Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  Family problems remained, however. In spite of her reconciliation with her daughter, the Duchess of Kent was not an easy woman, was quick to complain of neglect or any other failings, and had as fiery a temper as her daughter. It was fortunate that she was so genuinely devoted to Albert, and he to her, as it was sometimes his duty to deny her wishes. Her deep affection for her nephew was usually mixed with expressions of her grievances against the lack of consideration shown towards her, as when she told Anson (April 26th 1841) that ‘She thought the P. was not properly supported in his very difficult position, & she had not the influence to assist him in any way which a mother’s authority ought to give. She felt there was a want of little attentions towards her, which she was less indifferent on her own account than for the opinion of the public which she felt would blame her Child’. Anson defended both Victoria and Albert in this discussion, but when the Duchess pleaded for Conroy to be forgiven and reinstated he had to say that this was impossible. It was some time before she accepted this fact, and did so with such reluctance and unhappiness that the reader of her letters is left in no doubt about her emotional dependence upon him, and which long survived his disgrace and exile, both of which she constantly attempted to reverse until she realised that the venture was without hope. On this matter, Prince Albert was implacable.

  Early in January 1843, to take one example, she wrote to ask for a favour, an apartment in Hampton Court, for a member of the Conroy family. He replied:

  . . . I have not informed V. of your wish, for I should be sorry if she saw that you still retain a certain tender attachment for a family to whom the peace and quiet of the whole of her earlier life was sacrificed. In spite of that, Victoria does more for Sir John than she does for anyone, and I am afraid that even you in your limited circumstances impose privations on yourself and deprive yourself of the pleasure of doing something to relieve the situation of your own children, who really love you, I mean Karl and particularly Feodora, in order to heap favours on a man to whom you feel under an obligation, whereas it is he who owes you endless gratitude for raising him up from nowhere, and he who bears the guilt for so much of the suffering to which you were exposed and are still daily exposed . . .

  The Duchess wrote back on January 12th:

  My dear Albert,

  Your answer to the wish I expressed to you has upset me very much; I cannot say how much I regret that I wrote to you about it. Your remark that the peace and quiet of V’s earlier life was sacrificed to this family wounded me very much! it was too strong and unjust. I intended to leave your letter unanswered, but I could not bring myself to do so. Had Stockmar not told me last year that V. was not disinclined to grant her former playmate this favour which costs her nothing, I should not have mentioned it again.

  As to the remainder of your letter, I will only remark that Sir John was in the service of the late Duke; – and that I help Feodora as much as I now can.

  Your answer surprises and upsets me! I must repeat how deeply I regret having written to you about this matter.

  Your

  true

  Mother

  Albert’s response illuminates their relationship:

  I am deeply sorry that my letter wounded you, which truly was not my intention. But I considered it my duty to place the naked truth before you, as we are always more or less inclined to harbour illusions, and I am the only person whose relationship to you makes it possible to do this, and who can speak impartially and dispassionately of matters in which he was not involved.

  I should not be fulfilling my duty as a son, nor showing you true devotion, if out of fear of upsetting you for a moment I flinched from telling you the truth about a situation which has already caused you so much suffering and which daily continues to do so.

  This difference was quickly resolved, and the Duchess’s letters resumed their pattern of ‘My beloved Albert’ (Mein theurer geliebter Albert), and ending ‘Your truly loving Mother’ (Deine dich innigst liebende Mutter). He was sensitive to her need for small tokens of her position as mother of the Queen – the ‘little attentions’ for which she craved – and frequently was able to achieve them. Her rebukes – ‘I fear you and Victoria are not missing your Mama very much; that is how it is as life goes on’, and ‘Grandmamma send you both her love; she complains a little that you do not write to her very often, but I have defended you’ – are mild enough, and in one case had absolutely no effect:

  . . . As you seem to have sworn death to all pheasants, I beg you to spare the poor Frogmore pheasants, they come up under my window now, and Sir George claims that partridges come quite close too, and he told me that in the course of 15 months 40 cats had been shot in the garden . . .

  The essential problem had been that there was too little for Prince Albert to do. He busied himself intensely with reorganising the Court and its finances to the point that Peel became worried about the possibility of ‘a cheap Court’, to which Albert responded sympathetically, but pointed out that the existing system ‘works so that neither regularity, comfort, or security, nor outward dignity is in the Queen’s Palace’. This was tedious work which, Albert wrote, ‘hung about me like an ever-present weight’, and made him highly unpopular with politicians and others who had relations or friends at Court. The Queen was not greatly interested in these matters, and Peel, although very sympathetic, had to address himself to the political aspects of the Prince’s constant searches for economies and reforms. As late as 1844 he minuted warningly to the Prince that ‘Reforms in the Royal Household are not very palatable to either of the great political parties of the State . . . The esprit de corps, the fear of reductions, the hope of profiting by lavish expenditure, unite all, whatever be their party attachments, by a sense of common interest’. Eventually, to Albert’s intense relief, complete authority was given to the Master of the Household of his own choice, and he was wholly freed from these vexations. The reforms were indeed long overdue, and of great benefit, but it was poor – if onerous – employment for a man of his abilities. The fact that he did it at all, and did it so well, is greatly to his credit, but gave him neither pleasure nor satisfaction. In a far more interesting and rewarding area he addressed himself to the affairs of the Duchy of Cornwall in meticulous detail, to their lasting advantage.

  But after his skilful steering of the Ministerial transition of 1841 he now attended audiences with the Queen with her Ministers. ‘I must alone be her adviser’, as he told the departing Melbourne. He was increasingly informed about political and official business. He took charge of the Royal papers, read widely and deeply, was an indefatigable correspondent, a devoted husband and father – and yet, as Melbourne and Anson noted, was bored and dissatisfied. Queen Victoria shared neither his intense feeling for nature nor his pleasure in the company of intellectuals, which Melbourne – probably rightly – ascribed to her sense of inferiority in their presence. Long evenings playing chess or at official functions were infinitely tedious to him, and his inability at ‘small talk’ often gave others the impression of aloofness, coldness, and even arrogance, when the simple fact was that he was ineffably bored.

  Victoria frankly liked to be amused and entertained, and was far from hostile to the pleasures of the table – ‘A Queen does not drink a bottle of wine at a meal’, Stockmar wrote censoriously – she loved London and its excitements, was certainly not interested in ‘a cheap Court’, intensely resented her pregnancies, and had so little in common with her husband’s intellectual concerns and activities that the strength of their marriage becomes even more remarkable. It was a real sacrifice for her to abandon London life for ‘the solid pleasures of a peaceable, quiet, yet merry life in the country’, yet one she did make on his behalf. Also, always sensitive to his ‘sacrifice’ in leaving Coburg, she was increasingly concerned about his status. At the end of 1841 she wrote in her Journal, touchingly, that he ‘is above me in everything, really, and therefore I wish he should be equal in
rank with me’ and tentatively proposed again to Stockmar the idea of creating him King Consort. Stockmar, while understanding the motive, again strongly advised against such a step at so early a stage, and Peel agreed. Prince Albert had no knowledge of this proposal, which the Queen shelved but never abandoned. Both Albert and Stockmar strongly resisted the proposal that he should succeed Wellington as Commander-in-Chief after Wellington’s death, and very wisely.

  The key to his happiness lay not in titles or status, but in his political influence with the Queen and her Ministers. It had taken some time for Queen Victoria to realise this, and then she had resisted strongly. But the departure of Melbourne, the arrival of the far more amenable – to Albert – Peel, and the removal of Lehzen transformed his position, and his happiness. ‘He is now all-powerful’, Greville recorded; ‘. . . Melbourne told me long ago that the Prince would acquire unbounded influence’. Stockmar, summoned by Albert to assist him in resolving the intractable problems of the Royal Household and finances, noted the difference in April 1843:

  The Queen is well, the Princess wonderfully improved [in health], round as a little barrel, and the Prince of Wales, though a little plagued with his teeth, is strong upon his legs, with a calm, clear, bright expression of face. The Prince himself is well and happy, though he frequently looks pale, worried, and weary. He is rapidly showing what is in him. He is full of a practical talent, which enables him at a glance to seize the essential points of a question, like the vulture that pounces on its prey and hurries off with it to his nest.

  Lehzen’s departure not only led to the complete reconciliation between Victoria and her mother but to one between the Duchess and Queen Adelaide; Albert did not exaggerate when he told Ernest that it had required ‘the skill of a diplomat and the delicate touch of a tightrope walker, but patience and perseverance have won the day’. Thus, the bitter acrimonies which Queen Victoria had known all her life, and which had been a major part of it, were suddenly and dramatically replaced by harmony and love. It was in some respects Prince Albert’s greatest single contribution to his wife’s happiness in the first years of their marriage.

  There are few fates so melancholy for a man of ability, ambition, and political interests and skills to be placed in a political situation in which he is only a tentative participant, and is reduced to the position of an impotent observer. This had been Albert’s fate for the first year of his marriage, and had created the frustration which was the real cause of the explosion of January 1842, especially after his role in the smooth change of Government the previous summer. From this time his political role as the Queen’s chief counsellor, secretary, and sole confidant, although never formally defined, became understood and accepted by her and by her Ministers. His really useful and significant work could now begin.

  After this sad, but perhaps inevitable, and indeed even necessary, crisis, 1842 became a year of peace and happiness for the Royal couple, made especially memorable by their first visit to Scotland. Apart from a brief but very successful visit by George IV in 1822, no reigning monarch had visited Scotland since the unfortunate precedent of Charles I. The Royal couple went to Edinburgh, Perth, Taymouth and Stirling. Their reception was ecstatic, they were fascinated by the country and the people, and Albert, who was very struck by the similarities with the land and towns around Coburg, was introduced to the skills of deer-stalking, which he described as ‘one of the most fatiguing, but it is also one of the most interesting of pursuits’. They departed on September 15th with real regret. ‘As the fair shores of Scotland receded more and more from our view’, Queen Victoria related as their ship left the Firth of Forth, ‘we felt quite sad that this very pleasant and interesting tour was over; but we shall never forget it’. It was not until later that the idea of buying property in Scotland occurred to them, but this first venture across the Border left an indelible mark on both, and they returned in 1844.33

  It must be emphasised that in political as well as in personal terms their marriage was a partnership, and a most remarkable one. They worked together, with adjoining desks, whether at Buckingham Palace or Windsor, and, later, Osborne and Balmoral, and the sheer volume of the official and private documents they read and wrote demonstrates how hard and conscientiously they did work. But there was also laughter and enjoyment, as there was whenever they were together, save in the moments of sharp disagreements, which became fewer and fewer as their love and mutual respect deepened.

  It is because they worked together as a team that it is dangerous – except in certain clear and specific cases – to give the credit or otherwise to either of them individually. Although Albert’s influence on the Queen’s attitudes and opinions became immensely strong, to the point when she almost always – although not always – took his advice, her own judgements and opinions had their influence on him. She never entirely accepted his harsh views about Palmerston and his policies, although on this she often deferred to Albert and took his cause, and, as subsequent events proved, was more in instinctive sympathy with Palmerston’s English nationalistic view of the world than with her husband’s essentially pacific inter-nationalism, which she admired and supported, but with obvious inner qualifications. She was proud of her husband’s growing, and eventually very high, reputation among intellectuals, but did not really share his pleasure in their company. Her assessments of people may have often been impulsive and wrong, but they stemmed from a warm personality, and were an invaluable corrective to his, which often tended to place too heavy an importance on cerebral and moral qualities – although, as has been emphasised, this latter aspect in his character has been consistently exaggerated. Thus, in the case of Peel, Victoria’s uneasiness at his bleak and awkward manner initially led her – in addition to her Whig sympathies – to underestimate his many other qualities, but she was not entirely wrong in sensing that there was something lacking in his personality, and an inner coldness that his admirers fervently deny but which certainly existed. For his part, Albert’s admiration for Peel’s brain, experience, and unblemished character took him too far in accepting his judgements as almost automatically right. It was their combined assessment that was so interesting, and, so far as any human judgements on other humans are correct, was very close to the truth.

  This was also to happen over Palmerston, for whom Albert was to develop a very grudging, halting, but definite respect after years of intense and sometimes even bitter animosity – and which was wholly reciprocated. Here again, it was the combination of their characters and minds that brought the couple to a collective opinion that was eventually balanced, fair, and sensible.

  The quality and clarity of the Queen’s handling of business after Albert died – and most notably in the over-criticised period of withdrawal immediately after his death – is evidence enough that although she had learned much from him, and relied heavily upon his judgements, she herself had a mind to be admired, a firm application to work, however disagreeable, and much common sense and a shrewd understanding of human nature. Thus, it was the combination of these two remarkable minds and personalities that gave such formidable and growing strength to the political position of the Crown. The achievements, and the errors, were those of the team, working together in loving and happy collaboration at their linked desks.

  On November 25th Albert was so struck by a passage on King William III in Hallam’s History of England which he had been reading that he copied it out and sent it to Anson. It read: ‘The demeanour of William, always cold, and sometimes harsh, his foreign origin (a sort of crime in English eyes) conspired to keep alive this disaffection’. Anson and he then discussed the matter, and Albert said that while he could easily understand such antipathy, he had not experienced it personally.

  There was truth in this, but the fact was that his growing popularity was limited. His campaign to abolish duelling in the Army was not well received in traditional circles, and his open hostility to London Society was keenly resented. ‘He was not made t
o shine in commonplace society,’ it was well written by a contemporary. ‘He could talk admirably about something, but he had not the gift of talking about nothing, and probably would not have cared much to cultivate such a faculty . . . Thus it happened that he remained for many years, if not exactly unappreciated, yet not thoroughly appreciated, and that a considerable and very influential section of society was always ready to cavil at what he said, and find motive for suspicion in most things that he did’.

  By this stage Albert had definitely influenced Victoria’s attitude to town life, to the point when she had come to resent almost as deeply as he did the time they had to spend in London. Artists and musicians – most notably Mendelssohn – were welcome guests at Buckingham Palace and Windsor. Albert in effect became the Master of the Queen’s Musick, added strings to the wind instruments of the Queen’s Private Band, transformed its repertoire, and made it give the first performance in England of Schubert’s C Major Symphony. Peel’s appointment of him as President of the Fine Arts Commission gave him particular pleasure. He greatly increased and extended Victoria’s interest in music, and encouraged her painting, for which she had real ability, and installed etching equipment at the Palace. With their storms past, Lehzen gone, his wife and her mother totally reconciled, this was a period of much contentment. Vicky, called ‘Pussy’, was a great joy, and Bertie was thriving.