We Two: Victoria and Albert (43 page)

Enjoined by her husband to make no close friendships with her ladies-in-waiting, Victoria increasingly turned to her mother for everyday companionship and understanding. After Sir John Conroy’s death, the Duchess of Kent was finally prevailed upon to open her financial records and acknowledge that huge sums were unaccounted for. At last she admitted that Sir John, while claiming devotion to her interests, had not only swindled her but driven a wedge between her and her daughter for his own ends. For her part, Victoria admitted that she had been too influenced by Lehzen. It suited both mother and daughter to give up the bitterness of the past, and Victoria’s growing family proved a natural bond between the two. The duchess was a loving, generous, and indulgent grandmother who was careful, it seems, not to offend her son-in-law by questioning the way he was bringing up his children.

Prince Albert played an important part in the rapprochement between the Queen and the Duchess of Kent. He was fond of his aunt, and he was happy to serve as her chief counselor and financial adviser. Thanks to him and Sir George Couper, the excellent gentleman Albert appointed as her comptroller, the duchess cleared her debts, paid her bills on time, and put the financial scandals of the past behind her. With her status and reputation now secure, the duchess enthusiastically embraced her new role as, in effect, Queen Mother. Remembering that both his wife and her mother had quick tempers, Prince Albert prudently insisted that his mother-in-law always maintain separate residences, paid for out of her own civil list income. However, even if she did not precisely live with her daughter, the Duchess of Kent was a constant and beloved figure in royal family life.

Apart from Dear Mama, Dearest Uncle Leopold and his family were frequent and welcome guests, either staying with their royal English relatives or paying calls from their own home at Claremont. In fact, the king of the Belgians spent more time in England than his nephew Albert thought quite prudent in a head of state. The Queen’s Leiningen half brother and half sister, whose financial situation was not easy, also came frequently to England with their families as Victoria’s guests.

Duke Ernest I of Saxe-Coburg ceased to visit his son Albert and daughter-in-law Victoria within a year of their wedding, insulted that they declined to send the sums of money he requested. When the duke died in 1844, Prince Albert wept inconsolably and the Queen shed tears of sympathy, but the death was in many ways a solution to a festering problem. As for Albert’s brother, Ernest, he came to England as often as possible and, unlike
the Leiningens, was not very welcome. Once she realized his true character, Queen Victoria never took any pleasure in her brother-in-law’s company but she found it impossible to keep him away. When Ernest married, she liked and pitied his wife, Alexandrine, specifically invited her to come for visits, and was furious when Ernest persisted in coming alone.

Quite apart from these close relatives, Prince Albert liked to surround himself with members of German royal houses, most of whom could claim some distant kinship with him and the Queen. The language and cultural background of these people matched his own, and they appeared appropriately awed by his hospitality. Anytime in diary or letters that Albert happens to mention his current house party, we drown in a hyphenated deluge of Saxes, Mecklenburg-Strelitzes, Württembergs, Hesses, Hohenlohes, Coburg-Koharys, Hohenzollern-Sigmaringens, and Schleswig-Holsteins.

Although generous with their hospitality, the royal couple saw their guests mainly in the evening in large groups. They appreciated guests like the king of Saxony who could be trusted to amuse themselves and not get in the way of their busy hosts. Victoria had an iron-clad routine. Albert was out much of the day, either escorting his wife to public events or on business of his own, and he hated gossip and small talk even when he was at home. The chasm in status and wealth that yawned between the English royal family and their German relatives made relationships touchy. Neither the Queen nor the prince spent much time tête-à-tête even with visitors they dearly loved.

In many ways the English Saxe-Coburgs found relations easier and more relaxed with the family of Louis Philippe d’Orléans. The king and queen of the French were not only related by marriage but were fully the peers of the Queen and the prince. In the late summer of 1843, Victoria and Albert for the first time crossed the English Channel in the royal yacht to pay a private visit to Uncle Louis Philippe at the Chateau d’Eu on the coast of Normandy. The weather was fine, the countryside glorious; Louis Philippe, his Sicilian queen, and their numerous children proved to be charming hosts; and for six days the English royal couple felt deliciously at home in France. There were elaborate fêtes champêtres, intimate family dinners, and sea bathing for Albert. The prince enjoyed himself, as he was given precedence as if in England, and found the French king apparently willing to negotiate man to man such thorny international affairs as the marriages of the Spanish queen and her sister-heir. Victoria, meanwhile, had the kind of free-ranging, confidential chats with Queen Amélie and her delightful daughters and daughters-in-law that she rarely permitted herself at home.

The Queen and the prince returned from Normandy confident that they had not only made real friends but had managed to persuade Louis Philippe not to marry his younger son to the Spanish infanta and thus disturb the balance of power in the Iberian Peninsula. When the king of the French broke his promise about Spain within months, they felt deceived, but the friendship was too precious to be allowed to die. Queen Victoria kept her promise to invite Louis Philippe to come to England for a state visit, the first by a reigning French monarch in centuries, and to invest the king with the Order of the Garter, England’s highest honor. The visit was a much-needed boost to the aging Louis Philippe’s prestige and pride. It was also a very family affair, with Queen Amélie writing to Queen Victoria in advance of the visit, begging her not to allow the king to eat too much or endanger his life on horseback.

Unfortunately the 1844 state visit to England was the zenith of Louis Philippe’s reign. However delightful
entre amis
, the king of the French was a lackluster ruler, blind to the political realities of his native country. In 1848 he was violently deposed, and the whole Orléans clan was forced to make a run for safety. Like so many notable political exiles, from Giuseppe Mazzini to Karl Marx, they headed for England and arrived with nothing but the disguises on their backs. Queen Victoria welcomed them warmly even though she was within days of giving birth to her sixth child and had not irrational fears for her own throne in that year of revolution. Prince Albert made a collection of his children’s discarded clothing, which, one suspects, was received with less enthusiasm than it was given. King Leopold of the Belgians allowed his Orléans relatives to move into Claremont.

Victoria was a notably loyal friend. Until their political fortunes in France changed and they were able to reclaim some of their property and assets, the Orléans family was supported out of the Queen’s privy purse and formed part of her intimate social circle. All the same, it was clear that, however much kings and queens might like to see themselves as part of a caste that moved easily across borders, the friendships among them were subject to the vicissitudes of international politics.

FRIENDSHIP IS SOMETHING
that most of us take for granted and know we cannot do without. We find it in offices and sports clubs and reading groups, in letters and online, over tea and over the telephone. But friendship, companionship, and collegiality are exceedingly rare and precious commodities for members of royal families. Both Victoria and Albert felt the lack of congenial
friends acutely in their daily lives, and the intimate friendship they had for each other could not quite suffice.

Kings and queens had much in common but could very rarely spend time together even in an age of steam yachts and trains. Extended family members were either taboo, like the Cambridges; or disagreeable, like Duke Ernest; or at odds, like the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringens and the Schleswig-Holsteins. Even Vicky and Bertie, the royal couple’s eldest children, were still too young to be good company, at least in their mother’s eyes. At the end of each long day, the royal couple could at last dismiss the members of the household and turn with relief to each other, but being partners in business as well as bedfellows did not always make it easy to relax.

For the simple companionship and reliable affection that make the stresses of living bearable to busy people, the royal couple had to look somewhere hidden and unexpected. They found it not with royal peers or noble retainers but with persons at the very bottom of the social pyramid. Deep in the wings, out of the spotlight, were the largely anonymous men and women whom the royal couple counted on, relaxed with, and, perhaps, loved more than any others—their maids and valets.

In the daily drama of royal life, costume played a crucial role in bolstering the confidence of the two star actors and ensuring that their performances were well received. Any slip in presentation—the prince’s hat that courtiers giggled at, the Queen’s bonnet that protected her face from the sun but also from the curious gaze of reporters—could result in an unfavorable review. By their midtwenties both Victoria and Albert were impatient with fashion and yet fanatically concerned with appearance. They spent all too many hours of the day dressing, and their reliance on the skills and attention of their dressers increased each year. Every day, like a small child or an actor faced with a quick change of costume, the Queen stood while someone helped her into dresses. A maid did the Queen’s hair, fastened the laces, buttons, and rows of tiny hooks and eyes, carefully positioned the various necklaces and brooches and earrings with which the Queen liked to festoon herself, tied her shoes, handed her a reticule and a tiny, exquisitely laundered handkerchief embroidered
VR
, and opened the door as she swept out.

Victoria employed a squad of seven or eight maids, classified as either dressers or wardrobe maids. They were the Queen’s personal servants, not employees of one of the pestilential government departments. She was free to hire, fire, or reward them as she chose, recruited them with great care, and tried them out for several months before offering them a permanent position.
Some of the dressers were foreign, mainly German. All came recommended by the Queen’s relatives. Most had parents or siblings or cousins who also had served a member of the royal family.

The range of the dressers’ duties was wide, and their expertise considerable. The dressers made many of the Queen’s garments from scratch and were also at times asked to make garments for royal daughters or other relatives. If a garment needed to be altered—and with a constantly pregnant mistress, this happened regularly—the dresser took the dress apart and put it back together again. Since the sewing machine had yet to be invented, all this was done by hand, with invisible stitches. At least one of the dressers was a skilled milliner who trimmed not only the Queen’s hats but hats sent over from Germany by the Queen’s half sister.

If a pet dog tore the Queen’s dress, if she got mud on her skirts, if her felt hat with its delicate grebe feathers got wet, if her muslin bodice caught a drop of turtle soup, each stain had to be removed and each rip repaired before the garment was put away. White cotton and linen items like shifts, petticoats, nightgowns, and handkerchiefs were carefully tagged and listed by the dressers, dispatched to the central laundry at Kew, and carefully counted and checked off when the garments returned, duly bleached, washed, starched, and ironed with consummate art. When a dress was brought out from the closet, it had to be fluffed out and any creases pressed before it was presented to the Queen.

The dressers were also in charge of maintaining the Queen’s private rooms. Cleanliness and order were a passion with Queen Victoria, and every item in her suite had to be set out exactly as she liked it, from the solid gold set on her toilet table to the crowd of ornaments and piles of correspondence on her desk. The Queen’s jewelry collection was a major responsibility for the dressers, as was the Queen’s journal. Every day the dresser on duty locked the journal away from the curious eyes even of family members. Victoria liked to use different writing paper in different locations—at Balmoral, paper headed with a sketch of the castle, and so on. When she went into mourning, her paper was heavily edged in black. It fell to the dresser to ensure that the appropriate paper was ready on Her Majesty’s desk.

Unlike the Queen’s aristocratic ladies of the bedchamber, who had little to do and took it in turns to come into waiting for three-month periods, the working-class dressers all put in sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, most weeks of the year. Everything had to be ready for when the Queen awoke, usually around seven-thirty and putting her clothes away after a ball or a grand dinner could take hours. When the Queen was at home, the dresser on duty would help her to dress and then spend the rest of the day in the
dressing room, mending and sewing, ready to respond immediately to Her Majesty’s bell. The other dressers would be engaged with needlework and cleaning, but one came up to the dressing room at mealtimes so that the woman on duty could go down for her food.