Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  This event was more dominated by Albert’s devotion to his brother than to his actual piety. He was never, as a child or a man, excessively interested in religion, and was totally indifferent to abstract theology. He recorded Church quarrels in Bonn with a refreshingly sardonic amusement, and the subsequent endeavours to portray him as possessed of a profoundly religious character were categorised by his brother as for public consumption, and ‘suited him certainly even less than it did me’ – which is perhaps to take a good point too far, although an excellent example of what Roger Fulford describes as ‘that gentle malice which belies his very dull book of Memoirs’.11 Leopold took the view that ‘the real spirit of Christianity demands that man shall work every moment during life’, with which interpretation Albert was well content. His faith was real enough, and Florschütz described him as ‘instinctively devout’; certainly he had little interest in the formalities of religion, and his intellectual scepticism was to be fortified by the influence of Karl Gottlieb Bietschneider, an eminent and highly controversial critical theological scholar, at University. His subsequent compositions – and particularly his enchantingly colourful and warm Jubilate in A – testify to the minimal impact of the somewhat glum Protestantism in which he was confirmed. One detects in the tributes to his piety after his death by his contemporaries and friends, under the virtual command of Queen Victoria, an exaggerated note.

  If formal religion was of relatively small significance, it is difficult to understand Prince Albert without an appreciation of the deep importance of music in his life and personality. This was partly as a result of family influences. Leopold was extremely knowledgeable, and was regarded as a singer of professional quality, while Ernest’s coarseness of character was partly redeemed by his compositions, of which one was an opera that enjoyed considerable popular and critical success in Germany. For his part, Albert’s interest and pleasure had been attracted early; he was a genuine scholar as well as a gifted organist, and his own compositions – especially his Jubilate in A, but also his Chorale, the tune now generally known as Gotha – demonstrate not only his real gifts as a musician, with much tenderness and warmth, which were perhaps seen to their best effect in his Lieder und Romanzen, of which he composed twenty-six, but also that gaiety in his personality which his family and close friends knew, but which was less obvious in many of his relationships with strangers, and particularly English strangers. After his marriage he was to obtain special pleasure from planning concerts of his favourite works and most esteemed performers, and a contemporary subsequently wrote that:

  They seemed to take him into a dream-world, in which the anxieties of his life were for the moment forgotten. He would often stand apart in the Drawing Room, while some great work of Beethoven, Mozart, or Mendelssohn was being performed, rapt in reverie, but with a look on his face, which those could best understand, and most loved to see, who knew by it the pressure on a brain often too severely taxed was for the moment removed.

  The confirmation of the Princes was followed by a visit to Berlin with their father to be presented formally at the Prussian Court, and thence on a tour to Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. Grandmother Gotha was concerned that the schedule was too intense and the travelling too constant, and Albert wrote to his new step-mother that ‘It requires a giant’s strength to bear all the fatigue we have had to undergo. Visits, parades, rides, déjeûners, dinners, suppers, balls, and concerts follow each other in rapid succession, and we have not been allowed to miss any of the festivities’.

  To the Director of the High School at Coburg Albert wrote on February 5th 1836:

  In spite of all the distractions of our life here at Gotha, in spite of innumerable visits, in spite of the howling of the wind and storm, in spite of the noise of the guard under our windows, I have at length completed the framework of my Essay on the Mode of Thought of the Germans, and I send it with this for your perusal, begging you not to judge too severely the many faults which your critical eye will doubtless discover in it.

  You have my work without head or tail. I have sketched no form of introduction or conclusion, thinking it unnecessary, for my desire is to trace through the course of History the progress of German civilization down to our own times . . . The conclusion will contain a retrospect of the shortcomings of our time, with an appeal to every one to correct these shortcomings in his own case, and thus to set a good example to others.

  On March 12th he reported that ‘the work on the History of German Literature gets on but slowly, owing to our Gotha engagements’. ‘It is painful’, he wrote from Brussels in December, ‘to see the mean idea which the French and Belgians, and even the English, have of our German literature.’

  The position of King Leopold in the childhoods of Princess Victoria and Prince Albert was crucial. To each he was a trusted and loved uncle, to Victoria virtually a surrogate father, and his accession to the throne of Belgium had added not only to his formal position but to his glamour and attractiveness. The fact that he was at that time disliked and distrusted by the British Royal Family did not diminish his stature in her eyes, and always there was the influence and presence of Stockmar, in whom particularly Princess Victoria had begun to place much trust in a difficult childhood surrounded by swirling jealousies, personal antipathies, and political machinations. For some time Leopold had thought seriously of Victoire Kohary as a possible future wife for Albert, and it was only gradually that the idea of attempting to arrange a marriage with the eventual heiress to the English throne began to develop.

  It was natural that such an ambition should have long been harboured by the children’s mutual grandmother, the Duchess of Coburg, but it is wholly excessive to state that ‘The plan of a marriage between the two first cousins existed from the moment of Prince Albert’s birth . . . Marriage to Princess Victoria was to be his vocation and he accepted it, never considering anything else’.12 There is no evidence whatever that Albert was even faintly aware of the possibility until he was nearly seventeen, and it is the fact that Leopold, although concerned about the uncertain prospects of the younger son of the Duke of Coburg with his little reasonable hope of succession to any title or possessions, and who was genuinely devoted to his English niece, was only slowly drawn even to the possibility of a marriage between Albert and Victoria. Mythology is a strong barrier to the biographer, but, however frequently this particular myth has been repeated, the facts are that Prince Albert and Princess Victoria did not even meet until they were both seventeen, and that although Leopold did eventually arrange this meeting the results, as will be related, were not totally successful.

  It should also be remembered that there was no inevitability about Princess Victoria’s succession to the English throne until early 1830, and Leopold was on very bad terms with the British Royal Family. He kept his links open with Kensington Palace, and particularly with Princess Victoria, for whom his deep devotion was warmly returned, but even here the bitter disputes at Kensington Palace were as disagreeable to Leopold as they were labyrinthine. Leopold, moreover, was now a Continental monarch with more and substantial responsibilities, and the possibility of capturing the very considerable Kohary fortunes for the family was a very alluring one.

  These ambitions were changed by two factors. The first was that it became gradually clear that Princess Victoria was virtually certain to become Queen of England, and was by far the greatest prize in Europe. The second was that Stockmar, whose experience with Leopold and Charlotte had had such a profound influence on him, had maintained his English political contacts very thoroughly and had developed a very real affection and admiration for England, where he was well-liked, respected, and taken seriously by intelligent politicians. As he wrote to Prince Albert in 1854:

  I love and honour the English Constitution from conviction. I think that, with judicious handling, it is capable of realizing a degree of legal civil liberty which leaves a man free scope to think and act as a man. Out of its bosom si
ngly and solely has sprung America’s free constitution in all its present power and importance, in its incalculable influence upon the social condition of the whole human race; and in my eyes the English Constitution is the foundation-, corner-, and cope-stone of the entire political civilization of the human race, present and to come.

  Such emotions effectively countered King Leopold’s disgust with the Royal Family, and also played upon his feelings of responsibility for his fatherless niece and motherless nephew. Leopold was a schemer, and a calculating man, but he was much more than this. A marriage between Albert and Victoire Kohary was straightforward Realpolitik; a union between Prince Albert and Princess Victoria was a very different matter, and it was only gradually that Leopold became convinced of its feasibility. He also recognised that although Prince Albert might be relatively docile and be persuaded by his sense of duty, Princess Victoria was a quite different proposition.

  The childhood of Princess Victoria was not happy. Her father had died on January 23rd 1820, Stockmar having been summoned by the Duchess of Kent too late to do little more than console the distraught widow. Kent had been, as Stockmar wrote, ‘a chivalrous husband’, but he died deeply in debt. Leopold had to come to the rescue of his sister and niece, as the new King George IV – the Prince Regent succeeded his father nine days after the death of the Duke of Kent – was not only indifferent to their fate but was actively anxious for them to leave the country. Leopold relieved them from hopeless penury, but their circumstances were, and remained, difficult and humiliating, while Leopold received little commendation for his generous assistance either from his sister or Parliament. Meanwhile, the ambitious and avaricious Captain John Conroy, the Duke’s Equerry, made himself so essential to the Duchess’ existence that she was unheeding of warnings about his immense personal ambitions and doubtful financial probity. Her relationship with the King and his brother, Clarence, the heir to the throne, degenerated from the embittered to the sulphurous. For the growing Princess Victoria the visits to her Uncle Leopold at Claremont were ‘the brightest epoch of my otherwise rather melancholy childhood’.

  Another brightness was provided by an equally controversial personality, Louise Lehzen, who became the governess of both Victoria and her step-sister, Feodora, and was devoted to the child – a devotion warmly reciprocated. But Lehzen did not lack ambition either. It was at Conroy’s instigation that she was raised to the rank of a Hanoverian Baroness, while he became a Knight Commander of the Hanoverian Order. It was only gradually that Princess Victoria realised how she had become the object of Conroy’s ambitions that had nothing to do with her well-being, beyond her survival to become Queen of England. Leopold’s influence on his sister diminished sharply, and it was uncharacteristically unfair for Prince Albert to blame his uncle subsequently for the evil influence on the Duchess of Kent that the adventurer Conroy obtained: the truth was that the Duchess demanded too much of her brother Leopold and was impatient of his caution and difficulties, that he himself was deeply out of favour with the Royal Family and was the object of heavy criticism in Parliament and the popular Press, and Conroy poisoned the Duchess’ mind against him by alleging that he was seeking the Regency – if the Crown became vacant before Victoria inherited – for himself.

  Princess Victoria grew up, principally in Kensington Palace, in unhappy and difficult circumstances, surrounded by intrigue, and never permitted to be alone. Her guardians were always adults – her mother, Lehzen, or Conroy – and it was a childhood of intense loneliness. But her surviving Journals give a clear indication of a fresh, sometimes critical and even acerbic personality, with much warmth and zest and enthusiasm and spirit, which had survived a singularly complex and lonely childhood.

  But there was a severe price to be paid. She became understandably alienated from her mother and bitterly hostile to Conroy, and her devotion and gratitude to her uncle Leopold leap endearingly and movingly from her letters and her early Journals – the few originals that have survived the appalling holocaust after her death. But she also became a young woman with intense feelings and prejudices, so often the fate of an only child with no father or stable family life. Like Charlotte, she was headstrong and emotional, and, although talented, was hardly to be described as having notable intellectual qualities. She could be intolerant, was usually uninterested in the circumstances of others outside her immediate circle and concerns, and was not only ignorant through her education of the actual conditions of the nation she gradually realised she was likely to rule but at that stage remarkably lacking in serious inclination to learn more of them. In this sense, her surviving Journals make very revealing but somewhat depressing reading; there is an artless shallowness about them that reveals not only a selfishness, which is not uncommon, but a melancholy lack of imagination and sympathy for people outside her immediate knowledge. Individuals, towns, cities, and large tracts of the British countryside are bleakly assessed and curtly dismissed. As she grew up, and in spite of the severe restrictions of Conroy’s ‘Kensington System’, she acquired not only a precocious self-confidence but something very close to arrogance and personal vanity. None of this was to be wondered at, but her often over-sympathetic biographers have tended to minimise the unattractive aspects of this otherwise graceful, vivacious, and endearing girl brought up under unpleasant circumstances.

  No fair estimation of the young Princess Victoria can exclude certain realities about her personality. She was highly emotional and very impressionable, was by no means a good judge of people, was often lacking in gratitude, and was profoundly self-centred and highly susceptible to flattery. She had a hard common sense, but even this was variable when it did not affect her own personal interests.

  The similarities with Princess Charlotte are remarkable, both in circumstances – in effect both fatherless, and hostile to their mothers – and in personality, and it was not only Stockmar who commented upon the several common factors. The many portraits of Princess Victoria printed and published during the early years of her reign are mainly derivative, and the few drawn from life are clearly somewhat flattering. She was very small and Lady Wilhelmina Stanhope (later Lady Dalmeny, and the mother of the future Prime Minister Lord Rosebery), who was one of her train-bearers at her Coronation, wrote that she ‘never, at any time, could have been called pretty, but when she came to the throne she was distinctly attractive: her small fair head well set on extremely pretty shoulders, singularly graceful in all her movements, with a great charm of manner, the brightest and gayest of smiles, and a remarkably clear and musical voice’. But, for all her warmth, enthusiasm, and attractiveness, contemporaries also detected a coldness and an element of ruthlessness that troubled them. She had grown up in a hard school, and it appeared to many that this fundamental toughness and intolerance would remain her principal characteristics. And so they might well have been, had it not happened that she was temporarily released from the influences of her childhood, upbringing, and heredity by the warmth and ability of the one person whose quality she wholly appreciated and loved, and whose wise advice she eventually followed.

  That King Leopold had decided that marriage between Princess Victoria and Prince Albert would be highly desirable, and a further major advance in the Coburg family fortunes, is incontestable. What would be wrong would be to conclude that his actions were dominated by calculation and cynicism. For one thing, his devotion to Princess Victoria was as strong and as genuine as hers to him. ‘What a happiness was it for me to throw myself in the arms of that dearest of Uncles’, she wrote in her Journal on September 29th 1835, ‘who has always been to me like a father, and whom I love so very dearly!’ Moreover, Leopold was acutely aware of his own personal unpopularity in England, the keen dislike of the Coburg influence, and the increasing rift between his sister the Duchess of Kent and his niece Princess Victoria. These were not propitious circumstances, and certainly not made easier by his marriage in 1832 to Louise Marie, Princess of Orleans, the daughter of King Louis Ph
ilippe of France, and a Roman Catholic. His letters to his niece were addressed to ‘My dearest love’, and, although they often contained earnest advice, radiated an affection that is manifestly sincere. He was also unsure about his nephew, Prince Albert.

  Leopold’s visit to Coburg early in 1836 was deliberately planned by him and Stockmar to assess Albert’s development and to establish whether Florschütz’s enthusiastic reports were justified. Both were acutely aware of the low reputation of Duke Ernest and his entourage, and were genuinely – and very understandably – concerned at the possibility of moral and intellectual contamination from a Coburg hedonism. As Albert wrote to his brother in 1840, ‘You well know the events and scandals that had always happened in Coburg castle and in the town, and just this knowledge has made you indifferent to morality.’ Prince Albert was evidently not contaminated in this sense, but while Stockmar was impressed by Albert’s character and ability he considered that he was, not surprisingly, very deficient in his understanding of contemporary European political affairs – in which he demonstrated little interest – and was manifestly ill-at-ease with strangers. Albert’s shyness and reserve did not greatly trouble Leopold, and he shrewdly realised that they were not the result of lack of confidence and were also very attractive to women. Nonetheless, he agreed with Stockmar that Albert was not yet fully developed, and that there were gaps which had to be filled.

  Stockmar’s assessment is so interesting that it deserves to be quoted at some length.

  He is a handsome youth who, for his age, is tolerably developed, with pleasant and striking features; and who, if nothing interferes with his progress, will probably in a few years be a well-built man with a pleasant, simple, and yet distinguished bearing. Externally, therefore, he has everything attractive to women, and possesses every quality they find pleasing at all times, and in all countries. It may also be considered as a fortunate circumstance that he has already a certain English look about him . . .