by Gillian Gill
The turning point in the relationship between Victoria and her eldest daughter was the birth of Vicky’s first child, Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albrecht von Hohenzollern, known to his family as Willy and to Englishmen in the First World War as Kaiser Bill. As the Queen told her daughter soon after the birth, “There is no longer anything between us I cannot touch with you, and a married daughter be she ever so young is at once on a par with her mother.” When Vicky visited her family at Osborne in the summer of 1859, she was delighted to find that her mother now treated her like a sister and approved of everything she did. Queen Victoria openly admitted how “delightful, soothing, and satisfactory” she now found the “intercourse” with Vicky. “My heart requires sympathy,” she wrote, and “the possibility of pouring out its feelings quite openly to one who will feel for & understand me.” On her return to Berlin, Vicky wrote to her mother: “I never had a correspondence that I enjoyed so much because it is so natural and like thinking aloud.” The Queen and her daughter became friends and allies for life.
As this relationship took hold in the first years of Vicky’s marriage, both women saw it as complementary to the relationship that the princess had with her father. Both Victoria and Vicky saw themselves as chief worshippers at the shrine of Saint Albert. “I maintain Papa is unlike anyone who lives or ever lived or will live,” wrote Victoria to her daughter. “Dear Papa has always been my oracle,” Vicky replied. But the prince consort had not expected to compete with his wife for his favorite daughter’s time and sympathy, and it was unnerving to see that now Victoria was pouring out the details of her private life not just in her journal but in letters to their daughter. For Albert, the growing closeness between his wife and his daughter was a threat not just to his own relationship with Vicky but to his dominance in the family.
Prince Albert had experienced his wife’s powerful talent for putting herself on paper when they were engaged to be married, but he had not reckoned on its effect on their daughter. He knew that he himself lacked the same talent. In person, in the close family circle at Balmoral or Osborne, he could be funny and lighthearted and charming, the man his wife and daughters so loved. But he used the written word to instruct and inform, not beguile or confide. In the letters to his daughter that have been published, the prince all too often sounds boring and trite, more like a retired professor than a concerned young dad.
When Vicky moved to Berlin, Albert discovered just how essential she had been to his comfort. The prince’s emotional need in adulthood was to re-create the symbiotic relationship he had enjoyed with his brother in their Coburg days. As boys, he and Ernest had been one soul in two bodies, or so he remembered. His relationship with his wife was not of this kind. He loved Victoria and was dedicated to her care. Her adoration was as necessary to him as the air he breathed. Together they had built a successful marriage. But Victoria was not like him. Albert did not think much of women in general, and even as a woman, Victoria did not meet his standards.
Thus, as his eldest daughter came into adulthood, the prince was overjoyed to find in her a soul mate and an ideal companion. Vicky was serious, brilliant, industrious, and submissive to his leadership, and, unlike Ernest, she was chaste as well as passionate. From the cradle, she had been peculiarly responsive to her father’s mind. Vicky was his complement, formed in his image.
But now Vicky was gone forever. He himself had prepared, even hurried, her departure, thrusting her into the arms of a loving man who rightly expected to be first in her life. His daughter was dedicated to fulfilling his wishes and carrying out his policies in her new life. The Prussian alliance had proceeded exactly according to plan. But, ironically, he was now left with a gaping hole in his everyday existence that none of his sons, especially the eldest, seemed capable of filling. He was bereft, and there was no one to blame, no one even to mourn with now that Stockmar was gone. And life with Victoria was not getting any easier as she and Albert entered their forties.
WITHIN MONTHS of the Princess Royal’s departure for Berlin in February 1858, the Queen and the prince were quarreling over their ongoing correspondence with her and the visits to Germany that they planned. Albert got wind of Vicky’s pregnancy before his wife, presumably via the Stockmars. Unlike Victoria, he could be counted on to welcome the news that a grandchild was expected. The prince consort at once planned a quick solo incognito trip to Germany in May to see his daughter. Victoria told Vicky that she had agreed to let her husband go “though you know how miserable and, from my isolated position, lost I am without my master.” After Albert’s return, the Queen told her daughter that during her husband’s absence, she had kept so busy and was so determined not to “give way” that she did not miss him nearly as much as she had in 1844 or 1854. “I assure you dear that in Town and at Windsor I see very little of dear Papa very often, and often much less than you do Fritz—from the children, etc.”
By July of the same year, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were planning a joint visit to their daughter in Germany and quarrelling over who should go with them. Victoria wanted to take Alice and Helena along, but Albert categorically refused. He insisted that the younger girls would prevent them from giving Vicky their full attention. More probably, Prince Albert did not wish German princes to come flocking around his second daughter, who, with his permission, was already being courted by Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt. Alice was beginning to express some hesitation about marriage, so the prince may also have decided against letting her see her older sister in the miseries of the first trimester. Writing of the disappointment that Vicky’s younger sisters were feeling at being left behind, Queen Victoria commented that her husband was “very hard-hearted and a great tyrant on all such occasions.”
Queen Victoria liked Louis of Hesse, a tall, blond, tongue-tied, and, reportedly, chaste young German who conformed to her ideas of male beauty and seemed to be good husband material. All the same, she was in two minds about Alice getting married. The Queen now regretted allowing Vicky to be married so young and blamed Prince Albert for hurrying the match. She was determined that Alice would be at least eighteen at her wedding and would not be sent into exile in Germany far away from her parents’ protection. Timidly and with little success, Victoria was starting to challenge her husband’s absolute authority over the family and even his judgment. The question now became: Whose side would Vicky take, her mother’s or her father’s?
The prince continued to express disapproval of his wife’s constant flow of letters to Berlin. “Papa says you write to me too much,” Victoria wrote to Vicky. “He is sure you make yourself ill by it, and constantly declares (which I own offends me very much) that your writing to me at such length is the cause of your often not writing fully to him [my italics].” The Queen was at Balmoral, and, for once, bored and unhappy. Despite her express wishes, Prince Albert had insisted that their fifteen-year-old son Alfred (Affie) must go to sea and begin his career as a naval officer. “Papa is most cruel upon the subject,” wrote Victoria to Vicky.
Vicky’s personal secretary, “the young” Baron Ernest Stockmar, complained to his father that the princess was driven to desperation by her mother’s constant complaints and requests for information. Ever the busybody, old Stockmar, of course, passed this news on to Prince Albert and asked him to intervene. On October 4, 1858, Queen Victoria wrote to her daughter: “If you knew how Papa scolds me for (as he says) making you write! And he goes further, he says that I write far too often to you, and that it would be much better if I wrote only once a week! … I think however that Papa is wrong and you do like to hear from home often. When you do write to Papa again just tell him what you feel and wish on that subject for I do assure you—Papa has snubbed me several times very sharply on the subject and when one writes in spite of fatigue and trouble to be told it bores the person to whom you write—it is rather too much.”
Vicky, placed in the invidious position of adjudicating between her parents, assured her mother that she loved her letters, and, as the
collection of her letters shows, she wrote back almost as frequently. As often as she could, the Princess Royal also engaged with her father in the weighty political and philosophical dialogue they both enjoyed. In the winter of 1860, she sent her father a full treatise on the Prussian constitution. “Papa is much pleased with your memorandum—which I shall certainly read,” wrote Queen Victoria on December 16. “Papa paid you the compliment by quietly telling me (which I am sure is quite true) that I could not have written such a thing. What do you say to this?”
On the general subject of marriage and motherhood, Victoria in the letters to her daughter became increasingly cynical with the years. She recalled how miserable she had been having four babies in the first four years of her marriage. “One becomes so worn out and one’s nerves so miserable.” She refused Vicky’s suggestion that pregnancy was a spiritual experience: “I really think those ladies who are always enceinte quite disgusting; it is more like a rabbit or guinea pig.” She insisted that no man could really understand what women suffer and sacrifice when they bear children. “No father, no man can feel this! Papa never would enter into it at all. As in fact he seldom can in my very violent feelings.”
After Vicky wrote in disgust that the Prussian men thought women mattered only if they were beautiful and produced heirs, the Queen replied: “That despising of our poor degraded sex … is a little in all clever men’s natures; dear Papa even is not quite exempt though he would not admit it— but he laughs and sneers constantly at many of them and at their inevitable inconveniences, etc. Though he hates the want of affection, of due attention to and protection of them, says that all men who leave all home affairs—and the education of their children—to their wives, forget their first duties.”
Weary of congratulating young ladies on their approaching nuptials, Victoria remarked: “The poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat. When I think of a merry happy free young girl—and look at the ailing, aching state a young wife is generally doomed to, which you can’t deny is the penalty of marriage.”
In the past, the Queen had often been very vocal about her discontents, but there is something different about her complaints after 1858. They could no longer be explained in terms of her pregnancies and postpartum depression. Victoria is not known to have conceived a child after the birth of Beatrice in April 1857, and the way she and the prince doted on Beatrice indicates they were pretty certain that she was their last child.
There were good reasons why the royal couple might have decided that nine was enough. The management of four princes and five princesses was increasingly onerous. Already expensive, the royal children would, when they came of age, pose a heavy financial burden on the family as well as the state. Even more important than money was the matter of Victoria’s health and longevity. What if the next labor went wrong, and the Queen died? This fear haunted both the Queen and the prince. In November 1857, they gazed in horror at the beautiful corpse of their beloved first cousin Victoire de Nemours, who had suddenly collapsed and died after an apparently uneventful confinement. In January 1859, their daughter Vicky and her child almost died in childbirth. Here were eloquent reminders that every pregnancy was a risk to the mother’s life. Furthermore, the Queen’s violent mood swings and dramatic scenes when pregnant had set off warning bells at court. What if she were to fall into madness like her grandfather George III?
The English government was anxious for Victoria to remain on the throne for the foreseeable future. The Queen was immensely popular. Compared with most other ruling monarchs, she and her husband made an outstandingly effective team. As of November 9, 1859, the Prince of Wales would be of age to succeed, but he was clearly young for his age. Very young kings made mistakes and were often expensive to the nation.
The prince consort was also anxious for his wife to reign happy, glorious, and long, as the national anthem went. She was his access to power in England. As soon as she died, he would have to give up his key to the dispatch box. No longer would he draft the memoranda and make Crown policy, see every cabinet document, and huddle with ministers. As a young man, the prince consort had wished to have a large family for both personal and dynastic reasons. In this regard, he had achieved everything he had wanted, and more. Now it made sense to take precautions with Victoria’s life and ensure his son did not come to the throne any time soon.
There is a famous anecdote that appears in many of the secondary books about Queen Victoria. Following the birth of her ninth child, the royal doctors were alarmed about the Queen’s health, especially her mental health. They advised the prince that there should be no more royal babies. The prince quickly agreed. Given the same advice, Victoria was upset and said: “Oh, Doctor, can I have no more fun in bed?” Though the anecdote is probably apocryphal, it rings true. At the age of forty, husband and wife were likely to react in different ways to the necessity of limiting their family to nine.
Sexual restraint had not been hard for Albert as a teenager. As he once confided to his close friend and secretary George Anson, “he did not fear temptation with women because that species of vice disgusted him.” Now, with so much business to attend to and a wife who had lost her youthful prettiness, abstinence would be easier. Unlike his first cousin Ferdinand, a notorious womanizer who, at about Albert’s age, abdicated from the throne of Portugal after his wife the queen died, and went off to live in Paris with an opera singer, Albert desired power and influence, not women. A white marriage would suit him very well.
But Victoria, as her husband often remarked, was not like Albert. She was not a pure spirit. She still felt young. She still found men attractive. She remembered the precious few weeks of pleasure that she and Albert had enjoyed as newlyweds, before the pregnancies began. She was ready to feel them again. She had found it hard to observe the sparks of passion passing between Vicky and Fritz during their engagement. If pregnancy was the price of love, she was still prepared to pay it. Queen Victoria always loved her husband more than any other being. Her feelings for him were, in her own words, “strong and warm,” her love “ardent.” She longed for him and was faithful in word and deed. But, from the evidence of her letters to her daughter, after 1858 the Queen was beginning to shed the blinkers of passion and take stock of what the rest of life had to offer.
One small indication of the growing coolness between the royal husband and wife can be found in the Queen’s day-by-day accounts of her stay at Balmoral in the fall of 1858. At the beginning, for the very first time, she was less than excited to be in Scotland. “I enjoy the scenery and being out very much but I hate the life here,” she reported to Vicky. But by October 18, she had quite changed her mind. “I and the girls lunched while Papa was after the stag—and good J. Brown was so attentive to us and so careful,” she wrote to Vicky. “He is now my special servant, and there can’t be a nicer, better or handier one … Brown has had everything to do for me indeed had charge of me on all, on all these expeditions, and therefore I settled that he should be specially appointed to attend on me (without any other title) and have a full dress suit … Altogether I feel so sad—at the bitter thought of going from this blessed place—leaving these hills—this enchanting life of liberty—these dear people—and returning to tame, dull, formal England and the prison life at Windsor.” It is clear that the prince consort was happy to see his wife personally attended by the handsome gillie. The J. Browns of the world were very useful, and he could make sure that they posed no threat to his marriage or to the monarchy.
“I Do Not Cling to Life as You Do”
…
N THE FALL OF 1860, THE QUEEN AND THE PRINCE SET OUT FOR COBURG again. They were hoping this time to steer clear of Vicky’s Prussian in-laws with their protocol, endless military parades, formal concerts, and family feuds. They looked forward to having a quiet two weeks with their daughter and son-in-law, getting to know their grandson, Willy, now almost two, and discussing the ways of the world with dear old Stockmar.
> One day, as the Queen and Vicky, armed with their sketchbooks, were happily chatting to local people in the castle park, Colonel Ponsonby rode up with news. The prince consort had been involved in an accident but was unharmed. Concerned but unafraid, Victoria rushed to her husband’s side and found him lying on his valet’s bed with a cold compress over his bleeding nose. He had been driving out in an open carriage when the driver lost control of the horses. The carriage was heading straight for the railway line, where a cart had stopped to allow a train to pass. The prince jumped out of the speeding vehicle, incurring cuts and bruises but no broken limbs. He picked himself up and rushed over to see to the driver, who had been seriously hurt. When Colonel Ponsonby, hearing of the accident, rode up, the prince consort directed him to the Queen to allay any unnecessary fears.
By presence of mind and physical agility, Albert had escaped a life-threatening incident, but he was profoundly unnerved. The accident had been a memento mori. Other men he had known had not been as lucky as he. In 1842 the young Duc d’Orléans had similarly leaped out of a runaway carriage, but he had died in the fall. Albert had not been particularly close to the young duke, but all the same his death plunged Albert into what he described as consternation and deep distress. “To my imagination it appears as a mysterious enigmatic lesson full of deep significance, and will long exercise my mind and spirit,” Albert wrote about the duke’s death. Nine years later, Albert’s dear friend and mentor Sir Robert Peel was thrown by his horse and died a lingering and horrible death. Once again, Albert found it hard to recover from the shock and the sorrow of the sudden loss.
