We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  117 He accused royal historian Theodore Martin David Duff, Victoria and Albert, New York: Berkeley Medallion Book, 1972, pp. 30–35. Duff wrote a series of books on members of the English royal family and seems to have become progressively more disenchanted. No biographer has written a more scathing, or better referenced, indictment of the prince consort.

  117 It is a canard that Prince Albert In the recent book on the house of Saxe-Coburg that received the current duke’s imprimatur, Harald Sandner once again points to the enormous difference in character and looks among Prince Albert and his father and brother, and strongly suggests that Albert was not the Duke of Coburg’s son. Sandner has gone through the Coburg state archives with care, but he does not identify Duchess Louise’s supposed lover of 1818.

  119 All the same, for a sensitive These were among the documents that Queen Victoria collected, or had copied, after her husband’s death and that she had translated and published in her book The Early Years.

  119 If they confided them to anyone Frank Eyck, Prince Albert’s most informed and serious biographer, in his brief account of the prince’s youth, states: “The loss of his mother and the break-up of his home … had a profound influence on him. He still remembered vividly many years later what a shock it had been for him to have suddenly lost his mother, for whom he always kept an affection” (The Prince Consort: A Political Biography, Houghton Mifflin, 1959, p. 14). Eyck cites as support for this statement a letter written to Queen Victoria by Christoph Florschütz, January 7, 1863 (Royal Archives Z. 272.6). This letter has never been published.

  120 “It is a satisfaction to me Early Years, pp. 90–91. Florschütz’s testimony as to Albert’s happiness as a child has been cited as definitive by most of the prince’s subsequent biographers, but to me it seems self-evidently unreliable. The tutor wrote from memory in the mid-1860s, he was deeply implicated in his own narrative, and he needed to protect his relations with the house of Coburg. When he arrived in Coburg in 1823, his position in the ducal household was, as he says, fraught with difficulties and stresses. Florschütz was a poor man who took no holidays, ate and slept with his pupils, and had barely a moment to himself. Until the princes came of age, his personal life was on hold, and his future depended on the bonds he could forge with the two boys. He and Duchess Louise were rivals for the affections of her sons. Seeing which way his bread was buttered, Florschütz gave his allegiance to the tall, manly, imposing man who employed him. After his fifteen years of service to the princes, Florschütz retired on a pension and took up life in Coburg. He attended court, enjoyed the patronage of the dukes, and basked in the reflected glory of his famous pupil. Asked about the childhood of Albert, the Prince Consort, Florschütz unsurprisingly testified to an idyll.

  Chapter 10: THE PARADISE OF OUR CHILDHOOD

  122 The older ladies would provide Prince Albert to his father, 1826, Early Years, p. 52.

  122 Grandmother Augusta was a sharp Queen Victoria experienced her grandmother’s sharp tongue when Duchess Augusta paid a visit to Kensington Palace in 1826. “[Grandmama] was excessively kind to children, but could not bear naughty ones—and I shall never forget her coming into the room where I had been crying and naughty at my lessons and scolding me severely, which had a very salutary effect” (Hibbert, Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, p. 11).

  122 The boys soon learned The prince was known for his devotion to his stepgrandmother, Duchess Caroline, and he corresponded with her faithfully until her death. Duchess Caroline’s extravagant grief when Prince Albert left Gotha to be married features in many biographies. And yet, between 1835 and 1839, Albert spent little more than hours with the Duchess of Gotha, as she notes unhappily in her letters. She was one of the people of whom absence made his heart grow fonder.

  122 As a result, in comparison For example, the Darwins, Priestleys, Wedgwoods, Macaulays, Nightingales, Emersons, Beechers, Alcotts, or Peabodys. Queen Victoria was extremely impressed by a program of study that Prince Albert laid out for himself, though she admits he had little opportunity to pursue it. “The amount of work which the Prince thus traces for himself would probably not only seem excessive to the most studious English schoolboy … but was such as a hard-reading man at our universities might almost have shrunk from” (Early Years, p. 88). Maybe!

  122 Florschütz himself did much Eyck reports that some notables in the German duchies believed that Florschütz had radical political ideas and proselytized to his pupils (The Prince Consort: A Political Biography, p. 16).

  123 From the little attic bedroom When Queen Victoria first visited the Rosenau in 1844, she was struck by the extreme modesty of the attic sleeping quarters the princes Albert and Ernest had shared with their tutor as boys. Unfortunately, despite the recent renovations, this section of the house is still not opened to the public.

  124 His native landscapes were etched In Early Days, Queen Victoria devotes several pages to describing the countryside around the cities of Coburg and Gotha.

  125 This was excellent revenge The first edition of Grimms’ folk tales appeared in 1812, and Prince Albert read them as a child. In one tale, a princess is obliged to marry an ugly frog. When she finds the creature in her bed, she smashes it against the wall in fury and discovers that the frog is a handsome prince under a spell.

  125 “Is it not too long Early Days, p. 60.

  125 In his memoir, Duke Ernest II Stanley Weintraub, Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert, p. 33.

  126 Florschütz, who also had to Early Years, p. 46.

  126 But only by taking part Biographers of Prince Albert have tended to assume that he could not have loved his father when he was a boy and that the constant expressions of love that appear in Prince Albert’s letters to Duke Ernest were insincere or coached. I take his letters at face value. Just because a parent is abusive does not mean that a child does not love that parent.

  126 The letters and journals Even in childhood, Albert seems to have taken “Discretion is the better part of valor” for his motto. From the age of eleven until his death, he kept a diary, but not for the purposes of confession or self-analysis. All Albert’s correspondence as a boy was subject to review by his father and his tutor. For eighteen years, he and his brother were never apart and so had no need to write until Albert went to Bonn. The most candid extant letters were written to his stepmother and his stepgrandmother. The letters between the two brothers are presumably still in the private archives of the Coburg family. Hector Bolitho was allowed to see the letters for his 1932 biography and was then permitted to edit and publish a small selection. Bolitho’s 1934 volume The Prince Consort and His Brother is a model of discretion—in other words, it gives us frustratingly little that was not available to Queen Victoria and Grey. Nothing would advance our knowledge of Prince Albert more than a new, uncensored edition of his correspondence with his brother.

  126 In sympathetic response Weintraub, Uncrowned King, p. 36.

  126 In youth, he suffered In their private correspondence, Stockmar and Leopold drop the occasional casual remark about the execrable moral tone of the people around Duke Ernest, although they offer no details. It is clear that they both agreed that it was essential to remove Albert from Coburg as a teenager to prevent him from being corrupted.

  126 “From our earliest years,” wrote Early Years, p. 213.

  127 “You well knew the events and scandals Hector Bolitho, The Prince Consort and His Brother, New York: Appleton, 1934, p. 17.

  127 “I longed to be with you Ibid, p. 173.

  127 In short order, the new king Louise, first queen of the Belgians, wept uncontrollably at the time of her marriage, and her life was tragic and short. Queen Louise was another Coburg woman victim.

  127 “I wish I was with you Early Years, p. 82.

  128 It says something of the unhappy According to Monica Charlot, several French newspapers reported that the new king of the Belgians planned to marry his niece, the Princess Victoria of Kent (Charlot, p. 75). Given the fact t
hat his older brother Ernest did marry their niece Marie of Württemberg, it is not inconceivable that Leopold may at one point have entertained the idea of marrying his darling niece Victoria.

  128 She bore him no children By 1843, Duchess Marie had adopted a child of humble parentage and was bringing him or her up as her own. Prince Albert wrote to her, agreeing on the pleasures of seeing a child grow up, but cautioning her on giving the child expectations that could not be realized. “I wish you more success than generally attends the education of poor children of the lower ranks by persons of our own,” remarked Albert pompously (The Letters of the Prince Consort 1831–1861, ed. Kurt Jagow, trans. E.T.S Dug-dale, New York: Dutton, 1938, p. 83). The definitive book on Marie, based on extensive research in the Coburg state archives, is Herzogin Marie von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha by Gertraude Bachmann (Historischen Gesellschaft Coburg, 1999).

  128 History has been grateful for this. Duchess Marie decamped to Paris soon after her husband died, returning to Coburg mainly to see her visiting English relatives. Prince Albert continued to correspond with her until her death. These letters are often quoted, but Prince Albert’s biographers in English at least have not probed the relationship between the two. Bolitho in Germany was shown an interesting letter from Marie to Albert, written probably when the Coburg princes had left Coburg for Brussels and Bonn, which indicates that the cousins were at one time close allies. Marie wrote: “You think of me no more; you do not love me properly; and you do not consider my advice as being well intentioned.” Albert replied: “This doubt of our enormous love for you, and our gratitude, downright affection and care, cannot do otherwise than disturb us” (Bolitho, Albert—Prince Consort, p. 19).

  128 “So you go to England Early Years, p. 145. Duchess Marie was Victoria’s first cousin too, before becoming her stepmother-in-law.

  129 They went first to Mecklenburg Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III and mother to his fifteen children, was a princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, which gave her paternal family a luster it had hitherto lacked.

  129 To his stepmother/cousin Early Years, p. 113.

  129 Duke Ernest could afford At this time, virtually all army officers in England as well as in Germany came from the ranks of the aristocracy or landed gentry and officers generally had to find the money to buy their commissions and to maintain themselves in the service.

  130 Victoria dreamed of a partner Queen Victoria confided as much to Lord Melbourne in the week of her engagement.

  Chapter 11: TRAINING FOR THE BIG RACE

  131 His older brother, Ernest Duke Ernest of Württemberg married Princess Marie of Bourbon, another of the sisters of Queen Louise of the Belgians. The two cousins called Ernest were also in the late 1850s rivals for the love of the German opera star known as Natalie Frassini. See Gertraude Bachmann, Zwei Herzöge und eine Primadonna (Two Dukes and a Diva), Sonderdruck aus Jahrbuch der Coburger Landesstiftung, 2003.

  131 Feodora of Hohenlohe-Langenburg See Memoirs of Baron Stockmar, vol. 1, pp. 364–365.

  131 Ernest had not inherited King Leopold until early 1836 favored the marriage of his nephew Albert to another of his nieces, also, confusingly called Victoire/Victoria but three years younger than Victoria Kent. Victoria Coburg-Kohary was the daughter of Leopold’s brother Ferdinand and of Maria Antoinette Gabriella Kohary Victoire Kohary’s mother was a Hungarian princess who, through some legal hocus-pocus, had been declared a male and thus enabled to inherit the estates of her fabulously wealthy father. The family took the name Coburg-Kohary, and Ferdinand had higher ambitions for his children than marriage to an impoverished Coburg cousin like Albert. In due course, Leopold and Stockmar successfully negotiated the marriage of the eldest Kohary son, also named Ferdinand, with the queen of Portugal. The second Kohary son married Clementine of Bourbon, younger daughter of King Louis Philippe of France and sister of Queen Louise of the Belgians. In 1840 Victoire Coburg-Kohary married another Bourbon, Louis, Duc de Nemours, Queen Louise’s brother, the young man who found Queen Victoria’s table manners unacceptable.

  132 “If simply to fill Memoirs of Baron Stockmar, vol. 1, pp. 336–337.

  133 For decades, long before I am greatly simplifying the congruence in views between Leopold and Stockmar, especially after Leopold went to Brussels in 1831. Frank Eyck, the most sober and lucid guide to Coburg political ideas, notes how different the two men were both in personal morality and in political worldview.

  133 At the same time The evidence on Stockmar’s astonishing influence over the lives of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert can be gained from his memoirs, his correspondence with King Leopold, the Queen’s own testimony, and an unpublished memorandum by Prince Albert’s private secretary, Sir George Anson (Royal Archives, Y.54.15).

  133 Wiechmann was a tedious old soldier Prince William of Löwenstein wrote to Queen Victoria: “The somewhat stiff military nature of the princes’ governor, Colonel von Wiechmann, gave occasion to many disputes with the young princes, and frequently led to most comical scenes. It is impossible to give an idea in writing of the many trifling occurrences of this kind, for the ludicrous effect depended more on the mimicry and accentuation than upon the subject itself” (Early Years, p. 147).

  134 The mathematician Adolphe Quetelet Quetelet once observed that whereas Prince Albert did not think enough of his own talents, King Leopold never forgot his.

  134 “Such an expedition would require Early Years, p. 126.

  134 Berlin, Stockmar informed King Leopold, Memoirs of Baron Stockmar, p. 369. In Strangers (New York: Norton, 2003), his book on nineteenth-century homosexuals, Graham Robb notes that Berlin was famous for its male prostitutes.

  135 As Prince Albert wrote Early Years, pp. 154–155.

  135 Faced with the mass of evidence Lytton Strachey in his biography of the Queen, comments: “In one particular, it was observed, [PA] did not take after his father; owing either to his peculiar upbringing or to a more fundamental idiosyncrasy he had a marked distaste for the opposite sex [my italics]” (Queen Victoria, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1998/1921, p. 88). Strachey offers a sympathetic portrait of the prince as, implicitly, a gay man like himself; a brilliant, sensitive intellectual tragically immolated on the altar of his family’s dynastic ambitions and his wife’s predatory sexuality. Edward. F. Benson (Queen Victoria New York: Longmans, 1935) comments over and again on Prince Albert’s feminine traits and the reversal of roles between him and the Queen. Discussing Prince Albert’s decision to fire the tutor whom his eldest son Bertie had begun to trust and obey, Benson asserts that Albert “remembered his own affection for Herr Florschütz, a disordered unnatural fancy” (Benson, p. 190). Benson gives no supporting reference for this assertion, but it was taken up and cited in 1972 by maverick royal historian David Duff. He accuses the prince of having had “strange and unnatural feelings” for his tutor that had to be “sternly repressed” (Duff, Victoria and Albert, p. 70). Monica Charlot, in her 1991 biography of Queen Victoria, notes that Florschütz was “obviously attracted” to the boy Albert, repeats Duff’s assertion of an improper relationship between the two, and concludes that given the traumatic incidents in the boy’s early childhood and the fact that tutor and pupils lived together in close quarters night and day for fifteen years, it would be “scarcely abnormal” if indeed they had developed some kind of homosexual relationship (Victoria: The Young Queen, pp. 153–154).

  136 Bonn in the early nineteenth century For a fascinating account of Cambridge student life for Prince Albert’s English contemporaries, see James Pope-Hennessy’s two-volume biography of Richard Monckton Milnes.

  136 Very, very occasionally men were See Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century.

  136 As the writer and critic J. M. Coetzee has put it J. M. Coetzee, “Love and Walt Whitman,” the New York Review of Books, September 22, 2005, p. 24.

  137 It contained an edelweiss The Queen kept and treasured the flower, and she notes that, thanks to the scrapboo
k and to a diary kept by Florschütz, her younger son, Prince Arthur, was able to retrace his father’s steps exactly in 1865.

  137 All the same, the grandsons spent Early Years, p. 137.

  137 Prince Albert had seriously injured Again, in a note that allows her to remember each tiny feature of her husband’s body, Queen Victoria reports that Albert had a large scar on his knee from this accident.

  137 The visit would give him Letters of the Prince Consort, ed. Jagow, p. 15.

  138 “The chief question,” wrote Prince Albert Ibid, p. 144.

  138 As soon as the academic semester Within months of saying good-bye to his ducal charges, Rath Christopher Florschütz, aged forty, married the daughter of Herr Superintendent Genzler, a Coburg divine. Prince Albert was astonished at the marriage, as he told his brother.

  139 As Albert wrote to Ernest The Prince Consort and His Brother, ed. Bolitho, p. 11.

  139 On this occasion, as on many Astonishingly, another fire broke out at the Ehrenburg Palace a year later, when, during the feast to celebrate Albert’s betrothal, the gauzy curtains in the great hall blew into the candles and went up in flames. Such minor accidents were taken in stride.

  139 Now I am quite alone Early Years, pp. 156–157. I have preferred to do my own translation from the German text Queen Victoria included in appendix C to her book, rather than cite the overly cautious translation done by her daughter that appears on pp. 156–157. In general Albert has not been well served by his translators.

  140 No one better than Stockmar King Leopold wrote to Queen Victoria on April 13, 1838: “Concerning the education of our friend Albert, it has been the best plan you could have fixed upon, to name Stockmar your commissary-general; it will give unité d’action et de l’ensemble … I have communicated to him what your uncle [Duke Ernest], and the young gentleman seem to wish, and what strikes me as best for the moment. Stockmar will make a regular report to you on this subject” (Raymond, Queen Victoria’s Early Letters, p. 29). 140 “In many, many respects Eyck, p. 18.