We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  Court gossip, the young Queen quickly discovered, was a perennially irksome problem. Everything the royal family did was monitored, parsed, and, all too often, reported. Royal gossip was a rare commodity that courtiers peddled at London dinners and country house weekends, and that the popular press was increasingly eager to pick up. Lord Frederick Paget, for example, whose family had enjoyed great favor and privilege in the first years of Victoria’s reign, was deputed by the Queen to go to Germany as part of Prince Albert’s escort from Coburg. When scurrilous (and accurate) reports appeared in the English press about the prince’s paltry outfit and his fear of the sea, Lord Frederick was identified as the anonymous source and ceased to be welcome at court. Learning her lesson, Queen Victoria kept the great aristocratic families at arm’s length. Never in fifty-three years of reign did she have a male favorite like Queen Elizabeth I’s Earl of Essex. Never did she allow a wellborn woman to have power over her as Sarah, first Duchess of Marlborough, did over Queen Anne. After Albert’s death, she chose male favorites of humble birth who owed everything to her: the Scot John Brown and the Indian Abdul Karim.

  If Victoria was wary of courtiers as a group but was fond of selected ladies and gentlemen in attendance, Albert regarded the English court as a whole with black distrust. As a boy at his father’s small provincial court, Albert was already a square peg in a round hole, a quiet, bookish prig in an aristocratic society dedicated to protocol, political intrigue, financial misappropriation, adultery, and gossip. As a teenager, the prince was quickly worn down by the social whirl at the French and German courts he visited. At the same time, simply because, as the son of a duke, he received such lavish praise at home and had privileged access to court life all over Europe, Albert came to feel a great sense of superiority. In Brussels and at the University of Bonn, he was encouraged to see himself as the cream of the German intelligentsia as well as the German aristocracy. Winning the hand of the Queen of England more than confirmed Albert’s high idea of his own worth. As his brother, Ernest, would later remark, Albert “was contemptuous of mankind in general.”

  The prince, not without reason, viewed Germany as the cultural center of the world. Like most other Germans, he had little admiration, if great envy, of the mercantile might of Great Britain. Furthermore, Albert had been primed by his uncle and Stockmar to regard his future wife’s court as a larger, richer, more powerful version of the court of Coburg—in other words, a pack of jackals in heat. Hence, even before his marriage, the prince envisaged a sweeping reform of the Court of St. James’s and of the royal household. For a man destined to spend his adult life in a foreign country, he had a toxic combination of arrogance and xenophobia.

  ON HIS ARRIVAL In England, Prince Albert was received warmly and courteously by courtiers and commoners alike, but his egotism received a painful reality check once the wedding was over. He had expected to attack England’s manifest defects from a position of strength but found himself at once on the defensive. The English were at least as chauvinist as the Germans, and they had international power to back their sense of national superiority. As the painful negotiations over the royal marriage proved, almost no one in England except its queen found the younger son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to be remarkable.

  In his first year in England, Albert met noblemen at court and in the country whose amiable politeness masked a boundless scorn. What kind of man was beholden to his wife for his status and his fortune, they seemed to ask? Women at court were inclined to like the prince at first because he was handsome, but they soon turned hostile when he proved insensible to their charms. The prince’s skills and talents all too often told against him. A superior musician, talented painter, art connoisseur, and botanist, a man with a boundless appetite for facts and figures, Albert was met with barely concealed yawns and sneers in English society. To the average milord, the prince’s philosophical approach to problems was futile, his love of nature sentimental, his interest in science and technology incomprehensible, and his command of information pedantic.

  Faced with this painful initiation into English social life, the twenty-year-old Prince Albert proved unequal to the task of smiling at the bad hand fate had dealt him, to use his own expression. He found Englishmen to be dissipated in town, and stupid, boring, and uncultured in the country. That so many of them had incomes far exceeding his measly thirty thousand from the civil list, and lived in homes that made Buckingham Palace look like a modern maisonette only made matters worse.

  The prince could not hide the fact that the country house weekends he attended with the Queen were purgatory for him. Sensing his displeasure, the people who were presented to him on these occasions in their turn found the Queen’s new husband less than charming. Not only did the prince have a German accent, he also had no small talk. His handshake was stiff and curt, his coat oddly cut, and he was obsessive about protocol even at times when it was customary for royal gentlemen to relax with members of their entourage. Unlike most men his age, in Germany as in Britain, Albert did not care to get drunk or eat large meals, and he did not smoke. He was good at billiards and cards, but he refused to partake in the high-stakes gambling that had been the chief diversion at court in the previous two reigns. It was obvious to all that the prince was ready to bolt when an amateur soprano of noble birth sat down at the piano.

  NEITHER PRINCE ALBERT nor the English aristocracy had any interest in letting the general public know how strained relations were between them. Unexpectedly, hunting was where the animosity became most apparent. On the foxhunting field, the English aristocrat’s passions ran too high for loyal silence, and the prince’s reluctance to run with the hounds was news. Odd reports appeared in the press questioning the prince’s sportsmanship and thus the English identity he had ceremonially assumed in 1839. His love of the European battue, where animals were rounded up for mass slaughter, was considered a sign of his secret allegiance to England’s enemies.

  The furor over hunting was far from inevitable. When he arrived in England, Prince Albert was a superb all-around athlete. He hiked, he fenced, he swam, he skated, he played ice hockey. Above all, he was a fearless rider and a superb shot, capable of taking out a hundred grouse or hare in a single day. He surely anticipated that these skills would make him friends among the English sporting set. In fact, in December 1843, staying at Belvoir, home to one of England’s most famous packs, the prince won the admiration of the foxhunting fraternity by keeping up with the hounds while experienced riders were taking falls all around him.

  This well-publicized exploit could have been the beginning of Albert’s rapprochement with the English country set, but it was an isolated experiment. For this the Queen was partly to blame. Riding to hounds was considered too dangerous for Victoria, even before she began to have children, and she turned sulky when Albert went off after the fox without her. To placate his wife, the prince agreed to go out only occasionally, on his home territory with the Windsor pack.

  Albert could certainly have got around his wife’s objections if, to his methodical mind, chasing a pack of hounds across country at the risk of life and limb had made any sense. But it did not. So much time spent, so much damage to the crops, for one fox, if the hounds managed to catch him! And foxhunters scorned the creature comforts. A hot lunch was crucial to the prince’s well-being, but English sportsmen never stopped for more than a cold buffet under a tent. Thus it was easy for Albert to indulge Victoria and hunt only on his own turf and his own terms.

  Unfortunately, the prince failed to grasp the symbolic importance of foxhunting to the English. For him, as for most European aristocrats, the number of animals killed was the key to a good day’s hunting. When a French count or an Austrian baron went out with his guns and his loader, he expected that at the end of the day, regardless of his level of skill, he would have a pile of corpses to display to his admiring retainers and womenfolk. To a remarkable extent, a highborn man’s reputation and self-esteem hinged on how many deer, boar, rabbits, d
ucks, geese, quail, partridge, pheasants, sparrows, or whatever he killed in a day. To ensure that the numbers were impressive, the European upper classes perfected the battue.

  At first, the creatures on a lord’s estate were treated with tender, loving care. Nests were protected, chicks were hand raised, pregnant does were cherished like favorite daughters; stags could feed to their hearts’ delight on a farmer’s crops. Then the hunting season arrived, and in a meadow below the forest, a large canvas enclosure was set up by the lord’s servants. At the center of the enclosure was a sturdy chest-high barrier behind which the hunters and their loaders would stand in safety. In a shady area, chairs were placed so that ladies could watch the sport at ease. Then beaters drove the game down to the meadow and into the enclosure. There the hunters waited, ready to shoot at point-blank range as the terrified animals ran to and fro, trying in vain to escape. For a more moderate day’s sport, hundreds of birds were caught, crammed into baskets, and then released in a dazed flurry.

  Given these feudal methods, a nobleman could rack up astonishing statistics, all carefully noted in his game book to impress peers and posterity. Prince Albert’s father, who died at the age of forty-eight, claimed in his lifetime to have killed 75,186 birds and beasts. Albert’s brother, who traveled as far as Ethiopia in his search for wild game and had better guns, could not quite match their father’s statistics. He claimed in his fifty-six years of sport to have killed 3,764 red deer, 2,792 wild boar, 44,916 hares, and 13,202 pheasants.

  In England, things were different, since England had an empire but few large, wild animals at home. Africa and India offered a range of big game that made the European sportsman salivate, and safaris were cheap and reasonably safe and comfortable. An English peer who wished to impress his neighbors needed an Indian tiger skin on his hearth or an African wildebeest on the walls of his game room as well as a fat game book. But within the British Isles, the difficulty, discomfort, and danger of the hunt came to matter as much as the count.

  The English national sport was foxhunting, in which men spent passionate hours on horseback, often drenched to the skin, jumping gates and hedges. Foxhunting was not a sport for sissies, but it was not exclusively a male sport. A few women hunted, seated sidesaddle in very long and tight habits that increased the difficulty and danger. In Scotland, the prey was different, but the principal was the same. Forsaking their beloved pink coats for tweeds, lairds, assisted by gillies, stalked deer over bare, rough terrain that, before telephoto lenses, set the odds in favor of the deer.

  The prince’s hunting reputation took a severe blow in 1845 when he took his wife to Coburg and Gotha for the first time, and his brother, Ernest, organized a battue in his honor. When the reports of this event appeared in the English press, it was a public relations debacle for the Queen and the prince. Some doggerel from the pages of the satirical magazine Punch captures the scene of the battue and the English response:

  Sing a song of Gotha, a pocket full of rye

  Eight-and-forty timid deer driven in to die;

  When the sport was over, all bleeding they were seen

  Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the Queen.

  The Queen sat in her easy chair, and looked as sweet as honey.

  The Prince was shooting at the deer in weather bright and sunny;

  The bands were playing polkas, dress’d in green and golden clothes

  The nobles cut the poor deers’ throats, and that was all Punch knows.

  Albert learned that battues were taboo in Great Britain, and he never indulged in one again.

  MOCKED BY THE London smart set, sneered at by the country squires, spied on by the press, caricatured in humorous magazines and penny dreadful broadsheets, Prince Albert took action. Once the cynical Lord Melbourne was out of the way and his new friend and political soul mate Sir Robert Peel was prime minister, Albert determined to be master of the court and the household. He carefully monitored the invitations to levees and drawing rooms sent out by the Lord Chamberlain’s office to ensure that no unworthy persons appeared at the Court of St. James’s. He urged Victoria to do the same, and she obeyed.

  The prince’s iron rule was that no persons could be admitted into the presence of the Queen if they had even the slightest blot on their characters. A girl suspected of an illicit liaison, a woman whose brutal husband divorced her, a youth falsely accused of cheating at cards, an unlucky man who fell into bankruptcy, could protest to the Lord Chamberlain or send pitiful letters to the Queen, but they were still barred from court. By 1844, the prince had set the pattern for court life that would prevail more or less unchanged until his wife’s death in 1901.

  To their intense indignation, members of the English royal family were subject to Prince Albert’s new regime. The result was that, as a wife, Victoria was as alienated from her English uncles, aunts, and cousins as she had been as a girl. Partly this was the result of the uncles’ pride and intransigence. Ernest Cumberland, King of Hanover, Victoria’s eldest uncle, viewed the Saxe-Coburgs as a third-rank German dynasty, and flatly refused to walk behind Prince Albert. The king urged his brothers in England not to yield precedence. However, Prince Albert, convinced that Uncle Ernest had incited the Tory Party to heap insults on him before his marriage, was also out for revenge. On one of Ernest Cumberland’s rare visits to England for a family wedding, the king and the prince jostled for precedence, and Albert pushed the old man down some stairs. This incident appealed to Albert’s rather cruel sense of humor, and he and his wife accounted it a personal victory.

  The family of Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, was also rude to the newly married Albert on various public occasions. Cambridge, like his brothers Cumberland and Sussex, was outraged when Prince Albert was appointed sole regent in the event that Queen Victoria died having left an heir to the throne. Tit for tat, the prince decided that Mary and Augusta Cambridge— large, loud, boisterous young women, admittedly, but first cousins whom the Queen had known since childhood—were quite unfit to be her friends. As for their brother George, he was not only an unprincipled rake with a string of acknowledged bastards but had also once been Victoria’s most touted and most reluctant suitor. Albert would have none of him.

  Things came to a head between the two branches of the English royal family when Prince Albert learned that the Duchess of Cambridge had presented her lady-in-waiting Lady Augusta Somerset, daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, to Queen Victoria at a drawing room. The duchess had done so specifically to clear the young lady of the charge of having borne an illegitimate child to her son, George Cambridge. The prince professed to be scandalized that such a young lady should be at court. He persuaded the Queen to turn her back on Augusta Somerset in public and refuse to speak to her. The Cambridges were furious at this slight, the whole court took the part of Lady Augusta, and the prince was obliged to back down. However, from this point on, the Cambridges came to the palace only to pay their court or for large family parties where their absence would have caused comment.

  OBLIGED TO LIVE constantly in the company of persons who represented an aristocratic elite he viewed with suspicion and hostility, Albert was especially vigilant toward the members of the household. He viewed his wife’s ladies-in-waiting and his own equerries as potential spies and traitors, not friends and confidants, and he enjoined Victoria to do the same. Even members of the Queen’s personal household were scrutinized and then minutely monitored by the prince.

  Albert made it clear to equerries and maids of honor that he would regard it as treachery if, even in their private letters, they gave information to anyone about the domestic lives of their royal master and mistress. He forbade the members of the household to keep diaries during their years in waiting. Today these rules seem to be clear infringements on personal freedom, but they were apparently obeyed throughout the lifetimes of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria and, indeed, well into the twentieth century. A sense of noblesse oblige, sharpened by a fear of royal wrath, explains this loyal obedience, b
ut a delight in exclusivity also came into play. Anything a courtier reported about the royal family in private conversations was all the more delicious and prized because it was forbidden.

  Impeccable behavior was enforced even more fiercely on members of the household than on members of the court in general. The senior ladies-in-waiting were enjoined to chaperone the junior ones. Any hint of improper behavior that reached the prince’s ears would result in immediate dismissal and permanent disgrace. To ensure that there was no amorous dalliance at the court of Queen Victoria, individual members of the royal household were no longer allowed to walk the grounds of Buckingham Palace in their rare hours off duty. The young equerry Henry Ponsonby and the young maid of honor Mary Bulteel did manage to fall in love while in waiting, but they kept their relationship a close secret until they were ready to announce an engagement. They then took the Queen’s evident vexation in good part—Victoria hated to lose people she enjoyed and were useful to her—got married very fast, and moved to Canada until Her Majesty forgave them.

  As a result of the prince’s strict control, life at Queen Victoria’s court became tedious in the extreme. Imagine a regular evening party in which only a handful of those present, and those not the wittiest, are allowed to initiate conversation. The members of the household who were on duty spent hours leaning against a wall and hoping that the Queen or the prince would deign to address some comment to them. Henry Ponsonby who lived most of his adult life at Queen Victoria’s court, admitted that royal dinners were “awful.” At his first dinner with the royal family as an equerry, he waited until the fish course before daring to address the young lady seated next to him, since he suspected she was related to the Queen. Can one wonder that Queen Victoria ate very fast and Prince Albert retired to bed early?