Victoria

by Julia Baird

  The children fascinated the inquisitive, intellectual Albert. When Pussy was two and a half, he wrote to his stepmother about his love of being a parent:

  There is certainly a great charm, as well as deep interest in watching the development of feelings and faculties in a little child, and nothing is more instructive for the knowledge of our own nature, than to observe in a little creature the stages of development, which, when we were ourselves passing through them, seemed scarcely to have an existence for us. I feel this daily in watching our young offspring, whose characters are quite different, and who both show many lovable qualities.

  Albert commissioned the favored royal artist Edwin Henry Landseer to paint a pastel portrait of himself on his twenty-third birthday, to give to Victoria. In it, he carefully cradles the tiny princess and gazes down at her adoringly. Albert’s care was a way of healing the brokenness of his childhood home. He wrote to his brother: “Wedded life is the only thing that can make up for the lost relationships of our youth.”

  Relieved of much of the physical burden of child-rearing by her servants, Victoria was up walking within a month, and planning a trip to Windsor. Her letters to her uncle Leopold in early 1841 started to veer from talk of babies to foreign policy: “Your little grand-niece is most flourishing; she gains daily in health, strength and, I may add, beauty; I think she will be very like her dearest father; she grows amazingly; I shall be proud to present her to you. The denouement of the Oriental affair is most unfortunate, is it not?” When Leopold wrote back delightedly wishing she would have a large and happy family, she snapped, telling him not to harbor any illusions. She still saw herself as the leader of the country, first and foremost, and that’s where her responsibility fell:

  I think, dearest Uncle, you cannot really wish me to be the “Mamma d’une nombreuse famille,” for I think you will see with me the great inconvenience a large family would be to us all, and particularly to the country, independent of the hardship and inconvenience to myself; men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often.

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  And so, when she found herself pregnant again just three months after giving birth, Victoria wept and raged. She did not have the aid of the natural—if imperfect—contraceptive of breastfeeding, as she refused to nurse her children as her own mother had done, and birth control was widely considered sinful. Some women tried to coat their vaginas with cedar oil, lead, frankincense, or olive oil, in the belief that this might prevent the “seed” from implanting. In 1838, many aristocrats used sponges “as large as can be pleasantly introduced, having previously attached a bobbin or bit of narrow riband to withdraw it.” But there is no evidence Victoria was even aware of such a thing. Women were also advised to have sex around the time of ovulation if they wanted to avoid pregnancy, which we now know to be precisely the time that most conceive. The queen was miserable, later telling a grown-up Vicky that the first two years of her married life were “utterly spoilt” by pregnancy. She had to unglue herself from her husband’s side, and later complained that she enjoyed nothing at that time. Albert, though, was relishing his new life.

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  By the end of 1840, the brass keys to the rectangular red confidential dispatch boxes were in Albert’s hands. Inside were the documents revealing the thinking of the prime minister, the Cabinet, and the other men wrangling with the great social, economic, and geopolitical issues of the decade. Albert, slipping the key into the lock for the first time without his wife watching, was thrilled. A large part of his success, he knew, was due to the fact that his wife was lying supine, needing to be lifted from sofa to bed, but he had also earned it. His secretary and champion, Anson, remarked:

  This has been brought about by the fact of the Prince having received and made notes of all the Cabinet business during the Queen’s confinement, this circumstance having evinced to the Queen his capacity for business and power to assist in searching and explanation….[He was now] in fact, tho’ not in name, Her Majesty’s Private Secretary.

  It had taken the prince only two days after the birth to persuade his wife to have the boxes sent to him instead of her. On November 24, he boasted to his brother, who was in charge of a tiny German duchy: “I have my hands very full, as I also look after Victoria’s political affairs.”

  Albert had muscled, charmed, and earned his way into his new place as head of the house and functional monarch. In July 1841, when Vicky was eight months old, Anson recorded how satisfied he was:

  The Prince went yesterday through a review of the many steps he had made to his present position—all within eighteen months from the marriage. Those who intended to keep him from being useful to the Queen, from the fear that he might ambitiously touch upon her prerogatives, have been completely foiled….The Court from highest to lowest is brought to a proper sense of the position of the Queen’s husband. The country has marked its confidence in his character by passing the Regency Bill nem. con. The Queen finds the value of an active right hand and able head to support her and to resort to for advice in time of need. Cabinet Ministers treat him with deference and respect.

  On their first wedding anniversary in 1841, Albert gave his wife a brooch crafted in the shape of a cradle with a baby in it: “the quaintest thing I ever saw & so pretty,” wrote Victoria. This year, she declared, had been “perfect happiness.” Albert was responsible for this, but his own visions stretched far beyond nursery walls. He loved music, art, science, sanitation, and symmetry, and he wanted to broaden their reach in Britain. Once he had been allowed entry to the most powerful political discussions, Albert would slave for a country that still viewed him as a foreigner. There remained only two substantial blocks to his power: Lord Melbourne and Baroness Lehzen, the two people Victoria was closest to. To get what he truly wanted, he needed them gone.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Palace Intruders

  When a woman is in love, her desire for public power becomes less and less.

  —HECTOR BOLITHO

  In the early hours of December 3, 1840, a short, ugly teenager was lying under a floral chintz sofa in the queen’s sitting room in Buckingham Palace. Edward Jones, an unemployed errand runner, had been hiding for hours hoping to glimpse the queen. He lay awake listening to the sounds of the palace—the baby princess wailing intermittently; the night nurse pacing the nursery, softly singing lullabies; the odd footsteps and snoring of night watchmen. Just three hours earlier, the queen had been sitting on the very sofa he was now underneath; he hugged himself at the thought of it. The baby Princess Royal was actually asleep in the room next door! As the wind rustled the trees outside the window, he wondered if he should venture to the kitchen for more provisions before morning broke. Would there be more delicious potatoes in the larder? Cheese? Jones had been hiding in the palace for a couple of days, and he knew nighttime was best spent scavenging, exploring, and hunting for new hiding spots.

  In the anteroom next door, Mrs. Lilly, the monthly nurse charged with taking care of the baby princess, was awake, listening to the soft grunting sounds coming from the ornate cradle next to her bed. Suddenly, the door to the queen’s sitting room creaked loudly. Mrs. Lilly called out, but no one responded. She sat up, and yelled loudly when the door opened farther: “Who is there?” The door slammed shut.

  Mrs. Lilly ran from her room, woke Lehzen, and sent for Kinnaird, the page then on watch. Kinnaird scanned the sitting room and peered under a corner of the tightly stuffed sofa, upon which Victoria had been wheeled into her bedroom earlier in the night. He suddenly jerked upright, then slowly backed away. Lehzen glared at him and marched to the sofa, pushing it away from the wall. She placed a hand over her nose as her eyes flew wide; the teenager hiding underneath was covered in filth, and stank. He was seized and taken downstairs, where he said he had not meant any harm, he had only come to see the queen. Albert and Victoria slept soundly as the women scrambled to pin down the intruder just fifty yards away.


  The news ignited London. Much like Edward Oxford, the would-be assassin, this palace intruder enjoyed being grilled by the authorities. He boasted that he “sat upon the throne” and “saw the Queen and heard the Royal Princess squall.” He had scaled the garden wall and climbed in through a window, and spent three days in the palace, hiding under beds and in cupboards. Jones was the type of young man who might have succeeded on Fleet Street; he had dreams of writing a scandalous book about the royal couple and insisted this was the only reason he had trespassed—he wanted to “know how they lived at the Palace,” and especially to hear the conversations between the queen and her husband. His father claimed Jones was disturbed, and doctors appeared to confirm this by declaring the shape of his head to be “of a most peculiar formation.” But because he was unarmed and had not stolen anything, the Privy Council sentenced him to only three months’ hard labor.

  The security at the palace was notoriously lax in those times. Vagrants and drunken soldiers were often found passed out on the palace lawns, having climbed over the low walls, which were concealed by heavy, low-hanging tree branches. Many of the watchmen were elderly, having been promoted as recognition of long service, and often slept on the job. The Boy Jones, as the London newspapers called him, had broken in once before, in December 1838. He was captured by police in St. James’s Street, following a chase, and was found wearing two pairs of trousers and two overcoats. When the bulging top pair of pants was pulled down, several female undergarments fell out. He had been to the queen’s bedroom and dressing room, stealing a letter he found there, along with a portrait and the underwear. His actions were described as “youthful folly,” and he was acquitted.

  Three months after Lehzen found the Boy Jones, he broke into the palace a third time. He was discovered at 1:30 A.M. with meat and potatoes from the pantry hidden in his handkerchief. This three-time achievement earned him celebrity status. Charles Dickens wrote to the boy’s father soon after to request a meeting with the “Palace Victim,” more out of curiosity than admiration (he doubted the popular belief that the Boy Jones was smart, but unfortunately did not write about their meeting). The American novelist James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans, called on Jones’s father when he was visiting London and offered to take his son to America, where he thought a clever boy would thrive. A meeting was organized, but Cooper was surprised to meet “a dull, undersized runt, remarkable only for his taciturnity and obstinacy.”

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  Prince Albert used the story of the Boy Jones’s repeated trespassing as a pretext to scrutinize the complicated, inefficient, and wasteful palace administration. He was determined to rid the palace of all intruders, including Baroness Lehzen, who had taken on greater responsibility for the nursery as well as the queen’s finances during Victoria’s confinements before and after she gave birth. The prince, who craved structure, despised the ineptitude obvious in the running of the royal residence. He decided to implement new order for Victoria, instilling discipline in everything from her daily schedule to her finances and shambolic palaces.

  First, Albert gave Victoria a routine to follow every day. They breakfasted at nine, took a walk, then wrote and drew together and had lunch at two. Victoria saw Lord Melbourne in the afternoon for a few hours, before going out for a drive in a pony phaeton, with Albert or with her mother and ladies. Dinner was at eight. Albert ensured this schedule was followed as closely as possible, thereby curbing Victoria’s appetite for late nights.

  Second, the prince tried to curtail expenditure. He was staggered to discover that in 1839 the queen spent £34,000 annually on charities and pensions alone, roughly £2.6 million in today’s terms. He devoted particular time to the financial records of the Duchy of Cornwall, which provided substantial income for Victoria in 1840, mostly from its tin mines—£36,000, about a third of which vaporized in costly administration. He successfully pruned, restructured, and budgeted—and within a couple of years, had enough money to buy a private house for his family on the Isle of Wight. (He continually denied requests for money from his family in Coburg.)

  Third, the prince turned to the parlous state of Victoria’s homes, especially Buckingham Palace, where they spent several months a year. It was large, grand, and situated on the finest real estate in London, but ventilation was poor, the heating was patchy, and frequent gas leaks led to the odd explosion in the kitchen. The servants’ quarters were crowded and the nursery inadequate for their growing brood. The palace reeked of fecal fumes: the brick floor of the kitchen was the roof of the sewer that gurgled beneath the larder and ovens. The toilet on the floor above the queen’s dressing room often overflowed in front of the window. After dozens of cesspools overflowing with sewage were discovered underneath the floors at Windsor Castle in 1844, Albert replaced all the old Hanoverian commodes with modern flushing water closets.

  In the first year of Victoria’s reign, a commissioner of the Department of Woods and Works inspected Buckingham Palace after complaints of bad smells and declared the lower floors to be squalid and uninhabitable. In the kitchen, he found “the remains of garden stuff and everything else the most filthy and offensive.” The roofs leaked and the drains had holes in them, yet little was done. Three years later, Albert asked Stockmar to help him conduct another, more comprehensive review. They found an archaic and extraordinarily inefficient structure, with responsibility split between the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Steward, with some input from the Master of the Horse and the Office of Woods and Works. Lamps in Buckingham Palace were provided by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, cleaned by the Lord Steward’s office, and, mostly, lit by the Master of the Horse. The windows were always dirty, as the inside and outside were never cleaned at the same time: while the Lord Chamberlain’s office was responsible for the interior of the palace, the Office of Woods and Works was in charge of the exterior. The Lord Steward’s staff prepared and laid the fires, while the Lord Chamberlain’s lit them. Broken windows and cupboards were unattended to for months because before fixing them, the chief cook had to prepare and sign a requisition, which then needed to be signed by the Master of the Household, authorized by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, and given to the Clerk of the Works, under the Office of Woods and Forests. Albert appointed one officer to live in the palace and represent all three departments.

  Next were the servants. Up to two-thirds of palace servants were unsupervised at any given time, so they did much as they pleased, disappearing at will. The staff was known for rudeness. Rarely was anyone available to show guests to their rooms; many got lost in the labyrinthine corridors. Albert identified a series of scams and perks that servants had abused for decades: people outside the palace often forged the signatures of the queen’s ladies when ordering carriages, charging the cost of their ride to the royal household; fresh candles were put out each day while the footmen pocketed the previous day’s, many unlit; and expensive staff dinners were offered to those with only tenuous connections to the royal court. Albert slashed salaries, sometimes by as much as two-thirds, to account for the fact that many servants worked in the palace for only half the year.

  Last on Albert’s agenda was what he called the “moral dignity of the Court.” The gambling tables disappeared from Windsor. No one was allowed to sit down in the queen’s presence—or in Albert’s. (The wife of Lord John Russell—who was later prime minister—was allowed to rest in a chair after she had just given birth, “but the Queen took care when the Prince joined the company to have a very fat lady standing in front of [her].”) Ministers had to back out of the room when visiting the queen, as it was considered poor etiquette to show a monarch your backside. Court dress was obligatory. (If a woman did not want to wear the appropriate styles she needed to get a doctor’s certificate explaining how it would be injurious to her health, and then seek permission from the Lord Chamberlain’s department.) Punishment was given for “dishonest and sexually loose behavior.” A strict new code of conduct was carefully framed and hung in the be
drooms of maids of honor. Victoria’s name has long been associated with the puritanism Albert championed in her court, but he, not she, was the true advocate of these standards. Melbourne quickly realized that while Victoria “did not much care about such niceties of moral choice,” Albert was “extremely strait-laced.” The prince insisted on “spotless character,” while the queen did not care “a straw about it.” No one was exempt from Albert’s standards. Even his own brother had been a cause of fury due to his sexual licentiousness that had resulted in severe “visitations” of venereal disease. Yet Victoria would do little to stem her husband’s fervor; the Albert era, at least inside the palace, had begun.

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  Meanwhile, the political sphere was fizzing with speculation about when Lord Melbourne’s increasingly unpopular Whig government would be ousted by Sir Robert Peel’s Tories. Ever prepared, Albert had begun secret negotiations with Peel, sending his secretary, Anson, to try to forge a deal that would avoid the embarrassment of the Bedchamber Crisis, in which Victoria had stymied Robert Peel because of her fondness for Melbourne. Albert also maneuvered himself into discussions with Melbourne, communicating to the PM that he did not believe a pregnant Victoria (she was expecting their second child) was able to cope or “go through difficulties” herself, and that he wanted the prime minister to include him in any conversations with the queen on the matter.

  On May 9, 1841, Anson met with Peel to discuss the ladies in Victoria’s household. On Albert’s behalf, Anson offered the resignations of three senior ladies-in-waiting whose husbands were prominent Whigs, and thus allies of the outgoing Melbourne: the Duchess of Sutherland, the Duchess of Bedford, and Lady Normanby. Peel, after many protestations that his greatest aim was to protect the dignity and feelings of the queen, accepted. He also asked that Victoria formally notify him that those three positions were vacant. The change should come from her and not be seen as a condition of Peel’s forming a government.