We Two: Victoria and Albert (33 page)

That the Queen wished to ensure that her children did not come between her and her husband is disarmingly clear in a famous painting of 1841 by Landseer. Prince Albert, looking extremely handsome, is the picture’s focus of attention. The prince’s dress is casual, yet the star of the Order of the Garter pinned to his coat establishes his exalted status. He wears hunting dress, and the loosely knotted collar reveals a few inches of the white throat his wife so admired. He has on a pair of long, red suede
boots that the Queen found particularly dashing, and one magnificent leg clad in skintight breeches is thrust forward at the center of the picture. The prince has his right hand clasped on the top of his thigh while the other hand caresses the head of the greyhound Eos, who is looking adoringly up into her master’s face. Queen Victoria stands at her husband’s shoulder, and they are looking into each other’s eyes. The Queen is shown in a low-cut white satin dress not dissimilar in style to her wedding dress. Though plump and bosomy she gives no indication of being in the advanced stages of her second pregnancy. It would be more than a hundred years before any public image of a pregnant English queen was permitted to appear.

On the other side of the room and of the painting, separated from her parents by Eos, a small bench, and two other dogs, is little Vicky, recently given the title of Princess Royal. A sturdy toddler, who, given the absence in the picture of her brother Bertie, could not have been a year old, she stands, her bonnet thrown back, incongruously fondling one of the array of dead creatures that her father has brought back from the hunt.

For Queen Victoria, Albert was at the center of life. What mattered was the relationship between the two of them. The children, charming and decorative no doubt in their own way, lived on the margins of their parents’ happiness, more tolerated than welcomed by their mother. This would be true for the next seventeen years.

QUEEN VICTORIA BORE
seven more children. The nine came in groups, at a slowly diminishing rate: a girl, Victoria (Vicky), in November 1840; a boy, Albert Edward (Bertie), in November 1841; a girl, Alice, in April 1843; and a boy, Alfred (Affie), in August 1844. Two girls then, Helena in May 1846 and Louise in March 1848; followed by two boys, Arthur in May 1850 and Leopold in April 1853, and, finally, Beatrice in April 1857.

For a woman of the Queen’s generation, a family of nine was not uncommon. Rich and poor, profligate and virtuous, the Victorians had a lot of children. Women were, overall, better nourished, came to puberty younger, and were hence more fertile than in previous generations. The deleterious effects of multiple pregnancies on a woman’s body were of little concern to the Victorian medical profession, though many women and babies died in childbirth. The main difference between the royal couple and most contemporaries was that the Queen is not known to have suffered any miscarriages and that she emerged vigorous and healthy after her nine complete pregnancies. Given her fertility, she was a lucky woman to be alive at forty, as she was well aware. The queen of Portugal, Maria da Glória, who was almost exactly Victoria’s age and
as a teenager married Ferdinand, another Saxe-Coburg first cousin, bore eleven children, and died when she was thirty-five.

Another huge piece of good luck was that all nine of Queen Victoria’s children grew into adulthood. Unlike many women of her generation, Victoria never had to watch a son or daughter die in childhood. Her luck becomes clear when we compare her not only with a royal peer like Queen Maria of Portugal, several of whose children died young, but with her own daughters and granddaughters. Between 1860 and 1914, a surprisingly large number of babies born to members of the English Saxe-Coburg dynasty, most of them boys, died in childbirth or from childhood diseases.

But even if Queen Victoria turned out to be, in her own words, “good at” childbirth, her pregnancies continued to be a terrible burden. Indeed, as Albert’s sexual prudery took hold of her, she became more and more embarrassed by her condition. When she was carrying Leopold and Beatrice, the Queen found the ignorant yet inquiring eyes of her two oldest children, the teenaged Vicky and Bertie, especially hard to bear.

Victoria’s attitude toward pregnancy and childbirth was most clearly expressed in a letter to her daughter Vicky in March 1858, soon after Vicky was married and only a year after the Queen had borne her ninth child.

As a young married woman, Queen Victoria could not be sure how long her obstetrical luck would hold. It was certainly not her ambition to compete with her paternal grandmother, Queen Charlotte, mother of fifteen children. If Queen Victoria had had a choice, her childbearing might well have ended with the birth of Alfred when she was twenty-five. An heir and a spare was all England needed, and since the Queen inconveniently gave
birth to girls before boys, that meant four children. Victoria understood very well that more children were a threat to her life when they were in utero, a drain on her time and energy when they were young, and a financial burden for the country when they were adults.

But like most women of her nation and generation, Queen Victoria did not have a choice. Her wishes and preferences did not determine the size of her family. She had nine children because she was fertile, because she loved to go to bed with a husband who found the role of paterfamilias deeply satisfying, and because she knew nothing about nonreproductive sex.

Some primitive birth control measures, such as caustic douches and crude physical barriers to conception, were available to mid-Victorians, but they were nasty and ineffective and practiced mainly by prostitutes. Most married couples who wanted to limit their family size had only two options, abstinence and abortion. Virtuous husbands like Albert, who came chaste to their weddings, felt they had every right to find sexual satisfaction with their wives. As for abortion, it was no longer a legal option in a modern Christian nation that prided itself on its high moral standards.

Prince Albert could have nothing to do with abortion and birth control. In a gossip-ridden atmosphere like the Court of St. James’s, such things could not be kept secret from the press, and even suspicion would damage the monarchy. But Albert’s repugnance for all things sexual, which only grew as he aged, also cut the royal couple off from the practical and private information on nonreproductive erotic practices that had been available in aristocratic circles twenty years earlier.

An older man of the world like Lord Melbourne could have explained to Prince Albert how to make love without getting his wife pregnant, but such a conversation between the two men is unthinkable. An older woman of the world like Lady Emily Cowper, Melbourne’s sister and the daughter of that famous aristocratic courtesan, the first Lady Melbourne, could no doubt have offered Victoria a hint or two on nonphallic pleasure, and one can imagine the Queen listening and even taking notes. But Lady Cowper, after she married the notorious old roué Lord Palmerston in late 1839, ceased to be part of the Queen’s intimate circle.

Once Albert took control of his wife’s affairs in 1841, he made absolutely sure that Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting and maids of honor were women of absolute discretion as well as irreproachable morality. Everything the young Victoria knew about sex and reproduction she learned from her husband, and these were two areas in which the prince’s thirst for information ran dry.

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OLLOWING THE BIRTH OF HIS FIRST CHILD IN NOVEMBER 1840, PRINCE
Albert was in a far stronger position. Surely now his ambitions to take on a meaningful, independent role in matters of state and in the household would be realized. But two people close to the Queen blocked the mastery he sought in both the political and domestic spheres. Those two were Prime Minister Lord Melbourne and Victoria’s former governess, Baroness Louise Lehzen.

The prime minister was far too urbane and devoted to the Queen’s interests to allow any open rift with the Queen’s husband. He was also a man of power in English politics and thus a redoubtable foe. But if Victoria had believed that Albert would take Melbourne as his surrogate father and political mentor just as she had, she was deluding herself. The two men could not have been more different. The silent struggle between them could not be resolved by negotiation.

William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, was an English aristocrat in the eighteenth-century mold: rich, handsome, worldly, cynical. Although his family was only two generations removed from the professional middle class, the prime minister was very much the grand seigneur, winning the allegiance of peers, the admiration of inferiors, and the friendship of accomplished women by his ease, wit, and charm. He was not ambitious, yet the highest political power in England had been thrust upon him.

Victoria’s prime minister was quite as intelligent and well informed as her husband, but in different fields and in a very different style. Albert was an excellent musician and music critic. Melbourne blithely admitted that he had a tin ear. Albert had been taught good schoolboy English and French,
plus a little Latin, but his mind was formed by his native German. Melbourne was an excellent classicist, had superb French and good Italian but little if any German. Melbourne was a connoisseur of art and a walking compendium of information about English history and politics, but he wore his erudition lightly. One of the great stylists of his day, Melbourne rarely said or wrote anything that was not funny, piquant, incisive, and memorable. Albert had a heavier, more systematic mind, and his interests ran to science, technology, and metaphysics. He liked to lecture, to philosophize, and to derive practical policy from abstract principles. His specialty was the lengthy memorandum, in German or ponderous English. To the Court of St. James’s, he seemed more like a tutor or a music master than a prince.

In English domestic politics, the two men were poles apart, and here the comparison was distinctly in the prince’s favor. Melbourne was a die-hard conservative who did not believe in progress. His main commitment was to preserve the privileges of the Whig-Tory oligarchy, and he was deaf to the cries of the poor and oppressed. Both feudal and progressive in his social philosophy, Albert was a spirited defender of the working class. He favored social and political reforms as the intelligent way to defuse public discontent, quell rebellion, and keep kings on their thrones.