We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  If the marriage of Victoria and Albert was as much a power struggle as a love story, then Victoria proved to be the stronger. If their partnership was also a contest, then she was the winner. She took possession of the prince in death as he had taken possession of her in life. In her black dress and widow’s cap, she lived to play the tragedy queen, Victoria, Regina et Imperatrix, for forty more years. Albert had staked his life on becoming the Eminent Victorian, and yet he would find no place in Lytton Strachey’s famous book. His was the tragic role. The power and the glory were hers.

  TOURING BEAUTY SPOTS ASSOCIATED WITH BRITISH ROYALTY IN England, Scotland, and Germany was one of the perks of writing this book, and I usually had a friend to share the experience. My first visit to Windsor stands out in memory because my sister Rose came along. My experience of the Scottish Highlands carpeted in bluebells and yellow gorse was blissful in no small part because Judith Weltman was with me. Similarly, the Isle of Wight and Osborne House were fun because Margot Gill was by my side. Margot has been a great resource on British royal lore throughout this project.

  For a long time I put off a visit to Prince Albert’s beloved Coburg and Gotha as I had no German contacts and my German was rusty. I need not have feared. All the officials I met in those charming towns went out of their way to be helpful, and my German visit proved far more rewarding than I had ever dreamed possible. Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha offered a mine of information, and my discussion there with Sandra Gerlach was instrumental in my formulation of the relationship between Prince Albert and his ancestral domains. Things went even better in Coburg where the central tourist office is a model of efficiency They presented me with a superb poster of Queen Victoria and her family gathered in Coburg for a wedding and immediately put me in the capable hands of Gerhard Harten. Once convinced that I knew my Coburg history and could keep pace with him even uphill, Herr Harten volunteered to be my chauffeur as well as my guide and whisked me around every castle and monument connected to the Saxe-Coburg family in the area. I am greatly indebted to his erudition and friendliness.

  From the beginning, everyone I knew seemed fascinated by my tales of Queen Victoria’s marriage. My gratitude goes out to all the members of my reading, Russian, tennis, and bridge groups whose enthusiasm sustained me when it seemed We Two would never get finished. Thanks especially to two members of the Russian group, Tanya Kaye and Rita Bykhovsky. Tanya made insightful comments on early portions of the manuscript, and Rita and I had a number of detailed and ardent discussions about the Russian royal family. To my psychiatrist friend Francesca von Broembsen I always turn for expert advice on how family relationships play out and are put into words. My son Christopher Gill, a specialist in infectious disease, is my medical guru. My discussions of hemophilia and typhoid owe so much to Chris’s expert advice and help with literature searches. My fellow grandparent/ child-care-giver Ken McElheny read inchoate versions of many chapters and put his editorial zeal and historical expertise at my disposal. I inflicted multiple versions of later chapters on Maggie Byer, who has that mix of sharp criticism and effervescent praise every writer dreams of. Maggie hacks through the jungle of my prose, and the shape of the sentences in this book owes much to her. Thanks, Ken and Maggie, for devoting so many hours to my book. Thanks also to my beloved sister-in-law Linda Crosskey for the photograph of me that appears on the book jacket.

  Once the manuscript was finalized, it was exciting for me to work with the team at Ballantine Books. Philip Bashe, the copy editor, and Nancy Delia, the production editor, were models of zeal and accuracy. Barbara Bachman’s design for the book surpassed all my expectations. Lisa Barnes took on the job of my publicist with contagious enthusiasm. I can rely on Lisa to get back to me within the half hour whenever I hit even the smallest glitch. Jillian Quint has coordinated relations between me and the editorial and production staff, and her calm efficiency, lightened by flashes of humor, has earned my admiration. I wish her well in her new editorial career. But my special thanks go to Random House executive editor Susanna Porter, a dedicated and meticulous reader. In Susanna the great tradition of American editing lives on in difficult times. Reading my manuscript time after time, she homed in on errant details. She picked up on thematic patterns. She was generous with her praise. And then, when the close reading was done, she grasped what was new and interesting about the whole project and pushed me to take the final step into interpretation. How lucky I am to have had Susanna as my editor.

  Jill Kneerim and her colleagues at Kneerim and Williams have now seen me through two books, and I can no longer imagine doing without them. Leslie Kaufman in the New York office took time out of a busy to schedule to read the tricky first part of the manuscript and reassure me I was on the right track. As for Jill Kneerim herself, she is my cheerleader, adviser, and therapist as well as my agent. She is my friend. When she goes on vacation and turns off the BlackBerry I feel abandoned. Jill’s special contribution to the manuscript was to urge me to tell a story, not just collect materials and write pretty sentences, a tough lesson for ex-academics like me.

  Writing is a lonely slog much of the time, and it is thanks to the unfailing love and support of my family that I sit glued to my word processor year after year. My husband, Stuart, not only makes sure that I never lose a line to computer malfunction (or user stupidity!) but also uncomplainingly accepts that some nights we will not meet for dinner as I am engaged in a ten-hour bout with a tough chapter. My children, Catherine and Chris, and their terrific spouses are the center of my world. And every week I have the joy of watching my six grandchildren grow up— Bronwyn fourteen, Fiona eleven, Delia seven, Kalkidan three, James three, and Susanna one. My claims to being a family historian rest on regular practice of what George Sand called “the art of being a grandmother.”

  PRELUDE TO A MARRIAGE

  3 All afternoon Queen Victoria had been We are fortunate to know in great detail what Queen Victoria was doing, saying, and thinking in the year of her engagement and marriage. There are numerous contemporary letters and memoirs, but above all there is the Queen’s journal. When she first began her journal, at the age of thirteen, the then Princess Victoria wrote a dutiful and dull account of her engagements, the people she met, the operas she saw, and so forth. The entries for the early years offer limited insight into her thoughts and feelings, since the princess wrote in the certainty that both her mother and her governess, Louise Lehzen, read everything she wrote. However, by the time she came to the throne, Queen Victoria had acquired the habit of diary writing, and so she wrote freely and often at length, almost every day, from 1837 to her death in 1901. In 1912, soon after the death of Victoria’s eldest son and heir, Edward VII, and with the full support of the new King George V and Queen Mary, Viscount Esher transcribed the diaries up to the year of the Queen’s marriage. Esher subsequently published a judiciously selective, extensively annotated two-volume work entitled The Girlhood of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Diaries Between the Years 1832 and 1840 (London: Longmans, Green & Co.; New York: John Murray, 1912). Every transcription involves some amount of editing, and Esher was a man of the English courtier class, anxious to promote the interests of the royal family. But he was also a man of intelligence and finesse, committed to preserving the historical record. Esher was aware that Queen Victoria’s journals were one of the most precious documents in the history of the British monarchy and, even if they could not respectfully be published as written, must be kept in the archives for posterity. Sadly, however, Queen Victoria in her final years had read through her journals, marked the passages she wished to be preserved, and then committed the volumes to the care and discretion of her youngest daughter, Beatrice (Princess Henry of Battenberg). Beatrice was a Victorian in the worst sense of the word, and in the last years of her life, she took it upon herself to preserve her mother’s legend by censoring her mother’s work. She read through all the diaries, transcribed a text in her own hand, and then burned the original volume. The few sec
tions of the Queen’s journals that were published in her lifetime prove how much precious information was lost when Princess Beatrice bowdlerized and abridged. Thus Queen Victoria’s journals exist only in the form of transcriptions and fragments.

  4 Nemours made a rapid exit Nemours subsequently married another Victoria, or Victoire, as the name often became, the Queen of England’s first cousin Victoria of Coburg-Kohary, the eldest daughter of her uncle Ferdinand. 4

  4 Given her druthers This was the opinion of Lord Palmerston, then foreign secretary, who wrote to Lord Granville: “After being used to agreeable and well-informed Englishmen, I fear [the Queen] will not find a foreign prince to her liking” (Anthony Trollope, Lord Palmerston London: Isbister, 1882, p. 66).

  4 But unfortunately, not one By the late eighteenth century, it was already an article of faith in English political circles that the delicate balance between Whigs and Tories that made England a great nation would be destroyed if the monarch married into one of the main aristocratic families, most of which were firmly allied with one party or the other. The monarch, it was believed, must be above political party. As a result, no English monarch or heir to the English throne married a British commoner between 1660, when the future James II married Anne Hyde, until Charles, Prince of Wales, married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Charles’s grandfather George VI also married a commoner, Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, but their marriage occurred before anyone imagined that George would become king.

  5 She herself had been officially entered To take one example, by the age of seventeen, Maria da Glória, the queen of Portugal, had been married twice, and she was exactly Queen Victoria’s age. Queen Maria was first married to her stepmother’s brother, but he died within months of the marriage, thus further weakening her tenuous hold on the throne. In January 1836, Queen Maria was married by proxy to Ferdinand of Coburg-Kohary, Queen Victoria’s cousin.

  5 If her maternal and paternal relations The eldest son of a reigning English monarch is known as the heir apparent. Victoria was heir presumptive to her uncle William IV, the presumption being that King William and his wife, Queen Adelaide, would not produce an heir apparent.

  5 He distrusted the ambitions The dynasty composed of Georges I, II, III, and IV, and William IV is usually referred to as the house of Hanover, or, in earlier times, the house of Brunswick. However, as the future king William IV remarked to his fellow midshipmen when he was a fourteen-year-old boy sent to sea, the family name was Guelph.

  5 William’s preferred candidate Officially, members of royal families have no surname, even, apparently, on their passports. However, given that nineteenth-century royal persons tended to use the same Christian names over and over, in private correspondence they had various ways to distinguish between one family member and another, chiefly nicknames (Vicky, Bertie, Affie) and first name plus title (George Cambridge, Victoria Kent). When entering into the relationships between different members of the royal family, I found it useful at times to adopt the royal shorthand.

  5 The Duke of Cumberland was heir Salic law in Germany precluded women from inheriting lands and titles, so Victoria could not be Queen of Hanover.

  5 Given the risk of hereditary blindness George Cumberland eventually succeeded his father as King of Hanover. The Blind King, as he was known, did a creditable job until his kingdom was swallowed up by Prussia.

  5 He was a tall, strong young man George Cambridge did in the end prove the sire of kings and a queen. His granddaughter, Mary of Teck, a royal poor relation brought up at Kensington Palace, married King George V and was Queen Elizabeth II’s grandmother. Queen Mary was a redoubtable lady, far more intelligent and energetic than her husband.

  5 He, or his mother, was assiduous Queen Victoria’s early diary features meticulous lists of the numerous presents she received for Christmas and her birthday from relatives, friends, and attendants.

  6. He did not fancy his cousin As a youth, George Cambridge emulated his uncle Clarence (William IV) by taking up with an actress and producing several illegitimate children, who were known as the FitzGeorges.

  6 Their answer was a diplomatically expressed This refusal to entertain the idea of a Prussianmarriage is somewhat ironic. In the next generation, alliance with the Hohenzollerns became a cornerstone of Prince Albert’s foreign policy. See chapter 24.

  6 “I am really astonished Esher, vol. 1, pp. 47–48, King Leopold’s original emphases.

  8 The Queen faithfully recorded For these conversations on the subject of marriage, see Esher, vol. 2, pp. 207, 215, and 225–226.

  10 In the meantime, Victoria’s shilly-shallying Ibid, p. 139.

  10 His shoulders were broad There seems no doubt that at the time of his engagement and marriage, Prince Albert was at the peak of physical perfection. Even his enemies agreed that he was extremely handsome, though they criticized his legs as too heavy.

  12 Albert cast Victoria in the role “Es ist kleines Fräuchen” (“It is little wifey), Victoria said to Albert when he was close to death and failed to recognize her. Apparently this was one of the affectionate diminutives he used for her.

  12 Like so many famous I attribute to Jill Ker Conway the important observation that famous women find it necessary in their memoirs to downplay their talents and attribute their achievement to luck and the support of others.

  PART ONE: THE YEARS APART | Victoria: A Fatherless Princess

  Chapter 1: CHARLOTTE AND LEOPOLD

  18 She accused him, not unjustly Charlotte once remarked to Stockmar: “My mother was bad, but she would not have become as bad as she was if my father had not been infinitely worse.” Memoirs of Baron Stockmar cited by Christopher Hibbert, George IV, Penguin Books, 1973, p. 484.

  18 Three in middle age finally escaped For the most complete and carefully documented account of the six, see Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III by Flora Fraser, New York: Knopf, 2005.

  18 Orange was, admittedly, a drunken lout In Princesses, Flora Fraser offers evidence that the king of Württemberg, husband to the Princess Royal, eldest daughter of George III, was a brutal homosexual who actively abused his wife.

  19 Charlotte’s unexpected and stubborn refusal Prince Leopold wrote that he was able to communicate with Princess Charlotte only with the help of her uncle the Duke of Kent, since “she was treated as a kind of prisoner.” Cecil Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, New York: Knopf, 1972, p. 13.

  19 He had served valiantly The portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence of Prince Leopold in his youthful military glory can be seen in the Waterloo Room at Windsor Castle, above one of the doors, on the same wall as the three kings of England George III, George IV, and William IV The standard work in English on King Leopold of the Belgians centered on his relations with Queen Victoria is My Dearest Uncle: A Life of Leopold, First King of the Belgians by Joanna Richardson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1961). The key book on Leopold’s early life is Die Coburger Jahren des Prinzen Leopold bis zu seiner Englischen Heirat 1816 by Harald Bachmann, Sonderdruck aus des Jahrbuch der Coburger Landesstiftung (The Coburg Years of Prince Leopold, Up to His English Marriage in 1816), a special issue of the Journal of the Coburg State Foundation in 2005 to commemorate the 175th anniversary of Leopold’s accession to the throne of Belgium on July 21, 1831. Based on the extensive correspondence of the Saxe-Coburg family and their representatives in the Coburg archives, this book, unavailable in English, contains detailed new information.

  19 Officially he was celebrating The letters Leopold wrote to his family show that even before he set out for London, he intended to make a play for Charlotte. He wrote to his brother the Duke of Coburg in June 1815: “The Emperor [of Russia] has given me permission to stay here [England] as long as it suits me. I only decided to do so after much hesitation, and after certain very singular events made me glimpse the possibility, even the probability, of realizing the project we spoke of in Paris. My chances are, alas, very poor, because of the father’s opposition” (My Dearest Uncle, p. 26). Leopold’s mistress Caro
line Bauer claims in her memoirs that Leopold was promoted as a husband for Princess Charlotte by the Grand Duchess Catherine of Russia. The Russian government was anxious to prevent the strengthening in the alliance of England and Holland that would occur if Charlotte married the Prince of Orange, as her father wished. See Caroline Bauer and the Coburgs (London: Vizetelly), translated and edited by Charles Nisbet.

  20 His belt and sword blazed For the details of Charlotte’s wedding, see Joanna Richardson, My Dearest Uncle, pp. 39–42. Richardson quotes several admiring appraisals of Prince Leopold’s looks as a young man.

  20 “I have perfectly decided Richardson, p. 28.

  20 He was already a world-class Lothario Richardson (p. 19) says that Prince Leopold at the age of seventeen was seduced by Hortense de Beauharnais, the daughter of Napoleon and Josephine, and the mother to the future Napoleon III.

  20 But if he did not love Biographers of Leopold have liked to say that Princess Charlotte was the great love of his life and that after her tragic death he could never love another woman. One of the revelations of Bachmann’s book is that as a late teenager the then Prince Leopold had a passionate love affair with Pauline von Tubeuf but was not allowed to marry her, as she was not of royal rank. From this point, Leopold seems to have seen women as tools. Immersed in self-love and devoted to his own interests, Leopold did become fond of Charlotte, since she not only put him at the top of the social pyramid but quickly came to offer the adoration he demanded and to respond to his will. Leopold used his tragic love of Charlotte as a weapon against his second wife, the unhappy and ill-fated Louise d’Orléans.