by Julia Baird
Albert was infuriated and appalled by such a public scene. Muttering “I must have patience,” he returned to his rooms and refused to talk to Victoria for days. Stockmar acted as an intermediary. Victoria wrote to him that same day, immediately contrite, saying the argument was like a bad dream. She wanted him to tell Lehzen there had been a “little misunderstanding,” to calm Albert and say the queen was too upset to see anyone. Still recovering from Bertie’s difficult labor just a few weeks earlier, she could not stop crying. “I feel so forlorn and I have got such a sick headache! I feel as if I had had a dreadful dream. I do hope you may be able to pacify Albert. He seems so very angry still. I am not.”
He was. Albert was not going to temper his words anymore. He would force the queen to choose between her husband and her governess. He wrote to Stockmar:
Lehzen is a crazy, common, stupid intriguer, obsessed with lust of power, now regards herself as a demi-god, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge her as such, as a criminal….I on the other hand regard Victoria as naturally a fine character but warped in many respects by wrong upbringing….There can be no improvement till Victoria sees Lehzen as she is, and I pray that this come.
Victoria’s passionate fits came and went, but Albert’s anger was white, cold, and enduring. He was willing to inflict pain on his wife. He wrote to her, in icy tones, a couple of days later: “Doctor Clark has mismanaged the child and poisoned her with calomel and you have starved her. I shall have nothing more to do with it; take the child away and do as you like and if she dies you will have it on your conscience.” Victoria told Albert that she forgave him his “thoughtless words” and asked him to tell her if he was worried about something. But Albert stormed in a letter to Stockmar: “Victoria is too hasty and passionate for me to be able often to speak of my difficulties. She will not hear me out but flies into a rage and overwhelms me with reproaches of suspiciousness, want of trust, ambition, envy, &c, &c.”
The men were in agreement: the queen must surrender. Stockmar wrote a confidential note to Victoria threatening to resign if such scenes recurred. The queen wrote back quickly: “Albert must tell me what he dislikes, & I will set about to remedy it, but he must also promise to listen to & believe me; when (on the contrary) I am in a passion which I trust I am not very often in now, he must not believe the stupid things I say like being miserable I ever married & so forth which come when I am unwell.”
Victoria accepted that she had faults. She had been having these outbursts—which Albert called “combustibles”—ever since she was a child. But Albert seemed unable to accept that occasionally she needed to vent or storm. Instead he rebuked her and urged her to train her emotions: a Sisyphean task.
Victoria continued to defend Lehzen. She reasonably pointed out that she wanted to look after her former governess out of kindness and loyalty, and to keep her in the house as a reward for a lifetime of service. She acknowledged, though, that their position was “very different to any other married couples” because “A. is in my house and not I in his,” but, ultimately, that she would submit to him because she loved him. She promised to try to tame her temper, writing on January 20, 1842:
There is often an irritability in me which (like Sunday last which began the whole misery) makes me say cross & odious things which I don’t believe myself & which I fear hurt A. but which he should not believe, but I will strive to conquer it though I knew before I married that this would be a trouble; I therefore wished not to marry, as the two years and a half, when I was so completely my own mistress made it difficult for me to control myself & to bend to another’s will, but I trust I shall be able to conquer it.
Three months later, Lady Lyttelton was appointed governess. She was the perfect choice: sweet, competent, old-fashioned, and mild-mannered. The children adored her and she pleased both the prince, whom she deeply admired, and the queen, whose “vein of iron” she recognized instantly. It was agreed that Pussy had simply been fussed over too much, and that the doctors did little good.
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On July 25, without consulting his wife, Albert fired Lehzen. He then lied to Victoria, telling her that Lehzen wanted to go back to Germany for the sake of her health. She would be out of the palace in two months. He added that he approved of this. That night, Victoria wrote in her journal: “Naturally I was rather upset, though I feel sure it is for our and her best.”
Ever conscious of protecting Victoria, Lehzen was cheerful and comforting when an agitated queen walked into her room. She repeated Albert’s line, “saying she felt it was necessary for her health to go away, for of course, I did not require her so much now, & would find others to help me.” Victoria left the room, momentarily relieved. As she later sat next to her husband, playing a duet on the piano, she fought a desire to cry. It was done. Albert had willed it. She wrote in her journal: “Felt rather bewildered & low, at what had taken place, & naturally the thought of the coming separation from my dear Lehzen, whom I love so much, made me feel very sad.”
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On the night of September 29, 1842, Victoria dreamed of Lehzen. This was the woman who had smiled at her in Westminster Abbey when the heavy crown of England was placed on her head, who had given her strength when John Conroy had tried to usurp her power, who had held cold cloths to her brow to calm the fever that almost took her life at fifteen. The woman who had been closer to her than her mother. She dreamed that Lehzen had come into her room to say goodbye, embracing her with her usual tenderness. Victoria woke choked with grief: “It was very painful to me….I had heard it mentioned before—that odd feeling on waking—but I had no experience of it. It is very unpleasant.”
Downstairs, the baroness was buttoning her jacket. She stooped to take the last of her bags down to a coach waiting in the courtyard of Windsor Castle. The sky was whitening; she hurried down the stairs. She did not want to disturb Victoria, as she knew they would both struggle to maintain composure. Over breakfast that morning, Victoria received a letter from her “in which she took leave of me in writing, thinking it would be less painful than seeing me. This naturally upset me, & I so regret not being able to embrace her once more….I can never forget that she was for many years everything to me.”
With great dignity, the baroness returned to Germany to live with her sister, who died only a few months later. Lehzen lived alone for the rest of her life, supported by the generous annual pension Victoria provided. Her devotion to the queen never faltered. In 1858, she stood for hours on the platform of Bückeburg station waiting for a train bearing Victoria and Albert, who were on their way to visit the newly married Vicky. As the carriages rolled through the station without stopping, Lehzen stood there waving a handkerchief, trying to catch a glimpse of Victoria.
Lehzen had been the brace that steeled Victoria’s spine as it grew; she was enormously proud of her. Victoria visited her one last time, in 1866, after Albert died, at Reinhardtsbrunn. They hugged each other and cried; Victoria knew that Lehzen, though now frail, would understand the magnitude of her grief. Lehzen spoke constantly about her queen in her last months, when her mind was wandering and she was confined to her bed with a hip fracture. She died in 1870, at the age of eighty-five. Victoria ruled for another three decades.
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By the end of 1842, Albert’s rivals were gone. Melbourne had resigned and Lehzen was exiled to Germany. Albert had the keys to Victoria’s boxes, control of her finances (from both the civil list and private estates), and access to her ministers. By now he was not simply representing but overshadowing the queen. In his role as private secretary—the position John Conroy had coveted—he drafted letters, read state papers, advised the queen on every matter, and dominated meetings. With Peel, he prepared to do the work of a king: an unusually active, disciplined, and competent king. He was ready to start the real work on the “higher and graver things.”
There was much to do. The issues that concerned Albert most were army reform, education (especially science and geology), slavery, workin
g conditions, and foreign relations, most particularly the relationships with Germany and France. He cared deeply about music, art, housing, and architecture. He took up an official role in groups including the Royal Agricultural Society, the Philharmonic Society, the British Association, the Society for Improving the Condition of the Laboring Classes, the Statistical Congress of All Nations Conference, the National Education Conference, the Dublin Exhibition, the Great Exhibition, the Society of the Arts, the Society for the Extinction of Slavery, and the Royal Commission for Fine Arts (the latter in connection with the building of the new Houses of Parliament). He worked late into the night and rose early so he might have time to labor on his special projects. Albert was an inordinately driven man, and happily for Britain, his work would soon be put to transformative uses.
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Albert also ensured that the Christmas of 1841 was delightful. He imported pine trees from Coburg—popularizing the Christmas tree tradition, though they were hung from the ceiling as well as being placed on the floor as they are today—and they skated, built snowmen, and rode sledges across crunchy snow. Victoria could hardly believe she had two children, a one-year-old daughter and a two-month-old son, and such a gemütlich, or cozy, domestic life. On Boxing Day, from Windsor Castle, Anson reported with satisfaction that the queen “interests herself less and less about politics” and was a “good deal preoccupied with the little Princess Royal.”
Albert, in turn, became more and more preoccupied with politics. Across the Channel, Europe was simmering with revolutionary zeal. The British royals seemed remarkably immune to the threat of the guillotine for now, but there was no telling how quickly the wind could shift. The prince had fought for his place as man of the house, ensured the hedges were properly trimmed and the palace cleaned, the queen’s closest friends sidelined or sacked. He now turned his attention to the state of England and the survival of the British monarchy. Albert was determined to usher in a new era: one of a noble, nonpartisan, unbiased monarchy. He was also determined not to make the same mistakes as his wife. He would rule without favor. And he would no longer be mocked as a compliant, docile spouse; his mastery over his wife would be recognized and respected. The Albert epoch had begun.
CHAPTER 14
King to All Intents: “Like a Vulture into His Prey”
He is become so identified with her that they are one person, and as he likes and she dislikes business, it is obvious that while she has the title he is really discharging the functions of the Sovereign. He is King to all intents and purposes.
—CHARLES GREVILLE, DECEMBER 16, 1845
In the mid-1800s, the month of January was often the worst for those scraping a living from the streets of London. The summer stench of manure, tobacco, rotting fish, unwashed bodies, tanneries, chemical works, coal fires, and the cesspools beneath houses was replaced by a gnawing cold. The air grew bitter after the sun sank into a pale sky. Emaciated cats scavenged for food, and “pure-hunters” trawled the sewers for nails, coins, or bits of rope in the dark, often fending off large rats. The cold stiffened the limbs of corpses often left in gutters and narrow alleys for want of graveyards: young women who died in childbirth, men who froze in their sleep, skeletal babies with mysterious diseases. The cold also whistled through window cracks of tiny rooms where families huddled together for warmth. And in the enormous and poorly heated Buckingham Palace, the same cold forced Prince Albert to wear long johns to bed and a wig to breakfast. In London, the soot fell in flakes like snow, leaving a grimy black patina on hats, roofs, and upturned faces. The German prince longed for the crisp clean air of the country.
On the afternoon of January 27, 1846, as the royal carriage pulled up outside the Palace of Westminster, the sun was a pale pink smudge behind a forest of chimneys. A large, excitable crowd had gathered to watch members of Parliament walk past in their top hats and tailored frock coats. They shouted out the names of those they recognized. One man sold veal and eel pies; another was roasting chestnuts on the street corner. A woman hawking pork sausage clambered over the litter piled up in the gutter. A boy of about twelve, dressed in red, darted behind carriages to scoop up horse manure, placing it in a bucket by the side of the road; it would later be sold to farms and nursery gardens outside London. A crowd of children barely dressed in dirty rags chased a mangy dog down the street.
Prince Albert was coming to Parliament that day to support his friend the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, during what was to be the defining political debate of Peel’s career. Peel, the son of an industrialist, had come to believe that the tariffs placed on a range of foreign goods were hindering free trade and economic growth and unfairly pushing up costs for ordinary British citizens. Landowners, who were strongly supported by most Tories, argued that removing the tariffs—or “Corn Laws”—would ruin them. Peel spurned the wishes of his party as he advocated for their total repeal over the next three years. It was both political courage and career suicide. Victoria and Albert admired Peel’s stand, and had decided to support him after he sent series of memos on the Corn Laws to Albert. The hardworking Victoria shared Peel’s disdain for idle and privileged lords, writing in her journal in 1846:
[Peel] added that it made one impatient to see “gentlemen, who did nothing but hunt all day, drink Claret & Port Wine in the evening, & never studied or read about any of these questions, then proceed to lecture & interfere with the Ministers.” It does make one more than impatient & when one thinks how Peel sacrifices his health, his comfort, his time, & even his Party connections, solely for the good of the country to be only rewarded by abuse & shameful ingratitude, it quite makes one’s blood boil.
It was approaching 4:30 P.M. Police had lined the street since one o’clock, holding back the dense crowd, who noisily cheered any member of Parliament who opposed the Corn Laws. Inside Westminster, Peel walked into the House of Commons, bowed gracefully to the Speaker, and walked to the center of the Treasury Bench. He was self-assured and patrician: a tall, handsome man with fair hair and fine features, a long, thin nose, a high forehead, and dark, grave eyes. Observers described his manner as that of a banker or a “dapper shopkeeper.” The crowd stared at him coldly, four hundred aristocrats in all, boots muddy from the day’s hunt.
A hush descended when Prince Albert entered the Strangers’ Gallery. Lord George Bentinck, a Tory with a passion for horse racing, rolled his eyes: Did this German prince really think he could bring royal favor into the debate? First it was the queen with Melbourne; now, Albert with Peel? It seemed highly irregular, and wrong, to have this interference from the monarchy. Even “moderate men,” Disraeli later claimed, were bothered by his presence.
At 4:48 P.M., Peel rose, shook out his cuffs (a mannerism that particularly annoyed Victoria), cast a glance around the chamber, and began to speak. He did not stop for three hours. Albert rushed back to the palace afterward, as Victoria was heading to dinner, and reported that the speech had been “very comprehensive & excellent.” The debate ground on over a series of late nights. In late February, Lord George Bentinck—who was the cousin of Privy Council clerk and diarist Charles Greville—rose to his feet and poured scorn on the prince in an electrifying speech. (His wrath would earn him the leadership of the protectionist Conservative Party in the House of Commons. This party formed when the Tory Party split in two over the Corn Laws—the free-trade Peelists went with the prime minister, while the others regrouped as the Conservatives.) Lord George Bentinck was a striking figure with a red-tinged beard, dressed in a long frock coat, a velvet waistcoat, and a sizable turquoise stone that bulged from a gold chain around his neck. Peel, he said, had abandoned the honor of the aristocrats. And Albert was guilty of “listening to ill advice” and allowing himself to be “seduced” by Peel to “come down in this House to usher in, to give éclat, and, as it were, by reflection from the Queen, to give the semblance of the personal sanction of Her Majesty to a measure which, be it for good or for evil, a great majority at least of the landed aristocra
cy of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, imagine will be fraught with deep injury, if not ruin, to them.”
Attending the debate was the prince’s only overtly partisan action, and it was a mistake. The Tories had been suspicious of the throne since Victoria was crowned, and Albert, who wanted to be influential but neutral, had vowed to have no appearance of bias. In Theodore Martin’s biography of Albert, commissioned by Victoria, the queen defended her husband: “The Prince merely went, as the Prince of Wales and the Queen’s other sons do, for once to hear a fine debate, which is so useful to all princes. But this he naturally felt unable to do again.”
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By the time Parliament voted in March, the royal family was holidaying on the unspoiled Isle of Wight. Victoria was leaving the beach when a servant came running down, red-faced, with a box from Peel: the House of Commons had repealed the Corn Laws with a strong majority. Victoria stared at the letter, relieved. Albert viewed Peel as a kindred spirit and, eventually, like a second father. He wrote to Stockmar that the Tory leader “shows boundless courage, and is in the best spirits; his whole faculties are roused [er fühlt sich] by the consciousness, that he is at this moment playing one of the most important parts in the history of his country.” (Repeal was not, it should be noted, an individual achievement. The Anti–Corn Law League, which came largely from the middle class, was a polished, well-funded, and unified political group. The group’s leaders were clever orators and effective in placing aristocrats on the defensive by castigating them as wealthy landowners, inert politicians, and morally bankrupt leaders. Middle-class opinion was marshaled and aristocrats were criticized in a way they never had been before; it was a significant political shift.)