We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  Albert’s reaction to the pregnancy could not have been more different. His hopes and ambitions in England hinged on his siring at least one heir to the throne, and he fancied himself as father to a large brood of adoring children, stamped with his own image. Encouraged to take the long view by Leopold and Stockmar, he already envisaged an English Saxe-Coburg dynasty that, with all Great Britain’s power and wealth behind it, could spread over Europe and change the course of history.

  Until the late summer, Victoria persisted in living as much as possible as she had done before her marriage. Lord Melbourne continued to see almost as much of her during the day as her husband did. The Queen gave the prince no access to state papers and saw her ministers alone. In the evenings she preferred to play parlor games rather than discuss the issues of the day. She feared, she said, to open up subjects that might provoke disagreement with her dearest husband. What she meant was that the affairs of state were her business alone.

  By the third trimester of Victoria’s first pregnancy, things took a decided upswing for Albert. Stockmar was back in England, to the prince’s delight and relief, and the two began to plan political and marital strategy in detail. Stockmar was able to negotiate with parliament that, should Victoria die after giving birth to an heir, Prince Albert would become sole regent, without a council. Victoria’s uncles were furious at being passed over, but for the first time Albert had his way.

  In June when Victoria was to give the speech from the throne opening parliament, Albert rode by her side to the House and took a throne next to her own in the chamber. By August the prince was permitted to help his wife get through the paperwork that landed on her desk every day. Impressed by her husband’s talent for bureaucracy, Victoria ordered that he be given his own key to her dispatch box and made him a Privy Councillor. Albert wrote to Stockmar, who had returned to his own family in Coburg for a time: “I have come to be extremely pleased with Victoria during the last few months. She has only twice had the sulks … altogether she puts more confidence in me daily.” When Victoria was no longer able to appear in public, the prince began to represent her at official events, and he gave his first speech in English, to the Society for the Abolition of Slavery.

  As the Queen’s confinement approached, the death of Princess Charlotte one generation earlier was on the minds of everyone at the palace and indeed in the nation at large. Stockmar, who had observed that tragedy so closely, was in a good position to advise Albert. Clear on his strategies, happy in his duties, and filled with new energy, the prince made it a priority to monitor his wife’s physical condition and plan the lying-in. This birth was too important to be left in the hands of the women or of Sir James Clark, the Queen’s personal physician. Victoria adored Clark, but he had played a disastrous part in the Lady Flora Hastings affair. Albert selected Dr. Charles Locock, a Scottish obstetrician of excellent reputation, to supervise the delivery.

  Throughout the pregnancy, Albert danced attendance on Victoria, appearing at her side whenever she required him, at the sacrifice of his own leisure and sport. When Victoria went into labor around one in the morning several weeks before her due date, Albert was by her side, together with the Duchess of Kent, and one maid. Baroness Lehzen was not present during the labor. The duchess’s attendance on her daughter was the first clear sign that Albert was successfully negotiating a rapprochement between his wife and her mother, his aunt. Locock was in charge of the delivery, but three other doctors sat in the next room with the door open. One further room away, Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other dignitaries waited and listened. Albert stayed with his wife until she vigorously pushed out a large, perfectly formed baby girl at two in the afternoon of November 21.

  Locock, who thereafter became jocularly known in Britain as “the Great Deliverer,” had some very uncomplimentary things to say in private about the Queen’s fat, barrel-shaped body and her unembarrassed references to her condition. But Locock was competent and lucky enough to have a strong, healthy parturient, so all was well for mother, baby, and doctor. What Locock thought of the prince’s attendance at the bedside is not known. It was extremely rare for a nineteenth-century man of any class to be present at the birth of his children. Albert was not just present but actively involved. By putting aside social convention and taking on the modern role of childbirth coach, Prince Albert won his wife’s gratitude.

  It was an immense relief that Queen Victoria had negotiated the treacherous shoals of pregnancy and childbirth so successfully. All the same, the royal couple was very disappointed that their child was only a girl. When Locock informed the Queen that she had given birth to a princess, Victoria stalwartly answered, “Never mind, the next will be a prince.” Albert wrote enigmatically to his brother, Ernest, “Albert, father of a daughter, you will laugh at me.” Lord Clarendon, writing to Lord Granville in Paris, was more pragmatic: “Both the Queen and Prince were much disappointed at not having a son. I believe because they thought it would be a disappointment to the country, but what the country cares about is to have one life more, whether male or female, interposed between the succession and the King of Hanover [Victoria’s senior uncle, Ernest of Cumberland].”

  King Leopold wrote to congratulate his niece on the birth of little Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa and to wish that this should be the first of many such happy events. The Queen was sharply taken aback: “I think you will see with me the great inconvenience a large family would be to us all, and particularly to the country, independent of the hardness and inconvenience to myself; men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often.” But within two months of arising from her weeks of enforced bed rest and being carried to and from her sofa by her devoted husband, Victoria was pregnant again, and on November 9, 1841, she gave birth to a healthy son.

  The second pregnancy was more resented than the first, the labor longer and more painful. “My sufferings were really very severe,” wrote the Queen, “and I don’t know what I should have done but for the great comfort and support my beloved Albert was to me.” While the nation rapturously celebrated the birth of a Prince of Wales, the first since the birth of George IV in 1762, Victoria sank into postpartum depression. She felt trapped. The world’s congratulations, her family’s joy, her husband’s obvious delight, and the close bond of affection and care that had grown up between them over the past twenty-one months could not make up for her loss of the pleasures, energy, and freedom that pregnancy drained out of her life. For the first two years of her reign, she had been free, galloping her horse across Windsor Great Park, ready to take on the world. Now she seemed doomed to be hideous, swollen, and aching, chained to a sofa, hidden from the public view like a thing of shame, wheeled out every day for exercise like a dog. And since Albert delighted in his new role as father, hours that she and Albert had spent alone together now had to be devoted to their growing family.

  That the Queen wished to ensure that her children did not come between her and her husband is disarmingly clear in a famous painting of 1841 by Landseer. Prince Albert, looking extremely handsome, is the picture’s focus of attention. The prince’s dress is casual, yet the star of the Order of the Garter pinned to his coat establishes his exalted status. He wears hunting dress, and the loosely knotted collar reveals a few inches of the white throat his wife so admired. He has on a pair of long, red suede boots that the Queen found particularly dashing, and one magnificent leg clad in skintight breeches is thrust forward at the center of the picture. The prince has his right hand clasped on the top of his thigh while the other hand caresses the head of the greyhound Eos, who is looking adoringly up into her master’s face. Queen Victoria stands at her husband’s shoulder, and they are looking into each other’s eyes. The Queen is shown in a low-cut white satin dress not dissimilar in style to her wedding dress. Though plump and bosomy she gives no indication of being in the advanced stages of her second pregnancy. It wou
ld be more than a hundred years before any public image of a pregnant English queen was permitted to appear.

  On the other side of the room and of the painting, separated from her parents by Eos, a small bench, and two other dogs, is little Vicky, recently given the title of Princess Royal. A sturdy toddler, who, given the absence in the picture of her brother Bertie, could not have been a year old, she stands, her bonnet thrown back, incongruously fondling one of the array of dead creatures that her father has brought back from the hunt.

  For Queen Victoria, Albert was at the center of life. What mattered was the relationship between the two of them. The children, charming and decorative no doubt in their own way, lived on the margins of their parents’ happiness, more tolerated than welcomed by their mother. This would be true for the next seventeen years.

  QUEEN VICTORIA BORE seven more children. The nine came in groups, at a slowly diminishing rate: a girl, Victoria (Vicky), in November 1840; a boy, Albert Edward (Bertie), in November 1841; a girl, Alice, in April 1843; and a boy, Alfred (Affie), in August 1844. Two girls then, Helena in May 1846 and Louise in March 1848; followed by two boys, Arthur in May 1850 and Leopold in April 1853, and, finally, Beatrice in April 1857.

  For a woman of the Queen’s generation, a family of nine was not uncommon. Rich and poor, profligate and virtuous, the Victorians had a lot of children. Women were, overall, better nourished, came to puberty younger, and were hence more fertile than in previous generations. The deleterious effects of multiple pregnancies on a woman’s body were of little concern to the Victorian medical profession, though many women and babies died in childbirth. The main difference between the royal couple and most contemporaries was that the Queen is not known to have suffered any miscarriages and that she emerged vigorous and healthy after her nine complete pregnancies. Given her fertility, she was a lucky woman to be alive at forty, as she was well aware. The queen of Portugal, Maria da Glória, who was almost exactly Victoria’s age and as a teenager married Ferdinand, another Saxe-Coburg first cousin, bore eleven children, and died when she was thirty-five.

  Another huge piece of good luck was that all nine of Queen Victoria’s children grew into adulthood. Unlike many women of her generation, Victoria never had to watch a son or daughter die in childhood. Her luck becomes clear when we compare her not only with a royal peer like Queen Maria of Portugal, several of whose children died young, but with her own daughters and granddaughters. Between 1860 and 1914, a surprisingly large number of babies born to members of the English Saxe-Coburg dynasty, most of them boys, died in childbirth or from childhood diseases.

  But even if Queen Victoria turned out to be, in her own words, “good at” childbirth, her pregnancies continued to be a terrible burden. Indeed, as Albert’s sexual prudery took hold of her, she became more and more embarrassed by her condition. When she was carrying Leopold and Beatrice, the Queen found the ignorant yet inquiring eyes of her two oldest children, the teenaged Vicky and Bertie, especially hard to bear.

  Victoria’s attitude toward pregnancy and childbirth was most clearly expressed in a letter to her daughter Vicky in March 1858, soon after Vicky was married and only a year after the Queen had borne her ninth child.

  “Now to reply to your observation that you find a married woman has much more liberty than an unmarried one; in one sense of the word she has,—but what I meant was—in a physical point of view—and if you have hereafter (as I had constantly for the first 2 years of my marriage)—aches—and sufferings and miseries and plagues—which you must struggle against—and enjoyments, etc. to give up—constant precautions to take, you will feel the yoke of a married woman! I had 9 times for 8 months to bear with those above-named enemies and real misery (besides many duties) and I own it tried me sorely; one feels so pinned down—one’s wings clipped—in fact, at the best (and few were or are better than I was) only half oneself—particularly the first and second time. This I call the ‘shadow side’… And therefore—I think our sex a most unenviable one.”

  As a young married woman, Queen Victoria could not be sure how long her obstetrical luck would hold. It was certainly not her ambition to compete with her paternal grandmother, Queen Charlotte, mother of fifteen children. If Queen Victoria had had a choice, her childbearing might well have ended with the birth of Alfred when she was twenty-five. An heir and a spare was all England needed, and since the Queen inconveniently gave birth to girls before boys, that meant four children. Victoria understood very well that more children were a threat to her life when they were in utero, a drain on her time and energy when they were young, and a financial burden for the country when they were adults.

  But like most women of her nation and generation, Queen Victoria did not have a choice. Her wishes and preferences did not determine the size of her family. She had nine children because she was fertile, because she loved to go to bed with a husband who found the role of paterfamilias deeply satisfying, and because she knew nothing about nonreproductive sex.

  Some primitive birth control measures, such as caustic douches and crude physical barriers to conception, were available to mid-Victorians, but they were nasty and ineffective and practiced mainly by prostitutes. Most married couples who wanted to limit their family size had only two options, abstinence and abortion. Virtuous husbands like Albert, who came chaste to their weddings, felt they had every right to find sexual satisfaction with their wives. As for abortion, it was no longer a legal option in a modern Christian nation that prided itself on its high moral standards.

  Prince Albert could have nothing to do with abortion and birth control. In a gossip-ridden atmosphere like the Court of St. James’s, such things could not be kept secret from the press, and even suspicion would damage the monarchy. But Albert’s repugnance for all things sexual, which only grew as he aged, also cut the royal couple off from the practical and private information on nonreproductive erotic practices that had been available in aristocratic circles twenty years earlier.

  An older man of the world like Lord Melbourne could have explained to Prince Albert how to make love without getting his wife pregnant, but such a conversation between the two men is unthinkable. An older woman of the world like Lady Emily Cowper, Melbourne’s sister and the daughter of that famous aristocratic courtesan, the first Lady Melbourne, could no doubt have offered Victoria a hint or two on nonphallic pleasure, and one can imagine the Queen listening and even taking notes. But Lady Cowper, after she married the notorious old roué Lord Palmerston in late 1839, ceased to be part of the Queen’s intimate circle.

  Once Albert took control of his wife’s affairs in 1841, he made absolutely sure that Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting and maids of honor were women of absolute discretion as well as irreproachable morality. Everything the young Victoria knew about sex and reproduction she learned from her husband, and these were two areas in which the prince’s thirst for information ran dry.

  Whigs and Tories

  …

  OLLOWING THE BIRTH OF HIS FIRST CHILD IN NOVEMBER 1840, PRINCE Albert was in a far stronger position. Surely now his ambitions to take on a meaningful, independent role in matters of state and in the household would be realized. But two people close to the Queen blocked the mastery he sought in both the political and domestic spheres. Those two were Prime Minister Lord Melbourne and Victoria’s former governess, Baroness Louise Lehzen.

  The prime minister was far too urbane and devoted to the Queen’s interests to allow any open rift with the Queen’s husband. He was also a man of power in English politics and thus a redoubtable foe. But if Victoria had believed that Albert would take Melbourne as his surrogate father and political mentor just as she had, she was deluding herself. The two men could not have been more different. The silent struggle between them could not be resolved by negotiation.

  William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, was an English aristocrat in the eighteenth-century mold: rich, handsome, worldly, cynical. Although his family was only two generations removed from the professional middle
class, the prime minister was very much the grand seigneur, winning the allegiance of peers, the admiration of inferiors, and the friendship of accomplished women by his ease, wit, and charm. He was not ambitious, yet the highest political power in England had been thrust upon him.

  Victoria’s prime minister was quite as intelligent and well informed as her husband, but in different fields and in a very different style. Albert was an excellent musician and music critic. Melbourne blithely admitted that he had a tin ear. Albert had been taught good schoolboy English and French, plus a little Latin, but his mind was formed by his native German. Melbourne was an excellent classicist, had superb French and good Italian but little if any German. Melbourne was a connoisseur of art and a walking compendium of information about English history and politics, but he wore his erudition lightly. One of the great stylists of his day, Melbourne rarely said or wrote anything that was not funny, piquant, incisive, and memorable. Albert had a heavier, more systematic mind, and his interests ran to science, technology, and metaphysics. He liked to lecture, to philosophize, and to derive practical policy from abstract principles. His specialty was the lengthy memorandum, in German or ponderous English. To the Court of St. James’s, he seemed more like a tutor or a music master than a prince.

  In English domestic politics, the two men were poles apart, and here the comparison was distinctly in the prince’s favor. Melbourne was a die-hard conservative who did not believe in progress. His main commitment was to preserve the privileges of the Whig-Tory oligarchy, and he was deaf to the cries of the poor and oppressed. Both feudal and progressive in his social philosophy, Albert was a spirited defender of the working class. He favored social and political reforms as the intelligent way to defuse public discontent, quell rebellion, and keep kings on their thrones.