We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  But Juliana’s brothers Ernest and Leopold, as well as her Württemberg brother-in-law, did not find it difficult to get along with Grand Duke Constantine. For them Juliana’s marriage was a fabulous success. Intimate and lasting connections with members of the Russian imperial family were formed and yielded golden rewards for the Coburg family.

  Thanks to the good offices of his brother-in-law Grand Duke Constantine, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg was made a captain in an infantry regiment at the age of six, a colonel at seven, and, after transfer to the more prestigious Horse Guards, a general at twelve. In his late teens he made an important career in the Russian cavalry. Duke Ernest, Juliana’s eldest brother, was also intermittently associated with the Russian army and fought on the losing side at the battle of Austerlitz. When the fate of Germany was negotiated in Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic wars, tiny Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld managed, thanks to the close ties forged between the ducal family and the imperial family of Russia, to retain its status as one of the thirty-nine sovereign states in the new German federation.

  Sophie Coburg, the eldest sister, was instrumental in the rapid rise of Ferdinand, her middle brother. Sophie held off from marriage until her twenties and then married a French émigré soldier, Emmanuel de Pouilly (later Mensdorff-Pouilly). This was apparently a love match, but it too proved to be dynastic magic. Emmanuel de Pouilly was an extraordinary man, a great soldier, and the implacable enemy of Republican France. He placed his sword at the service of the Austrian emperor and proved to be a great war commander. De Pouilly was largely responsible for convincing the Coburg family to finally take a stand on its aristocratic feudal principles and take arms against Napoleon. Prince Ferdinand of Coburg followed his brother-in-law into the Austrian army, where both won military glory. After the war, de Pouilly was raised in rank, and he and his sons became pillars of the Austrian army and diplomatic corps.

  Prince Ferdinand and Prince Leopold, if not their braggart older brother, Duke Ernest, proved to be good at war. They were personally brave and good leaders of men. But military success was not enough, since army officers spent far more money than they earned. Marriage to an heiress, not war, was the road to advancement for the sons of a minor duchy. All three Coburg brothers needed to translate their prowess on the battlefield into success in the ballroom. Ladies could not resist a uniform, and, once the battle was won, medals for bravery and royal orders of Emperor This and Saint That were the essential decorations for a perfectly tailored, waist-hugging red jacket worn over skin-tight breeches and shining leather boots.

  Having moved to the Russian court and lobbied vigorously, Duke Ernest was for a time betrothed to the youngest sister of his friend Grand Duke Constantine and thus of the new Tsar Alexander I. That marriage fell through, for reasons explored below. Prince Ferdinand was smarter or at least luckier. Well regarded at the Austrian court, he won the hand of perhaps the richest heiress in Hungary, Princess Antoinette Kohary With her he founded a new dynasty that ruled for generations in Portugal and established numerous close links with the Orléans family of France. Prince Leopold was the most successful of all. As we have seen, as part of the Russian delegation, he brought his medals to London for the Waterloo celebrations, won the hand of the Princess Charlotte, second in line to the throne of Great Britain, and eventually became king of the Belgians.

  The Napoleonic armies brought revolution and democratic ideas to Germany, and these had great influence upon the German commercial and professional classes. However, once the wars were over, and the reorganization of the German states had been enforced by the victorious Great Powers, the surviving German rulers were determined above all to set the clock back and regain their grip on power. It was in this reactionary atmosphere that Prince Albert grew up.

  FOR GENERATIONS THE Coburg men married for money, status, and power. For lasting dynastic success, they had to be prolific sires, and they were careful of the company their wives kept. However, only in the case of Prince Albert did the Coburg family consider it important for its males to be chaste. Quite the contrary. The tall, handsome Coburg dynasts believed that, when it came to the family business of sex and reproduction, practice makes perfect. They had strong libidos and took full advantage of the droit du seigneur at home and of their sexual opportunities when abroad. Duke Francis of Saxe-Coburg, Albert’s paternal grandfather, was a notorious womanizer, and his successors, Duke Ernest I, Albert’s father, and Duke Ernest II, Albert’s brother, followed closely in his footsteps.

  The sexual mores that prevailed in the Saxe-Coburg family during Prince Albert’s childhood were vividly described by two discarded mistresses, Pauline Panam and Caroline Bauer. To get a sense of the ducal court in which Prince Albert was raised and how extraordinarily it differed from the court he established in England after his marriage to Queen Victoria, one needs to read the sensational memoirs of Panam and Bauer.

  Pauline Panam was a fatherless French girl of Greek mercantile extraction and exotic beauty. By her account, Duke Ernest seduced her in Paris when she was fourteen. In 1808, at her lover’s urgent behest, Panam made the journey from Paris to Coburg. She was told that she would be a lady-in-waiting to the duke’s mother. Panam’s only companion on her long and arduous journey into southern Germany was her little niece. In obedience to instructions given by the duke, who did not want to pay for a male escort, the two young girls were dressed as boys. When Panam’s hat fell off en route, loosing her glossy black hair, the male travelers became importunate, and the girls became very anxious to reach their destination. But as Panam finally drove through the dingy, silent streets of Coburg at night, her relief turned to shock and dismay. Schloss Ehrenburg, Duke Ernest’s medieval town residence, looked like some grotesque, smoke-blackened stable yard to the young Parisian who had seen Versailles and the Louvre. As the girls stood gazing disconsolately up at the palace’s arrow slits, two fat rats came scuttling out of the building and ran between their legs.

  Panam was not allowed into the palace but was whisked off to a secluded farm by one of the duke’s loutish henchmen. There for some weeks she remained, still disguised as a boy. She cut a gallant figure and, to her amusement and the duke’s titillation, attracted the amorous advances of several peasant girls. Even after Panam insisted on putting on women’s dress and making herself known in Coburg as the duke’s mistress, she was still forced to live in hiding. Panam was never privileged to enter the fabulous Hall of Giants inside the palace or see the fairy-tale glory of Schloss Ehrenburg when it was lit up with thousands of lamps and candles for a ducal celebration. On one occasion, she was summoned for a night rendezvous with her lover at Schloss Rosenau, his favorite retreat. After a long walk in a violent rainstorm that soaked her to the skin, Panam waited outside the house alone for hours. Finally she was obliged to climb up a ladder to the duke’s window and, when this proved too short, to scramble onto a chair he lowered for her from his bedroom.

  Panam became pregnant by the duke and was sent to Amorbach, the home of her lover’s sister Victoire of Leiningen (the future Duchess of Kent and mother to Queen Victoria), to have her baby. After being housed in a cowshed and treated like a scullery maid, Panam fled back to Coburg with her baby son, demanding her rights and threatening to reveal all to anyone who would listen. She and Duke Ernest continued to have sexual relations on and off for a number of years, and he seems to have loved her as well as lusted after her. However, in financial matters, Panam had to deal with the duke’s mother, Duchess Augusta, and his brother Leopold. Augusta had probably faced problem women like Panam during the reign of the late un-lamented Duke Francis, and, though she made promises to Panam, these were never made good.

  Duchess Augusta, as grandmamma to both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, has received very good press from English royal historians. Her great-grandchild Princess Beatrice loyally translated and published excerpts from Augusta’s wartime diary. In her letters to Pauline Panam, however, Duchess Augusta emerges as a cynical intriguer straight out of that
late-eighteenth-century fictional sensation Dangerous Liaisons. As for Leopold, Panam claims that he tried to rape her one day early in her pregnancy. Grand Duke Constantine, Duke Ernest’s brother-in-law, befriended Panam, but also wanted her for his mistress. Panam says the Coburg family tried to have her assassinated on several occasions and to kidnap her son, whom she had stubbornly insisted on naming Ernest.

  On one occasion Duke Ernest was furiously angry when Panam threw a small coin to a blind beggar. She took him for a miser, when, in fact, he was just perennially short of cash. As Grand Duke Constantine once sneered to Panam, Duke Ernest was lord over six peasants and two village surgeons. The Saxe-Coburgs had palaces and courtiers and magnificent connections but less disposable income than Panam’s dead father.

  Despite all her tears and pleading and threats, Panam never received the annuity that Leopold and Duchess Augusta promised. However, she survived, and she got her revenge by publishing her memoirs in Paris. The dramatic story of her liaison with Duke Ernest was substantiated by transcripts of letters that Panam had exchanged with different members of the Coburg family. The book was a bitter wound to Saxe-Coburg pride. The fact that Duke Ernest had seduced a fourteen-year-old girl was of no great consequence—such behavior was commonplace in the aristocracy. But the Coburgs’ own letters and Panam’s long campaign of revenge against them showed that the family was too weak, too poor, or too mean to get an annoying girl out of the way and silence her. It was probably the furor aroused by Panam’s book that destroyed Duke Ernest’s chance of marrying the tsar’s sister and thus equaling the marital successes of his two brothers.

  Caroline Bauer was a native Coburger, and she could have explained to Pauline Panam why in sixteen years she never saw the very modest sums of money Duke Ernest promised her. Even before the Napoleonic campaigns ravaged central Germany in the early 1800s, the Saxe-Coburg family was in bankruptcy. Duke Ernest’s grandmother, Sophie Antoinette of Brunswick, had tried to live like her sisters, who married the kings of Prussia and Denmark, and she had quickly run through the Coburg family fortune. Duke Ernest’s father, Duke Francis, who reigned for only six years, inherited a total annual income for the duchy of 86,000 talers and debts of over a million.

  To eke out the meager allowance of 12,000 talers allotted by his creditors, Duke Francis borrowed from his wealthier subjects, including Caroline Bauer’s own maternal grandfather, Ernest Frederick Stockmar. This wealthy merchant and court official in Coburg was ruined as a result of loaning his ducal employer 17,000 talers. The money was never returned, and not a penny was paid in interest. However, the ducal Coburgs acknowledged their debt to the now impoverished Stockmars in devious ways.

  Christian Stockmar, a man we have come across again and again in our story so far, was the oldest son of Ernest Frederick Stockmar. After his father was ruined, Christian Stockmar was obliged to begin life as a humble army doctor, but then he had a stroke of luck. He attracted the attention of Prince Leopold, younger brother of Ernest, the new Duke of Saxe-Coburg. He became first Leopold’s doctor and then his agent, counselor, and man of business. As we have seen, Stockmar moved to England when Leopold married Princess Charlotte. He became Charlotte’s beloved friend but refused to intervene in her pregnancy even though he believed that her doctors were ruining her health and endangering her unborn child. Christian Stockmar was holding Princess Charlotte’s hand as she hemorrhaged to death after childbirth.

  After Charlotte’s death, Leopold and Stockmar became even closer. Stockmar proved an exceptionally able and devoted servant, and he was careful to make few demands on his notoriously stingy employer. Stockmar understood that it was in his interests to acquire an independent source of income, and in 1821 he married his rich and disagreeable cousin Fanny Sommer and sired three children. Busy with the affairs of his demanding patrons—first Leopold and Ferdinand, and then Queen Victoria and Prince Albert—Christian Stockmar returned to Coburg only for brief visits.

  Caroline Bauer was Christian Stockmar’s first cousin. Her mother, Christina Stockmar Bauer, was a native Coburger who as a girl played with the ducal daughters Sophie, Antoinette, and Juliana of Saxe-Coburg. When Herr Bauer, a soldier, died young, the Bauer family fell on hard times. Caroline was able to persuade her widowed mother to allow her to go on the stage, and she quickly found success as an actress. One night when Caroline was playing in Dresden, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg happened to be in the royal box. Leopold was visiting his kinsman, the King of Saxony, and was still in deep mourning for his wife, Princess Charlotte. He saw an extraordinary resemblance between Caroline Bauer and his dead wife. After one or two private meetings with the actress, Leopold had his chief counselor Christian Stockmar persuade Caroline to come to England with her mother and become Leopold’s morganatic wife.

  Unmoved by questions of family honor, Stockmar persuaded his aunt and cousin to accept Prince Leopold’s terms, which included a modest annuity. The women came to England, were housed in a secluded villa, and met with an astonishingly cold reception from Leopold. According to Caroline, she went through a form of wedding ceremony with Leopold, at which her cousin Christian was present, but she and Leopold had sexual relations only for a matter of weeks. Otherwise all that the prince required of her on his rare visits was to sing arias and read tedious German books. Leopold listened and “drizzled,” picking out silver and gold threads from the trimming on old uniforms, and storing them in a little box so that the precious metals could be reused. Bauer claims that Leopold was such an industrious drizzler that he salvaged enough silver to make a tureen. This, with a characteristic mixture of pomp and parsimony, he presented to his niece, Victoria.

  After Leopold moved her to an even more isolated house near Claremont, his English country estate, Caroline and her mother could take no more. They escaped back to Germany and Caroline returned to the stage. Unlike Pauline Panam, she did get her annuity and probably a pleasant country estate near Coburg. She was apparently even invited to the palace. However, if Caroline Bauer found it in her interests to keep silent during her lifetime, she never forgave King Leopold for his loveless tyranny or cousin Christian for pandering her to his employer. She wrote a three-volume memoir telling the story of her life and her disastrous liaison, and directed that it be published after her death. Bauer’s memoir, even more than Panam’s, caused a sensation, since at the time of publication, the Coburg family was cutting a magnificent figure on the European social and political scene.

  PRINCE ALBERT WAS the avowed heir and disciple of three native Coburgers: his father, his uncle Leopold, and Christian Stockmar. All three were ambitious and held themselves in very high esteem. All three were cynical and unrepentant misogynists who traded women like merchandise. Purity, conjugal devotion, and fine moral scruples were not things that Ernest, Leopold, and Stockmar took seriously in their own lives.

  One of the many long-term schemes hatched by these three men was to produce from the ranks of the younger Saxe-Coburgs a royal consort for England who would promote their interests and realize their grand geopolitical designs. Ernest’s younger son, Albert, was eventually their choice. Albert would be their man, a man in their own image—in all things but one. Albert would be virtuous, he would be clean, and he would be monogamous. As a result, he would have healthy children, and he would found a dynasty that would rule Europe. This grand plan actually came to pass.

  To realize the family blueprint and also to achieve his personal goals, Prince Albert had to forget the real Coburg and invent a new one, heavily sanitized. Any memory of the Panams and Bauers in his Coburg past must be erased. Father, uncle, and counselor must be reinvented as faithful spouses, loving fathers, and moral men—as hegemonic nineteenth-century England was then challenging the world to define moral.

  For Duke Ernest, King Leopold, and Baron Stockmar, this mythomanic exercise by their protégé was noble and gratifying. For Queen Victoria it was an essential tool in guaranteeing the monarchy in England at a time of rising republican act
ivism. On Prince Albert himself, the gap between fiction and reality took a tragic toll.

  A Dynastic Marriage

  …

  UKE ERNEST I OF SAXE-COBURG-SAALFELD, PRINCE ALBERT’S FATHER, succeeded to his father’s duchy in 1806. His goal in life was to raise Coburg out of the third tier of German states. During the Napoleonic wars, his lofty schemes to marry a sister of the tsar, enlarge his domains, and move his capital city to beautiful Bayreuth all came to nothing. Other desirable marriages fell through, and only in 1817, when he was thirty-three years old, was Ernest able to find an heiress willing to marry him.

  Ernest’s bride was the seventeen-year-old Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. Gotha was one of the five little Ernestine duchies of Thuringia but almost three times larger than Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Viewed from the Coburg side, the marriage was especially desirable because the ancient and formerly fertile ducal family of Gotha was faced with extinction. Louise’s mother, a princess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, died giving birth to her, and although Louise’s father, Duke Augustus, quickly married Caroline of Hesse-Kassel, he had no children by her. Under Salic law, Louise could not inherit from her father, and so Duke Augustus’s heir was his only brother, Prince Frederick, a lifelong bachelor. Frederick had made various attempts to marry but failed, reportedly because of his “moral state.”

  Negotiations for Louise of Gotha’s marriage began as soon as she reached puberty. She was the last descendent of her noble house, and if she could not rule in Gotha, her husband or her son could. Louise’s income-bearing property from her mother would also pass from her father to her husband at the time of her marriage.

  Though she was not consulted about whom she would marry, or when, Louise was not unhappy at the prospect of becoming a wife. Her father was a difficult, distant man. Absorbed in his music and poetry, he showed her no affection. Louise’s stepmother Caroline, on the other hand, was possessive. The Duchess of Gotha had raised Louise from babyhood and resented anyone her stepdaughter befriended. The person Louise cared for most was Augusta von Studnitz, an intelligent, serious girl one year younger than herself. With Augusta, Louise could gossip, tell jokes, discuss love and men, and speak in confidence. Almost everything we know of Duchess Louise we learn from the letters she wrote as a young wife to this dear friend.