by Gillian Gill
Economy-minded radicals might cavil that the Queen of England already had a home by the sea, since she had inherited the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. But, like Windsor and Buckingham Palace, the Royal Pavilion was a Crown property, ruled by the various government departments, and, in any case, neither the Queen nor her husband liked the place. The extraordinary mix of Mogul minarets and Chinese dragons at Brighton made Prince Albert queasy. As for Victoria, it would be many years before she styled herself Empress of India and developed a passionate interest in the subcontinent.
Brighton was also no longer the secret fishing port playground of the very rich that it had been around 1810. By the 1840s, the town had grown up all around the Royal Pavilion and was increasingly frequented by low-class persons who mobbed the royal family when they ventured out on the front. Worst of all, the ghost of George IV wandered the Royal Pavilion. For Prince Albert the building was synonymous with promiscuity and excess.
The Lords of the Treasury were far from distressed to learn that the royal couple had no use for the Royal Pavilion. It had always been a drain on the exchequer. The decision was made to get rid of it, and between 1846 and 1848 the Pavilion was stripped down to the studs. The most precious furnishings and artworks were stored for use in other royal palaces, the rest were sold at auction, and the external structure was scheduled for demolition. The prince’s favorite builder, Thomas Cubitt, famed for his upscale town houses in Belgravia and Bloomsbury was poised to develop the site, but then the local people of Brighton stepped in. They decided their city would not be the same without its Royal Pavilion, however raped and despoiled, and in 1850 the Brighton Corporation managed to borrow sixty thousand pounds from the Bank of England to buy the property. One of the jewels of Regency architecture was saved, despite its royal proprietors.
The speed with which the Royal Pavilion was sacked was due in part to the fact that in 1844 the Queen and the prince found the perfect location for their private pied-à-terre. It was the Osborne House estate on the Isle of Wight, just across the Solent from Southampton and Portsmouth, and thus very handy for future trips to the Continent. The house was an undistinguished Georgian structure, but it stood on some thousand wooded acres sloping down to a private beach and had a magnificent view. Prince Albert planned for his wife to buy and take title to the property just like any private citizen. This would place the estate entirely under his control. His two closest confidants, his secretary George Anson and Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, were far from sure that the Queen should incur such a major expense and were nervous about the administrative problems of running the government on an island. However, once it became apparent that the prince could not be dissuaded from his plan, Peel acquiesced and Anson was dispatched to negotiate the sale.
Osborne’s owner, Lady Isabella Blatchford, was a shrewd woman who counted on getting 28,000 or even 30,000 pounds for her estate, but she was no match for the prince and his agent. A one-year rental on the property for 1,000 pounds was agreed upon, and the prince moved his wife and family in during the summer. Faced with evicting her sovereign lady the Queen, Lady Isabella agreed to accept 26,000, and still had to haggle over the estimated value of her furniture.
The Queen thoroughly enjoyed her first holiday at Osborne House in October 1844. For her, Lady Isabella’s small rooms and middle-class appurtenances had the charm of novelty. But the ministers of the Crown shoehorned into the attics grumbled, and the servants were sullen, so Albert had no difficulty persuading his wife that a much larger building was needed. In June 1845, the Queen laid the foundation stone for the new Osborne House, which, to her rapt admiration, Albert was designing himself with the help of Thomas Cubitt. This gentleman was an experienced builder but not a trained architect, and he was more than willing to defer to his royal client. The work went on apace, and by the summer of 1846, the royal family was able to move into its private wing of the house. The larger section for guests, servants, and offices was completed by 1851.
With the increasingly fast train service from London and a private steamer at their disposal, the royal pair soon found that Osborne was feasible even for three-day weekends. By 1850, the Queen could leave Buckingham Palace at seven in the morning and be wheeled out in her bathing machine for a quick dip by ten-thirty But for everyone except the members of the royal family, Osborne involved a good deal of work and inconvenience.
On a good day, ordinary mortals took at least twice as long to get from London or Windsor to Osborne, and on many days the sea crossing was hard on the weak of stomach. The ministers and household officers deputed to attend on the Queen were not enthusiastic about Osborne even in fine weather. For days on end, they had to abandon the office and the social whirl of London for evenings spent playing Fox and Geese or listening to Her Majesty taking a crack at bel canto. A week by the sea was no holiday for Victoria’s personal staff, since the two large coaches full of baggage with which she invariably traveled took several hectic days to pack. Separated from their families and crammed into tiny bedrooms, Victoria’s servants swore that the soft sea air on the Isle of Wight was murder on their constitutions.
But, in the eyes of the Queen and the prince, all this inconvenience and extra work was a small price to pay. For a few precious weeks and the odd weekend every year, the English Saxe-Coburgs could breathe in clean salt air, take healthful exercise, and pretend that they were any ordinary family with a private train, two private stations (one on and one off the island), a private boat slip on the mainland, a private yacht they hadn’t had to buy, a flock of servants, and a rapidly growing private income to buy little luxuries like paintings and statues and rare shrubs. Marie Antoinette had had the Petit Trianon. Victoria would have Osborne.
The house that Prince Albert built was an Italianate villa divided into two separate pavilions. The two sections were connected on the first floor by a gallery festooned with pictures and statues, and in the basement by a dark, narrow corridor along which the servants scuttled with food from the distant kitchens. The house featured two mock campaniles of different sizes (a water tower and a clock tower), a loggia, and terraces going down to the sea. As time went on, the Queen and the prince were able to acquire another thousand acres or so of surrounding land to further insulate them from Cowes, the nearby town. The building and landscaping of the new Osborne cost the Queen some 200,000 pounds, a large sum given her declared income, but the prince had no problem finding the money. Whether some of the profits realized by the sale of the Royal Pavilion and its effects were diverted into the financing of Osborne was a secret between Prince Albert and the Lords of the Treasury.
Osborne was the height of modernity, designed to give its owners the maximum comfort, privacy, and security. Its vaguely Renaissance shell was supported by cast-iron girders and designed to withstand fire. It had modern drains and water closets, plus bathrooms with hot and cold running water. With the technical assistance of the renowned chemist and inventor Dr. Lyon Playfair, the prince devised a system whereby the human sewage could be used for fertilizer on the estate. For the Queen, with her long, wide skirts and yards of petticoats, the water closets were a revelation, and within a few years she was refusing to go anywhere that did not have one for her private use.
Osborne also had special recessed windows and double insulation to protect against the sea winds. Some of the doors were of glass to extend the sea view through the house. However, there was no central heating even though the Queen and the prince were usually by the sea in May often a chilly month, and on weekends during the fall and winter. Victoria had found the under-floor central heating at the Royal Pavilion oppressively warm, so Osborne made do with fireplaces.
For Queen Victoria, Osborne had a delicious coziness. The bedrooms, dressing rooms, living rooms, and nurseries on the upper floors of the family pavilion were pretty but unpretentious, and the private reception rooms in the royal wing were intimate by the standards of Windsor or Versailles. The dining room, drawing room, and billiard room were arrang
ed en enfilade around the central staircase, and this design allowed members of the royal family to descend into the dining room unseen by members of the household. Evenings were more relaxed, since the room design allowed the royals to entertain guests in one section while behind some large pillars the ladies and gentlemen in attendance could sit down and even converse among themselves.
As a visitor to Osborne House can still see today, the young Victoria and Albert were people with big checkbooks who were eclectic and exuberant in their tastes. In this, their first real home, the royal couple put together stuff of all kinds: old masters and works by up-and-coming artists, ceramics, tesserae, and tiles, statues and busts, family portraits and sketches by family members, a superb billiard table, folksy bedroom furniture, eight-foot-tall china torchères, garden seats cut out of hunks of coal, and white marble sculptures of the four eldest royal children dressed as the seasons.
For his children, who spent more time each year at Osborne than could their parents, the prince ordered a fully furnished Swiss chalet. It was charmingly miniature by palace standards yet big enough for two servants to live in and for the royal daughters to play cook and housekeeper. Outside the chalet was a shed in which the princes and princesses kept their sets of garden tools for their imposingly large individual garden plots. Somehow the royal children were expected not only to keep up a regular schedule of lessons and make a natural history collection to rival their father’s in Coburg, but also to learn to bake a loaf of bread, grow a potato, and make a chair.
The royal couple were enthusiastic collectors of paintings by contemporary artists. In the public rooms and in the shared rooms of the private wing, they gave pride of place to large expensive canvases by fashionable painters like Winterhalter and Landseer. There were also a number of landscapes by German artists—Koekoek, Achenbach, Lindemann-Frommel—more famous then than now. But in his bedroom-dressing-room-bathroom suite, Albert hung his growing collection of paintings and drawings by early Italian and Flemish artists. He had developed a taste for the quattrocento during his Italian visit of 1838–39 and was able to pick up unfashionable pieces by Duccio, Fra Angelico, Gozzoli, Memling, Cranach, Giorgione, Mantegna, and Bellini for next to nothing. Today the prince’s bedroom Bellinis are the pride of the national collections, while his Winterhalters and Landseers are historic wallpaper for the royal residences.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Osborne is the royal couple’s predilection for sumptuous nudes, both male and female. A fresco by William Dyce, commissioned by Prince Albert for the head of the main staircase, shows Neptune Entrusting the Command of the Sea to Britannia. A chastely dressed Britannia salutes a naked Neptune, whose private parts are considerately hidden by a horse’s wind-tossed mane. Accompanying Neptune is an attractive set of naked young mermen and mermaids whose fish tails begin around their knees, allowing a plentiful display of buttock and bosom. Britannia is flanked by a young gentleman clad only in a hat who turns his beautiful back to the viewer. Under one arm the youth holds an arrow, identifying him as Mercury, while he wraps the other arm affectionately around the shoulders of a bearded man in a classical version of the sarong. Plato would have liked the picture, and so did Prince Albert.
Even more astonishing is the painting of Hercules and Omphale by Josef Anton von Gegenbaur that was Queen Victoria’s wedding gift and today graces the wall of the prince’s bathroom. It shows a magnificently muscled, half-dressed man, seated by the fire with a spindle in his hand, being embraced by a beautiful naked woman. The picture is indisputably erotic, and becomes more so once one knows the story behind the painting. According to Apollodorus, the mighty hero Hercules killed his male companion Iphitus in a fit of madness. To expiate this crime, Hercules agreed to live for three years as a slave to the Lydian queen, Omphale, who took him as her lover and, finally, her husband. Hercules expressed the terrible shame he felt as Omphale’s slave by donning women’s clothing and spinning thread by the hearth like a woman.
Even for a Greek myth, this is provocative material. The artists of classical Greece would have none of it, but the perverse eroticism of the mighty hero Hercules reduced to a feminized slave spoke to the Hellenistic and Baroque periods. Why the conventional Gegenbaur took up the subject in the mid-nineteenth century is unclear, but the appeal of his canvas to Victoria and Albert is not. Dumpy little Victoria, wreathed in yards of checked gingham, liked to imagine herself as the voluptuous Omphale. Albert knew himself to be a mighty hero in disguise, even though obliged in daily life to walk several steps behind his wife and get her to sign the checks. The erotic side of the royal marriage is expressed far more clearly in their art collection than in their letters and journals.
Today architectural experts tend to sneer at Osborne, opining that while the site is, of course, glorious, the house itself is ugly. The received wisdom is that the articulation of the two wings is awkward, the plaster work in the main reception rooms undistinguished, and the exterior a timid mishmash of styles that falls far short of that fabulous anachronism the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. The prince consort, critics contend, had a way with ornamental shrubs but should have left architecture to the professionals.
Even when it was new, Osborne was controversial. To the young middle-class German girl Frieda Arnold, Victoria’s dresser, it was a triumph. To the aristocratic Englishman Charles Greville, it was a monstrosity. To a grand seigneur like the Duke of Devonshire, busy in the 1840s refurbishing the glories of Chatsworth, Osborne was even more nouveau riche than Buckingham Palace. To a plutocrat like the Duke of Westminster, willing to spend 600,000 pounds on a single residence, Osborne, with its folksy tiles, fake statues, and faux marble columns, was cheap. However, to the majority of Englishmen in the nineteenth century, Osborne was an ideal home for a gentleman’s family. It inspired enormous public interest and was often copied.
For Queen Victoria, Osborne was perfect because Albert created it and she first lived there in her twenties, when she and he were full of joy and perfect companions. At Osborne Victoria could be within sight of Albert almost every minute of the day. The two as always sat down side by side to get through the business of state, and even business had its charms when it was conducted together. Both spent several hours each day in their private apartments working on their correspondence and their journals. They took it in turns to do the piano practice that both thoroughly enjoyed and took very seriously. “Dear Madam, you really must do that passage again; it is so impertinent to Mozart to libel it so,” Lady Mount Edgcumbe, the senior lady-in-waiting, remarked to the Queen one day at Osborne. And once their duties were done for the day, the royal couple could have fun.
When Albert went out on the estate, the Queen rode with him when her condition permitted, and the only escort they needed was a boy to open the gates. When the Queen was pregnant, she pottered around in a little pony cart, getting out to sketch, admire the view, or proudly watch her husband consulting with the workmen. She liked to sail, and she found it refreshing to immerse herself in the sea in the sanctuary of her bathing machine. In the evenings, when Albert played billiards, the Queen could watch or make music with her ladies-in-waiting and her guests. There were also parlor games, perhaps an experiment with table tapping, or a game of whist, though the prince did not think highly of his wife’s card play. Then, husband and wife would wish the company good night quite early. After taking her bath or her shower in her beautiful new bathroom, the Queen could stand with her husband on the balcony facing the sea and listen as Albert’s whistle coaxed the nightingales to sing. Then the two could retire to the new bedroom with the special lock Albert had designed that could be operated without getting out of bed.
PRINCE ALBERT ENJOYED life at Osborne, especially perhaps the hours he spent there with his children, but the real pleasure of the house for him came in the designing, the building, the decorating, and the landscaping. Once the place was complete, he lost interest, but fortunately by this time the railway had reached Edinburgh and Aberdeen, a
nd the prince himself felt rich enough, in one way or another, to purchase a second estate, much farther away and much more isolated, in the Highlands of Scotland.
In May 1848, Prince Albert, sight unseen, took over the twenty-seven-year lease on Balmoral, a 17,400-acre estate on the bank of the river Dee owned by the trustees of the Earl of Fife. It was high up between Ballater and Braemar, in an area renowned in Scotland for its low rainfall. The royal family’s first visit to its new rental was such a success that the prince quickly determined not only to buy Balmoral but to twist the arms of neighboring landowners to sell him the abutting properties of Birkhall, Abergeldie, and Ballochbuie so that he could really feel lord of all he surveyed.
Balmoral was wild, and its abundant game was a major incentive for the prince. In the early years, red deer and roe deer were so common that they came right up to the house, begging to be shot. Albert was happy to oblige, and he spent many of his days in Scotland deerstalking, sometimes allowing his wife to accompany him. Delighted, Victoria was careful to keep her distance and stay very quiet, even for hours on end. The local people were enjoined to stay away from any area where the prince was hunting, but if someone strayed in by mistake and scared away the deer, the Queen was quite irate that dear Albert’s day should be spoiled.
In one painting of the royal family at Balmoral, the German painter Carl Haag showed the prince on his return from a successful deer-hunting excursion. Albert is attired in the newfangled Highland outfit that he promoted and that showcased his superbly muscled legs. The tartan of the kilt is the one he personally designed, and the sash and star of the Garter are on his jacket. The prince is standing at the main door to the castle, proudly displaying to his wife, her mother, and her ladies the magnificent stags he has shot that day.
