Sons, Servants and Statesmen (4 page)

Yet for some weeks he felt oddly sidelined in his married life. To his friend Prince William zu Löwenstein he complained that he was ‘only the husband, and not the master in the house’.
²⁸
He found she had a tendency to be wilful and thoughtless. Though at heart she was kind and good-natured, she still seemed inclined to be moody, sulky, peevish and temperamental at times. In some ways she was an old head on young shoulders, well aware of her responsibilities as Queen of England, yet because she had gone from a sheltered upbringing to becoming theoretically the most powerful woman in the land, she had little experience of dealing with other people. It saddened him that he was at first denied her confidence in anything to do with the running of their households, and that she was disinclined to let him take part in political business. He was not asked into the room when she was talking to the Prime Minister; she never discussed affairs of state with him, she changed the subject whenever he tried to talk to her about political matters and she would not allow him to see any state papers from government departments. When he tried to suggest it, she told him gently but firmly that the English were very jealous of foreigners interfering in the government of their country. She was exercising caution, as initially she had wanted to create him King Consort, only to be warned in no uncertain terms by Lord Melbourne that if the English were allowed into the way of making kings, they might well be got into the way of unmaking them.

Melbourne had considerable sympathy for Albert and the Queen’s reluctance to share authority with anyone – even her husband. ‘My impression’, he wrote to George Anson, ‘is that the chief obstacle in Her Majesty’s mind is the fear of difference of opinion and she thinks that domestic harmony is more likely to follow from avoiding subjects likely to create difference.’
²⁹

Moreover, Albert had formidable allies in King Leopold and his confidential adviser, Baron Stockmar, both of whom were determined that he should be her right hand in her constitutional functions. On a visit to Windsor in August 1840, the King declared that the prince ‘ought in business as in everything to be necessary to the Queen, he should be to her a walking dictionary for reference on any point which her own knowledge or education have not enabled her to answer’.
³⁰

Albert’s patience, and a gradual recognition of his abilities by others, soon brought about a change for the better. Melbourne had initially been sceptical of this shy, unworldly young German prince. Though deeply devoted to the Queen himself, he was concerned for her future happiness, and never a trace of jealousy entered his soul. He readily knew that it would be to the benefit of all if she was able to find a husband worthy of her and act as her support in governing the kingdom. To the elderly Prime Minister, who knew his political career would soon be over, Albert’s qualities of calm, intelligence and conscientiousness were evident. He began talking political matters with Albert and urged the Queen to do likewise, telling her that he understood everything so well and should be involved more in the regular business of the monarchy. When he left office for the last time in 1841, he advised her to put her trust in her husband.

The advice was well received. Soon Albert was reading despatches, being asked for his advice and making important decisions. He was given the keys to the boxes of confidential state documents. At ministerial meetings he was always by the Queen’s side, ready to make his contribution when asked, and without exception all her prime ministers during his lifetime appreciated and valued his opinions, though at least one – the redoubtable Lord Palmerston – might not have been prepared to admit it, preferring instead to regard him as a royal busybody meddling in affairs beyond his station. When Albert encouraged Victoria to take a greater interest in European affairs and insist on the right to be consulted on them at all times, the ministers might disagree, wondering whether he was exceeding his brief as the consort of a constitutional monarch. But they soon realised that they were dealing with a man of intelligence whose grasp of affairs at home and abroad was always scrupulously well-informed and generally impartial. Before her marriage, she had been a somewhat partisan Whig, until Albert convinced her that it was the duty of the Crown to stand above party politics; she must give allegiance to neither Whigs nor Tories.

Like her Hanoverian predecessors, the Queen did not shrink at first from openly showing her support for ‘our party’. Until then, it had been accepted as common practice that in Windsor the monarch could control the election of members of parliament. Under Stockmar’s tutelage, and with Peel’s ready endorsement, Albert decided that the Queen should no longer do so. There was no question of the Crown withdrawing completely from involvement in political questions; but it was important that the Queen was seen to respect the integrity of the elected government and its party, just as she demanded that they respect her power as sovereign.

Within two months of his wedding, Albert had already formed his own view of the two-party system and the fundamental differences between each. The Whigs, he had decided, sought change ‘
before change
is required’, and ‘their love of change is their great failing’. The Tories, on the other hand, ‘
resist change
long after the feeling and temper of the times has loudly demanded it and at last make a virtue of necessity by an ungracious concession’.
³¹

Yet Queen Victoria never completely recognised the limits imposed on a constitutional monarch. At various times throughout her life, she submitted to a change of government with ill-concealed bad grace. Albert may have been better in masking his feelings, but it is doubtful whether he appreciated such limits himself. In this he was taking his lead from Baron Stockmar’s ill-advised opinion that the prime minister of the day was merely the temporary head of the cabinet, with the monarch as ‘permanent premier’.
³²
Lord John Russell once called the monarch ‘an informal but potent member of all Cabinets’.
³³
On the fall of his Conservative administration in 1852, Lord Derby recommended that Her Majesty should send for Lord Lansdowne; Lord John Russell maintained that his own claim should be considered; but the Queen chose the more amenable, if ineffectual, Lord Aberdeen instead. In 1858 the Queen and the Prince Consort, on whom this title had been conferred by letters patent the previous year, wanted Lord Granville to head an administration in order to avoid calling Lord Palmerston a second time, but in vain. As will be examined later, their relations with the maverick Palmerston had been very variable, and they opposed his Italian policy at a crucial time for Anglo-European relations, but their reservations about making him head of government counted for little.

Albert initially saw it as his role to broaden his wife’s education and undertake a certain amount of character-forming. She was painfully aware of her intellectual and cultural shortcomings, and she tended to avoid the company of clever people. He encouraged her to take a more intelligent interest in everything around her, introducing her to the wonders of art and science, and encouraging her to read more serious books. With his passion for music, and skill as a musician and composer himself, he extended her interest in and knowledge of music. She had been brought up to enjoy concerts and the ballet, but as in so many other artistic matters, she knew very little about them until he imparted his own grasp of and enthusiasm for the subject, particularly the work of Handel, which until then had never meant anything to her.

Gradually he became the dominant partner, the one who made the decisions. Where he had initially assumed the role of her unofficial secretary, in time the positions became reversed. In effect, she became his deputy in dealings with the ministers.
³⁴
After their eldest daughter Victoria, Princess Royal, married Prince Frederick William of Prussia in January 1858, she wrote regularly to her mother about personal matters, but always discussed political business with her father. Such letters were not generally shown to the Queen.

It is unlikely that she would have been more than momentarily piqued if she had known. During the days of Melbourne’s tutelage, her instruction in the matter of politics and government had been very enjoyable. In later years, thanks to Disraeli, the subjects would once again become interesting, in presentation if not in substance. However, while she was married, they were strictly for the male of the species, not for her. ‘Albert grows daily fonder and fonder of politics and business,’ she wrote to King Leopold in 1852, ‘and is so wonderfully
fit
for both – such perspicacity and such
courage
– and I grow daily to dislike them both more and more. We women are not
made
for governing – and if we are good women, we must dislike these masculine occupations; but there are times which force one to take
interest
in them
mal gré bon gré
, and I do, of course,
intensely
.’
³⁵
There spoke a reluctant political figure. How she would have viewed the election of women to parliament, let alone a woman prime minister, one can only speculate, but she would probably not have welcomed the concept.

In public and in private, the Queen became more serious and more dignified, less impulsive and impetuous. Before her wedding, she had been a high-spirited young woman, ready to tease and given to outbursts of almost uncontrollable laughter. With marriage to Albert, these high spirits were not extinguished altogether, but they were certainly dampened. In one sense, he taught her to be a queen, by assuming an appropriate sense of regal dignity. More than once, she admitted to him that it was he who ‘entirely formed’ her.

I
t has sometimes been argued that Prince Albert was the true architect of Victorianism, rather than the Queen who gave the era its name. Had she lived and reigned as a virgin queen like Elizabeth I, Victoria might have remained true to her Hanoverian instincts – hard-working, but with her virtues of industry tempered somewhat by an easy-going nature, a tendency to self-indulgence and a total lack of prudery. Marriage to the straitlaced, methodical, ever-earnest Albert ensured that the opposite happened.

In this, he was doing no more than following the precepts laid down during his early years by the dour, high-principled Baron Stockmar. Albert’s intense prudery can probably be ascribed correctly in part to the distress he suffered when his mother was banished from his life for adultery while he was still only a small boy, never to see him again, and by his concern with (bordering on disgust at) the infidelities of his father, a pattern which would be repeated by his brother Ernest. Stockmar’s influence had some effect on the industrious if ever-philandering Ernest as well, particularly with regard to liberal and political leanings, but in the unimpeachably clean-living Albert he found a ready disciple in all aspects.

Even before marriage, Albert was making his moral standpoint clear to one and all. When the Queen was choosing her bridesmaids, he proposed that she should take into account the reputation of their parents, a view which amazed the easy-going Lord Melbourne. He argued that it was one thing to demand previous employers’ references for stableboys and housemaids, but quite another ‘for persons of quality’. Though Melbourne had his way on this occasion, Albert continued to make a stand wherever he could. In 1852, when Lord Derby (who was twenty years his senior) became Prime Minister, Albert treated him to a homily on prime-ministerial duties. These, he declared, included the responsibility of being ‘Keeper of the King’s (or Queen’s) Conscience’, and observing the Queen’s insistence that the moral character of the Court must be beyond reproach.
¹
One might say that Albert was even more Victorian than Victoria herself.

In his letters to the Queen, the Prince addressed her as his ‘own darling’, or his ‘little wife’, his
Fraüchen
. On the rare occasions when they were apart, such letters were full of endearments to her. She hated the moments of separation, and when he had to go to Coburg for his father’s funeral in 1844 she missed him bitterly. It was the first time they had been apart for even just a night, and as she told King Leopold, ‘the
thought
of
such
separation is quite dreadful’.
²