Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  From Prince Albert’s letters and her enchantingly artless and touching account, they lived only for each other during that month, to the point when the Queen apologised to Melbourne for being unable to think of anything else than her own happiness (to which Melbourne tactfully replied, ‘Very natural’). ‘He seems perfection’, Victoria wrote to Leopold, ‘and I think that I have the prospect of very great happiness before me. I love him more than I can say, and shall do everything in my power to render this sacrifice (for such in my opinion it is) as small as I can . . . These last few days have passed like a dream to me, and I am so much bewildered by it all that I know hardly how to write; but I do feel very happy’. There were frequent dances, which Albert subsequently remembered with joy when ‘I was flying with you through that lovely ballroom’, and on one occasion Victoria showed him her Journal for the day of their engagement which deeply moved him. There was much passionate kissing, laughter, conversation, and happiness. The glow from Queen Victoria’s Journal is almost palpable. As Cecil Woodham-Smith has rightly written: ‘One of the most celebrated romances in history had begun, the Queen had fallen in love’.24 So, also, had Prince Albert. ‘Yes – I am now actually a bridegroom!’ he wrote to Löwenstein, ‘and about the 4th of February hope to see myself united to her I love!’

  * * *

  17 Introduction to The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol. I, pp. 27–28.

  18 A very good example of this was Rowland Hill’s revolutionary proposal in 1837 for a uniform charge of one penny for a half-ounce letter without reference to distance. In 1839 the Government proposed four pence, but under pressure retreated, and in January 1840 the ‘penny post’ was introduced. Letter-writing ceased to be the expensive prerogative of the rich; in 1839 the total number of letters in Great Britain and Ireland was eighty-two million, by 1875 it was over a thousand million. Combined with the dramatic expansion of the railway system, and consequently national newspapers, this was a revolution indeed.

  19 Disraeli: Endymion (1881).

  20 Longford, Queen Victoria, pp. 127–8.

  21 Ibid., p. 127.

  22 The Duchess of Kent.

  23 ‘The eye sees Heaven Open,/The heart floats on a sea of blessedness’ (Schiller: Song of the Bell).

  24 Woodham-Smith, op. cit., p. 182.

  chapter four

  ‘Only the Husband’

  With his engagement still a closely kept secret, Prince Albert left London on November 24th and discussed his situation, and specifically the arrangements for his future establishment, with Leopold and Stockmar at Wiesbaden. Leopold reported to Queen Victoria that her fiancé was looking particularly well: ‘It proves that happiness is an excellent remedy, and keeps people in better health than any other. He is much attached to you, and modest when speaking of you. He is besides in great spirits, full of gaiety and fun’. Stockmar, for so long so critical of Prince Albert, now wrote to Lehzen on December 15th that ‘the more I see of the Prince the better I esteem and love him’, and, while he did not underestimate the difficulties facing Albert now believed that ‘if he really possesses the love of the Queen and the respect of the nation, I will answer for it, that after every storm he will come safely into port’. One promising sign was the warmth of the letters to Albert from the Duchess of Kent; well aware of the severe tensions between her and Victoria, Albert’s letters were masterpieces of affection and tact. To Queen Victoria herself he wrote that ‘That I am the object of so much love and devotion often comes over me as something I can hardly realise. My prevailing feeling is, What am I, that such happiness should be mine? For excess of happiness it is for me to know, that I am so dear to you’.

  The public announcement in London of the engagement on November 23rd was greeted with enthusiasm in Coburg and Gotha – where Prince Albert arrived at the end of November – with the conspicuous exception of grandmother Gotha, who was, Albert reported to Victoria, ‘red-eyed’ when he went to see her. But in England, after the initial excitement, there were less favourable popular reactions than in Coburg. This was not to be wondered at, although the Queen was astonished and angered. She accepted Melbourne’s strongly worded advice that Albert should not receive the title of King Consort, which she had proposed, but the criticism of her choice for her husband was wholly unexpected. Prince Albert was not generally regarded as an appropriately important husband for the Queen of England, and his youth, the fact that he was Queen Victoria’s first cousin, was German, and a Saxe-Coburg at that, was the nephew of the Duchess of Kent and King Leopold – those highly controversial and not widely popular personalities – was without any wealth, and was generally unknown beyond these unflattering facts generated considerable hostility and critical questioning.

  Stockmar arrived in England, as the Prince’s Plenipotentiary, to negotiate the marriage contract and arrangements with Palmerston. ‘The ultra-Tories are filled with prejudices against the Prince’, he noted, ‘in which I can clearly trace the influence of Ernest Augustus of Hanover. They give out that he is a Radical and an infidel, and say that George of Cambridge, or a Prince of Orange, ought to have been the Consort of the Queen. On the whole, however, the mere determination of the Queen to marry, and the satisfaction thereby given to what was a very universal desire (for the idea that the King of Hanover and his line might succeed to the throne was very distasteful to the people) has raised the Queen’s popularity, and will for a while lend some strength to the very weak Ministry. The public is tolerably indifferent as to the person of the bridegroom; but I hear it generally complained that he is young’.

  Even more seriously, it was rumoured that the Prince was a Roman Catholic and had ‘Papalistic’ tendencies, as the Declaration of the marriage prepared by Ministers had unwisely, but deliberately, omitted to mention that he was a Protestant Prince. The Queen told Albert (November 21st) that the Declaration was ‘very simple and nice’, but although it had been courteously received when she read it, with great nervousness, to the Privy Council on November 23rd the glaring absence of reference to Prince Albert’s Protestantism had been swiftly noted.

  The uproar must be seen in its context. A vast and fundamental convulsion had gripped the Church of England when John Henry Newman, the saintly and influential Vicar of St. Mary’s Church, Oxford, published Tract Number 90 of a series of ‘Tracts for the Times’ whose contributors included Keble, Pusey, and Richard Froude, brother of the historian. Although the ‘Tractarian’ movement had caused widespread controversy, it was Number 90 that had caused the greatest excitement and division, because Newman’s fundamental point was that it was possible for an individual in all honesty to subscribe to the articles of the Church of England while yet holding many of the doctrines of the Church of Rome. Oxford responded violently to this heresy, the Vice-Chancellor and heads of houses meeting in solemn conclave to denounce and censure Newman, and the reverberations of the long and bitter battles over Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s once again thundered, and not least in Parliament. Prince Albert was the unwitting, and totally innocent, victim of the deep fears of the Protestant Establishment.

  The Prince himself set out the impeccable Protestant and non-Catholic history of his family on this matter in a long letter to Queen Victoria on December 7th, and Leopold had warned her to make this clear in public as any doubts would ‘give rise’ to interminable growling. On religious matters one cannot be too prudent, because one can never see what passionate people will make of such a thing’. But, looking nervously over their shoulders at their crucial Catholic Irish votes, Melbourne and his colleagues took a different view. As Prince Albert’s uncles, Ferdinand and Leopold himself – in his second marriage to Princess Louise d’Orleans, daughter of Louis Philippe, King of France – had married Catholics, the fears were not wholly groundless. The result was that the matter was fiercely debated in both Houses of Parliament, and in the Lords Wellington successfully moved an ame
ndment to the Congratulatory Address to insert the word ‘Protestant’, justifiably charging the Government with attempting to placate their Irish supporters in the Commons by the deliberate omission. He did not raise himself in the Queen’s estimation by adding that ‘It appears to me that the public ought to know something beyond the name of Prince Albert’, although it was in fact a characteristically blunt and fair point. So heated did the matter become that Palmerston wrote urgently to Stockmar ‘in great haste’ to seek categorical assurances on the matter, which were at once given. ‘God knows’, Stockmar later wrote, ‘with the prevailing fanaticism, what horrible absurdity might not have resulted’.

  This was a dismal beginning, which reflected considerable discredit upon Melbourne and his Ministers and plunged him and them even lower in Albert’s estimation, although not in that of the Queen, while also significantly increasing his already considerable and understandable unhappiness at the prospect of leaving his country, family, and friends. This gloom, which dominates his letters at this difficult time, was certainly not eased when a storm arose over the issue of his future income.

  Again, the Melbourne Government bungled the matter wretchedly. Taking the precedents of recent consorts, including that of the much-criticised Leopold, Ministers proposed to Parliament an annuity of £50,000 for Prince Albert without consulting the Opposition leaders, and the dismayed Albert accordingly found himself the victim of the intense passions of British party politics yet again. The Whigs accused the Tories and Radicals of lack of devotion to the Crown, while the latter responded with considerable vehemence on the fruitful topics of the arrogance of Ministers and their insensitiveness to the economic distress in the country.

  There was clearly another factor, with Leopold’s example still very much in the public memory, and unkindly exposed in a broad-sheet:

  He comes the bridegroom of Victoria’s choice,

  The nominee of Lehzen’s vulgar voice;

  He comes to take for better or for worse

  England’s fat Queen and England’s fatter purse.

  A motion by the Radical Joseph Hume to reduce the grant to £21,000 was defeated in the Commons, but one to fix it at £30,000 proposed by the flamboyant Tory Colonel Sibthorp was carried by 262 votes to 158, with Peel and his Tory colleagues on the front bench voting for the reduction. As Melbourne frankly admitted to Stockmar, ‘The Prince will be angry at the Tories. But it is not the Tories only whom the Prince has to thank for cutting down his allowance. It is rather the Tories, the Radicals, and a great proportion of our own people’. The Queen, however, said that the episode and the Press comments had made her hate the Tories even more. She wrote in her Journal for January 1st 1840: ‘From the Tories, good Lord deliver us’.

  Even worse was to come. The Government calmly presented to Parliament a Bill to grant Prince Albert naturalisation, but it also accorded him precedence for life after the Queen in Parliament or elsewhere as she might decide. This was Queen Victoria’s direct personal wish, after Melbourne had ruled out her proposal that he should be ‘King Consort’, but again there had been no attempt at Party consultation, and what was constitutionally a difficult situation that should have been recognised as such at the outset and seriously discussed before legislation was introduced now became, again, a political matter. As Prince Albert would rank above the Princes of the Royal Blood, the consent of Queen Victoria’s uncles was necessary. Sussex and Cambridge did agree, although not immediately, but Cumberland, now King of Hanover,25 violently objected, and persuaded Cambridge to withdraw his consent while also stirring up the Tories.

  Wellington, supported by Brougham, now implacably hostile to Melbourne, opposed the Bill in the Lords on the absolutely justified constitutional grounds that such sweeping powers should be granted by Parliament and not simply by the Queen. Ministers were disconcerted and the debate hurriedly adjourned. Unreasonably, the Queen again blamed the ‘abominable infamous Tories’. ‘I grew quite frantic’, she wrote in her Journal, ‘declared I never would forgive it, never would look at the Duke again, etc. “Don’t be angry”, Lord M. said calmly. I was quite furious and raged away . . . As long as I live I’ll never forgive these infernal scoundrels, with Peel at their head’. She considered it an ‘act of personal spite!!’ by the ‘vile, confounded, infernal Tories’, and resolved that Wellington should not attend her wedding. Melbourne was more phlegmatic, but the Queen’s wrath was intense:

  I was perfectly frantic – this wicked old foolish Duke, these confounded Tories, oh! may they be well punished for this outrageous insult! I cried with rage . . . Poor dear Albert, how cruelly are they ill-using that dearest Angel! Monsters! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!

  Eventually it was agreed to drop the offending section from the Bill and, at the suggestion of Greville, by Letters Patent issued on March 5th – this time, with all-Party agreement – it was provided that Prince Albert should henceforth ‘upon all occasions, and in all meetings, except when otherwise provided by Act of Parliament, have, hold, and enjoy place, pre-eminence, and precedence next to Her Majesty’. He was to receive no title, and it was not until July 1857 that he formally was granted, again by Letters Patent, the title of Prince Consort – long after it had become his universal, but wholly unofficial, title.

  The Queen had had little intimation that matters would be so difficult. ‘Your rank will be settled just before you come over, as also your rank in the Army’, she had written confidently to Albert on November 21st; ‘Everything will be very easily arranged’. She strongly resisted Leopold’s suggestion that he should receive a Peerage, and wrote to him with severity on November 26th that ‘the English are very jealous at the idea of Albert’s having any political power, or meddling with affairs here – which I know from himself he will not do’. To Albert she wrote directly on November 27th on the same lines, but admonitions such as these – which read somewhat strangely in the light of later events – were very different from the issue of the position and rank of her future husband. Thus, she regarded the disputes over this matter as not only personally insulting to herself and to her fiancé but also as demeaning to the position of the Sovereign. A complex woman, who in private was not only amusing but also modest, she was very different when the status of the Sovereign was involved, and the refusal of her clear wishes – only resolved by Greville’s opportune memorandum on the use of the Letters Patent procedure – was seen by her as a manifest attempt by political opponents in Parliament to diminish her powers.

  Prince Albert had been reasonably philosophical about the cutting of his annuity, remarking sadly that it would tend to limit his opportunities of assisting artists and men of learning and science, which he had already marked down as a personal priority, but the uproar over his title angered and upset him intensely, while the Queen was incensed. ‘The Tories really are very astonishing’, she informed Albert (January 21st); ‘as they cannot and dare not attack us in Parliament, they do everything that they can to be personally rude to me . . . The Whigs are the only safe and loyal people, and the Radicals will also rally round their Queen to protect her from the Tories; but it is a curious sight to see those, who as Tories, used to pique themselves upon their excessive loyalty, doing everything to degrade their young Sovereign in the eyes of the people . . .’ ‘We had much difficulty on this subject’, she wrote in 1856, ‘much bad feeling was shown, several members of the Royal Family showed bad grace in giving precedence to the Prince, and the late King of Hanover positively resisted doing so’. This was to cause endless difficulties and several embarrassments abroad. ‘The only legal position in Europe, according to international law, which the husband of the Queen of England enjoyed’, the Queen wrote, ‘was that of a younger brother of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and this merely because the English law did not know of him. This is derogatory to the dignity of the Crown of England’.

  It was also another stinging rebuff to the Melbourne Government, although not s
een as such by Queen Victoria, and, coming immediately after the fiascoes over the allegations about the Prince’s religion and his annuity, demonstrated that the forthcoming marriage and the monarchy itself were seriously unpopular. Not unreasonably, Albert – who first read of the annuity vote in a newspaper in Aix – drew the ominous personal conclusion that ‘the people of England were not pleased with the marriage’ and particularly with himself, and wrote to Victoria of ‘the very unpleasant effect produced upon me by the news’, but he added touchingly, that, ‘while I possess your love, they cannot make me unhappy’.