We Two: Victoria and Albert (35 page)

EVER SINCE THEIR
engagement, Prince Albert had preached to Queen Victoria that the Crown must be above party and above all must not be swayed by personal preference in relations to ministers. But finding a prime minister and a set of policies he wholeheartedly believed in, Albert became quite as much a Peelite Tory in 1841 as Victoria had been a Melbournite Whig in 1838. Both Peel and Prince Albert confidently anticipated that Peel would return to power sooner or later, so the two continued to correspond and meet regularly after Peel left office. Albert did not see this correspondence to be unconstitutional or a betrayal of the prime ministers who succeeded Peel, as he had alleged in the case of Victoria’s correspondence with Melbourne.

History has decreed that Prince Albert was right to ally with Peel, one of nineteenth-century England’s great statesmen. It has commended the prince, a very young man, newly arrived in England, for changing his political tactics and shading his political principles as he gained experience. All the same, in the lessons that Albert preached to his wife, in the guilt he laid upon her for her ardent support of Lord Melbourne and the Whigs, there was a double standard of which the prince appears to have been unconscious.

When Victoria came to the throne, she was inexperienced, isolated, and vulnerable. That she succeeded so brilliantly at first was to her credit. That she made some mistakes was to be expected. There is little sign that Albert understood Victoria’s difficulties or appreciated her achievements before their marriage. To put himself in the shoes of an eighteen-year-old girl thrust into the highest and most conspicuous position in the country was beyond him. He judged his wife more than he sympathized with her. The glare of publicity was not an issue for a prince of Coburg, and far from lacking support, Albert had been micromanaged at the later stages of his teenage Bildung by his uncle and Stockmar. As he saw it, Victoria was a woman, she made mistakes, and she needed a man to show her the way. He was a man, and a superior one, and men learned from experience. It was as simple as that.

Complacency was the shadow side of Albert’s righteousness. It would be increasingly characteristic of an age that has been labeled Victorian but was, in its origins, Albertian.

…

ITH MELBOURNE GONE, ALBERT COULD TURN HIS ATTENTION TO HIS
bête noire, Baroness Louise Lehzen.

Ever since Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837, her former governess had been delightfully busy. The baroness served as amanuensis to the Queen for much of her private correspondence and looked after her private accounts. She was the Queen’s chief liaison with the government bureaucrats who ran the royal residences, and she carried keys as a sign of her authority in the household. Unlike the aristocratic ladies in waiting, Lehzen was happy to do humble things like putting the Queen’s correspondence through the letterpress and keeping an eye on the laundry. With her love of caraway seeds and notepaper decorated with little steam engines, the baroness was a figure of fun at court. Despite this, she got on well with most people. She was heart and soul a Whig, it was true, but she never used her influence with the Queen for personal gain.

Before Victoria’s accession, the Coburg party (excluding the Duchess of Kent) had been careful to form an alliance with Lehzen, whom they saw as a key player in the struggle against Conroy At different times, both King Leopold and Baron Stockmar corresponded with the baroness. But once Prince Albert came to England, he and the baroness became rivals for the love of the Queen. The Coburg party, which now included Victoria’s mother, decided that if the royal marriage was to work as planned, Lehzen had to go.

Prince Albert found Baroness Lehzen personally repugnant and politically dangerous. The baroness continued to hover close to the Queen, silent
and watchful in the background, just as she had during the first twenty years of Victoria’s life. The prince felt the baroness’s presence as an intrusion, especially since, unlike most of the courtiers, she understood German, the language the Queen and prince used for their private conversations. When the Queen retired to her rooms to dress and have her hair done or prepare for the night, Lehzen was with her, and the two women gossiped and laughed. This was hardly surprising, but something about Lehzen’s passionate devotion to Victoria offended Albert. In his eyes, Lehzen was a narrow, gossiping, middle-class spinster, quite unfit to be the friend of a queen.

Albert also contested the authority Lehzen exercised in his wife’s household, which he felt should be his as the Queen’s husband. The baroness made him feel like a dependent in his own home. When he ventured to protest or make suggestions as to how things might be done more efficiently, she resisted with vehemence.

The prince also took the side of the Duchess of Kent in Queen Victoria’s ongoing dispute with her mother. In his first unhappy months in England, Albert found a sympathetic ear in his aunt the duchess. He and she were natural allies against the Melbourne-Lehzen axis. Albert considered it a child’s duty to love his or her parents, whatever their faults, and he found it shocking that Victoria had little good to say about her mother. Rather than sympathize with his wife for the miseries of her childhood, the prince blamed her governess for bringing her up badly. It suited the prince to cast his aunt in the role of Lehzen’s victim rather than as an ambitious egotist who had made her daughter’s life wretched.

Albert realized that Victoria’s mother was a silly woman and that her relationship to Conroy had been a great mistake. He certainly had no wish to live with her. When he took over the domestic reins, he always made sure that the Duchess of Kent maintained a separate residence. However, Albert found most women silly and annoying, and he considered it natural and proper that his aunt had always turned to strong men for advice and support. He simply didn’t like Conroy. Albert himself intended from now on to supply the strong male arm his aunt required. Under his guidance she proved happy to take on the new role of doting mother and grandmother.

In his dealings with Prime Minister Melbourne, Prince Albert had maintained a cool politeness. But he felt safe enough to quarrel openly with Baroness Lehzen. In his letters home to Germany, the prince became vituperative, referring to the baroness as “the hag” (“die Blaste”) and calling her “a crazy stupid intriguer.” He convinced himself that Victoria feared
Lehzen more than she loved her and would, in the end, be grateful to him for getting rid of her. He accused his wife of being “infatuated” with Lehzen and treating her as “an oracle.” The Queen declared this to be nonsense.

Victoria was sadly torn between her new husband and her old friend. She accepted that her husband had legitimate grievances, and she knew that Lehzen irritated Albert. All the same, she owed her former governess a great deal, and trusted her. When Albert challenged her about her closeness to the baroness, Victoria was angry. It was as if she was once more a helpless child cooped up in Kensington Palace with no friends of her own. If she and Lehzen had the occasional chat, what harm could that do?

As to the accusation that Lehzen was a political influence, the Queen hotly denied it. She vowed that she had never consulted Lehzen on matters of policy or shown her any state documents. Albert refused to believe her. He saw Lehzen as an enthusiastic ally of Lord Melbourne, as was indeed the case. He was sure that the baroness encouraged the Queen to maintain her personal hold over state business and royal affairs. She probably did.

After the departure of Lord Melbourne in the late summer of 1841 and the birth of the Prince of Wales in November, the antagonism between Prince Albert and Baroness Lehzen came to a boil over the superintendency of the royal nursery.

Nursery arrangements were normally in the purview of a married woman, and when her first child, Vicky, was born, Queen Victoria duly hired a wet nurse, Mrs. Roberts, and a governess, Mrs. Southey plus various nursery maids. She also allowed Lehzen to extend her domestic responsibilities to the nursery. This would have seemed normal to both women, since in great families at that time a young mother often asked her own governess to supervise the early education of her children. Both of Lehzen’s pupils, Princess Feodora and Queen Victoria, were eloquent testimony to Lehzen’s credentials as an enlightened educator. However, Prince Albert and his trusted confidant and adviser, Baron Stockmar, found the Queen’s nursery arrangements unacceptable.

Stockmar had strong views on the education of royal children, especially of the heir to the throne. In a long memorandum of 1841 that the Queen and the prince studied with rapt attention, Stockmar surveyed the sorry educational history of the Hanoverian kings and the bitter enmity between kings and their sons. George III and Charlotte, his queen, had been a prudent and respectable couple, Stockmar observed, but somehow the education of their sons had been sadly deficient. All seven of George III’s adult sons had rebelled and fallen into evil ways in one way or another. George IV
and William IV, the two eldest, were, in the baron’s view, such very bad kings that it was a marvel the English monarchy had survived.

The moral of the story, opined Stockmar, was that a monarch must pay particular and sustained attention to the upbringing of his or her children and establish the closest relationship possible with them, especially with the Prince of Wales. From the cradle, Stockmar admonished his royal tutees, it was essential to establish a step-by-step educational program for the princes and princesses. This process would shape the young natures to conform to their parents’ ideas and values, inspire the young minds, and lead the young bodies in the paths of virtue. The Prince of Wales could do no better than aspire to emulate the virtues and match the intellect of his illustrious father.

Queen Victoria rapturously agreed that Bertie must be shaped into a second Albert, and, as one might guess, the prince was fully persuaded by Stockmar’s ideas. They confirmed his sense of self and conformed to his exalted ideas of the paternal role. They encouraged him to forget that if he himself was a pattern of virtue, his father was not, and that he and his brother, Ernest, had been brought up like twins but were now, to put it mildly, very different men. The prince had no use for Lord Melbourne’s gentle observation to the Queen that education could certainly “mould and direct” but could not “alter a child’s character.”

Visiting the nursery frequently and without warning, the prince found the Queen’s nursery employees to be neither reliable nor efficient. Vicky was a very colicky baby, and her wet nurse was observed drinking a good deal of beer and eating a lot of cheese. The prince was horrified by the lack of security at the palace and installed a complex system of locks to which he kept the keys and which the staff found very wearisome. When Prince Albert came into the nursery one day and found all the windows shut and the nurse, wrapped in shawls, sitting in front of a blazing fire, he was horrified. He, Victoria, and a consensus of doctors believed that the health of children depended on their getting as much fresh air and cold water, and as little food, as possible.