We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  ONLY A SMALL handful of people were deeply affected by the prince consort’s death. Baron Christian Stockmar in Coburg fell into black despair. He had staked so much on this young princely protégé. Now with Albert dead and the star of Bismarck already rising in the Prussian sky, Stockmar saw his liberal dreams turning to ashes. “I feel right well,” Stockmar wrote in March 1862, “that I cannot judge this matter [the death of the prince consort] as one in full possession of his senses; for the thought of the malignity of my personal fate, which has allowed me to live so long that I should endure this cruel blow, drives me at times half mad. An edifice, which, for a great and noble cause, had been reared, with a devout sense of duty … has been shattered to its very foundations.” Baron Christian Stockmar died the following year.

  King Leopold of the Belgians was almost as heart-stricken as his old friend and confederate Baron Stockmar. He received the news of his nephew Albert’s death from the Queen herself. Albert had been dearer to him than his own children, the old king confided to Victoria in return. Though he was in poor health, Leopold rushed immediately across to England to support his niece and take charge at Windsor, since the Prince of Wales was obviously not up to the task. It was King Leopold, overruling Princess Alice, who insisted that the Queen should be moved immediately to the privacy of Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, a decision that many of Victoria’s ministers later regretted. In 1865 King Leopold died, a hard, sad, bitter man more lamented by his English niece than by his children and his court.

  Within hours of the bereaved Queen’s arrival on the Isle of Wight on December 19, Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Albert’s brother, arrived, soaking wet from the winter crossing. He took his sister-in-law in his arms in an agony of tears and, during the remainder of his visit, was as usual more trouble than comfort to her and his nieces and nephews. Ernest was a brilliant and complicated man, and his grief for his brother was intense. Since he and Albert had chosen for dynastic reasons to keep silent on their childhood and mythologize their youth, with Albert gone, Ernest lost two decades of intimately shared experience. On the other hand, Ernest had never enjoyed trailing in Albert’s wake, and there was comfort in the knowledge that he had the vitality and endurance that Albert lacked. Over the twenty-two years of Albert’s life in England, the two brothers had often been at odds over family and financial matters.

  Albert’s premature death mattered above all for Ernest because it posed a threat to his own international status. The two brothers had always been political allies, constantly exchanging information and devising strategy. The brothers shared the contradictory goal of uniting Germany without losing the independent sovereignty of their duchy. Thus, even as he wept with his widowed sister-in-law, Ernest blamed her and England for killing his brother. For the rest of his life, Ernest sedulously kept up his relations with the English Saxe-Coburgs, exploited his sister-in-law’s status, relied on her generosity, and launched vicious attacks in the German press on her and his niece Vicky. Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, died, unlamented, in 1893.

  All nine of Albert’s children were deeply marked by his early death, but in different ways. The prince had been a loving, attentive, involved parent from the moment each child took its first breath. For his family, Prince Albert had been fun, the clever mimic and cartoonist, the expert marksman, the gifted singer and accompanist, the master of the revels. He had made a palace into a home, and when he died, the fire went out and the lights dimmed. In their own marriages, his children would strive to re-create what could be called the Osborne experience.

  When the prince consort died, four of his nine children were clustered around him: his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, and the princesses Alice, Helena, and Louise. The two youngest children at home, Princess Beatrice and Prince Arthur, were spared the death scene. The eldest child, the Princess Royal, was in Berlin. The second son, Prince Alfred, was away at sea. Prince Leopold, the youngest boy, was still marooned in the south of France, following the sudden death of the elderly courtier sent out to look after him. It must have been terrible for the sick and lonely boy to receive the news of his father’s death, yet Leopold was less haunted by his father’s legend than his elder brothers.

  The prince consort’s death cast a very long shadow over relations between the Queen and the heir to the throne. For months after her husband’s death, Queen Victoria could hardly bear to be in the same room as the Prince of Wales. “Oh! That boy—much as I pity I never can or shall look at him without a shudder,” she confided to Vicky in Berlin. To the end of her life, the Queen had little affection or regard for Bertie, refused to allow him any independent position of consequence, and conducted the business of the Crown with the help of his sisters and his brother Leopold.

  Grave, intelligent, withdrawn, responsible, dutiful, humorless Princess Alice, not her brilliant elder sister Vicky, was probably the child most like their father. Alice worshipped the prince consort just as Vicky did, longed for his attention, strove to win his regard, and treasured his every word. After her sister married and moved to Berlin, Alice was overjoyed to take her sister’s place in her father’s life and, increasingly, in his heart. Her father’s death traumatized Princess Alice, although people were too preoccupied with the Queen and with Bertie’s engagement to the beautiful Alexandra of Denmark to take much notice. In July 1862, less because she was in love with her fiancé than because her father had wished it, Alice married Prince Louis of Hesse and set out for Germany. Alice’s trousseau was black, and her mother made sure the private ceremony was more like a funeral than a wedding. After a life of trouble and tragedy, Alice of Hesse yielded to diphtheria, dying at age thirty-five on December 14, 1878, seventeen years to the day after her father, with the words “dear Papa” on her lips.

  The person who regretted most passionately that she had not been with her father in his last illness was his eldest and most beloved child, Victoria (Vicky), the Princess Royal. Her lot was to experience the dying and the mourning from afar. In December 1861, Vicky had just turned twenty-one and was Crown Princess of Prussia, following the recent death of her husband Fritz’s uncle king. Her father-in-law William was now King of Prussia. Vicky was also in the first trimester of her third pregnancy, and very restricted in her movements even within the palace. Given the severe physical problems of her son, William, and the fact that her healthy second child was a girl, and thus barred from the Prussian royal succession, her unborn child was a matter of the gravest political and dynastic significance. Though she received almost daily bulletins on her father’s health, was apprised by her sister Alice that their father was very ill, and had certainly become very anxious, Vicky was still wholly unprepared for her father to die. When the news came, her first impulse was to set off for England at once, to comfort and be comforted by her family. But her father-in-law the king of Prussia absolutely forbade her to leave Berlin. Her husband went to England alone for the prince consort’s funeral. For three months, Vicky and her mother were forced to put their anguish on paper.

  After the prince’s death, the Queen turned to her daughter in Prussia for advice and support, convinced that Vicky was the person closest to the prince consort left on earth. Bertie, Alfred, Alice, and above all Vicky herself suffered from this official passing of the torch from father to eldest daughter. To the end of her life, Vicky considered herself the prince consort’s intellectual and political heir. Her mission in life, and that of her husband, was to realize her father’s and Stockmar’s vision for Prussia and for Prussian-English entente. When the prince consort died, both Vicky and her husband felt that they had lost their most precious support and inspiration, but they determined to fight on. Convinced that she spoke with her father’s voice, Vicky was empowered to embrace her role as her husband’s chief adviser. She was only a woman, she felt, but she was her father’s daughter, and she would be to Fritz as Albert had been to Victoria.

  This choice of role was peculiarly unfortunate and ill advised, as her crafty un
cle Ernest probably told her. Prince Albert in England was disliked as a German and distrusted in Germany as an Englishman, and the same was true in reverse for his daughter. Vicky, brilliant, capable, and pure, could not hide her distaste for the Prussian court and the Prussian government and her desire to reform them in the English image. Both Fritz’s father William I of Prussia, and his chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, quickly decided that the English-born Crown Princess was their greatest enemy. They believed, falsely, that her loyalty was to her mother, not her husband, and that she was an English spy scheming to betray Prussian interests. All notions of chivalry were abandoned in the attacks upon “the English Woman,” at court, in the government, and in the press. Within a year of her father’s death, Vicky and Fritz had already been forced out of all part in national governance and were pariahs in Prussia, reviled by the left wing for failing to stand up for democratic values, and by the right wing for their private opposition to the king and his ministers.

  Most fatefully King William and Bismarck passed their hatred and distrust on to Prince William, Vicky and Fritz’s eldest son, the future kaiser of World War I. Under their tutelage, this damaged boy became a deranged man all too willing to blame his English mother for all his problems, personal and political. To her death in 1901, Vicky, then dowager empress, was the most unpopular, slandered, and reviled figure in Germany.

  It is unlikely that the prince consort’s personal influence could have prevented King William I from falling under the sway of Otto von Bismarck. But there was one key moment when Albert’s influence might have been crucial. In 1862, when the legislature dared to oppose his plans for the army, the king of Prussia furiously prepared a statement of abdication that his son had only to sign to become king. Despite his wife’s frantic entreaties, Fritz persuaded his elderly father to keep his crown since the coronation oath committed a king to rule until his death. As a result, King William I of Prussia not only lived to be crowned Emperor William I of Germany at Versailles in 1871, but ruled for seventeen more years. Fritz finally acceded to the throne as Emperor Frederick I in 1888 and died of throat cancer three months later. Had the prince consort been alive in 1862, he might have been able to persuade Fritz that his higher duty was to the nation, not his father, and that he must seize the reins of power.

  No one ever doubted that if Crown Prince Frederick came to the throne of Prussia, Bismarck and the far-right party would be dismissed, and his wife, Victoria, would be the power behind the throne. As king and queen of Prussia in 1862, Fritz and Vicky would probably have had decades to try to realize her father’s political vision. The forces of liberal democracy would have had a better chance of prevailing over militarism and absolutism. It is not absurd to argue that, had the prince consort lived even one more year, had his daughter Vicky had a chance to dictate Crown policy and shape society in Prussia, there might not have been a First World War.

  WHEN THE PRINCE CONSORT died, everyone had the same question: How will the Queen survive this blow? Will she too lose her hold on life and quickly follow him to the grave? Or will she go mad and perhaps, in a moment of despair, take her own life? Even those who were not unhappy that the prince had gone to his Maker understood that his wife would feel his loss to the core of her being. “Albertolatry” was the religion at Windsor, and the Queen was its high priestess. Would she, like a Brahman widow, throw herself, metaphorically, on her husband’s pyre?

  In the first moments after Albert’s death, Queen Victoria pulled herself together and played her role of grieving widow, loving mother, and dutiful monarch to perfection. Carried out of the Blue Room by her nephew Ernest Leiningen and by Charles Phipps, the prince consort’s private secretary, she lay on a sofa, addressing a special word to each member of the household as they filed by in tears to kiss her hand. “You will not desert me? You will all help me?” she repeated heartbreakingly She gathered her children around her and was even gracious to Bertie when he sobbed that he would try to be all that she wanted him to be.

  But the true enormity of her situation hit the Queen when she moved into her bedroom and faced the empty bed. For the first time in her life, she would sleep all alone. In vain attempts to assuage those feelings, on the first night, she went to the nursery, picked up the sleeping Princess Beatrice and took her into her bed. Then she took to sleeping with the prince’s dressing gown over her bed, with his nightshirt in her arms, and a plaster cast of his hand in hers. Referring to her husband’s death, “I never dreamt of the physical possibility of such a calamity,” she wrote to Vicky from Windsor on December 18. “What is to become of us all? Of the unhappy country, of Europe, of all?… But how [shall] I, who leant on him for all and everything— without whom I did nothing, moved not a finger, arranged not a print or photograph, didn’t put on a gown or bonnet if he didn’t approve it—be able to go on … ? Oh! It is too, too weary! The day—the night (above all the night) is too sad and weary.”

  It was worse when she got to Osborne, her favorite place, the place where she and Albert had been a young married couple, happy to be in their own home at last, wandering the estate on their ponies, playing duets, listening to the nightingales, retiring to bed early alone, just the two of them. Albert had brought her security and contentment as well as passion and pleasure, and the bleakness of the future without him appalled her. “I am alas! not old—and my feelings are strong and warm; my love is ardent,” she wrote pathetically to her daughter.

  The intensity with which Victoria missed Albert dulled with the years, but his death was a wound that never really healed. As a woman, she was inconsolable, and her misery was as egotistic as it was epic. During her reign, Windsor Castle became more dungeon than palace, Buckingham Palace was more or less boarded up, Osborne had the air of a mausoleum, and Balmoral was as bleak as the surrounding moors.

  The extremity of desolation that Victoria expressed over and over does not endear her. When, in the early years of her widowhood, we find her declaring that she longed to die and be happy again with Albert in heaven, we take it all with a grain or five of salt. When she says that she and Albert had decided that hell did not exist and that the virtuous could count on being reunited with their loved ones in the hereafter, it seems a little too theologically convenient. The experience of losing a loved partner is hardly rare, and all too often Victoria’s emotion was selfish and over the top. Little Arthur laughing over lunch, Vicky writing of a wonderful trip she had taken, a failure by any member of her family and household to commemorate the anniversary of her engagement, would earn a stinging reproof or a fit of weeping from the Queen. Even in her first letter to her uncle Leopold after Albert’s death, the multiple underlinings and heightened vocabulary smack of melodrama: “My own DEAREST, KINDEST Father,—For as such have I ever loved you! The poor fatherless babe of eight months is now the utterly broken-hearted and crushed widow of forty-two!” she wrote to her uncle.

  The loneliness and longing, the feeling of uncertainty and abandonment that Victoria expressed were genuine. It is not hard to believe that once she was close to suicide. But all the same, the expression she found for her feelings was histrionic. The role of tragic heroine, preparing to follow her loved one into the grave, was one the Queen had wept to see enacted on the stage hundreds of times in her beloved operas. Now that the role was hers in real life, she had a libretto and a score to follow, and they made life a little more bearable, at least for her. The fear of madness had long been used as a weapon against the Queen, but now she found it useful. To press her hands to her temples like Gaetano Donizetti’s mad heroine Lucia di Lammermoor and piteously murmur that she must withdraw, as she was losing her mind, was a convenient way of getting out of doing anything she did not feel like.

  And if Victoria talked a great deal in the early years about heartbreak and going mad under the burden of state business, she never seems for a moment to have considered the more mundane solutions to her problems: remarriage and abdication. In truth, remarriage was a very difficult and r
are option for any Victorian widow in her forties. Passionlessness was what decent men required in their wives. A woman in her thirties was already considered to be old for marriage, and widows who remarried were greeted by hostility and prurient jocularity. For Queen Victoria, remarriage was virtually impossible. At twenty, she had been able to count the number of eligible suitors on the fingers of one hand. Now there was not one that would please both her and the English nation. German royal families no doubt could muster a few impoverished old bachelor roués willing to take on a widow in her forties, if she was rich enough. But Victoria had no wish to marry a man like her brother-in-law Ernest or the debauched misogynists Vicky had found at the court of Berlin. Among her fellow countrymen, Victoria could probably have found a man to her liking, but the ancient political barriers against a monarch marrying a subject remained.

  And to remarry, Victoria would almost certainly have had to abdicate, and, even as she lay long nights in her bed, aching for Albert, she never considered it. In seeking to comfort and support her mother in the days following her father’s death, Vicky knew exactly what line to take. “I can so well understand that you wish to die dearest Mama, to be with him again,” she wrote in January 1862, “but who then would carry out his wishes, would work out all he has begun with so much trouble and so much love? You know, beloved Mama, what would most likely be the fate of the nation if God were to remove you now. In twenty years all that causes us such alarm with Bertie may be changed and softened. But heaven forbid beloved Papa’s work of 20 years should be in vain. God requires immense sacrifices of you and has imposed such difficult duties on you but He has given you adored Papa for a guide … Your children and your people have need of you—you would not have them doubly bereaved when this blow is already as much as they can bear.”