We Two: Victoria and Albert (39 page)

Internal reform of such an entrenched bureaucracy was incremental and ineffective at best. The royal household constituted a system of state patronage of particular value at a time when people of all classes perpetually tottered on the edge of ruin. It was not just the lower servants who worked the system to their advantage. A maid of honor as well as a scullery maid might slip a silver spoon in her pocket, and was more likely to get away with it. Each Lord Chamberlain got two thousand pounds a year, which was significant
even to a nineteenth-century English peer. After the coronation, a decorous tussle occurred between the lord chancellor and the Archdeacon of Windsor over who should get the new solid silver inkstand that had been ordered to facilitate the Queen’s sign manual during the ceremony.

Why would a Lord Steward or a Commissioner of Woods and Forests seek to reform an institution from which they personally benefited and through which they obtained the undivided loyalty of thousands of their fellow citizens?

A VERITABLE BUREAUCRATIC
Hercules, Prince Albert was determined to cleanse the Augean stables he found at Windsor and Buckingham Palace. His campaign for domestic reform was the toughest he ever faced, a wearisome “infinitude of tiny minutiae,” as he himself confessed. But he was determined to prevail, and, rather to the surprise of Stockmar, who often criticized the prince for his lethargy, he proved to be a master of bureaucracy. Dreamy, cultured Albert metamorphosed into the consummate committeeman and negotiator, a devotee of meetings, a master of memoranda, and an indefatigable supervisor. Both the cabinet ministers and the gentlemen of the Treasury warmed to the prince, finding him a reasonable man who was prepared to make a deal and never went over budget.

Thanks to the excellent relations he developed with successive British governments after the premiership of Sir Robert Peel, the prince was able to persuade the Treasury to pay for things without depleting the Queen’s privy purse. Buckingham Palace was impossibly small for a modern royal family, argued the prince. His children were stacked up in the attics, and, while one of the Queen’s levees or drawing rooms could attract two thousand people, the largest room in the palace accommodated only five hundred. Parliament heeded the prince’s complaints, and after 1845, Buckingham Palace was significantly reconfigured, enlarged, and modernized at the taxpayers’ expense. The royal yacht was powered by sail and made the Queen seasick, reported the prince. Parliament promptly ordered a new, steam-powered royal yacht. The Queen was enchanted by the speed and safety of rail travel, parliament learned. A royal train was procured for the use of Her Majesty’s family and household.

The prince’s most important internal reform was probably to persuade the departments to appoint a master of the household in each of the royal residences. This permanent official lived in and took responsibility for coordinating the work that needed to be done to keep the place clean, well run, and in good repair. Once the prince took control, when foreign royalty came
to stay or a major public event took place, such as the funeral of the Duke of Wellington, the men and women of the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Steward could be counted upon to rise magnificently to the occasion.

In his relationship with the royal servants, Albert established himself as a strictly fair but attentive and tenacious master. Under his management, guests no longer wandered the corridors at Windsor for hours at night, trying to find their bedroom. Foreign diplomats did not blunder in on the Queen while she was dressing. The royal children were safely locked away in their nursery, to which their father kept the key. Such fires as the Queen would permit were lit on command. Items like candles, biscuits, and paper for the water closets were doled out carefully. The butler was under notice to keep the liquor bill low, especially since the Queen’s husband drank water or, perhaps, in memory of his native Germany, beer.

The prince made least headway with the Commission of Woods and Forests. When a new water closet was being installed at Buckingham Palace, the commission rose up in fury, not because the plans had the disadvantage of emptying the sewage directly onto the little roof under the Queen’s dressing room, but because they originated in the Lord Chamberlain’s department. The most intractable problem, however, was with the drains, which came under the commission’s rubric. Experts came in every few years to investigate and look grim, but even Prince Albert failed to get a modern drainage system installed in London or Windsor. This meant that for all their wealth, members of the royal family were subject to the ravages of infectious disease like ordinary folk. Medical care was freely available for all palace residents, but even Harley Street doctors at that time had few weapons to combat the regular outbreaks of cholera and typhoid that occurred when the cesspools overflowed into the drinking water.

Thanks to the prince’s energetic domestic campaign, within a few years, the comfort enjoyed by the English royal family was the envy of their foreign relatives. As Vicky discovered when she moved to Prussia in 1857, the Prussian royal household drew all its water from a single pump in the courtyard, and water closets were unknown in German castles. And the Germans found the Russians abhorrently dirty!

Having bearded the beast of bureaucracy in its lair, the prince was able to turn with relief to those parts of his wife’s estate where government officials had little or no sway. In managing the family money, Albert was outstandingly successful. He proved to have a combination of drive, vision, and administrative compulsiveness that would have made him a great captain of industry. These were bourgeois skills, unremarkable in mercantile families, habitually despised by aristocrats, and revolutionary for royals.

Deeply interested in agriculture, the prince introduced the latest in modern farming methods to the royal farms. He improved the breeding strains of the royal cattle and sheep. He designed and built in Windsor Great Park a superb new dairy conforming to the most exacting standards of hygiene. He installed a central laundry for the royal household at Kew in London that saved hundreds a year in lost or pilfered clothes and in salaries for washerwomen. He masterminded, supervised, and, along with the Queen, collaborated actively in the first exhaustive catalog of the royal collections. He had the royal pianos tuned regularly. He hired responsible men to manage his wife’s and son’s real estate and mining interests, kept an eye on the men he had chosen, and invested the profits wisely. The income from the royal estates soared under the prince’s management.

By 1845, Albert had wrapped his wife and family in a protective cocoon of comfort and privacy that no previous English sovereign had ever known. He earned the gratitude of parliament by his prudence and thrift. He earned the rapturous admiration of his wife. He created an idyll of family life that his children sought to re-create as adults. He won the approval of the English middle classes by espousing their values. Through the prince’s efforts, the English monarchy entered into a period of unparalleled prosperity, and when he died his wife was many times richer than at her accession.

Yet Albert’s assertion of control won him few friends in his own household. Victoria, as generous and appreciative as she was demanding, was adored by her servants. Albert was publicly obeyed and secretly resented. When the prince cut the wages of a housemaid from forty-five to thirty-five pounds a year, when he abolished the ancient perquisite of serving wine every night to a nonexistent official, when he pocketed the prize money for a champion ram at a county fair, dukes sneered and drovers grumbled.

The discontent was voiced by a newsman called, appropriately, Jasper Judge. This gentleman wrote for the Windsor local paper and was a stringer for the London press. Judge published a stream of articles and books excoriating the Queen and the prince for the public money spent on them. There was the new stable at Windsor that cost the Treasury forty thousand pounds. There was the fact that the royals were the major Windsor landlords and yet paid no local property taxes. There was the human waste from the castle and barracks that overflowed into the Windsor streets whenever it rained hard.

Jasper Judge accused the Queen and the prince of being hard-hearted landlords who thought only of their own pleasure, especially when it came to hunting. In his columns, Judge told the story of the poor woman gathering sticks who was set on and viciously bitten by the dog of one of the
prince’s gamekeepers. He reported the case of a poor man brought to court for poaching four pheasants and six pheasants’ eggs from the royal estates. The poacher was tried
in camera
and ordered to pay a fine of ten pounds and eleven shillings or spend four months in Reading gaol.

Jasper Judge’s press campaign infuriated Prince Albert. How could such a man be allowed to attack the monarchy with impunity? When his father and brother needed more space for their castle or their new opera house, they had no difficulty securing it. In Coburg, a political troublemaker like Judge would have been horsewhipped by one of the duke’s henchmen and forced out of his home. In England this was not possible, but Albert refused to let Judge get the better of him.

At first Prince Albert tried bribery, only to discover that Judge could not be bought. He then brought legal action not only against Judge but also against Judge’s son and his publishing associate, who were bankrupted and forced into exile abroad. Judge hung on in grim determination, but when he naively advertised an exhibition of etchings by the Queen and the prince, Albert saw his chance. Judge had purchased the etchings quite legally from the Windsor man who had printed them, but the prince took him to court for stealing the copies of the etchings and displaying them without their owners’ permission. The prince prevailed in court. Judge was convicted, jailed, and ruined.

None of these legal proceedings made Albert popular with the English people.

…

N THE MIDDLE AGES, A ROYAL COURT AND A ROYAL HOUSEHOLD WERE
much the same thing—the informal group of nobles chosen by the king and queen as their constant companions as they journeyed about the country. By the seventeenth century royal courts were more selective and more centralized, following the model of Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles, and there was a clear distinction between the court and the household.

To the end of the eighteenth century, the royal household remained the exclusive domain of members of the aristocracy, while the royal court was relatively inclusive, consisting of a variety of people useful to the monarch. Ministers, officials, and mistresses were not infrequently of low birth but still took their place at court. In France under Louis XIV, any man with a hat and sword had the right to enter the Palace of Versailles and see the king. Until the French Revolution, on the “Fete de Saint Louis,” French nationals and even foreign tourists were permitted to gawk at Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as they ate “the great repast”—”le grand couvert.” However, by the mid-nineteenth century in Great Britain, court functions were by invitation, and only a few thousand people at most ever gained entrance to a royal palace or saw the Queen close up. When at the time of the Crimean War Queen Victoria personally pinned Victoria Crosses, the new medals for valor, on the chests of returning veterans and touched the hands of men of all classes, she was conscious of doing something new and radical.