by Gillian Gill
Albert, for his part, was determined to institute the traditional balance of power between husband and wife by becoming the master in his wife’s house. He would manage her worldly goods even if he could not own them. Educated in statecraft by King Leopold and Baron Stockmar, Albert planned to take the reins of power from Victoria once they were married. He would leave her queen only in name.
BETWEEN OCTOBER 1839, when Prince Albert arrived at Windsor Castle, and the wedding in February 1840, Victoria held all the trump cards. Like a princess in a fairy story, she imposed upon Albert a series of tests and ordeals. The prince had to beg through family intermediaries for an invitation to come to England to see the Queen. When the invitation came, it was grudging and issued on the strict proviso that Her Majesty committed herself to nothing. After Victoria had looked Albert over and decided that, indeed, he was the husband she was looking for, her first impulse was not to clasp her beloved in her arms but to go into delicious conclave with her prime minister over how exactly she should propose and what arrangements would have to be made for the wedding.
Only then did Victoria summon Albert to her boudoir in her ancestral castle for a private interview. She proposed marriage, never doubting, for all her maidenly protestations, that he would accept. She magnanimously conducted the proposal interview in German, since she knew Albert was at a disadvantage in English. Victoria cooed her adoration and shed tears over the sacrifice Albert was making in marrying her, but the very structure of the proposal spoke volumes. Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, of her free choice, was condescending to marry a mere prince of Coburg because she found him agreeable. Very much the great lady, she was also very careful to save his feelings.
Now that she had made her decision, Victoria was eager to have Albert by her side. She set the marriage date for February 10, and on November 14, Albert left Windsor for Coburg, stopping for a few days en route at Wiesbaden, where his uncle and Baron Stockmar were both waiting for him. There, according to Stockmar’s memoirs, “All the circumstances and difficulties connected with Prince Albert’s position in England were submitted to a detailed and exhaustive discussion.” The Coburgs had no trust in the security of the regular mails, knowing government officials all over Europe routinely opened letters, so a special system of couriers was set up between London, Coburg, Wiesbaden, and Brussels. As soon as Albert left for Coburg, Stockmar traveled to London, charged with negotiating the marriage settlement.
One thing that was certainly part of the discussion between Albert, his uncle, and Baron Stockmar was Lord Melbourne and the prime minister’s relationship with the Queen. Stockmar and Leopold had known Melbourne, Palmerston, Wellington, and all the other key players on the English political stage for twenty years. They had grown old with them. While Melbourne was enduring the Byron scandal and Palmerston (reportedly) was bedding three of the five most powerful women in British society, Leopold was conducting clandestine affairs with women in England and abroad, seconded by his invaluable agent, Stockmar.
From the day of Victoria’s accession, King Leopold had been dismayed to hear from Baron Stockmar, his agent at the Court of St. James’s, how completely the Queen fell under her prime minister’s spell. Lord Melbourne for two and a half years had been both surrogate father and political mentor to the young Queen of England. Victoria adored Melbourne, laughed with him, relied on him, quoted him, adopted his friends and relatives as her own best friends and intimate companions. Cynical people such as the Duke of Wellington, Charles Greville, and Princess Lieven, the wife of the Russian ambassador, were saying that Victoria was in love with Melbourne though quite unaware of it. Such gossip could not fail to be distasteful to Victoria’s idealistic young fiancé.
The Coburg party, which comprised Victoria’s bitterly aggrieved mother as well as King Leopold and Duke Ernest, blamed Melbourne for the public relations debacle over the Lady Flora Hastings case and for the bedchamber crisis that had brought the Queen’s reputation so low in 1838. They were well aware that the prime minister at the outset had been, at best, lukewarm about Prince Albert as a husband for Queen Victoria. While at Windsor, Albert had met nothing but exquisite politeness and warm approval from Lord Melbourne, who was anxious to establish good relations with his beloved queen’s husband-to-be. But all the same, the prince from the outset was primed to see Melbourne as his chief rival for the Queen’s attention and regard, a secret adversary. The events in England over the next three months did nothing to change the prince’s mind on this point.
Once back in Coburg, if left to himself, the prince would have probably wallowed in the melancholy task of saying farewell to friends and family while packing his green student lamp and other prized possessions into one or two trunks. But Albert had little time for tears. Filled with pride and happiness, the Coburgers and Gothaners put on a giddy succession of celebratory breakfasts, shooting parties, dinners, balls, and galas well calculated to upset a young man who hated rich food, drank no wine, and liked to get to bed early. A distinguished party of English peers came to the Hall of Giants at Coburg bearing the insignia of the Order of the Garter, Britain’s highest honor—a gift from Queen Victoria—which Prince Albert received at the hands of his father. In another solemn ceremony, the weeping Albert renounced his German nationality and became British.
Throughout all this frenzied round of activities, Victoria could not be neglected for a moment. Though far away, the Queen received constant reports on the prince’s doings, wrote to him at least once every day, and went into hysteria if a fat love letter did not land on her plate each morning. The prince sat for a portrait that his beloved could gaze upon in his absence. He set to music a poem in honor of Victoria that his brother, Ernest, had composed. And he wrote every day at length, responding to the crescendo of insults from England, where, it seemed, no one was happy that the Queen had engaged to marry her cousin of Coburg.
The opposition Tory leaders in parliament, headed by the Duke of Wellington, suggested that Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha might be a closet Catholic, and thus constitutionally barred from marrying an English sovereign. The Tories cited the fact that both Albert’s uncle Leopold and his cousin Ferdinand had converted to Catholicism when they became the kings of Belgium and Portugal, respectively. All of Coburg saw it as a slap in the face when the English parliament demanded to see Prince Albert’s Protestant credentials. It was a point of honor in Prince Albert’s family, and a well-established historical fact, that a Coburg ancestor had been one of the first supporters of Martin Luther and the Reformation. However, Duke Ernest swallowed his pride and commissioned Stockmar to compose the necessary memorandum on Prince Albert’s lifelong and ineradicable devotion to the Protestant religion.
King Leopold had been one of the first to hear of the engagement of his niece and nephew, and he argued strenuously that Albert must receive an English dukedom when he married. As the king saw it, the prince’s success in his difficult new role depended on sealing his identity as an Englishman by making him an official part of the establishment, independent from his wife. Subsequent events proved that Leopold was right, but in 1839 he could not prevail. Melbourne insisted that it would not do for Prince Albert to be a member of the House of Lords, and thus involved in politics, and the Queen preferred Melbourne’s advice to her uncle’s. For his part, Albert declared that he would never stoop to an English dukedom, since a son of the royal house of Coburg outranked any English peer. In England, where many lords had genealogies as long and estates much larger and richer than Coburg-Gotha, this came off as a piece of pathetic rodomontade from a youth of twenty.
The issue of the prince’s precedence had also to be addressed before the marriage, and on this Victoria, Albert, and Uncle Leopold were of one mind. Precedence was a matter of burning importance among members of European royal families. At court, immense resources of scholarship and ingenuity were devoted to deciding who should lead whom into dinner, who should sit where at table, and who should “give the st
ep” (donner le pas)—in other words, walk behind whom when the time came to move in or out of a room or residence. Queen Victoria was determined that her husband should take precedence over everyone in Great Britain except herself, but on this issue she met with determined opposition not only from parliament but from members of her own family.
Her uncle Ernest, the much-loathed Duke of Cumberland, now king of Hanover, refused point-blank ever to yield precedence to Albert. Her uncle Cambridge was almost as recalcitrant. Her uncle Sussex agreed to give way to Albert, but only on the condition that the Queen make a duchess of his morganatic wife, Lady Cecilia Buggin, and receive the lady at court. The Tories in parliament also wished English royal dukes to have precedence over the Queen’s German husband. They pointed out that if as they fervently hoped, a Prince of Wales was born, that young man on his majority must have precedence immediately after his royal mother. Frustrated in parliament, Victoria was advised by Charles Greville, secretary to the Privy Council and an expert on English constitutional law, that she had the power to give her husband precedence after herself within Great Britain. She duly issued letters patent to that effect.
As a loyal wife-to-be, Victoria raised the issue with her ministers of making Albert her king consort. A sharing of royal power, in which the male spouse would in fact have executive authority and carry out the Crown’s business, was what Queen Mary Stuart had demanded for her husband, William of Orange, before they came to the throne in 1688. It was what Princess Charlotte, just before her tragic death, had said she wanted for her husband, (then) Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. It was what Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Kohary first cousin to both Victoria and Albert, enjoyed once his 1838 marriage to the Queen of Portugal was buttressed by the arrival of a male heir.
But Prime Minister Melbourne refused to take the Queen’s request before parliament. “For God’s sake, say no more about it, Ma’am,” he exclaimed, “for those who can make Kings can unmake them!” Her Majesty, at whatever personal cost, must bear the constitutional burden of monarchy alone, said Melbourne. Sad but resigned, Her Majesty gave way.
The unkindest cut of all to Albert’s pride at the time of his engagement was financial. He fully expected to receive on his marriage a parliamentary allowance of fifty thousand pounds a year for life. This was what fat, useless Prince George of Denmark, husband of Queen Anne, had enjoyed in the seventeenth century. It was what Uncle Leopold, even after he became king of a sovereign nation, had been paid ever since 1815 when he married Princess Charlotte. It was what Queen Adelaide was granted on the accession of her husband William IV and that she continued to receive until her death. Melbourne and the Whig cabinet assured the Queen that there would be no difficulty in securing for her husband the traditional appanage of a royal spouse.
But Melbourne was lazy, his government weak, and parliament sulky. The Tories unearthed their social conscience and joined with the radical faction of the Whigs in insisting that, since the economy was in decline and the working poor were in dire distress throughout the nation, the time had come to cut government expenses, including the civil list. To a very young, virtually penniless German gentleman who was marrying a very rich woman, thirty thousand a year, at a time when decent middle-class families managed on a few hundred, was surely enough. Thirty thousand pounds was, in fact, approximately the total annual revenue of the duchy of Coburg-Gotha, but the Coburgs would never cease to mourn the twenty thousand a year that should by rights have been Albert’s. They laid the blame squarely upon Lord Melbourne’s shoulders.
In fact, the Tories could afford to snub Prince Albert, since hostility to the royal marriage cut right across party lines. The nation was solicitous of the Queen’s happiness, keen to see her married, and anxious for the birth of a Prince of Wales, but few people in England had much enthusiasm for Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Royal bloodlines were of fierce importance in Germany, but they meant less and less in nineteenth-century England. Birth privilege and political power had long been firmly yoked to wealth in Great Britain, and Albert had no money. As a member of a royal caste, Prince Albert felt destined to rule the world, but even most conservative Englishmen had ceased to believe in the divine right of kings. Ever since Magna Carta, English aristocrats had seen themselves as kingmakers, and the homage they gave to the sovereign was always conditional on his (or her) good behavior.
Albert was also foreign and in English eyes ipso facto inferior. Tories and Whigs alike were fiercely xenophobic, and even British radicals had an ingrained sense of national superiority. Prime minister and plowman all pretty much saw Prince Albert as an imported royal stud with no assets but his handsome face. As a contemporary broadsheet rhyme put it:
He comes the bridegroom of Victoria’s choice,
The nominee of Lehzen’s vulgar voice;
He comes to take ‘for better or for worse’
England’s fat Queen and England’s fatter purse.
And if the British parliament was proving intransigent and the British press was taking pot shots, Victoria, at a distance of several hundred miles, was not at all the sweet, confiding little creature of the blue sofa. When Albert begged his betrothed to take two weeks away for a honeymoon, she refused. A honeymoon was quite impossible for the Queen of England, Victoria wrote. Perhaps her dearest Albert did not understand that she was quite indispensable to the business of government and liked to be close to parliament when it was in session and to her ministers at all times. Albert had crossed a line and was sharply reminded about the no-trespassing sign.
Then there was the issue of the prince’s household. Albert assumed that when he came to England, he would be free to bring his own team of aides with him from Germany. His cousin Ferdinand had been accompanied to Lisbon by his tutor Dietz, and the two of them took over the Portuguese affairs of state, with, it must be admitted, very bad results. At the very least, Albert counted upon having a German who was fully in his trust to serve as his private secretary and treasurer. In this way, Albert himself would control his financial affairs and be independent.
It was thus a terrible shock when the prince learned that, on the contrary, his fiancée intended to name Englishmen from her private circle to fill all the positions in his household. Lord Melbourne’s personal secretary, George Anson, a member of a noted Whig family, was to be the prince’s personal secretary. Albert begged Victoria repeatedly and in the mildest and most plaintive of terms, to allow him to have some Germans about him. Victoria informed him that he must be content to bring with him from Coburg his librarian, his valet, and his greyhound.
This matter of the private secretary was still unresolved when Prince Albert arrived in England for his wedding. In the end, faced with an ultimatum, he was forced to give way, and, in fact, he and Anson soon became close friends and allies. But the prince indulged in one small gesture of defiance. On reaching his majority, Albert had inherited an income of 2,400 pounds a year out of his mother’s estate. Determined that this money at least was his to do with as he willed, before leaving Germany, Albert assigned his brother, Ernest, to act as his trustee and manager. German money should stay in Germany, where no Englishman could touch it.
When parliament created difficulties for her dearest Albert, Queen Victoria was a veritable dragon, breathing flames of anger and defiance. As far as lay in her power, she bestowed honors on Albert, granting him precedence next to her own, giving him the Garter, and making him a field marshal in the British army, to the fierce indignation of the senior officer class. But all these things were in her power, and there was the rub. Power, not protection, was what Albert sought from his wife-to-be.
Victoria could play the loyal little woman to her heart’s content. Parliament and the cabinet, especially the cabinet presided over by Lord Melbourne, would ensure that Her Majesty gave away nothing that was hers. Charles Greville, a cynical man who observed the Queen closely, was sure that, in her heart of hearts, Victoria was not sorry that her husband would remain so financially and soci
ally dependent upon her.
THE ROYAL WEDDING was scheduled for early February, always a dark and dreary month in Britain but especially so in nineteenth-century London, where the air was clogged with soot. Traditionally royal weddings were private affairs, held in the evening, but the Whig government insisted that Queen Victoria’s wedding should be celebrated in daylight at the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace. Thousands of people could see the Queen and her husband go by and, as it were, get some entertainment for their tax money. Reluctantly, Victoria yielded to her ministers, but in all other matters relating to the wedding arrangements, she had her way, careless of gossip and censure.
The bridegroom and his party, she decreed, should lodge with her at Buckingham Palace. If her mother and other narrow-minded people thought it improper for bride and groom to be under the same roof, that was just too bad. Albert always preferred to err on the side of propriety, but he was in no position to question his fiancée’s arrangements. She was footing the bill not only for the wedding but for the travel expenses and “outfits” (clothing and all other personal items found necessary) of the whole Coburg party. Albert did write begging Victoria to choose as her bridesmaids only young ladies whose mothers had led irreproachable lives. Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, who was in a position to know, delicately intimated that ten such paragons of womanly virtue were not to be found among England’s great families, so the Queen ignored this request too.
Victoria dictated the guest list for her wedding, and she invited only five Tories. One of the favored five was Lord Ashley, who hardly counted, since he was married to Lord Melbourne’s niece. No Tories, not even the Duke of Wellington, were invited to the wedding breakfast. Albert wrote that he thought it a mistake for the Queen to identify so passionately with the Whigs, arguing that the monarchy should be above political party. Again the Queen took no notice. As Victoria saw it, the Tories needed to be punished, since they had proved to be her enemies in the parliamentary debates over her marriage.