by Julia Baird
In giving Albert free rein to work alongside her as she carried nine children, Victoria was soon to discover that the clever, intellectually restless Albert was a great asset. She spent roughly eighty months pregnant in the 1840s and 1850s—more than six years in total—and even longer recovering from childbirth. During this time, she was able to hand off work to a brilliant, trusted deputy. But her husband had no intention of being a subordinate partner, and this sparked the fiercest fights of their marriage. Even as a boy, Albert had displayed “a great dislike to being in [the] charge of women.” He had then married a woman who was in charge of an empire. As he and Victoria embarked on married life, each tried to assert his or her will in what had traditionally been the most unequal of relationships: husband and wife, and monarch and spouse. In this case, the spouse held the trump card: he would never have to bear children.
CHAPTER 12
Only the Husband, and Not the Master
[Acknowledging] one important truth [will make a successful marriage]—it is the superiority of your husband, simply as a man. It is quite possible you may have more talent, with higher attainments…but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.
—SARAH ELLIS, THE WIVES OF ENGLAND, 1843
In my home life I am very happy and contented; but the difficulty of filling my place with proper dignity is that I am only the husband, and not the master in the house.
—PRINCE ALBERT, LETTER TO
PRINCE WILLIAM OF LÖWENSTEIN, MAY 1840
The pistol cracked loudly. Heads swiveled, and the horses drawing the carriage startled and stopped. On the footpath stood a short, slender teenage boy holding a gun in each hand, gazing fixedly at the queen. It was June 10, 1840, a cloudy, warm Sunday afternoon. People milled about the park on foot or horseback, and had been curiously scrutinizing the royal carriage, which often drove past at this time on weekends, on the road leading from Buckingham Palace to Hyde Park Corner. Albert, who had noticed “a little mean-looking man” folding his arms over his chest just before he fired, grabbed his wife’s hand, crying, “My God! Don’t be alarmed!”
Victoria just laughed. She had thought someone was shooting at birds in the park. “I assured him I was not the least frightened, which was the case. It never entered my head, nor did it his, after the first shot, that it was meant for me.” It was. The man’s name was Edward Oxford, and he was an unemployed public house potboy from Birmingham with vague dreams of revolution. He was dressed respectably in a brown frock coat, light trousers, and a silk waistcoat. He stood still, staring with intense, dark eyes at the royal couple.
A second shot punched the air. Victoria ducked and this time the bullet whistled above her head, lodging in a wall opposite. Albert ordered the driver to keep going as onlookers seized Oxford and hauled him to the police. A defiant Victoria continued riding up Constitution Hill, stopping off at her mother’s house at Belgrave Square to tell her what had happened. The young couple, married for four months now, took a leisurely route back to the palace, going through the park, to give Victoria “a little air” and “to show the public that we had not, on account of what happened, lost all confidence in them,” as Albert told his grandmother. Victoria’s calm was reported admiringly in the papers the next day.
By the time the queen and Albert returned to Buckingham Palace in their open carriage, there was a swelling crowd of Londoners who had taken off their hats and were roaring in support. A cavalcade of gentlemen and ladies who had been riding in the park clustered around the queen’s carriage, escorting her home. It was, she wrote in her journal, like a “triumphal procession.” But when she finally returned to her room, Victoria sat on her bed, pale and shaken, showing vulnerability for the first time. Albert slid his arms around her and kissed her, praising her bravery. Victoria knew she had narrowly avoided death, writing: “Our escape is indeed providential.” Later, Albert showed her the pistols “which might have finished me off.” She ended her day’s journal with a prayer of thanks, and then she curled up tightly next to Albert, trying not to think of what might have been. But God had saved the queen, and a rising tide of popular sympathy drowned out any lingering thoughts of the past year’s scandals of Lady Flora Hastings and the Bedchamber Crisis.
Victoria continued to appear in public that summer after the attempted shooting, riding in an open carriage, unbowed. She had quickly grasped that demonstrating bravery in public with what modern leaders would call great “optics” would evoke a powerful response from her subjects. She was beginning to understand how to behave—not just as a woman and queen, but as an emblem of her country—as Britannia, who knew how to rule and how to lead. King Leopold, writing with great haste from Laeken after he heard of the incident, told Victoria: “That you have shown great fortitude is not to be doubted, and will make a very great and good impression.” She knew, now, the importance of symbolic strength.
In the grungy borough of Southwark, the police were rifling through Edward Oxford’s bedroom in search of a motive. They seized upon a sword, a cap with red bows, bullets, gunpowder, and documents pertaining to a club called “New England.” The vital clue seemed to be a memo implying he had been prompted to act by “some communications of an important nature from Hanover.” This ignited some public panic: Was Victoria’s greatly feared uncle—the much-maligned, scar-faced former Duke of Cumberland, now the king of Hanover—trying to kill the queen before she could produce an heir to take his place as first in line to the throne? The silver pistols Oxford had wielded bore the monogram ER, which some speculated stood for Ernestus Rex, king of Hanover. All of the documents, however, appear to have been written by Oxford himself; they were merely a ruse.
At the police station, the man Lord Melbourne called “a little vermin” was “thoroughly enjoying the attention.” When questioned, Oxford was disdainful, self-possessed, and cocky. He laughed sporadically. He was eager to know how the queen and Prince Albert had responded to his attack. Told that neither of them had been scared or alarmed, he shrugged and fibbed: “Oh, I know to the contrary; for when I fired the first pistol, Albert was about to jump from the carriage and put his foot out, but when he saw me present the second pistol, he immediately drew back.”
Leopold was surprised by the attack; not only had Victoria been a liberal monarch, “one should think that your being a lady would alone prevent such unmanly conduct.” In truth, Oxford suggested it was precisely because Victoria was female that he wanted to kill her. He told the constables his real motive was that he did not think a great country like England should be ruled by a woman. Oxford was charged with high treason and sent to Newgate Gaol, then to an asylum, where he spent twenty-seven years before emigrating to Australia.
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Seven men tried to kill Victoria between 1840 and 1882: unemployed youths, a cabinetmaker, a potboy, a chemist’s assistant, an agricultural laborer, and a former army officer. All of them became brief media celebrities before vanishing. All were odd, some were insane and some perfectly lucid, and most were sent to Australia, which was at the time serving as a remote prison for England’s criminals. Some attributed the sudden spate of attacks on a young, powerful woman to a strange, contagious “erotomania,” in which men who had fancied themselves lovers of the queen were “turned to jealousy by continued disappointment.” After a second assassination attempt in 1842, the poet Elizabeth Barrett (later Browning) wrote to a friend puzzling over “this strange popular mania of queen-shooting.”
I am very angry….Who shot George the fourth? Not even I—says the sparrow. Poor Victoria! Let the coolness be what it may, there is an undercurrent—she is a human being and a woman!—And is moreover conscious that of those who reproach her most, nobody has said that she has not wished to benefit her people according to her light. And the end of it all is,—she is set up for a mark to such little boys in her dominions as are pleased to play with pistols! It is worse than bad. I hear that people go now to see t
he poor queen leave the palace for her drive with a disposition to be excited, with an idea of seeing her shot at: there is a crowd at the gates every day!
Victoria’s reaction to each attack was the same: she was defiant and brave, but inwardly shaken. Why did so many men, in their derangement, want to marry her, subdue her, or shoot her? Even the powerful, privileged queen was not safe from violence.
That June afternoon, Albert’s first thought had been for their unborn child. When Edward Oxford shot at Victoria she was almost four months pregnant, which makes her boldness even more surprising. At the time, there was a superstitious belief in maternal impression—the belief that events disturbing the minds or spirits of pregnant women could harm, deform, or derange their unborn children. (The biography of Joseph Merrick, known as the Elephant Man—one of the most heart-wrenching of the Victorian “freaks”—provides this theory as an explanation for his deformity: his mother was startled and trampled on by an elephant when he was in her womb. The still-mysterious genetic disease he suffered from—thought to be neurofibromatosis or Proteus syndrome—had nothing to do with his mother’s uterus, but this idea defined the sad life of the Elephant Man. Victoria sent him a handwritten note each year.)
Victoria’s true and more practical concern, though, was not maternal impression but maternal mortality. Conservative estimates of the number of women who died giving birth in 1840s England are about four to five women per thousand. She had written a few months earlier that falling pregnant and having a great many children was “the ONLY thing I dread.” Laboring women died mostly from puerperal fever, for which there was no cure, despite the liberal doses of opium and brandy administered by doctors. When the Female Medical Society told doctors not to deliver children with hands dirtied by dissection rooms, The Lancet scoffed. Doctors claimed that the problem was not contamination but excessive “mental emotion” of the women who died. Victoria was also haunted by the death of her beloved cousin Charlotte, the onetime heir to the throne who had died in childbirth. Upper-class women weren’t exempt from the dangers of labor. In 1839, Princess Marie of Württemberg, the wife of her cousin, had died after giving birth to a boy.
Victoria was furious when she discovered her worst fear had been realized within a few weeks of her wedding. She confided in her grandmother the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha: “It is spoiling my happiness; I have always hated the idea and I prayed God night and day for me to be left free for at least six months, but my prayers have not been answered and I am really most unhappy. I cannot understand how one can wish for such a thing, especially at the beginning of a marriage.” If she had a “nasty girl,” she declared, she would drown her.
Victoria loved being married and wanted to spend every second with her new husband. Carrying a child would interrupt her newfound peace. Without pregnancy, she later wrote to her eldest daughter, married life was “unbounded happiness—if one has a husband one worships! It is a foretaste of heaven.” Once, when speaking to Victoria about someone else, Lady Lyttelton used the phrase “as happy as a queen,” before realizing what she had said. “Don’t correct yourself,” said Victoria; “a Queen is a very happy woman.” This was a queen who ran into Lady Lyttelton’s room in her dressing gown to drag her to come and see “the most lovely of all rainbows!” This was a queen who earnestly bent over tulips, geraniums, and queen bees as Albert explained their curious characteristics. Victoria soon declared in her journal that she now preferred the countryside to London.
Victoria refused to let her round belly change her life dramatically or mark her as weak. She shocked onlookers at a ball when obviously pregnant by dancing more than Lord Holland thought “a nurse or man midwife” would have approved. She refused to sit down at parties or stay indoors during wild weather. She boasted to her sister Feodora that she was in rude health: “I am wonderfully well. I take long walks, some in the highest wind every day and so am active, though of a great size, I must unhappily admit.” Just a few weeks before the birth, Lady Lyttelton described her as “very active; out walking before ten this morning, and seeming determined to bear up and complain of nothing.” Albert tried to keep her still by reading or singing to her as she lay on the sofa.
Charles Locock, her chief accoucheur, was taken aback by Victoria’s frank approach to pregnancy: “She had not the slightest reserve, & was always ready to express Herself, in respect to Her present situation, in the very plainest terms possible.” Locock took a great dislike to the queen, suggesting she lacked delicacy because she openly discussed her body with him. He inappropriately and maliciously confided in female friends that her body was shaped like a barrel: “She will be very ugly and enormously fat….She goes without stays or anything that keeps Her shape within bounds;…she is more like a barrel than anything else.” It was only recently that the idea that all pregnant women must wear corsets had begun to fade, and they still labored in petticoats, gowns, and chemises.
Albert tried to reassure his wife about the looming labor. Solicitous, thoughtful, and intelligent: Albert’s strengths were increasingly obvious. The women of the royal household gushed about his blue eyes, “simple tastes and pleasures, and happy, active temper.” He was credited with raising the quality of the conversation in the court to include science, art, and botany, above the usual gossip of the palaces. Albert was a serious man, who encouraged Victoria to read constitutional histories with him at night, but he also made her laugh. When he told his wife that she should just smile in public, like a dancer, he leapt into the air and pirouetted as he said it, to make his point.
—
Yet Albert was not as happy as the queen he loved. Part of this was due to the stifling nature of the royal household. He missed his family. He was bored by the conversation and usually preferred to play double chess on his own. He often nodded off during concerts and dinners. The time seemed wasted to him. Albert wanted to use the luster of the court to invite and attract great literary and scientific minds. The queen was reluctant, though; those people made her feel insecure. She worried that her education had been lacking, as Albert had told her, and as Melbourne told Anson, “She is far too open and candid in her nature to pretend to one atom more knowledge than she really possesses on such subjects.” She was thrilled that her husband did not care to dawdle with the men after dinner, but she seemed oblivious to the fact that he was just bored.
The prince had long bouts of melancholy from which his wife was unable to shake him. Two weeks after the wedding, when Albert’s father returned to Germany, Victoria found him sobbing in the hallway; he brushed past her without talking to her. She crept into his room, concerned. He turned to her, his eyes red, and told her quietly that she would not understand what it was like to leave behind a golden life and affectionate family. He was right—Victoria had been glad to pull up the drawbridge behind her when she married, leaving her mother, Conroy, and other vexatious people behind. Troubled, Victoria wrote afterward: “God knows how great my wish is to make this beloved Being happy and contented.”
But the true hurdle to Albert’s happiness was sizable. He was impatient to become, effectively, king. He was ambitious, intellectually restless, and appalled by the thought of being seen as a decorative spouse while his wife trod the carpeted halls of power. He also wanted to help Victoria avoid the kind of serious missteps she had made when she first became queen. He wanted to occupy the same elite, exclusive podium of sovereignty as Victoria. The people close to Albert saw the imbalance right away. His brother Ernest remarked on how Victoria had ensured “a quiet, happy but an inglorious and dull life for him” while “as queen she moves on another level.”
Victoria was perfectly happy with the arrangement. She knew Albert wanted to be the household head and agreed this was his rightful place. She had even, unsuccessfully, sought the title of King Consort for him in February 1845, five years into their marriage. But the question was, what did being the head of the household mean? Surely it did not mean relinquishing her job. She was pro
tective of the crown she had fought for and intended to keep her marriage separate from her work, continuing to meet with Melbourne and her ministers on her own. But Albert refused to be shut out or relegated to a second place. In his view, the husband should control all of his wife’s affairs. How does a man establish his natural authority in such a context? he wondered. He wrote to his friend Prince William of Löwenstein in May: “In my home life I am very happy and contented; but the difficulty of filling my place with proper dignity is that I am only the husband, and not the master in the house.”
Albert’s fundamental belief was that women were not meant to rule, and certainly not by themselves. His hometown, Coburg, was under Salic law and insisted on male sovereigns; that is why the crown of Hanover went to the next in line, the Duke of Cumberland, when Victoria became queen (making her the first Hanoverian to be monarch only of England). Baron Stockmar, King Leopold, and Ernest all shared Albert’s views. In 1850, Albert told the Duke of Wellington that he believed it was his duty to
fill up every gap, which, as a woman, the Queen 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…to place all his time and powers at her command as the natural head of her family, superintendent of her household, manager of her private affairs, her sole confidential adviser in politics, and the only assistant in her communications with the officers of the Government, her private secretary, and her permanent minister.