Victoria

by Julia Baird

  This was an extremely broad and comprehensive set of duties. But the times suited Albert’s aspirations. In the nineteenth century, only an infinitesimal number of aristocratic women had more money and power than their husbands. Most women were chattels without rights to their bodies, money, property, or children. Various philosophies sprang up to justify this position: women, by their nature, belonged in the home, and they could gain some prestige or status by having children and not sleeping with other men. By being, in other words, moral guardians of the hearth.

  This meant there was substantial cultural support for Albert’s jockeying, as major intellectuals of the era agreed that women were innately inferior. John Ruskin argued in 1864 that women’s natural state was “true wifely subjection.” Women’s power was not for battle, he said, “and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision.” Charles Darwin agreed, writing in 1871 that natural selection meant women were lesser than men. He conceded that women were more tender, intuitive, and perceptive, and less selfish, but added: “Some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.” When wives promised to obey their husbands, it was for good reason. As the author Sarah Stickney Ellis wrote in 1843, one thing that women must be certain of before marriage was “the superiority of your husband simply as a man.” She dedicated her popular book The Wives of England to the queen. “It is quite possible,” Ellis continued, “you may have more talent, with higher attainments, and you may also have been generally more admired; but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.” The illogic of this position fueled the restlessness of generations of women.

  But Victoria was taught to believe all of this, and Albert encouraged her in thinking her education and abilities lesser than his. The paradox of their marriage is that as her love and contentment grew, her confidence in herself wilted. It was best, her male advisers said, that she satisfied herself with her domestic life.

  In May, after three months of marriage, Albert decided to broach the subject of his role directly with his wife. After Victoria’s twenty-first birthday, which she said was the happiest she had ever had, Albert complained that she did not speak to him about politics or even “trivial matters.” Victoria confided in Lord Melbourne, telling him that while Albert was unhappy about a “lack of confidence,” she honestly didn’t want to do anything about it. Lord Melbourne described the exchange in a conversation recorded by Albert’s private secretary, Mr. Anson:

  She said it proceeded entirely from indolence; she knew it was wrong, but when she was with the Prince, she preferred talking upon other subjects. My impression is that the chief obstacle in her Majesty’s mind is the fear of difference of opinion, and she thinks that domestic harmony is more likely to follow from avoiding subjects likely to create difference. My own experience leads me to think that subjects between man and wife, even where difference is sure to ensue, are much better discussed than avoided, for the latter course is sure to beget distrust.

  All the men in Victoria’s life backed Albert’s quest for more power. They told the queen to trust him, to lean on him, to confide in him. Even her beloved uncle Leopold agreed “there should be no concealment from him on any subject.” The sharp-eyed Baron Stockmar was the only one to advise Albert not to be too hasty in his quest for the keys of power. He told Anson that while it was true that the queen should “by degrees impart everything” to her husband, there was “a danger in his wishing it all at once.” The danger was that Albert might make a mistake or overreach, and not be asked for his help again. Stockmar also suggested that the young Victoria’s problem was more ignorance than indolence, and that she just did not understand much of what she was being told of her ministers’ plans and bills.

  Victoria ignored these urgings and continued seeing her ministers alone, although even they were starting to feel sorry for her husband. Albert was still not allowed to see the state papers or sit in the room while the queen spoke to Lord Melbourne. She resented his attempts to give her advice or direction. When a box of official state papers arrived with a blunt note directing her to “sign immediately,” Albert took offense on her behalf and told her not to reply for a day or two, lest they think her a mere bureaucrat. Victoria picked up her pen and signed instantly. Having spent her childhood fortifying her spine, Victoria was not easily bent to another’s will. Even so, now her childhood allies were saying the same kinds of things her enemies had: that she was not capable of fully comprehending politics, and she should relinquish control. She could shrug this off when it came from Conroy, but it would be far more fraught when it came from her husband.

  The one person who did not believe Victoria should submit to Albert was Baroness Lehzen, a woman also well practiced at resistance. Lehzen had told her protégée that she believed Albert should have the same role she did: influential but invisible, a remarkable status for a woman whose official role had been governess. But soon after marrying, Albert had decided Lehzen had to go. The baroness’s sphere of influence had widened: she now managed Victoria’s finances and acted as her secretary, controlling her diary and processing invoices for payment. Albert believed the woman who had stood stoutly by Victoria’s side in her troubled teenage years now controlled her to an unhealthy extent. When out walking on the terrace one day with the queen, Lady Lyttelton noticed “Mme. De Lehzen’s pale face (the only face I ever see that seems to feel what is going on at all) with her usual half-anxious, smiling, fixed look following the Queen from one of the castle windows.” Lehzen saw everything. To Victoria, this was reassuring. To Albert, it was ominous.

  Albert’s skill came in intuiting that he would not win his power through force or demands, but watchful tenderness. As his wife’s waist expanded and contracted during a round of pregnancies, he would encourage her to lean on him. Albert tried a strategic kind of patience—he would have his way through will, intelligence, and, most of all, his complete wooing of and caring for his wife. She decided to give him what he wanted and needed. It was a sweet kind of capitulation.

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  Nine days before Edward Oxford cocked his gun at the pregnant Victoria, Albert gave a speech to the Anti-Slavery Society, which he had labored over, despite its being only 165 words long. The five or six thousand people in the crowd cheered loudly, which, he said, “rewards me sufficiently for the fear and nervousness I had to conquer before I began my speech.” Albert craved respect. He took his duties seriously—and was rapidly charming the court. It was, Lord Holland wrote to Lord Granville, “now all the fashion to praise Prince Albert.” One woman, sitting next to him at a dinner, wrote eagerly of their “deeply interesting conversation on the most important subjects”: “upon religious principle, its influence on Sovereigns and its importance in the education of children; and upon modes of worship, our views respecting them…also on the management of children generally; on war and peace; on prisons and punishment.” The Prince Consort was a natural polymath.

  Albert’s deliberate execution of a long-standing plan to rule England did not mean that he loved Victoria any less. The position of husband to the queen of England was part of a path chosen for him when he was an infant, which meant that his marriage was also his career, and he had always been philosophical about it. He knew it would be difficult and “plentifully strewn with thorns,” but he decided it would be better to be so “for some great and worthy object than for trivial and paltry ends.” In the weeks after the wedding, Albert’s brother Ernest reported on his brother’s progress to their uncle Leopold. In unpublished letters in German archives, Ernest “reported that Albert had done the correct thing by not hesitating to speak his opinion on everything. This had led to all orders within the household and stables being directed through him and thus he had become ‘the great channel through whom the Queen’s will’ was expressed.” The more vulnerable and earthbound his pregnant wi
fe grew, the more Albert’s official status rose.

  In the months following the assassination attempt, the men around Victoria began quietly to prepare for the possibility of her death—whether from gunfire, childbirth, or some unanticipated cause. On July 2, three weeks after the shooting, Melbourne told Victoria he wanted to discuss a subject of “great importance and one of great emergency”—perhaps Victoria knew what he was referring to? She did not. “It is about having a Bill for a Regency,” he said. When in July 1840 Albert was given the legal right to rule in the place of his wife in the event of her death, he wrote triumphantly to his brother Ernest: “I am to be Regent—alone—Regent, without a Council. You will understand the importance of this matter and that it gives my position here in the country a fresh significance.” Melbourne told Victoria the reason for Parliament’s decision was entirely Albert’s good character, even though it meant that if the English queen were to die, a German prince would be in charge.

  In August, the Prince proudly perched on a throne next to Victoria’s at the prorogation of Parliament after Melbourne discovered that precedent allowed this. In September, he was made a Privy Counsellor, and he boasted to Stockmar that he was being handed a stream of “interesting papers.” He had been “extremely pleased” with Victoria in the past few months, writing somewhat condescendingly: “She has only twice had the sulks…altogether she puts more confidence in me daily.” In November, just before she gave birth to their first child, Victoria successfully asked that Albert’s name be included in the liturgy, as her child’s would be.

  But the queen wouldn’t slow down—she worked hard throughout her pregnancies. She was preoccupied by what was then known as the Eastern Question: the impact of the decline of the immense Ottoman Empire. Founded in 1299 and centered in Turkey, at its time of greatest reach, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it spanned vast tracts of southern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Western Asia. But after decades of sluggish economic growth and inept administration, the empire that linked the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black Seas had grown weak: Czar Nicholas called it the “sick man of Europe.” England and France wanted to prop up Turkey and keep Russia out of the Mediterranean. But when the Ottoman sultan died and his teenage son became leader in 1839, the Turkish viceroy in Egypt tried to break Egypt away from Turkey. England, Russia, Prussia, and Austria were supporting Turkey, but France supported Egypt. War was narrowly avoided, and a peace agreement was signed in London in 1840. Victoria told King Leopold she gave “these affairs my most serious attention” and joked: “I think our child ought to have besides its other names those of Turco Egypto, as we think of nothing else….I hope I have done good.”

  Before long, Albert arranged to have his and Victoria’s heavy wooden writing tables pushed together so they could work side by side. Just before the birth of their child, he wrote to his brother: “I wish you could see us here and see in us a couple united in love and unanimity. Now Victoria is also ready to give up something for my sake, I everything for her sake….Do not think I lead a submissive life. On the contrary, here, where the lawful position of the man is so, I have formed a prize life for myself.”

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  Victoria gave birth three weeks early, on the afternoon of November 21, 1840. Her contractions had begun the night before, as she had woken to the sound of rain tapping her windows. She roused Albert and spent the next few hours racked with pain. (Characteristically, she later claimed that once labor had begun, she was not the slightest bit nervous.) Unusually for the era, Albert was with her during her labor, along with the doctor and nurse. In the next room sat men of state, an archbishop and bishop, as well as Lord Melbourne, cocking their ears as the queen panted and tried not to yell. (Lord Erroll, Lord Steward of the Household, boasted later that the door had been left open, so he had full, clear view of the queen.) Once the ordeal was over, a red, wriggling baby girl was brought out for inspection. She was in perfect health, but her parents were disappointed by the gender (as were many of their subjects). When the doctor told the queen, “Oh, Madam, it is a Princess,” she responded, “Never mind, the next will be a Prince.”

  Victoria lay back against her pillows in her canopied mahogany bed, declared herself to feel much better, and looked at her husband proudly as he smiled and stroked her hand: “Dearest Albert hardly left me at all & was the greatest comfort and support.” Soon, though, he was gulping down a quick lunch before dashing downstairs to represent the queen in the Privy Council for the first time. She was relieved; she had survived, she was alive. Outside, cannons boomed. Albert was ecstatic. He had become a father and a proxy for the queen in the same day.

  Victoria spent two weeks in bed after giving birth, as was then customary. Her baby was brought to her twice a day when she was in her dressing room, and she watched her being bathed once every few weeks. She called her “the Child” until she was christened Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa almost three months later. In later years, Victoria would reveal that she did not find babies endearing, especially newborns, with their scrawny mottled limbs and startled reflexes. (She has been criticized for calling infants “froglike”—but this is not simply derogatory; anyone who has nursed, bathed, or blown air on the stomach of a days-old baby will know that their limbs splay in an alarmed fashion called the Moro reflex. They do resemble frogs lying on their backs.) Because of this, an enduring myth that the queen lacked all maternal instinct has taken root in almost all major biographies.

  As Yvonne Ward from La Trobe University has demonstrated, the selection of Victoria’s published letters was made by two men, who rejected her correspondence with other women on matters such as babies, teething, and pregnancy as softer and less relevant. This has meant that Victoria’s starkly rebellious and countercultural remarks to her daughter Vicky—about the trials and difficulties of birth, written after most of her nine children were grown—are relied on as evidence that she despised her offspring. These letters sound a note of repugnance about the physical toll of bearing children—and, in Victoria’s case, of bearing such a great number of children. She did not say in these letters what effect childbearing had on her body, but she spoke often of suffering; it would not have been gentle on the small frame of a woman who did not reach five feet. It is likely that her uterus prolapsed in these years, and there is evidence she suffered enduring, painful gynecological problems. But the words she wrote in her journal at the time of having her children reveal a tenderness and optimism that have been forgotten.

  Victoria was, in many ways, a doting mother. Her diaries reveal her affection and love for her children, and how much she delighted in playing with them. Three weeks after Vicky was born, she called her “our dear little child” who got “daily prettier”: “She has large, bright, dark blue eyes and a nice little nose and mouth, a very good complexion with a little color in her cheeks, very unusual for so young a Baby.” Four weeks after the birth, she wrote: “It seems like a dream, having a child.” Her journal in early 1841 is a record of contentment: showing off her bright, pretty little girl, playing with Vicky as Albert played the piano nearby, or watching as Albert pushed Vicky around on a sledge outside. She laughed at her daughter’s attempts to sit up, and danced her on her knee. She was such a “dear” baby, she wrote repeatedly: “She is such a darling.” She clasped her with one arm on her lap, letting her play with trinkets as she wrote in her journal.

  On Christmas Day 1840, Victoria marveled at her great luck: “This day last year I was an unmarried girl, and this year I have an angelic husband, and a dear little girl five weeks old.” When Vicky was eighteen months old, Victoria wrote she had become “quite a little toy for us & a great pet, always smiling so sweetly when we play with her.” The queen spent more time with Pussy, as she nicknamed her daughter, than was expected of her. Lady Lyttelton, who became the children’s governess in 1842, wrote that Victoria had the child with her “constantly” and fretted about her development: “The Queen is, like all very
young mothers, exigeante, and never thinks the baby makes progress enough or is good enough. She has her constantly with her, and thinks incessantly about her, and seems also more and more devotedly fond of the Prince.”

  Motherhood was a surprise to Victoria. The young girl who had envied Gypsies their cozy domestic life was now astonished to find herself at the center of a loving family. Albert was consistently gentle, attentive, and kind. Looking back on this time in later years, the queen was rhapsodic, writing in the third person:

  The Prince’s care and devotion were quite beyond expression….He was content to sit by her [the queen] in a darkened room, to read to her, or write for her. No one but himself ever lifted her from her bed to her sofa, and he always helped to wheel her on her bed or sofa into the next room. For this purpose he would come when sent for instantly from any part of the house. As years went on and he became overwhelmed with work this was often done at much inconvenience to himself; but he ever came with a sweet smile on his face. In short, his care of her was like that of a mother, nor could there be a kinder, wiser or more judicious nurse.

  It was Albert who took on the traditionally feminine role in some ways, as Victoria regained her strength. He was the tender nurturer and the vigilant parent. He was the one Pussy ran to, and the one who lifted her in the air and waltzed around the room, trying to make her giggle. Victoria was not the slightest bit jealous; she adored Albert too, and the maternal instinct was not at the time glorified and elevated above the paternal. He was simply the more natural parent. Victoria told Leopold: “Our young lady flourishes exceedingly….I think you would be amused to see Albert dancing her in his arms; he makes a capital nurse (which I do not, and she is much too heavy for me to carry), and she already seems to [be] happy to go to him.” All Victoria wanted was for her children to resemble their father.