He is said to be prudent, cautious, and already very well informed. All this, however, is not enough. He must not only have great capacity but true ambition, and a great strength of will. To pursue so difficult a political career a whole life through requires more than energy and inclination – it demands also that earnest frame of mind which is ready of its own accord to sacrifice mere pleasure to real usefulness. If simply to fill one of the most influential positions in Europe does not satisfy him, how often will he feel tempted to regret what he has undertaken. If he does not, right from the start, regard it as a serious and responsible task upon the fulfilment of which his honour and happiness depend, he is not likely to succeed.
This was a severe assessment indeed, and may be partly explained by Stockmar’s obstinate perfectionism. But it was an absolutely honest portrait, characteristic of the man and his relationship with Leopold. Furthermore, Stockmar was as worried about Princess Louise’s wayward character as he was about Duke Ernest’s reputation, and was alarmed that aspects of it – the charm, intelligence, and wit unaccompanied by application to any subject for very long – were evident in the younger son. Neither he nor Leopold trusted the influence of Duke Ernest, particularly when he had taken his sons to Berlin after their confirmation, a city whose materialism and low moral standard both men deplored. In this matter they had no need to trouble themselves; Prince Albert had hated it as well.
Stockmar was right to be cautious. The Coburg atmosphere was narrow, claustrophobic, gossip-ridden and at best amoral; Florschütz’s talents might have been considerable, but his range was necessarily and humanly limited; neither of Prince Albert’s parents were, in Stockmar’s eyes, estimable people, and Stockmar’s sense of heredity was as strong as his revulsion from scandal and loose moral and intellectual standards. Judged by these criteria, Albert was unpromising material for advancement in political life, and it was wholly characteristic of Stockmar that he laid these concerns and apprehensions clearly before Albert’s uncle. But he also detected some signs that were hopeful, and indeed the fact about Prince Albert that most surprised and impressed him was that so fine a developing character should have survived such a background, and ‘with such a father and such a brother, both equally unprincipled’. But at the time his hesitations were real, were merited, and are very understandable.
Albert was not his pupil, nor his protegé, as Leopold had been, and his admiration for Florschütz – although considerable – was qualified. What Stockmar could not discern in Prince Albert was the presence of any intellectual and moral strength behind a very agreeable and charming façade. Above all, Albert seemed to lack – and indeed at that time did lack – any ambition or resolution. He was evidently a genuine and natural scholar and devoted countryman, an accomplished musician and linguist, well read and clearly highly intelligent and well educated, but he was in Stockmar’s eyes a somewhat gauche, unsophisticated, cheerful and amusing sixteen-year-old boy. In tendering his advice to Leopold, Stockmar had a heavy responsibility to bear. He did not conceal his doubts, and they were fully justified. His portraits were sharp, but also fair. Between Florschütz’s eulogies and Stockmar’s severities one sees the clear portrayal of a talented and engaging boy of sixteen, but still reserved and immature.
Nevertheless, in spite of all reservations, time was pressing, and Prince Albert and Princess Victoria – who was now almost seventeen and might inherit the English Throne at any time – had never even met, and knew very little of each other. On this meeting Leopold was now determined, and Stockmar, despite his qualified approval of Albert, completely agreed for political reasons, as there were now other challengers in the field. When Prince Adalbert of Prussia advanced his claims to be included ‘in the list of those who pretend to the hand of HRH the Princess Victoria’ in May 1837 the Duchess of Kent sent the magnificent reply to Lord William Russell, the British Minister in Berlin who had communicated this possibility: ‘If I know my duty to the King, I also know my maternal one, and I will candidly tell your Lordship that I am of opinion that the Princess shall not marry until she is much older. I will also add that, in the choice of person to share her great destiny, I have but one wish – that her happiness and the interests of the country be realised in it’. ‘From this time onward the connection [between Victoria and Albert] was regarded as the one aim to which all energies should be directed’, Charles Prince of Leiningen, Victoria’s half-brother, subsequently recorded in a memorandum specially written for Albert in 1841, but although this was now the Coburg intention – certainly that of Leopold and the Duchess of Kent, with Stockmar giving his cautious support and advice – the actual difficulties remained formidable, and not the least of these was the tempestuous character of Princess Victoria herself.
But there were other problems in England. By this stage, King William IV was seventy-one and clearly ageing rapidly, but his intense hostility to the Duchess of Kent, Conroy, and to the Coburgs in general had not abated. These vehement emotions were wholly understandable, particularly where they concerned the ambitious and tactless Duchess of Kent and the even more ambitious and obnoxious Conroy. The King’s most recent biographer has admirably summarised the attitude of the Duchess:
The Duchess of Kent seems to have considered his reign as an undesirable and inconsiderately protracted interregnum between the black wickedness of the Georges and the radiant paradise to open with the accession of Queen Victoria.13
The attitude of the Duchess prompted the King to urge his Ministers to ‘keep a watchful Eye upon the Designs of the Duchess of Kent, who may not scruple to sacrifice the Interests of this Country to personal Considerations’. Greville recorded a dramatic outburst by the King at Windsor in August 1836 when, in the presence of the Duchess of Kent and her daughter and a large assembly, he expressed the vehement hope that there would be no Regency and that the Royal authority would not be vested, even briefly, ‘in the hands of a person now near me [the Duchess] who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed’.14
The King’s ambition to marry off Princess Victoria to one of the sons of the Prince of Orange, the eldest son of the King of the Netherlands and the man rejected by Charlotte for Leopold, was eagerly shared by the Prince of Orange himself, who, after Leopold had become King of the Belgians, now had a particular additional cause of hatred against Leopold. ‘Voilà un homme qui a pris ma femme et mon royaume’ he would remark with venom, and Leopold fully returned his antipathy. Thus, when it became known at Kensington Palace that the King was inviting the Prince of Orange and his two sons to London, the Duchess at once urged Duke Ernest to accelerate his proposed visit, and indeed to come at once.
A ferocious storm ensued. The King ordered the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to prevent the Coburgs from coming, but the Duchess of Kent stood firm. Palmerston’s relations with the King were markedly lacking in harmony, and the King had to accept the fact of the forthcoming visit, but with a very bitter grace.
King Leopold was incensed, and wrote to Princess Victoria to tell her what was afoot. It was an angry letter, but also a very shrewd one. ‘The relations of the King and Queen therefore are to come in shoals’, he wrote, ‘when your relations are to be forbidden . . . Really and truly I never heard anything like it, and I hope it will a little rouse your spirits . . . I have not the least doubt that the King, in his passion for the Oranges, will be excessively rude to your relations, this however will not signify much, they are your guests and not his’. The point was not lost on the Princess. In spite of all the endeavours of the King and the Prince of Orange, she viewed the two Dutch sons with bleakness. ‘The boys are both very plain’, she wrote to the intensely relieved Leopold, ‘and have a mixture of Kalmuck and Dutch in their faces, moreover they look heavy, dull, and frightened and are not at all prepossessing. So much for the Oranges, dear Uncle’.
Leopold also wrote at length to Lehzen, asking h
er to convey the contents to Princess Victoria. After emphasising their link of deep loyalty to the Princess amidst all intrigues, and reminding Lehzen with some bluntness that she owed her continued presence at Kensington Palace to him, he went on:
The Princess’s 17th birthday marks an important stage in her life: only one more year and the possibility of a Regency vanishes like an evil cloud. This is the perfect time for us, who are loyal, to take thought for the future of the dear, dear child. An immediate alliance is out of the question; she must reach her 18th birthday, perhaps even more – her health must decide that; but the Princess might perhaps do well, for the sake of composure and peace of mind, to find a choice and firmly anchor herself to it . . .
Thus, in May the Coburg Princes travelled to England with their father from Rotterdam. ‘It must be a sine qua non’, Stockmar wrote to Leopold, ‘that the object of the visit must be kept strictly from the Princess as well as from the Prince, so as to leave them completely at their ease’.
Victoria’s account in her Journal (May 18th, 1836) of her first meeting with Albert deserves to be given in its entirety:
At a ¼ to 2 we went down into the Hall, to receive my Uncle Ernest, Duke of Saxe Coburg Gotha, and my cousins, Ernest and Albert, his sons. My Uncle was here, now 5 years ago, and is looking extremely well. Ernest is as tall as Ferdinand and Augustus; he has dark hair, and fine dark eyes and eyebrows, but the nose and mouth are not good; he has a most kind honest and intelligent expression in his countenance, and he has a very good figure. Albert, who is just as tall as Ernest, but stouter, is extremely handsome; his hair is about the same colour as mine; his eyes are large and blue, and he has a beautiful nose, and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth; but the charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful; c’est à la fois full of goodness and sweetness, and very clever and intelligent.
Albert’s immediate reactions on meeting Victoria are not recorded, but they can hardly have been as enthusiastic, to judge by his letters. The crossing had not been agreeable – ‘the journey to England has given me such a disgust for the sea that I do not like even to think of it’, he wrote – and he wrote to his step-mother on June 1st that he had been suffering from a bilious fever. ‘The climate of this country, the different way of living, and the late hours, do not agree with me’. Nor did the succession of dinners, concerts, and leveés to which the young Princes were invited and compelled to attend. ‘You can well imagine that I had many hard battles to fight against sleepiness during these late entertainments’, he reported with feeling. This disability for public life was to prove enduring; ‘he never took kindly to guest dinners, balls, or the common evening amusements of the fashionable world; and went through them as a duty which his position imposed upon him, than as a source of pleasure or enjoyment’, his first biographer and secretary wrote, on which Queen Victoria commented defensively: ‘Yet nothing, at the same time, could exceed the kind attention he paid to every one, frequently standing the whole evening that no one might be neglected’.
The Duchess of Kent gave ‘a brilliant ball here at Kensington Palace’ at which the Duke of Wellington was present. The Princes visited the Duke of Northumberland at Sion House, and saw ‘at last some of the sights of London’. ‘Dear Aunt [Kent] is very kind to us, and does everything she can to please us; and our cousin [Victoria] also is very amiable’, Albert recorded, with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm.
Princess Victoria was pleased and impressed by her cousins whom she described as ‘very amiable, very kind and good, and extremely merry, just as young people ought to be; with all that they are extremely sensible and fond of occupation. Albert is extremely good-looking, which Ernest certainly is not, but he has a most good-natured, honest and intelligent countenance’. Her half-sister, Princess Feodora, preferred Ernest to Albert, but Ernest – perhaps as a direct result of the strongly expressed views of Leopold and Stockmar – was never seriously considered as a possible suitor by anyone except himself.
It was on this first visit to England that Albert met Benjamin Disraeli. His views have not been recorded, but they were probably very similar to Ernest’s, who commented upon him as ‘a vain young Jew of remarkably radical tendencies. He carried his left arm in a black sling, which peculiarity was sneered at by his enemies, who said that he only did it to make himself interesting’.
Prince Albert made an immediate and excellent impression on others – and not least upon King William, who both liked him and referred to him as one of the most handsome young men he had ever met. Indeed, the more one studies this neglected Monarch, the more one warms to him. Rough and blunt he may have been – and was – but his kindnesses to his obvious successor were unaffected by his loathing for her mother, and his equal detestation for the Coburgs did not prevent him from quickly developing a fair and very generous opinion of Prince Albert. For the King’s goodness towards her, Victoria was always deeply grateful. ‘He had a truly kind heart’, she wrote of him many years later, ‘. . . and of his kindness to herself and his wish that she should be duly prepared for the duties to which she was so early called, the Queen can only speak in terms of affectionate gratitude’. The formal meeting between the King and Albert – at a Royal Ball – reflected immense credit on the very nervous and unwell young German Prince and the tired, suspicious, anti-Coburg and irascible King. They liked and respected each other at once.
Princess Victoria was impressed by the fact that both her cousins played the piano excellently, and that Albert was a gifted amateur artist. But there are two particularly interesting aspects of Victoria’s comments on Albert. As a person particularly susceptible to beauty, she was very struck at once by the fact that Albert was a very handsome young man, although not yet as handsome as he was to become. But also, in a life that conspicuously lacked fun – ‘I am very fond of pleasant society’, she had written to Leopold on March 14th 1837, ‘and we have been for the last three months immured within our old [Kensington] Palace. I longed sadly for some gaiety’ – she responded with especial warmth to Albert’s lively humour combined with a seriousness and reflectiveness which she noted in contrast with Ernest. Both were ‘very, very merry and gay and happy, like young people ought to be’. Those who remorselessly insist on the alleged misery of Albert’s childhood must avert their gaze from these, and many other, indications of the opposite.
The visit was marred by the knowledge of the King’s deep anger against the Coburgs and by Prince Albert’s inability to cope with the whirl of the celebrations and the insupportable late hours which the strange English kept. At the birthday ball itself he nearly fainted – ‘turned as pale as ashes’, as Princess Victoria recorded – and took to his bed for a day; on at least two other occasions he had to excuse himself and leave early, prompting Victoria to write to Leopold, ‘I have only now to beg you, my dearest Uncle, to take care of one, now so dear to me’. It is not difficult to detect a clear note of disappointment, even of disapproval, in Victoria’s accounts of Albert’s regular ailments and disappearances. ‘I am very sorry to say’, she wrote somewhat tartly to Leopold, ‘that we have an invalid in the house in the person of Albert, who, though much better today, has had a smart bilious attack. He was not allowed to leave his room all day yesterday, but by dint of starvation, he is again restored to society, but looks pale and delicate’. She immensely enjoyed the celebrations, and after another Ball, when she danced until dawn, she felt herself ‘all the better for it next day’. ‘Poor dear Albert’, however, did not. ‘Poor dear Albert came to breakfast without eating anything, looking weak and delicate’; ‘Poor dear Albert was unable to leave his rooms’.
Prince Albert’s emotions on this, his first visit to England, were understandably very mixed. He was evidently now aware of the strong hopes of the Coburgs and Stockmar, and could not have been unconscious of the fact that Ernest was extremely interested himself in marriage with Victoria – an interest that had to be emphatically suppressed by Leop
old and Stockmar. The clear and resolute hostility of King William to his aunt and uncle, and the harsh intrigues in the British Royal Family also shadowed the occasion. Beyond the political difficulties he disliked the food, the weather, and the succession of formal dinners with their associated dreadful hours. His English, although technically excellent, had never been tested so severely before. But it is also clear that he enjoyed the company of the young people invited for the celebrations, and was very struck by Victoria’s vivacity and attractiveness. There is no evidence at all that his feelings for her went beyond this point at this stage. For her part, Victoria wrote to Leopold that Albert ‘possesses every quality that could be required to make one perfectly happy’, but, also, one only detects cousinly affection, pleasurable amusement, and regard.
Thus, on neither side were there any indications of deeper emotions. As Prince Albert subsequently wrote in a personal memoir: ‘Princess Victoria and myself, both at the age of 17, were much pleased with each other, but not a word in allusion to the future passed either between us, or with the Duchess of Kent’. Victoria wrote to Leopold after Albert’s departure, saying that she accepted him as the husband whom he had selected for her, but did not consider herself bound to marriage in the near future. It was a tactful letter, pleasing to Leopold, yet clearly guarded, and Victoria subsequently made it clear that she did not consider herself committed to Albert at all. ‘He is so sensible, so kind and so good and so amiable too. He has besides the pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance that you could wish to see’. Leopold – and Stockmar – clearly understood that cousinly affection, although successfully created by this first meeting, was all that had been achieved.
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