We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  Haag shows Victoria, elegant in evening dress, smiling fondly at the dead creatures spread before her, and this was not wholly a fiction. It is true that the Queen had little taste for blood sports, did not like guns, and was wary of the stupidity of huntsmen. When, on the occasion of Bertie’s christening, her uncle Ferdinand peppered the beloved greyhound Eos with buckshot, she was hysterical. Happily the dog recovered. When Lord Canning almost shot the infant Prince of Wales, she was furious. But as a woman and a landowner of her generation, she knew that Albert and his male guests could not be happy unless they were shooting things.

  The negotiations with the Fife trustees over the acquisition of Balmoral were protracted, and for seven years the royal couple spent some six weeks in September and October in the “old” castle. The accommodation for a growing family, officials, attendant ministers, and servants was extremely cramped. Report has it that the billiard room was so small that the Queen and her ladies had to move around the room to enable the gentlemen to take their shots. Small or not, Balmoral suited Queen Victoria, who liked pretending to be an ordinary middle-class wife and mother. However, once again the ministers and the ladies grumbled, and as soon as Prince Albert took title, he launched an ambitious plan to erect a new, much larger structure and to raze the old one.

  As at Osborne, the prince served as his own architect, finding in William Smith of Aberdeen an experienced builder who could be counted upon to put his employer’s ideas into stone without any argument. In Scotland Albert the architect played things safer. He built a castle in the medieval style, with asymmetrical windows and rooms on correspondingly different levels. He used a pale gray local stone, Glen Gelder granite. Men were recruited from far and wide to build the castle, and Scottish stonemasons completed the restrained but charming external decoration.

  Several small strikes by the workmen for better work conditions took the prince by surprise. A Highlander like Sandy McAra might be happy in the role of feudal servant to his laird, but a Scottish workman from the south had a strong sense of his rights and was ready for industrial action. The prince gave way, as he could not afford adverse press coverage, and the house went up smartly. In 1855 Queen Victoria was able to occupy the family’s private quarters, and on August 30, 1856, she recorded in her journal arriving at Balmoral to find “the tower finished as well as the offices, and the poor old house gone.”

  Frieda Arnold, Queen Victoria’s dresser, visited the brand-new castle in 1855. On her six-hour carriage journey from Perth to Balmoral over the Pass of Glenshee, Arnold was swept away by the desolate beauty of the countryside, its “sublime stillness and endless peace.” A visitor today will feel the same. Arnold, like Prince Albert, was deeply nostalgic for her native country, and she saw at once how much the new Balmoral resembled a German hunting lodge. On a grander scale, and with the modern bathroom conveniences that he and his family now found essential, the prince had recreated his father’s Schloss Rosenau. Surrounded by wild and mountainous country, with the pleasant sound of a river ever in the background, Albert could relax.

  Queen Victoria was delighted with Balmoral. She felt that a Canaletto or a Rubens was superfluous there, since every window was a frame for sublimity. When in Scotland, the Queen spent as much of the day as possible outside. She rode her pony uphill on paths newly blazed for her use. With her faithful kilt-clad gillie leading her horse, she forded rushing streams, her long skirts trailing in the icy water. Covered with waterproofs and rugs, she took long drives in a high open carriage to local beauty spots for family picnics and sketching parties.

  In the Highlands, Victoria was an attentive neighbor to her fellow landowners, and an eager patron of the Highland games at nearby Brae-mar, but her instinct was to get away from people, not seek them out. The local crofters learned to keep their distance from the Queen when she was out on one of her jaunts. On the other hand, if she happened upon someone by accident, she stopped and chatted, rapturous if, at first, she was not recognized. She took to dropping in on women in the primitive cottages known as bothies, bringing food and warm clothing, pleased to be welcomed, amused when an old woman criticized a sock she had knitted.

  For even more solitude, the Queen took to retiring for a few nights each year to Alt-na-Guithasach, a barely accessible spot reached by boat across Loch Muick. She improved the route, had a path along one side of the lake chipped out of the granite, and extended the lodge or shiel to accommodate herself, a couple of family members, a lady-in-waiting and a gentleman-in-waiting, a lady’s maid, and a crew of boatmen and gillies. For Queen Victoria this was simplicity and seclusion. Frieda Arnold found Loch Muick desolate and marveled at the lives of the wife and daughter of the Queen’s keeper there. This woman and her little girl regularly spent weeks alone in their tiny home, far from human contact and aid, while her husband was at Balmoral, helping with the shooting parties. Victoria was always generous in paying for her pleasures in money, but, as Arnold delicately suggests, she did not always see the price in human suffering. The lonely little child, the gillie in his “Highland dress,” wading through freezing mountain streams, the piper playing in the pouring rain—all this was for Victoria a backdrop like Loch na Gar, the peak that towered over Balmoral Castle.

  The picturesqueness of Scotland seems never to have palled for Victoria. Though most of her food was imported from Edinburgh or Windsor, she relished such typically Scottish foods as finnan haddie (smoked haddock), oatmeal porridge, oatcakes, and shortbread biscuits. She liked scotch better than wine and even ate haggis. To judge from her journal entries, the bagpipers at Balmoral serenaded her endlessly, and by night and day men could be seen outside her castle dancing reels. One innovation at the new Balmoral was a ballroom built for the so-called gillies balls. People came from miles around to dance into the small hours, liberally wetting their whistles with the local brew. Queen Victoria adored these occasions and insisted that her family and her visitors attend. She mastered all the Scottish dances, and for hours on end could whirl like a top to the skirl of the pipe and the whoop of the sweating, inebriated men.

  Needless to say, Balmoral was a taste that most of the court ladies and gentlemen, the royal officials, and the ministers of state refused to acquire. It took a day of nonstop travel—two days with a layover—to get to the castle, and once you got there, there was nothing to do. Deeside may have been statistically the sunniest part of Scotland, but it could still see rain for days on end. During the Queen’s fall visits, the cold was often frightful once the sun went down, with ice on the lawn, snow on the hills, and a howling gale in the uncarpeted halls. As for the decor, it looked like middle-class kitsch to anyone used to the splendors of Woburn Abbey and Blenheim Palace. All those giant thistles, as witty Lord Clarendon remarked, would kill the appetite of a donkey.

  Not everyone found it delightful to go on a jaunt to a local waterfall, even with the piles of waterproofs and woolen blankets and provisions the Queen laid on for her guests. The Highland men that the Queen and the prince found so charming were surly with lesser mortals. Visiting hunters got tired of stag shooting after a while, since it often involved hours of fruitless walking in treacherous terrain. Prince Albert himself got fed up with watching the deer run away and concocted a plan to connect the high bare plain where his prey liked to congregate with a series of tunnels from which he could shoot undetected. This highly rational project did not meet Scottish standards of sportsmanship and was dropped.

  But despite small gaffes like this, Prince Albert was popular in Scotland. The Highlanders took it as a compliment when he built his German version of a Scottish castle, festooned his house in Royal Stuart tartan, and added a silver-encrusted sporran and jeweled dagger to his Garter star in the evenings. Ever since the Great Enclosures, when the lairds evicted their tenant farmers to make sheep farms, Deeside had had more lambs than children, and the coming of the Saxe-Coburg family brought some modest affluence. Albert was a good landlord who understood farming. He improved the dwellings of
people on his estate, established schools, paid good wages, and patronized local tradesmen. In six weeks the Queen’s household got through 13,225 pounds of red meat alone. Some of this, as well as some of the game shot by the prince and his friends, reached the protein-starved women and bairns in the bothies.

  The roads into the Highlands continued to be lonely, but with the Queen’s messengers traveling them constantly every fall, some improvements were inevitable. Hiking and riding trails opened up, and tourists began to trickle in. Plaid was fashionable, and kilts became all the rage for small boys all over Europe when the royal princes wore them at public events. It is no wonder that when Victoria first drove out to Balmoral from Aberdeen, a bewildering succession of victory arches was constructed along the road to welcome her. With the Queen and her family in the Highlands, Scotland felt a little less like a conquered nation or an abandoned colony.

  And the Queen was never safer than when she wandered the roads near Crathie, riding her pony or driving her trap with a single companion by her side, a tiny woman in a giant bonnet, a plaid shawl, and a muddy tweed skirt, startlingly, deliciously daringly “alone.”

  The Greatest Show on Earth

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  HE QUEEN AND THE PRINCE DID NOT SPEND THEIR WHOLE YEAR ON their private estates, and they had far less leisure than most of England’s upper crust. The prince especially dedicated himself to the business of government, and he was increasingly active in charitable organizations and arts groups.

  On the spectrum of mid-nineteenth-century British politics, Prince Albert was a moderate Tory, even a Liberal on some issues, but never a radical. In his capacity as the Queen’s chief adviser and personal secretary, he worked smoothly with government ministers of both parties, and in domestic affairs his was consistently a voice of enlightenment and a force for good.

  He was intelligent and exceptionally well informed on the issues of the day, from the design of small-bore rifles for the army to reform of the church schools in Ireland. When he agreed to chair or sponsor an organization, be it the Society for the Abolition of Slavery, the Royal Horticultural Society, Trinity House (an organization devoted to saving lives at sea), or the Committee to Erect the New Houses of Parliament, he was an inspiration. He did his homework, was an exemplary correspondent, delivered thoughtful speeches, and always tried to think the issues through without prejudice.

  He was in favor of social reform far more than his wife, who found it difficult to sympathize with the problems of people she did not know. Albert saw poverty as an ethical issue that, as the public voice of the Crown, it was his duty to address. He did all he could to investigate labor conditions in person, and the industrialists and engineers who took him round a system of locks here or a woolen mill there were always impressed by the depth of his knowledge. In his public speeches as well as in his committee work, he sought to convince the nation that its greatness depended on finding solutions to the problems of the poor. Reading the official reports that unveiled the horrendous conditions prevailing in British mills and mines, he contacted Lord Shaftesbury, who was leading the campaign for industrial reform, and offered to preside over the Society for Improving the Condition of the Working Classes.

  Albert was a scholar at heart, and he brought a valuable European perspective to the question of university education. He was a rare bird in England’s establishment in the mid-nineteenth century because he was as passionately interested in science and technology as he was in music and the arts. Keen to put his ideas into practice, he allowed his name to be put forward for election to the chancellorship of the University of Cambridge. Dyed-in the-wool conservatives among Cambridge graduates did their utmost to block the prince’s election, but, happily, they failed. Far from content to be a figurehead, Albert placed himself at the head of the Cambridge dons who were convinced that the university could regain its status as an intellectual powerhouse only if it encouraged scientific and technological research and stressed mathematics and the sciences for its undergraduates. Albert and his supporters managed to push through a substantial program of curricular and administrative reform in the face of ferocious opposition from classicists and theologians. It was in no small part thanks to Prince Albert that Cambridge University was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the modern world.

  The culmination of the prince’s work as a committee chairman was the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations of 1851. This proved to be the cultural sensation of the mid-nineteenth century, and it was generally agreed by the prince’s contemporaries that it never would have come off without him. The opening of the exhibition on May 1 was Albert’s finest hour.

  AN INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRIAL exhibition could obviously not be the work of one man, but Prince Albert worked as chief fund-raiser, lobbyist, and organizer, intelligently exploiting the power of the Crown. Neither he nor Queen Victoria contributed much financially. Even the seed money for the exhibition came from public subscriptions not from the prince’s pockets, though these were no longer as empty as he liked people to believe. But the Queen’s name was invaluable in getting the project off the ground, and the prince contributed at every stage. As chair of a committee notable for its diligence and efficiency he worked harder than anyone else.

  The idea of the Great Exhibition was not the prince’s. It probably came from Henry Cole, one of the many hyperactive, multitalented, pragmatic visionaries that Victorian Britain was producing. Cole (1808–1882) did not come from England’s ten thousand ruling families, and he was not an Oxford man. At fifteen he entered the Public Record Office as an assistant keeper and, through a combination of clear vision and administrative efficiency, rose rapidly through the bureaucracy. Cole is credited with designing the legendary Penny Black postage stamp, wrote children’s books and music criticism, designed a prize-winning tea service, and, in old age (as Sir Henry Cole, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum), commissioned the first commercial Christmas card.

  An artist as well as a technocrat, Cole was dismayed by the low standard of industrial design in Great Britain, and he became an active member of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. This body drew largely on the commercial and industrial middle classes, and it included such eminent men as the engineers Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson, the architect and builder Thomas Cubitt, the ironmaster Charles Fox, and the chemist Lyon Playfair. Prince Albert was the society’s president.

  The energetic Cole put on two small national exhibits in London, visited several more abroad—notably the ambitious Quinquennial Paris Exhibition of 1849—and began to think big. What if London were to stage an industrial exhibition so wide ranging that the whole world would sit up and take notice? The artistic, technological, and manufacturing products of Great Britain and its empire would be given pride of place, but an invitation would be extended to all the nations, from China to the United States to Egypt, to send samples of their products. The British people would see the wealth and beauty of nations spread before them. Manufacturers and inventors would submit their work to the scrutiny of expert panels in hundreds of categories and receive prizes that would translate into orders and sales. And the exhibition would attract so many visitors that it would be self-funding.

  Prince Albert quickly grasped Cole’s vision and added his own. Albert was instinctively an internationalist. He liked to see himself as a world statesman, and for him peace and prosperity were moral imperatives as well as practical goals. The prince envisaged the Great Exhibition as a forum where the nations would come together in both celebration and competition, where swords would be beaten into steam engines, barometers, and piano rolls. As host to the exhibition, Great Britain would showcase its economic power, its enlightened political system, and, not incidentally, its beloved royal family.

  Swept away by her husband’s enthusiasm, Queen Victoria appointed a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 under Prince Albert’s chairmanship and including three senior politicians from both
sides of the aisle: the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, and Lord John Russell. A date was settled and also a site: Hyde Park, a short drive from Buckingham Palace. Plans were made, subscriptions were canvassed, invitations to exhibit were extended, a catalog was put out to tender. The prince and his fellow commissioners fanned out across England to enlist support and undertook a vast correspondence. The building subcommittee ran an international competition to design the exhibition hall, hated the 245 designs that came in, and hatched a design of its own—which everyone else hated.

  The idea of a giant international exhibition in the very heart of London caught the imagination of people in the industrial North and Midlands, but opposition mushroomed in southern circles of power. The High Tories, who were strongly protectionist in their commercial policies and viewed all international projects with suspicion, were opposed to the prince’s exhibition on principle. The wealthy people who lived around Hyde Park and rode out when in town in the section of the park known as Rotten Row foresaw thousands of visitors trampling their sacred turf, seducing their maids, and making off with their silver.

  Hostile editorials appeared in the Times. Questions were raised in parliament. Who would bear the cost if the exhibition proved a failure? How many of Hyde Park’s ancient trees would be felled to erect this monstrous building? What scar would be left upon the land? The commission was planning for hundreds of thousands of visitors, many of them foreigners. This surely meant that traffic and business in central London would be at a standstill and crime would rocket. Colonel Sibley, a reactionary Tory member of parliament, denounced the prince’s Exhibition as a new Tower of Babel, and summoned hail and thunder down upon it. In the end, parliament voted in favor of holding the exhibition in Hyde Park only because one of the exhibition’s most stalwart supporters, Sir Robert Peel, who had been expected to lead the debate in the Commons, was thrown by his horse and died.