We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  ALBERT WAS NOT ALLOWED to stay at the Rosenau and mope. Within days of Ernest’s departure, he began a three-month tour that would take him all through Italy and then back into Switzerland to meet up with his father and some of his Mensdorff relatives. Albert had a new and unexpected traveling companion: Baron Stockmar. Though he dreaded cold and fatigue, Stock-mar was dispatched from England to undertake this lengthy tour in the depths of winter at the joint behest of King Leopold and of Victoria herself. The final stages in Albert’s Bildung were now at hand. No one better than Stockmar himself could prepare him for the complex and difficult new life that seemed likely to open before him.

  Six months earlier, Prince Albert had loved walking through the Alps, even when it snowed. He had enjoyed his ten months in Brussels and his two semesters at Bonn. But he did not much like Italy, probably because he was unhappy and could not even say it. He felt the cold at least as sharply as Stockmar. Rome was a disappointment, and, though he appreciated Italian art, architecture, and music, he hated Italian society and the Catholic religion. “In many, many respects the country is far behind what one had expected. In the climate, in the scenery, in the study of the arts, one feels most disagreeably disappointed,” he wrote pompously to his friend Löwenstein.

  He was still the same Albert, indifferent to ladies, eager for solid instruction, and with a slightly mean sense of humor. In Florence at a ball, the Duke of Tuscany remarked of Albert to the wife of the British ambassador, “Here is a prince we may be proud of. The beautiful young lady waits for him to dance, while he is busy listening to the man of letters.” Granted a private audience with Pope Gregory XVI, Prince Albert found it necessary to correct His Holiness on the Greeks’ cultural debt to the Etruscans. When the official who had brought the Coburg party to the Vatican grabbed the pope’s foot to kiss and was kicked in the mouth, Albert had a mad fit of the giggles and was shooed out of the room.

  In February Albert and Stockmar were joined by a young English nobleman, Lieutenant Francis Seymour. This gentleman’s job was to speak English with the prince, offer some youthful (but not dissipated) companionship, and report back to Queen Victoria. Seymour, who went on to a successful career in the English army and at Victoria’s court as General Sir Francis Seymour, later wrote a description of the prince in Florence. Seymour claimed that Albert led an exemplary life, ate simply, drank only water, toured ruins and art galleries, took long country walks, enjoyed discussions over tea with Baron Stockmar, when that gentleman was well enough to come down, and was asleep by nine. “[Prince Albert] had been accustomed to such early hours in his own country that he had great difficulty in keeping himself awake when obliged to sit up late,” wrote Seymour.

  Albert himself paints a rather different picture in a letter he wrote at the time to his friend Löwenstein. “I have lately thrown myself into the whirl of society. I have danced, dined, supped, paid compliments, have been introduced to people, and had people introduced to me; I have spoken French and English—exhausted all remarks about the weather—have played the amiable—and, in short, have made ‘bonne mine à mauvais jeu’ [pretended to look pleased when dealt a bad hand]. You know my passion for such things, and must therefore admire my strength of character that I have never excused myself—never returned home till five in the morning—that I have emptied the carnival cup to the dregs.” In the same bitter vein, Prince Albert wrote to Florschütz that he was under orders to “go into society, learn the ways of the world and vitiate my culture with fashionable accomplishments. And I will do it.”

  Stockmar, meanwhile, was supplying the Queen, King Leopold, and Duke Ernest with his acerbic reports on the prince’s progress. Stockmar praised the prince’s talents, enjoyed his company, but bemoaned his lack of interest in politics and his poor stamina. He reported that the prince was not “empressé” (enthusiastic and attentive) in his dealings with women and lacked “les belles manières.” Stockmar attributed this fault to Albert’s motherless childhood and the lack of cultured, intelligent women in his life. He opined that the prince would “always have more success with men,” damning with faint praise.

  In the summer, Albert returned to Coburg and, as he lamented to his friend Löwenstein, was obliged to dawdle around exchanging compliments before he could get away for a fortnight with his brother in Dresden. “Then I must go to a place that I hate mortally,” he wrote, “that charming Carlsbad, where papa is taking the waters, and much wishes me to be with him. I hope this campaign will be over by the middle of August.” Carlsbad was a spa, one of the holiday resorts notorious for sexual dalliance. The visit may have been Duke Ernest’s own contribution to the “campaign” to win Victoria’s hand, a final attempt to prepare his son Albert for the reproductive duties that lay before him, and he may even have succeeded. More probably Albert, following the dictates of his uncle and of Stockmar as well as his own inclinations, managed to resist to the bitter end the “corrupt moral atmosphere” his father generated.

  WITHIN THE YEAR, Albert would marry—Ernest was his best man—and take up life in England. At the time of the wedding, Ernest disgraced himself by his sexual exploits in London, causing his brother much embarrassment at the English court. Even worse, Ernest in early 1840 was infected with venereal disease and was causing grave anxiety in the family. This fact is established conclusively by a passage from a letter Albert wrote to Ernest from Windsor Castle on January 1, 1841:

  I am deeply distressed and grieved by the news of your severe illness. I have to infer that it is a new outbreak of the same disease which you had here [at Windsor in February 1840, at the time of Albert’s wedding]. If I should be wrong I should thank God; but should I be right, I must advise you as a loving brother, to give up all ideas of marriage for the next two years and to work earnestly for the restoration and consolidation of your health … to marry would be as immoral as dangerous … for you. If the worst should happen, you would deprive your wife of her health and honour, and should you have a family you would give your children a life full of suffering … and y our country a sick heir. At best your wife could not respect you and her love would thus not have any value for you; should you not have the strength to make her contented in married life (which demands its sacrifices), this would lead to domestic discord and unhappiness … For God’s sake do not trifle with matters which are so sacred.

  Albert’s solemn strictures made no impression on Ernest. Perhaps they never had. Ernest was determined to marry and, like his father before him, deludedly thought his marital prospects were brilliant. Duke Ernest I, Prince Ernest’s father, tried to marry him to a Russian grand duchess, but this plan came to nothing. While Ernest was at Windsor at the time of his brother’s engagement, Queen Victoria floated the beguiling idea that he should marry her first cousin, Princess Augusta of Cambridge. This glittering prospect also came to nothing. Perhaps Augusta, an opinionated young woman, was not interested in Ernest Coburg. Perhaps Albert decided that having Ernest reside in England with an English wife would not be good for his own marriage or for the precious Coburg family reputation.

  Obliged to fall back on a second-tier German princess, Ernest married Alexandrine, daughter of the Grand Duke of Baden on May 3, 1842. Prince Albert did not travel to Coburg for his brother’s wedding. He had already forbidden his brother to come to England during his wife’s second pregnancy in 1841, as Victoria had been seriously upset by her brother-in-law’s conduct at the time of her wedding. Prince Ernest was not invited to Windsor to attend the christening of his first nephew, the Prince of Wales.

  Prince Albert’s gloomy premonitions about his brother’s marital prospects proved right on the mark. Alexandrine of Baden was not yet twenty-two, in excellent health, and certainly a virgin when she married, but she never had children and seems to have feared infertility early in her marriage. That she was infected by her husband’s disease and made sterile seems all too likely. In 1844 Alexandrine officially adopted her husband’s nephew Alfred, acknowledging him thereby as the h
eir presumptive to the duchy of Coburg. Ernest himself was not sterile, and throughout his life he apparently pursued women with the kind of zeal he devoted to shooting animals and birds. He had a succession of maitresses en litre at the court of Coburg, whom Alexandrine humbly countenanced, and he managed to sire at least three illegitimate children.

  Royal biographers have not been anxious to establish exactly when and where Ernest Coburg was infected with venereal disease. This was especially true for Queen Victoria even though early in her marriage she discovered her brother-in-law was a cruel and licentious man. However, the question of Ernest Coburg’s venereal disease has an important bearing on our understanding of the young Albert. In the family correspondence of 1838 through 1840 and the Queen’s diary, there is a series of casual references to Ernest being seriously ill and causing concern—in Brussels, in Coburg, at Windsor when he famously had “jaundice” during the period of his brother’s engagement. The venereal disease could have been contracted as early as 1837 when, to the merriment of Albert, Ernest was incurring the wrath of General Wiechmann in Brussels and Bonn. But if Ernest contracted venereal disease when he and Albert were students, Albert must have known, since according to Albert’s own letters and diaries from the period, he and Ernest were more like identical twins than brothers, sharing lessons, lectures, activities, and friends.

  One part of Albert’s golden legend, as narrated and carefully documented by his widow, is that he had an ascendancy over his older brother from an early age. Men who knew the brothers in youth, like King Leopold, testified for the Queen that by force of will, character, and intellect, Albert took the lead in all the brothers’ affairs. Putting together Queen Victoria’s account of her husband’s early years and the facts now known about her brother-in-law’s adult life, can we really believe that as soon as Ernest got to Dresden on December 1, 1838, he stopped being a replica of his exemplary younger brother and metamorphosed into a carbon copy of their vain, philandering, egotistic, improvident father? Either Albert’s purity or his authority must suffer if it were proved that Ernest, his alter ego, the Jonathan to his David, the Damon to his Pythias, fell into vice as early as Brussels or Bonn, while he looked on in impotent acquiescence.

  The relationship between Albert and Ernest before 1840 is a historical enigma. It suited both to have it so. We shall probably never know the truth.

  Victoria Plans Her Marriage

  …

  ICTORIA AND ALBERT’S ENGAGEMENT AT WINDSOR IN OCTOBER 1839 was followed by a few weeks of bliss. Only the prince’s father and stepgrandmother, King Leopold, Baron Stockmar, and Lord Melbourne were told, and Victoria was especially insistent that her mother should not know. Albert’s brother, Ernest, the official chaperone, conveniently went down with “jaundice,” allowing the young couple to spend quite a lot of time alone. They did all the things the Queen liked best. They rode out together, sang and played duets, looked at albums of etchings side by side, and played with their dogs. Victoria adored Albert’s greyhound Eos, who followed them everywhere and was so perfectly tame. She was overjoyed to find that Albert had become a superb dancer. In private, in her fiancé’s arms and with Ernest at the piano, she at last tasted the delights of waltzing.

  Victoria drew Albert’s picture. Albert corrected the mistakes in Victoria’s letters. Seated on a little blue sofa, Victoria nestled in Albert’s bosom, and, when he sat at the piano, she dropped kisses on his head as she passed. He responded eagerly, embracing her passionately, telling her over and over again how much he loved her, and covering her hand with kisses—how small it was in comparison with Ernest’s! He called her Vortrefflichste, most splendid of women. Savoring an intimacy that she had craved since childhood and that he had not expected to enjoy, they were deliriously happy. Never would they be quite so happy again.

  AS WORD OF THEIR Queen’s impending marriage seeped out, Victoria’s subjects were titillated by the peculiar, one could say unique, problems facing the royal couple. Who would wear the breeches, saucily demanded English commentators. Humor of this kind was supremely distasteful to Prince Albert, in no small measure because he was, in fact, obsessed by the very same question, framed more delicately. Who would have the upper hand in the marriage, he or Victoria?

  For every other married couple in Great Britain, the answer was preordained and crystal clear, if not undisputed. The vast majority of both men and women in the nineteenth century agreed that by nature, religion, law, and immemorial custom men were superior to women. Biological science and social theory buttressed men’s claims to supremacy not only in politics, administration, and business, but also in the home. According to the legal doctrine of “feme covert,” a British woman who married lost all her independent legal and civil status. She and her husband were viewed by the law as one entity, and that entity was he. A married woman’s property, unless controlled by her natal family through a prenuptial agreement, was her husband’s. Anything she earned was legally his to do with as he willed. She could not buy or sell property or enter into any legal transaction without his leave.

  A husband could legally enforce sexual congress on his terms. He could physically chastise his wife, sequester her in the home, or commit her to a madhouse without much fear of the law. The children of the marriage were, in effect, the property of the husband, and through his last will and testament he could dispose of them as he chose even after death. Divorce for a husband was possible, if unpleasant and expensive. For a wife it was prohibitively difficult. The message to a woman in mid-nineteenth-century Great Britain was clear: Like a child, a felon, or a madman, she had no role to play in the public sphere. In the marketplace she was at most a consumer. Her place was in the home. Her duty and her pleasure must be to obey her menfolk, and dedicate her life to her family.

  But Victoria was not just a woman. She was a woman who reigned, a queen regnant, and this changed her relationship to every man and woman. The anomalousness of her situation was keenly apparent to her contemporaries at the time of her accession. As the radical politician Lord Brougham plaintively explained in an anonymous pamphlet: “An experienced man, well stricken in years, I hold myself before you, a girl of eighteen, who, in my own or any other family in Europe, would be treated as a child, ordered to do as was most agreeable or convenient to others—whose inclinations would never be consulted—whose opinion would never be thought of—whose consent would never be asked upon any one thing appertaining to any other human being but yourself, beyond the choice of gown or cap, nor always upon that: yet before you I humble myself.”

  When Victoria decided to marry, the anomaly of her legal and civil status became even more pronounced. In certain respects, she seemed the traditional bride. She was small and very feminine. She came to marriage as a guaranteed virgin, since she had been watched night and day since her birth. She was likely to bear children, since she was healthy, sexually mature, and came from a line of fertile women. All of this was eminently pleasing to the patriarch in Prince Albert. But as a social and legal entity, Victoria was far more man than woman.

  As Queen of England, Victoria was at the apex of national power and international status. Far from being a purely domestic creature, sheltered from the world, she had an exceptionally busy and demanding full-time job, and her whole life was lived in the public eye. England was very rich, and Victoria occupied the top of the governmental pyramid. She had a huge salary and enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle at state expense. She was also wealthy in her own right.

  None of this would change when the Queen married. Governed by the British constitution, not British civil law, Victoria was the only woman in Great Britain and Ireland to whom the law gave full, independent legal control over her income and possessions whether or not she was married. Most of what Victoria had she could not sell, bequeath, or otherwise alienate. For her lifetime she held what she had in trust for her successor in a unique kind of entail. Her chief source of income, her parliamentary allowance under the civil list, was hers by virtue of her p
osition as head of state.

  These were the facts of Victoria’s life. She knew them well, and, with some important provisos, they were very much to her taste. She took her duties and responsibilities as queen seriously, and enjoyed the work of monarchy. She was aware that she showed more talent for the job than most of her male predecessors. She reveled in her power and her independence.

  Albert’s situation was very different. He was a very young man of great integrity and ability with very little experience of life outside the home and the classroom. He was a proud youth, confident of being the equal of any man and better than most. At the same time, he was conscious that most European princes were richer and more powerful than he. He was a misogynist, confident of being superior to all women without exception, who was yet obliged to make marriage his career. Victoria, Queen of England, was the most magnificent mate to whom he could possibly aspire. Becoming her husband was, pun intended, his crowning achievement. What he brought to his marriage were the traditional gifts of a princess bride: beauty, pedigree, chastity, and the promise of royal children. Prince Albert was a man of reason who prided himself on his self-control and cool temperament. But the discrepancy between his self-image and the world’s opinion gnawed at the roots of his peace.

  As Victoria and Albert spooned on the little blue sofa, each had a secret agenda. Victoria was determined to change as little as possible in her delightful life as queen. She intended to have her Albert and her own way. She would continue to see her ministers alone! She would remain independent by retaining control over her property, her 385,000 pounds from the civil list, and her private income.