The Queen’s House

by Edna Healey

  Above all she had someone to share what Melbourne had called her ‘inordinate fondness for music’. Just as George III and Queen Charlotte had filled the Palace with music, had encouraged musicians of all kinds and had themselves been no mean performers, so Prince Albert and Queen Victoria played and sang together. The Queen now had a partner to join her in performing at her concerts in Buckingham Palace.

  The printed programme of one such concert shows how talented they were.

  QUARTETTE

  ‘Nobile Signora’ (Comte Ory) Rossini

  Prince Albert, Signori Rubini, Signor B. Costa, and Signor Lablache.

  DUO

  ‘Non fünestar crudele’ (II Disertora) Ricci

  Her Majesty and Prince Albert

  CORO PASTORALE

  ‘Felice Eta’ Costa

  Her Majesty, Lady Sandwich, Lady Williamson, Lady Normanby, Lady Norreys, Misses Liddell and Anson. Signor Rubini and Signor Costa. Prince Albert, Lord C. Paget, and Signor Lablache.

  QUARTETTO CON CORO

  ‘Tue di grazia’ Haydn

  Her Majesty, Lady Williamson, Lady Sandwich, Lady Norreys, Lady Normanby, Misses Liddell and Anson. Signor Rubini and Signor Costa. Prince Albert, Lord C. Paget and Signor Lablache.

  CORO

  Oh! Come lieto giunge’ (St. Paul) Felix Mendelssohn

  Her Majesty, Lady Sandwich, Lady Williamson, Lady Normanby, Lady Norreys, Misses Liddell and Anson. Signor Rubini and Signor Costa. Prince Albert, Lord C. Paget and Signor Lablache.32

  How delighted Nash would have been, could he have seen his beautiful Music Room put to such good use.

  In June 1842 Prince Albert invited the composer Felix Mendelssohn to the Palace to play his organ. Nothing better brings to life his and Queen Victoria’s genuine pleasure in music than the account Mendelssohn gave in a letter to his mother of his visit. The composer wrote, ‘Queen Victoria looks so youthful and is so friendly and courteous and … speaks such good German and knows all my music so well … She seated herself near the piano and made me play to her … first seven “Songs without Words”.’ He drank tea with them in the ‘splendid grand gallery in Buckingham Palace … where two boars by Paul Potter are hanging’.

  On 9 July Mendelssohn returned to the Palace. He described the occasion to his mother:

  Prince Albert had asked me to go to him on Saturday at two o’clock, so that I might try his organ before I left England: I found him alone, and as we were talking away the Queen came in, also alone, in a simple morning dress. She said she was obliged to leave for Claremont in an hour, and then, suddenly interrupting herself, exclaimed, ‘But goodness, what a confusion!’ for the wind had littered the whole room, and even the pedals of the organ (which, by the way, made a very pretty feature of the room), with leaves of music from a large portfolio that lay open. As she spoke she knelt down and began picking up the music; Prince Albert helped, and I too was not idle … Prince Albert played me a chorale by heart, with pedals, so charmingly and correctly.

  Mendelssohn asked the Queen to sing his ‘Schöner und schöner’, ‘which she sang beautifully in tune, in strict time and with very nice expression … The last long C I have never heard purer or more natural by any amateur.’

  Before leaving, Mendelssohn played the organ for them, and ‘they followed me with so much intelligence … that I felt more at ease than ever before.’ He remembered that before the Queen sang for him she said,

  ‘But first we must get rid of the parrot, or he will scream louder than I can sing.’ Prince Albert rang the bell and the Prince of Gotha said ‘I’ll take him out’; so I came forward and said, ‘Please allow me!’ and lifted up the big cage and carried it out to the astonished servants.33

  Queen Victoria and Prince Albert shared not only a love of music but also a deep interest in art. Queen Victoria was herself a competent artist, and Prince Albert had always loved art and had a particular interest in Italian paintings. Throughout Prince Albert’s lifetime, both were to be concerned with the care of the Royal Collection. They added to the collection and commissioned new works.

  Queen Victoria was too busy in the first years of her reign to spend much time investigating the immense collection of paintings bequeathed by George IV. Many of the most valuable were still in store at Windsor Castle or elsewhere and until the arrival of Prince Albert the Royal Collection was in a state of utter confusion.

  Now, under her husband’s influence, the Queen began to take an interest in her inheritance. However, when, in December 1843, she went to St George’s Hall, Windsor, ‘to look at some more old pictures’, as she wrote in her Journal, she was

  thunderstruck and shocked … in the way in which pictures, many fine ones amongst them and of interesting value, have been thrown about and left in lumber rooms at Hampton Court, while this castle and Buckingham Palace are literally without pictures. George III took the greatest care of them, George IV grew too ill to settle many things and William IV who was not famed for his good taste sent all the pictures away.

  My care, or rather my dearest Albert’s, for he delights in these things will be to have them restored, find places for them and to prevent, as much as it is in our power, pictures of the family and others of interest and value, from being thrown about again.34

  Not only did Prince Albert supervise the restoration of the Royal Collection; he was to decide how the paintings should be hung, and his arrangement of pictures in the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace was to be sacred, never to be changed in Queen Victoria’s lifetime.

  Although Prince Albert’s influence was profound and lasting, Queen Victoria had been interested in paintings even as a little girl. She had been well taught and drew quite well; her sketches of people and Scottish landscapes have a certain charm. She had, however, strong prejudices. Wilkie was condemned because he had wrongly portrayed her in a white dress at her first council and because the other portraits were not ‘like’ – they were ‘too atrocious’. Sir Edwin Landseer was a firm favourite because he painted the animals she loved so exactly and with such a gloss. His Free Kirk was to give her great pleasure because of its Scottish and Jacobite connections – Queen Victoria, like George III and George IV, was always conscious of what she called ‘the Stuart blood in my veins’. So the Prince of Wales pleased her with his birthday gift in 1860 of Flora MacDonald, painted by Alexander Johnston. Sir George Hayter’s state portraits were much admired. But of all her artists the German painter, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, best represented all she admired in art – his clear, bright colours and his ability to catch the character of his subjects delighted her for many years. The portrait of the elderly Duke of Wellington on 1 May presenting a casket to his godson, the baby Prince Arthur, who offers the old Duke a spray of flowers, is a typical and famous example.

  Late in life she praised the Austrian painter, Heinrich von Angeli, for his ‘wonderfully like portraits, his clear colours and correct drawing’. At the end of her life she chose the Danish painter, Laurits Regner Tuxen, to paint her with her vast crowd of descendants on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee. She insisted that they were ‘prettily arranged’, not stiff and formal, and that the bust of her dead Albert should be represented.

  As a collector of family portraits, Queen Victoria cannot be matched by any other British monarch. It was Prince Albert, however, who was the real connoisseur. As a young man in Italy, the Prince had become interested in early Italian art and after his marriage he collected the works of artists hitherto unfamiliar in England. After his death the Queen was lost, ‘always lacking his advice and working in the dark without his unerring and great taste’.35

  Throughout their marriage Queen Victoria and Prince Albert delighted in giving each other paintings as birthday presents. The Queen allowed herself an annual sum, ranging from £2,000 in 1841 to £3,300 in 1855. From this account she bought Prince Albert many pictures, including Italian landscapes by James Roberts to remind him of the country which she herself had never visited and romantic studie
s such as W. E. Frost’s Una Among the Fauns and Wood Nymphs.

  Contrary to popular belief, neither she nor Prince Albert were prudes and they obviously enjoyed Frost’s lightly veiled, lovely damsels. She commissioned from Daniel Maclise the illustration of the German romantic tale of Undine. Their favourite paintings often had lyrical or poetic subjects taken from the words of John Milton, William Shakespeare or Edmund Spenser.

  The collection which Queen Victoria bequeathed to Buckingham Palace is not as important as those left by Charles I, George III or George IV. Critics have attacked, as George Moore did, ‘the limitation of the Queen’s patronage’; he saw in them a sameness, ‘a staid Germanic, bourgeois quality, a lack of humour, a liking for the second rate’. In this there is some truth. However, as Sir Oliver Millar has written, ‘of all the motives that urged her to buy or commission pictures, the most powerful and pervasive was, simply, love’.36 As she wrote to her daughter, ‘how wrong it is not to paint things as they really are’.37

  More daunting, however, than the organization of the Royal Collection were problems in the royal Household. One of these was the fact that the Queen had no official secretarial help. It seems incredible to modern observers that Queen Victoria, young and inexperienced as she was, did not have a private office. In addition to Lehzen taking care of some of her private correspondence, Melbourne, as Stockmar’s son recorded, ‘gave himself up in a far greater degree than a Premier is wont to do’,38 to work which today would be done by a Private Secretary; and if it had not been for Stockmar, who, for her first fifteen months of office acted as an unofficial Private Secretary, the chaos at the Palace would have been even greater than it was.

  In fact, Queen Victoria had had less help than any of her predecessors. George III had worn himself out working without a Private Secretary until, when he became blind, he appointed Colonel Herbert Taylor to the post, paying him out of his private purse. This appointment was much criticized: it was considered dangerous for an outsider to have access to state secrets. The Prince Regent, too, was much attacked for making Colonel MacMahon his Private Secretary, especially as he paid him out of public funds. His ministers defended him on the grounds that he needed help to ‘get through the mass of mechanical labour which devolved on the crown’. William IV took on his father’s former Secretary, Taylor, an appointment which went unchallenged since he had proved to be wise and discreet.

  Queen Victoria was considered ‘both by the ministry and King Leopold, too young and inexperienced to be entrusted to the hands of any single man … whose influence might have become all the more extensive the more he was exempt from all control’.39

  So Stockmar had been sent to help her at the beginning of her reign. It says much for his tact and discretion that a foreigner should have caused such comparatively little hostility. There was some: there were times when Queen Victoria was irritated by his lengthy memoranda. But he was widely respected. Melbourne considered him not only an excellent man, but also one of the most sensible he had ever met.

  Stockmar’s undoubted success as an invaluable counsellor throughout the first twenty years of Queen Victoria’s reign was due to his guiding principles. These should be engraved in letters of gold over every courtier’s desk:

  If you are consulted by Princes to whom you are attached give your opinion truthfully, boldly, without reserve or reticence. Should your opinion not be palatable, do not, to please or conciliate them deviate for a moment from what you think the truth … never try to make them own how right you were, and how wrong they have been. It must be enough for you that you should, for their good and the good of the country, act upon the principles, the soundness of which is thus acknowledged.40

  It was Stockmar’s firm hand that steered the Queen and Prince Albert through the stormy waters in their first years, past the two great rocks on which their marriage could have foundered – the presence of the increasingly difficult Lehzen, and the management of the royal House-hold. Stockmar had his own rooms, was allowed special dispensation, could dress as simply as he liked and was allowed to retire before the Queen. He padded quietly round the Palace, observing the incompetence and confusion.

  He was also needed to deal with Lehzen, who, now supplanted and jealous, had become a great stumbling block to the happiness of their marriage. Prince Albert knew she must somehow be removed. Although Prince Albert and Queen Victoria were deeply and genuinely in love, they had some spectacular rows – not surprising where two strong-willed people were concerned. The birth of their first two children clipped Queen Victoria’s wings; she chafed at the loss of freedom and hated the trauma of childbirth – which she said made her feel like an animal. She was overstressed and subject to severe headaches, and often exploded with irrational outbursts of anger, which she desperately tried to control.

  In the following years she was so often pregnant. From November 1840, when their first child, Princess Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa – ‘Vicky’ – was born, to the birth of Princess Beatrice in 1857, the Queen had nine children. It was not until the birth of Prince Leopold on 7 April 1853 that the Queen’s frequent trials were eased by the use of chloroform. John Snow, the famous anaesthetist, reported to Dr Simpson that the Queen was ‘greatly pleased with the effect’. It is not surprising that there were times when Queen Victoria was tetchy. It was difficult enough being a Queen, but to be the mother of nine children as well was sometimes an impossible strain. She can be excused her frequent tantrums.

  As for Prince Albert, he became increasingly resentful that he was not the master in his own house. The jealous, possessive Lehzen drove him to unaccustomed bitter fury. He soon realized that the Palace would never be home until he had got rid of her. The governess who had so impressed Lord Holland in 1837 had now become a ‘yellow dragon’, spitting fire and venom; the Queen was her child and the household was her territory. She was always there, coming between husband and wife. More dangerous still, as a passionate Whig she encouraged the Queen’s prejudices. There was even a rumour that she was funnelling income from the estate of the Duchy of Cornwall into Whig party funds.

  The Tories saw her as an enemy: if the Whig government fell, her position would be threatened. So she was not only insecure, she was also overstretched. She controlled the Queen’s Privy Purse, acted as her Private Secretary, was in charge of the Queen’s domestic affairs and, above all, was responsible for the care of the children. This last was the final straw for the Prince.

  In January 1842 Stockmar was concerned to receive hysterical letters from both Queen Victoria and the Prince. There had been an appalling row in the nursery at the Palace: their child, Vicky, was ill, and Prince Albert blamed the doctor and, indirectly, Lehzen. Clearly he completely lost control, accusing Dr Clark of poisoning ‘the child with calomel’ and Queen Victoria of starving her. ‘Take the child away and do as you like, and if she dies you will have it on your conscience,’ he wrote to her in a furious letter. Queen Victoria wrote to Stockmar, appealing for his help. Prince Albert had become paranoid about Lehzen: she was, he wrote to Stockmar, ‘a crazy common stupid intriguer, obsessed with lust of power, who regards herself as a demi-god and any one who refuses to recognise her as such, as a criminal’.41

  Queen Victoria, he wrote, must choose between him and Lehzen. It was time for Stockmar to intervene. With his usual quiet frankness and wisdom, he wrote to the Queen, who realized at last that Lehzen must go. Prince Albert followed Stockmar’s advice and tactfully and gradually eased Lehzen out. On 30 September 1842 Lehzen quietly left, early in the morning, not wishing to upset Queen Victoria with a farewell scene.

  The other problem which was infuriating the orderly Prince Albert was the mismanagement of Buckingham Palace. The Prince was appalled to find the Palace accounts in such disorder. Queen Victoria, unaccustomed to dealing with money, had entertained vast numbers of people without thought of expense, and even Melbourne was amazed to hear that in addition she had spent £34,000 on pensions and charities in 1839 alone.

/>   In addition, Queen Victoria was nobly paying off her mother’s debts. It is not surprising that she had secretly turned for help to Miss Coutts, the heiress, whose grandfather, the banker Thomas Coutts, in his time had bailed out many royal debtors including George III, the Prince Regent, the royal Dukes and her own father.

  As for the organization of the royal Household, as Stockmar’s son noted in his memoirs,

  On the Queen’s Accession to the throne, the existing arrangements were in the highest degree impractical and confused, and resulted in disorder and discomfort. Many obsolete customs were kept simply because it lies in the English character … to feel the greatest dread of anything like a systematic and comprehensive reconstruction of things.42

  To reform the management of the Palace was a task which would take more time than the Prince could spare now that he was taking on more and more of the Queen’s work. ‘Whenever you need me,’ Stockmar had written, ‘send for me.’ Prince Albert needed him now. He came, and with his help Prince Albert undertook a complete reorganization. Stockmar spent some months at the Palace and on his return to Coburg produced a detailed memorandum.

  Stockmar’s son claimed in 1872 that at the time he was writing, ‘The English court … is one of the best ordered courts in Europe; the organization is practical, the service is done with exemplary regularity and punctuality.’43 He considered that this transformation from a Court still tainted by Regency corruption and inefficiency was mainly due to the work of Prince Albert, under the guidance of Baron Stockmar.

  Stockmar described his report as:

  Observations on the present state of the Royal Household; written with a view to amend the present scheme, and to unite the security and comfort of the sovereign with the greater regularity and better discipline of the Royal Household.44