by Julia Baird
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By 1845, Albert was effectively king. In December, Lord Lansdowne and Lord John Russell visited Windsor and were struck by his firm grasp of the crown:
Formerly the Queen received her Ministers alone; with her alone they communicated, though of course Prince Albert knew everything; but now the Queen and Prince were together, received Lord L. and J.R. together, and both of them always said We….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.
Victoria was then pregnant with her fifth child. She described her husband as a deputy who was smarter than she was; she was at times in awe of his abilities. The editors of Victoria’s letters, Arthur Benson and Lord Esher, testified to how hard Albert worked and how palpable his assistance to the queen was. He arranged and annotated the queen’s papers and wrote “innumerable” memoranda. But Victoria continued to be queen. While drafts of the queen’s replies were often in Albert’s handwriting, she corrected and rewrote parts of them, and she drafted much of her correspondence herself. Benson and Esher write:
A considerable number of the drafts are in her own hand, with interlinear corrections and additions by the Prince; and these so strongly resemble in style the drafts in the handwriting of the Prince, that it is clear that the Queen did not merely accept suggestions, but that she had a strong opinion of her own on important matters, and that this opinion was duly expressed.
It would be wrong to assume, as some have, that Albert’s efforts and opinions obliterated Victoria’s. When it came to matters such as religious tolerance, for example, Victoria had firm opinions from an early age. When Robert Peel wanted to improve tertiary education for Catholics and provide more funding for the Catholic Maynooth training college for priests, Victoria supported him despite the surge of protest in England. She was remarkably progressive about religion: “I blush for the form of religion we profess, that it should be so void of all right feeling, & so wanting in Charity. Are we to drive these 700,000 Roman Catholics, who are badly educated, to desperation & violence?” Victoria praised Peel for standing up against a “tide of bigotry, and blind fanaticism.”
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Peel’s Corn Law triumph cost him his career. On June 25, the prime minister lost an important vote in the House of Commons, partly because the protectionists had combined to vote against him. He resigned and retired, and the Whigs came to power once more. The queen, who had grown fond of Peel, told him she and the prince considered him “a kind and true friend.” Peel asked for a portrait of Victoria and Albert with the Prince of Wales—who had been born just after Peel became PM—in the “simple attire” he had often seen them in. Peel’s greatest asset was his single-minded determination to do the best for his country, and his greatest flaw was his inability to convince his party that it was the best. He is still remembered as a party traitor.
Victoria learned of Peel’s political demise while she was recovering from the difficult birth of her fifth child, a plump, strong girl, Princess Helena Augusta Victoria, in May 1846. While she was saddened, her domestic contentment had made her more philosophical. It was an utter contrast to her response to the loss of Melbourne five years earlier. “Really when one is so happy & blessed in one’s home life, as I am, Politics (provided my Country is safe) must take only a second place.” These words have been oft quoted to underscore the queen’s supposed dislike of politics. But a mere two weeks after giving birth to her fifth child, and watching poisonous political opponents savage an effective leader she had grown to admire, she was simply speaking a truth many politicians think at times of crisis: family matters more than anything else. The caveat she added is important here, too: provided her country was safe.
Lord Melbourne had gone, and now Robert Peel had too. But the royal couple no longer had need of mentors. By the time they both turned thirty in 1849, the queen and her prince were operating as a formidable joint force. The prime minister, the prominent Whig Lord John Russell, was tasked not only with placating and aiding the Irish, who were starving by the thousands, but also with managing his arrogant foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, whom Victoria and Albert grew to detest. Their battle with him would shape the next era of British foreign policy and demonstrate the force of the queen and her prince when they agreed, and fought together.
CHAPTER 15
Perfect, Awful, Spotless Prosperity
The two young people were for several years even more foolish about their babies than are most affectionate young parents, and in spite of public demands on their time they spent a large portion of each day playing with their human toys.
—CLARE JERROLD
There was a quiet, a retirement, a wildness, a liberty and a solitude.
—QUEEN VICTORIA ON SCOTLAND
He was only twenty-five inches tall and weighed a mere fifteen pounds, but General Tom Thumb was not at all nervous on the day he was to meet Queen Victoria. The American boy was six years old, though his age was usually advertised as twelve or fourteen. Charles Sherwood Stratton, who had stopped growing when he was only seven months old, looked like a miniature man. He had blond hair, black eyes, rosy cheeks, and perfectly tailored clothes. The confident American entertainer burst through the doors leading to the Queen’s Picture Gallery, where Victoria and Albert were waiting for him, and walked firmly along the long stretch of carpet.
Gasps were heard from the crowd. His manager, P. T. Barnum, who was then “renting” him from his parents, later wrote that he looked like “a wax doll gifted with the powers of locomotion.” Tom Thumb marched past some of the world’s greatest artwork—Rubenses, Van Dycks, Rembrandts, and Vermeers, mostly collected by King Charles I—and stopped in front of the petite queen. For once she found herself looking down on someone. Then he bowed deeply: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!” The court roared at the breach of etiquette: he had failed to address the queen as Your Majesty. The queen then took Thumb’s hand and walked him around the gallery, asking questions. He told her he thought her picture gallery was “first-rate” and the royal household laughed. For the next hour, Thumb sang, did an imitation of Napoleon, and gave a seamless performance.
Barnum had been instructed, as all guests were, to bow his way out of the room. The picture gallery was a considerable distance—about fifty meters long—and, as Barnum tells it, Thumb’s little legs could not keep up with Mr. Barnum’s; when he fell behind, he turned and ran a few steps, before backing out again, then running again. He kept up this routine until the gallery was rocking with laughter. The excitement agitated Victoria’s poodle; he began barking, and Thumb was forced to fend him off with his cane, which made people laugh even harder.
Victoria, who became worried that Barnum was not treating Thumb gently enough, described him as “the greatest curiosity, I, or indeed anybody ever saw”:
No description can give an idea of this little creature, whose real name was Charles Stratton….He is American, & gave us his card, with Gen: Tom Thumb, written on it. He made the funniest little bow, putting out his hand & saying: “much obliged Mam.” One cannot help feeling very sorry for the poor little thing & wishing he could be properly cared for, for the people who show him off tease him a good deal, I should think.
It was 1844, and this was the first of Thumb’s three successful trips to Buckingham Palace during a three-year tour of Britain and Europe. Victoria gave Thumb money and presents, but her greatest gift was her attention, which endowed him with prestige and publicity. General Tom Thumb became the height of fashion; carriages lined up outside his exhibition rooms in Piccadilly. Thumb rode through the London streets in a tiny but elaborate red, white, and blue carriage pulled by pretty ponies. He soon adopted court dress: an intricately embroidered chocolate-colored velvet coat and short pants; a white satin vest with colorful patterns; white silk stockings and shoes; and a wig, cocked hat, and fake sword. He and his famous showman master, Barnum, knew how to delight a crowd. Barnum claimed his young pr
otégé became a “great pet” to Prime Minister Robert Peel, as well as to the Duke of Wellington. The queen invited him to perform for her again in 1856.
Victoria was highly entertained by the “curiosities,” as they were then called: exotic animals or unusual men and women, from horse whisperers to dwarves and court jesters. Not long after she married Albert, Victoria met the “Lady of the Lions,” the first woman known to enter large cages of lions and tigers and exit unscathed. She performed in the courtyard of Windsor Castle as the queen watched from a window. Afterward, Victoria sent for the woman and praised her courage. “Poor girl,” said Victoria. “I hope and pray you will never get hurt. God bless you!”
Victoria’s kindness to the vulnerable and her curiosity about the unique endured throughout her life. When a couple billed to be the tallest couple in the world got engaged, she asked them to visit her at Buckingham Palace and gave the bride a wedding dress and a diamond ring. In her late seventies, the queen requested regular shows from the handsome muscleman Eugen Sandow. When an elephant called Charlie, who performed for her once, killed a man who had been teasing him, Victoria wrote a letter to his handler expressing her regret.
These were happy years. Victoria struggled with her pregnancies and rapidly multiplying brood, and she fretted about instability in Europe, but during the same period, she asserted her rights, gave her husband ample leeway to execute his plans, and delighted in her family. She and Albert sang along as Felix Mendelssohn played private concerts; constructed a theater to stage plays at home, and feasted on fine food and wine. Victoria indulged sometimes perhaps too much: “A Queen does not drink a bottle of wine at a meal,” wrote Stockmar to her sternly. What she really yearned for was privacy, solitude, and smaller homes by the sea and in the Highlands. Two of her best-loved words were “cozy” and “snug”—both encapsulated in the German word gemütlich.
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It was on the Isle of Wight, with its lush fields and chalky cliffs sloping into a gray sea, that Victoria and Albert first made their own home. The island had an enchanted air; walking paths were crowded with flowering thickets and overhanging branches; rabbits leapt about on the headlands; nightingales sang in the trees. The sea could be seen from almost every room in the light, breezy house, which was called Osborne. Victoria had stayed on the island as a girl, and when Peel notified them that an estate was available, Albert was able to negotiate a reasonable price, paid for by his own prudent budgeting. He relished the chance to design and remodel a house unhampered by intervention from a government department. He hired the renowned builder and draftsman Thomas Cubitt and was involved in everything: the Italianate floor plan and façade, the arrangement of art and china, the gardens, the beach, the soil, the sewage, the planting of the trees. Albert constructed an icehouse, a small lake to be used for fighting fires, a beach hut lined with mosaic tiles for Victoria, and a floating pool moored in the sea for the children. (Victoria used a wooden bathing machine, from which she slid discreetly into the sea.) He also designed the nursery cribs; the lamps over the slate billiard table, which swung out to be cleaned; the sliding doors in the drawing room that were mirrored to reflect the lights of the chandeliers at night; and the Swiss Cottage, where the children grew plants, collected rocks, and played in their model fort with their model guns. At Christmas he composed hymns for the family to sing to the accompaniment of wind instruments.
This home was, for Victoria, a “perfect little Paradise.” She delighted in the spring, the lambs and nightingales and foliage (“the trees seem covered as with feathers”). Albert thrived there. In May 1845, Victoria wrote: “It does my heart good to see how my beloved Albert enjoys it all, and is so full of admiration of the place, and of all the plans and improvements he means to carry out. He is hardly to be kept at home a moment.” It was, she noted three years later, a form of therapy for him. Albert loved gardening; he experimented with turning raw sewage into fertilizer, and was keenly disappointed when he could not find a way to make others follow suit, especially given the state of the sewers in London. He also gained a reputation as a man who treated his employees well.
The Victoria of Osborne House is a warm, lighthearted woman in the flush of her young marriage. The writing desks were dotted with framed portraits of the family and casts of baby feet and hands: fat, creased palms, dimpled elbows, smooth young faces—she and Albert were parents capturing the moments of youth that sprint past unmarked if you don’t throw butterfly nets over them. A painting displayed in the expansive yellow drawing room shows the subtle wit and playfulness of the couple at that time. It depicts three women sitting under trees heavy with green leaves, dappled by the afternoon sun. One of them, smiling mysteriously, is leaning on another. At first, it looks like an innocuous, dreamlike summer’s picnic. On closer examination, the shape of a man’s back can be traced under the skirt of the woman lying back with the smile on her face, and an extra pair of feet can be seen coming out from her petticoats. This painting, La Siesta by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, is thought to be the first that the queen bought. It is charming to think of a saucy Victoria laughing over the scenario with Albert, slyly showing the painting to visitors without pointing out the hidden man.*1
In the late summer or fall, the family traveled north to the sparsely populated low-lying mountains of Scotland. Victoria first went in 1842, when she was struggling with depression after Bertie’s birth. She and Albert were captivated by the remote stillness and beauty of the untamed Highlands. The family would wander up into the wild, solitary hills; Albert hunted or deer-stalked while Victoria drew or chatted with the ghillies—the locals who worked as attendants, especially on hunting, fishing, or walking expeditions—and the children played. Albert admired the “severe and grand character” and “remarkably pure and light” air, and the fact that the people were “more natural, and marked by that honesty and sympathy which always distinguishes the inhabitants of mountainous countries, who live far away from towns.” It reminded him of his childhood home in Germany.
Victoria and Albert took their first trip to the “pretty little Castle” of Balmoral in September 1848. They walked up the hills for miles, toward ever more glorious views, in utter silence: “It was wonderful not seeing a human being, nor hearing a sound, excepting that of the wind, or the call of blackcock or grouse. It filled me with peculiar feelings of admiration & solemnity,” wrote Victoria. The introverted Albert loved the “complete mountain solitude, where one rarely sees a human face,” and he wanted mostly to hunt: “I, naughty man, have also been creeping stealthily after the harmless stags, and today I shot two red deer.” He took his hunting very seriously, and Victoria anxiously waited to hear how many hides he had collected: when he got none, she almost cried. They spent afternoons working, replying to a flurry of reports from the outside world, about Ireland, an unstable Europe, unrest in India; but the mornings were still and undisturbed.
The queen shed her inhibitions at Balmoral and befriended the locals. She gave the tenants of her local cottages new petticoats, chatted with the women for hours, and sometimes joined them for tea. She found them simple, straightforward, and refreshingly unpretentious: “They are never vulgar, never take liberties, are so intelligent, modest and well bred.” The royal couple were smitten with the Highland life: they sported tartan, Albert studied Gaelic, and the queen and children took Scottish dancing lessons. Charles Greville was struck by the simplicity of their existence there: “They live there without any state whatever; they live not merely like private gentlefolks, but like very small gentlefolks; small house, small rooms, small establishments.”
Scotland would remain the place where Victoria felt happiest, and the most herself, for the rest of her life. She could sit in mud cottages and chat endlessly about anything. She could dance with Highlanders without snooty aristocrats raising eyebrows, and giggle with her ladies while clambering down slippery hills in the most beautiful, remote terrain. (In her diary on September 11, 1849, she wrote of one man who had take
n care of her on one sojourn and would be so important to her in future years: the handsome “J. Brown.”) Not all were charmed by her enthusiasm: after enduring a dinner party full of long, awkward silences at Osborne House, Lady Lyttelton watched the men play billiards with some envy as the queen began to talk about “her wild Highland life, and very pleasantly—that Scotch air, Scotch people, Scotch hills, Scotch rivers, Scotch woods, are all far preferable to those of any other nation in or out of this world.” “The chief support to my spirits,” Lady Lyttelton added, “is that I shall never see, hear or witness these various charms.” But this was the great magic of their new Scottish home: Victoria and Albert loved it more than anyone else did.
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During these years, Victoria occasionally fretted that her contentment might not last. She longed to freeze time. Sitting alone in her room on New Year’s Eve as 1847 gave way to 1848, she wrote:
When one is as happy as we are, one feels sad at the quick passing of the years, & I always wish Time could stand still for a while. This year has brought us much to be thankful for; the Children are so well, & the 2 eldest decidedly so improved. I have thought over my faults,—what I have to avoid, & what to correct, & with God’s help & perseverance on my part I hope to conquer my shortcomings.