Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  Queen Victoria was most gratified by the great press of people all the way from the palace gates to Westminster Abbey and ‘such an extraordinary outburst of enthusiasm as I had hardly ever seen in London before’. When she arrived at the abbey, state trumpeters high up on the roodscreen played a fanfare and the congregation rose for the national anthem. From the entrance the queen could see the cavernous space inside glowing with colour, the military in different shades of uniform, the crimson robes of the judiciary, the many splendid costumes of princes from across the world. As she proceeded down the long nave to the coronation chair, escorted by her family, a march from Handel’s Occasional Oratorio filled the air, adding to the solemnity of the occasion. This was the moment: Queen Victoria, elderly and modestly attired, appeared to be the shining symbol of prosperity and peace in an uncertain world. Those around her may have outshone her in their magnificence, but, as she walked through the abbey, there was no doubt who was queen and empress of the mightiest empire in the world.

  Whatever his opinion on her bonnet, the Liberal statesman Lord Rosebery later humbly conceded that few ‘could view unmoved . . . that touching and majestic moment in the Abbey when your Majesty appeared alone and aloft – symbolising so truly your Majesty’s true position’. As the service concluded, the many members of the queen’s family advanced forward to bow or curtsy before her and kiss her hand, some with tears in their eyes as she embraced them warmly; sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, grandsons-in-law and granddaughters-in-law. Queen Victoria felt it to be ‘a very moving moment’ and she was not alone. Her role as mother of the large royal dynasty merged with her role as the mother of the mother country and the symbolism stirred Lord Rosebery. ‘When later your Majesty passed from the Sovereign to the Mother, the touch of nature which has brought your Majesty into sympathy with the humblest of your subjects added the supreme emotion to a matchless scene.’16

  However glorious her role and however flattering her ministers, the queen had to act within the limits of her powers as head of state. In contrast to the immense power of the sovereigns of three of Europe’s great empires, autocratic Russia and semi-autocratic Austria-Hungary and Germany, according to Britain’s constitutional monarchy the queen could not dictate policy, raise taxes or lead the country to war. The last British monarch to veto a bill had been Queen Anne, 180 years previously. No matter how much Queen Victoria preferred one prime minister over another, she learned to put up with her least favourites, even Gladstone who she loathed and often attempted to oppose. Her progress was part of Prince Albert’s achievement; his vision had been to fashion a new role for the monarchy that rose above party politics, although even he believed the sovereign should have powers over the executive.17 Nonetheless he had helped Victoria to understand her most critical mistakes, notably in 1839 during the ‘Bedchamber Crisis’: the young queen had refused to relinquish any of her Whig ladies-in-waiting when the Conservatives had tried to form a government, in order to engineer that her Whig favourite, Lord Melbourne, stayed in power.18 In Victoria’s later years her private secretary, Ponsonby, noted that she still occasionally chafed against her inability to dictate policy and showed an increasing desire to interfere, which was often thwarted. Either she could not quite comprehend or it was convenient for her not to comprehend the exact limits of her power. But there remained one sphere of activity over which she exercised more than a symbolic control and it arose through her role as a grandmother.

  Proceeding through the London streets on that hot day in June 1887 were key players in the royal family’s future success: her grandchildren. The queen had long understood the importance of their marital alliances to extend royal power and influence, and in this particular sphere it was within her unique power to shape the political landscape of Europe. Thirty-four of her grandchildren survived to adulthood, and as they came of age she could turn Prince Albert’s vision into reality. But by the time of her Golden Jubilee, Queen Victoria had to acknowledge that an indefinable human element had entered Prince Albert’s plans. The varying abilities of their descendants and the extraordinarily complex political situations in which they sometimes found themselves had not proved conducive to achieving the grand vision. Central to her concern was the future of the British monarchy.

  For many years Queen Victoria had been troubled that her oldest son, Bertie, would not make a good king. Far from having that air of a Sunday school teacher about him that Prince Albert would have approved of, Bertie’s prodigious appetite for life’s little pleasures, especially with the opposite sex, had not diminished with his steady progress through middle age and the inconvenient widening of his girth. Ever since the queen’s beloved husband had been snatched from her in his prime, so reduced, she thought, by the revelations of Bertie’s adventures with an actress called ‘Nellie’ that Albert had succumbed to typhoid, their wayward oldest son had elevated philandering to an art form. With painful frankness, she blamed Bertie unfairly for the death of her husband. ‘Oh! That boy . . . I never can or shall look at him without a shudder’, she had confided to Vicky in Germany.19 Over the years there was gossip of Bertie’s liaisons with some fifty women, at least one of whom had landed him in the divorce courts, not to mention exciting goings-on in the most luxurious of Parisian brothels, Le Chabanais. No doubt Bertie was at pains to conceal from his mother that he had even had a contraption custom-made, promisingly called ‘a seat of love’, which aimed to provide sublime little extras for his possibly fading libido to help jolly things along.20 For Queen Victoria, whose sober life revolved around her duties, the seasons marking the transitions to Balmoral, Windsor or Osborne House with almost unvarying predictability, even without knowledge of Le Chabanais, her oldest son’s reckless impropriety with women was shaming and made her ‘very sad and angry’, she told Vicky. It overturned the Albertine ideal that required a monarch to meet the highest standards of mental, physical and moral attainment. ‘Oh what will become of the poor country when I die!’ she lamented.21

  The queen’s continuing disappointment in her first heir apparent prompted her to look to her second, Bertie’s oldest son, Prince Albert Victor, or ‘Eddy’ as he was known in the family. For the public watching the spectacle of the Golden Jubilee on that hot day in June, Prince Eddy was easily recognisable among the seventeen princes on horseback: a twenty-three-year-old of pleasing appearance whose even features bore a resemblance to his mother. But whereas Princess Alexandra was an acknowledged beauty, he was not quite handsome, and lacked her vivacity and his father’s air of confidence. Nevertheless he cut an impressive figure dressed in his naval uniform, the heavy fabric and decorations masking his natural delicacy. Years of cavalry training enabled him to ride well, his bearing dignified, his youthful air full of promise. Standing amongst the press of people with his programme sheet, the American journalist Ralph Blumenfeld noted the cheers of the crowd as he passed; the young prince was a ‘popular feature’ of the procession.22

  As Queen Victoria’s oldest British grandson, Eddy’s prospects were brilliant as arguably the most eligible young prince in history: the second in line to the British throne at the height of the empire’s power. His inheritance assured him of his position in the world as a future ruler of the largest empire the world had ever seen, approaching a quarter of the surface of the globe. He could offer his future consort the first position in Europe. In the words of his Aunt Vicky, of all the princes, Eddy was ‘first prize’.

  His grandmother knew otherwise. Rumours of a most indelicate and unwelcome nature were beginning to wend their way down the corridors of Balmoral and Windsor. Although Eddy knew how to charm the queen, she was not fooled. Her investigations revealed a young prince who was very far removed from being anything like his namesake, the illustrious Prince Albert. The young man on whom the whole great edifice would eventually rest had to be taken in hand.

  The high expectations required of the young prince were enshrined in his very name, purposefully chosen by Queen Victoria sh
ortly after his birth in January 1864: Prince Albert Victor. In her eyes, her late husband embodied all the shining attributes that this new prince required for his passage through life. It was the queen who proclaimed the baby’s illustrious name at his baptism in the chapel at Buckingham Palace, having given his mother, Alexandra, and father, Bertie, little choice in the matter.23

  From the very beginning the newborn prince fell short of the most exacting standards of physical perfection the queen looked for, through no fault of his own since he was born two months prematurely and weighed only three and three-quarter pounds. The queen blamed his father, Bertie, once again. Her oldest son’s pleasure-seeking and raffish ‘whirl of amusements’ continued after his marriage and she believed had exhausted his pretty young wife as she had struggled to hold his interest.24 Prince Eddy remained weak and ‘very fairy like’ at a year old, the queen observed. ‘What is not pretty is his very narrow chest (rather pigeon chested)’, which she felt took after his mother’s slender frame, rather than the sturdier build of his father.25

  Prince Eddy was joined in the nursery after eighteen months by a younger brother, George, who was more robust, and over time by three sisters, Louise, Victoria and finally Maud, born in 1869. Queen Victoria was never completely at ease with the apparently chaotic lifestyle of their parents, whose hectic social round formed a marked contrast to her own wholesome routine. Bertie was often absent and Alexandra, a devoted and indulgent mother, loved to take her children on prolonged trips to her home country of Denmark. She placed a firm emphasis on fun; boisterous and unruly behaviour was rarely chastised. Victoria was concerned that this approach was not conducive to raising future monarchs. Bertie and Alexandra’s children seemed to her ‘puny and pale . . . wild as hawks’ and worryingly ‘ill-bred’ and ‘ill-trained’.26

  Discipline entered Prince Eddy’s life when he was almost six in the shape of a nursery governess called Miss Brown, who began to teach him and George the rudiments of reading and writing. Sensing a certain lack of progress, Queen Victoria intervened in 1871, personally selecting a tutor for the two boys. The Reverend John Dalton, a liturgical scholar equipped with a First Class degree from Cambridge, appeared to be blessed with all the right attributes to bring out the best in the two princes. Dalton was industrious, learned and suitably deferential whilst also full of advice that happily coincided with Queen Victoria’s own views. He subjected the boys to a strict regime that began at 7 a.m. each morning and was designed to instil an appreciation of languages, the arts, history, mathematics – Euclid as well as algebra – and of course, the Bible.27

  Unfortunately, five years of this intense instruction appeared to leave Prince Eddy lacking the same appetite for study as his famous namesake. The Prince Albert was said to have displayed a keen attention to his lessons from a young age, but the Reverend Dalton reported with concern in 1876 that Prince Eddy could scarcely be made ‘to work at all’ without the presence of his younger brother, George. The following year Dalton was obliged to admit that his young charge was ‘somewhat deficient’ in habits ‘of promptitude and method, of manliness and self-reliance’.28

  In an attempt to remedy such blemishes, in 1877 after consultation with the queen, thirteen-year-old Eddy was enlisted with his brother, George, as a cadet in the Royal Navy on HMS Britannia. Despite rigorous supervision, as the months passed Dalton was sufficiently confounded by Eddy’s lack of progress to advise his parents to consider removing him from the Britannia. Alexandra was ‘dreadfully distressed’ at this news and favoured keeping her sons together rather than educating Eddy ‘at home alone’.29 The other cadets continued to outshine the heir to the throne and after two years Dalton admitted that his charge was still unable ‘to fix his attention to any given subject for more than a few minutes consecutively’.30

  Such undesirable news provoked much deliberation in elevated circles. The queen, the prince’s parents and even members of the cabinet became drawn into discussions over the next steps in the edification of the young princes. Bertie favoured sending his sons overseas, but the queen was not satisfied that a continued absence from home was the solution. On the other hand, she and her long-suffering daughter-in-law were united in a desire to shield Eddy and George from any knowledge of their father’s rakish pursuits. Eventually, all were agreed that fifteen-year-old Eddy and fourteen-year-old George should be sent for a prolonged tour of the British Empire on HMS Bacchante. As ever they were accompanied by Reverend Dalton, who took steps to screen the princes from exposure to any tittle-tattle about their father that found its way into the newspapers.

  Every care went into creating the kind of moral uprightness exhibited by the boys’ grandfather. Just to be sure, Queen Victoria’s homilies on virtue reached her grandsons in all corners of the empire. ‘Be always good, simple, pure of heart and mind, honest, dutiful, unselfish, honourable and kind to all . . .’ she ‘most earnestly’ instructed Eddy on his sixteenth birthday.31 Such advice arrived with unsolicited regularity. ‘May God bless you and give you strength to resist all evil and all temptations and be good, honest, God-fearing, unselfish, unfrivolous (which is very necessary in these days) dutiful, & affectionate to your grandmother and sovereign . . .’, she counselled in January 1883.32 Eddy’s polite replies to his grandmother show he had at least learned tact. Her ‘good advice gave me much pleasure’, he wrote. ‘If I follow out all you have said I could not do better.’ He reassured his grandmamma that the days he had spent with her in Balmoral were the ‘happiest days I have had in Scotland’.33

  His studious grandfather, as a young nineteen-year-old, had ventured to correct no less an authority than the pope on the finer points of Egyptian influences on Greek art. Eddy’s letters to his grandmamma faithfully charted his course across the world but failed to provide comparable evidence of an emerging scholar. He had climbed the pyramids, seen a cattle farm in a desolate spot in Cape Verde off the west coast of Africa, and visited his Uncle William, the king of Greece, where he found ‘the drive out from Athens was very pretty’.34 Although Eddy was ‘endowed with natural good feeling’, Dalton reported to Bertie from Singapore, ‘he will not exert himself enough . . . he is still more fond of animal than mental gratification, of eating, idling and play than of work and duty’, and he had developed ‘little stratagems and excuses for shirking what is disagreeable, but these are readily seen through’.35 Perhaps finding the need to defend himself, Dalton suggested ‘this weakness of brain, this feebleness and lack of power to grasp almost anything put before him . . . is a fault of nature’.36

  How was it possible that Prince Eddy, heir to the enriching heritage of his grandpapa, sprung from the same seed, could be in possession of such a fault of nature? After much deliberation it was decided to separate the two brothers and send Eddy up to Cambridge. This did draw a response from the allegedly ‘listless and vacant’ prince. ‘I can’t tell you how strange it seems to be without you and how much I miss you in everything all day long,’ Eddy confided to George in June 1883.37 All their lives the brothers had been treated like inseparable twins and now even bedtime felt strange. ‘I can hardly realise yet that you are not there, as I miss you more when I go to bed, more than at any other time,’ Eddy wrote in his next letter to George just five days later.38 The princes’ lives were now directed along different lines and partings remained painful: ‘I can’t tell you how much I felt for you on Sunday night when we had the unpleasant business of saying good bye,’ wrote twenty-two-year-old Eddy to George in February 1886, ‘and I know well what your feelings were and how wretched you must have felt at going away’.39

  Queen Victoria invited Eddy for a short stay at Balmoral on 3 September 1883 before he went up to Cambridge. He arrived after luncheon and went straight up to her rooms. As he entered she could see at once ‘he was looking rather pale and languid from having grown so fast’.40 Over the years she had learned to be more circumspect about expressing her forthright views and was far more forgiving with her grandchildren than sh
e had been with her own children. The interview went well. Eddy may not have natural ability but that was hardly his fault. The ‘dear good boy’ appeared to be doing his best; he had a charm of his own and was gentle, kind and polite. The queen may not have seen the report of his mentor, James Stephen, who was appointed to coach Eddy for university over the summer. Stephen reported bluntly to Dalton that there was little point in sending the prince to Cambridge, since ‘he hardly knows the meaning of the words to read’.41 He had experimented with several different approaches to teaching, Stephen told Dalton, but whether reading aloud, lecturing, straight dictation or written question-and-answer sessions, he was confounded. The prince’s ‘one great difficulty is in keeping his attention fixed . . . sometimes he attends pretty well for a time, and then suddenly, for no apparent reason, his mind relapses almost into a state of torpor’.42