We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  186 The German title of baron In 1821 the then Prince Leopold secured a Saxon barony for his friend Stockmar. This was raised to Baron of Bavaria in 1831 and then Baron of Austria in 1840 (Memoirs, vol. 1, p. liv).

  186 In their private letters “Nowhere in the records of history has Royalty been served with a devotion so purely noble and unselfish as that of this remarkable man [Stockmar] to the Queen and the Prince,” writes Martin, clearly expressing the judgment of his employer and collaborator, Queen Victoria (vol. i. p. 72). The encomium continues for three long pages.

  186 This passage from one of his last Memoirs, vol. i, p. civ

  187 He sired three children Ibid, p. lv.

  187 “[The Queen] was quite a girl Stockmar confided this in a conversation with the Prince of Wales’s admiring young tutor, Frederick Gibbs, whom Stockmar had been instrumental in engaging. See “The Education of a Prince: Extracts from the Diaries of Frederick Wey-mouth Gibbs 1851–1856, Cornhill Magazine, spring 1951, p. 117.

  188 “I expressed [to Peel, the new Charlot, p. 208.

  188 According to the memoirs Bauer claimed that Stockmar’s wife was a miser as well as a harridan who actually kept her husband short of food. This may simply be malicious gossip, but Bauer lived in Coburg during her cousin Stockmar’s last years and had ample opportunity to observe him and his family. As editor of his father’s memoirs, Stockmar’s son says nothing about his mother and the relations between his parents.

  190 They would be a formidable team In the memoir she cowrote with General Grey, Queen Victoria describes this turning point in her relations with her husband thus: “Thanks to the firmness, but, at the same time, gentleness with which the Prince insisted on filling his proper position as head of the family—thanks also to the clear judgment and right feeling of the Queen, as well as her singularly honest and straightforward nature—but thanks, more than all, to the mutual love and perfect confidence which bound the Queen and the Prince to each other, it was impossible to keep any separation or difference of interests or duties between them. To those who would urge upon the Queen that, as sovereign, she must be head of the house and the family, as well as of the state, Her Majesty would reply that she had solemnly engaged at the altar to ‘obey’ as well as to ‘love and honor,’ [sic] and this sacred obligation she could consent neither to limit nor refine away” (Early Years, p. 256).

  Chapter 16: ALBERT TAKES CHARGE

  191 He said he “was desirous Woodham-Smith, pp. 217–18. Jones was finally sent away to sea, where he drowned.

  192 The result was a lengthy For a published extract of this document, see Stockmar’s Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 116–125.

  193 The Queen had her own stable The Private Life of the Queen by a Member of the Royal Household, New York: Appleton, 1897, p. 13. Originally the author of this book was not identified, but it is now known that he was C. Arthur Pearson.

  193 Due to the fabulous extravagance Queen Victoria’s income from the civil list remained the same until her death, but this fact is somewhat misleading, since Prince Albert pioneered new methods of getting money out of the Treasury.

  194 Victoria was quite sure Vicky, as Princess Frederick of Prussia, was amazed to view the collection of jewelry that the dowager Empress Charlotte (born a Hohenzollern princess, widow of Tsar Nicholas I) traveled with. “Hers are huge things and really in such profusion that it seems almost magic—sapphires, emeralds, pearls, rubies, etc., but the quality is not very fine—her diamonds excepted which are magnificent” (Hannah Pakula, An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick, Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 137). English diplomats at the height of the power of the British Empire were at times struck dumb by the glittering profusion of gold and precious stones on display in foreign courts. For example, at the coronation of the tsar in 1883, the diplomat Everard Primrose wrote to his friend Mary Ponsonby: “The blaze of jewels was astonishing. The Archduchess from Austria glittered like the spray of a beautiful fountain, the Grand Duchess Constantine could scarcely support the weight of countless precious stones, while Princess Kotsoubey wore a wig of pearls” (Magdalen Ponsonby, Mary Ponsonby: A Memoir and a Journal, London: John Murray, 1927, p. 166). The Russian tsars, meanwhile, were competing with the fabulous heaps of jewels and gold and silver ornaments, including jewel-encrusted thrones, owned by the sultan of Turkey, the emperors of China and Japan, and several Indian maharajahs. The wonders Aladdin discovers in a cave were not simply a fairy tale.

  194 One of Victoria’s bridesmaids Longford, p. 213.

  194 Victoria did have a crown The crown traditionally placed upon the head of a British monarch during the coronation ceremony is the massive St. Edward’s crown, containing elements that date back to the Middle Ages but first used in 1661 for the coronation of Charles II. This crown appears for a brief time only once in every reign. However, from the images taken of Victoria even at the actual moment of coronation, she was crowned not with St. Edward’s crown but with the crown that was made for her. This crown is an early version of what is now known as the imperial state crown.

  194 The gallant Victoria allowed herself Betty Askwith, The Lytteltons: A Family Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1975, p. 65.

  194 However, by the early 1850s George IV found the coronet too effeminate, but both Queen Victoria and her successor, Queen Elizabeth II, loved to wear it as young women. We see Victoria with this coronet in the blurred image taken at her daughter Vicky’s wedding, and again in the famous 1859 portrait of her in state robes, with the imperial state crown on a small table behind her. The coronet is familiar to us today from many photographs of Elizabeth as a dazzlingly beautiful queen and from the image chosen for the postage stamps early in her reign.

  194 The British government decided Queen Victoria kept the family jewels long enough to wear them at the brilliant festivities marking the Princess Royal’s wedding to Prince Frederick of Prussia in January 1858. But immediately thereafter, she sent the Guelph treasure to Hanover. The princess, on her honeymoon journey through Germany, attended a state banquet in Hanover and was horrified to find that she was eating off the gold dinner service she knew so well from Windsor. She kept this mortifying piece of information from her mother, but this German slight to English power was an early sign of the ferocious hostility that Vicky was to experience in her life abroad. See Pakula, pp. 88–89.

  195 The 385,000 pounds a year See Vera Watson, A Queen at Home: An Intimate Account of the Social and Domestic Life of Queen Victoria’s Court, p. 22. Watson based her valuable book on extensive research into the records of the Lord Chamberlain’s Department 1837–1885.

  195 The royal household was a division The areas of authority of the four departments in charge of the royal household were, it seems, divided up topologically Both the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Stewart ruled “inside” the royal residences, with the Lord Chamberlain “upstairs,” dealing with the members of the royal family in their official and ceremonial capacity. The Lord Steward conducted affairs “downstairs,” notably in regard to feeding the whole household. The Commissioners of Woods and Forests and the Master of the Horse had dominion “outside.” The commission was responsible not only for the gardens, parks, and farms surrounding the royal residences but also with the physical structure of the buildings. The Master of the Horse, the smallest of the departmental units, looked after the Queen’s horses and carriages, and supervised her travel, which, over the years, became more and more extensive.

  195 Queen Victoria referred to them once Queen Victoria to King Leopold, March 25, 1845, Martin, vol. i, p. 209.

  196 Answer: because the Lord Chamberlain’s men Memoirs of Baron Stockmar, vol. 11, pp. 118–125.

  196 No wonder the official name See Watson, p. 19.

  197 After the coronation, a decorous tussle Watson, pp. 37–38.

  197 His campaign for domestic reform Martin, vol. ii, p. 5.


  198 The butler was under notice On her first visit to Germany, Queen Victoria expressed her delight in drinking beer. How much she drank at home is not clear.

  199 By 1845, Albert had wrapped In a speech in the Commons in 1845, Sir Robert Peel opined that in governing its finances the country could do no better than follow the example of the Queen’s household. He noted that three great monarchs had visited Great Britain in one year, all were entertained magnificently, and all without incurring any debt or requesting any additional funds under the civil list (see Martin, vol. i, p. 213).

  199 When the prince cut the wages Queen Victoria was aware of the criticisms aimed at her husband and felt obliged to counter them in the biography of the prince she commissioned from Theodore Martin. “The Prince,” wrote Martin, “possessed no independent authority by right of his position, and could exercise none, even within his own household, without trenching on the privileges of others, who were not always disposed to admit of interference. This could scarcely fail to embarrass his position in the midst of a vast royal establishment, which had inherited many of the abuses of former reigns and where he could find much of which he could not approve, yet was without the power to rectify. And as behind every abuse there is always someone interested in maintaining it, he could not but be aware that he was regarded with no friendly eyes by those who were in that position, and who naturally dreaded the presence among them of one so visibly intolerant of worthlessness and incapacity” (Martin, vol. i, p. 68).

  199 Judge published a stream of articles Jasper Tomsett Judge of Windsor seems to be the source of many of the unflattering anecdotes about Prince Albert that are reported by negative biographers, notably David Duff in his Victoria and Albert. Clare Jerrold gives a long and admiring account of Judge and his associates in her invaluable book The Married Life of Queen Victoria.

  Chapter 17: THE COURT OF ST. ALBERT’S

  202 The traditional qualifications The Duchess of Sutherland, Queen Victoria’s first mistress of the robes, did not have any obvious need of the Lord Chamberlain’s salary, but as the reign proceeded, and the political power of the Crown waned, the wives of England’s greatest lords were apparently less and less inclined to serve in the royal household. Membership had ceased to be a passport to influence and wealth as it had been in the reign of Charles II. The issue of financial need is carefully skirted in the memoirs of nineteenth-century courtiers. Even the Ponsonbys in the correspondence the family chose to publish do not discuss money. Queen Victoria confirms that money was key. Hearing from her daughter Vicky in Prussia that it was very difficult to find any suitable people to form part of her household, Queen Victoria answered: “What you say about needy gentlemen and ladies wanting to be about the Court is the case everywhere. The nice ones are always more difficult to get” (Dearest Child, p. 254).

  203 After Albert’s death, she chose Queen Victoria’s close relationship in old age to her Indian servant Abdul Karim, often referred to as the Munshi, is fascinating.

  203 As his brother, Ernest, would later See Fulford, p. 99, citing Duke Ernest’s Memoirs without page reference. Fulford, pp. 90–100, is very good on why Prince Albert was so unpopular in England, and I am indebted to his analysis.

  204 What kind of man was beholden To quote one of the anonymous rhymes published in the English press at the time of the royal marriage, and which Prince Albert, apparently, collected: “Quoth Hudibras of old ‘a thing / Is worth as much as it will bring.’ / How comes it then that Albert clear / Has thirty thousand pounds a year?” (Clare Jerrold, The Married Life of Queen Victoria, p. 11).

  205 He surely anticipated that these skills An example of Albert’s passion for hunting occurred on a trip by yacht around the coast of Wales. Albert and his brother-in-law Charles Leiningen spotted a small island covered with sea birds, and rushed down for their guns only to discover to their dismay that the birds were out of range. One of Albert’s technical passions over the years was to find guns that were more accurate and had a longer range. Though she hated guns, Victoria gave them to her husband as presents.

  206 To ensure that the numbers were impressive The battue system had been in operation in Germany for centuries, as we can see from a precious set of seventeenth-century marquetry pictures that paneled the walls of a room at the Ehrenburg Palace in Coburg during Prince Albert’s youth. These great works of art, probably the most expensive things in his collection, were transferred by Duke Ernest I to the Veste fortress in Coburg sometime after his younger son’s marriage.

  206 He claimed in his fifty-six years See Sandner, Das Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, 1826–2001, p. 52 and p. 96.

  207 Sing a song of Gotha Clare Jerrold, The Married Life of Queen Victoria, p. 320. Queen Victoria in her journal says that she took no pleasure in the Gotha battue, which family courtesy obliged her to attend, and that the English gentlemen in her party thought it a slaughter, not a sport.

  207 Albert learned that battues Some hostile biographers like Duff report that Albert organized a battue on his Osborne estate because the deer were destroying his shrubs.

  208 By 1844, the prince had set Frank Eyck cites an egregious example of the royal intransigence in regard to persons who failed to meet the prince’s standards of personal morality. When the Tory Lord Derby became prime minister, he begged that the wife of his lord chancellor, Sir Edward Sugden (later Lord St. Leonards), should be received at court. The Sugdens had been married for fifty years, but they began their relationship as teenagers, when Lady Sugden ran away with her then schoolboy lover. The two lived together for a few years before they could be married. The Queen declined to lower her standards for Lady Sugden, and so, as Eyck remarks, “The faithful old husband requested that he should not be asked to Court as long as the prohibition on his wife continued” (The Prince Consort: A Political Biography, p. 192).

  208 The result was that This estrangement with members of her own family persisted throughout the prince’s lifetime, and even beyond. In her letters to her daughter in Berlin, Victoria constantly advised Vicky not to become close to her (QV’s) first cousin Augusta, by this point Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who was often at the Prussian court. Augusta, wrote Victoria, reported everything back to her mother, the Duchess of Cambridge—which, of course, was just what Victoria expected Vicky to do.

  209 The Cambridges were furious See Longford, p. 181.

  209 Today these rules seem Note that Greville’s diaries were published only after his death. Two of the most celebrated memoirists of the Victorian court, Mary Ponsonby and Marie Mallett, obeyed the royal rules while in waiting. However, they kept their letters, and in later life set down memories of life at court and the royal family that their children were able to discover after their deaths and eventually publish in the twentieth century. Tina Brown, in her 2007 book on Diana, Princess of Wales, asserts that the old compact of privacy and confidentiality between the royal family and members of the British aristocracy held until the late 1960s or early 1970s.

  210 At his first dinner Arthur Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby: His Life from His Letters, London: Macmillan, 1943, p. 26.

  210 The new maid of honor Mary Ponsonby describes “the excitement and pleasurable mystery … in the first arriving into waiting; was it likely I should see the Queen alone and get to know her well?” (Mary Ponsonby: A Memoir and a Journal, p. 2).

  211 “For the Household appointments Eyck, pp. 191–192.

  212 The prince “was in ability For the lengthy dissection of the prince consort, see Mary Ponsonby, pp. 2–6. Magdalen Ponsonby’s 1927 memoir of her mother was followed in 1943 by Arthur Ponsonby’s memoir of their father (Henry Ponsonby: His Life from His Letters). Henry was a consummate courtier and royal official, as Mary was not, and in his references to Prince Albert, he is much more circumspect. However, he does call the prince “the Snark,” a reference to the creature in Lewis Carroll’s poem who is “slow in taking a jest” and “always looks grave at a pun,” and makes it delicately clear that he
and the prince were never friends.

  213 “It was a fine and gratifying Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, ed. Hibbert, p. 73.

  213 He risked appearing The hypocritical and villainous Mr. Pecksniff appears in Martin Chuzzlewit. The accusation of sanctimonious hypocrisy was peculiarly damaging in English high society as Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent, discovered in his dealings with ministers, parliament, the army top brass, and his family. The Duke of Kent was known to his mother and siblings as Joseph Surface, a reference to the hypocritical seducer and social climber in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The School for Scandal.

  Chapter 18: FINDING FRIENDS

  214 assassins might lurk in the crowd Five assassination attempts were made on the Queen during Prince Albert’s lifetime: in June 1840, May 1842, July 1842, May 1849, and May 1850. In 1840, when she was pregnant with her first child, the Queen was shot at twice as she drove in an open phaeton through Hyde Park. (See the prince’s own account of this event to his stepgrandmother; Jagow, p. 70.) In 1842, when a man shot at his wife on the mall, with extraordinary bravado Prince Albert deliberately provoked the unknown assassin to make a second attempt, and this led to the man’s arrest. (See the prince’s narration to his father; Jagow, pp. 76–79.) In 1850, two weeks after the birth of her seventh child, a man fired at the Queen as she drove up Constitution Hill. Eight days later, a man came up and struck her on the face with the brass knob of his cane. Fortunately, the deep brim of her bonnet cushioned the blow.

  214 As the Queen later wrote Dearest Child p. 77.