by Gillian Gill
Louise of Gotha was a sensitive, naive girl of sixteen when she was betrothed to Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg in the summer of 1817. She was not a classic beauty, but her frank and lively manner charmed everyone she met. Both in physique and in temperament she bore a close resemblance to the young Queen Victoria. Louise had been nourished on old tales of courtly love and was ready to fall in love with her husband. When she saw the man that her father intended her to marry, she was happy. Tall, athletic, and dashing, with crisp chestnut curls, Duke Ernest was the image of the perfect knight Louise had dreamed about. Anonymous letters alerted Louise to Duke Ernest’s amorous past, but she chose to ignore them. How could a man with such melting brown eyes ever hurt her? And since the Coburg and Gotha families were decided on the match, what choice did she have?
At first all went well. As Pauline Panam had discovered, Duke Ernest liked young, boyish women, and so he was not insensible to his wife’s charms. For a year or two he showered Louise with gifts, redecorating all her apartments in his various palaces, arranging elaborate celebrations for her birthday and at Christmas, having her portrait painted over and over again, and taking her with him on visits abroad. Louise’s own dowry money was paying for these attentions, but still she was delighted. She called her husband angel and master, and was happy only in his company. When the duke agreed to take his wife to his favorite retreat, Schloss Rosenau, a picturesque pseudomedieval house he had created about four miles from Coburg (and the very house into which Pauline Panam had climbed via the window for a rendezvous), Louise was enchanted. Louise’s ecstatic letters in the first year of her marriage read strikingly like those of the newly married Queen Victoria extolling the beauty and virtue of her Albert.
The young duchess’s letters intimate that she responded to her husband’s experienced lovemaking with ardent enthusiasm, and within three months of marriage, she was pregnant. Two years later she had given birth to two large healthy sons, Ernest Augustus Charles John Leopold Alexander Edward, born in Schloss Ehrenburg on June 21, 1818, and Francis Charles Augustus Albert Emanuel, born at the Rosenau on August 26, 1819. The two sons were known as Ernest and Albert, the names of the two sixteenth-century brothers who had founded the two branches of the Wettin family.
THE TWO LITTLE COBURG princes were imbued from babyhood with a sense of their own importance. Ernest, an engaging and intelligent child with his father’s tall, fine body, was by right of birth the more important of the two. He was heir apparent to his father’s duchy of Saxe-Coburg and heir presumptive to his maternal grandfather’s duchy of Gotha. Yet from Albert’s birth, Ernest stood in the shadow of his younger brother, and the older the boys grew, the greater was Albert’s ascendancy over Ernest. Or so Queen Victoria was told.
At the outset, looks probably had a great deal to do with this ascendancy. Little Ernest’s aunts Juliana, Antoinette, and Victoire, and his uncles Ferdinand and Leopold had all leaped up the European social ladder because their exceptional good looks had attracted exceptional marriage partners. Even those who loved little Ernest recognized early on that his face would not be his fortune. Apparently there was something unattractive about the shape of Ernest’s lower jaw. In letters, his mother and grandmother commented matter-of-factly that he was “not pretty.” Ernest was probably made to understand from earliest childhood that he had failed to be as handsome as his Coburg father and uncles, and failed to be as clever as his Gotha mother and his uncle Leopold. And he was equally aware that his little brother succeeded triumphantly where he failed.
Albert as a child was ravishingly pretty. On the day of his birth, his grandmother Augusta recorded how captivated she was by his huge “squirrel” eyes. She at once began to nurture dynastic ambitions for the child, which she communicated to her daughter in England, the Duchess of Kent. Louise of Gotha wrote to her friend Augusta: “Ernest is really big for his age, lively and intelligent. His big brown eyes sparkle with wit and vivacity … Albert is superb—quite extraordinarily beautiful; has big blue eyes, a sweet little mouth—a pretty nose—dimples in each cheek—he is tall and lively. He has three teeth, and though he is only eight months, he is already beginning to walk.” Albert was not just beautiful, he was quick to learn and easy to love. A deeply affectionate tot, he followed his uncle Leopold around like a shadow when that gentleman visited Coburg, kissed his grandmother’s hand repeatedly when she took him out for a carriage ride, and was so engaging that even his father found it impossible to take a stick to him when he was naughty.
In an age when many children died in infancy, Albert became the family pet not just because he was beautiful but because he was delicate. As a baby and small child, he was subject to digestive problems and frightening attacks of croup. He learned to submit with precocious resignation to the leeches and blisters that the doctors applied to his skinny little body. Albert tired easily and never seemed to get enough sleep, though he usually went to bed with the sun. Once, when he was three, Albert was observed falling out of his chair without waking up and then lying on the floor dead asleep. When it was time for the princes to go to bed, Albert was happy to be carried upstairs.
Prince Albert as a small boy was also shy. When introduced into a large group of people, he would cover his eyes, refuse to speak, and even run away. Once his mother had him dressed up as cupid for a children’s fancy dress party; four-year-old Albert simply stood next to the little girl who was his appointed partner and howled.
As was customary to women of her class, Duchess Louise gave the care of her sons over to servants when they were born, and she and the duke often left Coburg on family visits and state business. However, Louise’s letters prove that she was a loving and attentive mother who played with her children when she was at home and took pride and delight in watching both of them grow up.
But Duchess Louise preferred Albert to Ernest and made no secret of it. According to the testimony submitted to Queen Victoria around 1866 by the princes’ tutor Christoph Florschütz, among the difficulties he encountered on entering the Duke of Coburg’s service “was the partiality shown in the treatment of the children by their mother. Endowed with brilliant qualities, handsome, clever, and witty, possessed of eloquence and of a lively and perfervid imagination, Duchess Louise was wanting in the essential qualifications of a mother. She made no attempt to conceal that Prince Albert was her favorite child. He was handsome and bore a strong resemblance to herself. He was in fact her pride and glory.”
Louise preferred Albert because he was beautiful and precocious but also because he seemed to her a Gothaner, not a Coburger. He was her son, whereas Ernest was the duke’s. Louise was a woman of intelligence and well educated by the standards of her day. According to King Leopold, her father read Persian poetry with her when she was a child. Duke Ernest, on the other hand, was generally considered the least intelligent and able of the three sons of Duchess Augusta. He spoke haltingly, even stammering when unsure, and when he found himself in the counsels of the great, he was treated like a buffoon. Prince Albert was very verbal, beginning to talk at eight months and expressing himself perfectly by the time he was two.
Albert continued to take after his mother well into his teens. This is the testimony of no less than Baron Christian Stockmar, who knew Duchess Louise very well. When he saw the teenaged Prince Albert for the first time in many years, Stockmar wrote to King Leopold: “The Prince bears a striking resemblance to his mother, and, differences apart, is in many respects both in mind and body cast in her mould. He has the same intellectual quickness and adroitness, the same cleverness, the same desire to appear good-natured and amiable to others, and the same talent for fulfilling this desire, the same love of ‘espiègleries’ [practical jokes], and of treating things and men from the comical side, the same way of not occupying himself long with the same subject.”
When Ernest was four and Albert three, Duke Ernest sent away his sons’ nurse, Fräulein Müller, and brought in a tutor not just to give them lessons but to supervise every aspe
ct of their care. The new tutor was a twenty-five-year-old bachelor, Christoph Florschütz, usually referred to in the literature by his surname alone. He had already been tutor to the sons of Duke Ernest’s sister, Sophie Mensdorff, and his pupils were required to address and refer to him as “the Counselor” (“der Rath”).
Even in royal households, it was rare to appoint a tutor before a prince turned eight. Duchess Louise is not known to have protested the appointment, and in her extant letters, she barely mentions the tutor. Duchess Caroline, however, the boys’ stepgrandmother, who was prepared to take their part against their father, protested that they were much too young to be cared for by a young man. Albert in particular, she wrote to Duke Ernest, was frail and needed a woman’s care, especially at night. But the duke was adamant.
At the instigation of Prince Leopold, grand strategist of the whole Coburg clan, Stockmar had arrived in Coburg to observe the progress of the princes. He reported that whereas Albert “was aggressive and self-confident with other children in their games, and particularly when playing soldiers, he was strangely quiet and quick to cry at home.” For Ernest I of Saxe-Coburg, the mere implication that his three-year-old son was turning into a sissy was a call to arms. And in any case, the duke had his reasons for wishing to weaken his wife’s hold over their sons.
Queen Victoria once sympathized with her husband about the early loss of his nurse. She herself remembered what a severe trial it had been for her when Nurse Brock had left, and she was put in the care of the governess, Louise Lehzen. But Prince Albert would have no sympathy. “Even as a child,” the Queen recalled in her memorandum, “[the prince] showed a great dislike to being in the charge of women, and rejoiced over the contemplated change.” Albert was only three, but he understood that to be the son his father desired, he needed to look down on women and abjure their care.
AFTER THE BIRTH of the second child, it was clear to all in Coburg and Gotha that the ducal marriage was going bad. With new sources of income and credit since his marriage, with a healthy male heir and a second male child as insurance, with the annexation of the duchy of Gotha to Coburg now virtually guaranteed, Duke Ernest saw no further reason to curb his appetites. He returned to his bachelor ways, traveling without his wife, and openly pursuing any attractive woman who came along. He hunted most of the day when he was at home and caroused most of the night with men friends. Even his mother complained that she hardly ever saw him. Duchess Louise was bored with her husband’s relatives and the Coburg ladies-in-waiting he had chosen for her. Wounded to the quick by her husband’s indifference, falsely accused of flirting when she had been faithful, trying perhaps to regain the duke’s attention, she began an affair with a nineteen-year-old courtier, Alexander von Hanstein.
The end to the marriage came in 1824. Duchess Louise’s father had just died, quite unexpectedly, and her uncle, the new Duke of Gotha, was close to death, so the duchess had no close male protector and adviser. Maximilian von Szymborski, her husband’s Polish aide-de-camp and boon companion, came to Duchess Louise with an ultimatum. Szymborski had been spying upon the duchess. He accused her of having an adulterous liaison with Hanstein, and told her it could not continue. Louise would be permitted to leave the duchy as a free woman, retain the income she had inherited from her mother, and might eventually be granted a divorce that would enable her to marry again. But in return for her freedom she must give up all claims to her ancestral realm of Gotha in favor of the Duke of Coburg, and agree never again to see her sons Ernest and Albert. After some negotiation, Duchess Louise agreed to her husband’s terms, signed an act of separation, and prepared to leave.
Was Duchess Louise a feckless woman who sacrificed her sons in order to be with her young lover? Queen Victoria, who certainly did not approve of adultery, did not think so. She sympathized with her husband’s young mother, understanding that once her husband accused her of adultery Duchess Louise had little choice but to accept his terms, which were relatively lenient. Duke Casimir, a sixteenth-century ancestor of Duke Ernest I, upon whose portrait Duchess Louise as a young bride once gazed in horror, locked up his unfaithful wife for life in a fortress, put her lover in another, and let them both rot.
Even in 1824, women in Europe were still virtually the possessions of their husbands. However misused, they had no legal right to divorce, and, in the event of a separation, they had no rights to their minor children. In some aristocratic circles, an adulterous man might turn a blind eye to his wife’s affairs, or even encourage them if it suited his pocket or his political ambitions. But a woman had always to exercise discretion. A hint of scandal could destroy her social position, and proof of misconduct could endanger her life. Louise of Gotha was not discreet, her husband wanted to be rid of her, and she suffered the consequences.
Duke Ernest had planned for his wife to make a quick and quiet exit from Coburg, but in this at least he was thwarted. Duchess Louise was the last descendent of the ancient house of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, and even in Coburg she was far more popular than her husband. When the people of Coburg heard that she was being forced into exile, they acted. A crowd of men came to the castle at Rosenau, put the duchess in her carriage, got between the shafts, and pulled her all the way back to Schloss Ehrenburg, just as if she had been a bride. After that, the mob went off to Ketschendorf, the home of the dowager Duchess Augusta on the outskirts of the town, and forced Duke Ernest to drive with his two sons back to the Ehrenburg, where his wife was waiting. Then the crowd demanded that Szymborski, who was widely hated, should be delivered up to them. Szymborski managed to escape with his life, but only by a trick.
The Coburgers’ extraordinary demonstration of love and support for his wife did nothing to sway Duke Ernest. Duchess Louise left Coburg on September 4, 1824. In the final letter to her friend Augusta, she writes: “Parting from my children was the worst thing of all. They have whooping cough, and they said, ‘Mamma is crying because she has to go away while we are ill.’ Poor little mice, may God bless them.” Louise never again saw her native Gotha, her friend Augusta, her adoring stepmother, or her sons.
In 1825 Louise’s uncle Duke Frederick died, and, after some long and acrimonious negotiations among the five ducal families, Gotha was officially united with Coburg. Duke Ernest and his sons changed their name to Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. In 1826 a divorce was secretly put through, and Louise married Alexander von Hanstein. She and her husband lived comfortably on the income from her estates, and Louise’s kinsman, the Duke of Saxe-Hildburghausen, gave Hanstein the title of Count of Pölzig and Baiersdorf. Pölzig went on to have a distinguished career as an officer in the Prussian army.
Louise found happiness in her second marriage, but she had few years to enjoy it. Already in 1822, two years before her exile, she reported to her friend Augusta that she had severe stomach pains and inflammation of the bowels, and had suffered a hemorrhage. In February 1831, she went to Paris to consult the famous Dr. Antoine Dubois and was told she had inoperable cancer of the womb. After five months of agony, Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, Countess Pölzig, was dead, about a month before her thirty-first birthday.
One of the strangest things in the biographical literature on Albert, prince consort, is the recurring allegation that he was not the child of Duke Ernest. The rumor of Albert’s bastardy may have been spread by word of mouth in the gossipy courts of nineteenth-century Europe. In the twentieth century, the rumors began to appear in print from the pen of men who, for one reason or another, disliked the prince consort. The allegation was based on the known fact of his mother’s adultery with Hanstein and on the observed fact that in his sexual mores and his financial management Albert was remarkably unlike his father and his brother.
Some writers argued that the prince consort’s father must have been Jewish. As evidence of this, Jewish writers alleged the prince consort’s great intelligence and vast culture. Others, of an anti-Semitic bent, pointed to the large sums of money the prince was able to amass and the large properties he w
as able to purchase during his two decades in England.
Veteran royal biographer David Duff was also convinced that Prince Albert was not the son of the Duke of Coburg and advanced an even more audacious hypothesis: that Albert was the illegitimate son of his uncle Leopold. Albert’s life paralleled and extended his uncle’s in extraordinary ways, Duff pointed out. The two were very alike. Albert became virtually Leopold’s adopted son in his late teens, and all his life he was closer to Leopold than were Leopold’s Belgian sons and daughters. Using the evidence of Leopold’s own letters, Duff placed Leopold in Coburg around the time of Albert’s conception. He accused royal historian Theodore Martin of a cover-up, since, in his official five-volume biography of the prince consort, Martin denies that Leopold was there at that time.
But the idea that Albert was not his father’s son is nonsense, a tissue of innuendo and prejudice floating free of fact. The evidence of Duchess Louise’s extant letters is that she was deeply in love with and faithful to her husband until at least 1822. (Albert was born in 1819.) It is a canard that Prince Albert was a bastard, but how fascinating that so many upstanding biographers and historians of royalty have found it irresistible!
Family likenesses are funny things. Sometimes sons are like their grandfathers or their uncles. Sometimes, though male historians have trouble with this, sons are like their mothers and grandmothers and aunts. All the evidence suggests that Prince Albert inherited his tall, handsome body from his father; his brilliant mind, his love of learning, and his sensitivity to social wrongs from his mother.
