by Julia Baird
After the previous debacle, Peel was extremely grateful for Albert’s diplomatic intervention. In a twenty-seven-page memorandum, stored in the archives of the British Library, Peel’s excitement, ill-concealed triumph, and gratitude are evident, as is his anxiety that nothing be interpreted as a slight to the queen. The men openly acknowledged Albert’s intellectual superiority to the queen, Anson quoting the prince, who said that the queen had a “natural modesty upon her constitutional views” and was likely to accept the arguments of men more experienced than she was. There was some truth to this—Melbourne advised his successor to write fully to the young queen, and “elementarily, as Her Majesty always liked to have full knowledge upon everything which was going on.”
Most historians have assumed that Victoria, then in the second trimester of her second pregnancy, went happily along with the arrangement her husband made without asking her. But the change in prime ministers—facilitated by her husband behind her back—was a trying time for her. In the first week of May, she and Melbourne talked about the need to resolve the question of her ladies before she sent for Peel. While they were still discussing it, Albert acted without consulting her, offering Peel the resigations of the three Whig ladies. Victoria was surprised, writing on May 9: “My kind excellent Ld Melbourne told me that Anson had seen Peel (which I had no idea of, but which of course Albert must have known).” The aside is significant—why had her husband not told her? At the end of the day, she wrote, she “felt very low.” That night, she had nightmares about losing Melbourne and woke up exhausted and depressed, writing: “Oh! if only it were a dream!” Every time she thought of the prospect of losing her dear Lord Melbourne again, Victoria felt like crying. She told Leopold it was “very, very painful” but she was determined to be philosophical, especially now that she had Albert. After reading through the Anson-Peel memoranda from May 1841 closely, she added one caveat: Peel must understand that the queen was the one who appointed her ladies, not him. She insisted on this as a “principle,” underlining it emphatically. Peel agreed.
Victoria was torn between political expediency and loyalty. A few weeks later, she worried that she had capitulated to Peel too easily. Albert said her ladies were influencing her; Victoria cried for some time and admitted that the family of the Duchess of Bedford—who had not wanted to go—had left a letter for her. Anson wrote: “The Queen was the whole day much depressed and said it weighed heavily on her mind and felt she had been hurried and compromised by the Prince and Lord Melbourne.” She knew that she now effectively had no choice but to do as her husband suggested.
Victoria was often uneasy about what she felt was an abdication of her role to Albert. When Lord Melbourne told her that her husband had met with a triumphant reception at an event, she responded, “I don’t like it—first of all because I don’t like his being absent from me, and then because I dislike his taking my part in politics or in the general affairs of the country.” But Albert was politically dexterous. He and Anson were wooing current and future prime ministers and arranging meetings behind Victoria’s back. On May 15, Albert was in the room when Melbourne arrived to meet with Victoria; this time, he stayed.
In June, when Melbourne’s government lost a debate on foreign sugar duties, Peel forced a vote of no confidence and Parliament was dissolved. Victoria was glum, but an aging Melbourne was philosophical: “Why, nobody likes going out but I’m not well—I am a good deal tired, and it will be a great rest for me.” Victoria overtly displayed her bias by visiting influential Whig houses during the elections, but to little effect. The Conservatives returned with a large majority on August 19. For the first time, the queen did not go to the opening session.
Nine days later, Melbourne was finally forced to resign. He and his queen said goodbye a few hours after their last official audience, “in the starlight” on the Windsor terrace. The queen wept. Melbourne told her tenderly, “For four years I have seen you daily and liked it better every day.” When they said a final farewell at Claremont four days later, she sobbed. Victoria was much more amenable to Peel than she had been two years ago, but she still told Melbourne she was “dreadfully affected” at parting with him. Her journal is full of descriptions of how “wretched” she felt, of her “heavy heart” and “melancholy presentiments.” She was accustomed to seeing him every day; before this, the longest she had gone without seeing him was eleven days. A month later, she was still struggling with the change, spending far less time with the new PM than she had with Lord Melbourne. The queen’s correspondence with Peel was cooler and more businesslike; the affection had instantly drained from the relationship.
Albert was ready to work. He and Peel had much in common: shyness, an inclination for intellectual conversation, a love of art and literature—especially German writers and Dutch painters—and a commitment to social reform (though not to increasing the number of those eligible to vote, as Peel had opposed the 1832 Reform Bill). Albert even managed to persuade Peel to accept his veto of official appointments on the grounds of dubious moral behavior, including that of the surprised Duke of Beaufort. (When the duke’s wife died, he had married her half sister, which was prohibited by Church of England canon law.) Curiously, Peel agreed.
England’s new leader was a brilliant man, who had excelled at classics and mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, entered Parliament when he was only twenty-one, and been appointed home secretary thirteen years later. When in the Home Office, Peel had established the Metropolitan Police Force, called “bobbies” after him ever since. He was earnestly committed to ensuring workers were protected and campaigned for many years to repeal the Corn Laws, the tax on imported wheat that protected local landlords and pushed up the price of bread, causing much misery among the working classes and unemployed. He was the first prime minister to grapple seriously with the urgent challenges of the burgeoning population, Industrial Revolution, and recession. But he was never particularly well liked, partly because he was reserved and awkward. Lord Ashley described him as “an iceberg with a slight thaw on the surface.” Greville called him “vulgar,” “more like a dapper shopkeeper than a Prime Minister,” who cut jellies with a knife. Victoria liked to be charmed, and Peel was incapable of it. His smile had been likened to the gleam on the silver plate of a coffin lid. They had little to say to each other, and she was irritated by his manner of “a dancing master giving a lesson.” She would like him better, Greville observed, “if he could keep his legs still.”
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It was a hot summer, and the pregnant Victoria suffered constant headaches. She had lost her beloved prime minister, fought with her husband, and fretted over the health of her fussy baby daughter. She was often depressed, telling Leopold that her “present heavy trial, the heaviest I have ever had to endure,” of losing daily contact with Melbourne, was “a sad heartbreaking.” At the end of August, Melbourne wrote urging her “to pick up [her] spirits.”
Albert, usually more prone to melancholy than his wife, was buoyant and upbeat. Everything was unfolding as he had hoped. He was extremely pleased by the timing of Melbourne’s exit, which allowed him to become the queen’s sole confidant. He told Anson to remind Melbourne that “his view had always been that from this moment [he] would take up a new position, and that the Queen, no longer having Lord Melbourne to resort to in case of need, must from this moment consult and advise with [him].” Albert was also canny in persuading Victoria’s most trusted allies to speak in his favor. He asked Anson to tell Melbourne to “urge the Queen to have no scruple in employing the Prince.”
Melbourne agreed that Albert should naturally step into his place, but he warned him not to alarm Victoria by making her think “the Prince was carrying on business with Peel without her cognizance.” Melbourne then dutifully wrote the queen a letter praising Albert and nominating him—not Peel—as his true replacement, praising his “judgment, temper and discretion.”
As Melbourne’s dominance faded and Albert came to the fore, Victoria began to
recognize a new source of comfort in her life. She now knew love: a love that was safe, deepening, and enduring. Looking back as a wife and mother, she was embarrassed by the way she had behaved when infatuated with Lord Melbourne. She wrote in her diary on October 1, 1842: “Looked over & corrected one of my old journals, which do not now awake very pleasant feelings. The life I led then was so artificial & superficial, & yet I thought I was happy. Thank God! I know what REAL happiness means!”
This realization followed her for months; “real happiness” was a major milestone as she matured and bloomed in her marriage. In December 1842, Victoria talked to Albert about what had been her “unbounded affection and admiration of Ld. Melbourne.” She said she did not really know where it came from, “excepting the fact that I clung to someone, and having very warm feelings.” Albert told her she had “worked [her]self up to what really became at last, quite foolish.” Albert was perhaps too sensible to have ever worked himself up into anything foolish, but he was too dismissive of his wife’s feelings. Melbourne had made Victoria feel safe in her vulnerable first years as queen, and her affection for him was genuine, and reciprocated. It was painful to say goodbye.
Lord Melbourne became a somewhat sad and lonely figure in his decline. He gazed wistfully at the palace as he rode by, and waited for letters from Victoria in the years after his resignation. He hoped he might be called back to Parliament in 1846, but the queen told him she had refrained for the sake of his health. He wrote to Victoria when he heard she had postnatal depression, saying he, too, had been depressed: “I know how difficult it is to fight against it.” His biographer David Cecil says Melbourne longed for the queen. His days with Victoria had been the happiest and most fulfilling of his life—she had adored and needed him. When her name was mentioned, his eyes welled with tears.
The queen still sent Melbourne letters and presents and lent him money, but her attention was divided; at a ball in April 1842, there was such a long queue of people waiting to say goodbye to her that Melbourne slipped out into his carriage, downcast. He wrote to her the next day, telling her that as he drove past the palace he could see into her room, “so as to be able to distinguish the pictures, tables, etc., the candles being lighted and the curtains not drawn. Your Majesty was just setting off for the Opera.” He suffered a stroke soon after, and died in 1848.
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Baroness Lehzen and Albert clashed repeatedly as she tried to protect her territory and he tried to expand his. Stockmar told Lord Granville that Lehzen was “foolish” to contest Albert’s influence, and not to recognize that her position was different now that Victoria was married. Even Leopold, once a friend, described her as a “great future danger” for Albert.
The men of the court began to scrutinize and circle her. In December 1840, when Anson returned from a ten-day trip, he fumed that Lehzen had “meddled and made mischief wherever she has had the opportunity since I left.” While Melbourne assured him that Victoria’s love for Albert could not be diminished by Lehzen’s interference, Anson was not sure: “She was always in the Queen’s path, pointing and exaggerating every little fault of the Prince, constantly misrepresenting him, constantly trying to undermine him in the Queen’s affections.” There is little evidence Lehzen actually did this—she had previously praised Albert as “such a good and humble-minded person”—but it is clear she stiffened Victoria’s resolve to retain her prerogatives. John Conroy had schooled Lehzen, and her instincts were to protect the queen. It was important that Albert recognize, she said, that “the Queen would brook no interference with the exercise of her powers of which she was most jealous.” Here was the heart of the dispute: the fight over the powers of the queen.
The hostility soon spilled into public view. When Albert told Lehzen to leave the palace in 1842—something, she retorted, that he had no right to do—she stopped talking to him. Lehzen resented Albert’s trying to change things she and Victoria had agreed upon. Albert thought she was rude, disrespectful, and hungry for power—and had been promoted above her rank. He was livid when he found Lehzen, a commoner and staffer, holding Pussy on her lap—sitting down—in the nursery. (Even wet nurses were advised to breastfeed standing up out of respect for their infant royal charges.) When she neglected to tell Albert that Captain Childers, one of the queen’s courtiers, had fallen in love with the queen, he accused her of incompetence. Lehzen insisted she had told the Lord Chamberlain instead of Albert only because Albert had been so rude to her that it was impossible to talk to him.
When a woman like Lehzen threatened Albert’s authority, he became unusually nasty. She was generally viewed, as Albert’s biographer Roger Fulford put it, as a “spinster gremlin.” Albert referred to her as die Blaste—the hag—in letters to his brother. When she got jaundice that Christmas, he called her “the Yellow lady.” Albert blamed her for Victoria’s shortcomings: what he believed to be a substandard education—even though she was a better linguist, fluent in English, German, and French, with some Italian—and her anxiety about conversations with scholars and politicians much older than she. He was particularly critical of Victoria in the months before Lehzen left, but once she was gone, Albert described her to his brother as “the most perfect companion a man could wish for.”
Lehzen was jealous of Albert, but she was not the gremlin of his imagination. Lord Holland praised her as having “sense and information, great judgment and yet greater strength of mind.” The acerbic Greville described her as a “clever agreeable woman” who was “much beloved by the women and much esteemed and liked by all who frequent the Court.” Georgiana Bloomfield, a lady-in-waiting, said she was a “kind and motherly” figure to the women in the court, especially the younger ones. Likewise, Lady Lyttelton thought she was kind, helpful, and devoted. But Albert would not stand any rivals in Victoria’s affections, and instead of accommodating his ambitions, Lehzen fought them, just as she had fought Victoria’s mother and Conroy years ago. She was punished for standing up for her queen.
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During Victoria’s second pregnancy, the queen’s ladies marveled at her robust health. But in truth the young mother was feeling unwell, “wretched,” “low and depressed.” She had not wanted to have another child so quickly and deeply resented the limitations on her life—as though her “wings were clipped.” She grew less interested in her work, and frequently erupted in tantrums.
On November 9, 1841, a fat, healthy baby was born. Victoria was thrilled it was a boy, but felt low after a torturous birth. She wrote in her journal:
I will not say much, but my sufferings were really very severe and I doubt that I should have died but for the great comfort and support of my beloved Albert….At last at 12 m[inutes] to 11 I gave birth to a fine, large boy! Oh, how happy, how grateful did I feel that Almighty Providence has so greatly blessed me and preserved me so mercifully through so many days and trials. Though tired I felt very well once the child was there.
Albert gave her a jeweled brooch featuring the crest of their son; she then fell into a deep sleep for the rest of the day, relieved, again, that she had not died. But Victoria felt nothing for him when she held him in her arms; no love, or even affection. She would suffer from postnatal depression for a year. Throughout November, Albert continued to lift her from bed to chair. She felt weak and depressed and had trouble sleeping. Members of her household watched her nervously, suspicious that her grandfather’s madness would eventually emerge and overwhelm her.
It took many months for Victoria to shake her sadness, one she found inexplicable, as Albert made her so happy. Her nerves “were so battered,” she told Leopold in April 1843, that “I suffered a whole year from it.” She later told her eldest daughter that the problem was having two children in such quick succession: “Bertie and I both suffered and the former will ever suffer from coming so soon after you.” As the first boy, Albert Edward—later Edward VII—was born to be king, but his older sister would always be smarter, prettier, and more loved.
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br /> On January 16, 1842, Albert and Victoria drove as fast as they could back to Windsor from Claremont. They had spent a short break at Leopold’s English estate in an attempt to cure Victoria’s melancholia, but had been summoned back early because Pussy, whose health had been poor for months, was getting worse. Albert had long blamed Lehzen for problems in the nursery, but when his infant daughter grew ill, he was anxious and angry. Pussy became weak and unsettled when she was just a few months old, and neither Lehzen nor the wet nurse was able to soothe or fatten her. The queen wrote: “ ’Til the end of August she was such a magnificent, strong fat child, that it is a great grief to see her so thin, pale and changed.” Dr. Clark gave her ass’s milk and chicken broth with cream, which she was unable to keep down, as well as mercury-laced calomel, and the appetite-suppressing laudanum. The birth of a little brother, the boy her parents had longed for, only made little Pussy worse. The day after he was born, Victoria wrote: “Saw both children, Pussy terrified and not at all pleased with her little brother.”
They were silent for much of the trip: so many children died before even learning to walk. When the coach pulled in to the rectangular courtyard at Windsor, they ran up the stairs to the nursery. There, they were shocked at the sight of a thin, hollow-eyed Pussy, who nonetheless beamed and gurgled at them. Albert said something in anger, which prompted the nurse to respond aggressively. He turned to Victoria and muttered, “That really is malicious.” Victoria erupted, upset: did he want her, the mother, out of the nursery?
Both lost their tempers: Albert told Victoria she had an irrational infatuation with Lehzen, and said the pair of them had neglected their child—did they want to kill her? Victoria in turn accused him of wanting to control everything, including the nursery; of being jealous of her position, of her treasured friendship with Lehzen; of thinking the worst of her; of not allowing her to make her own decisions. After taking over much of her ceremonial role, she was incensed that Albert now wanted to control the care of their babies too. The months of subterranean tension had finally erupted. She was sorry, Victoria shouted, that she had ever married him.