by Julia Baird
“I was not the least frightened”: QVJ, June 10, 1840.
“a little air”: Albert wrote to his grandmother from Buckingham Palace, June 11, 1840, Jagow, Letters of the Prince Consort, 70.
“triumphal procession”: QVJ, June 10, 1840.
“you have shown great fortitude”: King Leopold to Queen Victoria, Laeken, June 13, 1840, Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:286.
“communications of an important nature”: This letter, dated April 3, 1840, was addressed to his workplace, the pub the Hog in the Pound, and read, “Young England—Sir—You are requested to attend tonight, as there is an extraordinary meeting to be holden, in consequence of having received some communications of an important nature from Hanover. You must attend; and if your master will not give you leave, you must come in defiance of him. A. W. Smith, secretary.” Murphy, Shooting Victoria, 40.
Ernestus Rex: Jerrold, Married Life of Victoria, 84.
they were merely a ruse: Murphy, Shooting Victoria, 38–40.
“Oh, I know to the contrary”: The Times, June 12, 1840, 6.
“one should think that your being a lady would”: King Leopold to Queen Victoria, June 13, 1840, Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:286.
ruled by a woman: The Times, June 12, 1840, 6.
Oxford was charged with high treason: In Melbourne, Oxford created a respectable life as a successful painter (under the name of John Freeman), churchwarden, investigative journalist, author, stepfather, and husband of a younger widow. When his book on the city of Melbourne was published, he hoped Victoria might somehow come to read it: “I should like a certain illustrious lady to know that one who was a foolish boy half a century ago is now a respectable, & respected, member of society.” He died a year before Victoria did, though, and his story was never published in England. Murphy, Shooting Victoria, 510.
strange, contagious “erotomania”: Turner, “Erotomania and Queen Victoria,” 226.
“I am very angry”: Miller, Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, 121.
Victoria sent him a handwritten note: Dekkers, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, 84.
Conservative estimates: Loudon, Death in Childbirth. A graph on p. 14 shows this figure was consistent from 1851 to 1890, when it rose slightly before dropping to four in one thousand births in 1900.
excessive “mental emotion”: Branca, Silent Sisterhood, 86–88. From 1847 to 1876, five women per one thousand live births died, and puerperal fever caused between a third and a half of these deaths. Doctors prescribed opium, champagne, and brandy and soda. Flanders, The Victorian House, 20.
“nasty girl”: Charlot, Victoria the Young Queen, 192.
“unbounded happiness”: Queen Victoria to Vicky, March 24, 1858, Fulford, Dearest Child, 77.
“Don’t correct yourself”: Wyndham, Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, 306.
Victoria soon declared in her journal: Martin, The Prince Consort, 1:99–100.
“a nurse or man midwife”: Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, 211.
“very active; out walking”: Wyndham, Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, 299.
still labored in petticoats, gowns, and chemises: Flanders, The Victorian House, 17.
“simple tastes and pleasures”: July 1841, Wyndham, Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, 311.
“She is far too open”: Memorandum from Mr. Anson on comments made by Lord Melbourne, Windsor Castle, January 15, 1841, Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:322. While Victoria was fluent in French and German, and wrote and understood Italian, “the rest of her education she owes to her own natural shrewdness and quickness, and this perhaps has not been the proper education for one who was to wear the Crown of England.”
“God knows how great”: QVJ, February 28, 1840.
“a quiet, happy but an inglorious”: Unpublished letter from Yvonne Ward collection, Prince Ernest to King Leopold, February 1, 1840, Staatsarchiv Coburg, 567/WE22: 66.
sought the title of King Consort: Charlot, Victoria the Young Queen, 171–72; Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:199; Martin, The Prince Consort, 1:256–57.
“In my home life I am very happy”: Grey, The Early Years, 256.
“fill up every gap, which, as a woman”: Cited in Martin, The Prince Consort, 1:74.
“her intellect is not for invention”: Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 84, on the “Angel in the House.”
“Some, at least, of these faculties”: Darwin, Evolutionary Writings, 303.
“It is quite possible”: Ellis, The Wives of England, 24–25.
that she satisfied herself: November 23, 1841. Stockmar wrote to Lord Melbourne: “I expressed [to Peel] my delight at seeing the Queen so happy, and added a hope that more and more she would seek and find her real happiness in her domestic relations only.” Charlot, Victoria the Young Queen, 208.
“She said it proceeded entirely”: May 28, 1840, “Minutes of Conversations with Lord Melbourne and Baron Stockmar,” Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:282–83.
Stockmar also suggested: As recorded by Anson, ibid., 1:283.
signed instantly: Charlot, Victoria the Young Queen, 190.
“Mme. De Lehzen’s pale face”: October 1838, Wyndham, Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, 282–83.
“rewards me sufficiently”: Jagow, Letters of the Prince Consort, 69. Also note that women were allowed to attend these meetings but could not speak or become full members. Tyrell, “Women’s Mission.”
“now all the fashion”: Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, 211.
“deeply interesting conversation”: February 1842, Fox, Memories of Old Friends, 289.
“plentifully strewn with thorns”: Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, 242.
“Albert had done the correct thing”: Prince Ernest to King Leopold, February 17, 1840, Staatsarchiv Coburg, 567/WE22: 76. From Ward, “The Womanly Garb,” 281.
“I am to be Regent—alone”: Albert to Ernest, July 17, 1840, quoted in Bolitho, Albert, Prince Consort, 51.
“She has only twice had the sulks”: Rhodes James, Albert, Prince Consort, 118.
“those of Turco Egypto, as we think of nothing else”: Queen Victoria to King Leopold, October 16, 1840, Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:242–43.
“I wish you could see us here”: Bolitho, The Prince Consort, 31.
“Oh, Madam, it is a Princess”: Longford, Queen Victoria, 153.
“Dearest Albert hardly left me at all”: Ibid.
Yvonne Ward from La Trobe University: Ward, “Editing Queen Victoria.”
“our dear little child”: QVJ, December 11, 1840.
“It seems like a dream”: QVJ, December 20, 1840.
“such a darling”: QVJ, March 11, 1841.
“This day last year”: QVJ, December 25, 1840.
“quite a little toy”: QVJ, February 24, 1841.
“The Queen is, like all very young mothers”: October 6, 1841, Wyndham, Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, 319–20.
“The Prince’s care and devotion”: From a memo written by the queen, recorded by Grey, The Early Years, 288–89.
“Our young lady flourishes exceedingly”: January 5, 1841, Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:321.
“There is certainly”: Ibid., 83.
“Wedded life is the only thing”: August 22, 1840, Bolitho, The Prince Consort, 25.
“Your little grand-niece is most flourishing”: To King Leopold, December 15, 1840, Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:318.
large and happy family: Ibid.
“I think, dearest Uncle”: January 5, 1841, ibid., 321.
Some women tried to coat their vaginas with: Aristotle, History of Animals, in The Works of Aristotle, Smith and Ross, vol. 4, book 7, 583a–b, quoted in Jalland and Hooper, Women from Birth to Death, 266.
“as large as can be pleasantly introduced”: Richard Carlile, Every Woman’s Book, 25–6, 31–32, 38, 42–43, quoted in Jalland and Hooper, Women f
rom Birth to Death, 267.
“utterly spoilt” by pregnancy: April 21, 1858, Fulford, Dearest Child, 94.
“This has been brought about”: Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, 218.
“I have my hands very full”: November 24, 1840, Bolitho, The Prince Consort, 34; Charlot, Victoria the Young Queen, 197.
head of the house: One of the editors of Victoria’s letters, Benson, writes to his co-editor, Esher, that in the year after Bertie was born, “a point of considerable difficulty has turned up. In the documents referring to the formation of the 1855 Govt, there are a good many memoranda signed Victoria R. These are sometimes in the first person singular ‘I’ and sometimes in the first person plural ‘we.’ But when they are in the first person singular, the word ‘I’ always stands for Prince Albert. This will cause great confusion.” Esher Papers, 11/5, Benson to Esher, March 4, 1907, quoted in Ward, “Editing Queen Victoria,” 217.
“The Prince went yesterday”: Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:371.
“perfect happiness”: QVJ, February 10, 1841.
Chapter Thirteen: The Palace Intruders
“When a woman is in love”: Bolitho, Albert the Good, 86.
“know how they lived at the Palace”: The Times, March 17, 1841. The Blackburn Standard (December 9, 1840) quotes him saying: “I wanted to know how they lived at the Palace, I was desirous of knowing the habits of the people, and I thought a description would look very well in a book.”
“of a most peculiar formation”: The Times, December 4, 1840.
three months’ hard labor: Jackson’s Oxford Journal, December 5, 1840.
notoriously lax: In July of that year, porters had also discovered a man asleep in the portrait gallery, not far from the queen’s bedroom; she had walked through there only a few minutes before. It was Tom Flower, who had tried to gain entrance to the coronation the previous month and had come once more to ask the queen to marry him. He was sent to Tothill Fields Prison.
“youthful folly”: All the Year Round, July 5, 1884, 234.
Charles Dickens wrote to the boy’s father: Bondeson, Queen Victoria’s Stalker, 44. Healey quotes Dickens saying he “strongly doubted the popular belief in the sharpness of his intellect.” The Queen’s House, 150.
“a dull, undersized runt”: Bondeson, Queen Victoria’s Stalker, 25n; Examiner, March 28, 1841. Bondeson adds, “It was later doubted whether it really was Fenimore Cooper who had offered the Boy Jones to emigrate or another American with the same name.”
the queen spent £34,000: Healey, The Queen’s House, 144.
“the remains of garden stuff”: Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, 208.
“moral dignity of the Court”: To Baron von Stockmar, Windsor Castle, January 6, 1846, quoted in Jagow, Letters of the Prince Consort, 99.
“a very fat lady standing in front”: Healey, The Queen’s House, 152n.
did not want to wear the appropriate styles: Wright, History of Buckingham Palace, 176.
strict new code of conduct: Ibid., 174.
the puritanism Albert championed: One example of the lack of puritanism in the young queen was her admiration and affection for artist George Hayter (when he painted the massive The Trial of Queen Caroline, he produced 189 likenesses). She told Lord Melbourne she knew Hayter had not been elected to the Royal Academy because “he had quarreled with his wife, and had separated from her.” She still knighted him in 1842. Warner, Queen Victoria’s Sketchbook, 98.
“extremely strait-laced”: Pearce, The Diaries of Charles Greville, September 6, 1841, 203.
did not care “a straw”: Ibid.
did not believe a pregnant Victoria…was able to cope: Memorandum dated May 5, 1841, Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:339.
change should come from her: A document described as “Secret. Memorandum of confidential communications with G. E. Anson, Private Sec. to Prince Albert, May 1841.” Peel Papers, vols. 121–23, British Library Archives, Add. 40, 303. Extract: 40301–3.
In a twenty-seven-page: Memorandum made by Peel, May 28, 1841, ibid.
“natural modesty upon her constitutional views”: “Memorandum of Mr. Anson’s last secret interview with Sir R. Peel” (no. 4), May 23, 1841, Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:358.
“elementarily, as Her Majesty always liked”: Memorandum by Mr. Anson, August 30, 1841, ibid., 1:383.
“Oh! if only it were a dream!”: QVJ, May 10, 1841.
a “principle”: Ibid.
“The Queen was the whole day much depressed”: Weintraub, Uncrowned King, 120.
“I don’t like it”: Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, 222.
“Why, nobody likes going out”: QVJ, May 9, 1841.
“dreadfully affected”: Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, 223.
Her journal is full of descriptions: For example, May 5, May 6, May 7, 1841.
drained from the relationship: Her “dear, kind friend” Melbourne continued to write to her, mostly in a personal vein, but occasionally, inappropriately, advising her on political matters—even on whether she should pay the new income tax. (In volume 1 of the letters [Viscount Melbourne to Queen Victoria, March 21, 1842], Melbourne says Victoria’s decision to pay tax is right, but says she doesn’t need to.) This infuriated Albert, who told Stockmar to write letters of complaint. (The reformist Peel wanted a 7 percent tax on all incomes over £150, a radical proposition in peacetime.) He continued to write to Victoria even when Stockmar vehemently and repeatedly told him not to. Victoria would repeat this pattern with another, later favorite prime minister, Lord Salisbury, when he lost the office in the 1880s.
“an iceberg with a slight thaw”: Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 326.
“more like a dapper shopkeeper”: February 21, 1835, Greville, The Great World, 99.
silver plate of a coffin lid: Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 326.
“a dancing master”: September 17, 1841, Pearce, The Diaries of Charles Greville, 204.
“present heavy trial”: Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:375–76.
“to pick up [her] spirits”: August 24, 1841, September 2, 1841, Ibid., 1:395–96.
“the Prince was carrying on business”: Memorandum by Mr. Anson, August 30, 1841, quoted in ibid., 383.
“judgment, temper, and discretion”: Ibid., 385.
“corrected one of my old journals”: QVJ, October 1, 1842. While she was reading her old journal, she scrawled in the margins, “Reading this again, I cannot forbear remarking what an artificial sort of happiness mine was then, and what a blessing it is I now have in my beloved Husband real and solid happiness, which no Politics, no worldly reverses can change; it could not have lasted long, as it was then, for after all kind and excellent as Lord M. is, and kind as he was to me, it was but in Society that I had amusement, and I was only living on that superficial resource, which I then fancied was happiness! Thank God! for me and others, this is changed, and I know what REAL happiness is.”
“really became at last, quite foolish”: QVJ, December 17, 1842.
“I know how difficult it is to fight”: Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:460.
happiest and most fulfilling of his life: Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:392.
welled with tears: Cecil, The Young Melbourne, 532.
“Your Majesty was just setting off”: Lord Melbourne to Queen Victoria, April 20, 1842, Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1:494.
died in 1848: Melbourne isn’t mentioned in the journal entry for the day he died, November 24, 1848; Victoria only learned of it when reading the papers the next day. She mourned him as a man who was “truly attached” to her, “and though not a firm Minister, he was a noble, kind-hearted, generous being.” (Queen Victoria to King Leopold, November 27, 1848, Benson and Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, 2:204.) As she wrote to Leopold, though, while she remembered him fondly, “God knows! I never wish that time back again.” Novem
ber 21, 1848, ibid., 2:203.
“great future danger”: Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, 216.
“meddled and made mischief”: Ibid., 219.
“always in the Queen’s path”: Ibid.
“such a good and humble-minded person”: Boykin, Victoria, Albert, and Mrs. Stevenson, 251.
“the Queen would brook no interference”: Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, 215.
wet nurses were advised: Gill, We Two, 181.
“spinster gremlin”: Fulford, The Prince Consort, 74.
“the Yellow lady”: Ibid., 179. Bennett (King Without a Crown, 74) points out that words in a letter to Ernest have been wrongly interpreted as Albert writing lovingly about Victoria, not nastily about Lehzen, because the sentence before it was cut out by Bolitho, The Prince Consort, 34. The full text reads: “The old hag has conceived a terrible hatred for you and takes you for the author of all ill. She said as much to Anson yesterday. Yesterday at table she looked most charming, very décolleté, with a bouquet of roses at her breast which seemed as if it was going to fall out.”
“sense and information”: Healey, The Queen’s House, 121.
“much beloved by…all who frequent the Court”: October 5, 1842, Greville, The Great World, 205.
“kind and motherly”: Bloomfield, Court and Diplomatic Life, 24.
“wretched,” “low and depressed”: QVJ, October 27, 1841.
less interested in her work: In 1840, she had complained to Melbourne that the Eastern Question was boring. Longford, Victoria R.I., 149.
a torturous birth: To his credit, Albert delayed notifying the usual persons that Victoria was in labor, which meant that several of the dignitaries, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, arrived late and missed the birth; surely Albert was sparing his wife the torture of going through excruciating pain while Cabinet ministers sat idly listening. Pearce, The Diaries of Charles Greville, November 11, 1841, 205.
“I suffered a whole year”: Jerrold, Married Life of Victoria, 178.
“Bertie and I both suffered”: Fulford, Dearest Child, 147.
“so thin, pale and changed”: QVJ, September 4, 1841, October 20, 1841, November 2, 1841, October 21, 1842.