by Gillian Gill
In many ways the English Saxe-Coburgs found relations easier and more relaxed with the family of Louis Philippe d’Orléans. The king and queen of the French were not only related by marriage but were fully the peers of the Queen and the prince. In the late summer of 1843, Victoria and Albert for the first time crossed the English Channel in the royal yacht to pay a private visit to Uncle Louis Philippe at the Chateau d’Eu on the coast of Normandy. The weather was fine, the countryside glorious; Louis Philippe, his Sicilian queen, and their numerous children proved to be charming hosts; and for six days the English royal couple felt deliciously at home in France. There were elaborate fêtes champêtres, intimate family dinners, and sea bathing for Albert. The prince enjoyed himself, as he was given precedence as if in England, and found the French king apparently willing to negotiate man to man such thorny international affairs as the marriages of the Spanish queen and her sister-heir. Victoria, meanwhile, had the kind of free-ranging, confidential chats with Queen Amélie and her delightful daughters and daughters-in-law that she rarely permitted herself at home.
The Queen and the prince returned from Normandy confident that they had not only made real friends but had managed to persuade Louis Philippe not to marry his younger son to the Spanish infanta and thus disturb the balance of power in the Iberian Peninsula. When the king of the French broke his promise about Spain within months, they felt deceived, but the friendship was too precious to be allowed to die. Queen Victoria kept her promise to invite Louis Philippe to come to England for a state visit, the first by a reigning French monarch in centuries, and to invest the king with the Order of the Garter, England’s highest honor. The visit was a much-needed boost to the aging Louis Philippe’s prestige and pride. It was also a very family affair, with Queen Amélie writing to Queen Victoria in advance of the visit, begging her not to allow the king to eat too much or endanger his life on horseback.
Unfortunately the 1844 state visit to England was the zenith of Louis Philippe’s reign. However delightful entre amis, the king of the French was a lackluster ruler, blind to the political realities of his native country. In 1848 he was violently deposed, and the whole Orléans clan was forced to make a run for safety. Like so many notable political exiles, from Giuseppe Mazzini to Karl Marx, they headed for England and arrived with nothing but the disguises on their backs. Queen Victoria welcomed them warmly even though she was within days of giving birth to her sixth child and had not irrational fears for her own throne in that year of revolution. Prince Albert made a collection of his children’s discarded clothing, which, one suspects, was received with less enthusiasm than it was given. King Leopold of the Belgians allowed his Orléans relatives to move into Claremont.
Victoria was a notably loyal friend. Until their political fortunes in France changed and they were able to reclaim some of their property and assets, the Orléans family was supported out of the Queen’s privy purse and formed part of her intimate social circle. All the same, it was clear that, however much kings and queens might like to see themselves as part of a caste that moved easily across borders, the friendships among them were subject to the vicissitudes of international politics.
FRIENDSHIP IS SOMETHING that most of us take for granted and know we cannot do without. We find it in offices and sports clubs and reading groups, in letters and online, over tea and over the telephone. But friendship, companionship, and collegiality are exceedingly rare and precious commodities for members of royal families. Both Victoria and Albert felt the lack of congenial friends acutely in their daily lives, and the intimate friendship they had for each other could not quite suffice.
Kings and queens had much in common but could very rarely spend time together even in an age of steam yachts and trains. Extended family members were either taboo, like the Cambridges; or disagreeable, like Duke Ernest; or at odds, like the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringens and the Schleswig-Holsteins. Even Vicky and Bertie, the royal couple’s eldest children, were still too young to be good company, at least in their mother’s eyes. At the end of each long day, the royal couple could at last dismiss the members of the household and turn with relief to each other, but being partners in business as well as bedfellows did not always make it easy to relax.
For the simple companionship and reliable affection that make the stresses of living bearable to busy people, the royal couple had to look somewhere hidden and unexpected. They found it not with royal peers or noble retainers but with persons at the very bottom of the social pyramid. Deep in the wings, out of the spotlight, were the largely anonymous men and women whom the royal couple counted on, relaxed with, and, perhaps, loved more than any others—their maids and valets.
In the daily drama of royal life, costume played a crucial role in bolstering the confidence of the two star actors and ensuring that their performances were well received. Any slip in presentation—the prince’s hat that courtiers giggled at, the Queen’s bonnet that protected her face from the sun but also from the curious gaze of reporters—could result in an unfavorable review. By their midtwenties both Victoria and Albert were impatient with fashion and yet fanatically concerned with appearance. They spent all too many hours of the day dressing, and their reliance on the skills and attention of their dressers increased each year. Every day, like a small child or an actor faced with a quick change of costume, the Queen stood while someone helped her into dresses. A maid did the Queen’s hair, fastened the laces, buttons, and rows of tiny hooks and eyes, carefully positioned the various necklaces and brooches and earrings with which the Queen liked to festoon herself, tied her shoes, handed her a reticule and a tiny, exquisitely laundered handkerchief embroidered VR, and opened the door as she swept out.
Victoria employed a squad of seven or eight maids, classified as either dressers or wardrobe maids. They were the Queen’s personal servants, not employees of one of the pestilential government departments. She was free to hire, fire, or reward them as she chose, recruited them with great care, and tried them out for several months before offering them a permanent position. Some of the dressers were foreign, mainly German. All came recommended by the Queen’s relatives. Most had parents or siblings or cousins who also had served a member of the royal family.
The range of the dressers’ duties was wide, and their expertise considerable. The dressers made many of the Queen’s garments from scratch and were also at times asked to make garments for royal daughters or other relatives. If a garment needed to be altered—and with a constantly pregnant mistress, this happened regularly—the dresser took the dress apart and put it back together again. Since the sewing machine had yet to be invented, all this was done by hand, with invisible stitches. At least one of the dressers was a skilled milliner who trimmed not only the Queen’s hats but hats sent over from Germany by the Queen’s half sister.
If a pet dog tore the Queen’s dress, if she got mud on her skirts, if her felt hat with its delicate grebe feathers got wet, if her muslin bodice caught a drop of turtle soup, each stain had to be removed and each rip repaired before the garment was put away. White cotton and linen items like shifts, petticoats, nightgowns, and handkerchiefs were carefully tagged and listed by the dressers, dispatched to the central laundry at Kew, and carefully counted and checked off when the garments returned, duly bleached, washed, starched, and ironed with consummate art. When a dress was brought out from the closet, it had to be fluffed out and any creases pressed before it was presented to the Queen.
The dressers were also in charge of maintaining the Queen’s private rooms. Cleanliness and order were a passion with Queen Victoria, and every item in her suite had to be set out exactly as she liked it, from the solid gold set on her toilet table to the crowd of ornaments and piles of correspondence on her desk. The Queen’s jewelry collection was a major responsibility for the dressers, as was the Queen’s journal. Every day the dresser on duty locked the journal away from the curious eyes even of family members. Victoria liked to use different writing paper in different locations—at Bal
moral, paper headed with a sketch of the castle, and so on. When she went into mourning, her paper was heavily edged in black. It fell to the dresser to ensure that the appropriate paper was ready on Her Majesty’s desk.
Unlike the Queen’s aristocratic ladies of the bedchamber, who had little to do and took it in turns to come into waiting for three-month periods, the working-class dressers all put in sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, most weeks of the year. Everything had to be ready for when the Queen awoke, usually around seven-thirty and putting her clothes away after a ball or a grand dinner could take hours. When the Queen was at home, the dresser on duty would help her to dress and then spend the rest of the day in the dressing room, mending and sewing, ready to respond immediately to Her Majesty’s bell. The other dressers would be engaged with needlework and cleaning, but one came up to the dressing room at mealtimes so that the woman on duty could go down for her food.
The dressers were subject to all of Prince Albert’s moral strictures, but in any case they had too little free time to stray far. An afternoon off was a rare treat, possible only if the Queen was sure to be away and gave her explicit permission. The wardrobe maids were on duty even at night. One of them was required to sleep on the makeshift bed in the dressing room next to the Queen’s bedroom. As Victoria interestingly remarked once to her daughter Vicky, she was so nervous at night that she always had a maid on call next door, “even when Papa is with me.”
The dresser on duty’s worst headache was probably not the endless dressmaking and mending and folding but the planning. She had to have the details of the Queen’s schedule well in advance in order to ensure that every item of apparel was ready to be put on in a hurry. Royal birthdays had to be carefully noted. If one fell while the Queen was in mourning, colored clothing would be laid out in place of the black for that one day. When the Queen went out of town, as she came to do more and more, everything she could possibly need had to be thought through in advance, checked with Her Majesty in person, collected, organized, packed, and then on arrival unpacked, pressed, and so on. Never one to waste time, Victoria became a whirlwind of activity when she was abroad, and her dressers were on their feet for most of the day and night.
Unsurprisingly, Victoria’s dressers were, for the most part, strong, young women, and they left her service after only a few years to marry or return to their native country. One exception was Marianne Skerrett, who entered the Queen’s service in 1837 when she was about forty and stayed until 1854, rising to be her head dresser. When Baroness Lehzen left England in 1843, Marianne Skerrett seems to have taken over many of her duties with the Queen and in some measure at least replaced her in the Queen’s heart. Skerrett, as she was known in the royal household, was a woman of humble birth and modest education, but, like her royal mistress, she could read and write fluently in French and German as well as English. As head dresser, Skerrett dealt with tradesmen, paid bills, answered begging letters, wrote for recommendations of other dressers and maids, and sometimes acted as the Queen’s amanuensis in corresponding with her family. Queen Victoria described Skerrett as “a person of immense literary knowledge and sound understanding, of the greatest discretion and straightforwardness.” Skerrett spoke her mind, and her power was respected.
Queen Victoria was a demanding employer, but people were eager to work for her. Domestic servants in the nineteenth century, especially women, were generally overworked and underpaid, and the Queen paid good wages: 200 pounds a year for the first dresser, 120 for the second, 100 for the third, and 80 for each of the wardrobe maids. In 1843 Charlotte Brontë was happy to get 16 pounds a year, plus room and board, as a teacher in Brussels, and her hours were also long and her holidays few. On the other hand, a senior lady-in-waiting got 500 pounds for her three months in the household.
Unlike many employers, the Queen could be counted upon to pay the wages every quarter, and the perquisites enjoyed by her personal servants were substantial. Food and lodging were free, and the dressers had decent rooms and ate very well. Within the whole household of servants in the royal palaces, a rigid hierarchy prevailed, and below stairs the Queen’s private servants were high in the order of precedence. At Christmas and on their birthdays, the dressers received thoughtful and substantial gifts from their royal employers such as a piece of clothing, a bolt of fabric, an elaborate etui, or a gold pin with a small pearl. The royal children, who treated the dressers like aunties, made them little things or bought trinkets out of their pocket money. If a dresser fell ill, she was given the best care that a royal doctor could provide and allowed ample time to convalesce. On leaving the royal service, a dresser received a decent pension, which, again, the Queen could be counted on to pay each quarter.
The publication in 1994 of a set of letters written by Frieda Arnold, one of Queen Victoria’s dressers, for the first time allowed a glimpse of life behind the scenes at the palace. Arnold was born into a middle-class German family, but after her father died, she was obliged to train as a seamstress and to enter service. Arnold was intelligent and well read despite her limited formal education, and she devoted her few hours of leisure to drawing and painting. Like Prince Albert, the dresser was desperately homesick for Germany and appalled by the dark, sooty atmosphere of London. However, she was interested in everything she saw in her new life and paints vivid word pictures of Windsor, Osborne, and Balmoral.
Even in these wholly private communications that the Arnold family kept to itself for over a century, Frieda scrupulously obeyed Prince Albert’s rules and maintained a vigilant silence about the lives of her royal employers. Though she and her fellow maids lived closer to the Queen and the prince than anyone else, though the wardrobe maids actually spent the night in the room next to the one where the Queen and the prince slept, Arnold is discretion personified. She recounts one innocuous little remark Queen Victoria addressed to her in Paris. She says how delighted she was when, one Christmas, the Queen gave her “a circular box of colours … a roll-up case of pencils … and a block book.” But she describes no scenes between the Queen and her husband and other members of the royal family even though their intimate conversations were generally conducted in German, her native language. Arnold does not even say much about her work, except that it took all of her energy and intelligence.
Mary Ponsonby hated the fact that the Queen and the prince were distant toward members of the household like herself but close to their personal staff. “You felt that they [the Queen and the prince] were pretty nearly indifferent as to which maid of honour, lady-in-waiting, or equerry did the work, they were on more natural terms with the servants,” wrote Ponsonby. “One result was that their standard of taste ran the risk of being vulgarized.” Mary Ponsonby prided herself on her enlightened social views, but she was still a tremendous snob. As the documented examples of Marianne Skerrett and Frieda Arnold prove, the Queen’s dressers were cleverer and better educated than many of the maids of honor.
The Queen enjoyed the company of her dressers because they were like her—intelligent, good at their jobs, easy to talk to, unpretentious. They were cultured but not intellectual. She could relax with them. She could talk family problems with them. And she could trust them.
Perhaps the most famous diarist of the mid-Victorian era was Lord Charles Greville. He is said to have known many important people, witnessed many important events, and listened at many important keyholes. Historians still quote the racy anecdotes he recorded about the royal family. Frieda Arnold did not need to listen at keyholes. She helped the Queen of England out of her evening bath and into her thin silk nightdress. She heard the morning dialogue of the Queen and the prince and brought their children in to see them. She had the key to the drawer where the Queen’s journal was locked up every day. But unlike Lord Charles, Arnold, even posthumously, would not stoop to betray the Queen’s trust. She had nobility of soul, not blood, and she kept silent. This too is what is meant by Victorian.
VICTORIA’S MAIDS were important to her but not even
Skerrett mattered to her as much as the valet Isaac Cart did to Albert. When the prince came to England, the Queen allowed him to bring with him from Germany only his greyhound Eos, his librarian Dr. Schenk, and his valet, Cart. Eos died, much mourned, of old age. Schenk soon returned to Germany. Cart remained in the prince’s service until August 1858, when he died. The Queen and the prince were in Europe at the time. “While I was dressing,” wrote the Queen in her journal, “Albert came in, quite pale, with a telegram saying ‘My poor Cart is dead, he died quite suddenly’ … I turn quite sick now writing it … I burst into tears. All day long the tears would rush every moment to my eyes … Cart was invaluable, well educated, thoroughly trustworthy, devoted to the Prince … He was the only link my loved one had about him which connected him with his childhood … I cannot think of my dear husband without Cart … we had to choke our grief down all day.”
Reportedly, Isaac Cart was a Swiss who in April 1829 became valet to both Coburg princes. Albert’s tutor Florshütz calls him “a faithful, attentive, and obedient servant” who “deserved the confidence reposed in him.” In October 1838, when Albert and his brother, Ernest, were threatened by a fire in a nearby room in the Ehrenburg Palace, Cart, according to Albert’s report, “lifted a marble table with incredible strength and threw it against the bookcase enveloped in flames, causing it to fall down,” thus helping to subdue the fire. In August 1840, Albert’s first year in England, the prince wrote to his brother: “My birthday passed by, but how different from what it used to be. Cart, with his embarrassed congratulations in the morning, when he always begins to laugh, and good old Eos, were the only well known faces.” In old age, Cart supervised the work of the prince’s staff of valets, many of them German. Frieda Arnold mentions in her letters that Cart was very kind and helpful to her as she adjusted to her new life in England.