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

by Lucy Worsley

  Once Victoria is married, we hear no more about her concerns over her weight or her appearance, just a frank acceptance that they were not perfect. ‘God knows,’ she would later exclaim, ‘there is nothing to admire in my ugly old person.’25 As a married woman, she had begun to feel more physically confident. This was Albert’s doing. Since his unhappiness and uncertainty at the time of his whirlwind engagement, Albert had come to be delighted with his buxom little wife. Sculptor John Gibson in 1844 was commissioned to model Victoria in evening dress. He recorded how ‘she came into the room accompanied by the Prince, who, like a fond young husband, had his arm round his wife’s neck, and pointing to her shoulder said, “Mr. Gibson, you must give me this dimple.”’26

  Victoria’s favourite portrait of herself was the so-called ‘secret picture’, which she commissioned from Franz Xaver Winterhalter without telling Albert in order to give it to him as a surprise gift. It shows her at twenty-four with a ripe, luscious body, plump white shoulders revealed, mouth very slightly and very sexily open. That was perhaps how Albert liked to see her, as his wife. However, in a self-portrait that Victoria would also sketch in her twenties, she shows herself looking much more stern and queenly. In this image, she has a dogged look of concentration, and seems tired, with the beginnings of a double chin. She was discovering that it was a pressing business being Albert’s spouse, and hard to combine with the role of queen.27

  Dr Locock found Albert much more congenial than his plain-speaking, plain-looking wife. When Victoria boasted of her ability to ‘bear pain as well as other People’, Dr Locock found that her husband held a contradictory view. Locock was slightly pleased to discover that Albert thought that when the pains began ‘she would make a great Rompos’.28

  But during her labour Victoria did not make a great Rompos; or, at least, no witnesses have recorded that she did. From 4 a.m. onwards, various people came and went from the room, a screen providing Victoria’s bed with a modicum of privacy. Dr Locock also found her pragmatic about the need, according to royal tradition, to have witnesses to the birth. ‘She would not care one single straw,’ he thought, ‘if the whole world was present.’29

  The lesser doctors argued about who should and shouldn’t be allowed in.30 Albert remained present throughout, as did Mrs Lilly, a specialist nurse for newborns. Victoria’s mother, who now lived elsewhere but who’d arrived at the palace before breakfast, had to wait outside, where her ‘anxiety was great … How I would have liked to suffer for her.’31

  Albert’s witnessing of the births of his children was reported in the newspapers and considered laudable. This was how modern fathers were supposed to behave.32 In due course Victoria would come to be unable to imagine giving birth without him, as he would always be present to ‘direct every thing’.33 This morning he was ‘pale and obviously very anxious’, with ‘bloodshot eye, and haggard expression’. But Albert never lost his cool and there was nothing ‘tumultuous’ about his manner.34 His talent for micromanaging was on full display, and he succeeded in easing the disagreements among the doctors. They had not yet ‘quite found out how to treat me’, Victoria complained afterwards. She took her own notes, in order to be able to pass them on to her medical team next time.35

  Early on in labour, Victoria would have been given a dose of castor oil to empty her bowels, to avoid ‘exceedingly disagreeable’ consequences later. She would have worn her loose dressing gown over a chemise and bedgown ‘folded up smoothly to the waist’ and beneath that, ‘a petticoat’. Stays were absent, despite the common belief among women that wearing them during labour would ‘assist’, by ‘affording support’. The latest medical advice was that this was ‘improper’.36 The chemise that Victoria was wearing would acquire special lucky significance for her. Nine childbirths later, she’d still insist upon donning the exact same one.37

  As the morning wore on, ‘a dark, dull, windy, rainy day with smoking chimneys’, the doctors began to grow worried.38 It was taking longer than they would have liked. ‘I began to believe that if not assisted,’ Dr Ferguson admitted, the baby ‘would be still born.’39 He tried to go into the room in order to help, ‘but Locock immediately vociferated that the Queen did not desire to have us’.40 The ‘disputes and squabbles’, Victoria thought, were partly the result of her frantically anxious ‘old governess who would meddle’. Lehzen was finding herself increasingly marginalised, now that Albert was on hand to manage every aspect of his wife’s life.

  The crowded room, the squabbling doctors, meant that it was all ‘far from comfortable or convenient’.41 The ‘last pains’, Victoria wrote, ‘which are generally thought the worst … began at half past twelve and lasted till ten minutes to two’. But finally, just after two, ‘a perfect little child’ was born.42 Carried along, this first time, by a cloud of pride and dopamine, Victoria proudly, if implausibly, claimed that she ‘never had any pain’.43

  For wife, husband, wife’s mother, three doctors, governess and a nurse, it was a wonderful moment of success and harmony after a lengthy labour and considerable disquiet. But then Dr Locock spoke, and the words were a blow to them all.

  ‘Oh Madam,’ he said, ‘it is a Princess.’44

  ‘I fear it will create great disappointment,’ Victoria replied, immediately seeing the implications of the baby’s gender.45 It would have been better politics to have produced a male heir straight away, as she and Albert ‘had so hoped & wished for. We were, I am afraid, sadly disappointed.’46 And now, on close observation, it also became clear that the baby girl, having been born so early, was also ‘sickly and delicate’.47 Victoria’s work was not done. She did her best to gather herself, and mouthed the phrase that disheartened royal mothers have used throughout the centuries. ‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘the next will be a Prince.’48

  At least Albert was on hand for consolation. ‘Dearest Albert hardly left me at all,’ Victoria noted, ‘& was the greatest support & comfort.’49 Nothing could have exceeded his ‘tender anxiety’, one of the doctors agreed. ‘He sat by her bedside during the whole time, cheered and sustained her – and covered her face with kisses.’50 Now it was Albert’s privilege to announce the baby’s birth. He led the way through to see the Cabinet ministers gathered next door, and a nursemaid, Mrs Pegley, ‘carried the baby into the room in which they were assembled’.51

  The commencement of the labour had also been the signal for the Privy Council to be summoned to Buckingham Palace. Victoria’s bedchamber lay at the end of a run of rooms linked by folding doors. During labour these were left open, so that the space where the ministers gathered at one end of the suite was visually connected with her very bed, although a screen shielded its lower end. The witnesses, present and correct in court uniform, consisted of Lords Melbourne and Palmerston, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London and Lord Erroll, who was Lord Steward of the Household. Through the open doors, Lord Erroll later claimed, ‘he could see the Queen plainly the whole time and hear what she said’.52

  The Bishop of London likewise reported that it was only ‘one minute after the birth’ that the little thing was brought in to them, wrapped in flannel, ‘the nurse laying it on the table for inspection’. There the baby lay wriggling on a table for a moment, screaming ‘of her discontent in being brought into this working-day world in so public a manner’.53 The Privy Councillors now ordered that Londoners be advised of the news of the birth by the ‘firing of the Tower guns,’ and people recorded with satisfaction that ‘the old etiquette of the court has strictly kept up’.54 There’d definitely been no cover-up of a stillbirth, or slipping of an imposter into the succession. The baby would be another Victoria, but generally known as Vicky.

  Victoria was by now getting the better of her disappointment and was beginning to feel pride and pleasure in the novel sensation that she now had a daughter. She discovered that Vicky had ‘large dark blue eyes’ and ‘pretty little hands’, and looked more ‘like Albert’ than herself.55 The bedroom for ‘the young lady’, as he
r mother called her, was to be Victoria’s own dressing room, ‘fitted up as a temporary nursery until her little royal highness’s apartments were got ready’.

  As Vicky’s arrival had been unexpected, very little had been prepared, with the exception of her ‘marble and silver bath’ and ‘her gorgeous cradle made in the form of a nautilus’.56 Gilded, lined with green silk and canopied in gaudy green and gold, it had arrived a week previously, from Mr Seddon, George IV’s favourite furniture supplier.57 The timing of the birth also meant that there was no wet nurse to hand. An old palace page was given the job of travelling as fast as he could to the Isle of Wight to bring back a midwife, one Mrs Ratsey, wife of a sailmaker, probably an experienced mother who’d recently lost a baby of her own. Mrs Ratsey, a ‘fine young woman’, arrived at Buckingham Palace by two o’clock in the morning.58 Unlike her mother, Victoria would not be breastfeeding. She hated the very idea of feeling ‘like a cow or a dog … so very animal and unecstatic’.59 And even had she wanted to feed her own baby, it would have hindered her getting pregnant again soon, as now she must.

  A few days later, Victoria reported that she was ‘recovering fast’ and keeping up with international events: ‘Albert has been reading to me a Despatch’.60 The officious Dr Locock tried to prevent these readings-aloud, assuming Victoria would ask to hear a novel and therefore overexcite herself. But Albert in fact stuck to government business, or else read his wife the religious ‘lessons for the day … as he has done so ever since we were married’.61 Not even Locock could refuse that. By the end of the month, Victoria was out of bed and, sitting in a chair, was ‘rolled into my large sitting room, a great pleasure, & the Baby was moved up into her new Nursery’.62 Soon Victoria was well enough to make her first visit to church, to give thanks for her survival and that of her baby. This marked a ritual return to the world, and Victoria dressed for it as if for a wedding, ‘all in white and had my wedding veil on, as a shawl’.63

  What did Victoria really think about babies? She did not actually see very much of her daughter. The care of royal babies was so professionalised and outsourced that Victoria, strikingly, only saw Vicky naked in her bath twice in the first five weeks of her life, finding her both times ‘amazingly improved’ and ‘much grown’.64 The queen thought it was unusual that Vicky sometimes cried, for one of her uncles had told her that his own offspring had never done so. (He meant that he had simply never had to hear them.)65 Children, Victoria thought, were not terribly interesting, ‘mere little plants for the first 6 months’.66

  And yet in recent years there has been a sea-change in historians’ assessment of Victoria’s maternal qualities, as scholars who are also mothers have looked at old sources in a new light. Yvonne M. Ward, for example, was rightly amazed that the two earliest editors of Victoria’s published correspondence, whose selections heavily shaped later views of her reign, buried the news of Vicky’s birth in a footnote, ‘several pages after its chronological place’.67 Very young babies are ‘like frogs’, Victoria once decreed, in a statement that’s often quoted to show her dislike of children, but historian Julia Baird notes that this is an accurate description of the swimming movement a baby makes, if you blow, as any fond mother does, upon its stomach.68

  And both historians point out that Victoria did express enjoyment about her first daughter. ‘This day last year I was an unmarried girl,’ she wrote, on Christmas Day, ‘and this year I have an angelic husband, and a dear little girl five weeks old.’69 Returning home after a day of engagements, Victoria and Albert would rush ‘up to the nursery, where we found dear little Victoria, just out of her bath, looking like such a duck’.70 The older Victoria’s wardrobe contained an apron to tie around the neck, embroidered with a crown, with a pocket for a towel to soak up any spillages: it was intended for bathing or cuddling children.71 At this stage in her childbearing career, at least, Victoria was happy, interested, involved to the extent that people thought appropriate.

  She would be extremely fortunate, as a nineteenth-century mother, never to lose a baby. The average number of children being born to nineteenth-century women was falling fast: between five and six in Victoria’s youth, it had dropped to more like three by the time of her death in the early twentieth century.72 The queen’s brood, eventually totalling nine, was unusually large for an upper-class family. Her contemporary, Maria, Queen of Portugal, married to another of the Coburg cousins, exceeded her with eleven. But then, worn out by all this, Maria promptly died at thirty-five. Being so fertile obviously came with risks.73

  Delighted and relieved after her daughter’s birth, Victoria now ordered that it must be ‘as soon as possible’ that Dr Locock got his fee of £1,000, Dr Ferguson his £800 and Mr Blagden his £500.74 And once she’d given birth to a child of her own, Victoria now began to see her mother anew. ‘Pray don’t ever dwell on those sad past times,’ she wrote of her childhood. Victoria was belatedly coming to appreciate Victoire’s ‘love & affection’, admitting to her mother that ‘I was also wrong in my behaviour towards you very often in those miserable days.’75 Albert, who got on well with his mother-in-law and aunt, is often given the credit for bringing about a reconciliation between mother and daughter. But it seems to me that it was as much due to Victoria’s own growing self-knowledge and maturity. In the pleasure of motherhood, much of the unhappiness of her own childhood was washed away.

  But all this pleasure came at a price, and it involved Albert.

  On the day of his daughter’s birth, Albert ‘had a late, hurried luncheon, & went to the Council at 4’.76 His departure to attend the Privy Council while his wife went to sleep was significant. At last he now had the chance to begin to prove that he was more than just the ‘parish bull’. In the run-up to Victoria’s confinement, it had been necessary to nominate a Regent to take over in the event of the queen’s dying but her baby surviving. Albert was selected, in July 1840, a result he took as a great vote of confidence. ‘You will understand the significance of the matter,’ he told his brother, ‘it gives my position here in the country a fresh importance.’77 In the Council meeting on the afternoon of Vicky’s birth, it was also decreed that Albert’s name, alongside that of his daughter, should for the first time be included in the liturgy. From now on, the British would pray for him.78

  For her part, Victoria’s devotion to her husband was growing ever deeper. She told Melbourne that she particularly liked the way Albert had no time for other women. ‘Damn it, Madam!’ was his reply. ‘You don’t expect that he’ll always be faithful to you, do you?’79 But in fact Victoria did. This was partly because of the tone of the age. Melbourne had grown up in a high society full of scandal and affairs; it’s not even certain that he was his father’s biological son. But now chivalry had entered the air. Men were committed to the pursuit of just one pure, perfect woman. Victoria and Albert agreed upon this model for their relationship, and in fact modelled it in person when they hosted a costumed ball with a fourteenth-century theme, appearing as Edward III and Queen Philippa (albeit with 1840s corsetry).

  This gradual change, from her dominance to his, was taking place not just in ballrooms but more widely in British society. The genders became more clearly and hierarchically distinguished as the 1830s gave way to the 1840s. A successful marriage, thought Sarah Ellis, writing in 1843, was founded on one important truth. ‘It is,’ she counselled her female readers, ‘the superiority of your husband as a man.’ ‘You may have more talent, with higher attainments,’ she advised them, ‘but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.’80 In considering her husband to be superior to herself, Victoria only believed what nearly everyone alive held true. The forthcoming campaigns for votes for women would enrage the queen, making her ‘so furious that she cannot contain herself’.81

  After the birth of their child, Victoria wrote, Albert’s ‘care and devotion were quite beyond expression’. He would happily sit beside her, reading or writing, and ‘no o
ne but himself ever lifted her from her bed to her sofa’. His care, she concluded, ‘was more like that of a mother, nor could there be a kinder, wiser, or more judicious nurse’.82 The words ring true, but they were perhaps strange ones to use of a husband: a ‘mother’, a ‘judicious’ nurse. In fact, Albert was infantilising his wife. Before their marriage, Albert’s letters began ‘Beloved Victoria’. But afterwards, he addressed her as ‘Dear Child’ or ‘Dear Good, Little One’.

  ‘Oh! If I only could make him King,’ Victoria exclaimed, ‘for I do so feel & recognise his superiority, & fitness to be such.’83 And through his care of her, stealthily succeeding where Conroy had failed, Albert was also establishing himself as her de facto Private Secretary.84 By 20 December 1840, a month after Vicky’s birth, Albert’s own secretary, George Anson, noticed ‘an important advance in the Prince’s position’. Albert now had the keys to the boxes that arrived daily, full of Cabinet documents. This had come about because everyone had got used to him doing ‘all the ministerial business during the Queen’s confinement’.85 Albert was thrilled. ‘Do not think I lead a submissive life,’ he told his brother.86

  Yet there was a downside. Now that Albert was writing the memos, or at least the drafts of the memos, on official royal business, they underwent a gradual change, a hardening, of tone. Victoria’s instincts, claims constitutional historian Vernon Bogdanor, were more conciliatory.87 But now Her Majesty (or possibly Albert on Her Majesty’s behalf) wrote sharply to Lord Palmerston, for example, complaining that the Foreign Office had sent the queen ‘drafts to approve when the originals have already been sent away which of course renders her doing so useless’.88 This was correct, but not charming. Albert, constitutional historians agree, did not really understand the British political situation. He thought that the sovereign was the best placed to determine where the nation’s interest lay. But this was not so. The sovereign could only act in tandem with the government.89 Albert was decisive, and commanded the detail that often eluded Victoria, but he was not acting in the best interests of a monarchy that essentially worked through influence rather than power.