We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  215 He not infrequently attended Jerrold reports that in August 1840 the prince was given the freedom of the city and made a member of the Goldsmiths and Fishmongers Companies, the greatest honors in the gift of the City of London. He was scheduled to receive the freedom of the city at a splendid banquet given by the Lord Mayor. Only hours before the event, the prince wrote saying he could not attend the banquet, rode over to the Guildhall, where he received the freedom of the city, apologized verbally, drove back to Buckingham Palace for dinner, and then drove out to Windsor, where Queen Victoria, heavily pregnant, was awaiting him. This debacle in public relations was possibly the Queen’s fault, but it was blamed upon the prince (The Married Life of Queen Victoria, p. 76).

  216 For her part, Victoria admitted Elizabeth Longford gives the most detailed account of this rapprochement. See Victoria R.I. pp. 145–148.

  221 Queen Victoria described Skerrett My Mistress the Queen: The Letters of Frieda Arnold Dresser to Queen Victoria, ed. Benita Storey and Heinrich C. Weltzien, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994, p. 8.

  223 She says how delighted she was My Mistress the Queen, p. 24.

  223 As the documented examples One of the insights that Tina Brown in The Diana Chronicles provides about the British aristocracy is that, until the 1970s, girls of that class were given a minimum of formal education. The miseducation of the famous Mitford sisters in the 1930s was, it appears, more typical than exceptional.

  223 They were cultured but not intellectual Arnold’s letters, written in the mid-1850s and il lustrated by the author’s own drawings, bear a distinct resemblance to the Leaves from a Journal of our Life in the Highlands that Victoria herself would publish in the 1860s. Like Victoria, Arnold says a great deal but leaves out a lot more.

  224 “While I was dressing,” wrote the Queen Cecil Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, p. 395.

  224 Reportedly Isaac Cart was a Swiss Queen Victoria, The Early Years, p. 95. Some biographers say that Cart used to carry Albert upstairs at night when he was very little, but this seems not to be true.

  224 In October 1838, when Albert Prince Albert to his stepgrandmother; Jagow, Letters of the Prince Consort, p. 17.

  224 In August 1840, Albert’s first year Bolitho, The Prince Consort and His Brother, p. 25.

  Chapter 19: A HOME OF OUR OWN

  225 As he wrote to his stepgrandmother Jerrold, p. 61.

  226 The Duke of Wellington, now in The Cinque Ports were an ancient confederation of southern seaports, originally composed of Hastings, Romney, Dover, Hyde, and Sandwich. The wardenship of the Cinque Ports was a lucrative sinecure.

  227 This was a bureaucratic revolution Before the telegraph, the railway, and the steamship, communications between London and Paris took a minimum of two days; London to Moscow, Rome, or Lisbon, ten to fourteen days; London to Washington or Constantinople, four weeks; London to Canton, five to seven months (Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston, p. 107).

  228 Above all, what Prince Albert called Prince Albert to his brother, October 18, 1844, Bolitho, p. 73.

  228 After bearing two children The Queen’s Scottish journals are full of quotations from and references to Walter Scott.

  229 What if the Scots proved See David Duff’s introduction to his excellent edition of selections from the Queen’s journals, Victoria in the Highlands, New York: Taplinger, 1968.

  230 To his Scottish hosts, he felt Alan Hardy, Queen Victoria Was Amused p. 39, quoting the book on Queen Victoria written by her Scottish son-in-law, the Duke of Argyll.

  231 “Here we were with only Duff, Victoria in the Highlands, p. 55.

  232 As for Victoria, it would be Osborne House is testimony to the love of Indian architecture and Indian people that Queen Victoria developed after the death of her husband. The Durbar Room, partly designed by Princess Beatrice, is rather a monstrosity, but the painted portraits the Queen commissioned of ordinary Indian folk are superb.

  232 One of the jewels of Regency George IV’s architectural legacy relies heavily on the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, since Carlton House, his fabulously expensive London residence as Prince of Wales and Regent, was torn down when he came to the throne.

  233 By 1850, the Queen could leave In 1855 Frieda Arnold traveled with her mistress Queen Victoria from Osborne to Windsor and noted that the journey took only three hours (My Mistress the Queen, p. 34).

  234 With the technical assistance See Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, vol. ii, p. 208.

  234 For the Queen, with her long A visitor to the Ehrenburg Palace in Coburg today is shown Queen Victoria’s water closet, the first ever to be installed in the building.

  235 In this, their first real home The statues were commissioned from Mary Thorneycroft, and in 1858 the same artist produced a study of the youngest child, Beatrice, in a shell. Another specially commissioned piece was John Gibson’s statue of the Queen in classical robes with a wreath in her hand, “set in a niche like a shrine,” as Frieda Arnold aptly notes (My Mistress, the Queen, p. 32).

  235 There were also a number Ibid, p. 32.

  237 The prince consort, critics contend See Mark Girouard on Osborne House in The Victorian Country House, pp. 147–153, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

  237 “Dear Madam, you really must Mary Ponsonby, p. 8.

  238 Then the two could retire Victoria’s eldest son, the sophisticated, sybaritic Bertie, spent far too many of his days kicking his heels at Osborne in his mother’s last decades, and as Edward VII, he could hardly wait to get rid of it. His sisters, who adored Osborne and had separate properties on the estate, were most upset. Today Victoria and Albert’s first home belongs to the nation and is open to the public most of the year. To find Prince Albert’s original Osborne, one must subtract the significant additions and alterations that the Queen made in the thirty years after her husband’s death.

  238 The royal family’s first visit All of these properties now form an integral part of the Balmoral estate. Prince Albert first purchased the lease on Balmoral for 2,000 pounds and then bought the property outright in 1852 for 30,000 guineas (a guinea was one pound and one shilling), apparently in his own name. In 1848 he bought Birkhall and its 6,500 acres in his son Bertie’s name. (See the letter to his brother, Ernest, of December 12, 1848: “I did not buy the estate in the Highlands, but Bertie. It seems to us to be a desirable purchase for him.” Bolitho, The Prince Consort and His Brother, p. 106.) According to David Duff, Queen Victoria acquired Ballochbuie some years after her husband’s death, but Abergeldie is still technically owned by the Gordon family, which leases it to the monarch (Victoria in the Highlands, pp. 84–85).

  239 When Lord Canning almost shot Fulford, The Prince Consort, p. 92.

  239 But as a woman and a landowner The 2007 movie The Queen shows that deerstalking is still a key sport for the men of the British royal family. When the princes William and Henry lose their mother in a tragic accident, their paternal grandfather, Prince Philip, can think of nothing better than a day of deerstalking to distract them.

  239 The negotiations with the Fife trustees There was a seventeenth-century tower, but otherwise the house dated to the 1830s.

  239 In 1855 Queen Victoria was able Duff, Victoria in the Highlands, p. 151.

  240 On her six-hour carriage journey My Mistress the Queen, p. 125.

  240 On a grander scale On her first visit to Coburg in 1844, the Queen was ecstatic about everything at the Rosenau except the chamber pots that she was obliged to use there and indeed in palaces throughout Germany.

  Chapter 20: THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

  245 The idea of the Great Exhibition Other accounts credit John Scott Russell with having the big idea and selling it to the prince.

  246 In the end, parliament voted This is the account given by Martin in Life of the Prince Consort, vol. ii.

  247 Never one to let the grass The precious piece of blotting paper is now preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  247 Amazingly, its fan of intersecti
ng ribs An etching of Paxton’s daughter standing on the lily pad appeared in the Illustrated London News.

  248 The memory of the great revolutions In 1858 England and France came close to war when a group of Italian revolutionaries tried to blow up the Emperor Napoleon III, and the grenades were found to have been built in Great Britain. Karl Marx, of course, found refuge in England in 1849 and wrote much of Das Kapital in the British Museum.

  248 As the prince wrote to his Prince Albert to Marie, dowager Duchess of Coburg, April 1851, Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, vol. ii, pp. 293–294.

  248 Three years after the end See Kingsley Martin, The Triumph of Lord Palmerston: A Study of Public Opinion in England Before the Crimean War, London: Hutchison, 1963.

  249 “Mathematicians have calculated Jagow, Letters of the Prince Consort, pp. 176–177.

  250 “The tremendous cheers Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, vol. ii, p. 299.

  250 As Victoria herself noted Martin, vol. ii, p. 314.

  253 And the building was pulled down The enlarged and re-created Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire in 1934.

  254 The frantic months of activity All of these expressions come from the Queen’s journal.

  254 When the prince met such men Lyon Playfair, who collaborated closely with Prince Albert on many public and private projects and admired him very much, once commented that never in all their dealings did the prince ever ask him to sit down.

  254 Albert could preside Several of the men associated with the Great Exhibition were subsequently knighted by Queen Victoria—Henry Cole, Joseph Paxton, Charles Fox. Lyon Playfair ended his life as Lord Playfair.

  Chapter 21: LORD PALMERSTON SAYS NO

  255 By November 1853, he was This is what Prince Albert told Stockmar in a long letter of January 24, 1854; Jagow, ed., p. 207.

  255 She frankly admitted this Queen Victoria’s Early Letters, ed. Raymond, p. 188.

  256 In the face of the vitriolic Albert to Stockmar: “As for the calumnies themselves, I look upon them as a fiery ordeal that will serve to purge away impurities … Everyone who has been able to express or surmise any ill of me has conscientiously contributed his faggot to burn the heretic, and I may say with pride, that not the veriest tittle of a reproach can be brought against me in truth” (Jagow, p. 206). Yet in 1860 Prince Albert was still sending to his “Dear Cousin” William, the prince regent (soon to be king) of Prussia, an exact account of the recent and secret negotiations of the Emperor Napoleon III with Russia and Austria, which he had heard of from the foreign office papers or discussions. Albert begins this brief note: “It may not be uninteresting to you to hear something that I will beg you to regard as strictly confidential” (Jagow, p. 349). The letter of February 8, 1859, to Prince William’s wife, Augusta, makes clear that Prince Albert also communicated on foreign policy issues with the Prussian court by trusted private emissaries such as Count Perponcher, who would convey information and opinions without committing any of it to paper.

  256 If any one man was responsible In my account of Prince Albert’s foreign policy, my key source is the five-volume biography of the prince that Queen Victoria commissioned from Theodore Martin. Frank Eyck’s The Prince Consort: A Political Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959) was also very important in forming my opinions of Prince Albert’s geopolitical ideas and diplomatic initiatives. Eyck was a naturalized Englishman born in Germany and a scholar of acumen and probity. He was given unusually complete access to the archives at Windsor and Coburg, and, almost alone among biographers of Prince Albert publishing in English, he was able to read the unpublished papers written in German. Eyck seeks to present Prince Albert in as positive a light as possible, but, unlike Hector Bolitho, he was more interested in the historical record than in hobnobbing with Prince Albert’s descendents. His work is all the more damning for being sober, scrupulously documented, and based on wide knowledge of nineteenth-century German history. For my account of Lord Palmerston, I rely mainly on Jasper Ridley’s Lord Palmerston (London: Macmillan, 1971) and Kingsley Martin’s The Triumph of Lord Palmerston: A Study of Public Opinion Before the Crimean War (London: Hutchison, 1963). After completing this chapter, I came upon a copy of Anthony Trollope’s 1882 contribution to the “English Political Leaders Series” (Lord Palmerston, London: Isbister) and was delighted to find the great novelist endorsing my account of the struggle between prince and foreign secretary. Trollope writes stalwartly in his introduction: “With the verdict of the Prince … in regard to Lord Palmerston [as revealed in the recently published biography of the prince consort by Theodore Martin] I am compelled to differ … I think that I shall be able to show that England has disagreed with his Royal Highness, and that England is right” (p. 2).

  257 They fought any measure likely In her official capacity as commander in chief, Queen Victoria put her signature on every army commission. This inevitably resulted in a backlog of commissions and was hardly conducive to army efficiency. However, when the practical suggestion was made that commissions should be certified in some other way, Victoria refused.

  258 The famine in Ireland For a brief summary of the issues involved in the repeal of the Corn Laws, see chapter 14.

  261 In the words of novelist Trollope, Lord Palmerston, London: Isbister, 1882, p. 26.

  262 Mrs. Brand resisted There are at least three versions of this affair: Greville (vol. vi, p. 441) and two memoranda in the Royal Archives by Prince Albert and by his secretary George Anson. Greville says that Queen Victoria knew about the event at the time. Albert and Anson believe that she did not and that she was horribly shocked when her husband told her about in 1850. My guess is that Victoria, in fact, did know in 1840, since the Brand affair would certainly have come to the ears of Baroness Lehzen, reputed to be a great gossip and a favorite with Melbourne and Palmerston. Court gossip between Lehzen and Victoria was one of the things that Prince Albert held against the baroness.

  262 Back in 1810, when Emily Gossips claimed that both Emily Cowper and her mother, the first Lady Melbourne, had an amorous liaison with the prince regent (later George IV). One of Emily’s younger brothers was reputedly the prince regent’s child.

  262 As the husband of a beautiful Lady Palmerston had three brothers, but none of them had any children when he died, so she inherited all the Melbourne estates.

  265 But on certain key issues See Prince Albert’s letter to Stockmar of August 20, 1850, soon after the Peace of Olmutz kept Prussia from going to war with Austria over Schleswig-Holstein: “The fixed idea here [essentially in Lord Palmerston’s foreign office] is, that Germany’s only object in separating Holstein with Schleswig from Denmark is to incorporate them with herself and then to draw them from the English into the Prussian commercial system. Denmark will then become a State too small to maintain a separate independence, and so the division of European territory and the balance of power will be disturbed. I grant that this is a tenable view, and that Germany (especially Prussia) has given cause for it; but assuredly this affords no ground for doing violence to law, to honour, to equity, to morality, in order to defeat an eventuality which has not been brought about by ambition or caprice, but by the nature of things” (Martin, The Life of the Prince Consort, vol. ii, p. 259). In 1864, three years after the prince’s death, Prussia under Bismarck crushed Austria and Denmark and absorbed not only Schleswig and Holstein but also Hanover, Hesse, Nassau, and Frankfurt am Main. In 1870 Prussia went to war with France and inflicted a stunning defeat. The Emperor Napoleon III was deposed and fled to England. Prussia, which by this point already had two-thirds of the population of Germany, acquired the French border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Suffice it to say that ambition and caprice, to say nothing of an obsession with military might, accounted far better for Prussia’s foreign affairs strategy than Prince Albert’s law, honor, equity, and morality.

  265 Reports that the tsar of Russia One ambassador claimed to have read the whole of Clarissa—then the longest novel in the English langua
ge—while waiting for Lord Palmerston.

  266 While giving lip service In 1848 a popular insurrection forced the Austrian emperor to agree formally to certain democratic reforms, including some form of elected assembly to which the executive arm of government would be responsible. The emperor, who believed that he was appointed by God to rule, never had any intention of respecting these agreements. By 1851, he felt strong enough to renounce them publicly, declaring, “Henceforth [Austrian] Ministers should be responsible solely to the Crown, as the center of all authority” (Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, vol. ii, p. 321).

  267 “Osborne, 20th August Queen Victoria’s Early Letters, ed. Raymond, pp. 147–148.

  268 It begins: “I said to Lord For the full text, ibid., pp. 148–150.

  268 According to the memorandum Frank Eyck, The Prince Consort: A Political Biography, p. 139. Eyck notes that Prince Albert also dug out the file of old grievances in 1848, when his wife’s half brother, Charles Leiningen, disagreed with him over German politics. He accused Leiningen of having “intrigued with Sir John Conroy against Queen Victoria before her accession” (Eyck, p. 92). This was both unfair and irrelevant.

  269 In August 1850, the Queen specified Queen Victoria’s Early Letters, ed. Raymond, pp. 172–173.

  270 Victoria wrote to her uncle Leopold Queen Victoria’s Early Letters, ed. Raymond, p. 188. Prince Albert in a January 1852 letter to Prince William, the de facto ruler of Prussia, was smugly pleased that Palmerston’s affronts to Austria and support of Hungary were at an end: “Since then he has himself made it easy for his colleagues by suddenly becoming Louis Napoleon’s accomplice. That was too much of a good thing, and the pitcher broke at last after too many journeys to the well. There is no doubt that now he is thinking solely of revenge, but I think him less dangerous in opposition than he would be in power, for there are not at his disposal those vast possibilities of doing harm, which the Foreign Office gave him” (Letters of the Prince Consort, ed. Jagow, p. 181).