by Gillian Gill
The first month in waiting was a thrilling ordeal for a young woman who dreamed of becoming the Queen’s friend, but under the regime of Prince Albert, the thrill quickly wore off. The new maid of honor found that she was merely an extra on the royal stage, perfectly interchangeable with twenty-three other ladies. Little was required of her, the pay was excellent, the accommodation elegant, the sheets silk, the hot water for baths unlimited, but her work was wearisome. Since it was strictly forbidden ever to turn one’s back upon a member of the royal family, the key skill required of women at court was to walk gracefully backward, even when wearing a train and a headdress trimmed with ostrich feathers eighteen inches high. Since it was strictly forbidden to sit down in the presence of royalty unless expressly invited to do so, stamina was vital for the long evenings spent standing in tight corsets and high heels.
A new maid of honor was greeted with kindness by the royal family and carefully inducted by the senior ladies into the complex rituals of court life. Thereafter she barely registered on the royal consciousness unless she made a faux pas. Bored in the evening, the Queen might ask a lady for news of her family and seem fascinated by accounts of life outside the palace. Her Majesty gave excellent presents but no confidences. As for the prince, he might notice when one of his wife’s ladies played a wrong note or used the wrong case for a German preposition, but he had no interest in what she might say.
EVEN AS THEY obeyed, the English social elite chafed at Albert’s rules and at the moral censure it implied. The High Tories, when they briefly came into office in 1852, had a much harder time than the Whigs or the centrist Peelite Tories in coming up with lists of prospective household officials that would satisfy the prince. When presented with Prime Minister Lord Derby’s list—which included his close relative Lord Wilton, a gentleman with a checkered past—the prince was aghast. “For the Household appointments Lord Derby had submitted a list of young gentlemen of which the greater part were the Dandies and Roués of London and the Turf. I prepared a counter list of some twenty respectable Peers of property.” Nonplussed, the Earl of Derby, who firmly believed that he and his ultra-Tory supporters were the backbone of the nation, said it would be very difficult to follow the prince’s directives, it might even bring his embryonic ministry to an abrupt end, but he would try. He then referred with oblique humor to the famous remark made by Lord Melbourne twelve years earlier that the prince’s “damned morality” would ruin everything.
Lord Derby was not the only man to be unsettled by the prince’s intransigent moral code. Old courtiers looked back with a certain nostalgia to the days of George IV when life at court was sleazy and dangerous and fun. They watched in silent indignation as the Prince of Coburg withdrew his wife and family behind closed doors as far as possible and even established an invisible wall to keep out the members of the household. The Queen and the prince now rarely made country house visits in England and rarely dined out in town. Unlike his wife’s uncles, the prince never became a member of one of the exclusive London men’s clubs like White’s. He did not offer epicurean stag dinners to friends, in part because he was careful with his money, in part because in England he had so few friends. Ceremonial dinners were obviously torture for him.
Mary Bulteel Ponsonby was the rare courtier who expressed the low opinion of Prince Albert held by many of her class, and even she kept her opinions off the record throughout her long life; her reminiscences were published only in 1927. Mary Ponsonby spent eight years in waiting, loved and admired her mistress the Queen, and observed the prince closely, pityingly, and without affection. She felt that he was not happy, though he smiled a great deal. She acknowledged that he was an “unselfish, kind-hearted, truthful, and just man,” who treated his servants with exemplary fairness. She says that some members of Albert’s household—she names no names—liked him and mourned when he died. However, she also alleges that the prince treated his gentlemen as servants, delivering orders and reproofs with no respect for their feelings or their rank. The prince’s policy, Mary Ponsonby says, was to make “no single great friend among the ministers or even among the household,” and members of his staff found this “unpleasant.” Here she is surely reporting what her more circumspect husband, Henry Ponsonby equerry to the prince for several years, told her in confidence.
A woman of strong intellect and broad culture who had traveled a good deal in Europe, Mary Ponsonby came to some cutting conclusions in her secret memoir. The prince “was in ability on the level of a very intellectual German of the second line … He was without a spark of frankness. His manner was the least pleasant thing about him unless he was perfectly at his ease, and this rarely happened. [His] self-consciousness completely prevented one’s recognition of being in the presence of a ‘Grand Seigneur.’ He gave one much more the impression of being an excellent tutor.”
Mary Ponsonby is surely speaking for many of her class, and her derogatory comments go a long way toward explaining why Prince Albert became so alienated from his natural allies among the English aristocracy. Members of the household might abjure diary writing and censor their correspondence, but an eloquent silence, a grimace, or a few words in strict confidence were all that were needed to make Prince Albert almost as unpopular as the sinister and ultra-conservative Duke of Cumberland had been one generation earlier, though for very different reasons.
When Albert kept his wife’s uncles and cousins at a disapproving distance but invited his debauched brother to come for Christmas at Windsor, without his wife; when he, the second son of a Duke of Coburg, insisted that the fabulously wealthy heir to an ancient English duchy should personally hand him his coffee; when he obliged a heavily pregnant English duchess to stand in the shadows of the royal box all through an opera; when he refused to hunt at other men’s places, or smoke and drink port with the men after dinner; the word went out. The political and social establishment of England concluded that Prince Albert was an unappealing and ungrateful German who condescended to all things English. He had turned his merry, nonjudgmental wife into a censorious prude just like himself. In his pride and his ambition, he was a danger to the Crown and to the nation.
THE STERN CODE of morality championed by Albert and embraced by Victoria was not, in its inception, killjoy bigotry. It was an ethical, rational, and necessary reaction against the excesses of the past. It was also a code they practiced as well as preached. The Queen and the prince were chaste, faithful, and devoted in no small part because members of their parental generation had been dissolute, treacherous, and cruel. They were prudent managers of money because their parents had struggled in a sea of debt.
There were also sound political reasons for undertaking the reform of the English court. As Leopold and Stockmar had amply memorialized for Albert’s benefit, the English monarchy had come close to foundering during the reigns of the profligate sons of George III. English society as a whole in the mid-nineteenth century was becoming more puritan in its beliefs and practices. Especially for a female monarch, a chaste and prudent lifestyle was essential.
The news that their Queen’s court was now so respectable was met with enthusiasm in the country at large and in the press. Queen Victoria’s hold on the affections of her people greatly strengthened, as she herself was already boasting in a letter to her uncle Leopold in 1844. “It was a fine and gratifying sight to see the myriads of people assembled, more than at the Coronation even, and all in such good humour, and so loyal; the articles in the papers, too, are most kind and gratifying; they say no Sovereign was more loved than I am (I am bold enough to say) and that, from our happy domestic home—which gives such a good example.” When other kings were being toppled from their thrones, the English monarchy stood firm. Albert deserves credit for this.
However, when it came to morality, there was a real difference between husband and wife. As Queen Victoria was prepared to admit, Albert was much stricter than she. From the first days of her reign, she had shown herself to be both respectable and responsible
, and yet not straitlaced or judgmental. Her husband was all four, and became more so each year. The war on sin at the Court of St. James’s that the prince waged so zealously for two decades was not wholly rational. Strategically it met certain goals for the Queen and the English monarchy, but tactically for the prince himself it spelled disaster.
As Lord Melbourne foresaw at the outset, the Prince of Coburg’s obsession with morality, however attractive to Methodists and evangelical Anglicans, won him few friends among England’s ruling families. He was rash to set himself up at the age of twenty as moral arbiter to his adopted nation and to lead a reform campaign at court. He risked appearing to be a real-life Pecksniff—Dickens’s sanctimonious, condescending hypocrite—and thereby alienating the power brokers of England, both Whig and Tory. For a man who sought not only to rule his wife’s kingdom but to take the lead in European politics, this was singularly ill considered.
Finding Friends
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HROUGHOUT THEIR MARRIED LIFE, VICTORIA AND ALBERT LIVED A strange kind of crowded solitude, especially when they were in London and Windsor during the season when parliament was in session. All day, every day, people could be seen milling around the Queen and the prince— children, family members, visiting guests, ministers, secretaries, comptrollers, gentlemen-and ladies-in-waiting, pages, and the hundreds of servants. Yet all too often, each day the only vital human contact was between the two of them—a half smile exchanged across the room, her hand tucked into his elbow as they went into dinner, a whispered comment in German, their private language, during a levee. For most of their day, like two extremely rare fish, the Queen and the prince swam circles together in a magnificent glass bowl, under the watchful eye of their custodians and visitors until, mercifully, the lights went out.
Theirs was an immensely stressful life, always on guard, always observed. No public appearances, however routine and scripted, could be taken for granted. The royal couple usually met with rapt applause, but boos could never be ruled out, and assassins might lurk in the crowd. The prince had schooled himself to endure court life, but the strain always showed. As for Victoria, she was the prima donna assoluta in the touring royal company, and the demands of her public and ceremonial roles sapped even her immense reserves of energy.
Victoria was peculiarly alone. She had been cast as a girl into the starring role of queen regnant on a binding lifelong contract, and all the other principals were men. As the Queen later wrote to her newly married daughter Vicky, who had suddenly been thrust into the hostile environment of the Prussian court: “That you should feel shy sometimes I can easily understand. I do so very often to this hour … Think however of what it was to me, a girl of eighteen, not brought up at court as you were—but very humbly at Kensington Palace—with trials and difficulties, to receive and to be everywhere the first.” Anyone who has found herself the token woman in a crowd of important men will understand why, as Queen Victoria grew older, she suffered a combination of stage fright and ennui. Even though she was always charming and rarely made a mistake at her public appearances, she increasingly limited them even during the life of her husband.
For Victoria, the perfect way to relax was to be alone with her husband, but in the royal residences this was possible only in their bedroom at night. Albert was happiest in the company of one or two beloved male friends like Prince William of Löwenstein, but, again, this was something that he almost never enjoyed once he moved to England. Evening parties at Windsor or Buckingham Palace always included women as well as men, and though Albert habitually spoke to his wife and other female relatives, he usually dallied over the port and cigars with the other men for barely fifteen minutes before rejoining the ladies. He not infrequently attended large all-male dinners with municipal worthies or army officers but found the food unpalatable, the speeches interminable, and the company dull. It was all too apparent that the prince could not wait to get home to his wife and his dispatch box. The prince loved sport and regularly played billiards or ice hockey and went hunting with the gentlemen of his household. However, his habitual reserve and insistence on protocol made even these lively occasions more an opportunity to demonstrate superiority than to build friendship.
One of Albert’s most compelling visions when he came to England was that he and his wife would create a happy, united, loving family. As the children were born, this vision became a reality in which the prince took enormous pride and pleasure. Family, the prince believed, should be the essential focus of life for himself and the Queen. Around the warm, compelling nucleus formed by himself, Victoria, and their sons and daughters, the numerous members of their extended family would group. There would be no need for other friends.
Victoria rapturously endorsed Albert’s vision. She was willing to admit, as he was not, that hitherto she had never known happy family life. With her passionate nature and boundless need for affection, Victoria felt safer and happier than ever before in the tight cocoon her husband wove around her. Whereas as a young woman the Queen had delighted in balls, elegant soirees, and dinner parties for dozens, she now liked family picnics, cozy tea parties, and intimate dinners en famille, though, sadly, these latter were only possible when the court went into deep mourning.
Enjoined by her husband to make no close friendships with her ladies-in-waiting, Victoria increasingly turned to her mother for everyday companionship and understanding. After Sir John Conroy’s death, the Duchess of Kent was finally prevailed upon to open her financial records and acknowledge that huge sums were unaccounted for. At last she admitted that Sir John, while claiming devotion to her interests, had not only swindled her but driven a wedge between her and her daughter for his own ends. For her part, Victoria admitted that she had been too influenced by Lehzen. It suited both mother and daughter to give up the bitterness of the past, and Victoria’s growing family proved a natural bond between the two. The duchess was a loving, generous, and indulgent grandmother who was careful, it seems, not to offend her son-in-law by questioning the way he was bringing up his children.
Prince Albert played an important part in the rapprochement between the Queen and the Duchess of Kent. He was fond of his aunt, and he was happy to serve as her chief counselor and financial adviser. Thanks to him and Sir George Couper, the excellent gentleman Albert appointed as her comptroller, the duchess cleared her debts, paid her bills on time, and put the financial scandals of the past behind her. With her status and reputation now secure, the duchess enthusiastically embraced her new role as, in effect, Queen Mother. Remembering that both his wife and her mother had quick tempers, Prince Albert prudently insisted that his mother-in-law always maintain separate residences, paid for out of her own civil list income. However, even if she did not precisely live with her daughter, the Duchess of Kent was a constant and beloved figure in royal family life.
Apart from Dear Mama, Dearest Uncle Leopold and his family were frequent and welcome guests, either staying with their royal English relatives or paying calls from their own home at Claremont. In fact, the king of the Belgians spent more time in England than his nephew Albert thought quite prudent in a head of state. The Queen’s Leiningen half brother and half sister, whose financial situation was not easy, also came frequently to England with their families as Victoria’s guests.
Duke Ernest I of Saxe-Coburg ceased to visit his son Albert and daughter-in-law Victoria within a year of their wedding, insulted that they declined to send the sums of money he requested. When the duke died in 1844, Prince Albert wept inconsolably and the Queen shed tears of sympathy, but the death was in many ways a solution to a festering problem. As for Albert’s brother, Ernest, he came to England as often as possible and, unlike the Leiningens, was not very welcome. Once she realized his true character, Queen Victoria never took any pleasure in her brother-in-law’s company but she found it impossible to keep him away. When Ernest married, she liked and pitied his wife, Alexandrine, specifically invited her to come for visits, and was furious when Ernest persist
ed in coming alone.
Quite apart from these close relatives, Prince Albert liked to surround himself with members of German royal houses, most of whom could claim some distant kinship with him and the Queen. The language and cultural background of these people matched his own, and they appeared appropriately awed by his hospitality. Anytime in diary or letters that Albert happens to mention his current house party, we drown in a hyphenated deluge of Saxes, Mecklenburg-Strelitzes, Württembergs, Hesses, Hohenlohes, Coburg-Koharys, Hohenzollern-Sigmaringens, and Schleswig-Holsteins.
Although generous with their hospitality, the royal couple saw their guests mainly in the evening in large groups. They appreciated guests like the king of Saxony who could be trusted to amuse themselves and not get in the way of their busy hosts. Victoria had an iron-clad routine. Albert was out much of the day, either escorting his wife to public events or on business of his own, and he hated gossip and small talk even when he was at home. The chasm in status and wealth that yawned between the English royal family and their German relatives made relationships touchy. Neither the Queen nor the prince spent much time tête-à-tête even with visitors they dearly loved.
