by Gillian Gill
But the Queen’s golden legend of her husband was severely tailored not only to her needs but to Albert’s own neuroses, and in the end it served him badly. Behind the gilt and incense, the real Albert Coburg was far more complicated and interesting than the man portrayed in his wife’s adoring book.
THE KEY TO PRINCE ALBERT’S life lay in fact, in the duchy of Coburg and the history of the Saxe-Coburg family, just as Queen Victoria suspected. But it was the key to a coded text that was intentionally kept hidden. What Duke Ernest II, King Leopold, Baron Stockmar, and the other men who had been close to Albert in youth wanted to conceal, what Albert himself wished to forget, was that in his Coburg years, he hated Coburg and all it stood for. Far from the fairy-tale kingdom the Queen saw on her visits, Coburg-Gotha throughout the prince’s lifetime and beyond was a tiny, poor, feudal polity ruled by licentious, frivolous, self-absorbed, debt-ridden dukes: Albert’s father and brother. Albert came to England determined to shake off the evils of the past, start from scratch, and realize his own idyll of the King. Hence he boarded up the door to his past.
Only when we have understood the real Coburg and seen how radically Albert reacted against it can we appreciate all that was odd, visionary, and remarkable in the achievements of Albert as prince consort. Only once we have taken into account the unremitting stress that reaction imposed on him can we explain his weaknesses. Only once we have comprehended how far, despite himself, his acts and attitudes were shaped by the family and the society he grew up in can we evaluate his successes and failings as a husband, a father, and a statesman.
The Coburg Legacy
“Ich werde neben unermüdlichem Streben und Arbeiten für das Land, dem ich im Zukunft angehören soll, und wo ich zu einer hoher Stellung berufen bin, nicht aushören, ein treuer Deutscher, Koburger, Gothaner zu sein.”
“I shall, while tirelessly striving and working for the country to which I shall henceforth belong and where I am called to a higher station, never cease to be a true German, a true Coburg and Gotha man.”
—Prince Albert, writing to his stepgrandmother, November 28, 1839, two months before his wedding
…
ERMANY TO ALBERT WAS THE VATERLAND. THIS IS HOW HE REFERS to it consistently in his private letters. But the German fatherland to which Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg belonged as a child was only a mental construct, a glorious memory or a pious hope, not a geographical and political entity.
Germany had once been the Holy Roman Empire, but by the mid-seventeenth century that empire had become a fraying patchwork of sovereign states ruled by kings, princes, archdukes, dukes, electors, margraves, landgraves, archbishops, bishops, and so forth. Some German nation states were smaller than Liechtenstein (sixty-one square miles) is today, and most were poor, rural, and sparsely populated. Industrialization came late to Germany, and commerce was difficult in a region so fragmented. By 1800, many English factory owners and Dutch merchants enjoyed fabulous wealth, while German rulers held court in moth-eaten velvet, feeding their families on credit.
The German states varied considerably in size, but they had one thing in common. All their rulers were men. According to the ancient Salic law that prevailed in Germany into modern times, no woman, whether single or married, could directly inherit the money, real estate, or titles owned by her family, though her husband or son could, for example, inherit from her father or uncle. As a result of this legal structure, based on the largely mythical code of an ancient German tribe, women had few opportunities to enter the public sphere and show mastery. Queen Victoria, as we have seen, could inherit the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from her childless uncles, but not the kingdom of Hanover in Germany. There Salic law was in force, and the kingdom passed from William IV to his next oldest brother, the Duke of Cumberland.
One result of Salic law was that German misogyny was of a deeper dye than its English counterpart. England in the seventeenth century had produced Queen Elizabeth, the greatest ruler in its history, and in the nineteenth it allowed Angela Burdett-Coutts to inherit one of the great banking fortunes from her mother. Part of the contempt for women that we shall find Prince Albert expressing throughout his life was due to the fact that he was a member of the atavistically sexist German aristocracy.
Each German ruler was absolute lord in his own slice of territory and presided with due pomp over his own court. Political rights and civic participation varied from one German state to another, and in the larger German towns there were flourishing commercial and professional families, Jewish as well as Christian. Around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this class produced many of the geniuses of Germany’s golden age: among them, Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant. It would also produce Karl Marx. However, throughout the nineteenth century, political power remained in the hands of hereditary rulers, and government for the most part was the jealously guarded preserve of the landed aristocracy.
German rulers during Albert’s youth were feudal in their outlook and repressive in their methods. They viewed their states as private property, personal fiefs. They took their rank and their name from those fiefs, but they were constantly looking to trade up. They showed little of that primal loyalty to the land that right-wing philosophers from Herder to Heidegger have extolled as peculiarly German.
Coburg, the state where Prince Albert was born, offers a case study in these attitudes. At the time of his birth, Coburg was a tiny national entity— two hundred square miles or so, with a population of some forty thousand. The primary identification of Duke Ernest, Albert’s father, was not with Germany, which did not really exist. It was not even with Coburg, though this was where he spent much of his time. It was with the international royal caste. What mattered to him was not the good opinion of the people in his fief but his reputation in the courts of greater monarchs. To hold his own with his fellow princes meant getting as much as possible out of his estates and giving as little as possible back. It meant squeezing the peasantry, not sending them to school. It meant grandiose building projects, so that there should be a palace and an opera house and a magnificent park to impress visiting grandees, even if that meant destroying humbler dwellings. When Coburgers and Gothaners, fired by the ideals of the French Revolution, began to question his corrupt administration and exploitative fiscal policies, Duke Ernest I changed his rhetoric to suit the times but also used tax revenues to purchase personal fiefdoms. There he could continue to rule autocratically, as his personal acquaintance the tsar did in Russia.
Coburg was a top-heavy society with a disproportionately large court and administration surrounding the duke and his family. Rewards even at the top were meager, and graft, bribery, influence peddling, and chicanery were endemic. Middle-class families competed to win the duke’s favor only to find, as we shall see in the case of the Stockmars and the Bauers, that the price of favor was very high.
Lower down the social scale, people paid heavy taxes, had few property rights, and no access to an independent judiciary. The Coburg men were expected to provide labor in the homes or on the estates of their lord, and they were also expected to fight his battles. When Duke Ernest II was an enemy of the invading Napoleon, Coburg men fought the French, to no avail. Ten years later, when the duke found it advantageous to be the ally of Napoleon, Coburg men were rounded up, conscripted into the French army, and sent off to fight in Russia, whence few of them returned. Coburg women were still subject to the droit du seigneur, and, as we shall see in the case of Caroline Bauer, for fatherless women becoming the mistress of a duke or prince was the best available career option.
The ancient medieval town of Coburg, with its seven thousand or so inhabitants, was the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Saalfeld’s capital, but he didn’t think much of it. Ernest I, Albert’s father, tried by every means open to him to persuade the Emperor Napoleon to give him Bayreuth. He planned to transfer his capital, his principal residence, and his court to that marvelous Bavarian city. Only when the mirage of Bayreuth finally faded did Duke Erne
st plunge massively into debt in order to renovate the Ehrenburg Palace and update the center of Coburg. After the war, as we shall see, Duke Ernest I gave up Saalfeld for Gotha, happy to change his name accordingly.
The political rhetoric of the Saxe-Coburg family changed markedly once Prince Leopold had established links with Great Britain that his nephew Albert would build upon. In extremely reactionary circles in nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, Coburg became a code adjective for a person seeking democratic reform and constitutional monarchy along the British and Belgian models. It is clear from his memoirs that Duke Ernest II, Albert’s older brother, saw himself as a prophet of enlightenment. However, it is far from clear how much changed in Coburg or even in Gotha, where the populace seems to have been more politically motivated and less personally reliant on the ducal family. In his personal administration and style of governance, Duke Ernest II followed the model set down by his father as far as circumstances would allow.
Prince Albert left Germany when he was twenty and cannot be held responsible for his father’s and brother’s administrations. However, he certainly knew what was going on in Coburg and Gotha. Duke Ernest I and Duke Ernest II were always in debt, constantly pestering their English relatives for financial assistance. Albert, liberal with his advice but grudging with his wife’s money, had a negligible influence on affairs back home. There is little indication, at least in his published letters, that he had any more concern for the welfare of Coburgers and Gothaners than did his father and brother. What concerned him were his family’s solvency, property rights, and territorial claims. Ideologically committed to the unification of Germany, Prince Albert was still desperate to ensure that the duchies of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha remained sovereign states, since his second son, Alfred, had been designated to succeed his brother as duke.
POOR AND UNIMPORTANT in the eyes of the world, the German royal families in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were at their historical nadir. However, they had one precious asset: their children. Since there were many German rulers, there were many royal German children, and there was a steady market for those children in the courts of the greater nations. The kings of Russia, Austria, France, Spain, England, and Portugal needed wives of a rank equal to their own. Since no lady in those countries, however rich and ancient her family, could be of equal rank to her sovereign, a king needed to find a foreign princess as a bride. After the seventeenth century, an astonishing number of the queen consorts of the great nations were born German princesses.
These immigrant ladies were a source of prestige in their native land, and they sent money home. They invited their German relations to coronations and royal marriages, paid their traveling expenses, and entertained them magnificently. They helped to arrange the marriages of their German menfolk to neglected princesses in their adopted countries. When George IV married his German first cousin, Caroline of Brunswick, his sister Charlotte married the heir to the king of Württemberg. Charlotte took her dowry and her parliamentary annuity to Germany with her and for decades kept the kingdom of Württemberg afloat for her husband and stepson.
Since they counted upon marriage to shore up their finances, German royal houses were obsessed with matters of rank, privilege, etiquette, and genealogy. It is no accident that the Almanach de Gotha, listing and ranking the members of the top European royal and noble houses, was compiled and printed in Germany and was heavily slanted toward German families. Entering the marriage market, a princely German father needed to advertise his products and identify the competition.
Germany scored two particularly fabulous dynastic successes in the eighteenth century. First, in 1714, to the envy of his peers, the Elector of Hanover was called over by the English political oligarchy to take the throne. The Hanoverian ruler was chosen to be George I, King of Great Britain and Ireland, because he was a Protestant and because his maternal grandfather had had the foresight to marry Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James I. Second, tiny Anhalt-Zerbst married one of its princesses to the heir to the Russian throne. He was mentally deficient, and a coup d’état in 1762 made his wife empress of all the Russias. The Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst is known to history as Catherine the Great.
The Wettin family of Saxony in central Germany was also well placed to produce royal brides. During the Protestant Reformation in the fifteenth century, the Wettins had split into two unequal branches. To its eternal humiliation, the senior, or Ernestine, branch had been forced by fortunes of war to accept the minor territory of Thuringia, while the junior, or Albertine, branch retained the ancestral Saxony, with its capital of Dresden and the title of elector (after 1815, king). In the course of two centuries, little Thuringia split further into five duchies: Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Hildburghausen, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. The total population in the Ernestine duchies was about three hundred thousand, and the five ducal families were constantly intermarrying and sparring with one another for territory.
Over several generations, the Wettin dukes of Thuringia married into the English royal family. The Duke of Saxe-Gotha managed to marry his daughter Augusta to Frederick, the eldest son of King George II of England. Frederick died young, but Augusta had at least the satisfaction of seeing her eldest son succeed his grandfather as George III. In 1817 the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen married his eldest daughter Adelaide to the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV.
However, by the late eighteenth century, it was becoming apparent to all the Wettins that the ducal family to beat was the Saxe-Coburgs. Coburg was perhaps the smallest and poorest of the duchies, but, with his second wife, Augusta of Reuss-Ebersdorff, the unremarkable Duke Francis produced seven remarkable children. The four girls, Sophie, Antoinette, Juliana, and Victoire, were attractive, biddable, and, as it proved, fertile. The three boys, Ernest, Ferdinand, and Leopold, were Adonises, and the two younger ones had inherited their mother’s brains as well as their father’s looks.
The Coburg children grew up in the hard days of the Napoleonic wars. For more than twenty years, Coburg stood in the path of armies from France, Austria, Russia, and Prussia. Coburg men were pressed into service in one army or another, and rural Coburg was ruined by double taxation and the insatiable demands of the military for food, shelter, and forage. Members of the ruling family were forced to flee for their lives on more than one occasion, and survival mattered more than pride. Duke Francis died in 1806, and from this point, the fate of the Coburg family rested in the hands of the formidable dowager Duchess Augusta, the vain and vacillating new Duke Ernest, and Ernest’s youngest brother, the brilliant and resourceful Prince Leopold.
War for a poor German peasant has usually meant death and destitution, as Bertolt Brecht shows in his play Mother Courage and Her Children. But for a man of the ruling class, war was a time of opportunity. The army was the only career option open to poor young men of the high German Protestant aristocracy, and for centuries Germany had trained Europe’s officers and supplied mercenaries to the world. The three Coburg brothers, Ernest, Ferdinand, and Leopold, understood that the Napoleonic conflict could be their chance to find fame, status, and money if they could only gain the ear of those in power. Thanks to their elder sisters, Sophie, Juliana, and Antoinette, they did.
In 1795 Empress Catherine of Russia, formerly Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, summoned to Saint Petersburg the three elder Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld daughters and their mother. The empress intended to choose one of the three girls as bride for her sixteen-year-old grandson, Grand Duke Constantine. He was already making a strong bid to become the Caligula of his generation, and, as the owner of many serfs and the commander of a regiment, had opportunities to inflict pain that would have aroused the envy of his contemporary the Marquis de Sade. None of this mattered to the Coburg family fighting for survival in a war zone.
The Coburg girls were beautiful, but their shabby dresses and pathetic jewelry raised titters at the magnificent Russian court. Constantine dismissed all three girls as apes. But
Catherine was determined to get her dissipated young grandson married, and one day she was watching from a window as the three Coburg girls alighted from a coach. Encumbered by her long court train, the eldest girl, Sophie, tripped and fell out headfirst. The second girl, Antoinette, sprawled on the dirt next to her sister, but the third, little Juliana, fourteen, hopped down nimbly. “That’s the one,” said Catherine, and Constantine and Juliana were married.
Following Juliana’s success in Russia, Duchess Augusta was able to secure the Duke of Württemberg as a husband for her daughter Antoinette. He was a repulsively ugly glutton, but he was connected by marriage with both the English and Russian royal families and so a great catch. Antoinette and her family spent the turn of the nineteenth century at the Russian court and were in high favor with the tsar. As a result, when the German states were reorganized in 1815, Württemberg, along with Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Hanover, became a kingdom.
Juliana’s marriage to Grand Duke Constantine was short and hellish. Caroline Bauer, who was close to the ducal family in Coburg throughout her life, recorded in her memoirs: “The brutal Constantine treated his consort like a slave. So far did he forget all good manners and decency that, in the presence of his rough officers, he made demands on her, as his property, which will hardly bear being hinted of.” After some eight years, Juliana fled Russia and took up residence in Switzerland, on the margins of polite society.