We Two: Victoria and Albert (47 page)

The royal couple were enthusiastic collectors of paintings by contemporary artists. In the public rooms and in the shared rooms of the private wing, they gave pride of place to large expensive canvases by fashionable painters like Winterhalter and Landseer. There were also a number of landscapes by
German artists—Koekoek, Achenbach, Lindemann-Frommel—more famous then than now. But in his bedroom-dressing-room-bathroom suite, Albert hung his growing collection of paintings and drawings by early Italian and Flemish artists. He had developed a taste for the quattrocento during his Italian visit of 1838–39 and was able to pick up unfashionable pieces by Duccio, Fra Angelico, Gozzoli, Memling, Cranach, Giorgione, Mantegna, and Bellini for next to nothing. Today the prince’s bedroom Bellinis are the pride of the national collections, while his Winterhalters and Landseers are historic wallpaper for the royal residences.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Osborne is the royal couple’s predilection for sumptuous nudes, both male and female. A fresco by William Dyce, commissioned by Prince Albert for the head of the main staircase, shows
Neptune Entrusting the Command of the Sea to Britannia. A
chastely dressed Britannia salutes a naked Neptune, whose private parts are considerately hidden by a horse’s wind-tossed mane. Accompanying Neptune is an attractive set of naked young mermen and mermaids whose fish tails begin around their knees, allowing a plentiful display of buttock and bosom. Britannia is flanked by a young gentleman clad only in a hat who turns his beautiful back to the viewer. Under one arm the youth holds an arrow, identifying him as Mercury, while he wraps the other arm affectionately around the shoulders of a bearded man in a classical version of the sarong. Plato would have liked the picture, and so did Prince Albert.

Even more astonishing is the painting of Hercules and Omphale by Josef Anton von Gegenbaur that was Queen Victoria’s wedding gift and today graces the wall of the prince’s bathroom. It shows a magnificently muscled, half-dressed man, seated by the fire with a spindle in his hand, being embraced by a beautiful naked woman. The picture is indisputably erotic, and becomes more so once one knows the story behind the painting. According to Apollodorus, the mighty hero Hercules killed his male companion Iphitus in a fit of madness. To expiate this crime, Hercules agreed to live for three years as a slave to the Lydian queen, Omphale, who took him as her lover and, finally, her husband. Hercules expressed the terrible shame he felt as Omphale’s slave by donning women’s clothing and spinning thread by the hearth like a woman.

Even for a Greek myth, this is provocative material. The artists of classical Greece would have none of it, but the perverse eroticism of the mighty hero Hercules reduced to a feminized slave spoke to the Hellenistic and Baroque periods. Why the conventional Gegenbaur took up the subject in the mid-nineteenth century is unclear, but the appeal of his canvas to Victoria and Albert is not. Dumpy little Victoria, wreathed in yards of checked
gingham, liked to imagine herself as the voluptuous Omphale. Albert knew himself to be a mighty hero in disguise, even though obliged in daily life to walk several steps behind his wife and get her to sign the checks. The erotic side of the royal marriage is expressed far more clearly in their art collection than in their letters and journals.

Today architectural experts tend to sneer at Osborne, opining that while the site is, of course, glorious, the house itself is ugly. The received wisdom is that the articulation of the two wings is awkward, the plaster work in the main reception rooms undistinguished, and the exterior a timid mishmash of styles that falls far short of that fabulous anachronism the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. The prince consort, critics contend, had a way with ornamental shrubs but should have left architecture to the professionals.

Even when it was new, Osborne was controversial. To the young middle-class German girl Frieda Arnold, Victoria’s dresser, it was a triumph. To the aristocratic Englishman Charles Greville, it was a monstrosity. To a grand seigneur like the Duke of Devonshire, busy in the 1840s refurbishing the glories of Chatsworth, Osborne was even more nouveau riche than Buckingham Palace. To a plutocrat like the Duke of Westminster, willing to spend 600,000 pounds on a single residence, Osborne, with its folksy tiles, fake statues, and faux marble columns, was cheap. However, to the majority of Englishmen in the nineteenth century, Osborne was an ideal home for a gentleman’s family. It inspired enormous public interest and was often copied.

For Queen Victoria, Osborne was perfect because Albert created it and she first lived there in her twenties, when she and he were full of joy and perfect companions. At Osborne Victoria could be within sight of Albert almost every minute of the day. The two as always sat down side by side to get through the business of state, and even business had its charms when it was conducted together. Both spent several hours each day in their private apartments working on their correspondence and their journals. They took it in turns to do the piano practice that both thoroughly enjoyed and took very seriously. “Dear Madam, you really must do that passage again; it is so impertinent to Mozart to libel it so,” Lady Mount Edgcumbe, the senior lady-in-waiting, remarked to the Queen one day at Osborne. And once their duties were done for the day, the royal couple could have fun.

When Albert went out on the estate, the Queen rode with him when her condition permitted, and the only escort they needed was a boy to open the gates. When the Queen was pregnant, she pottered around in a little pony cart, getting out to sketch, admire the view, or proudly watch her husband consulting with the workmen. She liked to sail, and she found it refreshing
to immerse herself in the sea in the sanctuary of her bathing machine. In the evenings, when Albert played billiards, the Queen could watch or make music with her ladies-in-waiting and her guests. There were also parlor games, perhaps an experiment with table tapping, or a game of whist, though the prince did not think highly of his wife’s card play. Then, husband and wife would wish the company good night quite early. After taking her bath or her shower in her beautiful new bathroom, the Queen could stand with her husband on the balcony facing the sea and listen as Albert’s whistle coaxed the nightingales to sing. Then the two could retire to the new bedroom with the special lock Albert had designed that could be operated without getting out of bed.

PRINCE ALBERT ENJOYED
life at Osborne, especially perhaps the hours he spent there with his children, but the real pleasure of the house for him came in the designing, the building, the decorating, and the landscaping. Once the place was complete, he lost interest, but fortunately by this time the railway had reached Edinburgh and Aberdeen, and the prince himself felt rich enough, in one way or another, to purchase a second estate, much farther away and much more isolated, in the Highlands of Scotland.

In May 1848, Prince Albert, sight unseen, took over the twenty-seven-year lease on Balmoral, a 17,400-acre estate on the bank of the river Dee owned by the trustees of the Earl of Fife. It was high up between Ballater and Braemar, in an area renowned in Scotland for its low rainfall. The royal family’s first visit to its new rental was such a success that the prince quickly determined not only to buy Balmoral but to twist the arms of neighboring landowners to sell him the abutting properties of Birkhall, Abergeldie, and Ballochbuie so that he could really feel lord of all he surveyed.

Balmoral was wild, and its abundant game was a major incentive for the prince. In the early years, red deer and roe deer were so common that they came right up to the house, begging to be shot. Albert was happy to oblige, and he spent many of his days in Scotland deerstalking, sometimes allowing his wife to accompany him. Delighted, Victoria was careful to keep her distance and stay very quiet, even for hours on end. The local people were enjoined to stay away from any area where the prince was hunting, but if someone strayed in by mistake and scared away the deer, the Queen was quite irate that dear Albert’s day should be spoiled.

In one painting of the royal family at Balmoral, the German painter Carl Haag showed the prince on his return from a successful deer-hunting excursion.
Albert is attired in the newfangled Highland outfit that he promoted and that showcased his superbly muscled legs. The tartan of the kilt is the one he personally designed, and the sash and star of the Garter are on his jacket. The prince is standing at the main door to the castle, proudly displaying to his wife, her mother, and her ladies the magnificent stags he has shot that day.

Haag shows Victoria, elegant in evening dress, smiling fondly at the dead creatures spread before her, and this was not wholly a fiction. It is true that the Queen had little taste for blood sports, did not like guns, and was wary of the stupidity of huntsmen. When, on the occasion of Bertie’s christening, her uncle Ferdinand peppered the beloved greyhound Eos with buckshot, she was hysterical. Happily the dog recovered. When Lord Canning almost shot the infant Prince of Wales, she was furious. But as a woman and a landowner of her generation, she knew that Albert and his male guests could not be happy unless they were shooting things.

The negotiations with the Fife trustees over the acquisition of Balmoral were protracted, and for seven years the royal couple spent some six weeks in September and October in the “old” castle. The accommodation for a growing family, officials, attendant ministers, and servants was extremely cramped. Report has it that the billiard room was so small that the Queen and her ladies had to move around the room to enable the gentlemen to take their shots. Small or not, Balmoral suited Queen Victoria, who liked pretending to be an ordinary middle-class wife and mother. However, once again the ministers and the ladies grumbled, and as soon as Prince Albert took title, he launched an ambitious plan to erect a new, much larger structure and to raze the old one.

As at Osborne, the prince served as his own architect, finding in William Smith of Aberdeen an experienced builder who could be counted upon to put his employer’s ideas into stone without any argument. In Scotland Albert the architect played things safer. He built a castle in the medieval style, with asymmetrical windows and rooms on correspondingly different levels. He used a pale gray local stone, Glen Gelder granite. Men were recruited from far and wide to build the castle, and Scottish stonemasons completed the restrained but charming external decoration.

Several small strikes by the workmen for better work conditions took the prince by surprise. A Highlander like Sandy McAra might be happy in the role of feudal servant to his laird, but a Scottish workman from the south had a strong sense of his rights and was ready for industrial action. The prince gave way, as he could not afford adverse press coverage, and the house went up smartly. In 1855 Queen Victoria was able to occupy the family’s
private quarters, and on August 30, 1856, she recorded in her journal arriving at Balmoral to find “the tower finished as well as the offices, and the poor old house gone.”

Frieda Arnold, Queen Victoria’s dresser, visited the brand-new castle in 1855. On her six-hour carriage journey from Perth to Balmoral over the Pass of Glenshee, Arnold was swept away by the desolate beauty of the countryside, its “sublime stillness and endless peace.” A visitor today will feel the same. Arnold, like Prince Albert, was deeply nostalgic for her native country, and she saw at once how much the new Balmoral resembled a German hunting lodge. On a grander scale, and with the modern bathroom conveniences that he and his family now found essential, the prince had recreated his father’s Schloss Rosenau. Surrounded by wild and mountainous country, with the pleasant sound of a river ever in the background, Albert could relax.

Queen Victoria was delighted with Balmoral. She felt that a Canaletto or a Rubens was superfluous there, since every window was a frame for sublimity. When in Scotland, the Queen spent as much of the day as possible outside. She rode her pony uphill on paths newly blazed for her use. With her faithful kilt-clad gillie leading her horse, she forded rushing streams, her long skirts trailing in the icy water. Covered with waterproofs and rugs, she took long drives in a high open carriage to local beauty spots for family picnics and sketching parties.

In the Highlands, Victoria was an attentive neighbor to her fellow landowners, and an eager patron of the Highland games at nearby Brae-mar, but her instinct was to get away from people, not seek them out. The local crofters learned to keep their distance from the Queen when she was out on one of her jaunts. On the other hand, if she happened upon someone by accident, she stopped and chatted, rapturous if, at first, she was not recognized. She took to dropping in on women in the primitive cottages known as bothies, bringing food and warm clothing, pleased to be welcomed, amused when an old woman criticized a sock she had knitted.

For even more solitude, the Queen took to retiring for a few nights each year to Alt-na-Guithasach, a barely accessible spot reached by boat across Loch Muick. She improved the route, had a path along one side of the lake chipped out of the granite, and extended the lodge or shiel to accommodate herself, a couple of family members, a lady-in-waiting and a gentleman-in-waiting, a lady’s maid, and a crew of boatmen and gillies. For Queen Victoria this was simplicity and seclusion. Frieda Arnold found Loch Muick desolate and marveled at the lives of the wife and daughter of the Queen’s
keeper there. This woman and her little girl regularly spent weeks alone in their tiny home, far from human contact and aid, while her husband was at Balmoral, helping with the shooting parties. Victoria was always generous in paying for her pleasures in money, but, as Arnold delicately suggests, she did not always see the price in human suffering. The lonely little child, the gillie in his “Highland dress,” wading through freezing mountain streams, the piper playing in the pouring rain—all this was for Victoria a backdrop like Loch na Gar, the peak that towered over Balmoral Castle.