Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  But there had been one major, and immensely important and beneficial consequence of the combined Hastings and Bedchamber crises. Conroy resigned his position in the Duchess of Kent’s household on June 1st. A certain mystery remains as to who, or what, precipitated this very desirable event, and the claims of the Duke of Wellington that he was the principal instigator may well have been true. ‘The Duke as usual has been called in, for in desperate cases he is always the Doctor they rely on’, Greville noted on June 1st, and Wellington subsequently reported to Melbourne that ‘That fellow’s going’, and, Melbourne told the Queen, was ‘in great joy at it’. Both the Queen and Melbourne were sceptical about the finality of Conroy’s departure, but in fact it was to be the last – or almost the last – of this sinister and deplorable man. He carried with him into his exile a deep bitterness against Leopold and Lehzen but not, it would appear, against the Queen herself; but she was to remain implacable in her hatred for him and the ill-service he had rendered to herself and her mother. The enormity of Conroy’s misappropriation of other people’s money was only fully appreciated later, but it may be that he considered it expedient to leave England before matters came to light. In any event, Conroy was gone, and the dark shadows that had so deeply afflicted Victoria’s relations with her mother slowly began to lift.

  There were other signs, in addition to the discussions with Melbourne over the possibility of marriage to Prince Albert, that the Queen’s mood had been substantially changed by the torrid events of the spring and summer of 1839. Her relations with Melbourne, although still immensely warm, began to show certain signs of her awareness of the decline in his own spirits. In June she confessed that she had found an evening in his company to be actually dull; on other occasions it was even more apparent that, as the Queen grew up with such rapidity in her new position, she was developing attitudes to which Melbourne did not respond. His flippancy, which had once so delighted her, now sometimes shocked her. His unrepentant dislike of religion – ‘I think there will be a great deal of persecution in this country before long, people interfering with one another about going to Church, and so on’ – was only one, if significant, area of difference. In a neat juxtaposition of their relationship, her admonitions on his eating, drinking, and sleeping habits became severely maternal and censorious. ‘I fear that I was sadly cross with Lord Melbourne’, she wrote after one of these episodes.

  But there was something else. Victoria’s bleak childhood had contained very little enjoyment and few contacts with her contemporaries, and particularly with young men. As she later wrote, she had had ‘no scope for my very violent feelings of affection.’ She found that in this aspect being Queen had not greatly improved her situation, and her unalloyed enjoyment of a visit by the youthful Alexander, Grand Duke of Russia, in the summer and with the subsequent feeling of deflation when he was gone was an indication of her growing interest in young men, in fun, and in laughter. As she remarked wistfully to Melbourne after the Grand Duke had departed, ‘a young person like me must sometimes have young people to laugh with’. She was delighted by the visits of her ‘Ferdinand’ Coburg cousins Augustus and Leopold and the shy and handsome Alexander Mensdorff-Pouilly, son of Princess Sophia. Alexander made a deep impression, even more than the Grand Duke, which both Melbourne and Leopold – with very different motives – hastened to remove. Eventually the young man wrote to Victoria a gentle letter of farewell which one doubts was a wholly spontaneous one. Alexander was indeed a handsome young man, and, as the Queen remarked with charming candour, she was ‘not insensible to beauty’.

  Elizabeth Longford has described this aspect of Queen Victoria’s character admirably:

  The Queen’s susceptibility to beauty was one of her most interesting characteristics. Whether in men, women, children, animals, landscapes, houses or clothes, she hailed it with an enthusiasm unexpected in one who set such store by sterling worth. Just before her marriage she frequently emphasised her admiration for male beauty, often discussing the handsome figure of one or other of her courtiers. Melbourne tried to damp down this ardour, perhaps because he feared no suitable consort would come up to the Queen’s romantic ideals. But she was set on a love-match and beauty was one of the essentials’.20

  It is too much to say that ‘King Leopold had thus cleverly set the stage for Prince Albert and a renewal of warm Coburg family life’.21 All he had achieved was to arrange the visit of the Princes in October, which Queen Victoria had tried to cancel in July. Neither she nor Albert were at all sanguine about the prospects, and the chilling words that ‘I might like him as a friend, and as a cousin, and as a brother, but not more’, emphasised the absence of her commitment. To her credit, she was troubled about the effect on her cousin, and recorded in her Journal (July 12th) a discussion with Melbourne:

  Talked of my fearing that too many of my relations had come over this year, which Lord M. didn’t think, and said there had been no remarks made about it. Talked of my Cousins Ernest and Albert coming over – my having no great wish to see Albert, as the whole subject was an odious one, and one which I hated to decide about; there was no engagement between us, I said, but that the young man was aware that there was the possibility of such a union; I said it wasn’t right to keep him on, and not right to decide before they came; and Lord M. said I should make them distinctly understand anyhow that I couldn’t do anything for a year; I said it was disagreeable for me to see him though, and a disagreeable thing. ‘It’s very disagreeable,’ Lord M. said. I begged him to say nothing about it to anybody, or to answer questions about it, as it would be very disagreeable to me if other people knew it. Lord M. I didn’t mind, as I told him everything. Talked of Albert’s being younger. ‘I don’t know that that signifies,’ said Lord M. ‘I don’t know what the impression would be,’ he continued, ‘there’s no anxiety for it; I expected there would be.’ I said better wait till impatience was shown. ‘Certainly better wait for a year or two,’ he said; ‘It’s a very serious question.’ I said I wished if possible never to marry. ‘I don’t know about that’, he replied.

  Her lack of enthusiasm for Albert was reciprocated. The young man’s impatience and annoyance at his position were very sympathetically viewed by Leopold and Stockmar when he was told that the Queen had said that there could be no discussion on the matter for two or three years ‘at the very earliest’. It was, as the Queen later completely admitted with great remorse, an impossible and humiliating position for a young man, and one that he justifiably strongly resented.

  But the reality of the situation was far more propitious than anyone realised. ‘The stage of schoolgirl hero-worship was passing’, as David Cecil has written of Queen Victoria, ‘and there had begun to stir uneasily within her the desire for a more mature emotional fulfilment’.

  Although in retrospect there appears to be a certain inevitability about the love between the young Queen and Prince Albert, none existed when they approached their second meeting, which they each viewed with doubts and apprehensions, and on Albert’s side with some degree of annoyance. He subsequently wrote to Löwenstein on December 6th that I went therefore [to Windsor] with the quiet but firm resolution to declare on my part that I also, tired of the delay, withdrew entirely from the affair. It was not, however, thus ordained by Providence’.

  Albert and Ernest arrived at Windsor Castle in pouring rain on the evening of October 10th after another terrible crossing of the Channel, cold, ashen, dishevelled, and without their luggage, which had been mislaid. Victoria, waiting for them very nervously at the top of the staircase, was not prepared for the change in Albert since she had last seen him. ‘It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert – who is beautiful’, she wrote that evening. Word was communicated to him that he had ‘made a favourable impression’, but although she told Melbourne on the 13th that she had not made a decision no one at Windsor had any doubt that she had fallen deeply in love. As Melbourne wrote to Lord John Russell on the 13th, ‘A ver
y strong impression is evidently made . . . and I do not know that anything better could be done. He seems a very agreeable young man, he is certainly a very good looking one, and as to character, that we must always take our chance of’.

  Queen Victoria’s admiration for Albert’s ‘beauty’ dominates her Journal and letters even more than on their first meeting, when she had written that ‘Albert is so very handsome, and has such a beautiful and delightful expression’ (Journal, June 4th 1836). ‘Albert’, she wrote now in her Journal on October 11th, ‘really is quite charming, and so extremely handsome, such beautiful blue eyes, an exquisite nose, and such a pretty mouth with delicate moustachios & slight but very slight whiskers: a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders & a fine waist; my heart is quite going’. To Leopold she wrote that ‘Albert’s beauty is most striking, and he is so amiable and unaffected – in short, very fascinating’. Leopold wrote in turn, with skilful restraint, that ‘Albert is a very agreeable companion. His manner is so gentle and harmonious, that one likes to have him near oneself . . . may Albert be able to strew roses without thorns on the pathway of life of our good Victoria! He is well qualified to do so’. The interesting point for Prince Albert’s biographer is that he was making an equally strong impression upon more detached observers. Lady Cowper – shortly to marry Palmerston after a long and star-crossed liaison – wrote that ‘Albert of Coburg, of whom there is so much talk, is a very charming young man, very well mannered and handsome and gay, and said to be very well informed and sensible’. Melbourne was impressed by him at once, although with certain reservations, and when he saw the Queen on October 14th and found that her mind was completely made up he urged her to marry quickly, and together they planned the timetable, the Parliamentary procedures for an allowance for Albert, and honours.

  Albert did not keep a Journal during these hectic days (or if he did, it has disappeared, with his other diaries), but from his letters and subsequent comments one has a clear picture of a shy young man at first bewildered and then deeply moved by Victoria’s passion. ‘How is it that I have deserved so much love, so much affection?’ he wrote to her, signing his letter ‘In body and soul ever your slave, your loyal Albert’. Lytton Strachey stated in his study of Queen Victoria that ‘he was not in love with her’ – only repeating, it is fair to point out, the comments of some contemporaries, including the waspish Duchess of Bedford – and implied, as others have done, that he was stampeded into matrimony by a scheming uncle and a passionate girl experiencing her first real love. But although Prince Albert was indeed understandably bewildered and confused by the pace of events and the turmoil of Queen Victoria’s feelings, we have enough evidence to realise that, beneath his reserve and reluctance to demonstrate his emotions to others, his heart had been deeply touched by Victoria’s warmth, ebullience and attractiveness. Although of a volatile nature, the young Queen had a sparkle and physical beauty which had affected many other men, who had also found her gaiety and zest irresistible. Thus, although Albert’s letters to her were somewhat less frenziedly excited than Victoria’s to him, she had no doubt that her love was fully returned.

  Prince Albert’s shyness and reserve in public was in such contrast with his real personality that his friends have had difficulty in conveying their pleasure in his company. Stockmar’s son wrote that ‘In his intercourse with persons to whom he was intimate, the cheerfulness and amiability of his youth never ceased, as well as a childlike pleasure in jokes, and a rare talent in producing or representing what was comical. In larger circles, on the other hand, he appeared formal, measured, and reserved, and, as many thought, cold and stiff’.

  On October 15th Albert was summoned to a famous private audience, which Victoria related in her Journal:

  ‘I said to him that I thought he must be aware why I wished them [the brothers] to come here, and that it would make me too happy if he would consent to what I wished (to marry me); we embraced each other over and over again, and he was so kind, so affectionate; Oh! to feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel as Albert was too great delight to describe! he is perfection; perfection in every way – in beauty – in everything! I told him I was quite unworthy of him and kissed his dear hand – he said he would be very happy “das Leben mit dir zu zubringen” and was so kind and seemed so happy, that I really felt it was the happiest brightest moment in my life, which made up for all I had suffered and endured. Oh! how I adore and love him, I cannot say!! how I will strive to make him feel as little as possible the great sacrifice he has made . . . I feel the happiest of human beings’.

  ‘The openness of manner in which she told me this quite enchanted me, and I was quite carried away by it’, Albert wrote to his grandmother.

  The references to Albert’s ‘sacrifice’ are frequent in the Queen’s Journal and letters of the time of her engagement. While he demurred at the description, she always appreciated, with acute sensitiveness and sympathy, Albert’s evident uneasiness in England. It was, after all, only his second visit to this cold, sea-tossed island with its peculiar food, uncongenial hours, chaotic politics, and deep suspicions of foreigners, and particularly Germans. ‘While I shall be untiring in my efforts and labours for the country to which I shall in future belong’, he assured his grandmother, ‘and where I am called to so high a position, I shall never cease to be a true German, and true Coburg and Gotha man’.

  Nor did he have any illusions about the other difficulties that would arise as consort of the Queen of England. ‘My future position will have its dark sides, and the sky will not always be blue and brilliant’, he wrote to Löwenstein. ‘. . . My future lot is high and brilliant, but also plentifully strewn with thorns’ was another comment, while to his grandmother he wrote: ‘Oh, the future! does it not bring with it the moment when I shall have to take leave of my dear, dear home, and of you? I cannot think of this without being overcome by a feeling of profound melancholy’. Grandmother Gotha, while delighted at his personal happiness, was ‘very much upset’, as she told Duke Ernest: ‘The brilliant destiny awaiting our Albert cannot reconcile me to the thought that his country will lose him for ever! and, for myself, I lose my greatest happiness . . . I hope the Queen will appreciate him . . . I cannot rejoice’.

  The Court tensions in London were only too obvious, and for someone to whom separation from his brother had been such an agonising experience the prospect of living permanently in a foreign country clearly had severe difficulties, and of which Prince Albert – and Stockmar – were acutely aware.

  It was characteristic of Queen Victoria to realise this immediately, and perhaps even more to her credit that although it would be excessive to say that she never forgot it, she constantly reminded herself of it, and was consequently even more devotedly grateful. For his part, Prince Albert at once assumed a protective attitude towards his adoring fiancée, immediately deeply conscious of her need for such protection and companionship. Few marriages begin with such mutual sensitivity and respect, and these, rather than natural physical attraction between two very attractive young people, was the rock on which their love and their marriage was truly based.

  The day after his engagement Prince Albert wrote to Stockmar:

  ‘I am writing to you today on one of the happiest days of my life to send you the most joyful possible news. Yesterday in a private audience V. declared her love for me, and offered me her hand, which I seized in both mine and pressed tenderly to my lips. She is so good and kind to me that I can scarcely believe such affection should be mine. I know you take part in all my happiness, and so I can pour out my heart to you. For the present the event is to remain a secret, and is to be announced to the nation before being communicated to anyone else, at the meeting of Parliament. What grieves me is that my aunt22 to whom this important step by her daughter touches so nearly is not to know of it. But as everyone says, she cannot keep her mouth shut and might even make bad use of the secret if it were entrusted to her, I quite see the necessity of i
t.

  ‘V. wishes that the wedding shall take place as early as the beginning of February, to which I gladly agreed as the relations between a betrothed pair, when the fact is public property, may often appear indelicate.

  ‘I cannot write further or on more serious matters – I am in too great a state of confusion for

  Das Auge Sieht den Himmel offen

  es Schwimmt das Herz in Seligkeit’.23

  Stockmar’s letter of reply was, although warmly congratulatory, replete with advice and warnings, to which Albert responded meekly but with some firmness that ‘I have laid to heart your friendly and kind-hearted counsels as to the true foundation on which my future happiness must rest, and they accord entirely with the principles which I had already thought out on that subject for myself.

  The secret of their engagement must have been extremely difficult to keep. For the next month the brothers stayed at Windsor, and Victoria and Albert were alone together so often in the Blue Boudoir that it was remarkable that even the Duchess of Kent was unaware of what had happened. It was indeed ‘a halcyon month’, as Roger Fulford has described it. There was no question at all that the Prince was now passionately devoted to Queen Victoria, but acutely conscious that his letters were stilted compared to hers. ‘I reproach myself so often’, he wrote movingly to her, ‘because compared to yours my letters are so cold and stiff, and yet I shrink from boring you with my outpourings’. But this was perhaps excessive self-criticism; in another letter he wrote that: ‘Thinking of you makes me so happy – what a delight it must be to walk through the whole of my life, with its joys and storms, with you at my side. Love of you fills my whole heart’. In a singularly moving letter Ernest told Queen Victoria that ‘Setting aside that he is my brother, I esteem and love him more than any man on earth. You will smile, perhaps, if I speak to you of him in such high terms of eulogy! but I do it in order that you may feel still more what you have gained in him! As yet, you are most taken with his manner, so youthfully innocent, his tranquillity, his clear mind – this is as he appears at first acquaintance. Knowledge of men, & experience – one would read less in his face; and why? because he is pure before the world and before his own conscience; not as if he did not yet know sin, the earthly temptations, the weakness of men – no, but because he knew and still knows how to struggle with them, supported by the incomparable superiority & firmness of his character’.