We Two: Victoria and Albert (38 page)

Queen Victoria took all this domestic anarchy in stride. From birth she had been subjected to dirt, cold, and discomfort, and emerged the stronger for it. She apologized to her guests, swallowed what was put in front of her as quickly as possible, dressed warmly, and got outside as much as possible. But entropy ate at the prince’s soul. On an income of hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, Her English Majesty should be better served. To buttress his personal observations, Albert commissioned Baron Stockmar to do an exhaustive analysis of the Queen’s domestic situation. The result was a lengthy and fascinating memorandum entitled “Observations of the present state of the Royal Household; written with a view to amend the present scheme, and to unite the greater security and comfort of the Sovereign with the greater regularity and better discipline of the Royal Household.”

Kings of England had long bemoaned the Byzantine ways of the Royal Household and tried to exercise more control over their income from the civil list. George III as a young man had struggled mightily to keep within his budget. His reward at court was the reputation of being a killjoy. George IV rejected the penny-pinching ways of his father but was careful to let sleeping bureaucrats lie. This king’s solution to the royal budget problem was to fall shamelessly into debt and wait until parliament bailed him out. Victoria, on her accession, was scrupulously honest with her privy purse and private income, but if she had tried to reform the royal household, she would surely have failed.

However, when her husband presented the annoyances of everyday palace living as problems that he could solve, and when he furthermore insisted that by sound management he could greatly increase her personal wealth, Victoria made no objections to his proposed reforms. In fact, she overflowed with admiration. Such energy. Such attention to detail. Such determination. Such plans. Dearest Albert was truly amazing and deserved to be given carte blanche.

WHEN THEY BEGAN
their financial partnership, Victoria and Albert suffered from an extreme case of what sociologists call “relative deprivation.” They felt poor and needy, even though Victoria was one of the wealthiest women in the world. In many ways, their domestic situation was closer to that of tenants than landlords, and they had surprisingly little authority over many of the people who served them.

The Queen was the highest paid public official in the kingdom, receiving an annual grant of 385,000 pounds from parliament. She used three large state properties in prime locations as her private residences—Buckingham
Palace, Windsor Castle, and the Royal Pavilion at Brighton—and she was also titular lord over the palaces of St. James’s, Hampton Court, and Kensington Palace in London, plus Holyrood House in Scotland. She had a great art collection, dating back to the Middle Ages but vastly expanded by her uncle, George IV. On her way into her private chapel at Windsor, the Queen passed through a tiny room full of Holbeins. On the walls of her homes, masterpieces by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Canaletto jostled for space with holiday sketches by royal amateurs.

The Queen had her own stable and took to the sea on her private yacht. Since she found coal dirty and gas smelly, all her homes—even Windsor Castle, with its vast underground furnaces—were heated by beech logs, already a rare and expensive commodity in industrial Britain. Victoria was also independently wealthy. At the time of her accession, she derived an income of about 120,000 pounds a year from her residential, farming, industrial, and mining properties in the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall. And the Queen had a small army of servants and a mountain of household goods. She never opened a door, carried a parcel, did up a button, or slit an envelope for herself. She ate breakfast and tea modestly off Sèvres porcelain but lunched off solid silver. She could entertain 150 guests at state dinners with plates, cutlery, serving dishes, saltcellars, and epergnes all made of gold.

But parliament had seen fit to allot her less money a year than her two predecessors, apparently because they had been men and were thus expected to spend more. This second-class budget seemed very unfair to Victoria. The elderly George IV and William IV had no legitimate children when they acceded, but Victoria was young and hoped to have at the minimum two sons to secure the dynasty. Royal children, until they came of age and were voted a separate income from the civil list, were a severe drain on their parents’ resources. The Queen’s personal fortune was also smaller than it seemed. The 60,000 pounds from the duchy of Cornwall constituted a large part of her income, but this belonged to the Prince of Wales and would actually become his to spend when he turned twenty-one.

For his part, Prince Albert could never forget that his appanage was 20,000 pounds a year less than that enjoyed by Queen Adelaide, William IV’s widow. The allotments the Queen and prince received under the civil list were also very unlikely to increase. Due to the fabulous extravagance of George IV, members of parliament had taken to debating whether the royal family gave value for money.

And then there was the vexed question of the Guelph treasure and who owned it. Amassed in the reigns of the first three Georges, this treasure included
a solid gold dinner service and Queen Charlotte’s jewels, valued in 1750 at 70,000 pounds. Victoria was quite sure that the Guelph treasure was hers—and that she needed it, since, in comparison even with other European monarchs, her collection of jewelry and plate was meager.

Great Britain started off as a poor offshore island and much of the treasure of the English Crown was melted down under Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Protectorate in the early seventeenth century. The greatest collection of Tudor and Jacobean plate is in the Kremlin, not the Tower of London. George IV, that great dandy, wastrel, and art connoisseur, did his best to build up the royal collections, buying jewels and plate among other valuable things. All the same, when Victoria acceded to the throne, she found that her jewelry was hardly commensurate with the wealth and power of the nation she represented to the world.

As a child, Victoria had been kept away from the courts of her uncle kings and, even when she became heir apparent, she was given relatively few valuable presents. New royal husbands could usually be counted on for a set of necklace and earrings in emeralds or rubies, at a minimum, but the best that Albert Coburg could do was a sapphire brooch. One of Victoria’s bridesmaids, Lady Sarah Villiers, when she married Prince Esterhazy, was given jewelry far more valuable than the Queen’s.

Victoria did have a crown, the one that had been specially reconfigured for her coronation and that featured two historic gems, King Edward the Confessor’s sapphire and the Black Prince’s ruby. The new state crown was lighter than the old one but still disproportionate to Queen Victoria’s small frame. It gave her a headache, especially since it had to be secured to her small, smooth head by long jewel-headed hatpins. On state occasions, a lady-in-waiting had the nerve-racking job of pinning on Her Majesty’s crown, and once Lady Sarah Lyttelton jabbed a pin in at the wrong angle. The gallant Victoria allowed herself a wince of pain, and the jab became a joke between the two women. However, by the early 1850s, Queen Victoria had taken to replacing her crown with an exquisite diamond-and-pearl coronet that had been made for George IV But for the first twenty years of her reign, when she dressed up for the season, Victoria wore her grandmother Charlotte’s jewels almost every day. She was especially fond of a rope of pearls, supposedly the finest in Europe.

The problem with the Guelph treasure was that Victoria’s uncle Ernest, the king of Hanover, claimed that it was his under the will of his mother, Queen Charlotte. The British government fiercely resisted the Hanoverian claim, but after a lawsuit that lasted for twenty years, the decision was made in favor of Hanover. The British government decided to give back the
Guelph treasure, which was a bitter disappointment not only to Queen Victoria but also to the Hanoverians who had expected a large cash payment in lieu.

WHEN PRINCE ALBERT
took on the task of reforming the royal household, he found that he had very little control over the income his wife received under the civil list. The Queen’s fixed expenses were enormous. She had big, aging properties to maintain with over one thousand people on the active payroll and the pension list. The 385,000 pounds a year Victoria received from parliament divided up as follows: 131,250 pounds for the salaries of the royal household, 172,500 for the expenses of the royal household, 13,200 for the royal bounty (pensions and charitable giving), 60,000 for the privy purse (the Queen’s personal expenses), and 8,040 “unappropriated.”

The royal household was as much an abstract concept as a practical entity. It referred to all the functions, activities, and facilities of the monarch every day of the year and in every place of residence. It was made up of all the staff involved in that life, from the Lord Chamberlain to the mistress of the robes to the head gardener to the under scullery maid. The royal household was a division of government, administered by four separate and autonomous governmental entities: the Lord Chamberlain’s Department, the Lord Steward’s Office, the Commission of Woods and Forests, and the Master of the Horse. Queen Victoria referred to them once as the “charming departments which really are the plague of one’s life.”

The four departments were administered by well-bred young men who needed an income but usually had better things to do than work. All four were inefficient, reserving their active energies for turf wars all the more ferocious because the turf had never, over the centuries, been fenced. They answered in theory to parliament, which exercised weak and intermittent control, and, in fact, to the Treasury Department. The Lords of the Treasury had the power of the purse and were the supreme guardians of turf. They made it their business to question bills, require exhaustive lists of expenditures, cut staff, and withhold payments, and generally make lesser bureaucrats know who was boss. On the other hand, when complaints came in, the Lord Chamberlain and his colleagues could always blame Treasury.

The employees who composed the royal household were paid out of the Queen’s civil list, but they were
not
her employees. Though their job was to serve her, they were not obliged to obey her. Only the specific governmental department that hired a worker could sack him. As a result, standards of
service in the royal palace were lower than in middle-class homes where a cook who burned the roast could be dismissed on the spot.

Among the four rival departments, the Commission of Woods and Forests excelled in procrastination and inefficiency. It was responsible for maintenance and repairs at the royal residences, all of which posed special problems that the commission ignored to the best of its very considerable ability. Persuading the commission to send in a man to put a door back on its hinges, mend a windowpane, or plane down the wooden table of the pastry chef took diplomatic talents of the highest order. If another department or individual fixed the broken window, the commissioners arose in protest, ready now to remove the offending new pane.

Jurisdictional problems arose constantly. As Baron Stockmar noted in his 1842 memorandum, the Queen at times shivered from cold because “the Lord Steward lays the fire, but the Lord Chamberlain lights it.” Why were the palace windows so dirty that at times the Queen could not tell if it was raining? Answer: because the Lord Chamberlain’s men cleaned them inside and the commissioners’ men cleaned them outside, but never at the same time.

When a job needed to be done, a requisition in due form would need to be submitted to the proper department, as the Duchess of Sutherland, Queen Victoria’s first mistress of robes, soon discovered. Two rooms at St. James’s Palace were allocated to the duchess for the official use of herself and her staff and to house the Queen’s state robes. But when the Duchess of Sutherland was shown her two rooms, she found them completely empty. Politely, the duchess wrote to the Lord Chamberlain, requesting chairs, tables, rugs, fire irons, a clothespress, a clotheshorse, a chest of drawers, a mirror, and locks on the doors. The request was surely modest, and the duchess was not only an important state officer but a lady of ancient birth, vast wealth, and great beauty with long experience at court, but she got nowhere at first. The Lord Chamberlain replied within two days with equal politeness that the matters addressed by Her Grace in her most recent communication lay outside his jurisdiction. No wonder the official name for an application to a governmental department was a “craving”!