Behind the Palace Doors (35 page)

Victoria’s refusal seemed to startle the prince. “I am very sorry,” he wrote to her from Coburg, “that you have not been able to grant my first request … for I know it was not an unfair one.… Think of my position, Dear Victoria, I am leaving home with all its associations, all my bosom friends, and going to a country in which everything is new and strange to me.… Except yourself I have no one to confide in. And it is not even to be conceded to me that the two or three persons who are to have the charge of my private affairs should be persons who already command my confidence.”

The queen was not to be persuaded on the issue, and was similarly intransigent on the length of their honeymoon, which he hoped might last “at least a fortnight—or a week?” “My dear Albert,” she replied imperiously, “you have not at all understood the matter.
You forget, my dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing.
”

Victoria adopted an entirely different tone as she rhapsodized about the honeymoon she had insisted upon keeping short: “When day dawned (for we did not sleep much) and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express! He does look so beautiful in his shirt only, with his beautiful throat seen.”

It was a remarkably vivid account, particularly for a monarch whose name has become almost synonymous with rigid and repressed sexuality.
^‡
And it was just one journal entry. “I NEVER NEVER spent such an evening!!!” she gushed in another. “My DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert sat on a footstool by my side, & his excessive love & affection gave me feelings of heavenly love & happiness, I never could have
hoped
to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, and we kissed each other again and again! His beauty, his sweetness and gentleness … really how can I ever be thankful enough for such a
Husband!

The love Victoria had for Albert turned to worship as the queen grew entirely dependent on her “beloved lord and master.” As she later recalled, “I … leant on him for all and everything.” Without his approval “I did nothing, moved not a finger, arranged not a print or photograph.” Accordingly, the retreat the couple purchased on the Isle of Wight was Albert’s own kingdom, where he held absolute dominion—even after death
.

The rains had been unrelenting that October day in 1844 as Victoria and Albert sailed across the Solent toward the Isle of Wight. There they hoped to purchase a private retreat for themselves—a place far from the suffocating court life and unhealthy air of London—that they could call their very own. There seemed to be no break in store from the abysmal weather when the couple arrived on the island just off England’s southern coast. But as they drove through the secluded Osborne estate on the outskirts of East Cowes, the sun managed to peek through the stormy skies and shine upon a large three-story home surrounded by stately trees, with grounds that sloped gently toward the sea. The queen was enchanted.

“It is impossible to see a prettier place,” she told Lord Melbourne, “with woods and valleys and
points de vue
, which would be beautiful anywhere, but all this near the sea … is quite perfection. We have a calming beach quite to ourselves. The sea is so blue and calm and the prince said it was like Naples. And then we can walk about anywhere by ourselves without fear of being followed and mobbed.”

Victoria and Albert had found their Eden; their “dear and lovely little domaine,” as the queen called Osborne. There they would spend some of their happiest days together, surrounded by their growing family, and completely at ease amid the estate’s bountiful pleasures.

Albert immediately set about making improvements to the place where, he said, he could be “partly forester, partly builder, partly farmer and partly gardener.” There was certainly plenty of work to be done on the neglected property, and the prince worked intently to create his personal paradise. “It does one’s heart good to see how my beloved Albert enjoys it all, and is so full of the plans and improvements he means to carry out,” Victoria wrote. “He is hardly to be kept at home.”

One of the prince’s first major projects was to replace the existing house on the estate, which he deemed too small, with a much larger structure in the style of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, complete with two belvedere towers that loomed over the landscape. Once completed, the new home was filled with Albert’s personal touches—from the furniture he designed to fit his wife’s tiny frame to the intertwined letters
V
and
A
over the doorways (except over the entry to the smoking room, where the letter
A
stands alone in deference to the queen’s strong dislike of tobacco).

One of the most striking features of Osborne House (which is no longer a royal residence and is open to the public) is the number of nudes throughout—robust male and female nudes in paintings and sculpture that Victoria and Albert exchanged
as gifts. This veritable celebration of naked human form is in vivid contrast to the popular image of a prudish queen who lent her name to an era of sexual repression. (Albert, who actually was a bit uptight about sex, did object to one sculpture that featured his bare legs and kept it hidden on a quiet cul-de-sac at the top of the house.)

With all of Albert’s thoughtful touches, Osborne became a much loved escape for his family. The royal children were each given an individual plot to garden and even had a fully furnished Swiss-style chalet that was built just for them. They learned to cook in the cottage’s miniature kitchen, with its full range of utensils, and kept their collections under glass cases in a minimuseum. “Yesterday there was a grand tea at the Swiss Cottage,” Victoria reported—“and imagine good Affie [her second son, Alfred] by way of amusement exhibiting his air pump and steam engine (puffing and blowing all the time—in the tool house) … and pumping over himself and [third son] Arthur.”

Victoria, too, delighted in Osborne. “Sat out under the trees, where it was really heavenly, and sketched,” she wrote during the summer of 1855. “Every day, every year, this dear sweet spot seems more lovely and with its brilliant sunshine, deep blue sea and dazzling flowers, is a perfect paradise,—and all my beloved one’s creation,—the result of his exquisite taste.”

The queen took her first sea swim off the estate’s private beach, but it could hardly be called a quick, spontaneous dip. First she stepped into a “bathing machine,” a changing room on wheels where she slipped into her swimsuit. The bathing machine was then pulled by a horse to the very edge of the shore, after which Victoria emerged from the other side directly into the water. “I thought it delightful,” she wrote, “till I put my head under water, when I thought I should be stifled.”

Of all the joys Osborne had to offer the queen, nothing came close to simply being with her man—reading books together, taking walks, watching the ships sail by on the Solent,
listening to the nightingales in the evening, or playing duets on the piano. “Never do I enjoy myself more or more peacefully than when I can be so much with my beloved Albert,” she wrote—“follow him everywhere.”

The relaxed and relatively carefree atmosphere at Osborne evaporated completely with Prince Albert’s untimely death in 1861.
^*
He was only forty-two, as was Queen Victoria, whose life all but ceased as well. For decades she lived in semi-seclusion, dressed in her widow’s weeds, obsessively tending to her late husband’s memory.

In her maudlin devotion to her mate, the queen ordered Osborne maintained exactly as Albert left it. During a visit in 1862, Lord Clarendon found it “difficult to believe” that the prince would not at any moment walk into his room because “everything was set out on his table and the pen and his blotting-book, his handkerchief on the sofa, his watch going, fresh flowers in the glass.” Amid the gloom, Queen Victoria even dabbled in the occult, desperately trying to contact her prince. Alas, she had to content herself with his jacket, which she took to bed with her every night.

Writing from the estate during her first Christmas without her beloved, Victoria pronounced how she would conduct herself as queen now that Albert was gone. “I am … anxious to repeat
one
thing,” she wrote, “and
that one
is my firm resolve, my
irrevocable decision
 … that
his
wishes
—his
plans—about everything,
his
views about
every
thing are to be
my law!
And
no human power
will make me swerve from
what he
decided and wished.… I am
also determined
that
no one
person, may
he
be
ever so good, ever so devoted among my servants—is to lead or guide or dictate
to me
. I know
how he
would disapprove it. And I live
on
with him, for him; in fact I am only
outwardly
separated from him, and only for a
time.
”

Poor Princess Alice, Victoria and Albert’s second daughter, had the misfortune of marrying Prince Louis of Hesse at Osborne less than seven months after her father’s death. She had lovingly attended her grieving mother—even sleeping with her in her bedroom—and now the queen dreaded the day of Alice’s “wretched marriage.” Victoria described the ceremony as “more like a funeral than a wedding,” which, thanks in large part to her, it was.

There were no joyous preparations before the ceremony. The queen made certain of that. “She [Alice] is dressing in her
Beloved Papa’s
room, while
I
am having my widow’s cap adjusted! I think it is a dreadful dream!” At least the bride was allowed to wear white for this special occasion, although her trousseau was the required black.

Only immediate family and a handful of relatives were invited to the service, which took place in the dining room of Osborne House—right under a family portrait dominated by Prince Albert. Victoria sat apart from everyone else, protectively flanked by her four eldest sons. “Fortunately for the bride and groom, who were much less the focus of attention than the huddled figure in black, the Archbishop of York kept the service short,” wrote biographer Stanley Weintraub.

“It was
very solemn—very affecting, very sad,
” the queen wrote after the ceremony. The archbishop, tears streaming down his face, “read the service … beautifully! But when it came to the words
till death us do part
I could not restrain my tears—tho’ I struggled and I did command myself till all was over. Affie sobbed dreadfully all through.”

Of course there was no reception. Immediately after the service the queen went to her room, where she ate lunch alone with the bride and groom. Alice and Louis were allowed a
couple of days for their honeymoon, but Victoria expected her daughter back at Osborne to attend to her. A week later, Alice left for her new home in Hesse.

“I hardly miss her at all, or felt her going,” the queen reported, “so
utterly
absorbed am I by that one dreadful loss.”

After several decades of deep mourning the shroud lifted a little. Victoria was even bold enough to stray from Albert’s original plan for Osborne and allowed an addition to be built. She enjoyed having her grandchildren and great-grandchildren visit her at the estate, where she provided entertainment for them and—occasionally—reveled in their company. Not all were enamored with Osborne, however.