We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  86 She expected Victoria to pay Charlot, p. 109.

  87 By the summer of 1839Hibbert, Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, p. 55.

  87 Melbourne agreed Charlot, p. 149.

  PART ONE: THE YEARS APART | Albert: A Motherless Prince

  92 Queen Victoria’s crest appears I am describing the 1867 Harpers American edition of the Grey book, which I have in my possession.

  93 The regular correspondence between Hector Bolitho, in preparation for his 1932 biography of the prince consort, was by his own account, the first person allowed to see the brothers’ correspondence. Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha wrote a two-volume memoir, but it deals almost exclusively with the years after his brother left for England.

  Chapter 8: THE COBURG LEGACY

  95 “I shall, while tirelessly striving Early Years of the Prince Consort, p. 335, my own translation. At the back of this volume, Queen Victoria gives an invaluable selection of her husband’s early letters, in the original German.

  96 Coburg, the state where Prince Albert German historians have recently begun to comb through the archives of the city of Coburg and of the Saxe-Coburg family. They question, politely the claims of the Saxe-Coburg dynasty in Germany to have been a force for liberalism. They cast a severe eye on the relationship between the dukes and their Coburg and Gotha citizens. In the account of Coburg I give here and in succeeding chapters, I am deeply indebted to the following works that, unfortunately, have not yet been translated: Das Haus von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha 1826 bis 2001 (The House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha from 1826 to 2001) by Harald Sandner (Coburg: Neue Presse, undated but around 2002); Die Coburger Jahre des Prinzen Leopold bis zu seiner Englischen Heirat 1816 (The Coburg Years of Prince Leopold up to His English Marriage 1816) by Harald Bachmann (Jahrbuch der Coburger Landesstiftung, 2005); Zwei Herzöge und eine Primadonna (Two Dukes and a Diva) by Gertraude Bachmann, (Jahrbuch der Coburger Landesstiftung, 2003).

  96 At the time of his birth, Coburg See Stanley Weintraub, Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert, New York: Free Press, 1997, p. 2. Coburg and Gotha today are two little German cities off the main tourist map. They suffered little damage during two world wars and are still recognizably the cities that Prince Albert saw in his youth. Anyone interested in Queen Victoria and Prince Albert should spend some time savoring the charming medieval city centers nestled among wooded hills that the prince remembered with such passionate fondness. Formerly part of Communist East Germany, Gotha is at best ambivalent about its ducal heritage. To this day, however, Coburg advertises itself as the cradle of the English, Russian, Spanish, Romanian, Greek, and Albanian royal houses. My Coburg guide alleged that the town emerged intact from World War II because of Coburg’s strong ties to the English royal family. The Saxe-Coburg family still makes its main residence near Coburg and owns large estates in the area.

  99 Charlotte took her dowry See Flora Fraser, Princesses.

  100 The army was the only career Hessians, for example, formed an important part of the British army fighting in the American War of Independence.

  100 The empress intended to choose Grand Duke Constantine was heir to the Russian throne until he yielded his claims to his younger brother Alexander in order to marry his mistress. She was of inferior rank, so their marriage was morganatic. A morganatic marriage fulfills the usual requirements for legal union, but any children are debarred from inheriting their father’s titles and estates because of their mother’s low rank. Louis XIV’s marriage to Madame de Maintenon was morganatic. The Duke of Sussex’s marriage to Lady Cecilia Buggin (see chapter 2, note to p. 29) was morganatic. Some children of morganatic unions have succeeded in erasing the taint on their family, notably the German family of Battenberg. This branch of the Hesse family married two of its sons to a daughter and granddaughter of Queen Victoria. In 1914, at a moment of immense anti-German feeling in England, the English Battenbergs metamorphosed into the Mountbattens just as the reigning house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha metamorphosed into the house of Windsor. Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Philip, is a Mountbatten.

  101 “That’s the one,” said Catherine Caroline Bauer is the origin of this strange and oft-repeated story. It seems probable that she or her mother, who as a child played with the ducal children of Coburg, was told it by one of the sisters themselves.

  101 “The brutal Constantine treated Bauer, p. 22.

  101 After some eight years, Juliana fled Constantine did his best to make his estranged wife’s life difficult until it suited him to get a divorce. Juliana, it seems, led a fairly irregular life once she went into exile, and efforts were made by her brothers and nephews to keep the facts about her from Queen Victoria and the respectable English branch of the family.

  101 Intimate and lasting connections King Leopold maintained good relations with his former brother-in-law Grand Duke Constantine to the end, and defended him to posterity. In the Coburg family memoir he wrote for inclusion in Queen Victoria’s book on the early years of Prince Albert, King Leopold represents Constantine as a wild youth who just needed a firm female hand.

  101 Thanks to the good offices Richardson, My Dearest Uncle, p. 18.

  103 De Pouilly was largely responsible The wartime diaries of Duchess Augusta of Saxe-Coburg document how much the whole family was inspired and supported by the brave and intransigent de Pouilly. Sophia adored him. Augusta relied on him. Ferdinand followed him to Vienna. Leopold aspired to be like him. See Napoleonic Days: Extracts from the Private Diaries of Augusta, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Queen Victoria’s Maternal Grandmother, 1806–1821, selected and translated by HRH the Princess Beatrice, London: John Murray, 1941.

  104 With her he founded a new dynasty To recapitulate, Ferdinand of Coburg-Kohary married his eldest son, also named Ferdinand, to Maria da Glória, the queen of Portugal, founding a dynasty there. Another son and a daughter married children of King Louis Philippe of France.

  105 Duke Francis of Saxe-Coburg A Coburg blacksmith once threatened to kill Duke Francis of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Prince Albert’s grandfather, for harassing his womenfolk. This incident was probably remembered because most citizens did not dare to protest their liege lord’s predatory ways.

  105 The sexual mores that prevailed Panam’s Mémoires d’une jeune Grecque: Madame Pauline Adélaïde Alexandre Panam contre son Altesse Sérénissime le Prince Régnant de Saxe-Cobourg appeared in 1823. Bauer’s Nachgelassene Memoiren von Karoline Bauer appeared after the author’s death in 1876 but was probably written twenty years or more earlier. I consulted the original French text for Panam, and Caroline Bauer and the Coburgs (London: Vizetelly), translated and edited by Charles Nisbet, the 1885 English abridged version of Bauer’s three-volume work. Rage and hatred against the Coburg family fill the pages of both memoirs, but the writers are intelligent, write well, and quote extensively from their correspondence with Coburg family members. These memoirs constitute an essential primary source on the Coburgs of the beginning of the nineteenth century.

  105 As the girls stood gazing Caroline Bauer’s description of Schloss Ehrenburg bears no resemblance to the handsome free-standing edifice, surrounded by gardens, that we see in Coburg today. But during the Napoleonic wars, the palace was uninhabitable, and Prince Albert’s paternal grandparents lived and had all their children in a modest town house around the corner. After the Coburg family started to move up the royal hierarchy in Europe, both Prince Albert’s father and his brother made it a priority to enlarge, remodel, and restore Schloss Ehrenburg, at one point employing the famous Berlin architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

  107 As Grand Duke Constantine once sneered Mémoires d’une jeune Grecque, p. 211.

  107 Caroline Bauer was a native Coburger Caroline Bauer wrote three sets of memoirs; two (From My Life on the Stage and Theatrical Tours) were published during her lifetime, and the third, and most famous, the 1876 Nachgelassene Memoiren von Karoline Bauer, was at once translated in whole or part in various languages. There is no doubt that
Bauer gives a very slanted account of her relationship with King Leopold. Her protestations of sexual innocence were probably an attempt to protect her reputation posthumously. It is possible that she and Leopold, in fact, continued their relationship for some years after she returned to Germany. The Coburg Tourist Office guide who showed me around the city took me to a charming little country house where, he said, Leopold and Caroline met. There is no doubt that Bauer was close to Coburg all her life and obsessively collected every piece of information that came her way about the ducal family.

  108 This, with a characteristic mixture For an excellent description of “drizzling,” or “parfilage,” as it was first known at the court of Louis XV, see Bauer, pp. 261–263.

  109 Father, uncle, and counselor Monica Charlot in her biography of the young Queen Victoria notes Prince Albert’s “capacity for reconstructing reality” (Charlot, p. 216) and how he manipulated the Queen by questioning her memories of her youth, and by feeding her the story of his own moral superiority from early childhood.

  Chapter 9: A DYNASTIC MARRIAGE

  110 Louise’s mother, a princess of Duchess Caroline was born in 1768 and died in 1848. If Duke Augustus married soon after the birth of his daughter Louise in December 1800, Caroline would have been about thirty-three at her wedding, old for a princess bride but still presumably capable of having children …

  110 Under Salic law, Louise could not The fact that (a) between them the brothers Augustus and Frederick of Gotha had only one legitimate child, (b) Augustus had to make do with a woman past her reproductive prime as his second bride and sired no children by her, (c) Frederick could never get any eligible girl to marry him, and (d) both gentlemen died suddenly in their forties suggests to me that they were infected with venereal disease. The remarks made by contemporaries about Augustus’s “eccentricity” and invalidism, and about Frederick’s moral turpitude, are probably couched in a genteel code, easily cracked at the time. Venereal disease of various kinds was rampant among the European aristocracy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and people understood that there was a link to infertility. Early stage syphilis and gonorrhea were not well distinguished, and the standard treatments involved mercury and arsenic, which certainly did not improve fertility. In its tertiary stage, the ravages of syphilis are hard to miss. A German aristocratic father, keen to see grandchildren, might marry his daughter to a drunken brute but would need compelling reasons to accept a man as his son-in-law who bore the marks of syphilis on his face.

  110 Frederick had made various attempts At the time of Louise’s marriage, her uncle Frederick renewed his efforts to find a bride and make an heir, but again he failed. See D. A. Ponsonby, The Lost Duchess, London: Chapman and Hall, 1958, pp. 121–122. This is still the standard biography available in English. Duchess Louise of Coburg indicated to Augusta von Studnitz (who herself was on Prince Frederick’s list of possible wives) that she had once aroused her uncle’s sexual interest. “I, too, had the good fortune to appear pleasing to him, but that signifies little, as I am his submissive niece” (Ponsonby, quoting Louise’s letter, p. 121). The idea of Frederick marrying his niece Louise seems grotesque except that, some ten years later, Duke Ernest I of Coburg, after his divorce from Duchess Louise, actually did marry one of his nieces, Marie of Württemberg.

  111 Tall, athletic, and dashing Duchess Louise gives a rapturous description of an actual tourney arranged by her husband in which he and other young men dressed in medieval armor and jousted. Duke Ernest appeared to perfection on horseback and in armor.

  112 The two sons were known as The order of Prince Albert’s given names is in some dispute. I use the order given in Early Years, p. 34. However, Ponsonby (The Lost Duchess, p. 106) says the prince’s birth entry in the Almanach de Gotha is Albert Francis Augustus Charles Emanuel. The prince consort was named Albrecht at birth, after his distant ancestor, but early on his name changed to the more modern Albert, and this is the name that appears on his German monuments.

  112 Yet from Albert’s birth In a letter solicited by Queen Victoria, King Leopold noted that he had seen Prince Albert in Coburg in 1822, 1823, 1824, 1826, 1827, and 1829, and that Albert “held a certain sway over his elder brother, who rather kindly submitted to it” Early Years, p. 46.

  112 In letters, his mother and grandmother Roger Fulford says that as an adult, Duke Ernest “was as unattractive as Prince Albert was attractive. His complexion was sallow with liver spots, his eyes were bloodshot and his lower teeth, like those of a bulldog, protruded far above his upper ones” (Fulford, The Prince Consort, London: Macmillan, 1949, p. 22). The many extant paintings of Ernest as a child and as an adult currently on display in Coburg and in Gotha barely indicate these defects.

  112 Louise of Gotha wrote to her friend Early Years, pp. 85–86.

  113 He learned to submit In one of her memoranda in the book on the prince consort’s early years, Queen Victoria notes that as an adult, Prince Albert still had the scars from the leeches applied during his childhood. It is moving to see the Queen recalling every detail of that beloved body.

  113 Once his mother had him dressed up This event occurred after the boy had been entrusted to Herr Florschütz, and Duchess Louise seems to have blamed the tutor for Albert’s gauche conduct. She remarked: “This comes of his good education.” Quoted from Florschütz’s recollections, Early Years, p. 9 7

  113 According to the testimony submitted Early Years, p. 90.

  113 He spoke haltingly Pauline Panam casually remarks on the duke’s stammer. She also says how frustrated the duke was because he had been ignored and snubbed during the peace negotiations following the close of the Napoleonic wars.

  114 When he saw the teenage Prince Memoirs of Baron Stockmar, vol. II, p. 6.

  114 He reported that whereas Albert Richard Rhodes James, Prince Albert: A Biography, New York: Knopf, 1983, p. 26, apparently citing some unnamed archival source.

  114 “Even as a child,” the Queen Early Years, p. 42.

  115 After some negotiation, Duchess Louise The terms of the “Trennungvertrag” (separation agreement) are given in Das Haus vob Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha 1826 bis 2001 by Harald Sandner, p. 59.

  116 In some aristocratic circles See, for example, the careers of the first Lady Melbourne, of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and of Madame de Pompadour.

  116 Then the crowd demanded D. A. Ponsonby, the English biographer of Duchess Louise, suggests that Duke Ernest was not just a womanizer but a practicing homosexual, and that the men who served over the years as his personal aides were also his lovers. Ponsonby argues that when Duchess Louise discovered that Duke Ernest and Maximilian von Szymborski were lovers, she was revolted and felt obliged to leave her husband, even at the cost of losing her sons. When Szymborski took an active role in ending the duchess’s marriage and sending her into exile, the local people turned into what we might now call an antihomosexual lynch mob (Ponsonby, pp. 155–156). Ponsonby was writing in the 1950s, when homosexuality had been isolated from the sexual continuum and was commonly seen as pathological. Her main evidence for the assertion that Ernest and Szymborski were lovers is that, in her letter to Augusta von Studnitz at the time of her separation, Louise refers to Szymborski as Ernest’s “darling” (Liebling). Another translation for Liebling would be “favorite,” but, of course, some version of the word favorite has been used in many languages to refer discreetly to the men with whom European kings such as James I of England or Henri II of France enjoyed especially intimate relations. I would doubt that Louise left Ernest because she could not stomach his homosexuality. The vast majority of gay men in the past married, and many had successful marriages. All the same, I think Ponsonby is to be trusted about Duke Ernest’s sexual proclivities. Her family had been associated with the English Crown for at least 150 years, and she would not launch an accusation of homosexuality against Prince Albert’s father casually at a time when to be called gay was a slur. Second, it seems to me that Pauline Panam’s Memo
irs support Ponsonby’s assertion that Duke Ernest II was bisexual. It is surely suggestive that Duke Ernest asked his teenage mistress Panam to travel as a boy and to maintain male dress for some months after her arrival in Coburg. When describing her first meeting with Duke Ernest’s then chief aide, Baron Fichler, the predecessor to Szymborski, Panam refers to him as “Ami du Prince”— capital letters and underlined, as if it were a title. She mocks Fichler’s mincing walk, high, squeaky voice, exaggeratedly fashionable dress, and blinking eyes—in other words, his obvious effeminacy. Panam was a successful courtesan when she wrote her memoirs, and she had needed to acquire a sophisticated understanding of male sexual patterns and practices.

  116 In the final letter to her friend Ponsonby, p. 151.

  116 Louise never again saw Duke Ernest first exiled his wife and a few attendants he had chosen as his spies to St. Wendel in his personal fief (Furstentum) of Lichtenberg. There she acted for a time as a kind of regent and proved immensely popular with the people who were beginning to show signs of rebellion against their absent and exploitative duke. Duchess Louise’s body was first kept in a house in St. Wendel. A street, a pharmacy and a restaurant in the town are named for her. See Sandner, pp. 61–62 and also p. 47. Prussia purchased Lichtenberg from the Duke of Coburg in 1833 for 2.1 million talers.

  116 In 1825 Louise’s uncle The year 1826 saw a complicated reshuffling of the Ernestine domains between the five branches of the Thuringian Wettins. To gain Gotha, Duke Ernest had to give up the territory of Saalfeld and renounce any claim to Altenburg.

  117 Others, of an anti-Semitic bent According to royal biographer Hector Bolitho, who was himself Jewish, in 1921 Herr Max W. L. Voss, author of England als Erzieher (England As Educator) wrote, “Prince Albert of Coburg, the Prince Consort, is to be described without contradiction as a half Jew, so that, since his time, Jewish blood has been circulating in the veins of the English royal family.” See the introduction to Hector Bolitho’s Albert—Prince Consort, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964, p. 11. Also, in 1921 Lytton Strachey suggested more discreetly and sympathetically that Baron Mayern, “a charming and cultivated man, of Jewish extraction, was talked of” as the prince’s father.