Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life

by Lucy Worsley

  And one final aspect of the ‘wonderful furriner’s’ anxiety was the prospect of parting from his home, and from the person to whom he’d previously been closest: his brother. Ernest was a pallid, fretful figure at the Windsor Castle engagement dinner. While Albert was sexually inexperienced, almost prudish, Ernest, on the other hand, had in his private life followed their father’s dissipated example. ‘Poor Ernest has been suffering since Wednesday last with the jaundice,’ Victoria wrote, ‘which is very distressing.’69 She would have been more distressed still had she known that Ernest was in truth suffering from venereal disease. There was a striking contrast between the two brothers: so close, yet so different.

  Albert therefore had much on his mind. But Victoria at least was uncomplicatedly glad. Even an ordinary ‘poor girl has not much free choice’, she thought, when it came to choosing a husband, and for a princess it was even harder: ‘a very sad, bad lookout!’70 But now – and for ever – she was persuaded that she had chosen for herself. She chose to be delighted by Albert, basking in the luxury of his love and attention. ‘These last few days,’ she told her Uncle Leopold, ‘have passed like a dream to me … I do feel very, very happy.’71

  Albert would frequently find it easiest to meet his future wife’s emotional expectations through presents, and he came up with a plan to give her a lover’s gift of a brooch with enamel orange blossom, symbol both of chastity and of weddings.72 But late that night of his engagement he also sat down to write her a letter expressing the words he so often found it difficult to speak out loud.

  It was to be the first of many such paper expressions of love, warning, admonition and, eventually, of anger, which would travel down the corridors of Windsor Castle between their two rooms. Yet this first one, written by Albert when he was still the supplicant, not yet the master, when everything still lay ahead of them, was the most perfect. ‘I hardly know how to answer you,’ he admitted. ‘How is it that I have deserved so much love, so much affection? … in body and soul ever your slave, your loyal ALBERT.’73

  Victoria had not cried at her accession, or indeed at her coronation. But alone in her own room at Windsor Castle that night, reading her first love letter, she did at last shed tears.

  11

  Wedding Day: three palaces, 10 February 1840

  ‘Oh! this was the happiest day of my life!’1 Victoria was writing about her wedding. It was a wet February morning at Buckingham Palace, a mere four months after her engagement. Even the lace that Victoria was to wear on her cream silk dress was older than that: she’d ordered it before Albert had accepted.2

  The announcement of the engagement had wonderfully increased the standing of the monarchy. Then – as now – the births, deaths and marriages of the royal family provided both a background beat to everyone else’s lives, and a sense of renewal. The very fact that Victoria was to be married made her more attractive. There was a new ‘blush on her cheek’, thought the clerk to her Privy Council, ‘which made her look handsomer and more interesting’.3

  ‘The last time I slept alone,’ Victoria wrote in her journal of the night just past.4 Having sought solitude for so much of her childhood, she was now desperate to be alone no more. As soon as she opened her eyes, she at once wrote a note to Albert, in the German he found reassuring: ‘Dearest, How are you today and have you slept well? … What weather!’5 She folded it up into a tiny triangle, addressed it to ‘His Royal Highness The Prince’ from ‘The Queen’ and sent it with a servant along the palace corridors to his room. This was the last time she would need to write to Albert for a long period, as they would be much together, and the note forms the climax to several months of correspondence. Much of it regards finance and titles and politics, but the queen nevertheless wrote on a variety of incongruously girlish pads of paper, some with purple Pierrots, others with pink edging.

  Albert, too, began his wedding day with his pen in his hand. But his heart was in the Germany from which he had only returned two days previously. ‘In less than three hours,’ he wrote to his grandmother, ‘I shall be standing before the altar with my dear bride.’ His nerves are apparent. ‘I must end,’ he concludes, as time began to run out. ‘May God be my helper!’6

  Although Albert was exactly the same age as Victoria, and although he had travelled further and seen and learned much more, he was less well prepared for public life. He’d sat out his engagement ‘rather exasperated about various things, and pretty full of grievances’.7 He already had quite a long list of grudges against his new country. He hadn’t been allowed to appoint German staff to his household, Parliament had voted him a smaller than expected income and his credentials as a Protestant had been questioned.

  Albert would have liked a smaller, more private wedding. But another of his grievances was having to share his wife-to-be with her subjects. Not even the queen was able to get her own wish for a traditional royal wedding, held in the evening behind palace doors. It was Melbourne who insisted that the ceremony should take place in daylight. Victoria would travel through the park from Buckingham Palace to St James’s Palace as a bride-to-be, then back to Buckingham Palace as a married woman, then on to Windsor Castle in the evening. This meant there would be no fewer than three separate opportunities for her subjects to see her.

  The date and time of the ceremony was announced in the London Gazette five days in advance so that people could make their plans.8 The papers were pleased. ‘She is kept by the nation as a spectacle,’ claimed the Penny Satirist, establishing a current of thought that would flow through Victoria’s whole reign, ‘and it is right that she should be seen. In fact it is her duty to come out and show herself, that we may have value for our money.’9 But while Melbourne was gleefully calculating the political gain to be had from crowds of citizens cheering their sovereign on her wedding day, Victoria was annoyed. ‘Everything,’ she grumbled, ‘was always made so uncomfortable for Kings and Queens.’10

  And not even Melbourne could persuade her to compile the guest list for the ceremony in the manner he thought best. Still displeased by the incident with her bedchamber ladies; still smarting from the House of Commons’ failure to vote Albert the income she thought he deserved, Victoria refused to invite more than a couple of her hated Tories. This was widely considered to be politically inexpedient. ‘Nothing could be more improper and foolish than to make this a mere Whig party,’ wrote the critical ‘Gruncher’.11 In his opinion, Victoria’s insistence on inviting only her friends to her wedding was ‘wilful, obstinate and wrong-headed’.12

  And yet on this point Victoria would not budge. ‘It is MY marriage,’ she said, digging in her heels, ‘and I will only have those who can sympathise with me.’13

  Victoria had her breakfast at nine o’clock, and to judge from past form it was a large one. She judged ‘a good breakfast’ to consist, for example, ‘of a mutton chop and mashed potatoes &c’.14 But avoiding luncheon had paid off. She had dropped down from her heaviest of 8 stone 13 pounds in 1838 to just 7 stone 2 a year later.15 She hadn’t been particularly well in the weeks before the wedding, exhibiting signs of stress, ‘nervous and feverish, so much so that they fancied she was going to have the measles’.16

  Once her mother had finally been allowed to know of Victoria’s engagement, there had been something of a rapprochement between them. Conroy had eventually agreed to leave court, and Victoire was much relieved. Now she came in to Victoria’s rooms to give her daughter a ‘Nosegay of orange flowers’.17 ‘My beloved Child enters a new life,’ Victoire thought. ‘She does not know how I love her & what I feel.’18 But while Victoria’s journal entry does mention her mother’s flowers, it doesn’t dwell on them, and quickly sweeps on to say that immediately afterwards ‘my dearest kindest Lehzen gave me a dear little ring’. The governess and her gift was obviously more warmly received.19

  Even though she had written to him, Victoria also met Albert face-to-face. She knew that she needed to brace him up for the big day. He had only come back to Buckingham Pal
ace from Coburg a couple of days previously. A glittering levee of courtiers had assembled to meet him, but as soon as his carriage was announced Victoria threw ceremony out of the window. ‘Nobody could conceive what she was going to do,’ it was reported, ‘and before anyone could stop her, she had run downstairs and was in his arms.’20 This passionate, enthusiastic Victoria was her very best self.

  Once she had reassured Albert both on paper and in person, it was time to get ready. She had her hair dressed in loops upon her cheeks, and a ‘wreath of orange flowers put on.’ Her dress was ‘a white satin gown, with a very deep flounce of Honiton lace, imitation of old’.21

  This simple cream gown of Victoria’s was a dress that launched a million subsequent white weddings. She broke with monarchical convention by rejecting royal robes in favour of a plain dress, with just a little train from the waist at the back to make it appropriate for court wear.22 It was a signal that on this day she wasn’t Her Majesty the Queen, but an ordinary woman. She wore imitation orange blossom in her hair in place of the expected circlet of diamonds. She’d had the lace for the dress created by her mother’s favoured lacemakers of Honiton, in Devon, as opposed to the better-known artisans of Brussels. A royal commission like this was a welcome boost – then as now – to British industry.23 This piece of lace would become totemic for Victoria. She would preserve it, treasure it and indeed wear it until the end of her life.

  Victoria had personally designed the dresses of her bridesmaids, giving a sketch to her Mistress of the Robes, still Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland. Harriet – rich, beautiful, Whiggish – had by now become the closest thing to a female friend that Victoria allowed herself. Her courtiers noticed Albert’s wish that she should place a greater distance between herself and them. They sensed his desire that she become ‘pretty indifferent’ as to which maid-of-honour or lady-in-waiting was on duty, being on ‘more natural terms’ only with her lower servants.24 ‘No familiarity,’ Victoria schooled herself, ‘no loud laughing … watch yourself, and keep yourself under restraint.’25 She could well have felt threatened by her Mistress of the Robes, whom, it was said, ‘moves like a goddess’ and ‘looks like a Queen’.26 But Victoria was always conspicuously generous to people more beautiful than herself, and made Harriet an exception among her staff in treating her more like a comrade.

  Since her accession, Victoria had been granted a dress allowance roughly twice as large as her predecessor William IV’s, but she and Harriet thought that how they spent this public money was entirely their own affair. Harriet engaged tradespeople including dressmakers, a habitmaker, furrier, silk mercer, hosier, glover, perfumer and a specialist ‘umbrella maker’. ‘Her Majesty,’ she wrote, loftily, when the Treasury wanted to know where the money had gone, ‘does not wish to send some of the Bills (like those of the Dressmaker’s etc.) to the office.’ Abstracts only would be provided.27

  But whatever Victoria’s private feelings, her dress was certainly for public consumption. ‘I saw the Queen’s dress at the palace,’ wrote one eager letter-writer, ‘the lace was beautiful, as fine as a cobweb.’ She wore no jewels at all, this person’s account continues, ‘only a bracelet with Prince Albert’s picture’.28 This was in fact completely incorrect. Albert had given her a huge sapphire brooch, which she wore along with her ‘Turkish diamond necklace and earrings’.29 It was the beginning of a lifetime trend for Victoria’s clothes to be reported as simpler, plainer, less ostentatious than they really were. The reality was that they were not quite as ostentatious as people expected for a queen. This is really what they meant by their descriptions of her clothes as austere, and pleasingly middle-class. In other countries, members of the middle classes would join the working classes on streets and at barricades and bring monarchies tumbling down. But in Britain, part of the reason this did not happen is that Victoria, her values and her low-key style appealed with peculiar power to the respectable slice of opinion at society’s upper middle.

  And so, dressed but not overdressed, the unqueenly looking queen was ready for her wedding day to begin.

  At 11.45, Albert left Buckingham Palace with his father and brother to travel through St James’s Park in a procession of nine carriages. They were heading to the Chapel Royal of St James’s Palace, originally built by Inigo Jones as a private Catholic chapel for the French queen Henrietta Maria, but long since brought into the Church of England. Anti-Catholic feeling had been behind the slanders that Albert, a Lutheran and a foreigner, therefore probably wasn’t a true Protestant. Before 1828 Catholics, even powerful ones like the Duke of Norfolk, were barred from holding public office, and anti-papistry was poisoning England’s troubled relationship with Ireland. As Albert was marrying the Head of the Church of England, he ostentatiously held his green-velvet-covered Protestant prayer-book in his hand.30

  Fifteen minutes afterwards, Victoria followed in his wake, travelling with her mother and the Duchess of Sutherland in the seventh of seven more carriages. The ride took her through enormous crowds of people, even though it was ‘a dreadful day – torrents of rain, and violent gusts of wind’.31 The park was completely packed, to the extent that ‘there was scarcely room to get along at a foot’s pace’.32 Despite the weather the spectators were in a mellow mood, and The Times reported that when some of them were catapulted into the crowd by the breaking of the branch of a tree they’d climbed, the accident was greeted only with ‘roars of laughter’.33 The gathering presented a fine opportunity for commerce. One ballad-seller offered for purchase printed lyrics for as many as twenty-three different songs about the wedding of the queen.34

  Arriving at the rambling, red-brick St James’s Palace, Victoria was taken to an upper dressing room. Here, her waiting bridesmaids were highly relieved to see her. These twelve tense young ladies had been ‘immured’ in the room for an hour and a half. They’d been asked to arrive early, then had nothing to do but ogle the soldiers beneath the window, ‘who looked a good deal rusted by the rain’.35

  The identities of these bridesmaids had been a matter of much moment. Albert had tried to suggest that some of those proposed were inappropriate because their mothers were not respectable. Among their number was Lady Sarah Villiers, whose mother, Lady Jersey, had been one of George IV’s mistresses. Lady Eleanor Paget’s parents had both been divorced. Lady Ida Hay was the illegitimate grandchild of William IV. But Melbourne quietly overruled Albert, pointing out that there simply weren’t twelve young ladies with completely blameless mothers to be found in the whole of the aristocracy. It was more evidence of the degeneracy of the culture of the preceding court, to which Victoria – and even more particularly Albert – would bring a moral cleanse.

  The bridesmaids wore white roses around their heads, with further blooms pinned to the tulle overskirts of their dresses. Victoria’s opinion was that they ‘had a beautiful effect’, but others disagreed.36 Used to seeing golden tassels, velvet robes and colourful jewels at royal ceremonies, onlookers thought that the trainbearers ‘looked like village girls’.37 The pale colour scheme was even carried through to the complexion of Victoria’s face. One of the young ladies, as she shook out the bride’s skirts, noticed that the queen was ‘as white as a sheet’.38

  Inside the chapel, galleries had been erected to cram the congregation into every upper corner. The chapel’s furnishing scheme of dark panelling, crimson cushions and yellow fringes was pulled together by a ‘rich Brussels carpet’.39 The guests in their gowns of ‘white, amber, crimson, purple, fawn’ sported ‘wedding favours’ or bows of white satin ribbon or gold lace topped with orange blossom.40 ‘We were miserably cold,’ complained one American invitee, with the bare arms and neck required by formal court dress, and nothing to keep her head warm but the regulation white plumes of feathers.41

  The guests passed the time watching the arrival of ‘embroidered heralds’, ‘robed prelates’ and ‘surpliced singing-boys’, but they were getting bored as well as cold by the time a ‘flourish of drums and trumpets’ announced that
the ceremony was beginning.42 With relief, they saw Albert enter to the strains of ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ and welcomed him with applause and handkerchief-waving. Albert was wearing tight white breeches with his red coat; his neck was constrained by his high golden collar, and his shoulders were braced to bear the heavy chain of the Order of the Garter. He didn’t much look like a conquering hero.43 The best that one reporter could find to say was that he was no longer visibly seasick, as he had been upon his arrival in London. It was thought that the ladies, however, were pleased by his ‘pale and pensive’ looks.44

  Beneath his jewelled chain he wore the uniform of a field marshal, with white satin rosettes on his shoulders.45 Albert was wearing the clothes that ‘no doubt he borrowed to be married in’, sniffed Florence Nightingale, who was staying with her aunt in London.46 She was joining in a general disparagement of Coburg’s relative penury, and Albert must have been all too aware that he was not particularly popular. His departure from Coburg had been an occasion of celebration: his people could see that their boy was going up in the world. But in Britain, Coburg hardly counted at all. One member of the congregation thought it would be difficult not to laugh at the point in the ceremony when Albert was supposed to endow his wife ‘with all his worldly goods’.47 As Albert complained to Victoria, all this mockery ‘makes my position here no very pleasant one’.48