by Gillian Gill
The Tories were identified with the interests of the landowners, and they were the party of the political diehards who hated all things foreign, including ideas, and hankered after the good old days when Charles I ruled England by divine right. However, the leaders of both Tory and Whig parties were part of the landed aristocracy, and virtually every member of the House of Commons as well as of the House of Lords was a landowner with a title in his family if not to his name. Together Whigs and Tories formed the small political oligarchy that ruled England, and the policies each government followed when it came to power related more to the exigencies of the moment than to fixed political principles. The parliamentary Whigs and Tories were united by one fundamental conviction: that it was their birthright to rule England.
In the English royal family it was traditional for the King to be a Tory and the Prince of Wales to be a Whig, but the choice of party was a matter of personal antagonism not political ideology. Of the seven sons of George III, five were Tories but two were Whigs, including Queen Victoria’s dead father, the Duke of Kent. He had become affiliated with and supported by the Whigs in no small part because his brother Cumberland was affiliated with and supported by the Tories. The circle that had formed around the Duchess of Kent at Kensington Palace between her husband’s death in 1819 and her daughter’s accession in 1837 was also composed of Whigs, largely because George IV had turned Tory when he became king and William IV and his brother Cumberland had always been Tories, and the duchess hated her brothers-in-law.
The fact that, at the time Victoria came to the throne, the government was Whig under Lord Melbourne was largely a matter of luck. The Tories had ruled England almost continuously during the previous five decades, and Melbourne was a very reluctant prime minister. But luck, rather than her parents’ affiliation with the Whig Party, proved definitive. The young Queen became a fervent Whig mostly because Lord Melbourne was a Whig, and Lehzen—who may actually have had some political ideas—was a Whig, and they were her closest and most trusted friends.
WHETHER WHIGS OR TORIES, the people who gathered around Victoria in the first three years of her reign were loyal servants of the English Crown and intensely protective of the young Queen herself. Those who had seen the damage done to English political institutions and English society by the madness of George III, the profligacy of George IV, and the stupidity of William IV knew that the monarchy must start a clean page if it was to survive. Observers at court such as Princess Lieven, wife to the Russian ambassador, and Charles Greville could see that Victoria was a hot-blooded Hanoverian like her father and also a woman who needed a man to lean on, just like her mother. Sensitive to the erotic undercurrents in the Queen’s attachment to him, Lord Melbourne knew that his most important duty to the new monarch was to keep her virginal image intact until she married. His own conduct must be beyond reproach.
But Melbourne and the older members of the Whig set that clustered around Queen Victoria before her marriage were in no way prototypic examples of the sexual values we have come to call “Victorian.” They had lived through the regency and the reign of George IV. Lord Conyngham, Victoria’s first lord Chamberlain, the man who came to tell her that she was queen, was the son of George IV’s last and most rapacious mistress. Conyngham installed his mistress as housekeeper at Buckingham Palace, and was observed embracing her. Reform was in the air in the English court, the sins of the past were being swept under the rug, but the new standards of housekeeping were still far from rigorous.
William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne, had for thirty years led a life as tragic as it was dissolute, and his reform barely preceded Victoria’s accession. It was thanks to the talents in salon and boudoir of his mother, Elizabeth Milbanke Lamb, that the Lamb family was raised to an English peerage. As the second Lord Melbourne once remarked, his mother was “a remarkable woman, a devoted mother, an excellent wife—but not chaste, not chaste.” Elizabeth Milbanke Lamb’s four younger children, including the future prime minister, were all considered far too intelligent and handsome to have been sired by her husband. The resemblance between the adult Lord Melbourne and his mother’s intimate friend Lord Egremont was striking, and it was rumored that the Prince of Wales himself could be the father of the younger Lambs.
The young Lambs were brought up in the sexually anarchic set of the fifth Duke of Devonshire, his first wife, Georgiana, and his mistress (later second wife) Lady Elizabeth Foster, and their children and nieces and nephews. William Lamb knew Lady Caroline Ponsonby Duchess Georgiana’s niece, when they were children, fell in love with her, and married her. Both were brilliant, fascinating, neurotic adults who found promiscuity normal. He had a taste for sadomasochism, which she found difficult to satisfy. She liked to dress as a boy and took lovers, most famously Lord Byron. After the poet threw her over, Lady Caroline sent Byron a letter, enclosing a tuft of blood-stained pubic hair she had hacked off with a scissors. She went mad and had to be confined. Throughout his wife’s short and tragic life, Melbourne remained kind and loving, but he took several mistresses, including (or so her husband claimed in court) the famous author and women’s rights activist Lady Caroline Norton. After he reluctantly agreed to become prime minister, Melbourne was twice named in divorce proceedings, but since nothing could be proved against him in court, he managed to survive the scandal.
Lady Emily Lamb, Melbourne’s sister, followed happily in the footsteps of their mother. She too married a rich, dull, complaisant husband, Peter, fifth Earl Cowper, gave him a legitimate heir, and then found her pleasure elsewhere. Lady Emily Cowper was part of the notorious set that surrounded George IV as prince regent. She was rumored to have had a series of lovers, including the prince regent himself (who reportedly had sired one of her brothers), though she was careful to ensure that there were no compromising documents. Her elder daughter, Minnie, was said to be the fruit of a long liaison with Lord Palmerston.
How much Queen Victoria knew of the past lives of her dear friends Lord Melbourne, Lord Palmerston, and Lady Emily Cowper is not known. Probably a highly sanitized version of their lives was told to her, in dribs and drabs, as needed. Lehzen, who was close to Lord Melbourne and had her ear to the ground for court gossip, probably knew a good deal. What she decided to pass on to her royal mistress in the dead of night as they talked through the hole connecting their bedrooms, we shall never know.
THE FIRST EIGHTEEN months of her reign were a triumph, but then Victoria began to feel the strain. The novelty of her situation had worn off. The company of men twice her age who were too gouty to dance and snored in concerts was no longer quite so much fun. A line of thousands of men waiting to kiss her hand became an ordeal. She felt exposed at court, the subject of endless gossip and nasty cartoons in the press. Of course, she had Lehzen, her oldest friend, her accomplice, her spy, and her amanuensis. Lehzen was essential. All the same, as a mere Hanoverian baroness with no official position, Lehzen had necessarily to remain in the shadows.
Victoria’s mother should have been her daughter’s protector and adviser but instead subjected the Queen to an unending stream of annoyance and criticism. The duchess would not dismiss Sir John Conroy from her service. She protected him fiercely, refusing point-blank to allow anyone to audit the financial records over which Sir John had long presided. She expected Victoria to pay her debts, which in the end amounted to some eighty thousand pounds, without any inquiry into their nature, and could see no way to manage on an income that Victoria had increased by eight thousand pounds a year.
It was, as Victoria recorded in her diary, “torture!” to be obliged to live with her mother. And yet, as an unmarried woman still legally underage, she could not live alone without causing a scandal. Leopold, Stockmar, and Melbourne were for once unanimous in opining that if Victoria moved her mother out of the palace, the monarchy could fall. So the Queen lodged her mother in apartments as far away from her own as possible and saw her only in public. This studied neglect only fueled the duchess’s rage. What ca
n you possibly have against dear Sir John, who is so completely devoted to me? asked the duchess. Take care you do not make Lord Melbourne King of England, warned the duchess. Oliver Twist by that vulgar Mr. Dickens is no reading for a young person, much less a queen, opined the duchess. It is quite unbecoming for a woman to take so much wine at dinner, snapped the duchess. If only you would do your duty by your family and the nation and marry your cousin Albert, sighed the duchess.
In 1839 Victoria made some important mistakes that left her tired and disillusioned. She allowed the rumor to circulate that the unmarried Lady Flora Hastings, whose abdomen was suspiciously swollen, was pregnant— perhaps by Sir John Conroy! Lady Flora had been no friend to the Queen in the Kensington Palace days, but medical examination proved that she was a virgin, and within months she died of liver cancer.
As the false pregnancy scandal was coming to a boil, the Queen also caused a constitutional crisis known as the Bedchamber Affair. Victoria took on the whole English political establishment by intransigently citing her royal prerogative to appoint or retain her ladies of the bedchamber, regardless of their political affiliations. She did so in order to keep Melbourne by her side as prime minister, and she succeeded. The leader of the Tory Party, Sir Robert Peel, a cold, silent, scholarly man the Queen could not bear, felt obliged to stay out of office. Melbourne’s Whig government limped on. The newspapers were merciless in their critique of “Little Vic.” She had grossly insulted Lady Flora, a blameless lady of high birth. She had dared to challenge the balance of power between the two political parties and to assert her right to the same royal power and privilege last enjoyed by George III. People no longer gathered to cheer the Queen in the streets. When she went to the races at Ascot, she was hissed by two ladies of the court, and cries of “Mrs. Melbourne” were heard.
By the summer of 1839, Victoria was confessing to Lord Melbourne that she felt bored and disinclined to work hard. Perhaps she was wrong to enjoy what she called “business.” Melbourne agreed: “You lead rather an unnatural life for a young person; it’s the life of a man.” The arrival in London on a state visit of Grand Duke Alexander, the tall, handsome, attentive heir to the tsar, made it all too plain to the Queen, and indeed to the whole court, what she was missing in her life. But even as she was dancing till dawn and falling a little in love with the grand duke, domestic policy and international diplomacy were still of vital interest to her. As soon as some great issue was being debated in parliament, Victoria’s passion for public affairs flared up, and she was awake until the small hours, writing letters and journal entries.
It was four and a half months after Victoria waved a tearful good-bye to her imperial Russian guest when Prince Albert appeared at Windsor Castle. This second time, the youth her whole family was crazy for her to marry turned out to be, mirabile dictu, the incarnation of her desire. Albert was so beautiful, and they had so much in common. He was so very tender and loving, and assured her that he had never loved any other woman. They would live happily ever after.
But even when she lost her heart, Victoria did not lose her head. Her happiness now depended on Albert, yet all the same she was determined to have him and everything else as well. She would rule England, manage an independent income of 385,000 pounds, hold sway at Windsor and Buckingham Palace, possess enough diamonds to cover her from head to toe, and enjoy her Prince Charming too. The marriage, as the Queen saw it, was to be on her terms, and Lord Melbourne reassured her it would be. Both, however, were deceiving themselves.
BIOGRAPHICAL CAVEAT
NTIL DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES, CAME ALONG, FULL DISCLOSURE and transparency were not to be expected from royal persons. Almost from the cradle, princes and princesses realized just how interesting they were to the world and became intent on controlling their legacy and swathing their lives in the mystic aura of majesty. Members of royal families zealously built up a trove of documentation for posterity and regularly purged it of items they were unwilling to imagine in a memoir or a history book. When Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, produced a heavily cut and censored transcript of the handwritten volumes of her dead mother’s journals, and then burned the originals, she was a case study in this dual royal compulsion to keep and destroy records.
For Queen Victoria the record kept was so large, so detailed, and so frank that censorship failed even in regard to the Queen’s unhappy early years over which the English royal family sought for two generations to draw a veil. A clear, comprehensive, and nuanced account of Queen Victoria’s youth has become possible in the last half century and greatly enhances the Queen’s reputation. It humanizes Victoria when we know the challenges she faced as a girl. It adds to her stature when we learn of the abusive collusion of her mother and Sir John Conroy Unlike the Wizard of Oz, Victoria had nothing to fear if a little dog pulled the curtain back. Here in the temple reserved for royalty was a formidable woman whom people idolized whether she emerged in a diamond tiara or a poke bonnet.
Unfortunately, the same is not true for her husband. The deeper one plumbs the biographical literature on Albert, prince consort, the more likely it seems that the standard account of the prince’s life before his marriage is a myth that even the nineteenth century found hard to credit. Albert as child and youth remains a puzzle because only timid steps have been taken to move beyond the account left us by his first, best informed, most dedicated, and certainly most influential biographer: his wife, Victoria.
AFTER ALBERT’S DEATH, Victoria’s mission was to inscribe Albert’s name upon the world’s consciousness and claim for him a place among the great of history. A full-scale biography of her husband was an obvious priority, and since the Queen liked order and chronology, the first biographical task she set herself was to recapture her husband’s German years. She zealously collected every piece of paper relating to the prince consort that she could find at Windsor or could call in from Germany. She lovingly set down for the record little things that Albert himself had told her about his youth. She solicited the recollections of those who had known him then. She collaborated actively with Albert’s private secretary, Charles Grey, in compiling and writing a book.
The resulting work, published in 1867, is usually known as The Early Years of the Prince Consort and attributed in bibliographies to General Sir Charles Grey. However, it is more useful and accurate to identify it as Queen Victoria’s first major foray into print. The book is identified on its spine as Queen Victoria’s Memoirs of the Prince Consort: His Early Years. The title page reads: The Early Years of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort compiled under the Direction of Her Majesty the Queen, by Lieut.-General the Hon. C. Grey. Queen Victoria’s crest appears on the book’s spine, and her 1867 signature, Victoria R, is written in gold on the cover.
Most of the information we have today about the prince consort’s youth is derived from Early Years. The documentation it presents is invaluable. But, as the biographer of a German boy, Queen Victoria suffered from crippling handicaps.
In the first place, she did not know her husband as a boy and had few firsthand memories of him to share. In their first twenty years, Victoria and Albert saw each other only for a few brief, tense, and closely chaperoned weeks in 1836. The Queen was also singularly ill equipped to tell the story of a boy growing up in Germany. Until she was a grandmother she did not really know any boys, and she did not have an in-depth knowledge of Germany. She visited there for the first time in 1845, four years after her marriage, and, surrounded by German royalty and by some sixty-one of her Coburg relatives, she got a luxury tourist’s view of the country.
Victoria assumed that Albert had given her an accurate picture of himself as a boy. In fact, though the prince consort often wept nostalgic tears for his lost German home, he was remarkably reticent about his life before coming to England. Whereas Victoria was committed to putting every detail of her life down on paper so she could relive it later, Albert was not. For a royal person, the autobiographical urge was, in fact,
singularly absent in him. As an adult, he wrote volumes and volumes of memoranda as well as thousands of letters, but no memoir, not even an autobiographical sketch. His diary is resolutely impersonal. Even to his wife, Albert imparted only tiny shards of memory.
To supplement and give life to her account of her husband’s youth, Queen Victoria turned to those who had known him. Certain people came forward, but more did not. In many ways, the most fascinating thing about The Early Years of the Prince Consort is identifying those who either chose not to collaborate with the royal biographer or, conceivably, were not asked. The most deafening silence comes from the prince’s brother, Ernest, the man who, Albert once wrote, spent not even one night apart from him in his first nineteen years. Early Years contains no reminiscences and only one letter from Duke Ernest—written to Queen Victoria just before her wedding and thus in her possession—and a handful of letters from Albert to Ernest for which the prince had presumably kept copies. The regular correspondence between the two brothers that began in the fall of 1839 and ended only with the prince’s death was not made available to the Queen, to Charles Grey, or to Theodore Martin, the man commissioned to write up the prince’s years in England.
The male friends from Albert’s childhood and youth who contributed to the Queen’s volume were those willing to substantiate its author’s exalted opinion of her husband. These German men grieved for Albert, their lost friend or kinsman. They had an interest in promoting the fortunes of the Saxe-Coburg family. They understood Queen Victoria’s power and knew how fiercely loyal she was to friends. What sense did it make to challenge the preconceptions and shade the sunny vision of the most important woman in Europe?
