As the good Herr Florschütz proceeded with kind but Teutonic vigour to educate Albert, he was guided in his task by Baron Christian Stockmar. As Private Secretary and physician to Albert’s uncle, Leopold King of the Belgians, Stockmar was the Machiavellian figure who would long lurk in the shadows of Albert’s life – envisioning a future role for him leading the thrones of Britain and a united Germany in the cause of constitutional monarchy. The vehicle for this would be marriage to Leopold’s niece Victoria, heir to the British throne, and Albert’s future life was already being mapped out for him when he was in his early teens. The subordinate, if not redundant role of consort was not the future that the Prince would have wished for himself, but as the second son of the ruler of a minor duchy the size of Lancashire and with no throne coming his way, marriage to Princess Victoria was, as Stockmar told him, a responsible task ‘upon the fulfillment of which his honour and happiness depend[ed]’. Such cold logic was the stock-in-trade of the punctilious Stockmar. It would shape the austere, intellectual Albert’s mind for the roles to come, so much so that he would later tell the Queen, ‘To me a long closely connected train of reasoning is like a beautiful strain of music.’ Stockmar’s rationale lent the indelible mark of dry, Germanic formulas to Albert’s abstract attitude not just to the masses and the human condition, but also to his approach to history and politics – a fact that would later put him at odds with the instinctive, empirical way in which they were conducted in Britain.5
After a period of intense intellectual and cultural grooming in Brussels, the University of Bonn, the Swiss Alps and the art galleries of Italy, Albert was deemed ready to take up his burden of duty. The prospect made him fearful, for despite being the most handsome student prince in Europe, he had remained supremely indifferent to the charms of the opposite sex, preferring the man’s world of the intellect and philosophical debate. He had heard tell that his putative bride was ‘incredibly stubborn’ and, worse, frivolous, delighting in ‘court ceremonies, etiquette and trivial formalities’.6Albert was shocked that Princess Victoria took no apparent interest in the beauties of nature, but was prone to staying up late. She didn’t like getting up early either, something he would have to change. For a young man of Albert’s sober mentality, marriage to the English princess had, in his opinion, ‘gloomy prospects’. When Leopold and Stockmar had stage-managed the couple’s first meeting in England in 1836, Albert had come away thinking Victoria ‘amiable’, but little more. She, for her part, had found ‘dearest Albert’ handsome and kind, but rather pale and sickly. Although Victoria soon came to the conclusion that her putative husband was possessed of ‘every quality that could be desired to make me perfectly happy’, marriage to Albert after she became Queen in 1837 was not an immediate, foregone conclusion. For the first time in her life Victoria was independent of her mother’s stifling control. She was determined to enjoy her freedom and have her own way in everything, as well as relishing her sovereign power, all of which was far more attractive than matrimony and the inevitability – and dangers – of childbirth. Besides, to her mind, Albert needed to gain wider experience and improve his English in order to be the consort of a queen. As princeling-in-waiting, Albert was therefore obliged to sit it out while the impressionable and impetuous Victoria was distracted by the claims of the other candidates jostling for her hand. Leopold and Stockmar, meanwhile, began to fear their long-held dream was slipping beyond their reach.
An absence of three and a half years and a string of unsuitable candidates changed everything. Just as Albert was losing patience with the long wait for Victoria’s final approval, he was summoned to England in October 1839. The young queen was taken aback; the shy, podgy young man of 1836 had been transformed into a storybook-handsome prince who, with his large blue eyes and his ‘exquisite nose’, was both ‘striking’ and ‘fascinating’.7She was swept off her feet by Albert’s good looks, fine figure and youthful charm. What had begun as a stage-managed dynastic union now unexpectedly burst into the full bloom of ecstatic love, certainly on Victoria’s part. Five days later, using her queenly prerogative, she proposed. Albert was far less certain of his feelings at this point, playing the role of acquiescent, if not bewildered mate, happy to bask in Victoria’s passionate attachment to him: ‘Victoria is so good and kind to me. I am often at a loss to believe that such affection should be shown to me,’ he told Stockmar.8Mentally prepared though he may have been for the marriage to come, it was far harder for Albert to adapt in the four short months left to him to the idea of leaving his beloved Coburg for Buckingham Palace in the heart of sooty, polluted London. He contemplated his future life in England and the task of adapting to its language, the customs of its court, its chilly climate and its food with great apprehension. Marrying Victoria, and all the expectations that went with it, was a tremendous burden. He would have to leave behind everything that he loved, but he was characteristically single-minded about the sacrifice he was expected to make and the challenge that awaited him. ‘With the exception of my relations towards [the Queen] my future position will have its dark sides, and the sky will not always be blue and unclouded,’ he wrote resignedly to his stepmother. ‘But life has its thorns in every position, and the consciousness of having used one’s powers and endeavours for an object so great as that of having promoted the good of so many, will surely be sufficient to support me.’9
It was a terrible wrench for Albert to leave Coburg and especially the Rosenau, the ‘paradise of our childhood’, not to mention his brother Ernst, who had till then been his dearest and closest friend.10At the end of January 1840 Albert departed in floods of tears, accompanied by his faithful greyhound Eos and his Swiss valet Isaac Cart, vowing that he would ‘never cease to be a true German, a true Coburg & Gotha man’, and suffering violent seasickness all the way across the Channel.11Much as he loved Victoria, hers was the overwhelming passion. Young, introverted and inexperienced sexually, he did not know how to respond to her ardour and felt swamped by it. Never being one to express his feelings openly, he anticipated marriage more as a test of his purity of intent than as the fulfilment of any personal or emotional aspirations. Love, in his book, came second to the greater good; but for Victoria, it was absolutely everything. And even as Albert travelled, debate was raging in Britain on the thorny subject of his cost to the nation. Victoria’s demand for an annual income for him of £50,000 had prompted much satirical comment on this German prince, who ‘comes to take “for better or for worse” England’s fat queen and England’s fatter purse’.12
On a freezing cold 10 February 1840 Victoria and Albert were married in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace, in a ceremony from which many of the leading members of Parliament were absent. Victoria allowed only five Tories to be invited, in retaliation for the open hostility of men in that political party to her choice of a German bridegroom: ‘It is my marriage,’ she declared with her characteristic stubbornness, ‘and I will only have those who can sympathise with me.’13Critics of her beloved Albert would henceforth be given short shrift. That day, as everyone agreed, Albert had never looked more handsome, nor she more radiant as she gazed up at his beautiful face. When asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury the previous day whether she wished to promise ‘to obey’, Victoria had replied that she wished ‘to be married as a woman and not as a Queen’.14Her lifelong role as Albert’s votaress was born on her wedding day. After only three days’ honeymoon at Windsor, punctuated by walks on the terrace and duets at the piano, she was eager to get back to business, professing herself to be the ‘happiest, happiest Being that ever existed’. Albert clearly had more than fulfilled his sexual expectations; but as for the rest – he was left to shift for himself, his only perceived role being that most marginal one of royal stud; ‘we should erect a statue to Prince Albert for having provided us with this additional barrier against the King of Hanover’, remarked one of the royal household when the Princess Royal was born that November.15
Prince Albert had been only too rig
ht to anticipate the sense of alienation he would feel in England; it had been made far worse by the fact that he arrived in a country already disposed to dislike him as a German, as a ‘pauper prince’ and, even worse, that suspected him of being a secret Catholic. From the outset he was made fun of in the satirical press and among old-school Tories at court for his heavy German accent, his stiff and starchy manner and his outmoded style of dress. Soon after his arrival he was deeply affronted when Parliament voted to reduce his allowance to £30,000. But the worst of it was that, as a man driven by a sense of purpose, he found it very hard to deal with the idleness imposed on him by his role as husband to the monarch. He could not reconcile himself to being married to a wife who, whilst acknowledging at all times her husband’s authority as head of domestic affairs, often treated him with brusque impatience and seemed intent on excluding him from any useful assistance in her official duties. In May 1840 he observed with some disgruntlement: ‘In my whole life I am very happy and contented; but the difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is, that I am only the husband, and not the master of the house.’16
Albert’s emasculation during these early months, as he struggled for a modicum of independence while Victoria demanded that he be at her constant beck and call on domestic matters, was frustrating and deeply humiliating. It took place against a backdrop of heated arguments between the Queen and the government over his precedence at court and his appointment as regent (should she die in childbirth). Having accepted naturalisation on his marriage to the Queen, Albert expected some official recognition of his position of pre-eminence – perhaps a peerage and, with it, a seat in the House of Lords. The Queen could not deny that she would have liked him to be accorded the status of King alongside her, but this was not to be. Albert’s crippling shyness did not help matters. The artist Benjamin Haydon observed him at a ball in 1842, looking ‘like a cowed and kept pet, frightened to sit, frightened to stand’.17Nevertheless Albert’s patience paid off: he gained great influence over Victoria, subtly and by degrees, judiciously giving way in trivial things, so much so that he ‘never finished a game of chess with her for the first three years’.18For the time being he established his influence in the only way open to him, by inculcating his own lofty ideals and interests in his impressionable wife. Victoria, whilst having natural gifts of intuition, was never his equal intellectually and accepted it. She was ‘as full of love as Juliet’, as Sir Robert Peel had observed, and, hungering as she did for Albert’s praise and approval, submitted herself willingly, adoringly, to his greater wisdom.19Prince Albert became for her the much-longed-for father figure. Under his diligent tutelage, Victoria’s mind was reformed: her slim grasp of the arts and science was enhanced. She eagerly accepted Albert’s leadership as regards the books they read, the music they enjoyed, the paintings and sculpture they collected. She even modified her own ‘bad’ habits – as Albert perceived them – by ceasing to stay up late and giving over less and less of her time to dancing and idle gossip with her ladies-in-waiting.
But Albert, with his thirst for constant self-improvement, was discontented merely to sit by his wife’s side, blotting her official letters as she wrote them; he sought to play an active role in the political life and culture of his adopted country. The first step came when in September 1840 a heavily pregnant Victoria made him a member of the Privy Council in order to stand in for her when she was confined; soon after she gave him a duplicate set of keys to her official boxes. From there Albert set about studying British laws and the constitution, educating Victoria, who by temperament was an autocrat, in the art of good administration and her sovereign duty. He worked hard to soften the obstinate and shamefully partisan attitude that she had displayed in the early years of her reign, weaning her away from her Whig bias towards an acceptance of the new Tory government and impressing upon her the all-essential political impartiality of the sovereign. Victoria was reluctant to relinquish any royal prerogatives, but understood the constitutional limitations placed on her, which her husband insisted she scrupulously observe. In so doing she ensured that her throne did not share the fate of those that later fell, like Louis Philippe of France’s, in the revolutionary year of 1848.
In the battle to assert his supremacy over the Queen, in the autumn of 1842 Albert engineered the removal of her closest and most powerful confidante, her old governess, Baroness Lehzen. The first real opportunity to exercise his punctilious sense of order and frugality had come earlier that year when he had reorganised the royal household in a sweeping programme of cost-cutting and the rigid elimination of the ‘canker’ of waste, inefficiency and pilfering that had gone on for decades.20The money saved by this exercise would later be used to fund the building of Osborne House. By 1845, having endured the first years of his anticipated martyrdom uncomplainingly, Albert now held a position of moral and sexual power over his wife, as she slipped increasingly into the contented role of Hausfrau. Such was his concerted re-education of her as monarch that Victoria became convinced that her life before Albert had been worthless – entirely artificial and frivolous. The royal couple had become effectively a dual monarchy, receiving ministers together and talking of their role collectively, in terms of ‘We think, or wish, to do so and so’. They even worked side by side at adjacent desks. Officially, the only title Albert was conceded was that of ‘Husband of the Queen’, but the marked elevation in his role by his wife prompted the court diarist, Charles Greville, to observe that ‘He is become so identified with her that they are one person.’ The Queen patently disliked official business, whereas Albert relished it; as a result, Victoria’s dependency on him grew as her resistance to his control waned. It was obvious to Greville ‘that while she has the title he is really discharging the functions of the Sovereign. He is King to all intents and purposes.’21And behind the scenes Albert worked hard to repel any encroachments on the power of the Crown that he now effectively controlled.
While he was set on a determined course of slowly winning the confidence of the British government as an unofficial, self-appointed minister, as the years passed much of Albert’s time was necessarily consumed by domesticity. He was to provide patient and reassuring support to his wife through her successive pregnancies and bouts of post-natal depression. Victoria’s histrionic outbursts were, however, extremely hard to deal with; as a natural introvert, Prince Albert hated emotional conflicts – and those with his wife were tempestuous, to say the least. He therefore developed a habit of avoiding confrontations and writing headmasterly notes to her about her behaviour, rather than dealing with it face-to-face, a practice that infuriated the headstrong and combative queen. Albert would not be diverted from his mission to remould his petulant wife; he doggedly and repeatedly urged her to curb her temper and learn self-restraint. Duly chastised, Victoria tried hard to rise to the challenge and aspire to the levels of perfection with which her adored husband was endowed. Little by little, Albert chipped away at his wife’s impetuosity, and with it, one might also say, her instinctiveness and natural vivacity. Power and control were the aphrodisiacs that drove Albert; he might never be King, but all the time his wife was his creature, and so often physically sidelined by pregnancy that he could vicariously enjoy some of the power he knew he would never officially be given.
Without doubt, Albert’s domestic life with Victoria brought many pleasures, as the children arrived in quick succession, from Vicky, their firstborn, in 1840 to their ninth child, Beatrice, in 1857. As a typical patriarch, he imposed his authoritarian attitudes on the royal nursery, putting his children in characteristic Victorian awe and fear of him. He oversaw their health, diet and welfare with Teutonic precision, recommending simple food and a rigorous curriculum. Much as he loved them and enjoyed their company, the Prince was a hard taskmaster. ‘Upon the good education of Princes, and especially those who are destined to govern,’ he remarked to his secretary George Anson, ‘the welfare of the world in these days greatly depends.’22With this in mind, he closely s
upervised the schoolroom’s day-to-day running with his children’s governors and governesses. One of them, Madame Hocédé – French teacher to Prince Leopold and Princesses Helena and Louise – later recalled her regular consultations with the Prince about his children’s education and how he never left her ‘without my feeling that he had strengthened my hands and raised the standard I was aiming at’.23Having a particular interest in education, Albert personally devised his children’s demanding curriculum and administered corporal punishment (albeit reluctantly) when they failed to toe the line. All of the children suffered, to varying degrees, from the academic and personal pressures placed on them by both parents, as well as the constant comparisons made with their sainted father by the Queen. But whereas the intellectually gifted Vicky blossomed under Albert’s favouritism and tutelage, his son and heir Bertie wilted and rebelled under its rigour; the emotional scars Bertie suffered in hopeless pursuit of academic achievements beyond his grasp set the scene for future conflict between them.
Only a handful of people in the inner sanctum of the royal household ever came to know Prince Albert intimately; even fewer won his friendship. The majority at court and in government – whom Albert always held at arm’s length – found it impossible to warm to his inhibited manner and thought him cold and egotistical, like a ‘German Professor’, one of several nicknames in circulation.24Even the Queen’s jealous Hanoverian relatives, such as her uncle the Duke of Cambridge, viewed him as a ‘Coburg interloper’. She might promote her husband as a paragon of virtue to anyone who would listen, but too often the Prince Consort appeared inflexible, particularly over matters of royal etiquette and protocol, and humourless too. He always seemed so decidedly superior in his detachment from court circles, and in particular in his disdain for the profligacy of the British aristocracy. They in turn could not understand why the Prince had no mistresses, or, for that matter, any apparent interest in women. It was only a matter of time, they assumed, before this would change. ‘Damn it, Madam,’ Lord Melbourne had remarked to the Queen when she was first married, ‘you don’t expect that he’ll always be faithful to you, do you?!’25But in fact Albert was. He refused to play the gallant and was notorious for being offhand with ladies at court, so much so that his secretary Anson noted that ‘the Queen is proud of the Prince’s utter indifference to the attractions of all the ladies’.26
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 3