by Julia Baird
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It was the threat of war in Europe, though, that most preoccupied Victoria and Albert in 1858 as their daughter settled into her new Prussian palace. Italy was then divided into many states, with Austria ruling the north, incorporating Lombardy, Venetia, and Tuscany (and their capitals, Milan, Venice, and Florence), and the push to unify it had gained strength. There were three Italian wars of independence between 1848 and 1866, which ultimately concluded with a united Italian peninsula. Austrian rule had remained intact after the first war in 1848; a decade later, another began when France was drawn in to help the Italian nationalists (Napoleon III wanted Italy to unite under a Sardinian king). The British were suspicious about the French intentions. Victoria believed Italy would merely be France’s stepping-stone toward the Rhine, and Victoria and Albert were concerned that the ambition of Napoleon III—a close friend they were losing faith in—would ignite a full-blown European war.
In March 1859, after Napoleon III lent his support, the leader of the powerful, democratic northern Italian state of Piedmont-Sardinia mobilized. In April, Austria sent an ultimatum demanding they disarm. When they refused, Austria declared war. England remained staunchly neutral, despite public support for Sardinia. Albert and Victoria were influential in pushing the Cabinet to maintain this neutral stance, sending a torrent of letters to the bellicose Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell. The interventionist ministers wanted to help France, but Victoria and Albert reined them in repeatedly. They were often at odds with Palmerston over his sympathy for the Italian nationalists during the years that he was prime minister, from 1855 to his death in 1865 (apart from an interlude in 1858–59 when Lord Derby was PM). But on July 11, 1859—the same day that London’s Big Ben tower clock struck for the first time—a preliminary peace between France and Austria was unexpectedly agreed upon (it was confirmed by a treaty signed by all three parties in November, and Lombardy ended up being ceded to Sardinia). A full-scale war had been averted, and the royal couple had played a crucial part in staying Britain’s hand.
Victoria and Albert were now at the height of their powers. As one of the editors of the queen’s letters, Lord Esher, later observed, the work of the queen, with Prime Ministers Peel, Aberdeen, Palmerston, and Derby, “was of immense value….[Victoria] had on several very vital occasions stayed the action of a Minister, when such action involved risks and perils which reflection convinced him and his colleagues they were not justified in incurring.” Without “the tenacity of the Crown,” he wrote, England would have been drawn into the Austro-Italian war of 1859.
But the question of whether Albert was starting to intervene in government affairs more than was appropriate remained. By 1859, almost two decades after he had married Britain’s queen, he was showing signs of increasing stridency. He frequently fought with government ministers to get them to change course. In 1905, reading through the correspondence, Lord Esher noted that this tendency may have only increased with time:
The Prince Consort was taking a stronger hold than ever of the helm of State and there were constant battles between him and the Ministers, he acting in the Queen’s name….That there was friction is beyond doubt. Had he lived, his tenacity might have hardened into obstinacy, and the relations between him and a Government founded—like ours—on democratic institutions, would have become very strained.
The role of the monarchy under Albert’s leadership, then, was of forceful influence, which urged the government to exercise restraint in foreign policy and democratization, to erode the authority of the aristocracy and exert influence through a web of royal connections that spanned Europe in a network of carefully planned and delicate backdoor diplomacy. Victoria and Albert were among the most skillful diplomats of their time, meeting with kings and queens, writing to emperors and empresses, and trying to sway them through friendship or argument. Albert planned to seed the British royal bloodline in the courts of Europe with his offspring. The first step was placing Vicky in the royal court of Prussia, which was a strategic triumph, though her life there would be miserable.
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On January 27, 1859, Victoria became a grandmother. She ran along the castle corridors to tell Albert about the birth of Vicky’s first child, Frederick William Victor Albert, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II. Victoria then sent out a flurry of telegrams as bells rang in the town below Windsor Castle and illuminations flared. She had at first been horrified to discover her daughter had become pregnant so quickly; she called it “horrid news.” Vicky, sounding like her father’s daughter, responded that she was proud to create an immortal soul. Victoria rolled her eyes at the suggestion that birth was some kind of spiritual endeavor: “I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.” Once the child was safely born, Victoria felt “relieved from a great weight,” given how perilous childbirth still was. But two days later, she learned the birth had been “very severe”; the baby had been in breech position and had almost died. Albert advised rest, cold baths, and sea air. Vicky sent her mother a locket with a clipping of her grandson’s hair.
Victoria had berated her daughter for “choosing” a delivery date when she could not be there with her, and sent in her stead a bottle of chloroform, Dr. James Clark, and the curiously named midwife Mrs. Innocent. Victoria carefully recorded every detail of Vicky’s recovery: when she first lay on a couch, when she was able to sit up in her armchair and get to her feet, when she was able to walk. It was only when Vicky came to visit in May 1859 that Victoria learned that her grandson’s left arm had been injured at birth and hung weakly from its socket, paralyzed. When Victoria finally met little Willy in 1860 on a trip to Germany, she described him as a “fine fat child, with a beautiful white soft skin.” Victoria was an adoring grandmother, who believed her children’s offspring to be “the best children I ever saw.”
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In the late 1850s, as she approached the age of forty, the queen grew slender and content. She was at last relieved from the cycle of childbearing and delighted in the privacy of the Isle of Wight and the freedom of Scotland. She and Albert often stayed in a small granite and wood hut above Loch Muick, spending hours floating on the lake fishing for trout before going to bed early, “so peaceable & happy in this little cottage, far away from all human habitations.” The working poor who inhabited the cottages near Balmoral Castle continued to be startled by unannounced visits from the queen. Victoria and Albert undertook long expeditions through remote parts of the Highlands, where they traveled incognito and stayed in inns. They loved the game of anonymity, evading questions from curious passersby and trying to guess how their cover had been blown if they were recognized. Once, the giveaway was the crown on the dog cart and the marking on the bedsheets they brought along that made the locals suspect they were wealthy visitors from Balmoral, compounded by the fact that Victoria wore so many rings. One morning, the royal group realized they had been found out when they woke to the sounds of drums and fifes and saw that their elderly landlady had donned a fancy black satin dress adorned with white ribbons and orange flowers.
On one of their 1859 expeditions, when they had reached the top of the second-highest mountain in Britain, Ben Muich Dhui, Albert described the queen as “particularly well, cheerful and active.” Her expeditions were lighthearted; they giggled as they slipped down escarpments and slid on rocks, and they laughed at the wry ghillies. Victoria grew particularly fond of her “invaluable Highland servant” John Brown, a man she would later call her best friend, who guided her horse, carried her shawls, and lifted her over rocky, steep terrain. She often mentioned how much she had laughed. A common refrain then was “Oh! if only the time did not fly so fast!” The last note in Albert’s diary in that year is “We danced in the New Year.” Victoria, in these halcyon days, was always dancing: waltzes, trots, and especially reels. Albert could rarely match her stamina on the ballroom floor, but it didn’t matter. As she got back on her feet in the week
s after giving birth, she knew that if she could dance, she was ready to turn her face to the world again.
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Walking through the gardens at Buckingham Palace on June 1, 1859, along the muddy lake edge where pale pink flamingos poked their beaks into the water, Victoria relished the new intimacy that had blossomed between herself and her eldest daughter. They talked about everything: “We so completely understand one another. She is a dear, clever, good affectionate child & we are like 2 sisters!” Once Vicky grew up, her relationship with her mother shifted to more equal footing: they had both married and borne children.
Yet Albert remained the adored instructor, nurturing his daughter morally and intellectually. He told her to win hearts by thinking of others, and encouraged her to be punctual, and serene about the fickle moods of the public. He set her complex translation tasks and offered to look through the Prussian budget to help her understand it better. Albert also made her promise that she would tell him “faithfully the progress of her inner life,” a strikingly thoughtful gesture from an intense father to an intense daughter. In return, he promised to nurture that inner life as fulfillment of his “sacred duty.”
The abstract, philosophical nature of Prince Albert’s brain is illustrated in his letters to Vicky. When she said she was homesick, for example, her mother warmly assured her she was missed. But her father wrote an analysis of the condition of homesickness. Assuring her it was a natural state, he explained it was “a painful yearning, which might exist quite independently of, and simultaneously with, complete contentment and complete happiness.” It was a dualism, he said, in which “the new I” cannot disconnect from “the I which has been”: “Hence, the painful struggle, I might almost say, spasm of the soul.”
Victoria wanted to know everything, and demanded a level of excruciating detail about Vicky’s new life—her reception, her housing, her health, her clothes, her rooms, her daily routine. She told Leopold that, never having been apart from her daughter for any real length of time, she was “in a constant fidget and impatience to know everything about everything. It is a great, great trial for a Mother who has watched over her child with such anxiety day after day, to see her far away—dependent on herself!” Shortly after the wedding, Victoria wrote and told Vicky to leave “descriptions of great things” to others, “but give me your feelings—and your impressions about people and things, and little interior details. 1st: What dress and bonnet did you wear on landing? And what bonnet the next 2 days? 2nd: What sort of rooms had you at Cologne and Magdeburg? 3d: Did you dine with your people at Cologne and did you sup at Magdeburg at 12? 4: What cloak did you wear on the road, and have you been drawing? 5: How do you like the German diet—and how do your poor maids bear this hurry scurry?”
Victoria was often guilty of micromanaging her children’s lives, showing concern but also an oppressive zealousness and control. When giving Vicky various instructions, Victoria wrote: “So you see, dear, that though alas far away (which I shall never console myself for)—I watch over you as if I were there.” She was also frequently critical. She reprimanded Vicky for not eating enough during the day, for capitalizing too many words, for not numbering pages correctly, and for mixing up the date of her accession. She told her to not laugh too loudly or stoop when she wrote, to maintain dental hygiene—“few people have good teeth abroad”—to be tidy for the sake of her husband, and to have no familiarity with anyone in her court except her parents-in-law. “I really hope,” she wrote, “you are not getting fat again? Do avoid eating soft, pappy things or drinking much—you know how that fattens.” She also warned her daughter against neglecting her husband or duties because of too much love for her babies. “No lady, and less still a Princess,” she said, would be fit for her husband or her position if she “overdid the passion for the nursery.” Victoria insisted that she saw her youngest children being bathed and put to bed only about four times a year.
Vicky was somewhat surprised at her mother’s sudden overwhelming fondness for her, given how harsh a disciplinarian she had been in earlier years. But the two women concurred in their belief that Albert was a demigod. It was to Vicky that Victoria confided tales of her unhappy childhood, how she had no outlet for what she knew as her “very violent feelings of affection.” This was why, she said, she owed everything to Albert: “He was my father, my protector, my guide and adviser in all and everything, my mother (I might almost say) as well as my husband. I suppose no one ever was so completely altered and changed in every way as I was by dearest Papa’s blessed influence. Papa’s position towards me is therefore of a very peculiar character and when he is away I feel quite paralysed.” The queen was unaware how vulnerable this utter dependence would one day leave her.
Bertie was one subject the women disagreed on. Victoria regularly railed against her secondborn, while Vicky rarely said a word in return. In March 1858, Victoria told her daughter she was “wretched” about Bertie, who was then sixteen and preparing for his confirmation the next month by reading sermons to his mother. Over the next few months he would travel to Rome and begin his studies at Oxford, but Victoria despaired of his constant laziness. She called him ignorant, dull, and far from handsome, “with that painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin.” She decried his hanging “Coburg nose”—just like his mother’s—his putting on weight, his large mouth, and his new hairstyle. The fashion was to cut the hair short and part it severely in the middle, which Victoria said “makes him appear to have no head and all face.”
Victoria described her children the same way she described most people: bluntly and often harshly. Of her son Leopold, for example, she wrote: “He is tall, but holds himself worse than ever, and is a very common looking child, very plain in face, clever but an oddity—and not an engaging child though amusing.” Helena suffered from features “so very large and long that it spoils her looks.” The attractive Arthur, Alice, and Louise were praised and held up as foils. When Vicky told Victoria that Bertie, while visiting her in Germany, was charming, his mother scoffed in reply: “I think him very dull; his three other brothers are all so amusing and communicative.” Vicky’s heart sank; defending him was a vain exercise.
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Victoria was now the most famous working mother in the world. Her image, that of a mother-queen, made a once remote-seeming monarch instead a figure of ordinary flesh. Walter Bagehot wrote in 1867 that having a family on the throne “brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.” Victoria simultaneously reigned over England and appeared as though she were solely concerned with her domestic life. In England at the time, women who had jobs were pitied, but the 1851 census found one in four wives and two in three widows worked. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the ranks of working women swelled rapidly and became respectable. It was still believed, though, that men were enhanced by work, while women were weakened by it. But the queen worked without guilt.
Yet it is only at this stage, when Victoria was steeped in the contentment of motherhood, that we begin to see the creeping anger she felt at what childbearing required of women. She called it the Schattenseite, or shadow side, of marriage: little discussed, or even properly understood, except by the women who bore children. When Vicky suggested that a married woman had more liberty in society than an unmarried woman, the queen responded that in one sense that was true, but in another, physical sense, it wasn’t:
Aches—and sufferings and miseries and plagues—which you must struggle against—and enjoyments etc. to give up—constant precautions to take, you will feel the yoke of a married woman….I had 9 times for eight months to bear with those above named enemies and I own it tired me sorely; one feels so pinned down—one’s wings clipped—in fact, at the best…only half oneself—particularly the first and second time. This I call the “shadow side” as much as being torn away from one’s loved home, parents and brothers and sisters. And therefore I think our sex a most unenviable one.
T
he hidden world of nineteenth-century motherhood—of medical ignorance, and lack of pain relief—made Victoria shudder when she thought of what her daughters might go through. When looking at suitors for Princess Alice in 1860, Victoria was gloomy: “All marriage is such a lottery—the happiness is always an exchange—though it may be a very happy one—still the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat.”
Even the angelic Albert failed to understand the lot of women. Victoria wrote angrily to Vicky in 1859 that Albert sometimes “sneered” at her and other women for their bodily trials. Vicky had been complaining that one of her husband’s cousins despised women and thought they were only good for decoration. Victoria responded:
That despising our poor, degraded sex is a little in all clever men’s natures; dear Papa even is not quite exempt though he would not admit it—but he laughs and sneers constantly at many of them and at our unavoidable inconveniences, etc., though he hates the want of affection, of due attention to and protection of them, says that the men who leave all home affairs—and the education of their children to their wives—forget their first duties.
The Prince Consort grew tired of Victoria’s complaints about the debilitation of pregnancy. When she was entering into the middle trimester of her last pregnancy in the fall of 1856, Albert accused her in a letter of being demanding and selfish. By writing, he had intended to calm her, but he also showed impatience with her complaints about the physical constraints she railed against: