Victoria

by Julia Baird

  Walking through the palace gardens on the day after Lady Flora died, Victoria had an overwhelming urge to roll in the green grass, over and over, until she was so dizzy she could somehow forget her shame. She was rarely named in press reports, but she was often directly blamed for Lady Flora’s death. Some reporters bluntly accused the court of murder. Victoria often insisted she felt no remorse, but her own role troubled her deeply: “I can’t think what possessed me.” She swore she would never again leap to conclusions because of the way people looked. Victoria knew that her crown was tarnished.

  The conviction Victoria formed that Lady Flora was catty and sly was wrong. Lady Flora was a woman of great pride, faith, and sensitivity. Throughout her extended period of torment, she wrestled with how to forgive those who hurt her. She would not sink to hating, she said: “For myself I feel this trial has been sent in love, it has drawn me closer to God, & shaken off some worldly feelings, & promoted deep heart-searching.” When she took her last communion, lying in bed on June 20, the Bishop of London asked her if she had forgiven her enemies. She said she had, and that she held no bitterness toward them. The Duchess of Kent, who was kneeling beside her, cried. As she walked out of the room, she took the hand of Lady Flora’s sister Sophia and asked, “Forgive my poor Child?”

  Some claimed Lady Flora died of a broken heart. On July 20, 1839, her body was buried in the vault of an ancient church in Ayrshire, surrounded by the craggy mountains of southern Scotland. “The whole ceremony,” wrote a reporter from The Times, “was most imposing.” Several thousand people came to her funeral; she had become a martyr, especially for the Tories. “Her memory is embalmed by the sympathy and affection of a noble people,” wrote The Corsair, adding that if the English court did not change, “there can be no safety for the life, for the happiness, or for the reputation of the Queen of England.”

  —

  It was a gloomy summer for Victoria. She was lonely, moody, and on edge, and she felt fat. Having had her decisions challenged so publicly, she had become particularly sensitive to challenges to her authority. If she suspected that any of her ministers had not consulted her on a matter, she wrote heavily underlined, angry screeds, demanding an explanation. Harriet Martineau wrote that Victoria’s unhappiness could be seen by anyone. The author blamed Melbourne:

  At her accession, I was agreeably surprised at her appearance. The upper part of her face was really pretty, and there was an ingenuous and serene air which seemed full of promise. At the end of the year, the change was melancholy. The expression of her face was wholly altered. It had now become bold and discontented. That was, it is now supposed, the least happy part of her life. Released from the salutary restraints of youth, flattered and pampered by the elated Whigs who kept her to themselves, misled by Lord Melbourne, and not yet having found her home, she was not like the same girl that she was before.

  The saga dragged on for months, with Lady Flora’s brother publishing damning correspondence and Dr. Clark releasing a summary of his invasive exam. The darkness did lift for the queen, though, abruptly and spectacularly, just the day after Dr. Clark published his defense. Victoria woke depressed, with a terrible headache and sore eyes, to discover that someone had pelted her dressing room with rocks, smashing panes of glass into splinters. It was a mysterious but apt sign of what lay before her. That morning, as she tiptoed around the wreckage, a bilious Prince Albert stepped off a boat onto British soil and began his journey by land to see her. From the second he climbed out of his carriage at Windsor Castle, everything was different. Victoria would always remember October 10, 1839. On that day, her heart was blown to smithereens.

  * * *

  * When Peel became prime minister two years later, Albert’s private secretary, Anson, told him not only that there were three prominent Whig women who would leave the household, but that they would have done so in 1840. Peel was astonished: “Had the Queen told me that these three ladies immediately connected with the government had tendered their resignation, I should have been perfectly satisfied and should have consulted the Queen’s feelings in replacing them” (Ziegler, Melbourne, 298). Pride, haste, and heartbreak had prevented this matter from being resolved at the time.

  CHAPTER 10

  Virago in Love

  I told Albert that he had come like an angel of light to save me…for I alone could not have helped myself. I was young & wilful.

  —QUEEN VICTORIA

  Queen Victoria, even when she was most infatuatedly in love with Prince Albert, always addressed him exactly as if he were a little boy of three and she his governess.

  —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  Victoria stood at the top of the red-carpeted stairs at Windsor Castle staring down at her cousin Albert. He was climbing up the stone staircase with his brother Ernest, past a statue of George IV and suits of armor, to take the young queen’s hand. It was early evening on October 10, 1839, and the two men had just arrived after traveling on an overnight boat trip through the rain from the Continent to Dover. Victoria stared at Albert in the flickering light, struck: though wan and still seasick, he was magnificent. He had filled out in the three years since she had seen him last; his chest was broad, his thighs muscular, and his face perfectly proportioned. The queen, suddenly self-conscious, stretched out her hand.

  She was smitten. Victoria wrote in her journal that night: “It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert—who is beautiful.” The next day, she went into further detail about the lure of his physical attributes: he was “so excessively handsome,” with “such beautiful eyes, an exquisite nose, and such a pretty mouth with delicate mustachios and slight but very slight whiskers; a beautiful figure broad in the shoulders and a fine waist.” It was a kind of lust she was powerless to contain. Looking at him made her stomach cartwheel: “I have to keep a tight hold on my heart.” Just four days later, she would loosen her grip entirely.

  Albert had spent the journey steeling himself for a difficult conversation. The proud German prince had resolved to tell “Cousin Victoria” that he would not drum his heels for years while she toyed with the idea of marrying him. He was tired of being left dangling and did not want to be dictated to. Victoria had wanted the two brothers to come several days earlier, but Albert told his brother Ernest to let her wait. He was well aware of her reservations. Albert’s father had told him she was a “virago queen”—strong-minded and domineering—whose house was in turmoil. Albert considered her something of a hedonist, a woman who relished parties and sleeping late. They were a curious pair—the boy who happily wandered the woods around his summer residence, the Rosenau, looking for rocks, shells, and leaves to add to his natural science collection; and a girl who complained she hated walking because she got stones in her delicate boots, but would gladly dance until the soles of her shoes were as thin as sheets. As rolling gray waves slapped the prow of his ship, sailing across the English Channel, Albert rehearsed lines for the conversation he was dreading. How would you tell a young queen that you were not prepared to wait for her favor?

  —

  Victoria was extremely wary of marriage. After a stifling childhood, she was now finally free—finally able to do as she wanted. She had no memories of her parents together and had never witnessed a strong, happy marriage—save that of her uncle Leopold and his second wife, Louise, who had been like a sister to her. She knew that most of her uncles had been unfaithful and unkind to their wives; why would she rush toward such a risk? Most girls of twenty may have been married or betrothed, but, as she wrote the year after she became queen, she wanted to “enjoy two or three years more” of her “present young girlish life” before “the duties and cares of a wife.” She also worried about her workload, which “marrying now would render still more fatiguing.” Besides, the country liked her the way she was, a young queen on her own. The whole subject, she declared, was “odious.”

  As for Albert, well, he was young and sickly, his English was poor, and he was lacking in sophistication. Their last v
isit, in 1836, had been uninspiring; Ernest had left thinking he was the one Victoria favored. Still, they kept in touch. Albert wrote her a letter congratulating her on becoming “Queen of the mightiest land of Europe.” In it, he asked, “May I pray you to think likewise sometimes of your cousins in Bonn, and to continue to them that kindness you favored them with till now. Be assured that our minds are always with you.” Victoria also directed Stockmar to accompany Albert on a tour of Italy, to broaden his education. It was a great success—the cerebral Albert was in raptures about the “inexhaustible source of knowledge,” although he did not fancy the scenery or climate (in this sense, his tastes were the opposite of Victoria’s; she far preferred sketching landscapes to trotting through museums).

  Victoria was also a romantic and did not want love to be planned, or calculated; she wanted it to burst upon her with great, irresistible force. How could that possibly happen with her pale, serious cousin? In July 1839, a few months before their October meeting, Victoria tried to stop Albert from coming to visit. She begged Leopold not to let her cousin get his hopes up: “for, apart from my youth and my great repugnance to change my present position, there is no anxiety evinced in this country for such an event.” If her marriage were rushed, it “might produce discontent.” Her cousin sounded wonderful on paper, but as she sensibly pointed out, she “may not have the feeling for him which is requisite to ensure happiness.” She asked Leopold to cancel the visit and be perfectly clear to Albert that there was “no engagement.” All signs pointed to disappointment. She even hinted, in a letter to the increasingly frustrated Albert, that she had a crush on another gentleman from the Continent: “We have had the Grand Duke of Russia here for some time. I liked him extremely.”

  Victoria had not been wanting for suitors. She was powerful, vivacious, and young. Newspapers in the United States reported rumors that President Martin Van Buren, then a fifty-four-year-old widower, “thinks seriously of making an offer” to her. The Daily Advertiser saw “no reason why he should not offer, or why he may not stand as good a chance as the namby-pamby princes and kings of Europe.” A succession of men from the New World and Old had been suggested as possible husbands for the “rose of England,” but she was not interested in any of them.

  And, as was becoming a pattern, Victoria was under the strong influence of a particular opinion: that of Lord Melbourne. He had warned Victoria against marrying Albert on three counts: he was a German, a cousin, and a Coburg. Given that his mother-in-law was also his aunt, was there not a chance that Albert would side with her? (Victoria, certain of Albert’s loyalty, “assured him he need have no fear whatever on that score.”) Melbourne’s most forceful argument was simply that this marriage was “not NECESSARY.” On this point they agreed. There was some self-interest behind Melbourne’s argument, as he did not want their cozy intimacy disturbed. Victoria, too, told Lord Melbourne she hoped he would not remarry, when his sister was urging him to.

  Most of all, the willful Victoria was concerned that marriage would mean she might no longer be in charge; that in becoming a wife, she would not be able to be the kind of decisive and controlling queen she liked. In April 1839, in the midst of the Lady Flora Hastings debacle, she and Lord Melbourne had discussed how they might be able to boot Victoria’s mother out of the palaces Victoria inhabited. One possibility was marriage, though Victoria said it was a “schocking [sic] alternative” to her current life. She said she was “so accustomed to have my own way, that I thought it was ten to one that I shouldn’t agree with any body.” Melbourne said, perhaps unwisely, “Oh! But you would have it [your own way] still.” This was the model of marriage planted in Victoria’s mind. Her power would remain intact; her future husband, then, would be more of a traditional wife. She would rule, and he would trail behind.

  —

  Albert was sick of it. His uncle Leopold warned him of Victoria’s hesitation and inflated the wait from a two- to a four-year delay. Albert interpreted this as rejection and prepared to tell her he would not stand idly by. She had initially underwhelmed him, anyway. “Cousin Victoria is always friendly toward us,” he wrote when they first met as teenagers. “She is not beautiful by any means, though extremely kind and bright.” His famous relative had been presented as his destiny throughout his life, but now that they were both twenty years old, he was worried he would soon look like a fool: “If after waiting, perhaps for three years I should find that the Queen no longer desired the marriage, it would place me in a ridiculous position, and would to a certain extent ruin all my prospects for the future.” His future hinged on the whims of a young queen. He walked into Windsor Castle, nauseated and exhausted, and looked up at the small figure looming above him on the stairs, the most powerful woman in the world.

  On October 13, Victoria told Lord Melbourne that her opinion about marriage had changed. She had spent the last three days in a state of agitation, scribbling in her journal while listening to Haydn symphonies, sneaking looks at Albert as his greyhound stole food from her fork. Albert was so “amiable and good tempered,” she said to Lord Melbourne, owning up to her own bad temper, and confessing that she now recognized “the advantage of beauty.” When she told him of her intentions, the prime minister advised her to think about it for a week. But the next day, she told him her mind was made up. A kindly Melbourne changed tack and assured her she would be much more comfortable, “for a woman cannot stand alone for any time, in whatever position she may be.” Throughout her life, this message would be repeated to Victoria: women cannot, and should not, rule alone. “Thank you,” said a flushed Victoria, “for being so fatherly.”

  Now came the excruciating part. As a ruling queen, it was convention that Victoria must do the proposing. It really was tantamount to informing him of her decision, but to a protected young woman, who did not have a father and did not confide in her mother, the prospect was nerve-racking. She and Albert had never discussed anything like love or marriage; her stomach clenched every time she thought of it. That night, to her delight, Albert squeezed her hand while saying good night. This was encouraging.

  Finally, on Tuesday, October 15, at twelve-thirty, Victoria sent a summons when Albert was out hunting. He walked into his room to see the note lying on his dressing table. Half an hour later, he went to see her. Victoria asked him to sit down, then tried to make some idle talk. She was trembling a little, and speaking too quickly:

  I said to him that I thought he must be aware why I wished him to come and that it would make me too happy if he would consent to what I wished (namely 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!

  Albert accepted instantly. Victoria told him she was not worthy of him, lifted his “dear hand,” and kissed it repeatedly before she called for his brother Ernest. Then, tellingly, Albert went to pay his respects to Lehzen—the woman Victoria truly thought of as her mother. Victoria’s diary entries on that day and the several following are striking for their unrepressed joy. It was as though she had chanced upon the prospect of happiness with unaffected surprise: a blind woman stumbling on a marble statue, unable to stop caressing it. Victoria wrote to her uncle Leopold later that day:

  He seems perfection, and I think that I have the prospect of very great happiness before me. I love him MORE than I can say, and shall do everything in my power to render this sacrifice (for such in my opinion it is) as small as I can. He seems to have great tact, a very necessary thing in his position. These last few days have passed like a dream to me, and I am so much bewildered by it all that I know hardly how to write; but I do feel very happy.

  For almost a month, Victoria kept her secret from her mother. In her contentious biography of the queen published in 1840, Agnes Strickland wrote that the betrothal was “sanctioned” by the Duchess of Kent. Victoria firmly scribbled in the margins: �
��Never. The Duchess of Kent never knew anything of it until the Queen told it to her a few days before the Prince left.” Victoria distrusted her mother and had persuaded Albert that her mother would tell people and cause mischief. The duchess clearly suspected something was afoot; twice she burst into Victoria’s room without knocking, when she knew she was with Albert, which Victoria thought most indiscreet. Finally, the queen summoned her mother to her room on November 9. The Duchess of Kent threw her arms around Victoria and wept; she knew her daughter had not asked for her blessing, but she told her she would give it to her anyway. Albert then came into the room, hugged Victoria, and stood holding her hand. An emotional duchess said they were so young—Victoria replied that Albert was so steady—and vowed that she would never meddle in their marriage. She also gushed, inappropriately, about other men who had wanted to marry Victoria.

  The duchess’s joy shriveled somewhat as she returned to her room. She was unable to sleep, knowing Victoria had waited so long to tell her. She fretted about who had known before she had, wondering if the couple had decided to marry too quickly. She worried about where she was going to live and wrote Victoria several letters on the subject of her housing, which her daughter shrugged off as a nuisance. Her mother, she said, was a “great plague.”