was his dedication to directing and correcting them. As they by now numbered seven, their mother was rather losing track. ‘All the numerous children are as nothing to me,’ she wrote, ‘when he [Albert] is away; it seems as if the whole life of the house and home were gone!’25
This, however, was a very private pronouncement. As the historian Marina Warner notes, any public statements Victoria made about family life always implied that fulfilment and happiness lay at home. What made her glad was not so much her children in themselves, but the delight they gave to Albert.26 ‘I find no especial pleasure or compensation in the company of the older children,’ she admitted, ‘I only feel properly à mon aise & quite happy when Albert is with me.’27
Victoria’s children could tell that their mother had mixed feelings about them, and in consequence they were growing up to be an unruly and dysfunctional lot. Albert intended them to meet his own high standards of intellectual achievement and self-discipline. When his dullard sons Bertie, the eldest, and his younger brother Alfred (or Affie) did not naturally meet the mark, Albert tried to beat his requirements into them by force. ‘Their father decided on whipping them,’ explains the ever-supportive Dr Clark, who concluded that the ‘effect was excellent’.28 They were indeed ‘rare young toads’, in the unguarded words of a Windsor gardener who suffered from their pranks. But other people thought that the boys ‘had almost more than their share of corporal punishment from the hands of their father’.29 Bertie’s beatings left him feeling so helpless that he gave way to uncontrollable rages: ‘he stands in the corner stamping his legs and screaming in the most dreadful manner.’30
With the constant injunctions placed upon the royal children to behave well and to keep quiet, Windsor Castle could have a morgue-like atmosphere. After Albert’s reformation of the disorderly and wasteful management he’d uncovered upon taking up residence, it had grown ‘almost uncanny, how quiet this enormous building is, and sometimes one could imagine that the Castle was quite empty’. Because of the carpets everywhere, ‘one hears nothing at all’, and ‘people speak very quietly’.31
Only at Christmas did the tension lift. ‘The younger Royal infants were there during all dinner-time,’ wrote one of the maids-of-honour, describing how Princess Vicky and her younger sisters Alice, Lenchen and Louise made a lovely appearance in their ‘little wreaths of holly … you can’t think how simple and happy all the Royalty looked, just like any other family’.32 The holiday saw a general and much-welcomed relaxation of the usual formality of court life. At Christmas ‘people jostle one another’, wrote one of the lords-in-waiting. ‘Lords, grooms, Queen, and princes laughed and talked, forgot to bow, and freely turned their back on one another … little princesses, who on ordinary occasions dare hardly to look at a gentleman-in-waiting, in the happiest manner showed each person they could lay hands on the treasures they had received.’33
Albert doted particularly upon his clever eldest daughter. He saw that Vicky had inherited his cerebral, logical nature, rather than her mother’s passion and emotion, and he judged her to be ‘very intelligent and observant’.34 He almost worshipped her, to the extent of commemorating the loss of a milk tooth, which he tugged out himself, by setting it into a brooch, where it formed the white flower of a design in the shape of an enamelled thistle. It was a bizarre, and highly Albertian, piece of jewellery.35 But Vicky, in return, understood that even she could not quite fulfil his desires. Vicky ‘never thought he could really care for me’, she wrote later. ‘I felt so much too imperfect for that. I never dared to expect it.’36
Albert had such impossibly high standards. And then, as Victoria told Vicky all too candidly, ‘he was disappointed you were not a boy’.37 Vicky would often get bombshells like this from her mother, bald statements of unpalatable truths, and Victoria placed quite different demands upon her eldest daughter than Albert did. These were urgent claims for affection and attention, very much like those Victoria’s own mother had used to make. Just as Victoria had once done herself, Vicky nobly bore her mother’s ‘anger and reproaches … till the poor child … is made seriously ill’.38
If even brilliant Vicky felt that she couldn’t meet her father’s expectations, the situation was still graver for her less satisfactory younger brother. Bertie, heir to the throne, was ‘uncommonly averse to learning’, according to his governess. Laddle thought he showed ‘wilful inattention’ and made ‘constant interruptions’ to lessons, ‘getting under the table, upsetting the books and sundry other anti-studious practices’.
Bertie had been difficult from the start. After the birth of her first child, Victoria had made a swift recovery; not so after her second in November 1841. ‘My poor nerves,’ she wrote, ‘were so battered … I suffered a whole year from it’.39 Her doctors began to prescribe further ‘soothing draughts’, ‘draughts for Headache’ and ‘Draughts for pain’.40 Victoria started to chafe against the immobility and inconvenience of being pregnant again so quickly: ‘men never think, or at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often.’41
But Albert insisted. Not only was it a royal duty, he could perhaps see that having the babies occupied his wife, weighed her down and allowed
him to assume more and more of her responsibilities. From Victoria’s point of view, though, her concentrated decade of childbearing meant that her initial pleasure in motherhood wore off. Bertie, her second, brought with him an episode of severe postnatal depression. Victoria began to see visions, ‘spots on peoples faces, which turned into worms’, while ‘coffins floated’ before her eyes. Even Albert grew worried. ‘The Queen is afraid,’ he told Dr Ferguson, the obstetrician who took a special interest in psychology, that ‘she is about to lose her Mind!’ Dr Ferguson was brought in for a consultation, only to find his patient ‘lying Down, and the tears were flowing fast over her cheek as she addressed me – overwhelmed with shame at the necessity of confessing her weakness and compelled by the very burden of her mind & her sorrows to seek relief’.42
Victoria came to understand that her depression was a distinct malady that came and went, but which affected her particularly during and after pregnancy. In due course, she prepared her own daughter to expect ‘lowness and tendency to cry … it is what every lady suffers with more or less and what I, during my two first confinements, suffered dreadfully with’.43 Yet Albert made sure the babies kept coming. ‘It is too hard and dreadful what we have to go through,’ Victoria complained. Men ought to ‘do every thing to make up, for what after all they alone are the cause of’.44 Victoria eventually told Dr Clark that she could not bear to have any more: ‘if she had another Child she would sink under it.’45
