Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  * * *

  1 H. A. L. Fisher: A History of Europe, p. 504.

  2 Stockmar: Memoirs, xl-xli.

  3 Joanna Richardson: George The Magnificent, p.145.

  4 A brilliant lawyer and accomplished Lord Chancellor, he was to be excluded from the 1835 Whig Government and never held public office again. In the words of Justin McCarthy: ‘He thought he knew everything and could do anything better than any other man. His vanity was overweening, and made him ridiculous almost as often as his genius made him admired’, (A Short History of Our Own Times (1910), p. 7) a terse portrait on which it is difficult to improve.

  5 Sir Jack Dewhurst: Royal Confinements, 110.

  6 See F. Crainz: An Obstetric Tragedy for the most detailed account.

  chapter two

  ‘A Good and Useful Man’

  The marriage of Prince Ernest of Saxe-Coburg, then aged thirty-three, to Princess Louise, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Duke Augustus of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, on July 31st 1817 at Gotha had certain similarities to that of the Duke of Kent to his sister a year later, the dominant motivations being political and dynastic, although it began glowingly. Biographers and historians have tended to take a bleak view of this handsome, extrovert, selfish and self-indulgent man, but contemporary opinions, although often morally censorious, were considerably more tolerant. Ernest’s sons certainly revered him, and his mother-in-law, the formidable but warm-hearted Dowager Duchess of Gotha, does not appear to have blamed him for the eventual failure of the marriage, although it is evident that he was far from blameless. If he certainly lacked the intelligence, caution, and ambition of his younger brother, Leopold, there was a compensating warmth and spirit in his character that emerge clearly from his own letters and the memories of his two sons. His portrait is not easy to give, but the principal features are clear enough, and are not without their attractions.

  His young wife is less difficult to discern. She was small in stature, widely regarded as singularly pretty, vivacious, and intelligent. She was precocious and vital, and was a sensitive and accomplished musician, a quality which her two sons – and particularly the younger – were to inherit. She was also of a romantic disposition, and there seems no doubt that she was genuinely in love with the dashing Prince Ernest. Her surviving letters give an impression of somewhat artless warmth, and her mother-in-law wrote of her immediately after the marriage that ‘It is a charming, tiny being, not beautiful but very pretty, through grace and vivacity. Every feature of her face has expression; her big blue eyes often look so sad from under her black lashes, and then again she becomes a happy wild child’. To a close friend Louise wrote after her marriage ‘to tell you how happy and contented and joyous I am . . . If one loves an Angel, one’s master and husband, one is much softer and more tender, more susceptible, and warmer also for friendship’. For Ernest’s part, in spite of the fact that marriage was a necessary requirement to preserve the Protestant succession to Coburg, his affections seem to have been fully engaged.

  Late in 1817 the Duke of Saxe-Coburg died, and Ernest succeeded to his titles. Their first son – Ernest – was born in Coburg at the Ehrenburg Palace on June 21st 1818. The noise of the town in her confinement distressed Louise, and her mother-in-law insisted that her next should be in the family country home, The Rosenau, some few miles outside the town. There, on August 26th 1819, the Princess gave birth to her second son, subsequently christened Francis Charles Augustus Albert Emmanuel, but known in the family from his birth as Albert.

  Many years later, dark rumours circulated both in Coburg and London as to whether this child was in fact the Duke’s son, and one rumour, of which Coburg had an inordinate quantity, selected the Court Chamberlain, the Jewish Baron von Meyern, as the real father. In July 1820 one of the ladies-in-waiting told the Duke that Louise was in love with a Count Solms, which she vehemently denied and which reduced the Count to derisive laughter. Ernest’s reactions were more ominous. ‘If he had been sensible’, Louise wrote to a close friend, ‘he would have laughed also, but he took it seriously and was angry with me. We talked about it and it all ended in tears . . . Now he watches me, which he has never done before’.

  The first published allegation that Albert was not the legitimate son of Duke Ernest appears to have originated in a vicious anti-Semitic work by one M. L. W. Foss, published in Berlin in 1921, which stated that ‘Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, is to be described without contradiction as a half Jew’, and in the following year Lytton Strachey dealt with this wholly unsubstantiated statement with characteristic felinity:

  There were scandals: one of the Court Chamberlains, a charming and cultivated man of Jewish extraction, was talked of . . .’7

  The letters from Louise’s mother-in-law to her daughter, the Duchess of Kent, clearly indicate that the marriage was a happy one until Prince Albert was at least two years old, and Louise’s subsequent affair with Lieutenant von Hanstein appears to have been the only actual case of her infidelity; it was certainly the only one cited in Duke Ernest’s divorce petition, and, as Hector Bolitho has emphasised, ‘there exists no fragment of evidence in the letters written by either Louise’s enemies or her friends to prove or even suggest that she was unfaithful until the Princes were grown children’.8

  There is no evidence that the marriage of Ernest and Louise was under any serious strain at this time until the rumours about Solms in 1820. But Ernest’s suspicions received justification subsequently when he discovered that she did have a lover, a young army officer, Alexander von Hanstein, on which discovery he demanded a separation, and despite popular clamour for a reconciliation she left Coburg for ever in September 1824, when Albert was five years old. Louise neither admitted nor denied the charge of adultery, but there was a divorce in 1826, after which she immediately married von Hanstein, who had become Count von Polzig.

  Although Louise was sixteen years younger than Duke Ernest, and had a reputation, possibly, but not certainly, justified, for being flirtatious, no contemporary account that survives accuses her of being promiscuous, and her love for von Hanstein was clearly real. Whether Ernest’s own conduct with other women was as bad as some have claimed, and his frequent absences from Coburg and neglect of his wife gave her justification for her loneliness and infidelity, is a matter on which it is impossible to adjudicate. What does appear clear is that the allegations about the doubtful paternity of the second son circulated only after Louise’s subsequent liaison with von Hanstein was exposed, and developed when Albert’s character grew into a very different one from that of his elder brother. Accordingly, everything points to the emphatic conclusion that Albert was indeed the second son of Ernest, Duke of Coburg, and the rumours that gave him a Jewish father and a promiscuous mother may be safely rejected. Albert was not unaware of these rumours, which later became widely current in London and were crudely hinted at in hostile political tracts. Although he was to become sternly censorious of sexual licence, it was not with the glum intolerance of which he has been accused. One who came to know him well subsequently wrote that the presence of what he regarded as evil ‘depressed him, grieved him, horrified him. His tolerance allowed him to make excuses for the vices of individual men; but the evil itself he hated’. His lifelong devotion to his mother’s memory and name was one evidence of this tolerance.

  Prince Albert loved his parents deeply, and always honoured and treasured them. After the death of his father in 1844 he and Ernest had his mother’s body brought back to Coburg to rest in the same mausoleum as that of his father, which the brothers had had built specially for them. This action has not often been remarked upon by Albert’s biographers; its significance may be regarded as very considerable. It may also be considered significant in any assessment of Duke Ernest’s own reputation, which has been somewhat harshly portrayed on occasions as that of a debauched and odious profligate. His elder son was to write of him that ‘he took
the keenest interest in anything and everything which concerned our bringing up. A more beautiful bond between a father and his sons it would be difficult to find’. All the evidence justifies this tribute. Duke Ernest’s inadequacies and failings were many, but he received and always held the devotion of his sons.

  The Duchess of Gotha wrote joyfully to the Duchess of Kent on August 27th 1819 from The Rosenau:

  The date will of itself make you suspect that I am sitting by Louischen’s bed. She was yesterday morning safely and quickly delivered of a little boy. Siebold, the accoucheuse, had only been called at three, and at six the little one gave his first cry in this world, and looked about like a little squirrel with a pair of large black eyes.9 At a quarter to seven I heard the tramp of a horse (in the courtyard at Ketschendorf). It was a groom, who brought the joyful news. I was off directly, as you may imagine, and found the little mother slightly exhausted, but gaie et dispos. She sends you and Edward [the Duke of Kent] a thousand kind messages.

  Louise is much more comfortable here than if she had been laid up in town. The quiet of this house, only interrupted by the murmuring of the water, is so agreeable. But I had many battles to fight to assist her in effecting her wish. Dr. Muller found it inconvenient. The Hof-Marshal thought it impossible – particularly if the christening was to be here also. No one considered the noise of the palace at Coburg, the shouts of the children, and the rolling of the carriages in the streets . . .

  How pretty the May Flower [Victoria] will be when I see it in a year’s time. Siebold cannot sufficiently describe what a dear little love it is. Une bonne fois, adieu! Kiss your husband and children.

  Augusta.

  Albert was christened in the Marble Hall at The Rosenau on September 19th, the address being delivered by Pastor Genzler (whose daughter later married Albert’s tutor, Florschütz) and who had also officiated at the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. ‘The good wishes with which we welcome this infant as a Christian, as one destined to be great on earth, and as a future heir to everlasting life, are the more earnest when we consider the high position in life in which he may one day be placed, and the sphere of action to which the will of God may call him’.

  Louise wrote of her children on May 22nd 1820:

  Ernest est bien grand pour son âge, vif et intelligent. Ses grands yeux noirs pétillent d’esprit et de vivacité . . . Albert est superbe . . . d’une beauté extraordinaire; a des grands yeux bleus, une toute petite bouche – un joli nez – et des fossettes à chaque joue – il est grand et vif, et toujours gai: Il a trois dents, et malgré qu’il n’a que huit mois, il commence à marcher.

  In July, 1820: Albert est toujours beau, gai et bon, et a sept dents. Il marche déjà, quelquefois tout seul, et dit ‘papa et maman’; n’est-ce pas un petit prodige pour dix mois?

  When Albert was two:

  Albert adore son oncle Léopold, ne le quitte pas un instant, lui fait des yeux doux, l’embrasse à chaque moment, et ne se sent pas d’aise que lorsqu’il peut être auprès de lui . . . Il est charmant de taille, et yeux bleus. Ernest est très fort et robuste, mais pas la moitié si joli. Il est beau, et a des yeux noirs.

  A few months later:

  Mes enfants ont fairs les délices de leurs aieuls. Ils sont beaucoup et deviennent très amusants. L’aîné surtout parait avoir de l’esprit, et le petit captive tous les coeurs par sa beauté et sa gentillesse.

  From an early age, Louise made Albert her particular favourite, and as their tutor, Florschütz, later recorded:

  Endowed with brilliant qualities, handsome, clever, and witty, possessed of eloquence and of a lively and fervid imagination, Duchess Louise was wanting in the essential qualifications of a mother. She made no attempt to conceal that Prince Albert was her favourite child. He was handsome and bore a strong resemblance to herself. He was, in fact, her pride and glory. The influence of this partiality upon the minds of the children might have been most injurious.

  Albert was not as physically strong as he appeared. He had a slow and somewhat feeble pulse, low blood pressure, and even as a child fatigued easily. He was to develop into a boy, and then into a man, of quite remarkable application and intellectual energy in what was in reality a weak physical frame.

  In 1839 Ernest wrote that ‘from our earliest years we have been surrounded by difficult circumstances of which we were perfectly conscious and, perhaps more than most people, we have been accustomed to see men in the most opposite positions that human life can offer. Albert never knew what it was to hesitate. Guided by his own clear sense he always walked calmly and steadily on the right path’.

  Queen Victoria later wrote of her (and Albert’s) grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg (‘Grandmother Coburg’):

  She was a most remarkable woman, with a most powerful, energetic, almost masculine mind, accompanied with great tenderness of heart and extreme love for nature . . . She was adored by her children, particularly by her sons; King Leopold being her great favourite.

  She had fine and most expressive blue eyes, with the marked features and large nose inherited by most of her children and grandchildren. Both the Prince [Albert] and his brother were exceedingly attached to her, and they lived much with her in their younger days.

  It was the Dowager Duchess’ great ambition that Albert – interestingly, not Ernest – should marry his cousin, Victoria, but she died when Albert was twelve years old.

  Of all her children, Leopold was the favourite, and he subsequently wrote of her that ‘she was a woman in every respect distinguished; warm-hearted, possessing a most remarkable understanding, and she loved her grandchildren most tenderly’.

  The Dowager Duchess kept her daughter, the Duchess of Kent, fully informed of the Coburg cousins, particularly about Albert. ‘He is not a strong child’ (February 10th 1821); ‘Little Alberinchen, with his large blue eyes and dimpled cheeks, is bewitching, forward, and quick as a weasel. He can already say everything. Ernest is not nearly as pretty . . .’ (July 11th 1821); ‘Leopold is very kind to the boys. Bold Alberinchen drags him constantly about by the hand. The little fellow is the pendant to the pretty cousin [Victoria]; very handsome, but too slight for a boy; lively, very funny, all good nature, and full of mischief . . .’ (August 11th 1821).

  The Duchess of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (‘Grandmother Gotha’), the boys’ step-maternal grandmother (the second wife of Duke Augustus who was father of Louise) was equally devoted and beloved. In the summer of 1822 the boys stayed with her when their parents were away. Their mother wrote in their album that ‘Ernest is very much grown. He is not as handsome as his father, but he will have his good figure. Albert is much smaller than his brother, and lovely as a little angel with his fair curls’.

  Grandmother Coburg recorded on February 14th 1823:

  The little boys have interrupted me, for you know how little one can do during such a visit. A couple of boys always find means to be noisy, which, and the loud talking, calls for many a scolding from grandmama. They are very good boys on the whole, very obedient, and easy to manage. Albert used to rebel a little sometimes, but a grave face brings the little fellow to submit. Now he obeys me at a look.

  She wrote to the Duchess of Kent on May 9th 1823:

  The boys are very wild, and Ernest flies about like a swallow . . . Do not yet tease your little puss with learning. She is so young still.

  In 1823 the boys – aged five and not yet four respectively – were put under the care and tuition of Herr Christoph Florschütz of Coburg.

  This development was the direct result of the intervention of Stockmar, whom Leopold had asked to report upon the young Princes and their education. Stockmar had gone to Coburg, conducted his investigation, and reported favourably on the boys. He was struck by the fact that although Albert was aggressive and self-confident with other children in their games, and particularly when playing soldiers, he was strangely quiet and quick to cry at
home, a difference which Stockmar considered ‘very marked’. He became convinced that the boys needed a male tutor, and Herr Florschütz, tutor to Alexander and Arthur Mensdorff, youngest sons of Emmanuel, Count of Mensdorff-Pouilly and his wife Sophie, sister of the Duchess of Kent and Leopold, was engaged. It was an inspired choice, one of Stockmar’s most remarkable, even by his standards.

  Apparently Albert had disliked being under the care of women, and was happy at the event, despite his long-standing affection for his nurse, Miss Muller. Grandmother Gotha, solicitous for their health (‘Albert being so subject to attacks of croup’), opposed the development, but was swiftly reconciled to the conscientious and devoted Florschütz.

  After Louise left Coburg for von Hanstein in 1824 she never saw her children again, and died seven years later. ‘Leaving my children was the most painful thing of all’, she wrote. ‘They have whooping cough and said, “Mamma cries because she has to go now, when we are ill”. The poor lambs, God bless them. The Duke was friendly towards me. We came to an understanding and parted with tears, for life. I am more sorry for him than for myself’. There were no subsequent contacts of any kind between her and her sons, which was part of the divorce agreement. Her stepmother wrote: ‘I told her that it was impossible for them to forget their mother, but that they were not told how much she suffered, for this would make them suffer also’. ‘The Prince never forgot her’, Queen Victoria later wrote, ‘and spoke with much tenderness and sorrow of his poor mother, and was deeply affected in reading, after his marriage, the accounts of her sad and painful illness. One of the first gifts he made to the Queen was a little pin he had received from her when a little child’. Florschütz subsequently recorded that when the Duchess left Coburg ‘there was no cheerfulness or happiness here’.