But Melbourne, nearly sixty years old and as much a father figure for Victoria as he was a parliamentarian, argued against the notion of wedding one of her cousins, adding, “Those Coburgs are not very popular abroad; the Russians hate them.”
Her little feet grown even colder at the idea of marriage, Victoria wrote to her uncle Leopold that July, expressing her uneasiness at being older (by a few months) than Albert. Besides, she scarcely knew him and was also worried that they might not suit one another as lovers: “. . . one can never answer beforehand for feelings, and I may not have the feeling for him which is requisite to ensure happiness. I may like him as a friend, and as a cousin, and as a brother, but not more; and should this be the case (which is not likely), I am very anxious that it should be understood that I am not guilty of any breach of promise, for I never gave any. . . .”
So in October 1839 Albert set out once more for England and a second look-see. And upon meeting him again, the reluctant queen became thunderstruck. Her October 10 journal entry records, “. . . It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert—who is beautiful.” The following day her diary was full of praise for his waltzing and his horsemanship. On October 13, she admitted in her journal that she had changed her mind about postponing marriage for a few years. Melbourne counseled her not to wait too long; if they presented Parliament with a royal engagement there was little the legislative body could do to find a way of thwarting it if they so chose. And he urged her to inform Albert of her decision without delay.
No one could propose to a regnant queen of England. So the twenty-year-old Victoria was impelled to take the initiative and offer her hand, or ask for Albert’s, in marriage. It was one of the few times she took the reins in their relationship. Her diary entry of October 15, 1839, memorializes the proposal: “At about ½ p. 12 [half past twelve] I sent for Albert; he came to the Closet where I was alone, and after a few minutes I said to him that I thought he must be aware why I wished [him] to come here, and that it would make me 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 a 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 [to share his life with her] and was so kind and seemed so happy, that I really felt it was the happiest, brightest moment in my life. . . . 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 . . .”
That evening, before the queen went to bed, she was handed a letter that read, “Dearest greatly beloved Victoria, How is it that I have deserved so much love, so much affection? . . . I believe that Heaven has sent me an angel whose brightness shall illumine my life. . . . In body and soul ever your slave, your loyal ALBERT.” After reading this tender and effusive declaration, Victoria burst into tears.
According to Victoria’s diary, during Albert’s visit the two of them kissed and snuggled and held hands at every available opportunity. Albert accompanied her to a parade review in Hyde Park, where Victoria may have taken more notice of her fiancé’s physique than the military marches, observing that Albert was wearing a pair of white cashmere breeches with “nothing under them.”
He wielded the blotting paper after she signed state documents. She “gave him a ring with the date of the ever dear to me 15th engraved in it” along with “a little seal I used to wear.” And “I asked if he would let me have a little of his dear hair.”
“No two lovers could be happier than we are!” she declared on November 1.
They parted from each other with many tears but Albert wrote to Victoria when he reached Calais: “I need not tell you that since we left all my thoughts have been with you and your image fills my whole soul.” Two weeks later, he wrote, “Dearly beloved Victoria, I long to talk to you, otherwise the separation is too painful. Your dear picture stands on my table and I can hardly take my eyes off it.” Whenever the queen received a letter from Albert, she would melt. “Never, never did I think I could be loved so much,” she replied to him on November 28.
Nonetheless, many English disdained the match. A popular satirical verse from 1840 titled “The German Bridegroom” referred to Albert as a gold digger: Here comes the bridegroom of Victoria’s choice,
The nominee of Lehzen’s vulgar voice;
[Baroness L. was V.’s former governess]
He comes to take “for better or for worse”
England’s fat queen and England’s fatter purse.
But the prospective royal marriage had a few niggling political hurdles to overcome. For example, Parliament was adamant that Albert not be made a peer. There was also some concern that because Albert was German, he might impose their national character and agenda on the British monarchy. It was difficult for Victoria to explain to her fiancé that “The English are very jealous of any foreign interference in the government of the country. . . .”
As their wedding day neared, it was clear how much the typical gender roles were reversed. Albert had griped when he learned that their honeymoon would only consist of a few days spent at Windsor. On January 31, 1840, Victoria wrote to him, patiently reiterating why the magnitude of her responsibilities precluded a lengthy holiday. “. . . dear Albert, you have not at all understood the matter. You forget, my dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing. Parliament is sitting, and something occurs almost every day, for which I may be required, and it is quite impossible for me to be absent from London; therefore two or three days is already a long time to be absent. I am never easy a moment, if I am not on the spot, and see and hear what is going on.”
According to Melbourne, Albert was “a great stickler for morality” and “extremely strait-laced.” To that end, he insisted that Victoria’s bridesmaids have thoroughly unblemished characters, and even that the girls’ mothers’ reputations be stainless. In contrast to Albert’s strict judgmental nature, Victoria was, at the time, far more empathetic and forgiving, chiding Albert for his narrow view of humanity. “I always think that one ought always to be indulgent towards other people, as I always think, if we had not been well brought up and well taken care of, we might also have gone astray.”
On February 10, 1840, three years after becoming queen, Victoria married her first cousin, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, in the Chapel Royal, St. James’s.
It’s difficult to imagine how Victoria found the time to write a journal entry on her wedding day, but her firsthand description of events could scarcely be matched by another. According to the diary, before breakfast her mother brought her a nosegay of orange blossoms and a wreath of orange blossoms was placed atop her hairdo; the wreath would set the bridal fashion for decades, as would the color of her dress. “I wore a white satin gown with a very deep flounce of Honiton lace, imitation of old. I wore my Turkish diamond necklace and earrings, and Albert’s beautiful sapphire brooch.” Albert wore the uniform of a British Field Marshal, decorated with the Order of the Garter.
“When I arrived at St. James’s, I went into the dressing-room where my 12 young Train-bearers were, dressed all in white with white roses, which had a beautiful effect. Here I waited a little till dearest Albert’s Procession had moved into the Chapel.” His procession, and hers, were both lavish and colorful. But there was a near comical moment when it was clear that Victoria’s bridal train wasn’t long enough to allow all twelve of her bridesmaids to walk normally; like the women’s chorus in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, they had to trip forward with precarious, mincing steps, taking care not to bump into each other.
Witnessed by three hundred guests, “The Ceremony was very imposing, and fine and simple, and I think ought to make an everlasting impression on every one who promises at the Altar to keep what he or she promises . . .” Victoria wrote. Afterward, she returned to Buck
ingham Palace alone with Albert, where they had a half hour of conversation to themselves before it was time to set out for Windsor. Victoria changed out of her formal wedding ensemble into a simpler version of the same, “a white silk gown trimmed with swansdown and a bonnet with orange flowers.”
After they reached Windsor and acclimated themselves to their suite of rooms, Albert “took me on his knee, and kissed me. . . . We had dinner in our sitting room; but I had such a sick headache that I could eat nothing and was obliged to lie down in the middle blue room for the remainder of the evening, on the sofa, but, ill or not, I never, never spent such an evening. . . . He called me names of tenderness, I have never yet heard used to me before—was bliss beyond belief! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!—May God help me to do my duty as I ought and be worthy of such blessings.”
With such effusive joy and vitality, it’s doubtful—despite the raging headache—that Victoria was gritting her teeth and thinking of England as she and Albert consummated their marriage.
On February 11, 1840, the morning after the wedding night, Victoria awoke in a state of bliss, but she still had time to memorialize her feelings in her journal. “When day dawned (for we did not sleep much) and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express! He does look so beautiful in his shirt only, with his beautiful throat seen. . . .” Later that day she wrote to her uncle Leopold, gushing, “Really, I do not think it possible for any one in the world to be happier, or as happy as I am. . . . What I can do to make him happy will be my greatest delight. . . .”
Victoria’s afterglow remains just as bright in her journal entry of February 12. “Already the 2nd day since our marriage; his love and gentleness is beyond everything, and to kiss that dear soft cheek, to press my lips to his, is heavenly bliss. . . .”
The following day, the woman who after Albert’s death stubbornly refused to acknowledge that women had such vulgar appendages as “legs” wrote with a hint of the erotic, “My dearest Albert put on my stockings for me. I went in and saw him shave; a great delight for me.”
Victoria and Albert couldn’t get enough of each other, either in or out of the bedchamber, and within a few weeks, the queen was pregnant. If she could have enjoyed her apparently terrific sex life without the incumbent duty of childbearing, she probably would have been ecstatic. She and Albert eventually had nine children, but Victoria never had much praise for infants, even her own.
Pregnancy was “the ONLY thing” Victoria dreaded. She had hoped to devote all her personal time to her precious spouse. And when she learned that she was in a delicate condition, she was “furious. It was too dreadful,” she told her uncle Leopold. If her “plagues” were to be “rewarded only by a nasty girl,” she would drown it. And to the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha the queen wrote, “I am really upset about it and it is spoiling my happiness; I have always hated the idea and I prayed God night and day to be left free for at least six months. . . . I cannot understand how anyone can wish for such a thing, especially at the beginning of a marriage.”
Toward the end of 1840, at the christening of her eldest daughter and first child, Princess Victoria, the queen was already pregnant again, and her increasing state depressed her. Later she would insist, “What made me so miserable was to have the first two years of my married life utterly spoilt by this occupation. I could enjoy nothing, not travel or go about with [Albert]. If I had wasted a year . . . it would have been very different.” She felt as though her wings had been clipped and considered her gender “a most unenviable one.”
Years later, in 1859, she wrote two separate letters to Vicky, now Princess Frederick Wilhelm of Germany, regarding the recent birth of Vicky’s first child (the future Kaiser Wilhelm), admitting that she “. . . hated the thought of having children,” and“... I have no tendre for them till they have become a little human; an ugly baby is a very nasty object—and the prettiest is frightful when undressed—till about four months; in short as long as they have their big body and little limbs and that terrible frog-like action. . . .”
Albert, however, was thrilled by his wife’s fertility. After Princess Victoria was born, the queen wrote that her adoring and solicitous husband had behaved “just like a mother” to her, “nor could there be a kinder, wiser, or more judicious nurse.” Albert would read to the queen, write for her, or simply sit by her side in a darkened room. He came the moment she called, and wheeled her bed or sofa from one room to the next. Beyond Buckingham Palace, he represented his wife at Privy Council meetings. His aim, he told the Duke of Wellington, was to be “the natural head of the family, superintendent of her household, manager of her private affairs, her sole confidential adviser in politics, and only assistance in her communication with the officers of the Government . . . her private secretary and her permanent minister.” Although Victoria’s initial inclination after their marriage had been to avoid discussing affairs of state with her husband and to keep him out of politics and governance—restricting his input to “a little help with the blotting paper,” as she put it—Albert eventually became all that he desired and more, even choosing his wife’s clothes and accessories.
Much of this was due to King Leopold’s advice to his niece. “The Prince ought in business as in everything to be necessary to the Queen. He should be to her a walking dictionary for reference on any point which her own knowledge or education have not enabled her to answer.”
The royal couple had their first real fight over the upbringing of their children. Victoria had insisted on retaining her former governess, Baroness Lehzen. But Albert saw the baroness as “a crazy, stupid intriguer . . . who regards herself as a demi-God, and anyone who refuses to recognize her as such is a criminal.” Harsh words indeed, and intended to wound his wife as well as her representative in the nursery, neither of whom he felt gave his input any credence. “Victoria is too hasty and passionate for me to be able often to speak of my difficulties,” Albert complained to his mentor, Baron Stockmar. “She will not hear me out but flies into a rage and overwhelms me with reproaches of suspiciousness. Want of trust, ambition, envy, etc, etc. . . . All the disagreeableness I suffer comes from one and the same person,” he added, referring to Baroness Lehzen. He would frequently lament, “I am only the husband and not the master of the house.”
But Victoria could be as hotheaded and stubborn as her spouse. She offered her side of the story to Stockmar, insisting that she didn’t wish to quarrel with Albert, but he “must tell me what he dislikes and I will set about to remedy it, but he must also promise to listen to and to believe me; when (on the contrary) I am in a passion which I trust I am not very often in now, he must not believe the stupid things I say like being miserable I ever married and so forth, which come when I am unwell. . . .”
Victoria suffered from severe postpartum depression each time she gave birth. As she described it in her journal, “there is often an irritability in me which . . . makes me say cross and odious things which I don’t myself believe and which I fear hurt A., but which he should not believe . . . but I trust I shall be able to conquer it. Our position tho’ is very different to any other married couples. A. is in my house and not I in his.—But I am ready to submit to his wishes as I love him dearly.”
The Baroness Lehzen was eventually dismissed, and Albert assumed control of the children’s upbringing, proving to be an exceptionally doting father. From then on, the royal household was managed, and their offspring raised, according to his strictures—pragmatic, prudent, efficient, and disciplined. Together, he and Victoria worked diligently to promote the royal family as the archetype of English domestic bliss, a model for the middle classes to emulate.
Their children remained the only object of their quarrels. Another flare-up occurred in April 1853, after the queen had given birth to her eighth child, Prince Leopold, who suffered from hemophilia—a blood disorder recessively linked to the X chromosome. Prince Leopold’s case is traditionally believed to have been caused e
ither by a mutation in Victoria or in the sperm of her father, the Duke of Kent. From there, the disease spread through virtually every royal house of Europe as Victoria arranged political marriages for her daughters—three of whom were carriers of the disorder.
Victoria’s stress over her delicate newborn exacerbated her usual postpartum melancholia. Albert made things worse by infantilizing his wife, calling her “dear child” or “dear, good little one.” Although he was aware of the larger, more troubling matters that were the catalyst, he would accuse her of starting rows over trifles. When the spoken word failed, he defended his conduct to her in a letter: . . . When I try to demonstrate the groundlessness and injustice of the accusations which are brought against me I increase your distress. . . . But I never intend or wish to offend you. . . . If you are violent I have no other choice but to leave you . . . I leave the room and retire to my own room to give you time to recover yourself. Then you follow me to renew the dispute and to have it all out. . . . Now don’t believe that I do not sincerely and deeply pity you for the sufferings you undergo, or that I deny you do really suffer very much. I merely deny that I am the cause of them, though I have unfortunately often been the occasion. . . . I am often astonished at the effect which a hasty word of mine has produced. . . .
Despite these squabbles, the royal marriage was an indispensable partnership. The first time Victoria became pregnant, a bill was passed in Parliament giving Albert the full powers of regent. He was also appointed a Privy Councilor. Under Prime Minister Robert Peel’s government (1841-46) he had keys to the cabinet and red dispatch boxes and was sent all important government papers to review with the queen. Peel made it possible for Albert to be present when Victoria’s ministers had audiences with her; and on some occasions the consort met alone with ministers on his wife’s behalf. As far as Victoria was concerned, any presentations made to Albert had the same force and effect as if they were made directly to her.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 40