by Julia Baird
Victoria clutched at these assurances as well as any accounts of heroism. On October 9, 1854, for example, she was given the “satisfactory” dispatch from Lord Raglan—the Commander of the British troops in the Crimea—about the Battle of Alma: “We also read the sadly large list of casualties with deep interest. The Battle was most brilliant & most decisive, but very bloody. Never, in so short a time, has so strong a battery, so well defended, been so bravely & gallantly taken.”
That night, Victoria joined her children dancing reels at Balmoral.
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The battle of Alma, just north of Sevastopol, on September 20, 1854, had been the first decisive victory for the allies. This was followed by the chaotic Battle of Balaclava on October 25, in which the British and French light cavalry, armed only with lances and sabers, confronted rows of Russian men armed with guns. The bullets wounded or killed about 240 out of 660 of the British Light Brigade alone (a total of 737 allied soliders were killed or wounded or went missing in the battle). Tennyson’s sad refrain was published just a few weeks after the charge was made: “Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die. / Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.” The charge of the Light Brigade was forever memorialized as a moment of glorious sacrifice, as needless slaughters ordered by shortsighted generals so often are.
Victoria trembled when listening to Lord Raglan’s dispatch about the terrible outcome at Balaclava; that night she lay awake for hours. She came down to breakfast the next day only to receive another, even worse dispatch. She trembled throughout her morning walk, lunch, and dinner. The military tried to assure her that the battle had been a great victory despite the fact that no advance had been made. Victoria, who had not known war in her lifetime, was stunned: “What an awful time! I never thought I should have lived to see & feel all this!” She swung from grief to pride and back again: her empathy and imagination made her wretched. Thoughts of the men and their widows consumed her. She slept fitfully, and she repeated the word “anxious” dozens of times in her diary.
The war finally came to hinge on the small Russian-controlled port of Sevastopol, on the Black Sea. It was the fort there that the allied armies of Britain, France, Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire had intended to capture as soon as they landed in the Crimea. But it was not until the Battle of Inkerman on November 5, 1854, which had broken the Russian resolve, that the port was encircled and the siege began. It dragged through the winter of 1854; the fort had been engineered by brilliant Russians in the early 1800s and proved nearly impossible to penetrate. The queen and her ministers waited every day for news. By Christmas 1854, the public mood was glum; people devoured Russell’s daily accounts of the misery, lack of provisions, and failure to capture the Russian citadel. Lady Lyttelton wrote to a friend: “The gloom and weight on one’s spirits are dreadful; it appears to me that war never before was so horrible.”
Victoria was an involved commander in chief, and she was a part of all discussions to do with the war, even though she believed herself not especially competent in military matters. She wrote to the Duke of Newcastle: “The Queen feels it to be one of her highest prerogatives and dearest duties to care for the welfare and success of her army.” Albert worked alongside her, writing memoranda that summarized various disputes and political wrangles. When, in January 1855, a motion to hold an inquiry into the conduct of the war was carried by a large majority, the prime minister, Lord Aberdeen, resigned. Lord Palmerston was made prime minister, to the satisfaction of Victoria and Albert, who thought he would make a far better PM than foreign secretary.
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Yet along with the war came something strange: an outbreak of hostility toward Albert. As Stockmar pointed out, distrust of the prince stemmed from the fact that he was an outsider; he did not dress, ride horses, or even shake hands in the “true orthodox English manner.” His reserve and “severe morality” were evident in the fact that he refused to swear, gamble, or keep a mistress. Protectionists had resented his showcasing of foreign industry at the Great Exhibition. Then there was the inescapable fact that he was German.
Suspicion of foreign influence ran deep in Britain. Many resented the prince’s advising the queen in any capacity; some argued that it was unconstitutional for him to advise the sovereign on state affairs, to discuss them with ministers, or to be informed of them at all. For thirteen years, the fact that he shadowed the throne had gone largely unremarked. Now, at a time when he was campaigning openly against the mismanagement of the war and arguing for extra troops to be sent, he became a victim of wartime xenophobia. He was accused of excessive intervention, an almost sinister influence over the queen, and a desire for personal power in the lead-up to the war. He was blamed for blocking Palmerston’s push to war against the Russians, as well as for the fact that Palmerston had briefly retired from the Cabinet over a dispute about a reform bill. False rumors spread that Albert had been charged with treason.
Victoria called the attacks “abominable,” “unwarrantable,” “horrid,” “infamous and now almost ridiculous.” A wounded Albert responded by cutting back some of his commitments until the matter was resolved in Parliament. Victoria disagreed with his retreat, thought it seemed guilty, and criticized Albert for being “afraid to do what I should think to be right.” She pressed her ministers who dined at her table to support a public, parliamentary repudiation of the gossip. Gladstone assured her the critics were just excited about “the Eastern Question & their desire for war.” Lord Aberdeen dismissed it as antigovernment propaganda of no consequence. When Parliament opened on January 31, 1854, Russell led the debate in the lower house that defended Albert’s role as a key adviser. This subdued the critics, and Victoria reported three weeks later that the jeering had stopped in the crowds.
Many of the rumors were right, though: Albert was intensely involved in the queen’s work and had, in many ways, usurped her role. He was now regularly meeting with prime ministers alone, and he had gained the respect of the Cabinet and foreign leaders; the French emperor Napoleon III, who met him in September 1854, declared that “he had never met with a person possessing such various and profound knowledge.” Victoria would mention these meetings casually in her diary, though she remained keenly engaged in political affairs throughout her pregnancies and confinements. Albert saw their relationship as one befitting two people in the traditional biblical model of marriage, in which the man is the master of the woman.
Reading through their correspondence around this time, Lord Esher remarked that they “were the real Ministers of the Crown, and even Palmerston, now and then, had to take a back seat.”
But at the same time that Albert was suspected of wielding too much power, he was mocked for having too little. The prospect of a woman’s having a more powerful job than her husband was constant fodder for cartoonists in those decades and inspired a host of apocryphal stories. In one, credited to the painter E. M. Ward, Albert is dining with the Council of the Royal Academy when a royal messenger arrives and tells him the queen needs him urgently. Albert nods, then returns to his dinner. After sending away two more messengers, he finally climbs into his carriage, only to tell his driver to bypass the palace and go directly to Claremont, the country house owned by Uncle Leopold.
A story related by the Edwardian biographer Lytton Strachey is perhaps the most widely told. Albert locks the door behind him in his room; Victoria comes up and bangs her fist on it:
Victoria: “Open the door!”
Albert: “Who is there?”
Victoria: “The Queen of England!”
Silence. A torrent of knocking.
Victoria: “Open the door!”
Albert: “Who is there?”
Victoria: “The Queen of England!”
Silence. More knocking.
Victoria: “Your wife, Albert.”
The door immediately swings open.
But it was obvious to all who met them that Albert was the dominant figure; an und
erstanding had developed between the two that Albert’s talents were superior. An unpublished letter he wrote to his brother in March 1841, not long after their wedding, provides a glimpse of his views of women’s intellectual inferiority. He wrote:
That you are frequently in society including excellent artists is pleasing to hear. However, I cannot agree that you can only gain in conversation with brilliant/clever ladies/women. You will lack in manliness and clarity of your perceptions of the world; for the more brilliant those ladies are, the more confused they are about general ideas and principles. I would prefer to see you in close and intimate traffic with older men who are experienced in life and have achieved something and reached a balance within themselves and with humanity in general.
Albert was not particularly interested in women, clever or not. Unlike many other politicians and aristocrats, he had not grown up surrounded by cerebral women—such as the reformer writer Elizabeth Montagu or Lord Melbourne’s mother, Elizabeth Lamb, who ran salons and were at the center of sophisticated cultural life in nineteenth-century England. Albert had been motherless since he was young; he had had a male tutor, a male lawyer, and a household full of men. Rather than encouraging his wife to have faith in her own abilities, he instructed her on her need for “improvement.”
Victoria was now calling Albert her “Lord & Master.” On their fourteenth wedding anniversary, in 1854, she sighed: “Few women are so blessed with such a Husband.” She rifled through her desk to find their marriage service: “I feel so impressed by the promise I made ‘to love, cherish, honour serve & obey’ my Husband. May it ever be duly impressed on my mind, & on that of every woman.” She scoffed at women who dominated their husbands, particularly Lady John Russell, the wife of the prime minister. When the queen of Portugal died, Victoria bemoaned the loss of “a most devoted, loving wife, an exemplary mother & an affectionate true friend.” She did not mention the fact that her friend was also a monarch.
The higher Victoria pushed Albert, the lower she sank in her own estimation. The queen was increasingly showing signs of lacking confidence in her own abilities, a change from her teenage pluck. Little wonder, as her husband told her that her eldest daughter was more intellectually capable than she was. Eighteen years after her accession, she wrote: “I trust I have tried to do my duty, though I feel how incompetent, I, as a woman, am, to what I ought to be. I often think what a blessing it would be, were dearest Albert King, instead of me!” Victoria was well educated and intellectually curious; she discussed astronomy with Lord Rosse, including topics such as the weight of the stars, and distant planets like Jupiter. But she was frequently intimidated and increasingly uncertain. In October 1854, after several months of dispatches from the front in the Crimean War, she hesitated before writing about the war in her journal: “I am so little versed in military matters, that I shall be unable adequately to describe what the difficulties consist in, but will try to put down in a few words, what I mean.”
The qualities that had enabled the queen to fight for her crown were the same qualities Albert now said were ruining her character and ability to rule: stubbornness, obstinacy, strength, self-belief. She longed to please him. On his thirty-fifth birthday, in 1854, she dressed carefully in pink and white muslin, watched his face closely as he opened his presents, and pondered how unworthy she felt. (She would pass this fear on to Vicky, too, who was a prodigiously clever, precocious child and later the intellectual equal of her husband, Fritz; in that era, it was the lot of a woman tied to a clever and dominant man.) Surely “no wife ever loved & worshipped her husband as I do,” she wrote. Victoria was overjoyed when every man in uniform was told to stop shaving above his top lip, just like Albert. By August 4, 1854, she was told the mustaches were “very popular” among the Guards. She wanted her children to resemble Albert, her soldiers to mirror Albert, her ministers to consult Albert, and her subjects to respect Albert.
The prince’s ambition was impatient and large, and he genuinely wished to assist his wife. When the Duke of Wellington offered him the position of commander in chief in 1850, he declined because Victoria needed his help:
The Queen, as a lady, was not able at all times to perform the many duties imposed upon her; moreover, she had no private secretary who worked for her, as former sovereigns had. The only person who helped her, and who could assist her, in the multiplicity of work which ought to be done by the sovereign, was myself. I should be very sorry to undertake any duty which would absorb my time and attention so much for one department, as to interfere with my general usefulness to the Queen.
Sitting in his room in Windsor Castle on April 6, 1850, bent over the green lamp he had brought from Germany, Albert wrote a memo on his understanding of his unusual role:
This position is a most peculiar and delicate one. [It] requires that the husband should entirely sink his own individual existence in that of his wife—that he should aim at no power by himself or for himself—should shun all contention—assume no separate responsibility before the public, but make his position entirely a part of hers—fill up every gap which, as a woman she would naturally leave in the exercise of her regal functions—continually and anxiously watch every part of the public business, in order to be able to advise and assist her at any moment in any of the multifarious and difficult questions or duties brought before her.
In 1857, Albert was at last made Prince Consort, to Victoria’s great satisfaction. By this time, Greville wrote, the queen was dwarfed by her husband’s staggering command of policy detail, and “acts in everything by his inspiration.” Albert assumed his command without affirming hers. Instead of relying on a wide range of advisers, Victoria relied only on him; her dependence was total, and her confidence was damaged. But Albert underestimated her intelligence, as well as her stamina and strength.
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As the war marched on through 1855 and 1856, Victoria grew jealous of the woman she called “the celebrated Florence Nightingale.”* She pored over newspapers for mention of the “Lady of the Lamp,” and she wrote at length in her diary about how the soldiers loved the formidable nurse. She wished that she, too, could be mopping the brows of her wounded troops. Victoria spoke about her soldiers in a maternal way; when she personally gave the men their Crimean War medals in March 1855, she was emotional, writing how rare it would be for “the rough hand of the brave and honest soldier” to come into contact with the queen’s small, smooth one. She was pleased to hear that many had cried that day.
The queen gave Nightingale a brooch on January 20, 1856, inscribed “Blessed are the Merciful.” Later that year, she invited the now widely renowned nurse to Balmoral. Victoria wrote to her in January 1856: “It will be a very great satisfaction to me, when you return at last to these shores, to make the acquaintance of one who has set so bright an example to our sex.” Nightingale quickly agreed, hoping to seize an opportunity to lobby for a royal commission.
When they met at Balmoral, Victoria found Nightingale thin, slight, and careworn—she had contracted what was called “Crimean fever” during the war (thought to be typhus). Traveling incognito as “Mrs. Smith” with her aunt, she had returned home suffering from chronic brucellosis, a savage bacterial infection that dogged her for the rest of her life. Victoria was surprised: she had been expecting a cold, severe woman and found someone “gentle, pleasing and engaging, most ladylike and so clever, clear and comprehensive in her views of everything.” But the queen most admired Nightingale’s single-mindedness:
Her mind is solely and entirely taken up with the one object to which she has sacrificed her health and devoted herself like a saint. But she is entirely free of absurd enthusiasm…truly simple, quiet, pious in her actions and views, yet without the slightest display of religion or a particle of humbug. And, together with this, an earnest wish never to appear herself—travelling under a feigned name so as not to be known, and refusing all public demonstrations.
Nightingale spoke mostly about the lack of “system and organization�
�� in the military medical care, which had led to so much suffering in the Crimea, and how important it was that it be improved. Victoria was thrilled when Nightingale thanked her for her “support and sympathy saying that, to a man, the soldiers had all deeply felt and appreciated my sympathy and interest.” Albert discussed the subject with Nightingale at length, agreeing that matters had become even worse since the war ended. Nightingale was taking care with her words, eager to excite sympathy and support for her cause. (Her success was becoming widely known; just a few years later, she would be asked by the United States government for advice on how to care for the wounded in the American Civil War.) She spent the next month at the home of Sir James Clark, near Balmoral, startling Victoria by cutting all her hair off in an attempt to get rid of a lice infestation contracted in hospital. A royal commission into health in the army was agreed upon by the end of her stay, to her great satisfaction.
Nightingale’s initial conclusion was that Victoria may have been curious, but was “stupid—the least self-reliant person she had ever known”; she would send for Albert if she found herself stuck for conversation. But Nightingale changed her views dramatically once she had spent more time with the queen. As for Albert, she decided he “seemed oppressed with his situation, full of intelligence, well up in every subject,” but was capable of being greatly wrong. “He thought that the world could be managed by prizes and exhibitions and good intentions.” He was, she concluded ominously, “like a person who wanted to die.” What precisely she meant is unclear, and it was an observation made in hindsight in 1879. It may have been his exhaustion or ill health, but it was a chilling insight from a woman whose expertise lay in trying to help people to live.