We Two: Victoria and Albert

by Gillian Gill

  323 “Today I will write Bolitho, The Prince Consort and His Brother, p. 177.

  324 Queen Victoria followed Queen Victoria wrote to her daughter Vicky, pregnant with her first child: “I hope you will have no chance of two for some time and not of three for a long time. Bertie and I both suffered (and the former will ever suffer) from coming so soon after you” (Dearest Child, p. 147).

  325 A few weeks after Hibbert, Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, p. 93.

  325 Two years later, even more ominously Martin, vol. I, p. 193.

  325 Instead Bertie turned out This is what Stockmar confided to Frederick Gibbs (“The Education of a Prince,” p. 110). Queen Victoria, ever self-deprecating, told her daughter Vicky that Bertie “is my caricature, and that is the misfortune, and in a man—this is so much worse. You are quite your dear beloved Papa’s child!” (Dearest Child p. 187).

  326 When Bertie was seventeen Dearest Child p. 147.

  326 In 1861 she found him Woodham-Smith, p. 414.

  326 Fed, according to his father’s instructions A Welsh nurse hired by the prince was surprised to find that her little brothers and sisters were better fed than the royal children.

  327 He wrote to his own Bolitho, Albert, Prince Consort, p. 109. Bolitho dates this quotation to 1846, but it must be later if the reference to six children is correct. Louise, the sixth child, was born in March 1848.

  327 This last statement From the account given by Cecil Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria and Lady Lyttelton had a good understanding, and both saw the need not to pressure or overwork the Prince of Wales. However, once Birch was appointed, Prince Albert had total supervision of his son, and the Queen ceased to intervene.

  328 “I seem,” Birch told Baron Stockmar St. Aubyn, p. 28. Himself a master at Eton, the Hon. Giles St. Aubyn thoroughly detests both Prince Albert and Baron Stockmar, considering them sanctimonious humbugs. He is quite clear that Henry Birch was dismissed because he had managed to win the affection of his pupil.

  328 He was realistic about the Prince This is what St. Aubyn writes, p. 28. Unfortunately he sloppily conflates reports on the Prince of Wales contributed by Birch and by Gibbs. Philip Magnus’s 1964 biography of Edward VII is less class obsessed and more scholarly than St. Aubyn’s, but he has little to say about his subject’s youth, apart from noting: “The treadmill devised for the future Edward VII was a vicarious atonement for the wickedness of George IV” The fullest account of Henry Birch’s relationship with Bertie comes in Hector Bolitho’s biography of the prince consort. By his own account, Bolitho had unrivaled access not only to the material in the Windsor Archives but to stories about Prince Albert passed down in the royal family. He claims that Prince Albert at first liked the “young, good-looking, amiable” master from Eton, and thought Bertie was likely to become “attached” to him. But when the boy did become attached, Prince Albert decided “that the degree of attachment was dangerous … The kind sympathetic tutor became a symbol of romantic fondness that the boy did not seem to feel for his parents. The young Prince wrote affectionate letters to Birch, and, stealing into his bedroom, placed them on his pillow. Sometimes there was a present to prove his devotion” (Bolitho, Albert, Prince Consort, p. 110).

  329 Gibbs, he wrote, was “exempt from reproach” Ibid, p. 29.

  329 The baron’s historical anecdotes Until quite recently, the diaries of royal servants have been rare. However, in spring 1951, an article entitled “The Education of a Prince: Extracts from the Diaries of Frederick Weymouth Gibbs, 1851–1856,” was published in Cornhill. The magazine did not divulge who had submitted the article and, presumably, owned or found the diaries.

  329 He was deeply affected Lady Canning, an intelligent woman at the court, watched the parting and wrote, “It has been a trouble and sorrow to the Prince of Wales, who has done no end of touching things since he heard he was to lose [Birch]” (Bolitho Albert, Prince Consort, p. 110).

  330 He developed a passion for sticks “The Queen & Prince sent to ask me if the Prince of Wales was unwell. He had behaved rudely to his sister in their presence,” wrote Frederick Gibbs in his diary. “I told them he had been so to me—that he had thrown dirt and swung a large stick at me, and had struck me with a stick in a passion. The Prince told me not to allow this—that if he did so I must box his ears or take the same stick and rap his knuckles sharply” (“The Education of a Prince,” p. 111).

  330 Tens of thousands of boys Lord Shaftesbury’s brother, a scion of one of England’s oldest families, got into a fight at Eton with an older boy, was beaten, knocked out, and died before anyone thought to intervene.

  332 It was only when Bertie approached Longford, quoting an archival document, p. 348.

  332 Lord Valletort was chosen Fulford, The Prince Consort, p. 258.

  332 In his leisure, the Prince of Wales Woodham-Smith, p. 404.

  332 The Queen and her beloved doctor Longford, p. 345.

  332 Colonel Lindsay, one of the equerries St. Aubyn, p. 30.

  332 Queen Victoria reported to Vicky Dearest Child, p. 144.

  333 “The only use for Oxford St. Aubyn, p. 45.

  335 “It is very difficult Letter of June 4, 1861 (Dearest Child, pp. 337–338). The future Queen Alexandra was indeed one of the great beauties of the age and a fashion plate. Her one blemish was a scar on her neck, and she became famous for her high chokers as well as her legendary wasp waist. Her three daughters disciplined their bodies to produce the waist, but did not inherit their mother’s beauty.

  335 When reports came in Princess Dagmar, Alexandra’s younger sister, married Tsar Alexander III and became known as Tsaritsa Maria Fedorovna. Much against her will, since she hated Germans with a passion, her son, Tsar Nicholas II, married Princess Alix of Hesse.

  335 He did, however, repair immediately Dearest Child p. 353.

  336 Usually a loyal defender Ibid, p. 356.

  336 It would, in his view Sandringham was acquired by Queen Victoria for her son Bertie in 1862, soon after the prince consort’s death. In the end, both the Prince and the Princess of Wales loved Sandringham, which they remodeled to suit themselves.

  Chapter 26: PROBLEMS IN A MARRIAGE

  327 Victoria began to write In preparation for his biography of the Empress Frederick (The English Empress, English edition, 1957), Count Egon Corti apparently counted the letters that had been preserved in the Windsor and Kronberg archives from the mother (3,707) and the daughter (4,161) (Woodham-Smith, p. 389). Roger Fulford, in Dearest Child, the first volume of his edition of the letters between the Queen and the princess, says that the bound volumes of the letters numbered eight from Vicky to her mother, four from Vicky to her father, and thirteen from Queen Victoria to her daughter. Fulford does not say how many volumes there are of letters from Prince Albert to his daughter. Fulford says that he chose to publish about a fifth of the Queen’s letters. Even in the published selection of the correspondence, the number of letters passed between the mother in England and the daughter in Berlin just from January to May of 1858 is astonishing.

  338 “I wish you for the future Dearest Child, p. 35.

  338 At once, the Queen was all Ibid, p. 96.

  338 She wrote to Vicky in June Ibid, p. 120. “Annoyance” does not begin to describe the birth of Vicky’s first child. Almost pathologically modest, Vicky refused any physical examinations during her pregnancy, and thus no one was able to establish that her baby was in the breech position. Queen Victoria longed to attend her daughter’s first delivery but could not leave England when parliament was in session. However, the Queen sent from England her personal physician Sir James Clark, a trusted nurse, and a supply of chloroform. The princess went into labor on schedule one evening, but after some twelve hours of increasing agony, the baby remained stuck in the birth canal. The lives of the princess and her baby were in jeopardy, and Clark begged the Prussian physicians in attendance to intervene with forceps or at least dull the young mother’s pain. They refused, preferring to begin w
riting the official death notice. Finally, Dr. Eduard Martin, the competent obstetrician expected to preside over the birth, received word that the princess was in labor. Mysteriously, the message to Martin had been delivered to the wrong address. When Martin got to the palace, he insisted on doing a vaginal examination, directed Clark to administer the chloroform, and pulled out the baby with forceps. The facts surrounding the birth of future Kaiser Wilhelm II were long shrouded in mystery, and, as one reads the version that emerged decades later, it is hard not to think that a faction in the Prussian court would have been happy to see the English princess die in childbirth. The princess’s husband failed lamentably to protect the wife he adored by taking control of the birth as his father-in-law, Prince Albert, had done in similar circumstances. Vicky’s own reaction was strange. She acknowledged that Martin had saved her but was still repulsed by the liberty he had taken by thrusting his hand into her vagina, and in her subsequent, and fortunately uneventful pregnancies, she continued to use Dr. Wegner, the court-appointed doctor who had stood by while she and her first baby fought for life.

  Unsurprisingly, the baby who emerged after this birth trauma was not breathing, and it took great efforts to revive him. None of the attending doctors reported that there was anything wrong with the child. However, some days later, the English nurse sent by Queen Victoria reported that the baby’s left arm had been torn out of its socket and was dangling and useless. It proved that his ear had also been permanently injured and the hours in the birth canal probably damaged his brain. As an adult, the emperor of Germany had a left arm some eight inches shorter than the right and virtually useless, and was psychopathic. History might have been different and Vicky’s life less tragic if Dr. Martin had arrived in time to save her but failed to resuscitate the child.

  339 As the Queen told her daughter Dearest Child p. 184.

  339 “My heart requires sympathy” Pakula, p. 133.

  339 On her return to Berlin Dearest Child p. 181.

  339 The Queen and her daughter became Mother and daughter died within months of each other. In her final years, Vicky, by this time the dowager Empress Frederick, had inoperable breast cancer and lived in an agony of pain for which her German doctors, on her son the emperor’s instructions, refused to give her more than tiny doses of opium. Vicky held on to life in part to save her mother sorrow. When Queen Victoria died, ironically in Kaiser Wilhelm’s arms, Vicky set all her affairs in order, got her personal papers out of the country, and died. See Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Letters of the Empress Frederick, London: Macmillan, 1928.

  340 “Dear Papa has always been Dearest Child, pp. 45–46.

  341 The prince consort at once planned It was on this occasion that Prince Albert told his brother that he would be traveling with “only Colonel Ponsonby, and Dr. Becker [his German librarian], besides one courier, a valet de chamber, and three men servants” (Bolitho, The Prince Consort and His Brother, p. 185). This was Albert’s idea of a minimal staff.

  341 Victoria told Vicky Ibid, p. 91.

  341 “I assure you dear Ibid, p. 104.

  341 Writing of the disappointment Ibid, p. 123.

  341 Queen Victoria liked Louis of Hesse Prince Louis of Hesse and Prince Frederick William of Prussia were not dissimilar in looks, but Alice was not nearly as happy with her Louis as Vicky was with her Fritz. Alice, like her older sister, thought that her father was the ideal man and wanted to marry someone just like him. She soon discovered that her husband was a vain, stupid, and sensual man.

  342 On October 4, 1858 Dearest Child p. 135.

  342 “Papa is much pleased Ibid, pp. 292–293.

  343 “One becomes so worn out Dearest Child p. 192.

  343 “I really think those ladies Dearest Child p. 191.

  343 “No father, no man Ibid, p. 182. In this same letter, Queen Victoria notes that Alice has picked up on some things (presumably relating to sex and reproduction) and is beginning to dread marriage.

  343 After Vicky wrote in disgust Ibid, p. 205.

  343 Weary of congratulating young ladies Ibid, p. 269.

  343 Victoria is not known to have Beatrice, referred to in the family as “Baby” until she was at least five, was allowed to watch her father shave and cheek her mother at mealtimes. The Queen’s letters have many references to Baby’s darling new outfits and her cunning little sayings. One wonders how Alice, Helena, and Louise reacted to such favoritism.

  343 In November 1857, they gazed See the prince’s letter describing this tragic event that occurred at Claremont, to his uncle Leopold, Jagow, p.284.

  344 Given the same advice In her fascinating little book (Queen Victoria. The Woman, the Monarchy, The People (New York: Pantheon, 1990, p. 43), Dorothy Thompson relates this story, noting that it crops up a lot in the literature, mostly without attribution. Thompson apparently found the story in Barry St. John Neville’s Life at the Court of Queen Victoria: Illustrated from the Collections of Lord Edward Pelham-Clinton, Master of the Household, with Selections from the Journal of Queen Victoria (Salem, New Hampshire: Salem House, 1984, introduction, p. 13, no attribution).

  344 As he once confided Roger Fulford, The Prince Consort, citing the Royal Archives, p. 265.

  345 If pregnancy was the price Elizabeth Longford claims that Victoria told her daughter Vicky just after Prince Albert’s death that she bitterly regretted not having another child (Longford, pp. 389–390). Longford acknowledges that this is odd given the Queen’s “violent attitude toward childbearing.” My interpretation would be that Victoria wished that, in their final years together, she and her husband had enjoyed conjugal relations, even at the risk of another pregnancy.

  345 Her feelings for him were Dearest Mama, p. 106.

  345 I and the girls Dearest Child p. 131–139.

  Chapter 27: “I DO NOT CLING TO LIFE AS YOU DO”

  346 “To my imagination it appears Letter to King Frederick William II of Prussia, Jagow p. 81.

  347 “God have mercy on us!” Woodham-Smith, p. 402 and note p. 468, quoting Memoirs of Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, 1888, vol. IV p. 55.

  347 Such remarks would make Dearest Mama, p. 30.

  348 Prince Albert aged so fast When it became clear to Queen Victoria that she must intervene, it was too late. On December 7, 1861, Queen Victoria talked with doctors Clark and Jenner “over what could have caused” her husband’s illness. “Great worry and far too hard work for long!” she concluded. “That must be stopped” (Woodham-Smith, p. 425).

  348 “Were there not so many things Jagow, p. 347.

  350 Gastric problems troubled Albert In Uncrowned King, Stanley Weintraub suggests that Prince Albert had stomach cancer, and Christopher Hibbert in his biography of Queen Victoria hints at the same thing. Since Queen Victoria refused to allow an autopsy on her husband’s body, it is impossible to substantiate this hypothesis.

  351 Her diagnosis was Two weeks before her husband died, Queen Victoria was writing to her daughter in Berlin: “I can begin by saying that dear Papa is in reality much better—only so much reduced and as usual desponding as men really only are—when unwell” (Hibbert, Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals, p. 153).

  352 On one of his visits to London Measles is highly contagious but dangerous mainly to children who are undernourished and to adults who have never acquired any immunity. In 1861 almost everybody in Europe contracted measles in early childhood and was thereafter immune, with mothers conferring initial immunity on their infants up to about the age of one. It is possible that royal persons were less exposed to common childhood ailments like measles and thus did not acquire immunity. In the nineteenth century, measles was often confused with the less serious rubella (German measles). That Prince Louis was able to travel to England when he had measles and then infected only his future mother-in-law and one of her children seems unlikely. That Queen Victoria claimed she caught measles twice is another indication that on at least one occasion she came down with rubella, not measles.

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bsp; 352 “You say no one is perfect Dearest Child p. 354.

  353 In his diary he wrote in June Woodham-Smith, p. 414.

  354 Victoria had the most fun ever Victoria published an account of these “Great Expeditions” in her first volume of Highland memoirs. See David Duff, Victoria in the Highlands, pp. 172–192.

  355 On his occasional meetings Historians have had little good to say about King Pedro, or his father.

  355 “The death of poor, good Pedro Fulford, The Prince Consort, p. 264.

  355 Queen Victoria confided to her diary Jagow, p. 370.

  355 “If you were to try and deny it I paraphrase here the account of the letter given by Cecil Woodham-Smith, pp. 416–417, the only one with quotations. The full text of this letter has never been published.

  357 He was suffering from typhoid fever According to the death certificate made out by his eldest son, the prince consort contracted the typhoid fever that killed him on November 22. This date was no doubt supplied by one of his attendant physicians, Dr William Jenner. Such dates were necessarily approximate at a time when blood tests for pathogens were unknown. It seems far from unlikely that the prince in fact contracted typhoid some weeks earlier, soon after his return to Windsor Castle. If so, the news of the deaths of Pedro and Ferdinand, ironically from typhoid, and the letter from Stockmar came when the prince consort was already suffering from the disease that would kill him. Well or sick, the prince would certainly have reacted with deep disappointment and rage to the news of Bertie’s dalliance with Nellie Clifden. But if Albert’s reaction to his son’s fall from grace has always seemed so extreme, it may have been in no small part because he was suffering the effects of a life-threatening fever. The exploit of the Prince of Wales clearly exacerbated his father’s mental disarray. But Bertie was not responsible for his father’s death, as Queen Victoria fervently believed for many years.

  359 Though he was a fervent advocate Let me cite just two instances of the prince consort’s work as a sanitarian. At the Great Exhibition, Albert constructed in Hyde Park model working-class houses that featured indoor plumbing. At this time, a water closet and running water were considered to be luxuries. When Florence Nightingale returned from the Crimea in 1856, she was invited to stay with the Queen and the prince at Balmoral and had long conversations with them about how and why so many men had died of infectious disease in the recent war. At the prince’s strong recommendation, the Queen authorized a royal commission to examine the issues. The resulting report, that Nightingale supervised and wrote, was a major step toward protecting the lives of British soldiers.