We Two: Victoria and Albert (2 page)

NEMOURS WAS ONLY ONE
of the royal gentlemen who had recently come to England to woo its queen. At twenty, Victoria had seen a great many suitors. Given her druthers, she would probably have married one of the many young English aristocrats who danced attendance on her at court. Some, like Lord Elphinstone and Lord Alfred Paget, were handsome; many could trace their ancestry back to the Norman Conquest; some were so rich they could have bought the duchy of Coburg out of pocket change. But unfortunately, not one of these delightful young Englishmen was eligible. English political tradition had long decreed that no monarch could marry a subject.

At twenty, Victoria was almost on the shelf, and conscious of it. Most princesses of her time were married off as soon as they reached puberty. She herself had been officially entered in the royal marriage market at the age of fifteen when her confirmation was celebrated. If her maternal and paternal relations had not been at daggers drawn over the choice of a bridegroom for her, she might well have been married in her midteens, while still merely the heir presumptive to the English throne.

William IV, Victoria’s paternal uncle, who succeeded his brother George IV to the throne in 1830, was elderly, obese, and afflicted with gout, asthma, and congestive heart failure. He knew he had not long to live and was anxious to see his niece and heir safely married to a man of his choice. The King was determined that man would not be a Coburg. He distrusted the ambitions of the Coburg family, which, in the German social hierarchy, was far inferior to his own Guelph-Brunswick-Hanover line. In Leopold, the king of Belgium, the most redoubtable of the Coburgs, William saw only the jumped-up ruler of a silly, fake nation. As for his Coburg sister-in-law the Duchess of Kent, Victoria’s mother, William IV positively loathed her.

William IV’s preferred candidate for Victoria’s husband was her first cousin George Cumberland, the son of the King’s brother the Duke of Cumberland. This youth would have been a popular as well as royal choice: One English newspaper was already touting the marriage when the prospective bride and groom were nine years old. The Duke of Cumberland was heir presumptive to the Guelph family’s hereditary German domain of Hanover, just as Victoria was heir presumptive to the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Married, Victoria Kent and her cousin George Cumberland could, in the fullness of time, reunite the kingdoms. But George Cumberland, though handsome and engaging, was born with sight in only one eye, and when he was fourteen, an accident with a swinging curtain pull destroyed his good eye. Given the risk of hereditary blindness, as well as the difficulties of public life for a blind man, George Cumberland was ruled out as a suitor for Victoria Kent.

However, William IV had another nephew called George, the son of his youngest brother, the Duke of Cambridge. George Cambridge led Victoria Kent out to the dance at the few state occasions her mother allowed her to attend. He was a tall, strong young man who seemed to promise well as a sire of kings. He, or his mother, was assiduous in sending gifts and expressions of affection when Victoria celebrated her birthday. But once his parents pressured him to go a-wooing at Windsor, George Cambridge took off for Gibraltar, supposedly on military service, and remained abroad. Young Cambridge had a distressing case of acne, but he prided himself on being a
connoisseur of female flesh. He did not fancy his cousin Vic, as he was known to refer to the heir presumptive. She was short, she was plain, and she showed signs of wanting her own way.

Disappointed in his nephews, King William IV then brought over the sons of the Prince of Orange from the Netherlands, a Protestant kingdom with dynastic links to England. Unfortunately, they were ugly, awkward, and glum, and Victoria was barely civil to them. At last, in desperation, the King trotted out his notorious German cousin the Duke of Brunswick as a possible suitor. That gentleman in his time had certainly charmed enough women, to say nothing of men, and Victoria seemed rather fascinated by him. But her mother was not, so that was that.

William also sounded out the heir to the throne of Prussia, Frederick William Hohenzollern, another Protestant prince. Through the English minister in Berlin, this prince explained that men of his family did not undertake matrimonial scouting expeditions. He would deign to cross the English Channel only upon a written assurance that the Princess Victoria would marry him. On this prince, Victoria and her mama were, for once, entirely in agreement. Their answer was a diplomatically expressed, unequivocal, unexpected, and bitterly resented no.

And so it came about that, in the fall of 1839, by elimination, the chief contender for the hand of the Queen of England was her first cousin Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

ALBERT COBURG WAS
born on August 26, 1819, three months after his English cousin, and their grandmother, the dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, was envisaging a marriage between the two while both were in the cradle. However, the two young people were brought together for the first time only in May 1836. The Duchess of Kent invited her brother, Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and his two sons, Ernest and Albert, to come and celebrate her daughter Victoria’s seventeenth birthday.

This invitation caused a minor diplomatic furor. William IV did all in his power to keep the Coburg party out of England. The King went so far as to allege that it was highly improper for the Duchess of Kent to invite two young men to sleep under the same roof as her maiden daughter. Uncle Leopold in Brussels, who took lessons in hypocrisy and prudery from no one, was furious in turn. “I am really
astonished
at the conduct of your old Uncle the King,” wrote King Leopold to the Princess Victoria. “Now that slavery is even abolished in the British colonies, I do not comprehend
why
your lot alone should be to be kept, a little white slavey in England
, for the plea sure of the Court.”

In the end, the Coburg party defied King William’s wrath and set sail for England. The Duchess of Kent, flush with parliamentary funds as mother to the heir presumptive, put on an impressive program of excursions, dinners, parties, and balls for her relatives. The Princess Victoria, who at this time was a virtual prisoner in her own home, was extremely happy to see her Coburg cousins so she could have some fun. On the surface, the ducal visit was a success. As Victoria energetically underlined in diary entries that she knew her mother would read with special attention, she found Ernest and Albert
very
pleasant and interesting. In affectionate letters calculated to assuage her uncle Leopold’s wrath, Victoria assured him that she found Albert, so handsome and amiable,
very
much to her taste. But she did not beg to marry the Coburg cousin at once, she did not threaten elopement, she did not even make promises for the future. No
coup de foudre
had taken place. King Leopold had miscalculated, and the ducal party returned crestfallen to Brussels to thrash out what had gone wrong. It was not hard.

Victoria at seventeen was already a young woman, charming if not pretty, full of vitality, eager to flirt if given half a chance. Albert was a chubby, self-absorbed, pedantic boy who had no interest at all in girls. Things had gone badly from the outset. After a rough Channel crossing, Albert was a quivering heap. He then spent days in bed with a bilious complaint. His riding habit was not well cut, his seat was very bad, and he did not even care much for the sport—all conspicuous faults in the eyes of such a keen equestrienne as Victoria Kent. Albert was an excellent musician and sketched well, two talents that endeared him to his English cousin. But he was not at all fond of dancing and liked to be in bed by nine, just when, in Victoria’s opinion, the evening was getting amusing. After one state dinner, Albert vomited. At his last English ball, he slipped on the dance floor and fell over backward. Victoria took his hand, sat out with him for a while, and was very kind when he said he must go to bed, he felt so unwell. But she was not impressed. Cousin Albert at sixteen and three quarters was not the stuff of which girlish dreams are made.

Victoria was not a romantic, nor was she controlled by her hormones. As perhaps the greatest heiress in the world, the princess saw marriage as the most important business transaction of her life. It behooved her to be cautious and guard her interests intelligently. Certainly she was very unhappy at home and longed for independence. But with her majority only a year away, the health of her uncle king visibly failing, and the throne of
England within her grasp, Victoria in mid-1836 was neither desperate nor willing to take chances.

One year later, following her accession, Victoria was even less inclined to send for Cousin Albert and name the day. She threw herself into the pleasures and duties of being queen. When it came time to send out the invitations to her coronation, she conspicuously failed to invite her cousins of Coburg. But the wild exhilaration of accession did not last. After eighteen months, Victoria began to feel lonely, insecure, and confused. In June 1839, Grand Duke Alexander, heir to the tsar of Russia, came to visit, and he and the Queen had a brief romantic idyll. They spoke to one another in French, he introduced her to the pleasures of dancing the mazurka, and when he left, she felt very low. Marrying the tsarevitch was quite impossible, but the pleasure she had found in Alexander’s company had given her a yen to be married. What she needed could no longer be supplied by a governess, a doctor, an uncle, or a prime minister.

As she agonized over the pros and cons of marriage, Victoria turned to her supremely charming prime minister, Lord Melbourne. In his mid fifties, he was now her dearest friend. The Queen faithfully recorded their conversations on the subject of marriage in her journal each night. She told Melbourne that she had no wish to marry now, perhaps never. Using the third-person form that was de rigueur in all communications with monarchs, the prime minister replied that Her Majesty need consult only her own wishes. On the whole, women did like to marry, and Her Majesty probably would too, but there was no rush. The country, as he understood the country, was in no urgency for the Queen to marry. Indeed, when one looked at the list of possible suitors, not one of them stood out, and the English press would take pleasure in attacking them all. Yes, Prince Albert was perhaps the front-runner, but marriages between first cousins were often not sound, and Germans, especially Coburgs, were not popular with Englishmen.

The Queen told Lord Melbourne of the pressure from her mother, from her uncle Duke Ernest, and from her uncle King Leopold to allow a visit from the Coburg cousins. By inviting Albert to her home, was she not committing herself to a marriage that, one day—who knew?—might suit her, but as of now was not at all what she desired?

Lord Melbourne advised the Queen to see the projected visit as her chance to look the young man over. She should invite the two princes to come but, in kindness, explain to Albert that he was coming, as it were, on approval. The decision on marriage was entirely Her Majesty’s, said Lord Melbourne. She need not fear that if she married Albert, she would no
longer have her way. English monarchs, whether men or women, were subject only to the English Constitution.

Reassured by this urbane advice, Victoria carefully drafted a letter to her uncle Leopold, knowing that it would be copied and redirected posthaste to Coburg. She had fond memories of her cousins Ernest and Albert, she said. Like all her beloved German relatives, they would be welcome in England. However, she presently felt no desire to rush into marriage. Albert must come to England only if he understood that his cousin Victoria committed herself to nothing.