Victoria

by Julia Baird

  Dearest,—how are you today, and have you slept well? I have rested very well, and feel very comfortable today. What weather! I believe, however, the rain will cease. Send one word when you, my most dearly beloved bridegroom, will be ready. Thy ever-faithful, VICTORIA R.

  Victoria stood still as she was carefully buttoned into her white satin dress, with a flounce of lace and a six-yard train edged with orange blossoms. Her hands shook slightly as she pinned Turkish diamonds to her ears and looped them around her neck before fastening a sapphire brooch from Albert on her breast. She held her feet out as her maids tied the ribbons of her delicate white satin slippers around her ankles. Her dress sat low on her shoulders, displaying her smooth ivory chest, and her hair, parted severely in the middle, was looped into low buns on either side of her head.

  Victoria’s clothes had been carefully chosen to display her patriotism. The fabric of her dress was from the Spitalfields, the historic center of the silk industry in London, and two hundred lace makers from Devon had labored on it for months. The pattern was destroyed afterward so that no one could copy it. Her gloves were stitched in London and made of English kid. Victoria had commissioned a huge swath of handmade Honiton lace for her dress, in an attempt to revive the flagging lace industry (machine-made copies had been harming the trade). She stood in front of her mirror and stared at her reflection disbelievingly. On her head she wore a simple wreath of orange blossoms and myrtle. In portraits she looks young and pale, hovering between anxious and dreamy.

  The queen had asked that no one else wear white to the wedding. Some have wrongly interpreted her choice of color as a signal of sexual purity—as Agnes Strickland later gushed, she had chosen to dress “not as a queen in her glittering trappings, but in spotless white, like a pure virgin, to meet her bridegroom.” Victoria had chosen to wear white mostly because it was the perfect color to highlight the delicate lace—it was not then a conventional color for brides. Before bleaching techniques were mastered, white was a rare and expensive color, more a symbol of wealth than purity. Victoria was not the first to wear it, but she made it popular by example. Lace makers across England were thrilled by the sudden surge in the popularity of their handiwork.

  —

  As Victoria made her way to her golden carriage, the crowd clamored. She kept her eyes down, and “a hurried glance around, and a slight inclination of the head, was all the acknowledgment returned.”

  The torrents of rain and violent winds deterred “vast numbers” of well-wishers, but the public anticipation could not be dampened. There are few things as certain to knit British hearts as a royal wedding, and London had been thrumming with excitement for weeks. The Satirist complained: “We are all going stark staring mad. Nothing is heard or thought of but doves and Cupids, triumphal arches and white favors, and last, but not least, variegated lamps and general illuminations.” The cantankerous historian Thomas Carlyle was, as usual when it came to royal events, wearily wondering why such a great fuss was being made: “Poor little thing.” (Even from a distance, he said, he could correctly tell that the woman hated by the Tories had “an abundance of obstinate temper.”)

  Still, after a year of hissing, name-calling, and savaging by the press, it seemed as if London was once more in love with their queen. A small number were obsessed. Victoria had a clutch of farcical, fixated stalkers, some of whom grew quite distressed by the upcoming nuptials. Several were committed. One devoted man stationed himself outside the gates of Kensington Palace and followed her carriage when it appeared each day. Another, Ned Hayward, sent a torrent of letters to the Home Office desperately seeking to propose to Victoria. He finally tried to stop her horse to hand a letter to her himself, but was arrested. Another gentleman, believing that he was the rightful king and that Victoria would be an excellent housekeeper, climbed over the Windsor Castle gate and declared, “I demand entrance into the castle as the king of England.”

  The wedding excitement was so ubiquitous that Charles Dickens joked with his friends that he, too, was a victim of it. In a letter to the eccentric poet Walter Savage Landor, he wrote: “Society is unhinged here by her majesty’s marriage, and I am sorry to add that I have fallen hopelessly in love with the Queen.” Three days after the wedding, Dickens wrote a letter to a friend pretending to have been one of Victoria’s pursuers:

  On Tuesday we sallied down to Windsor, prowled about the Castle, saw the corridor and their private rooms—nay the very bedchamber…lighted up with such a ruddy, homely brilliant glow—bespeaking so much bliss and happiness—that I, your humble servant, lay down in the mud at the top of the long walk, and refused all comfort.

  Dickens returned, he joked, with “pockets full of portraits” that he “wept [over] in secret.”

  —

  Souvenir marriage medals were proudly displayed by the damp crowd waiting to see the bride. The police stood in stiff rows along the muddy route from the palace to the chapel, pushing back rowdy onlookers. Burglars began creeping through the alleys and backyards of London, taking advantage of the fact that the bobbies would be distracted for a day. Meanwhile, along the route from the palace to the chapel, tree branches were collapsing under the weight of the people clinging to them.

  When Victoria arrived at St. James’s crimson and gold Chapel Royal, she went to her waiting trainbearers, all in white dresses of her design. She gave each of them a small turquoise brooch in the shape of an eagle, as a symbol of courage and strength. Albert waited at the altar, looking dashing in a bright red, tightly fitted uniform decorated with the collar and star of the Order of the Garter, the highest order of chivalry in Britain, with his blue eyes fixed on his solemn little bride as she approached. Florence Nightingale, who, like most, thought Albert a “remarkably agreeable looking youth,” reported that a Mrs. Lefevre, who stood close to Victoria during the ceremony, said she was

  perfectly composed and spoke distinctly and well but that every orange flower in her head was quivering and she was very pale and her eyes red as if she had not slept. But she signed her name like a lion and was so anxious that PA should appear to advantage that she touched his elbow whenever he was going to do wrong, showed him where to sign his name and put him right when he set the ring on the wrong finger. After the marriage she cleared up and looked quite happy.

  The next day, the only report Victoria wanted to correct was that she had cried: “I did not shed one tear the whole time.” She had been trained in the art of composure and did not intend to be seen as an unsteady queen.

  —

  After the ceremony, the newlyweds snatched half an hour together in Victoria’s room before facing the crowds at the wedding banquet. Victoria placed a ring on Albert’s finger as he said there should never be any secrets between them. (She wrote in her journal twenty-three years later, “There never was.”) Victoria then changed into another white dress, edged with swansdown, and a bonnet with an enormous brim—a hat she could hide inside.

  The feast was a frenzy of nodding, curtsying, beaming, and handshaking. The couple finally left at four in the afternoon, trotting off in simple fashion as the sun started to poke fingers through the clouds, with three coaches accompanying them and people cheering and running alongside. Greville complained that they “went off in a very poor and shabby style” in an old traveling coach, but the queen did not notice; as the sun singed the clouds red before sinking into black, it was just “I and Albert alone, which was SO delightful.” This would be a refrain throughout her marriage: what she wanted most of all, always, was to be with Albert alone.

  After a three-hour journey, the exhausted couple arrived at Windsor Castle. Victoria had a headache; she changed and lay on the couch, mentally scrolling through images of her chaotic day. Albert played the piano as she rested. It was so much quieter than London; what a relief. She thought back on the past few hours: the look on dear Melbourne’s face as he tried to stem his tears. The happy moment when Albert placed a ring on her finger and it was done. The rippling, jostli
ng ocean of faces lining the route to the chapel; and at the palace, the thick heat of goodwill, the deafening applause, the sight of elegant Albert in his uniform. The mad cheering of the boys at Eton as they rolled into Windsor. The profundity of the service. “The Ceremony was very imposing, and fine and simple,” she wrote in her journal, “and I think ought to make an everlasting impression on every one who promises at the Altar to keep what he or she promises.”

  What she liked about it most of all, though, was that as they stood before the archbishop, they were called simply Victoria and Albert. For the rest of her life, she thought with a swelling joy, she would just be Victoria to her Albert. She wasn’t a queen or ruler, but simply a wife and lover. She rolled onto her side and looked at her husband as his fingers glided along the piano keys, playing one of his own compositions. Albert looked up and came over to her, kissing her. By 10:20, they went to their room, as Victoria spelled out, “of course in one bed.” She lay by his side, in his arms, and on his chest, smiling in the darkness as he whispered to her.

  —

  Victoria woke the next morning after a night of little sleep. She lay still, staring at Albert’s face in the early light, marveling at him and his pale throat, which she had seen only glimpses of before. He was “beautiful, angelic.” She was sated and thrilled with an intimacy her mind had strained to imagine. Luckily for her, the mortifying tradition of the court coming to peer at the royal couple when they first climbed into the same bed had gone out of fashion with George III. She was also lucky in that Albert seems to have been a competent, tender lover. Victoria’s wedding night was the closest thing she had known to bliss. Her elation was palpable in her journal entry:

  I NEVER, NEVER spent such an evening! MY DEAREST, DEAR Albert sat on a footstool by my side, and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before. He clasped me in his arms, and we kissed each other again and again! His beauty, his sweetness and gentleness,—really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!

  It was a kind of lustful enchantment. Over breakfast, Victoria gazed at him, again noticing how he had no neckcloth on under his black velvet jacket and was “more beautiful than it is possible for me to say.” The next day, she was cooing in otherworldly tones: “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. I feel a purer more unearthly feel than I ever did. Oh! was ever woman so blessed as I am!” It was the small, intimate gestures she loved the most: when Albert put on her stockings for her, when she watched him shave. He slid into bed next to her, kissing her over and over; they fell asleep with arms entwined. After Lord Melbourne remarked that she looked “very well,” she replied that Albert’s “kindness and affection” were “beyond everything.” In these days, it was Albert’s touch that she wrote about, as well as his handsome appearance, while continuing to faithfully record the subject and nature of every conversation with her Lord M.

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  Historians have long acknowledged that Victoria had a high libido—some have implied she was some kind of sexual predator who devoured a tolerant but exhausted husband. She was undoubtedly extremely passionate, the fact of which clashes with the strong associations Victoria often carries of dour old age and puritanical condemnation. Given how fraught sex was at the time for women—with limited access to contraception and abortion, and no pain relief for childbirth—Victoria’s unbridled and unabashed physical enjoyment of her husband is remarkable.

  In the nineteenth century, it was assumed that women with strong libidos were pathological: female desire was considered dangerous and potentially explosive, and it was thought that women’s animal nature would overwhelm their weak will and they would lose control. Women were dubbed “nymphomaniacs” for dreaming, thinking about, or having what was considered to be an excessive amount of sex. Some were given clitoridectomies or had leeches placed on their perineums. Others were told to abstain from meat and brandy, use hair pillows, douche with borax, have cold enemas, or adhere to strict vegetable diets. In 1886, a doctor reported that the most likely candidates for nymphomania were virgins, widows, or women with blond hair aged sixteen to twenty-five. Projection was prevalent in the Victorian medical profession.

  Most female illnesses were thought to derive from troublesome pelvic organs. The greatest sources of knowledge about the female organs were assumed to be male gynecologists, which made the bodies of women a secret even, or perhaps especially, to themselves. (The 1858 Medical Registration Act specifically excluded women from becoming qualified doctors.) Sex education for girls was unthinkable. British doctor and author of books on masturbation William Acton even argued that some married couples were so ill informed that their marriages were never consummated. (You cannot help but feel some sympathy for Dr. Acton’s wife, given his 1857 declaration: “The majority of women (happily for them) are not troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.”) Many women tried to avoid orgasms because they were told they led to pregnancy. In 1877, Robert Tait wrote:

  The majority of women enter the married state with but a very hazy notion of what its functions are…there is a false modesty on these subjects ingrained in our English life which has to be paid for in much suffering amongst women.

  For many married women, sex was a chore, not something to be enjoyed. Given the ignorance surrounding women’s bodies, Victoria’s delight in sexual pleasure was genuinely countercultural. Albert did not record his views on sex, but it is clear that he satisfied his wife. And he certainly admired her, writing to his brother approvingly about her oft-praised bosom. Just a few months after his wedding he told Ernest, somewhat defensively, that Victoria had “changed much to her advantage” and had looked lovely at the previous night’s dinner: “She had a very low-necked dress, with a bunch of roses at her breast which was swelling up from her dress.”

  —

  Despite the intensity and obvious physicality of his relationship with Victoria, who was certain she was the only woman to whom Albert had ever made love, there has been some speculation that Albert was gay. What made Albert’s contemporaries skeptical was the fact that Albert appeared immune to the charms of London’s great beauties, whose names he too often forgot; he did not flirt and was not impressed with appearance. When Albert turned eighteen, he had jokingly promised Stockmar he would “pay more attention to the ladies.” Stockmar said Albert was just “too indifferent and too reserved” around the opposite sex, adding, “He will always have more success with men.” This was partly true. Albert loved his wife, but socially and intellectually he preferred male company. This preference was obvious to the likes of Lady Clarendon, a politician’s wife, who struggled to make conversation with him at dinner and noted that the only women he spoke to were royalty. While he did not enjoy the after-dinner port drinking and male banter that were then the custom—usually leaving to play chess alone or sing duets with Victoria—his closest friendships were with men.

  There is no evidence that Albert had a physical relationship with a man, but many have suspected he did. Lytton Strachey stated that Albert did not take after his cheating father for two possible reasons: either because of his “peculiar upbringing” or because of “a more fundamental idiosyncrasy,” which was “a marked distaste to the opposite sex.” Others point to the male friendships he developed at Bonn University and Albert’s close relationship with Christoph Florschütz, a gifted scholar who shared a small attic room with Albert and Ernest for fifteen years. Albert credits Florschütz, not his father, for the happiest years of his life. His intense attachment to his tutor is unsurprising, given the absence of his mother. Some have also pointed to the strong culture of homoeroticism at many male colleges such as those that comprised Oxford and Cambridge and public schools such as Eton in the nineteenth century, and there is no reason to think Bonn would be exempt. Intimate behav
iors—passionate declarations of love, sharing of beds, and kissing—that today would be called homosexual did not attract a label.

  It is extremely unlikely that the discussion about Albert’s sexuality will ever move beyond speculation. He and Victoria had an intimate and satisfying marriage, and Victoria was the chief protector and creator of the memory of Albert. No one seriously gossiped about it while he was alive, at a time when homosexuality was not considered an identity but something people occasionally dabbled in, often as teenagers and young men and women. According to Michel Foucault, the beginning of the categorization of homosexuality as an identity did not come until 1870.

  And ultimately, the fact that Albert did not ogle or admire other women was one of the things Victoria loved most about her husband. It made her feel secure, protected. It was also excellent revenge on the popular, pretentious society women who circled the royal court. She told Melbourne happily “of Albert’s not caring greatly for beauty, and hating those beauties who are so feted, and wishing to spite them always.” Victoria flew into a fury when Melbourne suggested that that sort of interest in women was apt to come later. It was a stupid thing to say, and Victoria fumed: “I shan’t forgive you that.” She did, though, of course, the very next day. Melbourne apologized and said he had only been referring to Albert’s shyness.

  —

  The marriage between Victoria and Albert is one of the greatest romances of modern history. It was genuine, devoted, and fruitful. Together, they ushered in an era when the monarchy would shift from direct power to indirect influence, and from being the fruit of the aristocracy to becoming the symbol of the middle class. They restored and raised the stature of the monarchy, preserving it from the revolutions that toppled the aristocracies and royal families in Europe during the same years that Victoria and Albert were widely feted in Britain. Albert would grow to surpass his wife, for a short time, in influence, but not in longevity, stamina, or sheer will. Albert would soar; Victoria would endure.