We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  If Prince Albert had dispatched Stockmar to report from Berlin before young Fritz arrived at Balmoral ready to propose, the visit might have been of some use, but probably not. The prince’s mind was made up, and he was not a man to second-guess himself. All the same, now officially apprised of the difficulties that Vicky would encounter in her married life, Prince Albert took on the duty of preparing her himself. Each day he tried to dedicate an hour exclusively to Vicky, acting as her professor and her political mentor. Vicky was an outstanding student, able to match her father in intellect and in diligence. She was ready for what amounted to a graduate course in international politics, history, and law. She read his vast memoranda with passionate interest, and wrote essays and reports and historical digests of her own. Vicky adored her father and was desperate to earn his approval. As she later wrote to her mother, she saw him as inerrant, the oracle, the fount of wisdom. Nothing made her happier than to sit at her father’s knee, gazing up as he discoursed in his beloved German on the English constitution, German political movements, and European diplomacy. For two years, fierce and focused, proud and principled, Albert and his daughter plotted the future of Germany, confident that their vision must prevail because it was right.

  The intensified bond between the prince and his eldest daughter inevitably sent ripples through the royal family. To spend an hour taking lessons one-on-one from his father was Bertie’s idea of torture. All the same, the eldest son found it galling to see his big sister shine in the glow of their father’s approbation. Unsurprisingly, the Prince of Wales’s tutor, in his daily reports to Prince Albert, could report no improvement in his young charge’s conduct.

  In her journal, Queen Victoria described the day when Fritz asked Vicky to marry him as one of the happiest days of her life, but she found the two years between the proposal and the marriage unexpectedly difficult. When Fritz came over to England, which he did as often as his military responsibilities allowed, the Queen was pushed into the role of chaperone and found it irksome. The physical attraction between Fritz and Vicky was almost shocking to observe. How, Victoria wondered, could her teenaged daughter inspire such passion in a man?

  The Queen resented the increasingly close relationship between her husband and her eldest daughter. It was part of the family dogma that Vicky was the image of her father, while Bertie was a caricature of his mother. In Albert’s eyes, his daughter Vicky could do no wrong, and it was plain that his greatest pleasure in life was to nurture her young mind. His wife, Victoria, by contrast, was a mass of Hanoverian faults, which it was the prince’s sad duty to correct.

  Once Vicky was confirmed and officially “out,” she was allowed to have dinner with her parents. Albert enjoyed this, Victoria did not. By the end of 1856, the Queen was pregnant with her ninth child. She wanted more time alone with her husband, not less, and found the intelligent scrutiny of her affianced daughter unnerving. If she and Albert agreed about anything, it was that Vicky must be given no sense of what awaited her once she was married. But how was Victoria to account for her swelling body and constricted lifestyle? “We dined with Vicky, who generally leaves us at 10,” wrote the Queen in her journal, “and then I have the rare happiness of being alone with my beloved Albert.” The prince, exhausted by his wife’s litany of complaints and upset by her apparent hostility to their daughter, offered to send Vicky back to the nursery for her meals. The Queen could only capitulate and beg pardon.

  Now that she saw so much more of her parents, Vicky grasped how the land lay between them and was as ready as any teenager to capitalize on their differences. The Princess Royal had always had what her mother called “a proud, high spirit,” and she resisted the vigorous efforts her parents had made to subdue her will. Her engagement gave Vicky the prominence she felt she deserved, and, though she dreaded losing her father, she looked forward to marriage. As a wife, she would be able to enjoy Fritz’s embraces undisturbed. Confident in the adoration of her fiancé, conscious of being cleverer and stronger willed than he, she imagined she would be able to do as she liked in Berlin. She would take charge, just as her father had done.

  Vicky began to criticize her mother and refuse to obey her. The Queen, in turn, complained bitterly about her disrespectful behavior. As Queen Victoria remembered this period, Vicky had such an “uneven temper” and was “so unpleasant and unamiable” toward those she lived with and to whom she owed respect, obedience. Caught between the two women, Prince Albert’s domestic life was even more fraught.

  AS THE TIME for the wedding approached, the Prussian government wrote stating that crown princes of Prussia were always married in Berlin. Her daughter’s wedding was an area over which Queen Victoria claimed jurisdiction, and she wrote an official letter back that brooked no debate. “Whatever may be the usual practice of Prussian Princes, it is not every day that one marries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England. The question therefore must be considered settled and closed.” Vicky would be married in England. Victoria, in her communications with Prussia, was indeed “absolutely frank and truthful,” so very different from her husband. One can imagine Lord Palmerston applauding his sovereign’s letter.

  But in retaliation, negotiations with the Prussian royal family became acrimonious over the financial settlements for the young couple and the composition of the princess’s household. Remembering his own friendlessness when first coming to England, Prince Albert wanted his daughter to have a few English women around her in her new country, but the Prussian court refused point blank. Vicky’s household would be chosen for her from members of the Prussian aristocracy. As a concession, the group included two young married women her own age.

  To Prince Albert’s dismay and Queen Victoria’s fury, the crazy old king, at the behest of his childless German wife who hated the English, barely increased his nephew’s meager allowance. He refused to confer a “morning gift” on the Princess Royal—the rich settlement traditionally made on a Prussian royal bride the day after the consummation of her marriage. This meant that although the Prussian state would pay for all living expenses, the new ménage would have very little discretionary income. As the royal Hohenzollern brothers saw it, in Berlin and Potsdam the English princess would find a luxury that put Windsor Castle to shame. However, she must find the money for such things as clothes, furnishings, books, and travel. How could this be a hardship, since she came from a rich nation and had a rich mother known for her generosity? “I resent bitterly the conduct of the Prussian Court and Government,” Queen Victoria wrote in her journal, “and do not like the idea of our child going to Berlin, more or less the enemy’s den.”

  Parliament gave the Princess Royal a dowry of forty thousand pounds and an annual income for life of eight thousand pounds. This was less than her mother had hoped for but still a generous provision and a much-appreciated expression of affection. Throughout her marriage, Vicky and her husband relied on her English parliamentary stipend over which she exercised independent control. Against strong Prussian resistance, Prince Albert insisted that his daughter should have a private secretary of her choice to administer her personal fortune and conduct her private affairs. When Baron Stockmar’s son Ernest, known as “the young baron,” was chosen for the post, even Fritz protested, claiming (quite correctly) that Ernest Stock-mar would be regarded in Berlin as a “secret political agent.” Prince Albert wrote back reprovingly to his future son-in-law: “It is not in either of your interests … to placate enemies who desire both the political and social failure of the marriage. It is rather your duty to fight for its success in spite of them.”

  The wedding, to be held at the Chapel Royal in London, was scheduled for January 25, 1858. As the day approached, Queen Victoria was increasingly filled with foreboding. She had taken to referring to her daughter as “poor, dear Vicky.” She understood the weight of political hopes that Prince Albert placed on their daughter’s young shoulders and feared they would be too much. The Queen could easily imagine the problems that would face a
foreign teenage girl at the Prussian court. She knew that her daughter was marrying into a family that was even more hostile and divided than the one she herself had known as a child.

  Vicky’s youth and innocence had begun to trouble her mother. The Queen saw Fritz’s passion and her daughter’s ardent response and foresaw the consequences. Politics and history had been explained to the girl, but not how kisses translated into babies. Victoria herself had enjoyed three years of freedom before marriage and had felt rage and regret when she became pregnant for the first time at twenty. Vicky would go to the altar at the age of seventeen and two months, and if she had her father’s brain, she had her mother’s body. After seventeen years as a wife, Queen Victoria was beginning to see marriage as a lottery that only a handful of women could win.

  The night before her daughter’s wedding, Victoria broke down in tears. “It is like taking a poor lamb to be sacrificed,” she told her husband. Albert refused to yield to his wife’s emotion. “Vicky is very reasonable,” he declared. “She will go well prepared into the labyrinth of Berlin.” When Vicky came to her mother’s rooms the next morning to have her hair done and put on her wedding dress, emotion ran very high. In a famous daguerreotype of the Queen, the prince, and their daughter Vicky on the day of her wedding, the bride and her father look serious but composed, but Queen Victoria is a blur. She was too upset to stay still for the photographer.

  The wedding was a magnificent affair. Royal persons were stuffed into every corner at Windsor, and the display of gifts to the bride evoked great admiration. They included diamond, sapphire, emerald, and ruby sets from her parents, siblings, and the king and queen of Prussia, a fabulous rope of thirty-six pearls from Prince William and Princess Augusta, and some Brussels lace from her great-uncle Leopold. The Prussian royal family was anxious to impress the world with the opulence of its gifts, even as it planned to keep the young couple very short of money. King Leopold, who, with her father, was to walk the bride down the aisle, was willing to look stingy. Vicky gave her husband-to-be an emerald ring exactly like the one her mother had given her father when they were married and which he always wore on his little finger.

  For two days at Windsor, the newlyweds were allowed to be alone and found ecstasy in each other’s arms. On the morning after the wedding, they were observed skating on the pond like two carefree children. Then their combined families arrived for more celebrations, and Queen Victoria tried to get accustomed to the sight of her daughter happily taking her husband’s arm and walking up to bed with him every night. When the time came for the couple to leave on February 1, the English royal family dissolved in a flood of tears. Vicky presented her mother with a brooch containing a lock of her hair. On her knees, she thanked her parents for their love and care and swore to be a worthy daughter.

  Escorting his daughter to her stateroom on the royal yacht at Gravesend, Prince Albert was able to maintain a semblance of calm to the end. But the next day he wrote to his daughter: “My heart was very full when yesterday you leaned your forehead on my breast to give free vent to your tears. I am not of a demonstrative nature and therefore you can hardly know how dear you have always been to me, and what a void you have left in my heart; yet not in my heart, for there assuredly you will abide henceforth, as till now you have done, but in my daily life, which is evermore reminding my heart of your absence.”

  Father and Son

  …

  N MAY 1856, QUEEN VICTORIA DECIDED THAT THE VEXING ISSUE OF her husband’s rank and title must be addressed. After fifteen years of marriage, Albert still had no English title. At the time of their wedding, much to the fury of her English uncles, the Queen had issued letters patent giving her husband precedence after her own in Great Britain and Ireland. However, once Albert stepped ashore in Europe, he was again a mere prince of Coburg, forced to bring up the rear at private and public events and to sit humiliatingly far away from his wife at dinner unless the ruler of the country took pity on him.

  Victoria drew up a memorandum of intent and submitted it to Prime Minister Lord Palmerston. Her words were plain and heartfelt. “It is a strange omission in our Constitution that while the wife of a King has the highest rank and dignity in the realm after her husband assigned to her by law, the husband of a Queen regnant is entirely ignored by the law. This is the more extraordinary, as a husband has in this country such particular rights and such great power over his wife, and as the Queen is married just as any other woman is, and swears to obey her lord and master … Therefore … I have come to the conclusion that the title which is now by universal consent given him of ‘Prince Consort,’ with the highest rank in and out of Parliament immediately after the Queen, and before every other Prince of the Royal Family, should be assigned to the husband of the Queen regnant once and for all. This ought to be done before our children grow up, and it seems peculiarly easy to do so now that none of the old branches of the Royal family are still alive.”

  In June 1856, the Queen asked Lord Palmerston to discuss her memorandum with his ministerial colleagues, and a “Prince Consort Bill” was drafted in cabinet. However, in March 1857, Palmerston was obliged to tell Her Majesty that, acting on legal advice, he could not bring the bill forward. The Queen was making claims based on her particular circumstances for an act of parliament that would permanently define the constitutional status of consort to a queen regnant. Ministers declined to do this.

  Reminded of the protests by the Queen’s uncles fifteen years earlier, Palmerston and his cabinet colleagues were reluctant to grant Prince Albert higher precedence than the royal English princes who were his four sons. What if the Queen should die? For the rest of his life, Albert as prince consort could claim precedence over all his children and their wives, except for the new king and queen. If Albert remarried, he would confer his own precedence upon his second wife. This could not be.

  Undeterred, Queen Victoria took legal counsel of her own and learned that she was again authorized to issue letters patent conferring the title of prince consort on her husband. In a letter he sent by special courier, Albert felt obliged to explain the decision to his brother, the head of the Coburg family. “Today I will write upon a topic which I never liked to let you know through the post. It is the title Victoria gave me and which has been announced. I am to have the title ‘Prince Consort of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.’ This ought to have been done, as you thought yourself, at our wedding … What pressed the question is the fact that our children, who are all princes of the country and of the house, are growing up. If their father is not a prince of the country, wicked people might later on succeed in bringing up the Prince of Wales against his father, and tell him he should not allow a foreign prince to take a place before him.” Protectively Albert asserted that Victoria’s position, especially when she went abroad, would be “precarious” as long as her husband “with his lower German title, pretended to have the right of a high English one, one which the Queen could not give him in Germany and which the German courts would not acknowledge. An English Prince has rights as such, and nobody can refuse to acknowledge them; nowhere in Europe.”

  Why had it become imperative in 1856 for the royal couple to resolve the issue of Albert’s title both at home and abroad? One reason was quite obvious. Vicky’s marriage to Prince Frederick William of Prussia was already scheduled for early 1858, and a regular exchange of visits with the Prussian royal family would surely ensue. Victoria and Albert had learned in 1845 that a king of Prussia—unlike a friendly emperor of France or an avuncular king of the Belgians—could not be counted on to give Prince Albert precedence in Prussia as a sign of courtesy to the visiting Queen of England.

  The other reason was more murky and contentious. If Queen Victoria died in 1856, her husband would become regent for their son. But once the Prince of Wales turned eighteen on November 8, 1859, he would be of age to succeed his mother in the event of her death or of becoming regent if she were found incompetent to rule. Even if the Queen live
d on, in 1862 the Prince of Wales would come of age and be entitled to demand precedence immediately after his mother—not only for himself but for his wife, his three brothers, even his five sisters. The idea of Prince Albert crowded out on state occasions, trailing into meals behind his sons and daughters and their spouses, and snubbed by the Prussians was not to be borne. Queen Victoria could do nothing about the succession, but she could at least “give” her husband the highest rank next to the reigning monarch for his lifetime.

  For a proud man like Albert, it had always been humiliating to receive such gifts from his wife. But he saw no alternative. Bertie was an affectionate boy, but he could not be trusted to do the right thing by his father. It was all too possible, as the prince admitted to his brother, that “wicked people might … succeed in bringing up the Prince of Wales against his father.”

  It was no secret in the family or at court that neither Queen Victoria nor Prince Albert liked their eldest son very much. They loved him of course— that was a parent’s duty—but they could not approve of him. They had no confidence in him. The thought of him on the throne gave them nightmares.

  HISTORY RECORDS THAT KINGS and their heirs apparent are often bitterly at odds. Shakespeare in Henry IV makes sowing wild oats seem an excellent way for young Prince Hal to prepare for kingship, but Hal’s father, King Henry IV, clearly did not see it that way. The first three Hanoverian kings were notoriously unable to stand the company of their eldest sons. Queen Victoria followed in the sad old pattern, since, according to her own account, her problems with her son and heir Bertie began at his birth. The prince consort’s relations with Bertie began to go seriously wrong when the Prince of Wales was ten.