by Jane Ridley
Years later, Albert liked to say that it was, in fact, “a blessing when there was a little imperfection in the pure royal descent and … some fresh blood was infused.”
“We must have some strong dark blood,” he would say, to correct the constant fair hair, blue eyes, and “lymphatic” blood of the Protestant German royal families who intermarried again and again.27
Whether there was, in fact, a little imperfection in the case of Albert himself is debatable.28 But his personality was so different from those of his relations—he was an art lover, a scholar, and a workaholic in a family of lusty philistines—that it is tempting to speculate about his Jewish paternity. Supposing Meyern really was Albert’s father and Conroy was Victoria’s, this would mean, as A. N. Wilson has mischievously pointed out, that the royal families of Europe are descended from a German Jew and an Irish soldier. “Given this,” comments Wilson, “it is surprising that these families manifested so few of the talents stereotypically attributed to the Irish and the Jews: such as wit or good looks.”29
Albert’s mother revenged herself on her unfaithful husband by taking lovers. When Albert was five, Duke Ernest banished his wife from court because of her affair with an officer, Alexander von Hanstein. Albert never saw his mother again. She married Hanstein, and died at age thirty, supposedly of cancer of the uterus.
The sudden disappearance of his mother traumatized Albert’s childhood. Physically frail and easily tired, he was often in tears. Duke Ernest was a distant, neglectful father, and Albert’s parent figure was his tutor, Christopher Florschutz, who created a secure schoolroom world for the two brothers at Rosenau, the Hansel and Gretel castle in the Thuringian Forest where Albert was born.
Albert grew up surrounded by men. Theodore Martin, his official biographer, noted approvingly that he had “even as a child shown a great dislike to be in the charge of women.”30 Uneasy and awkward with girls, he was stiff and overbearing. “Ought to pay more attention to the ladies,” was Melbourne’s gruff comment.31 Albert had a horror of the sexual promiscuity that had poisoned his childhood, broken up his family, and contaminated the Coburg court.
The motherless boy learned to forget about his misery by succeeding in his lessons. His hobby was collecting and labeling objects—obsessive behavior that perhaps satisfied a need to control that can still be seen in his wife’s papers, methodically filed, cataloged, and indexed in his own hand in the Royal Archives.32 Order made him feel safe; creating and organizing his own world was perhaps his security against the chaos and loss left by his mother’s disappearance.
Albert’s career was shaped by his uncle Leopold, the widower of Princess Charlotte, whose death in childbirth in 1817 had cheated Leopold of his chance to rule as king or consort of England. Since 1831, Leopold had been King of Belgium, but he still clung to his ambition to control the throne of England. By arranging a marriage between his niece Victoria and his nephew Albert he would guarantee his own influence, as well as bring off a major dynastic coup for the minor house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
When Albert was sixteen, Leopold dispatched his physician Baron Stockmar, who acted as his agent, to report on the boy’s progress. Stockmar’s verdict was mixed. Albert, he reported, was well educated, but knew nothing of European politics and was excessively prudent and unambitious. Stockmar began to groom the shy prince for the English throne. He removed him from Coburg’s provincial, seedy court and sent him to the University of Bonn, where he received the best modern education of the day. Law, finance, public administration, art history, and history—all were eagerly devoured by the studious Albert. Next, he toured Italy with Stockmar; he rose each morning at six to study by the light of his green student’s lamp, shunned social invitations, drank only water, and retired to bed at nine.
When Albert was twenty, Leopold and Stockmar judged him ready for his destiny. He had received an education that trained him supremely well as a public servant, but gave him no experience in dealing with human relationships. He preferred work to social life. He had little emotional intelligence. Of women he had no experience whatsoever.
Victoria and Albert were married on 10 February 1840 in Inigo Jones’s boxlike Chapel Royal in St. James’s Palace. The next day the euphoric bride wrote to her uncle Leopold from Windsor: “Really I do not think it possible for anyone in the world to be happier or AS happy as I am. He is an Angel.”33
Victoria always slept with a maid on the sofa in the next room, but this never inhibited her enjoyment of sex. Nor did she object to the white cotton long johns that Albert insisted on wearing to warm his perpetually cold feet. She was annoyed to find herself pregnant almost immediately. Later, she complained that the first two years of her married life had been ruined by the aches and sufferings of pregnancy: “Without that—certainly it is unbounded happiness—if one has a husband one worships! It is a foretaste of heaven.”34
Blaming her pregnancies allowed Victoria conveniently to forget the tensions and rows that had scarred the first two years of her marriage. For all their sexual harmony, the two first cousins were locked in a struggle for dominance. Albert had married a wife who was also a queen, and Victoria did not let him forget it. When Albert suggested a honeymoon, Victoria put him sharply in his place: “You forget, my dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing.”35
Victoria clung to her power as queen, but she was uneasily conscious of her inadequacy for the role. As for Albert, he knew exactly what he wanted: control not only of the royal family, but also of the royal household and the monarchy itself. He had no faith in Victoria’s ability to rule. The male-dominated political world of the day legitimized his quest for power. Women had no place in England’s public sphere. A female sovereign was an anachronism, a constitutional oddity. Taking control out of Victoria’s hands was a matter of public interest.
Shortly after the wedding, Albert began to flex his muscles. He complained that the court was dull. Chess after dinner each night bored him; he wanted literary and scientific conversation, but the Queen feared that her education had not equipped her for intellectual topics. He sulked when Victoria refused to discuss business with him.
At first Victoria resisted, but pregnancy soon forced her to share her public duties with her husband. In June 1840, the Regency Bill passed unopposed through Parliament, making the twenty-one-year-old German prince sole regent in the event of Victoria’s death. It was a triumph for Albert, who had been infuriated when Parliament had slashed his allowance a few months before—a snub intended to humiliate him.
When Victoria was seven months pregnant, Albert reported: “I have come to be extremely pleased with Victoria during the past few months. She has only twice had the sulks.… She puts more confidence in me daily.” He noted that he was “constantly provided with interesting papers.”36 Soon twin writing desks were installed for Albert and Victoria, side by side, at both Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.
Victoria’s first child, Vicky, the Princess Royal, was born on 22 November 1840. The baptism was held on 10 February, the anniversary of Victoria’s marriage, and her uncle Leopold wrote triumphantly to her: “The act of the christening is, in my eyes, a sort of closing of the first cyclus of your dear life.”37
Only a month after the christening, Victoria was pregnant again. “Victoria is not very happy about it,” Albert told his brother.38 She resented this second pregnancy even more than the first.
Victoria considered that serially pregnant women were “quite disgusting”—“more like a rabbit or a guinea-pig than anything else and … not very nice.”39 She didn’t admit it, but she disliked motherhood partly because it forced her effectively to abdicate in favor of her power-hungry consort. She made a sort of sense of this by convincing herself that Albert was a higher being to whom she must surrender herself completely. In a letter to her daughter Vicky in 1858, she described her feelings for Albert: “I owe everything to dear Papa. He was my father, my protector, my guide and advisor in al
l and everything, my mother (I might almost say) as well as my husband. I suppose no one was ever so completely altered and changed in every way as I was by dear Papa’s blessed influence.… When he is away I feel quite paralysed.”40
A woman who is trying to find both a mother and a father in her husband is unlikely to be an engaged mother herself. Victoria was so needy for Albert’s love and support that she had little affection to spare for her children. Her pregnancies were unwelcome by-products of her infatuation with Albert. She showed no inclination to dote on her new baby son.
* * *
* The medical bill for the birth totaled £2,500 and the doctors were solemnly informed that these lavish fees were paid solely “in consideration of HM’s having given birth to a Prince and future heir to the Crown of England and that they must not be considered as forming any precedent for future payments.” (RA VIC/M11/25, Sir Henry Wheatley to Albert, 11 November 1841.)
† Three other brothers were unable to take part in the race for the succession. The Prince Regent was still legally married to his estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick, who was too old to have another child. The second brother, Frederick, Duke of York, was married to a Prussian princess, but the marriage was childless. Augustus, Duke of Sussex, brother number six, had ruled himself out by marrying Lady Augusta Murray in defiance of the Royal Marriages Act.
‡ Next in succession after the Regent came the Duke of York (childless), then Clarence (childless), and fourth, Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent.
§ The hemophilia gene is carried on the X chromosome, which means that women can be carriers, though, like Victoria, they show no symptoms.
‖ Porphyria is a dominant gene, which means that each child of a carrier has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the disease. However, one of the peculiarities of the illness is that in 90 percent of those with the faulty gene, it remains latent and they show no symptoms of the illness. The gene can thus appear to skip generations and then resurface. Queen Victoria’s medical history includes some of the physical symptoms of porphyria, but they are neither specific nor acute enough to make a convincing case for a diagnosis. (Rohl, Warren, and Hunt, Purple Secret, pp. 6–7, 117, 222–23.)
CHAPTER 2
“Our Poor Strange Boy”1
1841–56
The new baby was named Albert Edward: Albert after his father, and Edward in memory of Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent. The name Albert pleased no one. Lord Melbourne politely harrumphed that although it was an Anglo-Saxon name, it had not been much in use since the Norman Conquest; while Albert’s dreadful father, Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, objected that the prince was not named after him.2 Victoria referred to the child as “the Boy.” When he was eighteen months old she wrote, “I do not think him worthy of being called Albert yet.”3 He never was. Instead, everyone called him Bertie.4
When Bertie was four weeks old, he was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester. At Albert’s behest, Bertie had been given the title of Duke of Saxony as well, which annoyed Englishmen but gave him the right to inherit German lands.*5 Victoria worried that, as heir to the throne, the baby would take precedence over his father, and she insisted that his name should come after Albert’s in the nation’s prayers.
She was troubled by depression. Bertie’s birth had been difficult. The doctors told her that “it was a mercy it had not been the first child as it would have been a very serious affair.”6 She was often tearful, and in letters to her uncle Leopold, she complained that she had been “suffering so much from lowness that it made me quite miserable.”7 Six weeks after the birth, she was still “much troubled” by lowness.8 Her misery dragged on for a whole year.9
Postnatal depression made it hard for Victoria to bond with her new son. She claimed to dislike all babies for the first six months; they were “mere little plants,” with that “terrible frog-like action.”10 She had a horror of breast-feeding, and Bertie was fed by a wet nurse, a woman named Mrs. Brough.†11 He was a fat, healthy baby, but Victoria thought him ugly—“too frightful,” she later wrote. He was also “sadly backward.”12 Never one to conceal her feelings, Victoria made no attempt to hide her boredom with the child.
Victoria blamed her depression on what she called the “shadow side” of marriage—pregnancy and the hormonal chaos that it caused.13 But the weeks after Bertie’s birth also saw a crisis in her relations with Albert. He forced a palace revolution, eliminating Victoria’s closest ally: Baroness Lehzen, her devoted governess.
A Lutheran pastor’s daughter with an unappealing habit of chewing caraway seeds (used as a carminative for expelling wind), Lehzen had remained close to Victoria after her marriage. A private passage linked her room to the Queen’s. As well as supervising the court and issuing much-prized invitations, she was in charge of the royal nursery. By the time Bertie was born, Albert had developed an obsessive hatred of her. The “old hag” was, he said, “a crazy, stupid intriguer, obsessed with the thirst of power, who regards herself as a demi-god.”14
The trouble with Victoria, thought Albert, was that Lehzen had warped her character by giving her the wrong sort of upbringing.15 Now, encouraged by his own political adviser, the wizened Baron Stockmar, he sought to promote the development of “proper moral and religious feelings” in his wife.16 She must be taught that, like the queen bee, her chief purpose in life was reproduction, while Albert did the work of a thousand worker bees. Victoria must be isolated from anyone who might seek to influence her ideas. Stockmar had already tried to put a stop to the correspondence between the Queen and Lord Melbourne, her ex–prime minister and father figure. Now he plotted to remove Lehzen, whom he accused of scheming against Albert.
In January 1842, Victoria and Albert were staying at Claremont, fifteen miles from Windsor, where the Queen had been sent to recover her health after Bertie’s birth. An urgent message arrived: Their daughter Vicky was dangerously ill. They rushed back and raced upstairs to the nursery, where they found the ailing Vicky. Albert flew into a rage, blamed Victoria for allowing Lehzen to neglect the nursery, and refused to speak to his wife for days. Victoria capitulated. She apologized, took the blame, and agreed to Lehzen’s removal. Albert and Stockmar had won.
The angry notes that Victoria and Albert wrote each other during this quarrel give a glimpse of a turbulent marriage. Albert is sometimes seen as a Hamlet figure, always waiting for a better moment, with “a hidden streak of wax,” but this hardly fits with his behavior over Lehzen.17 Bullying his wife at a time when depression made her vulnerable, and removing her closest friend, reveals a cold ruthlessness that some might say amounts to cruelty.
His motives were partly political. Lehzen was the obstacle blocking his plans to reform the court, which was anachronistic, uncomfortable, and wasteful. The responsibilities of the offices of lord chamberlain and lord steward overlapped, so that, for example, the latter found the wood for a fire, while the former lit it. Albert slashed perks at Windsor such as the “Red Room Wine,” a weekly allowance paid to a butler to buy alcohol, and the daily practice of installing fresh candles, which were sold off by servants if they were not used.18 Modernizing the court brought it into line with the age of reform; it was, Albert believed, a necessary process that Victoria could never have achieved while Lehzen remained in control.
When Bertie was ten weeks old, he was christened at Windsor. For the baptism, Victoria dressed in her Garter robes adorned with a large diamond diadem. St. George’s Chapel, with its banners and music, filled her with peaceful feelings; she found it “calming” to reflect that so many of her relations, in fact the entire family of George III—including her father, whom she had never known—were buried in the vault beneath the flagstones upon which she stood. “The Child” behaved well, and his mother offered earnest prayers that he might become a true and virtuous Christian and grow up “like his beloved Father!”19
After Lehzen was sacked, Lady Lyttelton was appointed royal governess. A well-meaning, intelligent woman in her fifties,
she was, as Victoria wrote, “a Lady of Rank.” Her role was to supervise the nursery and give occasional lessons.20 Sarah Lyttelton, or “Lally” as the children called her, worshipped Prince Albert, sentimentalized the royal marriage, and wrote syrupy letters about the “babes.”
In the nursery, Bertie’s companion was his sister Victoria, the Princess Royal, known as Vicky. Barely a year older than Bertie, she was a paragon. At three she spoke French and could already read. At four a governess was engaged, and soon Vicky learned Latin, later reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and Shakespeare for relaxation.21
Albert doted on Vicky. The relationship between father and daughter was so close that Victoria already felt excluded. The arrival of a younger sibling did not lead, as it often does, to the dethronement of the eldest child. On the contrary, Albert made no attempt to conceal his preference for Vicky. Bertie by comparison seemed backward; few children would not.
It was soon recognized that he was less gifted than his sister. Lady Lyttelton wrote reports on the children for the royal parents. She judged two-year-old Bertie “just as forward as the generality of the children and no more—but with every promise I think as to disposition and intellect.”22 At three, “he is not articulate like his sister, but rather babyish in accent.” He “understands a little French,” but “is altogether backward in language, very intelligent and generous, and good-tempered, with a few passions and stampings occasionally.”23
The stamping and tantrums grew worse. Bertie developed a stammer. At three and a half, he refused to do his lessons, upset his books, and sat under the table.24 His anxious parents concluded that there could be only one explanation: Bertie was retarded. What they could or would not see was that his naughtiness was attention-seeking behavior typical of a less loved second child. Albert has often been praised for stimulating Vicky’s mind; it has been rightly pointed out that he must equally bear responsibility for the slow development of his son.25 Victoria was also to blame for ignoring Bertie.