We Two: Victoria and Albert (46 page)

Victoria was equally enchanted. Her darling Sir Walter Scott had not lied. The Scottish countryside was astonishingly beautiful and the people picturesque. Barefoot children shyly waved. Beautiful girls in plaid shawls, their red hair streaming down their backs, gazed at the Queen in wonder. Tall, muscular men begged to know when Her Majesty might come again. How different it all was from the squalid indifference of the Pimlico slums that flanked Buckingham Palace.

With Albert delightfully invigorated, Scotland fed a royal love affair now entering its second decade. It also, as we see in the Queen’s journal entry for
Wednesday, September 18, 1844, unconsciously opened a tiny window onto other romantic possibilities that Victoria would explore, only much later.

The Queen and the prince set off at nine in the morning on two ponies, “attended only by Lord Glenlyon’s excellent servant, Sandy McAra, in his Highland dress.” This Sandy led his royal charges straight uphill to give them a panoramic view of “the Falls of the Bruar, Ben-y-Chat, Ben Vrackie, Ben-y-Glo, the Killiecrankie Pass, and a whole range of distant hills.” It was a glorious day and, in her own words, “the most delightful, most romantic ride” the Queen had ever had. “Here we were with only this Highlander behind us holding the ponies (for we got off twice and walked about)—not a house, not a creature near us, but the pretty Highland sheep, with their horns and black faces,—up at the top of Tulloch, surrounded by beautiful mountains.”

In Scotland, better than anywhere else, the Queen of England found the realization of her concept of “aloneness.” It consisted of her and Albert happy together in a beautiful place far from prying eyes—with a silent, trusted servant on hand to ensure their security and minister to their needs. In Sandy McAra we find an early avatar of John Brown, the passionately devoted gillie whom Albert hired and promoted and then bequeathed to his wife as perhaps his most precious gift.

The idea of buying property in the Highlands was born probably as early as the royal visit of 1842. Land there was cheap, and, as the Queen’s journal shows, the main features in her mental map of Scotland were property boundaries, not mountains and lochs. As she traveled about, Victoria automatically noted who owned what. But the railway was slow in coming to Edinburgh and Glasgow, and it took days to reach Inverness or Oban by sea. Governing from the Highlands was not yet possible. While nursing their Gaelic fantasies, the royal couple turned to the south coast to satisfy their immediate need for a private place outside of London.

IN THE SPRING
of 1843, Queen Victoria was successfully brought to bed with her third child. Though the baby was only a girl, a grateful nation presented Her Majesty with a new royal steam yacht, named—what else?—the
Victoria and Albert
. In the late summer of 1843, as we have seen, the Queen and the prince set out on their new toy for a cruise of the English south coast, followed by a private visit to Louis Philippe and his family at their private estate at Eu on the coast of Normandy.

On their return to England, Victoria and Albert had a moment of revelation.
The king of the French had the Tuileries, the Louvre, Saint-Cloud, Versailles, Fontainebleau, and who knew what else, but he regarded these properties as business addresses. For rest and relaxation, Louis Philippe and his family repaired to Normandy. What the English Saxe-Coburgs needed was an English Chateau d’Eu. The big question was: Could they (by which they meant she) afford one?

Economy-minded radicals might cavil that the Queen of England already had a home by the sea, since she had inherited the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. But, like Windsor and Buckingham Palace, the Royal Pavilion was a Crown property, ruled by the various government departments, and, in any case, neither the Queen nor her husband liked the place. The extraordinary mix of Mogul minarets and Chinese dragons at Brighton made Prince Albert queasy. As for Victoria, it would be many years before she styled herself Empress of India and developed a passionate interest in the subcontinent.

Brighton was also no longer the secret fishing port playground of the very rich that it had been around 1810. By the 1840s, the town had grown up all around the Royal Pavilion and was increasingly frequented by low-class persons who mobbed the royal family when they ventured out on the front. Worst of all, the ghost of George IV wandered the Royal Pavilion. For Prince Albert the building was synonymous with promiscuity and excess.

The Lords of the Treasury were far from distressed to learn that the royal couple had no use for the Royal Pavilion. It had always been a drain on the exchequer. The decision was made to get rid of it, and between 1846 and 1848 the Pavilion was stripped down to the studs. The most precious furnishings and artworks were stored for use in other royal palaces, the rest were sold at auction, and the external structure was scheduled for demolition. The prince’s favorite builder, Thomas Cubitt, famed for his upscale town houses in Belgravia and Bloomsbury was poised to develop the site, but then the local people of Brighton stepped in. They decided their city would not be the same without its Royal Pavilion, however raped and despoiled, and in 1850 the Brighton Corporation managed to borrow sixty thousand pounds from the Bank of England to buy the property. One of the jewels of Regency architecture was saved, despite its royal proprietors.

The speed with which the Royal Pavilion was sacked was due in part to the fact that in 1844 the Queen and the prince found the perfect location for their private pied-à-terre. It was the Osborne House estate on the Isle of Wight, just across the Solent from Southampton and Portsmouth, and thus very handy for future trips to the Continent. The house was an undistinguished Georgian structure, but it stood on some thousand wooded acres
sloping down to a private beach and had a magnificent view. Prince Albert planned for his wife to buy and take title to the property just like any private citizen. This would place the estate entirely under his control. His two closest confidants, his secretary George Anson and Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, were far from sure that the Queen should incur such a major expense and were nervous about the administrative problems of running the government on an island. However, once it became apparent that the prince could not be dissuaded from his plan, Peel acquiesced and Anson was dispatched to negotiate the sale.

Osborne’s owner, Lady Isabella Blatchford, was a shrewd woman who counted on getting 28,000 or even 30,000 pounds for her estate, but she was no match for the prince and his agent. A one-year rental on the property for 1,000 pounds was agreed upon, and the prince moved his wife and family in during the summer. Faced with evicting her sovereign lady the Queen, Lady Isabella agreed to accept 26,000, and still had to haggle over the estimated value of her furniture.

The Queen thoroughly enjoyed her first holiday at Osborne House in October 1844. For her, Lady Isabella’s small rooms and middle-class appurtenances had the charm of novelty. But the ministers of the Crown shoehorned into the attics grumbled, and the servants were sullen, so Albert had no difficulty persuading his wife that a much larger building was needed. In June 1845, the Queen laid the foundation stone for the new Osborne House, which, to her rapt admiration, Albert was designing himself with the help of Thomas Cubitt. This gentleman was an experienced builder but not a trained architect, and he was more than willing to defer to his royal client. The work went on apace, and by the summer of 1846, the royal family was able to move into its private wing of the house. The larger section for guests, servants, and offices was completed by 1851.

With the increasingly fast train service from London and a private steamer at their disposal, the royal pair soon found that Osborne was feasible even for three-day weekends. By 1850, the Queen could leave Buckingham Palace at seven in the morning and be wheeled out in her bathing machine for a quick dip by ten-thirty But for everyone except the members of the royal family, Osborne involved a good deal of work and inconvenience.

On a good day, ordinary mortals took at least twice as long to get from London or Windsor to Osborne, and on many days the sea crossing was hard on the weak of stomach. The ministers and household officers deputed to attend on the Queen were not enthusiastic about Osborne even in fine weather. For days on end, they had to abandon the office and the social
whirl of London for evenings spent playing Fox and Geese or listening to Her Majesty taking a crack at bel canto. A week by the sea was no holiday for Victoria’s personal staff, since the two large coaches full of baggage with which she invariably traveled took several hectic days to pack. Separated from their families and crammed into tiny bedrooms, Victoria’s servants swore that the soft sea air on the Isle of Wight was murder on their constitutions.

But, in the eyes of the Queen and the prince, all this inconvenience and extra work was a small price to pay. For a few precious weeks and the odd weekend every year, the English Saxe-Coburgs could breathe in clean salt air, take healthful exercise, and pretend that they were any ordinary family with a private train, two private stations (one on and one off the island), a private boat slip on the mainland, a private yacht they hadn’t had to buy, a flock of servants, and a rapidly growing private income to buy little luxuries like paintings and statues and rare shrubs. Marie Antoinette had had the Petit Trianon. Victoria would have Osborne.

The house that Prince Albert built was an Italianate villa divided into two separate pavilions. The two sections were connected on the first floor by a gallery festooned with pictures and statues, and in the basement by a dark, narrow corridor along which the servants scuttled with food from the distant kitchens. The house featured two mock campaniles of different sizes (a water tower and a clock tower), a loggia, and terraces going down to the sea. As time went on, the Queen and the prince were able to acquire another thousand acres or so of surrounding land to further insulate them from Cowes, the nearby town. The building and landscaping of the new Osborne cost the Queen some 200,000 pounds, a large sum given her declared income, but the prince had no problem finding the money. Whether some of the profits realized by the sale of the Royal Pavilion and its effects were diverted into the financing of Osborne was a secret between Prince Albert and the Lords of the Treasury.

Osborne was the height of modernity, designed to give its owners the maximum comfort, privacy, and security. Its vaguely Renaissance shell was supported by cast-iron girders and designed to withstand fire. It had modern drains and water closets, plus bathrooms with hot and cold running water. With the technical assistance of the renowned chemist and inventor Dr. Lyon Playfair, the prince devised a system whereby the human sewage could be used for fertilizer on the estate. For the Queen, with her long, wide skirts and yards of petticoats, the water closets were a revelation, and within a few years she was refusing to go anywhere that did not have one for her private use.

Osborne also had special recessed windows and double insulation to protect against the sea winds. Some of the doors were of glass to extend the sea view through the house. However, there was no central heating even though the Queen and the prince were usually by the sea in May often a chilly month, and on weekends during the fall and winter. Victoria had found the under-floor central heating at the Royal Pavilion oppressively warm, so Osborne made do with fireplaces.

For Queen Victoria, Osborne had a delicious coziness. The bedrooms, dressing rooms, living rooms, and nurseries on the upper floors of the family pavilion were pretty but unpretentious, and the private reception rooms in the royal wing were intimate by the standards of Windsor or Versailles. The dining room, drawing room, and billiard room were arranged
en enfilade
around the central staircase, and this design allowed members of the royal family to descend into the dining room unseen by members of the household. Evenings were more relaxed, since the room design allowed the royals to entertain guests in one section while behind some large pillars the ladies and gentlemen in attendance could sit down and even converse among themselves.

As a visitor to Osborne House can still see today, the young Victoria and Albert were people with big checkbooks who were eclectic and exuberant in their tastes. In this, their first real home, the royal couple put together stuff of all kinds: old masters and works by up-and-coming artists, ceramics, tesserae, and tiles, statues and busts, family portraits and sketches by family members, a superb billiard table, folksy bedroom furniture, eight-foot-tall china torchères, garden seats cut out of hunks of coal, and white marble sculptures of the four eldest royal children dressed as the seasons.

For his children, who spent more time each year at Osborne than could their parents, the prince ordered a fully furnished Swiss chalet. It was charmingly miniature by palace standards yet big enough for two servants to live in and for the royal daughters to play cook and housekeeper. Outside the chalet was a shed in which the princes and princesses kept their sets of garden tools for their imposingly large individual garden plots. Somehow the royal children were expected not only to keep up a regular schedule of lessons and make a natural history collection to rival their father’s in Coburg, but also to learn to bake a loaf of bread, grow a potato, and make a chair.