by Gillian Gill
While Albert was finding the three-month separation before his marriage an ordeal, Victoria too was troubled by doubts and worries. How exactly would she square the solemn oaths she had taken at her coronation with the equally solemn oaths she would take at her wedding? What did it mean for a queen to endow her husband with all her worldly goods? Could she find it in her heart to promise to love, honor, and obey when she had found so much pleasure in doing as she liked? To be a good wife, must she cease to be queen in all but name? It made her ill even to think of such things, and for a while it was feared at court that the Queen had measles and the wedding would be postponed.
On the way to London for his wedding, Prince Albert arrived in Brussels tired and peevish, as King Leopold duly reported to his niece Victoria. The Coburg party was then subjected to an unusually long and stormy Channel crossing and emerged at Dover, as the prince wrote to his fiancée, as pale as wax candles. However, the prince received a rousing welcome as he journeyed to London from the coast. When Albert arrived at Buckingham Palace, Victoria was waiting for him at the door and threw herself into his arms, an extraordinary lapse of protocol.
On the day of the wedding, the bride woke to pouring rain and mist, and at once penned an affectionate little note, inquiring if her beloved had slept well and assuring him that the weather must break. When the bride was dressed, she invited her husband-to-be to come see her in her wedding dress. This was another breach of decorum, but on this day it was Albert’s admiration that Victoria craved, not the cheers of the masses. Instead of the heavily jewel-encrusted gold and silver cloth of traditional royal bridal gowns, the bride had chosen a white satin dress trimmed with a deep yoke of English lace. On her bosom she wore the modest sapphire brooch that Albert had given her, and a crown of orange blossoms, not diamonds, on her head.
For his part, the groom looked ravishingly handsome. For the first time, he was wearing the scarlet coat of a British field marshal, decorated with the blue sash, star, and chain of the Order of the Garter. The uniform jacket was cropped to the waist in front, swallow-tailed behind, and the prince had made sure that it fitted him like a glove. Skintight buff pantaloons, flat black court slippers, and a large white satin bow on one shoulder completed the prince’s costume. To the modern eye, this paragon of masculine modesty seems to have chosen to wear ballet tights for his wedding, but such was the military fashion of the day.
The groom’s party set off first from Buckingham Palace and was cheered on its route despite the rain. Arriving punctually at the chapel, flanked by his father and brother, also tall and fine in their German uniforms, Prince Albert looked pale. He was visibly disconcerted by the aggrieved remarks that the Duchess of Kent, just behind him, addressed to her sister-in-law, Queen Adelaide. Victoria’s mother felt that she had not been given her proper prominence in the chapel.
The bride was prompt, and though the ten gawky maidens carrying her train made for a bumpy progress down the aisle, Victoria was too ecstatic to mind. The marriage ceremony was underrehearsed, and Albert, still uncomfortable in English, struggled at times. Victoria, blushing yet radiant, played her part to perfection. Remembering the problems she had encountered at her coronation, she had made sure that Albert’s ring slid easily onto her fourth finger. When the Queen vowed to love, honor, and obey, her gloriously limpid voice electrified the guests who had been crammed into the little chapel. When the prince read his vows, the Queen was observed to turn directly toward him and gaze raptly up into his face. After the ceremony, people noticed the way the Queen warmly embraced her aunt-in-law, Queen Adelaide, and shook hands with her mother. In the vestry, bride and groom waited patiently as Earl Marshall, the Duke of Norfolk, who insisted that it was his right to sign the register first, searched through all his pockets for his spectacles.
Back at Buckingham Palace for the wedding breakfast, Victoria spent ten minutes alone with Lord Melbourne. Throughout the ceremony he had hovered close by the Queen’s side, his eyes dim with tears and wearing a new coat that he had joked to her would be the toast of the event. The special relationship the prime minister had enjoyed with his sovereign was winding down, and Melbourne at least knew it. Victoria also spent a half hour alone with Albert. She presented him with a ring, and he urged that there should never be any secrets between them. His campaign for political power could not begin too early.
There were seven simultaneous and duly hierarchical wedding breakfasts featuring two hundred of the thickly iced and marzipaned fruitcakes traditional in English weddings. The main cake, bearing effigies of bride and groom, was nine feet in circumference and had to be carried in by four men. Breaking away early from the festivities, Victoria changed into a white satin morning gown trimmed with swan’s down and a deep-brimmed bonnet that shielded her face from the inquiring gaze of the public. Thereupon, as she recorded later that day, “Dearest Albert came up and fetched me downstairs, where we took leave of Mamma and drove off at near 4, Albert and I alone which was so delightful.”
The bride had decided against buying a new carriage for her wedding and went off in an ancient barouche. Charles Greville found the equipage astonishingly shabby, but it was escorted all along the route to Windsor by a troop of carriages and cheering outriders. Arriving at the castle, the bride and groom first toured the private apartments that Victoria had had refurbished, and the prince discovered that, as at Buckingham Palace, Baroness Lehzen slept next door.
Both Queen and prince then separated to change their dress for a third time that day. Albert donned the dark blue Windsor uniform that was reserved for men dedicated to the Queen’s private service, and then sat down at the piano to calm himself with music. On this first night, the Queen and prince had reduced their retinue to a minimum: just two gentlemen and two ladies. Dinner was served for the party of six, but for once Victoria had no appetite and after dinner had to lie on the couch with a sick headache. Albert sat on a stool by her side, holding her hand and whispering endearments. The bridal pair retired early to bed and were spared the taxing rituals and coarse jests whereby royal couples of the past on their wedding night were put into bed by the ladies and gentlemen of the bedchamber. Bride and groom did not get much sleep, and when she awoke next morning, Victoria gazed with delight on her sleeping husband’s beautiful white neck, revealed by the loose nightshirt he wore.
Many couples have foundered on the reefs of their wedding night, and Queen Victoria in later life tended to regard brides as lambs for the slaughter, poor innocent young things surrendered to the criminal passions of men. But for her and Albert at Windsor in 1840, it was all moonlight and roses and a fair wind. It seems clear from the Queen’s journal that not only did she and her husband consummate their marriage at the first opportunity but that Albert was able to initiate her into the pleasures of sex. This immediate success was of crucial importance in determining the course of the marriage. Victoria was a sensual, self-willed woman with warm Coburg and Hanoverian blood in her veins. The experienced men of her court saw her as ripe for the plucking. To secure his wife’s affections, and to make himself indispensable to her, Albert needed to satisfy her physically.
In the light of history, Albert’s success has seemed a given. He sired two children in his first twenty-two months of marriage, and then seven more. All the same, it is puzzling that conjugal felicity came to the royal couple so easily. According to the testimony of those who knew him, Albert had never slept with a woman before his marriage. He assured his wife that he never felt a flicker of desire for any woman but her. None of this bodes well for marital success, as the wife of poor virginal John Ruskin could testify. Albert was a healthy twenty-year-old who came from a long line of libidinous men, but he was very tired and tense when he and Victoria finally found themselves alone. Both he and his handlers—his father, his uncle Leopold, and Baron Stockmar—must have felt some twinges of anxiety.
It helped that the bride was both passionate and innocent. It helped that the first woman the prince took into his arms
had long been his destiny. Albert was above all a dutiful man, and duty dictated that he finally give rein to his own sensuality and make love. It helped that the prince’s wife was not a stranger but his first cousin. In the European aristocracy where first cousins married routinely and uncle-niece marriages were not unknown, a touch of incest was a kind of aphrodisiac.
It helped that Victoria was so like Albert’s mother, the only woman he had ever loved and whom he had tried hard to erase from his memory. Until he was five years old, Albert was adored and petted by a tiny, plump, vivacious young mother who made no secret of how much she preferred him to his brother and his father. Now, as if by a miracle, another woman of the same physical type and temperament had come into his life, adored him even more extravagantly, and was his for life.
Sexual compatibility was to be the bedrock of the marriage of Victoria and Albert. However, from the beginning, erotic passion was divided unequally between them. She was madly in love; he was pleased to be adored. This was what the courtiers who kept watch over the two recorded in their letters and diaries. It is what we today can deduce from the couple’s extant private papers.
But sex is only one part of intimacy, and physical intimacy was crucial to both husband and wife. The success of Victoria and Albert’s marriage came out of the happiness and peace they both found in bed together. Victoria before her wedding never spent a night alone, and for the twenty-one years of their marriage, she required her husband to come to bed with her. This was one issue on which she laid down the law as woman and as queen. Albert too was accustomed from birth to sharing a room or even a bed with his brother or tutor, and found it hard to be alone, especially at night. Albert yearned to be a “we,” not an “I,” though on his own terms. Even at the height of his political and charitable activities, the prince returned to his wife by nightfall, whatever it cost him in fatigue and inefficiency.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert lived in a fishbowl, set apart yet under constant observation. In bed they were alone, unseen, and delectably together, free to speak their minds as well as act out their passions, united against the whole world. It was just “we two.” As Victoria wrote in heartbroken fragments after Albert’s death: “I who felt, when in those blessed Arms clasped and held tight in the sacred hours at night, when the world seemed only to be ourselves, that nothing could part us. I felt so v[ery] secure.”
Bearing the Fruits of Desire
…
HE DAY AFTER THEIR WEDDING, QUEEN VICTORIA AND PRINCE ALBERT took breakfast at about nine, and early in the afternoon were on view to the general public, walking arm in arm on the terrace at Windsor Castle. Later that day it was Albert’s turn to plead a sick headache and lie on the sofa while Victoria held his hand. Cynical men of the world like Wellington and Greville were convinced that the prince had failed to meet the challenge of his first wedding night. It would be only months before they realized how wrong they had been.
The Queen had agreed to a three-day honeymoon at Windsor, but the privacy and quiet that Albert craved were not to be had even for that brief time. Dozens of court officials arrived at the castle within hours of the bridal pair, Prime Minister Melbourne was in constant attendance, Baroness Lehzen hovered in the wings, and every eye was on the Queen and the prince. Albert looked weary and ill at ease. Victoria was in roaring high spirits. She had an intimate dinner party for ten on the second night and on the third a dance for a large and exuberant party. Albert retired to bed early, but the Queen danced until midnight.
Though the first months of the marriage were delightful for Victoria, they left Albert deeply dispirited. The prince arrived in his new wife’s country prepared to find fault, and he did not have to look far. Court life was as little to his taste as ever, the polluted air around Buckingham Palace gave him constant sore throats, and English food turned his stomach. Winters in England were much less extreme than in Germany, and his father had trained Albert to endure cold without complaint, but the dank winter chill that prevailed inside his wife’s palaces seeped into the prince’s bones. Why on earth did the English prefer fireplaces to stoves when most of the fireplace heat went up the chimney?
The frost on the inside windowpanes equaled the frosty welcome Albert received at court. He came to England convinced that Englishmen in general were inferior to Germans because they cared only about money and were indifferent to art, music, and philosophy. As he saw it, the English of the higher classes were either stupid and superficial—their heads crammed full of silly jokes, hunting anecdotes, and remarks on the weather—or else cynical and immoral. Either way, they were unworthy of his regard. Unsurprisingly, sensing the contempt and disapproval that lay beneath the prince’s glacial politeness, the great men of England did not warm to the Queen’s new husband.
Germany for Albert was already taking on a misty glow. When not actually in their company or answering their eternal begging letters, the prince was able to forget that his own father and brother were at least as promiscuous as certain English dukes, and spent a great deal of their time thinking about money, or, in their case, the lack of it.
As for the women who were introduced to the prince, very willing to be charmed by such a handsome young man, they too soon turned cold and censorious. A hint of flirtatiousness, a shadow of immorality were anathema to the prince, and he had nothing to say even to the virtuous and intelligent ladies of his wife’s household. Queen Victoria was conscious of her own plainness, was surrounded by beautiful women, and had been warned by her friend Lord Melbourne that all husbands had a roving eye, yet she never felt the need to be jealous. Albert’s fidelity to her was adamantine. No other woman made any impression on him.
Isolated, homesick, a fish out of water, Albert was very unhappy. His wife, while professing to idolize him, treated him more like a gigolo than a husband. He was allowed to blot her signature on state documents, and that was all. In a letter to his university friend Löwenstein, Albert complained that he was not “master in the house.” Fears he had entertained in Germany about Victoria’s stubborn nature and small mind revived. Albert confided in Stockmar that he found Victoria “naturally a fine character, but warped by wrong upbringing.”
Albert showed his discontent. He retired to bed early and sometimes fell asleep after dinner parties or even at the theater. When his wife chatted and joked with her former friends, he looked sour. When she accepted an invitation to some great man’s house, he made it clear that neither the company nor the entertainment provided was to his taste. Music was one of the passions that Victoria and Albert shared, and the Queen made much of her husband’s superb musical talents. Yet when she asked the famous singers Giovanni Battista Rubini and Luigi Lablache to come give a private concert, Albert snoozed. As one of Queen Victoria’s ladies reported maliciously on this occasion: “Cousin Albert looked beautiful, and slept as quietly as usual, sitting by Lady Normanby”—incidentally one of the most celebrated beauties at court.
For months after his move to England, Albert remained as pale and ailing as on his first days. Parting with his father after the wedding caused him an agony of tears, even though Duke Ernest had made unpleasant advances to Victoria’s ladies and was already being a thorough nuisance about money. Brother Ernest’s sexual exploits and need for cash if anything outpaced his ducal father’s, but when he also left England, the Queen found her husband weeping in the corridor and deaf to her comfort. How could she understand his feelings, he said, when her own childhood had been so unhappy? The myth of Albert’s idyllic childhood and the close relationship he had enjoyed with his father was being born.
BUT ALBERT’S UNHAPPINESS did not last long. Change was in the offing, and the balance of power between husband and wife was about to shift dramatically. Queen Victoria missed her second period after the wedding. When it became clear that she was pregnant, she was distraught. She had long understood that it would someday be her duty to give an heir to England, but she felt no desire to advance that day. The prospect of bearing a child
was a nightmare all the more dreadful since the physical facts of pregnancy and labor had been scrupulously hidden from her.
Victoria was aware that labor was an ordeal and that women not infrequently died as a result of giving birth. This was bad enough, but she also observed that even a healthy and uneventful pregnancy was an immense bore. In the mid-nineteenth century, pregnant women of the leisure classes were enjoined to curtail their physical activities, to disappear discreetly from society once their condition could no longer be concealed by corsetry and to spend the last weeks before delivery under virtual house arrest. Victoria’s favorite daytime pastimes since her teenage years had been galloping across country and dancing until dawn. These activities would not be countenanced for a queen bearing the hope of the nation.
Victoria made no secret of the fact that she was unhappy to be pregnant. She said so even to German relatives she knew would be overjoyed by the news. She wrote forthrightly to Albert’s stepgrandmother, Duchess Caroline of Gotha: “I must say that I could not be more unhappy. I am really upset about it and it is spoiling my happiness. I have always hated the idea and I prayed God night and day to be left free for at least six months, but my prayers have not been answered and I am really most unhappy. I cannot understand how anyone can wish for such a thing, especially at the beginning of a marriage.” To Uncle Leopold she was even more brutally frank: “The thing is odious and if all one’s plagues are rewarded only by a nasty girl, I shall drown it, I think. I will know nothing else but a boy. I never will have a girl.”
