Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  But it was not only as a lover but as a husband, friend, and companion that Victoria’s deep dependence upon him began in that first year. Subsequently, she recalled how he quietly organised their day:

  At this time the Prince and Queen seem to have spent their day much as follows:

  They breakfasted at nine, and took a walk every morning soon afterwards. Then came the usual amount of business (far less heavy, however, than now); besides which they drew and etched a great deal, which was a source of great amusement, having the plates bit in the house.

  Luncheon followed at the usual hour of two o’clock. Lord Melbourne who was generally staying in the house, came to the Queen in the afternoon, and between five and six the Prince usually drove her out in a pony phaeton. If the Prince did not drive the Queen, he rode, in which case she took a drive with the Duchess of Kent or the ladies.

  The Prince also read aloud most days to the Queen. The dinner was at eight o’clock, and always with the company. In the evening the Prince frequently played at double chess, a game of which he was very fond, and which he played extremely well.

  Queen Victoria ‘tried to get rid of the bad custom, prevailing only in this country, of the gentlemen remaining, after the ladies had left, in the dining room.’ But Melbourne advised against it, and the Prince himself thought it better not to make any change. The compromise was that the gentlemen were permitted only five minutes at the table after the ladies withdrew. What Albert did change, however, were the hours of such dinners, and he gradually achieved his objective of eliminating the, to him, loathsome practice and custom of the English of sitting and conversing after dinner until the early hours of the morning. To the dismay and surprise of many, matters concluded by eleven at the latest. He was elected to the Royal Society, and made a Privy Councillor on his twenty-first birthday (‘my thoughts were naturally much at The Rosenau’, he wrote); his earnest studies in English law and politics continued, as did his firm pruning of the Household and the lazy and indifferent Royal staff. From these activities he made substantial savings, and his energies also made the Windsor Home Farm a profit-making concern. In this period Prince Albert made some enquiries about the state of the finances of the Duchy of Cornwall, which revealed that the income was £36,000 a year, of which £12,000 was spent on administrative costs. Stockmar (September 13th) advised him ‘to avoid going too deep into details, which will only bewilder you. It is for you to give only the impulse, to establish sound principles, and this once done to hold fast, in everybody’s dispute, to these principles with steel-like sternness . . . The fundamental principle to which you have to hold fast is that the Duchy is altogether a private affair with which neither the Government nor its ministers have, or ought to have, anything to do.’ The Prince followed this counsel closely, and with Anson’s advice began to drastically improve the income, and reduce the administrative costs, of the Duchy of Cornwall.

  There was another aspect about life in England that baffled him, and which he disliked – the English Sunday, whose gloomy boredom irked him. He was worried by ‘the want of amusements for common people of an innocent class’, the lack of pleasure grounds, and public entertainments. ‘One thing I am sure of’, he wrote to Sir Robert Peel in 1846, ‘& that is, that the English people generally can enjoy themselves with propriety & are not so dull & cold as the Saints of the day wish to represent & make them’. When the opening of Osborne was celebrated with a huge dinner to the workmen and their families he organised music and dancing, and he recorded with pleasure ‘that everybody seemed in the highest spirits, shouting & laughing’. Even at this early stage he was thinking of steps that could open up to ordinary people the pleasures of music, art, and gardens then the privilege of the very few. Unhappily, the English Sunday was to defeat him, and also Queen Victoria, whose dislike of ‘a Sunday Face’ became well known in her Court. But he was to make progress in his other objectives. ‘Albertian England’, far from being calculatedly earnest and glum, was intended to be cheerful and relaxed. No one can understand the Great Exhibition of 1851, or Prince Albert, without grasping this essential point.

  Buckingham Palace had replaced St. James’s as the Sovereign’s London residence, and after years of disputes between patrons and architects, considerable press and Parliamentary criticism, and very heavy expenditure, was habitable when Queen Victoria came to the throne, but was neither comfortable nor secure. A twelve-year-old boy was found in the Palace in 1838 having lived there for a year without having been discovered, and in December 1840 Edmund Jones, aged seventeen, was discovered asleep under a sofa in the Queen’s sitting room, and it was not his first intrusion. Indeed, after severe punishment of three months’ imprisonment and spells on the still-preserved barbarity of the treadmill he broke in again, was captured again, returned to the treadmill and eventually sent into the Navy. With the Queen the target of assassination attempts, and the possibility of any of the Royal children being kidnapped, these episodes reflected well neither on the Royal servants nor the ramshackle building itself.

  The situation had its elements of pure farce. The Lord Steward and the Lord Chamberlain had their functions, however ill-defined, that were in practical terms irreconcilable. Territorial disputes were common; the Lord Chamberlain allegedly had control of the rooms at Buckingham Palace, while the Lord Steward dominated the kitchens. The insides of the windows were cleaned by the minions of the Lord Chamberlain or the Lord Steward, whereas the outsides were the responsibility of the Office of Woods and Forests. When Queen Victoria asked for a fire she was told that the Lord Steward’s functionaries laid it but that the Lord Chamberlain’s lit it. The result was that the Queen of England had no fire. And there was another authority – that of the Master of the Horse, to whom the footmen and junior servants of the Palace owed their allegiance. Prince Albert discovered an item called ‘Red Room Wine’, which transpired to trace back to the days when the Red Room at Windsor Castle had been used as a guard room and wine had been provided at the public expense to the officer on duty. The list of petty corruptions, ancient and profitable usages, and incompetence was very formidable.

  The gradual transformation of the Palace from what Queen Victoria reasonably described as ‘a sad state’ was lengthy, expensive, and controversial. The Prince’s minatory letters to Ministers about the Palace – ‘a disgrace to the Sovereign and the nation’ he described it to Peel – were detailed and frequent. The problem was, as always, money, and Albert noted that whenever he raised the matter Peel ‘puts on his wooden face’. But although Ministers were grudging, and there was a constant barrage of criticism from Radical M.P.s in the Commons and in the newspapers, improvements were made under Thomas Cubitt and Edward Blore in the 1840s and by James Pennethorne in the early 1850s27 which resolved the most acute difficulties, provided much better accommodation for the Royal Family, their staff, and State visitors, but it was never admired architecturally nor loved by its occupants. The removal of the Marble Arch from outside the Palace to its present position, when the somewhat gloomy new façade was completed, and Pennethorne’s new Ball Room, were perhaps the most significant artistic external improvements, and Prince Albert was to achieve much with the interior and the grounds. But it was never to be regarded by any of the family as ‘home’.

  The administration of the Palace was chaotic. Uxbridge was regarded by Albert as indolent and insolent and overbearing, and as long as Lehzen reigned there would be problems. But there were others, of temperament. Prince Albert was a countryman, with a quickly formed and abiding dislike of London, its Society, its entertainments, and late hours, and the condition of the Palace was not calculated to diminish these hostilities. ‘In a small house’, he wrote somewhat wistfully to Ernest in March 1841, ‘there is more cheerfulness to be found than there is in the big cold world, in which most people have hearts of stone’. Victoria, in total contrast, did not initially share Albert’s profound feeling for nature and a pastoral and quiet life. She was t
he Queen, she was young, she was attractive, and she loved dancing and flattery. Her subordination of what to her were real pleasures to her husband’s craving for a calm, ordered, and rural routine was to be a major personal sacrifice, but she also shared Albert’s strong preference for Windsor, which became their real home. If Buckingham Palace was, regarded from any consideration of comfort, efficiency, or attractiveness, notably deficient, George IV had left to his successors a transformed Windsor Castle. He and his chief architect Sir Jeffrey Wyatt – who had with the King’s puzzled permission, changed his name to Wyatville to mark the signal honour – ‘found a workhouse and left a palace.’ He found ‘the coldest house, rooms and passages that ever existed’; he left a warm, dry, comfortable, well-appointed house.28 To describe George IV’s Windsor Castle as ‘a house’ is somewhat misleading, when one contemplates the magnificence of the State and private apartments, the glittering Waterloo Chamber, and the pictures and furniture and statues that George IV acquired and which Wyatville used to such wonderful advantage. George IV saw it as ‘his Versailles’, a palace appropriate for the Sovereign of England, where, as has rightly been written, ‘he brought together once more in one great building the royal medieval past, the long centuries between, and the living present.’29 There has been no need to make any significant change from George IV’s time to this. It is unquestionably, the finest and most satisfying of all the palaces of the British monarchy. When the Court left Windsor to return to the draughty, uncomfortable, and lamentably ill-managed Buckingham Palace on January 2nd 1841 the Queen noted the event with keen and heartfelt regret. This was, on the surface, a small victory for Albert; it was to prove an enduring one.

  But perhaps the most important of his achievements in this early period was to reconcile his wife with her mother, a difficult task – made even more difficult by Melbourne’s views, soured by his experience of the Conroy faction, and which prompted him to describe the Duchess to her daughter as ‘a liar and a hypocrite’ – which he achieved with great delicacy and skill, and the eventual removal of Lehzen. As it had been Lehzen who had been a major cause of the rift – and certainly symbolised it – the latter should have stemmed naturally from the first achievement, but did not. Lehzen told Anson, that the Prince ‘had slighted her in the most marked manner and she was too proud not to resent it’. Albert actually told her to leave, but she refused on the grounds that he had no power to turn her out of the Queen’s house – a peculiarly infuriating and offensive response. Prince Albert referred to her in correspondence as ‘the House Dragon spitting fire’, and, when she had jaundice, somewhat cruelly, as ‘the Yellow Lady’. Leopold backed Albert strongly, as did Anson, but Melbourne advised caution. To this Anson responded that Lehzen ‘was always in the Queen’s path, pointing and exaggerating every little fault of the Prince, constantly misrepresenting him, constantly trying to undermine the Queen’s affections and making herself appear a martyr, ready to suffer and put up with every sort of indignity for the Queen’s sake. The effect of this state of things cannot be viewed but with alarm’. There is no question that Anson faithfully reflected his master’s views. But, so strong were Queen Victoria’s memories of Lehzen’s loyalty in difficult times that she emphatically supported the Baroness against her husband, and the subject became one of such tension between the couple that Albert decided to bide his time. Leopold wrote to Victoria to say that Charlotte had always regarded him as ‘her lord and master’, and Ernest, who stayed for two months after the wedding, noted that they ‘could not yield to each other’. Prince Albert informed Stockmar that ‘I have come to be extremely pleased with Victoria during the past few months. She has only twice had the sulks’, but the reality, as Anson noted, was of two strong-minded young people deeply in love and yet engaged in a battle of wills. ‘Victoria is annoyed that I should disturb her with such quarrels, she takes everything about the Baroness so much to heart and feels she ought to be her champion’. It was Melbourne’s view that if Prince Albert made the matter a choice between himself and Lehzen the Queen, with her ‘determination and obstinacy of character’, would choose Lehzen. This was unquestionably a gross exaggeration, but there was sufficient truth in it to make Prince Albert and Anson draw back – for the present.

  The remarkable year of 1840 ended with the birth, on November 22nd, of, in Victoria’s words, ‘a perfect little child . . . but alas a girl and not a boy, as we both had so hoped and wished for. We were, I am afraid, sadly disappointed’. ‘I should have preferred a boy’, Albert wrote frankly to Ernest, ‘yet as it is, I thank Heaven’.30 Albert was deeply solicitous, his wife recovered rapidly from her confinement, and the baby – christened Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa at once and always known as Vicky, on February 10th 1841, the anniversary of their marriage – was healthy.

  Their first Christmas together was spent at Windsor Castle, with Christmas trees, decorations, and presents. The former German custom was little known in Britain until it was popularized by Albert, to the point that it became believed that he had actually introduced it into his adopted country, when in fact that credit belongs to Queen Charlotte. The Queen had begun to relent in her attitude to the political position of her husband, and in a brief flurry of excitement and tension over the chronic Eastern Question in August had, on Melbourne’s advice, shown Albert all the dispatches, and he had submitted detailed memoranda to the Prime Minister; ‘he seldom answers me’, Albert wrote to his father, ‘but I have the satisfaction of seeing him act entirely in accordance with what I have said’. After the birth of his daughter he had been given full access to Cabinet and other confidential papers for the first time, and had become, in Anson’s words, ‘in fact, tho’ not in name, Her Majesty’s Private Secretary’. Lehzen was resisting strongly; ‘in her’, Anson wrote, ‘we must be always subject to troubled waters’.

  But it was a very happy first Christmas, with skating on the frozen pond at Frogmore, Christmas trees, presents, and the new baby. In her Journal Queen Victoria reflected with emotion on ‘the solid pleasures of a peaceful quiet yet merry life . . . with my inestimable husband and friend’.

  * * *

  25 The Kingdom of Hanover, under the Salic law, could not pass to a woman, so Cumberland had inherited it on the death of his brother King William, and was, until Queen Victoria had a child, heir to the British throne. It was this fact which tempered popular opposition to the Queen’s engagement, and had a considerable influence upon politicians.

  26 In fact the ball was never found. Oxford was guilty but insane and committed for life.

  27 The changes to the façade overlooking the Mall included the famous balcony, first used by the Queen and Prince to respond to the crowds at the opening of the Great Exhibition in 1851. The balcony was Prince Albert’s suggestion.

  28 Owen Morshead: Windsor Castle, p. 96.

  29 J. H. Plumb and Huw Weldon: Royal Heritage, p. 242.

  30 His irritation both with the formalities of religion and obsequious courtiers was never better demonstrated than in his testy exchange with a Canon of Windsor who sought permission to offer a special prayer for the Queen in labour.

  ‘You pray five times already; it is too much’.

  ‘Can we pray, Sir, too much for Her Majesty?’

  ‘Not too heartily, but too often’.

  chapter five

  The Turning-Point

  The struggle for supremacy between Prince Albert and Lehzen caused the darkest hours in his marriage with Queen Victoria. It coincided with the decline and disintegration of the Melbourne Government and the rise of the accursed Tories, and Queen Victoria’s morale was lowered further when she discovered that she was pregnant again very soon after the birth of Vicky. ‘You cannot really wish me to be the Mama d’une nombreuse famille’ she wrote to Leopold with some feeling on January 5th 1841, and many years later she wrote to Vicky herself that ‘what made me absolutely miserable was to hav
e the first two years of my married life utterly spoilt by this occupation’. ‘Victoria is not very happy about it’, Albert wrote to Ernest in March, informing his brother of the news, with considerable understatement. ‘One feels so pinned down – one’s wings clipped’, she wrote.

  Low and depressed as she was, there were also signs, which Melbourne noted with concern, of jealousy at her husband’s developing position, and particularly his contacts with the Opposition Tories. Prince Albert and Peel, each shy and awkward men of exceptional ability, seriousness, and dedication, had already developed a strong and enduring regard for each other which Queen Victoria, still obsessed by her Whig prejudices and memories, neither comprehended nor shared. ‘I study the politics of the day with great industry’, Albert wrote to his father in April. ‘I speak quite openly with the Ministers on all subjects, so as to gain information . . . and I endeavour to be of as much use to Victoria in her position as I can’.

  It was with considerable dismay that she viewed the political situation at the beginning of 1841. In the inimitable phrase of Kitson Clark: ‘It was in February that the Government began to give signs of collapse, like the first menacing cracks of a hewn tree’.31 Its position in Parliament became more precarious as the Conservatives won a series of by-elections, and the dilemma of whether or not to capitalise on the popular fervour of the Anti-Corn Law League exercised Ministers throughout the spring. The problem here was that very few of the masses who attended the rallies of the League had votes, and in the counties the landowners and farmers who had votes were alarmed and hostile to the campaign of the League, now fortified by the Report of the Committee on Import Duties, which was widely circulated by the League and made an immediate impact on the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Francis Baring, and a larger one on Peel. Eventually, both political parties prevaricated. Baring proposed reductions in the duties on imported sugar and timber, and after Lord John Russell had unsuccessfully put forward a sliding scale for imported corn, it was decided to propose a lower fixed duty. Seeing the trap, Peel attacked on the issue of sugar and dodged the much more lethal one of corn. When Ministers proposed a debate at the beginning of June on the Corn Laws to flush Peel out he at once tabled a motion of no confidence which had priority, and on which the debate began on May 27th.