We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  Despite his doubts, Stockmar accepted the assignment of facilitating the marriage of Victoria and Albert. He was bored at home in Coburg with his disagreeable wife. He enjoyed living in England, which he saw as the greatest nation on earth. For decades, long before the Crown of Belgium was won, Leopold and Stockmar had conceived a grand geopolitical plan in which enlightened European monarchs would lead their peoples toward economic and social progress through carefully controlled and limited democracies. England was the kingpin in this system, and the approaching accession of a new, presumably malleable, half-Coburg queen regnant offered all kinds of possibilities. If Stockmar indoctrinated Albert and Victoria, each in turn, if they then married and founded a new dynasty, they might change the future of Europe and realize the Leopold-Stockmar vision.

  Therefore Stockmar emerged from retirement and, despite his notoriously frail health, started shuttling across the English Channel. He had been Princess Charlotte’s dear friend. Now he was Victoria’s. In the difficult weeks just before Victoria’s accession and for months afterward, Stockmar was at the Queen’s shoulder, vying with Prime Minister Melbourne for influence. At the same time, at first through correspondence and finally in person, Stockmar masterminded Prince Albert’s education—his Bildung, as the Germans say. From the fall of 1836, Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha grudgingly yielded to his brother Leopold the control of his younger son, Albert. Prince Ernest too yielded to his brother. For the next few years, Ernest was content to play second fiddle, offering support, encouragement, and social cover as Albert was trained to win Victoria’s hand.

  First King Leopold dispatched the two Coburg brothers to his royal French in-laws for a short visit. Albert and Ernest were given a gratifying reception at Louis Philippe’s brilliant court, but Albert took no pleasure in Paris. The city, he found, was noisy and crowded, his hotel shabby and cramped. Then the Coburg princes returned to Brussels for eight months to stay in a quiet and comfortable house paid for by their uncle. Florschütz was still with the princes, but Baron von Wiechmann was also appointed as governor to supervise their lives. Wiechmann was a tedious old soldier, and Ernest quarreled with him a lot, but the high-ranking Wiechmann was a key indicator of Albert’s rising status and the expectations of his handlers.

  In Brussels Albert’s political education began in earnest at the hands of some of the most eminent men in Belgium, and he gave proof of exceptional intellectual mettle. A Belgian government minister gave him and his brother lessons in contemporary politics. The princes improved their French in the classroom and in the salons. The Reverend Mr. Drury, who had once had the honor of corresponding with Lord Byron, was retained to teach them English literature. The mathematician Adolphe Quetelet, often called the father of modern statistics, shaped Prince Albert’s thinking on economic issues in crucial ways. But almost more important to both young men than the lectures and tutorials was the experience of living in Brussels, the capital city of one of the richest and most modern nations in the world. Coburg-Gotha was still an oppressive semifeudal state. Now in Brussels Albert got a taste of the democratic ideas and social patterns he might expect to meet in England.

  Ernest and Albert enjoyed Belgium. When Duke Ernest wrote that he would expect to see them at home in Coburg for the Christmas holidays, Prince Albert wrote back with extreme politeness and equal firmness that it was impossible for them to leave Brussels. “Such an expedition would require five or six weeks, and our course of study would be quite disturbed by such an interruption. We told dear uncle the purport of your letter, and he said he would write to you on the subject.” And that was that. The dreamy, passive boy of the Rosenau was emerging from his father’s shadow—into his uncle’s.

  The next stage in Stockmar’s grand plan was for the princes to move on to a university. There, in Prince Albert’s phrase, they would “get more wisdom.” The Wettin elders in Saxony and Thuringia were apoplectic just thinking of the incendiary notions the Coburg princes would pick up at a university. Even Stockmar found it difficult to find the right academic environment for his two prize pupils. Berlin, Stockmar informed King Leopold, was inadvisable mainly because “a certain dissoluteness is as epidemic in Berlin as the influenza.” Conservative, autocratic Vienna was equally out of the question. In the end, Stockmar chose the University of Bonn, though it too was conservative by Belgian standards. The princes Ernest and Albert, together with the faithful Florschütz and the increasingly irritating Wiechmann, took up modest lodgings in April 1837 and began studying law.

  Prince Albert did only two semesters at Bonn, but his eighteen months as a student prince were probably the most congenial of his life. He was not radicalized in either his political or religious views, but he loved the work, attended lectures conscientiously, and experienced a “rage for reading.” He and Ernest became friends with several other young aristocrats from families close to their own: the Grand Duke of Weimar, Prince William of Löwenstein-Wertheim, Count Erbach, and the new, young Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. As Prince Albert wrote to his friend Prince William in October 1838, some months after leaving Bonn, “I believe that the pleasant days which we spent together [at the university], partly in useful occupations, partly in cheerful intercourse, will ever appear to me as the happiest of my life. In spite of our unrestrained intimacy [Ungenirheit] and our many practical jokes, the utmost harmony always existed between us. How pleasant were our winter concerts—our theatrical attempts—our walks to the Venusberg—the swimming-school—the fencing ground-! I dare not think back upon all those things.”

  Albert still lived under the careful eye of his tutor and governor, who sent regular reports on him to King Leopold, Baron Stockmar, and Duke Ernest. The reports were laudatory and reassuring. Unlike the typical student, Prince Albert had a profound distaste for drinking, whoring, and fighting. When not studying, he played the organ in the local cathedral, composed music, took long walks in the company of friends, played with his beautiful greyhound Eos, swam in the river, fenced in competitions (careful not to scar his handsome face), sang lieder, and engaged in long discussions of philosophy and law. Thanks to Uncle Leopold, he also had a little money to spend at last and bought his first pieces of art: sketches by Dürer and Van Dyck, the beginning of a notable collection. Singing drinking songs with his aristocratic friends, doing wickedly accurate imitations of Wiechmann and his professors, and drawing lively caricatures were the full extent of the wild oats Albert is known to have sowed in these eighteen months of (comparative) freedom.

  THIS IS THE CANONIC portrait of Albert the Chaste drawn by Queen Victoria in her account of her husband’s early years. Faced with the mass of evidence the Queen presents, with her certainty that she was the only woman with whom Prince Albert ever had sexual relations, and his well-documented scorn for the female sex and discomfort in mixed society, a number of historians over the years have hinted that the prince was homosexual.

  They insinuate that, given wholly into the care of a lonely, frustrated young man when he was very young, Albert developed an “unnatural attachment” to the tutor with whom he and his sexually precocious brother shared a tiny attic bedroom. As a student, his homosexual tendencies could flower. Bonn in the early nineteenth century was not notorious for its male prostitutes like Berlin, but intense male friendships were as common at the university there as at Oxford and Cambridge. While his brother followed in their father’s brothel-hopping footsteps, Albert led a blissful social life with young men who, like himself, did not need female society to have a good time.

  In mid-nineteenth-century Europe, both men and women of all classes moved effortlessly and without censure across a range of emotions and practices that today would be categorized as either homosexual or heterosexual. Boys and girls, men and women, habitually shared their beds with friends, relatives, and even complete strangers of their own sex. Males and females openly kissed, embraced, walked arm in arm or arm around waist, and expressed passionate love for members of their own sex without attracti
ng adverse notice. Among aristocrats, who had the money and the leisure for advanced erotic exploration, homosexual acts were common and celebrated in a flourishing pornography industry. It is not incidental that Donatien de Sade was a marquis.

  Throughout Europe, upper-class boys in exclusive schools and regiments were routinely exposed to homosexual advances. Some unfortunates were raped by masters or older boys. Some had youthful affairs without feeling guilt or anxiety. Many men who had shown a pronounced preference for sex with other men eventually married and sired children. Very, very occasionally men were hideously punished for “unnatural acts,” but overall society’s preference was to respect the privacy of the bedroom and ask no questions. As the writer and critic J. M. Coetzee has put it, people in the nineteenth century by and large “did not feel they needed to ask themselves what the amative content of intimacy [between men] might be … because their notion of intimacy did not boil down to what the men in question did with their sexual organs.”

  Nonetheless, even if it is easy to document that after the age of five Albert’s intimate relationships were all with men (except for his love of his wife, the Queen), even if it is possible to argue that the young Albert could have experienced homosexual love, there is not one scrap of hard evidence that he did. This is not surprising. He was a man of great renown, major achievement, and small popularity who died tragically young and had a loyal band of friends and relatives. In the years following his death, the person who assiduously collected and lovingly savored the records of Prince Albert’s boyhood was his wife. Queen Victoria was the last person likely to uncover evidence that her husband had not slept with women because he preferred to sleep with men.

  NEWS FROM ENGLAND intruded on Prince Albert’s idyllic time in Bonn. In June 1837, William IV died and Victoria became Queen. Albert wrote her a dutiful letter of congratulations in English, to which she dutifully replied. But for the next eighteen months, Victoria gave only a cursory thought to her cousin Albert. She complained to Uncle Leopold that when Albert wrote to her, neither his English nor his French was up to par. Leopold felt it wiser not to mention Albert anymore.

  Nonetheless, all Europe buzzed with reports that the Queen of England planned to marry Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. For a young man, it was demeaning to have to wait for a woman to give him the nod. Therefore, on the advice of his uncle Leopold and with the consent of Queen Victoria, who was kept abreast of every stage in her cousin’s Bildung, Albert did not go back for his summer vacation to Coburg or to Brussels. Instead, with his faithful brother, tutor, and valet in tow, he disappeared into the Alps for a long walking tour through Switzerland and then continued on for a visit to Northern Italy.

  Long, strenuous walks in beautiful mountains were infinitely more to Albert’s taste than hobnobbing at the court of the French king. With his favorite companions since childhood, Albert was very happy during that summer. Even when the weather turned bad, Albert insisted on doing each stage of the journey through the mountains on foot. But he did not completely forget his duties as a Coburg prince. He compiled a scrapbook of his travels that he sent to his cousin Victoria at her request. It contained an edelweiss he had picked and a scrap of paper in Voltaire’s handwriting for his royal cousin’s increasingly famous collection of autographs.

  After months away, the princes Albert and Ernest paid a cursory visit to their relatives in Coburg and Gotha. Their grandmother Caroline noticed appreciatively that dear Albert was now in superb physical shape. All the same, the grandsons spent a total of nine and one quarter hours in her house, most of them asleep in bed. Back at Bonn by the beginning of November, the princes planned to spend Christmas in Brussels but had to defer the visit until January. Prince Albert had seriously injured his knee and was unable to travel. No doubt under orders to bring his equestrian skills up to Queen Victoria’s high standards, Albert missed a jump when riding in an indoor arena and banged his leg against a wall.

  By late January, however, he was once again able to take long walks, and he and his brother spent the whole of February in Brussels. As Albert explained to his grandmother, who he knew would be upset not to see him in Coburg for the holidays, going to Brussels was important for his future. The visit would give him and Ernest “the opportunity of learning more distinctly what uncle [Leopold] thinks of the coming separation, next spring, of our [his and Ernest’s] hitherto united lives, and also of giving him, at the same time, our own views of it. That moment [of separating] is, in its saddest form, ever before me. We would, therefore, as long as time allows us, do all we can to soften its pain and to gild the pill.”

  In fact, Leopold was especially anxious to explain viva voce to Prince Albert where he stood with his royal English cousin. Stockmar at the English court was reporting that Victoria was a confident and conscientious monarch. She loved her work and was deeply absorbed in her relationship with her prime minister, Lord Melbourne. She saw Melbourne every day, often several times a day, and corresponded with him constantly. She was in no hurry at all to see Albert. “The chief question,” wrote Prince Albert to his father from Brussels in February 1838, “is now as to my mode of life in the meantime [until Victoria finally made her mind up, one way or the other]. For the first half year it is settled that I should remain at Bonn. We have now got through the most difficult of our studies, and intend to turn the summer to account in learning modern languages, and reading political works. After that I am to travel in accordance with your wishes and those of my uncle, in order to learn to depend more upon myself. This plan is also most agreeable to myself, and uncle is trying to get for me as traveling companion a well-informed young Englishman—a Mr. Seymour.”

  The phrase “in order to learn to depend more upon myself” is significant. Finally it seems to have dawned on Duke Ernest, King Leopold, and Baron Stockmar, all men who formed their closest relationships with men and vastly preferred male company, that Prince Albert’s “pure” life with his brother, his tutor, and bosom friends like Prince William of Löwenstein came to him a little too easily. His patterns of behavior to date were indeed an excellent preparation for monogamous married life in puritanical England. In a world where venereal disease was endemic, they boded well for his reproductive success. But they were not good training for courtship. Queen Victoria had more power and autonomy than any other woman in the world. She could not be led obediently to the altar by her family like an ordinary princess.

  But Albert was far less preoccupied with Queen Victoria than with the impending separation from his brother. He was faced with the dissolution of the familiar and deeply comforting intimacy with Ernest and Florschütz that he had known since he was five years old. The prospect almost broke his heart. Only Cart would remain with him, and Cart was only his valet. As soon as the academic semester was over, Florschütz would retire after fifteen years of selfless service. In November Prince Ernest of Coburg would move out of his brother’s shadow and begin an independent life, taking up his commission in the army of their kinsman, the king of Saxony. As Albert wrote to his friend Prince William of Löwenstein: “The separation will be frightfully painful for us. Up to this moment we have never, as long as we can recollect, been a single day away from each other. I cannot bear to think of that moment.”

  As they had as boys, Prince Ernest and Prince Albert spent the late summer and fall of 1838 together in Coburg, mainly at the Rosenau. Ernest was unwell, causing his family great anxiety. Both young men were sadly conscious that things would never be the same again. As Albert wrote to Ernest on August 29, 1839: “Whatever may be in store for us, let us remain one in our feelings. We have, as you correctly say, found what others seek in vain, during all their lives: the soul of another that is able to understand one, that will suffer with one, be glad with one: one that finds the same pleasure in the same aspirations.”

  In fact, they almost died together. When staying overnight at the ancient and largely unoccupied Ehrenburg Palace, Prince Albert was awakened by a strange smell. A servant
had left some papers on top of a stove in a room some four doors away from the one where he, his brother, and Isaac Cart were sleeping. The old timbers and easily flammable paintings and draperies were already burning when Prince Albert got to the room. Instead of leaving as quickly as possible, he and Cart recklessly closed the windows and doors and fought the flames with jugs of water, bedding, and clothes while Ernest ran downstairs to get help. It was probably thanks to the rapid reaction of Prince Albert and Cart that the Ehrenburg Palace suffered only minor damage. On this occasion, as on many others subsequently, Prince Albert showed bravery, leadership, and presence of mind.

  At last November came, and Duke Ernest and Prince Albert with due pomp accompanied Prince Ernest some way on his road to Dresden. The parting was wrenching—Albert wrote that he could barely hold back his tears before the assembled princes and princesses—and on his return home, Albert wrote to his stepgrandmother Duchess Caroline:

  Now I am quite alone. Ernest is off over the mountains, and I am left behind, still surrounded by so many things which allow me to pretend that he is in the next room … We accompanied Ernest as far as Lobenstein, where we spent the evening and the following morning at the home of our dear great-aunt … The next morning brought the pain of parting … We … then drove home, this time without Ernest, arriving at ten o’clock at night, almost frozen to death. We traveled, as usual, in an open Droshky, and had to endure 16 degrees of cold while crossing the lovely Frankenwald. Now Ernest has slept through his first night at Dresden. Today he will be feeling slightly empty. Now I really have got to get out of the habit of saying we and use the egotistic, cold-sounding pronoun I. With we every thing sounded much softer, for we expresses the harmony between two souls and I expresses the individual man’s resistance to external forces, and also, admittedly, his trust in his own strength. I am afraid of tiring you as I rattle on like this, but in the present silence it is a comfort to be able to talk freely.