by Gillian Gill
Marriage to a queen was still by far Albert’s best career option. His plan was to become king consort in England, as his cousin Ferdinand was in Portugal. This position would offer a suitably broad arena for the political and diplomatic talents he felt within him. Beneath his mask of calm and compliance, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was fiercely ambitious and competitive.
But Albert was not in the least in love with Victoria and in general had no regard for the female sex. He remembered his English cousin with little affection, and of late he had come to disapprove of her. He felt that the Queen of England’s young head had been turned by the adulation that greeted her on her accession. She liked late nights and dancing rather more than was proper. According to the grim doctrine that Stockmar had inculcated in him, Albert viewed marriage to Victoria less as a pleasure in store than as a burden to bear out of duty to his family, his caste, and his beloved Germany. If, in the end, the Queen of England decided not to marry him, his pride would be hurt, not his heart.
In the meantime, Victoria’s shilly-shallying was making him the laughingstock of European courts, and this was not to be borne any longer. The time had come to take the active role at last and deliver an ultimatum. As he gazed up at mighty Windsor, potent symbol of all he stood to gain or lose, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was ready.
AT SEVEN-THIRTY, hearing that the Coburg princes had finally been sighted, Victoria walked to the top of the Sovereign’s Staircase. She composed herself for their entrance below. In the Queen’s childhood, her mother had adjured her to grow tall like her father and his royal brothers, but Victoria had been unable to comply. Her supporters claimed she was five feet one inch; her detractors gave her a bare four ten. In the gutter press, she was known as “Little Vic,” which rankled with her. Fortunately, horses, thrones, and sweeping staircases were standard issue for a queen, and Victoria made full use of them. Perched on high, she could look down on her subjects, as a reigning monarch should.
In the covered courtyard below, two young men appeared, both tall and well made, but the younger incomparably the more handsome. Prince Albert, when Victoria had last seen him at sixteen, was a pretty boy. Now he had grown into manhood. His shoulders were broad, his waist slim, his legs thick with muscle. Chestnut hair curled about his face, and he had a thin, elegant mustache. In his stained traveling costume, Albert was remarkable; in full dress uniform at the ball tomorrow, he would be any woman’s idea of Prince Charming. Uncle Leopold was quite right: Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was the handsomest young prince in all Europe.
Prince Albert looked up. The Queen gazed into his large, shining blue eyes; eyes astonishingly like her own. Followed by his brother, Albert ran up the stairs, knelt gracefully to kiss Victoria’s hand as queen and then kissed her on the cheek as cousins should. Albert, at five feet eight, seemed very tall to Victoria, and suddenly she found it delightful to look up into a man’s eyes, clasp his hand, and feel his whiskers brush her face.
Victoria was a little flustered. The thought of spending the evening without these young visitors was not to be borne. The delays on the journey, the storm at sea, the late hour, the lost baggage—all was at once explained and forgiven. Let her cousins come in after dinner and spend the evening with her and her party. En famille, what did it matter if, just this once, they appeared in their traveling dress?
As the Queen recorded in her journal and again in a letter to her uncle Leopold that very evening, “Albert is beautiful!”
Three days later, on October 14, Victoria proposed marriage to her cousin Albert. He accepted. In the first week of February 1840, they were married. With their union, the Victorian age had begun.
OTHER ENGLISH MONARCHS have lent their names to an age or a style— Elizabethan, Jacobean, Carolingian, Georgian—but “Victorian” has a special currency even today. It is an intensely affective word, since it relates to the things closest to all of us, to the way we run our sex lives and organize our families.
By 1914 the term Victorian had come to connote all that was stale, respectable, hypocritical, xenophobic, and oppressive for writers such as Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. It became fashionable to argue that the Victorians abroad had been jingoistic tyrants, and smug Philistines at home. A Victorian father was the stern patriarch who cast his daughter out on the street if she took a lover. A Victorian household was a lethal mix of parsimony and show, with a master, a mistress, and servants who knew their place. Victorian religion was a bah-humbug affair, narrow minded, censorious, and sectarian. The ugliness of Victorian art, architecture, and handicrafts was glaringly apparent.
When I was a student at Cambridge University in the 1960s, the received wisdom was still pretty much that the sun had long set over the Victorian empire—and thank goodness! But as the century wound down, the winds of opinion and taste began to shift. A new generation of scholars like Peter Gay and novelists such as A. S. Byatt rediscovered the pulsing vitality of Victorian life, unearthed a fascinating cast of characters, and built bridges between past and present. Young people in England queued up for exhibitions of the Pre-Raphaelites at the Victoria and Albert Museum, gladly voted funds for the renovation of that old monstrosity St. Pancras Station, and redecorated their houses with Liberty prints, lace antimacassars, William Morris wallpaper, and aspidistras, aka rubber plants. And more fundamentally, by the 1990s, in the United States perhaps even more than in Britain, a lament had arisen over the loss of Victorian values: faith, thrift, discipline, patriotism, responsibility, stability, innovation, entrepreneurship, sexual continence, marital fidelity, parental control, social cohesion.
To tease out the many meanings of Victorian, there is no better way than to reexamine the relationship of the most influential and famous married couple of the nineteenth century. Unique yet representative, inhabiting a bubble of royal privilege yet tuned to the Zeitgeist, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert express many of the complexities and contradictions of the age.
Her marriage had been an idyll and a moral example to the nation, or so at least the Queen claimed after her husband’s untimely death. As a giddy, willful girl of eighteen, she, Victoria, had found herself on the throne of Great Britain and completely out of her depth. Then Albert came into her life, a modern Galahad, pure of thought, mighty in deed. As husband and consort, he had solved the problems she faced as queen and made her happier than any other woman before or since. Confronted by Albert’s God-given superiority, she had willingly given obeisance as a good wife should.
This was what the widowed Queen told the world, but it was at best a half-truth. To name but a few of the fictions, Victoria had emerged strong and enterprising from a very difficult childhood. Within days of her accession, England’s power brokers discovered to their astonishment that this young girl understood the business of monarchy better than any of her male ancestors. Albert, when Victoria married him, was hardly a fount of wisdom, just an overprotected youth fatally confident of his abilities to rule a kingdom. The Queen retreated into domesticity a year or so after her wedding not because she wanted to but because society demanded it, because she had lost her closest allies, because she could not allow her marriage to fail, and because, much against her will, she was pregnant with her second child and saw only more pregnancies in her future. Albert cast Victoria in the role of “kleines Fräuchen,” but it was never a good fit for the woman who stood at the very top of Europe’s steep social pyramid and always walked several steps ahead of her husband when they emerged each day from their bedroom.
Like so many famous and achieving women of the past, Queen Victoria felt the need to stress frailty, failure, and luck, not strength, competence, and ambition, when writing about herself. However, her fairy-tale account of living happily ever after with Prince Charming was also exceptionally well calculated to serve her most cherished goal: to secure the future of the English monarchy. By playing into the prejudices and desires of her contemporaries, Queen Victoria kept her crown at a time when other kings
were losing theirs. Today her great-great-granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II still rides through London every year in a golden coach to open parliament and give the speech from the throne.
The English in the nineteenth century liked to hear of female weakness and submission. They had seen Europe shaken to its foundations by a series of revolutions, and male hegemony was one ancient certainty that the vast majority of the population, male and female, was ready to defend at all costs. In 1840, the year that Victoria and Albert were married, no woman in the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland could vote, be elected to parliament or any other public office, attend the university, or enter a profession. If a woman married, her property, her earnings, her children, and her body legally belonged to her husband, to do with as he willed. The world of business was more hostile to women in 1840 than it had been in 1740 or 1640, and though many women were forced to work, a bare handful could make a living wage.
In its overt misogyny, in its passionate assertion of male superiority in its religious, political, legal, cultural, and religious institutions, Great Britain was typical of its time, but it had one strange constitutional quirk. It was a monarchy, and if an established dynasty failed to produce a legitimate male heir to the throne, England was prepared to allow a woman to reign and inherit the powers and wealth of her royal male predecessors. There was one unwritten but absolute proviso, however. The fabulous promiscuity of a Catherine the Great of Russia was out of the question in England. A man of marked libido such as King Charles II could be accepted, even popular, with the English nation, but, at a minimum, a queen regnant must be a virgin like the great Elizabeth, or a faithful spouse like Mary Tudor, Anne Stuart, and Mary Stuart. Optimally, a queen, if queen there must be, would, unlike her four predecessors, bear sons.
No one in Europe understood the constitutional anomalies and sexual imperatives of the English monarchy better than that inordinately ambitious German family the Saxe-Coburgs. If their plan to marry the heiress of England to one of her Saxe-Coburg cousins were to succeed, not only must the Queen’s virginity be unchallenged but her husband must come to the marriage chaste. Any sexual taint acquired in youth might endanger his reproductive success. Thus Albert, not his more mature and manly brother and cousins, was the young man finally designated by his family to win the hand of the Queen of England. Albert was handsome and intelligent and ambitious. He had always done what his elders told him to do, and, above all, he had never shown a flicker of interest in women.
To marry such a youth to a strong-willed, passionate, mature woman was hardly a recipe for conjugal bliss, but dynastic marriages did not aim for happiness, as Lady Diana Spencer would discover in 1981. The long, faithful, loving partnership of Victoria and Albert has come to be a dusty old fact enshrined in the history books, but as a lived reality, it was an extraordinary feat achieved against the odds. A young man and a young woman, one in Germany, one in England, dreamed of finding in marriage things that neither had seen much of as children: love, affection, companionship, trust, intimacy, a private space in which they could be delectably alone—just “we two.”
In large part they succeeded, but their marriage was always a work in progress, not a fait accompli, a drama not a pageant. Theirs was a business partnership as well as a marriage, and they engaged in an impassioned, weirdly public contest over who was the senior partner. At different points in the marriage, one spouse would emerge bloodied from battle over dominance, negotiate hard for mere equality, and then fall into the other’s arms, intending to fight another day. A careful reading of the letters and diary entries written during Albert’s lifetime reveals an Ibsen-esque drama, in which Victoria, that tiny bundle of energy with the core of steel, plays a heroine fighting for survival in a society where women were denied their identity and their pleasure. In counterpoint, we find a modern tragedy, with Albert a romantic hero who quickly metamorphosed into a portly paterfamilias before dying, victim to his own ambition, at the age of forty-two.
At a distance, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert can look like charming tapestry figures, unicorns among flowering meadows, irrelevant to our modern world. But if we listen to their voices up close, we find to our surprise a forerunner of today’s power couple—a husband and wife, each with a different personal agenda, but lovers as well as partners in a great enterprise, both leading meticulously scheduled, constantly monitored, minutely recorded, and carefully screened lives. How very twenty-first century!
Charlotte and Leopold
…
HE FOLKTALES OF CHARLES PERRAULT AND THE GRIMM BROTHERS are surprisingly reliable about the lives of kings and queens in old Europe. Those tales are full of strange and dangerous royal courtships. Kings and queens are unable to conceive a normal child. Queens die in childbirth. Orphan princesses are sorely beset by uncaring fathers, wicked stepmothers, and villainous uncles, and only seven dwarfs or a magic donkey’s skin can save them.
The solutions are magical, but the problems were not fantasies. European kings and queens were in fact often neglected or abused in childhood. As adults they were plagued by the imperative to find a spouse and produce an heir. They then frequently repeated the cycle of neglect and abuse with their own children.
Before Princess Victoria of Kent was born, there lived a Princess Charlotte, her first cousin and very like her in character and ability. If Charlotte had lived and had children, a Saxe-Coburg dynasty would have taken hold in England in 1817, not 1840, and history books might well chronicle the joint reign of Charlotte and Leopold. But Charlotte was a princess that no fairy godmother came to save.
Charlotte’s parents, George, Prince of Wales (later prince regent, and then King George IV), and Princess Caroline of Brunswick, were first cousins. They had never seen each other before the eve of their wedding. George loathed Caroline on sight and consummated the marriage in a state of insulting inebriation. The two separated nine months before the birth of their only child and thereafter waged an increasingly ugly and public war on each other. He accused her, not unjustly, of being dirty, uncouth, and garrulous. She accused him, not unjustly, of promiscuity, malice, and neglect. Unloved and uncared for, Charlotte was a pawn in her parents’ acrimonious marital game.
Princess Charlotte emerged from this difficult childhood a woman of considerable abilities, if little education, and possessed of unusual courage and resolution. Wild, headstrong, opinionated, and self-absorbed, Charlotte yet longed for affection and intimacy. At eighteen she had few illusions and fewer friends, and longed to throw off the financial and social straitjacket of her life as an unmarried princess. She was anxious to avoid the fate of her royal aunts, the six talented and beautiful daughters of King George III who as young women were tethered to their dysfunctional parents and barred from marriage. Three in middle age finally escaped into the arms of grotesque bridegrooms, but frustration and boredom gnawed away at the lives of all these princesses.
Like the heroines of so many English novels of the period, Princess Charlotte saw marriage as the answer to her problems. She knew that, as second in line of succession to the English throne after her father, she was the most eligible partie in Europe. She also knew that her acceptable marital choices were limited to a handful of unknown foreigners. As two of her spinster aunts had discovered to their cost, tradition and the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 prevented the marriage of an English royal princess with any man, duke or drover, born in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was common practice for princesses to be married to men they had never met, so Charlotte would be lucky to get a glimpse of her suitors at a ball or state dinner.
Charlotte’s father the prince regent also saw marriage as the solution to the problems he had with his daughter. He doted on tiny, cute girls, but Charlotte resembled her large, loud, voluptuous mother, and he had never loved her. Worse, Charlotte was popular with the English people, while he was greeted by catcalls and averted faces when he made a rare public appearance. The regent planned to marry his daughter off to t
he Prince of Orange, a distant cousin and the heir to the throne of Holland, England’s most ancient ally. Orange was, admittedly, a drunken lout, but Charlotte’s aunts had been grateful to marry worse.
At first Charlotte agreed to the betrothal. Then, astonishingly, she broke off the engagement and tried to run away from home. Perhaps she had read some novels and believed that young women had a right to choose their husbands. More probably she had made a rational assessment of what a Dutch marriage would mean to her. As Princess of Orange, she would be obliged to spend at least half the year in Holland. While she was abroad, her father might finally obtain the divorce he wanted and then marry a young princess. If a healthy stepbrother were born, Charlotte would no longer be her father’s heir. Though she had little love and no respect for her mother, the princess considered it essential to remain in England to support her own and her mother’s interests.
Charlotte’s unexpected and stubborn refusal of the Dutch prince angered her father, and she found herself a virtual prisoner. Marriage became even more desirable. She was in a hurry to find an eligible European prince properly subservient to her needs and wishes and willing to live in England. Charlotte made a strong play for Prince Frederick of Prussia, whom she found attractive, but he proved unresponsive. Then, as if by magic, at a ball given by her aunt the Duchess of York, another foreign prince appeared before Charlotte. He was charming, and his bloodline was impeccable. He had served valiantly in the recent wars against Napoleon and looked magnificent in his Russian cavalry officer’s uniform. If she deigned to marry him, he would owe her everything. His name was Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld.
