We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  Stockmar’s delusions of omnipotence and his overt misogyny can be seen clearly in the following account he gave in the 1850s of the role he played in England at the time of Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837. As Stockmar remembered it, Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, the cabinet, the Privy Council, parliament, and the court, to say nothing of Queen Victoria herself, had been mere puppets in his hands.

  “[The Queen] was quite a girl and knew nothing of the business, and was surrounded by women such as the Baroness Lehzen, who knew as little or less, and wished to lead her. I saw nothing was to be done till they were removed. So I looked around, and saw who there was to guide her. I induced her to put herself under Melbourne. He was not a fit person to be the guide of a girl … put around her some persons he should not—would not try to make the court moral—because he said it was no good trying—Courts always had been immoral, and would always be. But he was still the best person we could get, and we got rid of the influence of the women.”

  Stockmar loved and was, in his way, loyal to Queen Victoria. However, he was German enough to be convinced that the English Constitution was an unfortunate aberration in that it allowed women to rule. Stockmar was Prince Albert’s man, heart and soul. In Albert he saw the perfect instrument of his own geopolitical strategies. A remark by Stockmar after Victoria had angrily and painfully given birth to her second child in a year exposes the disjunct between Victoria’s wishes and interests and those of the Albert-Stockmar-Leopold axis. “I expressed [to Peel, the new Prime Minister],” wrote Stockmar to the departed Melbourne, “my delight to see the Queen so happy and added a hope that more and more she would seek and find her real happiness in her domestic relations only [my italics].”

  Christian Stockmar had personal reasons for helping Prince Albert to get rid of Baroness Lehzen. Stockmar and Lehzen had more in common than either the baron or the prince were willing to acknowledge. Both began life as talented but impoverished Germans of the professional class, obliged to seek their fortunes in the employ of royalty. The relationship that Lehzen had with Queen Victoria uncomfortably aped Stockmar’s own with Prince Albert. Lehzen wished Queen Victoria to be like that great female autocrat Queen Elizabeth, just as Stockmar wished Albert to be a second King William of Orange, who ruled for his wife Queen Mary. Lehzen encouraged Victoria to keep her power and maintain her private independence of her husband. The Queen trusted her and listened to her. Stockmar urged Albert to assert himself as a husband and take over the government. Albert was all ears.

  The alliance of Victoria and Lehzen was a threat to the alliance of Albert and Stockmar. When Albert was able to send Lehzen into exile, the balanced square became a triangle with Stockmar in the pivot position, and Albert’s influence over his wife was decisively enhanced.

  Stockmar once remarked that if Baroness Lehzen had only been a little quieter and more sensible, she could have lived out her life at the palace, but this was the baron at his most hypocritical. Stockmar knew Albert’s hatred of Lehzen to be obsessive, and he stoked those fires. He knew that exile to her sister’s home in Germany meant misery for Lehzen just as it would be misery for him to retire to Coburg to live with his wife. But he had no pity.

  As it turned out, both Stockmar and Lehzen had similarly unhappy endings. Both found themselves exiled to German backwaters, and both took cold comfort in their memories and their correspondence with royalty. According to the memoirs of Stockmar’s cousin Caroline Bauer, Fanny Stockmar took her revenge when her husband finally retired from the international scene and put himself at her mercy.

  AFTER THREE YEARS of marriage, the balance of power had swung decisively toward the husband. As Greville noted in surprise, the prince was now privy to all the affairs of state and dictated royal policy king in all but name. With the departure of Baroness Lehzen, the prince assumed control of his wife’s finances, both her income under the civil list and that from her private estates. He was master of his own household, having wrested even the management of the nursery and the education of the children from his wife’s hands. Albert, it seemed, had won the struggle for dominance.

  Both husband and wife professed their satisfaction at this turn of events. The Queen claimed that she was the happiest and most fortunate woman in the world because she had married Albert, and he was perfection. True and lasting happiness was now hers, she wrote in her letters and journal, because she acknowledged Albert as her master and embraced the traditional role of a married woman. Confirmed in his masculinity, confident in his superior ability, the prince was pleased that his conception of marital relations was finally being realized. Though foreseeing squalls ahead—women were such fickle jades!—he commended his wife for seeing sense. Victoria was the most delightful companion a man could wish for, he told his brother.

  After the fiery independence and delight in business that she displayed in the years before her marriage, Victoria’s enthusiastic acquiescence to Albert’s dominance is disconcerting to a twenty-first-century reader. But the Queen was a realist with few good options. She was pregnant with her third child in three years and fearing that it would not be her last. She had lost her closest female friend, and she felt vulnerable. She was now dependent on her husband as friend and confidant as well as lover. With new family commitments added to the old ceremonial duties, she had more than enough to occupy her. By bending, not breaking, hunkering down and conserving her energies, Victoria was maximizing her chances of survival at a time when a woman compounded her loss of strength and risk of death with each additional pregnancy.

  Since she had opted to marry and had chosen Albert of her free will, since custom decreed that a woman must look up to her husband, and since a queen regnant of England could not look up to an ordinary man, then Albert must, ipso facto, be extraordinary. The perfection of the Queen’s husband was an article of faith on which both she and Albert could build a marriage.

  The new feminine deference, the decision that business was man’s work, was both reality and pretense for Victoria. She had the luxury of appearing to wish to give up her power and prerogatives to her husband, confident that the English Constitution would never allow her to do so irrevocably. Melbourne and Peel, Whig and Tory, were agreed that if the public learned that Albert functioned as king, the monarchy would be at risk. Victoria might meekly savor Albert calling her “kleines Fräuchen” (little wifey) when they were alone, but when the two emerged from the bedroom each morning, he fell into step behind her.

  Victoria had not forgotten the oaths she had taken at her coronation, and she still aspired to be a great queen. Deeply in tune with the nation, Victoria now sensed that marriage and motherhood held the key to her dynastic success. The people over whom she was titular ruler loved her in no small part because she appeared to correspond to their feminine ideal. They did not love her husband because he was her ideal man, not theirs. This was a fact she might decry out of wifely duty, but it was an unspoken source of power. Furthermore, Victoria was a shrewd judge of men, and she recognized real ability in her husband. She and Albert had the same financial and political goals. In a man’s world, the prince could realize those goals better than she could alone. By her admiration and trust, she could empower and energize him. They would be a formidable team.

  And the sacrifices would not all be on her side. In return for giving up so much, Victoria, a charming egotist with no tolerance for boredom, expected a great deal from her husband: total fidelity and constant companionship, comfort and security, and an unending succession of new pleasures and sensations. The Queen was like a fat tiger, content with the cage, answering to the whip, but lashing out from time to time, and daring her tamer to get careless. Albert would have his work cut out to keep his wife happy.

  Albert Takes Charge

  …

  AKING HIS WIFE COMFORTABLE AND SAFE WAS ONE OF THE FIRST tasks Albert set himself in 1842 when he could at last call himself “master in the house.” Already in the early months of his m
arriage, while the Queen was closeted with her ministers, the prince was poking around in the domestic arrangements and taking notes. Albert was not used to comfort. His beloved little country house the Rosenau had been less than cozy. His family’s ancestral palace at Coburg had been an antiquated firetrap. All the same, the prince proceeded to be appalled by the waste, dirt, and disorder he found at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.

  The servants were slovenly and disobedient. Below stairs at Buckingham Palace, the corridors were lined with refuse and infested by rats and roaches. At times whole suites had to be closed off when the stench from the drains became intolerable. Treasures were everywhere but sadly neglected. The Windsor Castle library was crammed with rare books and manuscripts, but there was no good catalog. Open a cupboard and out fell some dusty drawings by Leonardo da Vinci or a pile of George III’s correspondence.

  Security at Buckingham Palace was so lax that the curious and the mad had little trouble getting in. A youth who became known to the press as “the Boy Jones” was found in the palace on three separate occasions, once by Baroness Lehzen under the sofa in the Queen’s sitting room. Jones boasted of the nights he had spent sitting on the throne, eating the Queen’s food, and peeping at the baby princess in her crib. He said he “was desirous of knowing the habits of the people, and thought a description would look very well in a book,” a singularly modern remark.

  Queen Victoria took all this domestic anarchy in stride. From birth she had been subjected to dirt, cold, and discomfort, and emerged the stronger for it. She apologized to her guests, swallowed what was put in front of her as quickly as possible, dressed warmly, and got outside as much as possible. But entropy ate at the prince’s soul. On an income of hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, Her English Majesty should be better served. To buttress his personal observations, Albert commissioned Baron Stockmar to do an exhaustive analysis of the Queen’s domestic situation. The result was a lengthy and fascinating memorandum entitled “Observations of the present state of the Royal Household; written with a view to amend the present scheme, and to unite the greater security and comfort of the Sovereign with the greater regularity and better discipline of the Royal Household.”

  Kings of England had long bemoaned the Byzantine ways of the Royal Household and tried to exercise more control over their income from the civil list. George III as a young man had struggled mightily to keep within his budget. His reward at court was the reputation of being a killjoy. George IV rejected the penny-pinching ways of his father but was careful to let sleeping bureaucrats lie. This king’s solution to the royal budget problem was to fall shamelessly into debt and wait until parliament bailed him out. Victoria, on her accession, was scrupulously honest with her privy purse and private income, but if she had tried to reform the royal household, she would surely have failed.

  However, when her husband presented the annoyances of everyday palace living as problems that he could solve, and when he furthermore insisted that by sound management he could greatly increase her personal wealth, Victoria made no objections to his proposed reforms. In fact, she overflowed with admiration. Such energy. Such attention to detail. Such determination. Such plans. Dearest Albert was truly amazing and deserved to be given carte blanche.

  WHEN THEY BEGAN their financial partnership, Victoria and Albert suffered from an extreme case of what sociologists call “relative deprivation.” They felt poor and needy, even though Victoria was one of the wealthiest women in the world. In many ways, their domestic situation was closer to that of tenants than landlords, and they had surprisingly little authority over many of the people who served them.

  The Queen was the highest paid public official in the kingdom, receiving an annual grant of 385,000 pounds from parliament. She used three large state properties in prime locations as her private residences—Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and the Royal Pavilion at Brighton—and she was also titular lord over the palaces of St. James’s, Hampton Court, and Kensington Palace in London, plus Holyrood House in Scotland. She had a great art collection, dating back to the Middle Ages but vastly expanded by her uncle, George IV. On her way into her private chapel at Windsor, the Queen passed through a tiny room full of Holbeins. On the walls of her homes, masterpieces by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Canaletto jostled for space with holiday sketches by royal amateurs.

  The Queen had her own stable and took to the sea on her private yacht. Since she found coal dirty and gas smelly, all her homes—even Windsor Castle, with its vast underground furnaces—were heated by beech logs, already a rare and expensive commodity in industrial Britain. Victoria was also independently wealthy. At the time of her accession, she derived an income of about 120,000 pounds a year from her residential, farming, industrial, and mining properties in the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall. And the Queen had a small army of servants and a mountain of household goods. She never opened a door, carried a parcel, did up a button, or slit an envelope for herself. She ate breakfast and tea modestly off Sèvres porcelain but lunched off solid silver. She could entertain 150 guests at state dinners with plates, cutlery, serving dishes, saltcellars, and epergnes all made of gold.

  But parliament had seen fit to allot her less money a year than her two predecessors, apparently because they had been men and were thus expected to spend more. This second-class budget seemed very unfair to Victoria. The elderly George IV and William IV had no legitimate children when they acceded, but Victoria was young and hoped to have at the minimum two sons to secure the dynasty. Royal children, until they came of age and were voted a separate income from the civil list, were a severe drain on their parents’ resources. The Queen’s personal fortune was also smaller than it seemed. The 60,000 pounds from the duchy of Cornwall constituted a large part of her income, but this belonged to the Prince of Wales and would actually become his to spend when he turned twenty-one.

  For his part, Prince Albert could never forget that his appanage was 20,000 pounds a year less than that enjoyed by Queen Adelaide, William IV’s widow. The allotments the Queen and prince received under the civil list were also very unlikely to increase. Due to the fabulous extravagance of George IV, members of parliament had taken to debating whether the royal family gave value for money.

  And then there was the vexed question of the Guelph treasure and who owned it. Amassed in the reigns of the first three Georges, this treasure included a solid gold dinner service and Queen Charlotte’s jewels, valued in 1750 at 70,000 pounds. Victoria was quite sure that the Guelph treasure was hers—and that she needed it, since, in comparison even with other European monarchs, her collection of jewelry and plate was meager.

  Great Britain started off as a poor offshore island and much of the treasure of the English Crown was melted down under Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Protectorate in the early seventeenth century. The greatest collection of Tudor and Jacobean plate is in the Kremlin, not the Tower of London. George IV, that great dandy, wastrel, and art connoisseur, did his best to build up the royal collections, buying jewels and plate among other valuable things. All the same, when Victoria acceded to the throne, she found that her jewelry was hardly commensurate with the wealth and power of the nation she represented to the world.

  As a child, Victoria had been kept away from the courts of her uncle kings and, even when she became heir apparent, she was given relatively few valuable presents. New royal husbands could usually be counted on for a set of necklace and earrings in emeralds or rubies, at a minimum, but the best that Albert Coburg could do was a sapphire brooch. One of Victoria’s bridesmaids, Lady Sarah Villiers, when she married Prince Esterhazy, was given jewelry far more valuable than the Queen’s.

  Victoria did have a crown, the one that had been specially reconfigured for her coronation and that featured two historic gems, King Edward the Confessor’s sapphire and the Black Prince’s ruby. The new state crown was lighter than the old one but still disproportionate to Queen Victoria’s small frame. It gave her a headache, especially since it had
to be secured to her small, smooth head by long jewel-headed hatpins. On state occasions, a lady-in-waiting had the nerve-racking job of pinning on Her Majesty’s crown, and once Lady Sarah Lyttelton jabbed a pin in at the wrong angle. The gallant Victoria allowed herself a wince of pain, and the jab became a joke between the two women. However, by the early 1850s, Queen Victoria had taken to replacing her crown with an exquisite diamond-and-pearl coronet that had been made for George IV But for the first twenty years of her reign, when she dressed up for the season, Victoria wore her grandmother Charlotte’s jewels almost every day. She was especially fond of a rope of pearls, supposedly the finest in Europe.

  The problem with the Guelph treasure was that Victoria’s uncle Ernest, the king of Hanover, claimed that it was his under the will of his mother, Queen Charlotte. The British government fiercely resisted the Hanoverian claim, but after a lawsuit that lasted for twenty years, the decision was made in favor of Hanover. The British government decided to give back the Guelph treasure, which was a bitter disappointment not only to Queen Victoria but also to the Hanoverians who had expected a large cash payment in lieu.

  WHEN PRINCE ALBERT took on the task of reforming the royal household, he found that he had very little control over the income his wife received under the civil list. The Queen’s fixed expenses were enormous. She had big, aging properties to maintain with over one thousand people on the active payroll and the pension list. The 385,000 pounds a year Victoria received from parliament divided up as follows: 131,250 pounds for the salaries of the royal household, 172,500 for the expenses of the royal household, 13,200 for the royal bounty (pensions and charitable giving), 60,000 for the privy purse (the Queen’s personal expenses), and 8,040 “unappropriated.”