by Gillian Gill
THE COBURG PRINCES, aged five and six, were eyewitnesses to the extraordinary events of 1824. Intelligent little boys, they surely had some intimations that their father and mother had for some time not been in agreement. They were watching when a crowd of angry citizens forced their father to drive back to the Ehrenburg Palace. They were in the palace when the mob outside howled for Szymborski’s head. Soon after, when they were both ill with whooping cough, their mother came and wept to tell them she was going away. They never saw their mother again and apparently were never given any news of her during her life. Even news of her death probably came to them in the extraordinary form of the announcement of their father’s wedding. According to Queen Victoria, it was not until after his own marriage that Prince Albert was told how much his mother had suffered in her last year, and he wept for her.
Within days of their mother’s departure, the princes’ father went away too. For five months the two little boys were left in the care of “der Rath.” What the duke instructed the tutor Florschütz to tell his sons about their mother, when it dawned upon them that she was not coming back, is not known.
The idea that his small sons might need him after all the distressing events they had experienced seems not to have occurred to the Duke of Coburg. Children, for men like him, existed for the benefit of their parents, not vice versa. Having got rid of his wife, the duke had to mend his bridges with relatives abroad, and he was in need of pleasure. He had provided his sons with a capable young tutor. After a year’s trial, the duke felt confident that Florschütz understood his duty. Duchess Louise had babied Albert and hurt Ernest, who was a real chip off the old Coburg block. What the boys needed was a firm male hand.
Duke Ernest’s sense of responsibility for his sons extended to a request that they write to him regularly and keep a diary of their daily activities that he could read on his return. Letters to absent parents and diaries were a common educational exercise for upper-class schoolchildren in this period, to be carefully supervised and scrutinized by tutors and governesses. All the same, for a sensitive, articulate child like Albert, they were a precious link and a needed outlet for emotion.
Albert’s letters and diary are full of sadness and loss. He makes no reference to his mother, but he is free to say how much he misses his father. The five-year-old prince artlessly records how often he cried. He cried because the Rath pinched him to explain that pinch was a verb. He cried because his cough was so very bad and worrisome, because he was punished for not putting his books away, because he wrote a letter so full of mistakes that the Rath tore it up. Albert ends each letter to his father: “Think of me with love, your Albert.” Once he begs the duke to bring him a doll that nods its head.
Is it any wonder that Albert cried? Both his parents were gone in bizarre circumstances, and he did not know when they would be back. For a five-year-old, this was already tragic. If, as is all too likely given his intelligence, Albert gathered from adult conversations that his mother had been sent away in disgrace, and he feared that she would not be returning, this would have been traumatic. Duchess Louise was young, pretty, witty, capricious, and fun. Everyone except her husband and his henchmen loved her. Albert was like his mother—everyone said so—and that had been a source of deep happiness to the boy. She made no secret of the fact that she loved him more than his big brother, that he was her “pride and glory.”
What happens to a sensitive, precocious boy when such a mother suddenly disappears? Surely the bottom drops out of his world. Did Albert blame himself for his mother’s disappearance? Did he hate her for abandoning him? These would be normal reactions for a small child hit by inexplicable loss. Did Albert identify with his mother, so small and childlike? Did he remember that she had dared to quarrel with his father before she suddenly disappeared? Did he begin to fear his father?
None of these questions has an answer. Neither Albert nor his brother, Ernest, in all their yards of letters, memoirs, and memoranda, ever recorded memories of the time when they lost their mother. If they confided them to anyone, their secrets were faithfully kept.
According to the 1866 testimony of Florschütz, testimony solicited by Queen Victoria and sanctioned by Albert’s brother (by this time Duke Ernest II of Coburg), the princes did not miss their mother. In fact, the duchess’s departure was more a cause of relief than sorrow to the boys, since she was not a good mother. “Duchess Louise was wanting in the essential qualifications of a mother,” wrote Florschütz. “She made no attempt to conceal that Prince Albert was her favorite child … The influence of this partiality might have been most injurious.”
If Florschütz is to be believed, the Coburg princes swiftly got over the “difficulties” caused by their parents’ dispute in 1824 because they received far better care from him than they had from their mother. “It is a satisfaction to me to reflect that these sad events did not interfere permanently with the happiness of my beloved pupils, and that, with the cheerfulness and innocence of childhood, they retained their respectful and obedient love for their parents. Thus deprived of a mother’s love and care, the children necessarily depended more entirely on that shown by their tutor; and he is conscious of … having given himself up with unceasing solicitude … to the good of his pupils. And he was rewarded by their … love and confidence, their liking to be with him, and the entire unreserve with which they showed their inmost thoughts and feelings in his presence.”
Today mothers are expected to raise their small children of both sexes. Biologists, psychologists, and therapists as well as parents all agree that a young child’s mother, however imperfect, is the center of its world and the object of its passionate adoration. There is also a consensus in the social sciences that the early mother-child relationship forms a template for adult relationships. If the course of a child’s love for its mother is interrupted in some way by death, separation, or betrayal, the effects on the child’s development are deep and permanent.
Who can believe that Prince Albert was unaffected by his mother’s disappearance? On the contrary, the prince’s development as a sexual being and all his subsequent relationships with women were shaped by the fact that at the vulnerable age of five he was abandoned by the person he loved most.
The Paradise of Our Childhood
…
RNEST PROBABLY SUFFERED LESS THAN ALBERT WHEN THEIR MOTHER went off. Her preference for his younger brother must have hurt. Now he was the heir to both Coburg and Gotha, after his father he was the most important person at both courts and in both duchies, and the path in life laid out for him was congenial. He adored his brother, Albert, and was ready to protect him. With their mother gone, he would be the most important person in Albert’s life. Together, with the Rath’s help, they would negotiate life with their alarming father.
For his part, Albert concentrated on doing everything asked of him as well as he could. Handsome and brilliant, he would be the perfect boy and win the love and admiration of all who knew him.
For some six years after their mother’s disappearance, Prince Ernest and Prince Albert settled into a routine, traveling only once beyond the eight hundred or so square miles of Coburg-Gotha to visit their Mensdorff cousins in Mainz in the Rhineland. The Duke of Coburg himself was away for many months every year, and the Ehrenburg Palace, which was undergoing extensive renovations and extensions, was often closed up. Although Duke Ernest kept his mother and stepmother-in-law at arm’s length when he was at home, during his absences he allowed his sons to pay longish visits to Duchess Augusta at her villa at Ketschendorf, just outside Coburg city, and to Duchess Caroline in Gotha, a day’s journey away. However, the Coburg princes spent most of their time at the Rosenau. All of these arrangements indicate a father of limited means, intent upon his building projects, his opera stars, and his visits to the courts of more important relatives.
The grandmothers’ houses were more relaxed than the Ehrenburg and less spartan than the Rosenau. The older ladies would provide small treats for the b
oys when they were young—a picnic expedition to a local beauty spot, a new pet goat, a visit to a fair with pocket money to buy “a Turkish crescent, a whip, an eagle, and a crossbow.” Later there were outings to the theater and opera, which the boys enjoyed very much. All the same, there is no real evidence that the two grandmothers were able to fill the gap left by the boys’ lost mother, as some of Albert’s biographers have suggested. Grandmother Augusta was a sharp, imperious old woman who suffered neither fools nor naughty boys gladly. Duchess Caroline adored her grandsons—Albert was the image of her beloved lost stepdaughter—but she was a worrier and terribly deaf. Neither grandmother had much influence over Duke Ernest’s treatment of his sons, though Duchess Caroline is on record as trying to protect them. The boys soon learned from their father to take the love of the old women for granted and spend as little time with them as possible.
Apart from their father, Florschütz was the most important person in the princes’ lives, and the closeness between tutor and tutees grew apace. Florschütz was an enlightened educator. Though he was himself a fine example of the educated, hard-working, and ambitious bourgeois Protestant, he acted on the presumption that all work and no play made the princely Jack a dull boy. He gave his charges ample time to get outside and to develop their personal interests. As a result, in comparison to the daughters, much less the sons, of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant meritocracy of their generation, the Coburg princes were not remarkably advanced when they were children. But this liberal educational policy reaped rich results in the end. Both princes grew into well-informed, intellectually curious, highly cultured adults. One of the puzzles in this family history is why, when it came to educating his own sons, especially the eldest, Prince Albert did not take more leaves out of Florschütz’s book of pedagogy.
Florschütz himself did much of the teaching when the princes were young, and he stressed natural science, modern languages, modern history, and, most radically, philosophy, with which the German universities of the day, though not the ducal courts, were on fire. Prince Albert learned some Latin but no Greek. Though he was taught English and French from an early age, and could read and write both languages well by his teenage years, Albert was not a natural linguist like Queen Victoria and was not taught by native speakers. He always retained a heavy German accent in both languages. In general, Albert as a boy excelled in European history, German literature and composition, natural history, art, and music, and all his life, his interests continued to be in science, technology, and art. None of this prepared him very well for life at the Court of St. James’s. The highborn Englishmen among whom Albert was fated to spend his adult life were soaked in the classics as boys, to the neglect of the sciences, and as adults considered French and Italian the languages of civilized men.
Music was something that Prince Albert breathed like the air in his native Germany. Most of the great composers before the 1820s started their careers as court musicians in little German kingdoms like Prince Albert’s own Coburg. His mother’s father, Duke Augustus of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, was for a time the patron of Carl Maria von Weber. Music making was the commonest form of entertainment among all classes in Germany, and amateur musicians were often highly proficient. Tiny Gotha had its own theater, orchestra, and singing groups, touring companies brought the latest operas each year, and music was an integral part of life at the Saxe-Coburg court. Uncle Leopold, among his many attributes, sang as well as many professional singers, and when members of the ducal family got together, they made music.
Albert started piano early and then progressed to the organ. As late teenagers, both he and his brother turned to composition, and either probably could have earned his living as a musician. Ernest in later life wrote a couple of successful operas, which were performed in Gotha or in his brand-new opera house in Coburg. Albert as a youth completed at least two pieces of religious music for organ and choir and twenty-six Lieder und Romanzen (songs and romances). After he took up life in England, Prince Albert’s compositions were performed at royal events like the christenings or weddings of his children, but as a musician he had a charming modesty. As he once explained, he and his wife both loved music and dedicated time to performance in order to better appreciate the genius of others. When Felix Mendelssohn came to the English court, the Queen and prince begged him for a lesson, and he found them apt and appreciative pupils. When the sheet music blew away, the Queen herself picked it up, a royal tribute to genius.
Albert’s interest in natural history was bound up with his love of the Thuringian countryside. Coburg and Gotha in his lifetime were no bigger than villages by our modern standards, and the landscape surrounding them remained virtually untouched by industry throughout the nineteenth century. Albert’s father owned a number of small country residences, each offering beautiful views, walks, and rides, but Albert loved his birthplace, Schloss Rosenau, more than any other house. From the little attic bedroom he shared with his brother and tutor at the Rosenau, the young prince had a spectacular panorama of wooded hills and a beguiling river. In the afternoons, tutor and pupils, with an enthusiastic dog or two at their heels, would roam far and wide, scrambling up rocky hillsides to find a falcon’s nest, tracking deer, and collecting birds eggs, plants, insects, and rock specimens. These they made into a little natural history collection that grew into the Ernest-Albert Museum at Coburg. His native landscapes were etched into Prince Albert’s memory, and it was these, and the clean, scented air, that he missed above all when he moved to smoky London.
The princes, if not poor Florschütz, who had no free time or holidays, were encouraged by Duke Ernest to form friendships with males their own age. They were especially close to their Mensdorff cousins, the sons of their aunt Sophie, who had once been Florschütz’s tutees themselves. Also, from 1825 until 1833, each Sunday afternoon from two to seven, a dozen wellborn boys were invited to the castle to play with the princes. When possible, the boys played outside, and one of their favorite games was to reenact the chivalric adventures of their Saxon ancestors. They went hunting for birds in summer and skated and sledded in winter. When confined indoors, they played contentious games of chess, put on concerts, and wrote small plays that they staged for the pleasure of the ducal court.
Albert and his brother were also guests of honor at the annual celebrations their father arranged for local schoolchildren. On these feudal occasions, the ducal party looked on approvingly as the children played games with carefully restrained exuberance. Cake and wine were served in the afternoon and roasted sausages in the evening, to the delight, we are told, of the young guests.
Class hierarchy was rigidly observed in Coburg. The boys summoned to play at the castle on Sundays were the sons of court officials and expected one day to take over their fathers’ jobs. The distinction in rank between the princes and their playmates was never forgotten, and Ernest and Albert were not subjected to the brutal challenges other boys faced in the woods, the classroom, and on the playground. All the same, Albert was allowed to enjoy some of the rough and tumble of a normal boy’s life, and he was not cut off from the world by an invisible wall of privilege and surveillance like the young Victoria at Kensington Palace. The Ehrenburg Palace was in the heart of the city of Coburg, and a busy local inn operated only a stone’s throw away from the Rosenau. Prince Albert as a boy was occasionally permitted to sit down for bread and cheese and beer at a table in that inn’s courtyard, just like any other local lad.
Albert had a slightly malicious streak, and as a boy he loved to play practical jokes and make fun of people. He was an excellent mimic and had his friends in stitches with his imitations of older folk. He had a gift for drawing cartoons and caricatures—a little book of cartoons was one of his engagement gifts to Queen Victoria—and he specialized in inventive practical jokes. On one occasion, young Albert filled some pea-size glass vials with a noxious chemical and tossed them onto the floor and into the boxes of the theater in Coburg. Another time, his cousin Princess Caroline of Reuss was inf
uriated to discover that Albert had filled the pockets of her cloak with soft cheese. Not to be outdone, Caroline collected all the frogs she could find and put them in Cousin Albert’s bed. This was excellent revenge since, Queen Victoria solemnly informs us, Prince Albert had a horror of frogs and toads all his life. Perhaps he was afraid of turning into one, like the prince in the Grimms’ fairy tale.
The Coburg princes’ peaceful routine of lessons and nature walks applied only in their father’s absence. When at home, Duke Ernest demanded his sons’ company, always at breakfast, often for dinner, and, as they grew older, at the daily hunts and evening parties. In the duchy of Coburg, Duke Ernest progressed from one residence to another like a renaissance prince. After 1826 when he acquired his ex-wife’s domain of Gotha, these peregrinations could, to the Duke’s manifest satisfaction, be extended to the palace in Gotha and the country house of Reinhardsbrunn. Duke Ernest liked to live outdoors and to eat in public. Whenever possible, his breakfast was served in a different place each day on the grounds of his current residence, or at a local beauty spot. With so much traipsing to and fro, the meal often lasted for several hours and was an ordeal for the servants. Thirty years later, as master of chilly Balmoral Castle, Prince Albert too loved to eat alfresco.
Since the duke tended to be abroad during the summer, the regular progresses from one residence to the next in the dark months were hard on the whole court. Winters in central Germany were severe, and people forced out on the roads fell off their horses, got stuck in snowdrifts, or tumbled into freezing rivers. Duke Ernest enjoyed the challenge of bad weather and thought his sons should too, but Duchess Caroline worried constantly about her grandsons’ catching their death of cold. “Is it not too long a day’s journey from Coburg to Ichtershausen for the dear children,” wrote Albert’s stepgrandmother to Duke Ernest on November 26, 1826, “and in this horrible weather? Would it not be better to make this stage in two days? Excuse this advice, but I am afraid the children will arrive unwell.”
