requires that the husband should entirely sink his own individual existence into that of his wife – that he should aim at no power by himself or for himself – should shun all contention – assume no separate responsibility before the public, but make his position entirely a part of hers – to fill up every gap which, as a woman, she would naturally leave in the exercise of her regal functions – continually and anxiously to watch every part of the public business, in order to be able to advise and assist her in any moment in any of the multifarious and difficult questions brought before her, political, or social, or personal. As the natural head of her family, superintendent of her household, manager of her private affairs, sole confidential adviser in politics and only assistant in her communications with her officers of the Government, he is, besides, the husband of the Queen, the tutor of the royal children, the private secretary of the sovereign and her permanent minister.
In Hanover and Coburg – Albert’s home turf – Salic law pertained, which barred women from reigning. Albert’s doubts about Victoria’s ability to fulfil her duties as sovereign may have stemmed from this. He expected not only to be head of her household, but also to be a political player. From the outset, Albert aimed to exercise ‘personal power unparalleled by any Consort’.
Their uncle Leopold, as usual, offered advice. Immediately before their wedding, Albert and his party had stayed in Brussels. Leopold wrote to Victoria: ‘I have already had some conversation with [Albert], and mean to talk à fond to him tomorrow. My wish is to see you both happy and thoroughly united and of one mind.’ Leopold later told Albert’s secretary, George Anson, that he had urged that Albert ‘ought in business as in everything to be necessary to the Queen … a walking dictionary for reference on any point … [and there] should be no concealment from him on any subject’. Whether Leopold or Albert recounted these ideas to the Queen at the time is not verifiable, but – considering the emotional climate in the week before their wedding – it seems unlikely. Victoria had by now begun to resent Leopold’s advice as intrusive; in a letter written shortly before her marriage (one published by Benson and Esher), she complained to Albert: ‘[Leopold] appears to me to be nettled because I no longer ask his advice, but dear Uncle is given to believe that he must rule the roast [roost] everywhere.’
Three months after the wedding, Albert’s brother Ernest reported that despite Albert’s inroads in the domestic arena, he had achieved no political role for himself. As a wife, Victoria had created ‘a quiet, happy but an inglorious and dull life for him’ but ‘as queen she moves on another level’. Albert, however, had begun to engineer changes. Some of these were documented in memoranda, excerpts of which were included by Benson and Esher. For example, in May 1840, three months after the wedding, Albert requested that his secretary, Anson, ask Lord Melbourne to speak to the Queen about allowing him more influence. In a memorandum written by Anson after discussion with Albert, Victoria was quoted as confirming that the Prince had complained that she did not confide in him on ‘trivial matters and on all matters connected with the politics of the country’, which Lord Melbourne advised her she should do. At the same meeting Baron Stockmar, Leopold’s adviser to Albert, agreed that the ‘Queen had not started upon a right principle’ by excluding the Prince from her meetings with her ministers. He also warned, however, that ‘there is danger in his [Albert] wishing it all at once’, and advised that Victoria ‘should by degrees impart everything’ to Albert. Whether he meant ‘to give’ or ‘to communicate’ is perhaps less important than the qualifier – ‘everything’. Needless to say, such advice would never have been given to a female consort. Conversely, it seems unthinkable that men of such experience should have seriously imagined that Victoria – who as an adolescent had withstood Conroy’s attempt to impose an extended regency, and who spoke often of enjoying queenship – would so readily relinquish a position for which she believed she had been ordained by God.
Benson thought these memoranda ‘interesting enough of the early married days’, but showed no interest in interrogating Albert’s progress. In his 1932 biography of Albert, Hector Bolitho similarly accepted these events as unremarkable: ‘When a woman is in love, her desire for power becomes less and less,’ he wrote. But later biographers have been struck by the baldness of Albert’s aspirations. Monica Charlot in 1991 observed, ‘For Albert there was no doubt that a Queen reigning in her own right was something of an anomaly.’ Victoria did come to accept Albert into a joint monarchy. This eventually occurred not so much because she yielded, however, but because she was so regularly confined by her nine pregnancies and subsequent childbirths and recoveries, which gave the men – both Albert and the politicians – more opportunity to organise matters as they thought fit.
Victoria married in February and by Easter it was known she was with child. This bolstered her husband’s political position, not just his masculinity. In June, an assassination attempt – the first of many – was made on her life. Following this attack, and with all parties aware of the perils of childbirth, in July 1840 an Act was passed through Parliament naming Albert regent in the event of Victoria’s death before her heir’s attainment of eighteen years of age. This was an important event, yet Benson and Esher did not include any reference to it: to do so would have required mentioning a pregnancy, something they could not do. At the time, Albert wrote ecstatically to his brother:
I am to be Regent – alone – Regent without a council. You will understand the importance of this matter and that it gives my position here in the country a fresh significance.
Albert was not yet twenty-one years old. Legally he was not yet an adult. He had been naturalised as British before his marriage, but he did not own property, yet Stockmar, Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington and Albert’s secretary, George Anson all worked behind the scenes to steer the bill through Parliament. Melbourne was delegated to raise the matter with Victoria – a delicate issue which she recorded verbatim in her journal thus:
[Lord Melbourne said,] ‘There is a subject I must mention, which is of great importance, & one of great emergency; perhaps you may anticipate what I mean;’ (which I answered I did not), ‘it is about having a Bill for a Regency’ …
A Queen consort, especially of Albert’s age, would not have been accorded the same responsibilities. Victoria’s mother had been declared Regent in 1820 when Victoria was heir presumptive – but she was a mature woman who had acted as regent for her son in Leiningen for several years during her first widowhood. In Albert’s case, this regency was for the heir apparent. As Monica Charlot observed, ‘The spirit of the age certainly was on Albert’s side.’ Albert acknowledged this himself just before the birth of their first child, the Princess Royal, when he wrote to his brother:
I wish you could see us here and see in us a couple united in love and unanimity. Now Victoria is also ready to give up something for my sake, I everything for her sake … Do not think I lead a submissive life. On the contrary, here, where the lawful position of the man is so, I have formed a prize life for myself.
During Victoria’s confinement for the six weeks following the birth, Albert conducted Privy Council meetings, wrote correspondence on her behalf and met with her ministers. Again, Benson and Esher included no reference to this in their selections, although Victoria noted it in her journal and Albert related it to his brother.
Albert’s progress over the next year was steady. By May, Victoria was again pregnant. Many of the letters and memoranda bearing her name from these years were drafted by Albert, and the editors had to establish a protocol for presenting these. Benson wrote to Esher:
A point of considerable difficulty has turned up … there are a good many memoranda signed Victoria R. These are sometimes in the first person singular ‘I’ and sometimes in the first person plural ‘we’.
But when they are in the first person singular, the word ‘I’ always stands for Prince Albert.
This will cause great confusion.
&
nbsp; Victoria’s use of the third person singular – ‘she’ – throughout her letters was retained. She may have used ‘we’ more frequently in verbal exchanges, but in memoranda written by Albert, ‘we’ referred to the royal couple. A footnote was occasionally given explaining authorship, but frequently this was inconsistent, suggesting that the editors were sometimes unsure.
In 1839, before her marriage, the first great constitutional problem of Victoria’s reign arose: her reluctance to part with Lord Melbourne as Prime Minister. Following a debate in the House of Commons, Melbourne resigned. When the elderly Duke of Wellington refused the Queen’s offer to form a new Tory government, she had to turn to Sir Robert Peel, the Conservative leader in the House of Commons. According to custom, a change of government was accompanied by a change of the personnel of the monarch’s household; convention held that the new Prime Minister should nominate the Ladies of the Bedchamber. The existing Ladies had been chosen on Lord Melbourne’s advice and were thus predominantly Whigs, with no Conservative connections or sympathies. Peel demanded that this custom be observed. Victoria refused.
Benson and Esher documented this crisis more thoroughly than they did most other topics. They showed Peel to have had none of Melbourne’s ability to persuade the young Queen, who had no intention of giving in. There is room for debate as to her motives. Was she trying to hold to a political principle? Did she feel a particular attachment to her ladies? She had only been Queen for a little over twelve months and perhaps felt some insecurity in the running of her Court. Or did she realise that she might be able to return Lord Melbourne’s ministry to power? The documents in the Letters, especially her journal entries, tend to suggest the latter. Writing in her diary midway through the crisis, she recorded: ‘Lord Melbourne said we might be beat. I said I never would yield.’ The following days produced a torrent of letters and memoranda, which Benson and Esher selected and edited to great dramatic effect.
Peel finally refused to take office, being unable to secure a majority. Melbourne continued as Prime Minister. When he resigned again in 1841, Victoria was in the early part of her second pregnancy, which had followed uncomfortably closely after the first; her first two babies were born a mere fifty weeks apart. What Benson and Esher’s selection does not reveal is that Albert and Melbourne, without Victoria’s knowledge, discussed how to avert a second Bedchamber Crisis and sent Anson to meet with Sir Robert Peel to ‘prepare the ground’ for a change of government. Following these meetings, Victoria signed a memorandum instructing the Prime Minister to appoint only those members of her household who would be sitting in Parliament. She retained the right to appoint her own Ladies of the Bedchamber, although the Prime Minister could object to particular individuals ‘in case he would deem their appointment injurious to the Government’. There were still some upsetting scenes in the Court, which suggests that Victoria was not happy with the situation. This in turn suggests that the memorandum was drafted by Albert.
Benson and Esher included many letters from this period, mostly between Victoria and Melbourne. In the end only three of Victoria’s ladies were asked to resign. Melbourne declared that his time in Victoria’s service was ‘the proudest as well as the happiest part of his life’. Sir Robert Peel and his Cabinet were finally sworn into office in September 1841, and Albert was made chairman of the Arts Commission for the rebuilding of Parliament. In contrast to Victoria, Albert liked Peel and forged a strong working relationship and friendship with the new Prime Minister. The Whig sympathies of the Court were shifting. In any case, Peel had won by a substantial majority in the general election and could not easily have been undermined, even by the monarch.
By August 1841, Albert believed that the ‘Court from highest to lowest’ had been brought ‘to a proper sense of the position of the Queen’s husband’. Senior statesmen like Melbourne and Palmerston were non-plussed by Albert’s fervour, but also admiring of his tenacity. Monica Charlot observed that the two Whig statesmen were ‘caricatures of English aristocrats’ – gregarious, displaying an air of indolence, epicures, accomplished in the art of witty exchanges after dinner and fond of the company of women – whereas Albert was the opposite – ‘Germanic, solitary, intolerant, finding social life time-wasting, and women of little interest’. Albert was thirty years their junior, with values and ideas of which they were sceptical. Despite these differences, they admired his good qualities, although Albert remained highly critical of them.
It seems that these politicians saw no reason to question the ambitions of a male consort to a sovereign; it was only natural that Albert should seek to exercise more power. The response had been very different when Queen Adelaide, consort of Victoria’s uncle, King William IV, was thought to have influenced the King during the reform agitation. On one occasion, her carriage was assailed by an angry mob. When the government resigned in 1834, The Times declared, ‘The Queen has done it all’; the headline was placarded all over London. It was not all plain sailing for Albert. In 1854 he was (falsely) accused of political meddling and declared a traitor by the broadsheets; he was even rumoured to have been sent to the Tower of London. Nevertheless, the double standard persisted into the 1900s, and Benson and Esher saw nothing unusual in Albert’s desire to expand his role.
Nor did Benson and Esher seek to downplay Albert’s influence, as they had done with King Leopold. Albert was more foreign than Leopold, but as the Queen’s husband and, to a lesser extent, as father of the heir, his growing power was perfectly acceptable. The part Victoria’s pregnancies played in his ascension got no mention. Victoria did come to acknowledge how competent Albert was and increasingly deferred to his judgment. Their marriage remained a partnership, albeit one very different from the conventional Victorian vision of marriage, and one requiring more complex negotiation than the published letters would suggest.
Chapter 9
WOMEN’S BUSINESS
BENSON FOUND WOMEN’S LETTERS to be ‘very tiresome’. Consequently very few of the thousands of letters Victoria exchanged with her female relations and friends were included. She corresponded with many women, including: her half-sister, Princess Feodore of Hohenlohe-Langenburg; her aunt Louise, Queen of the Belgians, wife of Leopold and daughter of King Louis-Philippe of France; her cousin Victoire, Duchess of Nemours and sister of Ferdinand; her sister-in-law Alexandrine, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg from 1842; and Dona Maria, Queen of Portugal.
The small number of women’s letters in the published volumes cannot be attributed to the editors’ ignorance of their existence. As early as March 1904, Benson described a set of letters from Princess Feodore as ‘simple family letters, full of detail, such as the Queen loved. But the writing is troublesome … They would be interesting enough just to skim through if they were printed.’ Feodore’s handwriting is far easier to decipher than Lord Melbourne’s, and Benson was more than willing to struggle with Melbourne’s hieroglyphics. Excerpts from four of Feodore’s letters were published, but there survive hundreds more, written weekly over a forty-four year period, in the Royal Archives at Windsor and at the Hohenlohe-Zentral Archive in Germany. Surely such a long friendship would have revealed a unique side of Victoria’s nature, especially given the intimacies of sisterhood and the particular circumstances of these two women? Feodore was married to an elderly, impoverished duke and struggled to raise her children in loneliness and isolation in Germany, far away from her mother, who remained in England, while Victoria became Queen, married and had a large number of children.
Another entry in Benson’s diary confirms that women’s letters were available: ‘finished the last vol. of documents – the letters of Q. Louise [of the Belgians] up to the end of 1841 …’ Esher and Knollys discussed the whereabouts of Victoria’s correspondence with Alexandrine in 1905. Esher also knew about the letters from Feodore and Queen Adelaide to Victoria’s official governess, the Duchess of Northumberland, concerning Victoria’s welfare under the Kensington System. These were drawn to the editors’ attention very late
in the editing. Even if they had been found earlier, however, it is unlikely that they would have been included, given their subject matter.
The Queen of Portugal’s monthly letters to Victoria, written in a very idiosyncratic French with little or no punctuation, are held in the Royal Archives, Windsor. Benson and Esher included one letter from Maria, congratulating Victoria on her engagement, but Maria wrote many more over the following thirteen years. Only six of Victoria’s replies have been found to date in Lisbon and discovering more is unlikely – as Maria confessed to Victoria, ‘I have the rather bad habit of tearing up letters after I have replied to them.’
Victoria and Maria met in person on only two occasions, both times in London as children. Maria, just seven weeks older than Victoria, came to the Portuguese throne as a fifteen-year-old in politically tumultuous times. By the time she married Prince Ferdinand (Victoria’s cousin), when she was seventeen, she had already been betrothed to her uncle and then married to her stepmother’s brother, who died two months after their wedding. After negotiations between the various chancelleries of Europe, a marriage contract was signed in Coburg with Baron Stockmar as one of the signatories. Maria married Ferdinand first by proxy and then in person in Lisbon in 1836. Their first child was born the following year. (Bismarck was, later in the century, to characterise the House of Saxe-Coburg as the ‘stud farm of Europe’.)
At the start of their correspondence, the letters between Victoria and Maria were brief, and Maria mentioned Ferdinand only rarely. This may have been in deference to Victoria’s still being a single girl. After Victoria’s marriage, and especially after her first child was born, their letters became much more personal and familiar. Victoria was impressed by Maria’s devotion, almost fealty, to Ferdinand. In a letter to Leopold before her accession in 1837, Victoria wrote of Maria, ‘One good quality, however, she has, which is her excessive fondness for, and real obedience to, Ferdinand.’ After Victoria’s wedding day, the more experienced Maria wrote:
Censoring Queen Victoria Page 10
