We Two: Victoria and Albert (34 page)

Melbourne was an Englishman, convinced of the superiority of all things English, a courtier to the English monarch by birth and training, a native of the ingrown world of British politics. Albert was proudly a German and therefore an alien in xenophobic England. He was also an internationalist and a rationalist who saw Britain as part of Europe and was reluctant to say “my country right or wrong.”

And whereas Albert, a married man at twenty, was conscious of having led a blameless life, Melbourne was a very recently reformed old roué. The erotic subtext that for a time had made Victoria’s relationship with her prime minister so delightful to both disgusted Albert. For him Melbourne was a tainted old man, representative of the corrupt order in British society and politics left over from George IV, a pernicious and dangerous influence on the Queen.

LORD MELBOURNE WAS
too powerful a man for Albert to tackle head on, and the prince’s political advisers abroad urged him to do nothing hasty. Time, and paternity, were on his side. Melbourne himself had told Stockmar as early as 1838 that his ministry was hanging on to power by a thread, and in the summer of 1841, the Whig government was defeated in parliament by a vote of no confidence. The prime minister was forced to call a
general election, and Queen Victoria campaigned vigorously and openly for the Whigs. She dragged her reluctant spouse to Brocket Hall, Broadlands, and Panshanger, the country homes of Melbourne, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, and Palmerston’s wife. Behind her husband’s back, and with the connivance of Baroness Lehzen, Victoria contributed money to the Whig Party from her private purse. But to the Queen’s chagrin, the Tories were returned with a large majority, and Lord Melbourne ceased to be prime minister.

Prince Albert had foreseen this turn of events, and he knew that only two years before his wife had damaged the monarchy by refusing to accept Sir Robert Peel, the leader of the Tories, as her prime minister. A tall, reserved, awkward man of few words, Peel had none of Melbourne’s polished ease with royalty, and the Queen could not bear him. In May the prince opened secret negotiations with Peel on how the transfer of power could be managed, and the two men hit it off immediately. When the time came for a change of ministry, Albert had enough influence over his wife to persuade her to accept the new prime minister with good grace.

When Sir Robert Peel became prime minister of England in August 1841, Lord Melbourne was heartbroken—not to lose power but to lose his place next to the Queen. In bidding farewell to Her Majesty, he remarked with characteristic grace and fatherly directness, “For four years I have seen you daily and liked it better every day.” Victoria missed Melbourne very much at first, and the two continued to correspond, mainly on personal matters. This correspondence aroused Albert’s suspicions. He dispatched his secretary George Anson to Lord Melbourne’s London residence with a long memorandum penned by Baron Stockmar. Melbourne was charged with acting unconstitutionally and endangering the Crown by writing to the Queen behind the new prime minister’s back. Melbourne exploded with anger—”God eternally damn it, flesh and blood cannot stand this!” he said to Anson, who had once been his own private secretary and friend—but there was nothing he could do. The prince and Stockmar now called the shots. In November 1842 Lord Melbourne suffered a devastating stroke, and he died, a broken man, in 1848.

Victoria never lost touch with her old friend and mourned him when he died. But under Albert’s influence, she came to doubt the value of her past emotions and the validity of her memories. Albert had become her oracle. He judged Melbourne severely and viewed his wife’s relationship with her first prime minister as an unfortunate aberration. The Queen castigated herself bitterly for the mistakes made in the second year of her reign when she was under Melbourne’s influence. “A worse school for a young girl or
one more detrimental to all natural feelings and affections cannot well be imagined,” she wrote, “than the position of a Queen at eighteen without experience, without a husband to guide and support her.”

WITH MELBOURNE GONE
and Victoria increasingly absorbed in domestic cares and dependent upon him, Albert rejoiced to find that the balance of power had swung decisively his way. For the next twelve years, the prince served as his wife’s private secretary, saw all the documents submitted to her, was present at all her meetings with ministers, communicated with the ministers and court officials directly, dictated many of his wife’s official responses, composed endless memoranda, and engaged in a vast private correspondence with powerful men in England and abroad.

For many years Albert’s access to power was not known to the public or even to many people at court. When the Whigs returned to power in 1846, Lord Charles Greville was flabbergasted to discover how completely Victoria was ruled by her husband. Albert had become so identified with the Queen, Greville noted in his diary, that they “are one person, and as he likes and she dislikes business, it is obvious that while she has the title, he is really discharging the functions of the Sovereign. He is King to all intents and purposes.” By 1842, in letters and conversation Victoria habitually used the first person pronoun “we” in reference to her own thoughts and actions. That pronoun was not the lordly plural of her ancestor kings but useful shorthand for her oneness with Albert.

The Coburg party rejoiced in the prince’s transition to power behind the throne, seeing it as the inevitable result of his superior abilities. In fact, however, the fortuitous change in English government that brought Peel and the Tories into office, plus the Queen’s absorption in her pregnancies, were probably the decisive factors. When Melbourne and his Whigs were defeated, Queen Victoria was in the final stages of a very unwelcome second pregnancy and full of anxiety about her approaching confinement. For the time, at least, the fight had gone out of her, and she longed above all to feel at one with the husband upon whose support she now relied. Albert, on the other hand, was personally and philosophically aligned with Peel’s moderate Tories. He forged an alliance with the two most important Tory politicians, Peel and the Duke of Wellington. This initial alliance provided a template for his successful relationships with successive governments between 1841 and 1853.

The Iron Duke, as Wellington was called, occupied a unique place in English social and political life. He was the supreme hero of the Napoleonic
wars, having successfully defeated the army commanded by the Emperor Napoleon’s brother in Spain and then the army commanded by Napoleon himself at the battle of Waterloo in 1814. After the war, he became the leader of the Tory Party and served several times as prime minister. At the outset, Prince Albert’s relationship with the Duke of Wellington was a tactical move, not a personal friendship. Wellington had spearheaded the opposition to Albert in parliament before the royal wedding. He had shown a marked distaste for the Saxe-Coburg connection and had raised the issue of Prince Albert’s Protestant credentials. He had played a key part in the parliamentary debates that cut Prince Albert’s income and denied him precedence. Furthermore, Wellington too was a man formed during the regency of George IV, and he always had an ongoing relationship with a woman who was not his wife. When the Iron Duke was almost eighty, his current inamorata came within a hair of suing him for breach of promise.

But Wellington, unlike Melbourne, was not just a political figure who went in and out of office. He was a national hero, a symbol of British might, and so Prince Albert found it politic to close his eyes to Wellington’s personal life and forget the slights of the past. The rapprochement with Wellington was highly productive. The two men formed a mutual admiration society, and in 1851 Wellington sought to persuade the prince to take over from him as commander-in-chief of the British army. The prince refused, but he was nonetheless gratified. In token of his regard for the duke, and as a shrewd publicity move, Albert named his third son Arthur—the Duke’s given name—and chose Wellington as the child’s chief sponsor.

In an exceptionally revealing letter to Wellington in 1851, Prince Albert explained his conception of the “peculiar and delicate” role he played as Victoria’s husband. The consort to the Queen of England, wrote Albert, should

Prince Albert was even closer to Sir Robert Peel than to Wellington. Peel was a man of extraordinary brilliance. After taking a double first at Cambridge in classics and mathematics, he entered parliament at the age of twenty-one, made a maiden speech that at once marked him as a coming man, and became home secretary at the age of thirty-four. Here at last was an Englishman whom the prince could look up to and learn from, an Englishman whose German was almost as good as his Greek, Latin, and French. Soon, Albert was loaning Peel his personal copy of the ancient German epic
The Nibelungenlied
.

As a minister of state, Sir Robert Peel proved exceptionally able, but he was never a popular favorite or a beloved cabinet colleague. Unpopularity was one of the things he shared with Prince Albert. Peel was what we would call a technocrat, a moderate conservative, intent upon gradual social and political reform. The ultraconservative faction in his party known as the High Tories distrusted him for his progressive views as much as they looked down upon him for his low origins. The son of an extremely wealthy and socially responsible Lancashire textile magnate, Peel was sensitive to the misfortunes of the industrial working class and stressed the responsibilities of factory owners to their employees. As prime minister he pushed through legislation designed to limit working hours and improve the conditions in factories and mines. This alienated M.P.s in both parties who represented the interests of the industrial north.

Dislike of Peel within his own Tory Party turned into implacable hatred in 1846, the time of the great potato famine in Ireland. The Corn Laws were an old protectionist measure that forbade the importation of cheap foreign wheat, thus keeping the price of bread high and increasing the profits of the landed gentry at the expense of the poor. The High Tories regarded the benefits they received from the Corn Laws as sacrosanct. A firm believer in free trade and an advocate for social justice, Peel forced the repeal of the Corn Laws through parliament with the support of the Whigs and into the teeth of the opposition from the right of his own party, led by Benjamin Disraeli. Peel knew that the repeal was political suicide for him, but he chose duty over ambition. Within months, the High Tories found a pretext to defeat Peel’s government, preferring a weak Whig government to an effective Tory one.

Prince Albert had wholeheartedly supported Peel in his reform measures, and when the repeal of the Corn Laws was debated in the Commons,
the prince was in the balcony to hear Peel’s historic speech. The High Tories, who had never taken to the prince, bitterly resented this open gesture of support from the Crown. For their part, the radical faction of the Whig Party in parliament grumbled that the prince was acting against the constitution by attempting to influence English politics. Realizing his mistake, the prince never again attended a debate in the Commons, but the damage was done.