We Two: Victoria and Albert (37 page)

By 1841 Stockmar had been an international diplomat and agent to kings for more than twenty years, and he had come to believe in his own
myth of omniscience. However, when he took over the roles of marriage counselor and educational guru to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, his limitations and prejudices became glaringly evident. Stepping outside one’s areas of expertise and laying down the law is always dangerous, and Stock-mar knew less than most men about women and children. His own marriage was hardly a model. He had married his cousin Fanny Sommer because he needed money and she had some. He sired three children, but, as his own son admits, when his children were young “now and then it happened that several years passed by without his seeing wife or child.” Unsurprisingly, his long and habitual absences from home made his wife bitter and resentful.

And though Stockmar befriended women, he had no regard for them. All his close relationships were with men. When in 1815 he saw clearly that the doctors of his new friend Princess Charlotte were mishandling her pregnancy and delivery, Stockmar did not intervene. When in 1826 his then employer Prince Leopold offered morganatic marriage to his first cousin, Caroline Bauer, and carried her off to a life of neglect and seclusion in England, Stockmar assisted the seduction. When in 1842 Queen Victoria fought with Prince Albert to retain the love and support of her oldest and must trusted friend, Baroness Lehzen, Stockmar was instrumental in getting rid of Lehzen.

Stockmar’s delusions of omnipotence and his overt misogyny can be seen clearly in the following account he gave in the 1850s of the role he played in England at the time of Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837. As Stockmar remembered it, Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, the cabinet, the Privy Council, parliament, and the court, to say nothing of Queen Victoria herself, had been mere puppets in his hands.

“[The Queen] was quite a girl and knew nothing of the business, and was surrounded by women such as the Baroness Lehzen, who knew as little or less, and wished to lead her. I saw nothing was to be done till they were removed. So I looked around, and saw who there was to guide her. I induced her to put herself under Melbourne. He was not a fit person to be the guide of a girl … put around her some persons he should not—would not try to make the court moral—because he said it was no good trying—Courts always had been immoral, and would always be. But he was still the best person we could get, and we got rid of the influence of the women.”

Stockmar loved and was, in his way, loyal to Queen Victoria. However, he was German enough to be convinced that the English Constitution was an unfortunate aberration in that it allowed women to rule. Stockmar was
Prince Albert’s man, heart and soul. In Albert he saw the perfect instrument of his own geopolitical strategies. A remark by Stockmar after Victoria had angrily and painfully given birth to her second child in a year exposes the disjunct between Victoria’s wishes and interests and those of the Albert-Stockmar-Leopold axis. “I expressed [to Peel, the new Prime Minister],” wrote Stockmar to the departed Melbourne, “my delight to see the Queen so happy and added a hope that more and more she would seek and find her real happiness in her domestic relations
only
[my italics].”

Christian Stockmar had personal reasons for helping Prince Albert to get rid of Baroness Lehzen. Stockmar and Lehzen had more in common than either the baron or the prince were willing to acknowledge. Both began life as talented but impoverished Germans of the professional class, obliged to seek their fortunes in the employ of royalty. The relationship that Lehzen had with Queen Victoria uncomfortably aped Stockmar’s own with Prince Albert. Lehzen wished Queen Victoria to be like that great female autocrat Queen Elizabeth, just as Stockmar wished Albert to be a second King William of Orange, who ruled for his wife Queen Mary. Lehzen encouraged Victoria to keep her power and maintain her private independence of her husband. The Queen trusted her and listened to her. Stockmar urged Albert to assert himself as a husband and take over the government. Albert was all ears.

The alliance of Victoria and Lehzen was a threat to the alliance of Albert and Stockmar. When Albert was able to send Lehzen into exile, the balanced square became a triangle with Stockmar in the pivot position, and Albert’s influence over his wife was decisively enhanced.

Stockmar once remarked that if Baroness Lehzen had only been a little quieter and more sensible, she could have lived out her life at the palace, but this was the baron at his most hypocritical. Stockmar knew Albert’s hatred of Lehzen to be obsessive, and he stoked those fires. He knew that exile to her sister’s home in Germany meant misery for Lehzen just as it would be misery for him to retire to Coburg to live with his wife. But he had no pity.

As it turned out, both Stockmar and Lehzen had similarly unhappy endings. Both found themselves exiled to German backwaters, and both took cold comfort in their memories and their correspondence with royalty. According to the memoirs of Stockmar’s cousin Caroline Bauer, Fanny Stockmar took her revenge when her husband finally retired from the international scene and put himself at her mercy.

AFTER THREE YEARS
of marriage, the balance of power had swung decisively toward the husband. As Greville noted in surprise, the prince was
now privy to all the affairs of state and dictated royal policy king in all but name. With the departure of Baroness Lehzen, the prince assumed control of his wife’s finances, both her income under the civil list and that from her private estates. He was master of his own household, having wrested even the management of the nursery and the education of the children from his wife’s hands. Albert, it seemed, had won the struggle for dominance.

Both husband and wife professed their satisfaction at this turn of events. The Queen claimed that she was the happiest and most fortunate woman in the world because she had married Albert, and he was perfection. True and lasting happiness was now hers, she wrote in her letters and journal, because she acknowledged Albert as her master and embraced the traditional role of a married woman. Confirmed in his masculinity, confident in his superior ability, the prince was pleased that his conception of marital relations was finally being realized. Though foreseeing squalls ahead—women were such fickle jades!—he commended his wife for seeing sense. Victoria was the most delightful companion a man could wish for, he told his brother.

After the fiery independence and delight in business that she displayed in the years before her marriage, Victoria’s enthusiastic acquiescence to Albert’s dominance is disconcerting to a twenty-first-century reader. But the Queen was a realist with few good options. She was pregnant with her third child in three years and fearing that it would not be her last. She had lost her closest female friend, and she felt vulnerable. She was now dependent on her husband as friend and confidant as well as lover. With new family commitments added to the old ceremonial duties, she had more than enough to occupy her. By bending, not breaking, hunkering down and conserving her energies, Victoria was maximizing her chances of survival at a time when a woman compounded her loss of strength and risk of death with each additional pregnancy.

Since she had opted to marry and had chosen Albert of her free will, since custom decreed that a woman must look up to her husband, and since a queen regnant of England could not look up to an ordinary man, then Albert must, ipso facto, be extraordinary. The perfection of the Queen’s husband was an article of faith on which both she and Albert could build a marriage.

The new feminine deference, the decision that business was man’s work, was both reality and pretense for Victoria. She had the luxury of appearing to wish to give up her power and prerogatives to her husband, confident that the English Constitution would never allow her to do so irrevocably. Melbourne and Peel, Whig and Tory, were agreed that if the public learned that Albert functioned as king, the monarchy would be at
risk. Victoria might meekly savor Albert calling her “kleines Fräuchen” (little wifey) when they were alone, but when the two emerged from the bedroom each morning, he fell into step behind her.

Victoria had not forgotten the oaths she had taken at her coronation, and she still aspired to be a great queen. Deeply in tune with the nation, Victoria now sensed that marriage and motherhood held the key to her dynastic success. The people over whom she was titular ruler loved her in no small part because she appeared to correspond to their feminine ideal. They did not love her husband because he was
her
ideal man, not theirs. This was a fact she might decry out of wifely duty, but it was an unspoken source of power. Furthermore, Victoria was a shrewd judge of men, and she recognized real ability in her husband. She and Albert had the same financial and political goals. In a man’s world, the prince could realize those goals better than she could alone. By her admiration and trust, she could empower and energize him. They would be a formidable team.

And the sacrifices would not all be on her side. In return for giving up so much, Victoria, a charming egotist with no tolerance for boredom, expected a great deal from her husband: total fidelity and constant companionship, comfort and security, and an unending succession of new pleasures and sensations. The Queen was like a fat tiger, content with the cage, answering to the whip, but lashing out from time to time, and daring her tamer to get careless. Albert would have his work cut out to keep his wife happy.

…

AKING HIS WIFE COMFORTABLE AND SAFE WAS ONE OF THE FIRST
tasks Albert set himself in 1842 when he could at last call himself “master in the house.” Already in the early months of his marriage, while the Queen was closeted with her ministers, the prince was poking around in the domestic arrangements and taking notes. Albert was not used to comfort. His beloved little country house the Rosenau had been less than cozy. His family’s ancestral palace at Coburg had been an antiquated firetrap. All the same, the prince proceeded to be appalled by the waste, dirt, and disorder he found at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.

The servants were slovenly and disobedient. Below stairs at Buckingham Palace, the corridors were lined with refuse and infested by rats and roaches. At times whole suites had to be closed off when the stench from the drains became intolerable. Treasures were everywhere but sadly neglected. The Windsor Castle library was crammed with rare books and manuscripts, but there was no good catalog. Open a cupboard and out fell some dusty drawings by Leonardo da Vinci or a pile of George III’s correspondence.

Security at Buckingham Palace was so lax that the curious and the mad had little trouble getting in. A youth who became known to the press as “the Boy Jones” was found in the palace on three separate occasions, once by Baroness Lehzen under the sofa in the Queen’s sitting room. Jones boasted of the nights he had spent sitting on the throne, eating the Queen’s food, and peeping at the baby princess in her crib. He said he “was desirous of knowing the habits of the people, and thought a description would look very well in a book,” a singularly modern remark.