We Two: Victoria and Albert (55 page)

IN APRIL 1856
, the queen wrote to Lord Palmerston: “Now that the moment for the ratification of the Treaty of Peace is near at hand, the Queen wishes to delay no longer the expression of her satisfaction as to the manner in which both the War has been brought to a conclusion, and the honour and interests of this country have been maintained by the Treaty of
Peace, under the zealous and able guidance of Lord Palmerston. She wishes as a public token of her approval to bestow the Order of the Garter upon him.” This was the highest honor in the Queen’s gift, and few prime ministers received it.

Queen Victoria and Lord Palmerston emerged from the Crimean War as winners both in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world. Victoria felt reinvigorated and knew that she was beloved. Palmerston became prime minister in February 1855 and remained so almost continuously until his death in 1865. The judgment of history as well as of his contemporaries is that Palmerston was a great statesman, and along with Gladstone and Disraeli one of the three greatest British statesmen of the nineteenth century. His statue rightfully stands in Parliament Square. His struggle with Prince Albert is a mere footnote.

Prince Albert did not fare as well. While Palmerston established a firm grasp on executive power and the prince’s wife received the plaudits of the public, Albert labored unselfishly and intelligently behind the scenes. The Palmerston cabinet and the parliament recognized his contributions to the war effort, but the press and public were kept largely in the dark on the prince’s work, for fear that the old accusations of treasonous intervention should be sounded. The record shows that Prince Albert worked as hard as anyone to ensure a British victory over Russia and to strengthen the country after the war. As Britain began to move hesitatingly toward a reform of the army, the cabinet came to rely on the expertise in matters of arms and military equipment that the prince had acquired through his extensive correspondence with the technologically and strategically advanced German states. Britain owes him a debt for his wartime service.

The fight with Lord Palmerston occurred when Prince Albert was only in his early to midthirties, but it left him far more depleted than his elderly opponent. That the “Pilgerstein” he had so often denigrated to his German correspondents as an ass and a rascal was now a proven war leader and the country’s idol was a blow to Albert’s intellectual vanity. That the new prime minister proved to be as gracious and forgiving in victory as he had been implacable and vigorous in combat somehow rubbed salt in the prince’s wounds.

The Crimean War also went a long way to redress the balance of power between Victoria and Albert. However eager the Queen might have claimed to be for her husband to govern in her stead, it was now clear to both that parliament, the cabinet, and the public would not allow him to do so. She as sovereign was the official source of power, but she could exercise that power only through, or with the consent of, her ministers. The British constitution,
as Albert repeatedly complained, made no previsions for the status and functions of the consort to a queen regnant. He could advise her and serve as her private secretary, but even that was her choice, not his right. Any attempt a consort made to overstep the bounds of his subordinate role would be resisted by the British political establishment and could endanger the monarchy.

The war allowed Victoria to display once again the star quality that had made her accession in 1837 such an exciting political moment. At least until the Prince of Wales grew up, no one in the family could fill the symbolic function of the monarchy better than the Queen. She was still the marquee attraction, Prince Albert merely her understudy whose occasional appearances emptied the stalls. These were the basic facts, though neither the Queen nor the prince liked to look them in the face.

When late one night in September 1855 the news came of the fall of Sebastopol, the royal family was at Balmoral. The Queen recorded in her journal: “In a few minutes, Albert and all the gentlemen, in every species of attire, sallied forth, followed by all the servants, and gradually by all the population of the village—keepers, gillies, workmen—up to the top of the cairn [where a victory bonfire had been laid a year earlier]. We waited, and saw them light it accompanied by general cheering. The bonfire blazed forth brilliantly, and we could see the numerous figures surrounding it— some dancing, all shouting … About three-quarters of an hour after, Albert came down, and said the scene had been wild and exciting beyond everything. The people had been drinking healths in whisky, and were in great ecstasy.”

In Victoria’s hurried account, Prince Albert suddenly comes alive for us. We see him aroused from sleep, grabbing the first clothes to hand, and dashing headlong uphill to drink whisky, and dance and shout in ecstasy around the bonfire with all the local men. This is the friendly, athletic, impulsive Albert that his wife and his children, especially his daughters, adored. This was the Albert the English people might have loved but were never permitted to see.

…

HE YEAR 1853 WAS DIFFICULT FOR THE ENGLISH ROYAL FAMILY
. Even as tensions arose in the Balkans and Russia went on the warpath against Turkey, cracks were appearing in the high varnish of the royal marriage. The Queen was due to give birth to her eighth child in April 1853, and she was prey to what the prince called “great and foolish nervousness.” Relations between husband and wife were tense, and there were times when conversations ended with her screaming in frustration and his stalking off. They then communicated for a while by letter, for which biographers have been grateful.

Victoria blamed her husband for the physical discomfort and social limitations she endured when pregnant. She claimed that, like most men, he had no understanding of all that women sacrificed to bring children into the world. The raw animality of motherhood was increasingly hard for her to bear. Pregnant, Victoria felt less like a queen than a cow, and while she was still willing to pay the price of intimacy, the price went up with each child.

Albert felt that Victoria exaggerated. He had felt generally less healthy since his move to England, especially when in London, and his work for the Great Exhibition had taken a huge toll. What were a few contractions in comparison to the constant pain and debility he suffered and which he never allowed to interrupt his work or to ruffle his temper? His wife’s complaints reinforced his view that women were weak, irrational, selfish creatures, and his cool disapproval added fuel to the fire of his wife’s discontent. He protested that he did everything in his power to alleviate sufferings for which he was “the occasion” but not the cause. His duty, he said, was to remain
calm and work toward reconciliation with his wife, but he could not be expected to forgive the unjustified imprecations she heaped upon him.

There was blame on both sides in these marital squabbles, and the couple could have used a friend more impartial than Baron Stockmar. There is no doubt that Queen Victoria was spoiled, hot tempered, and demanding and often made life difficult for her husband, and yet it is Victoria who wins our sympathy. After a cooling-off period, she was always the one ready to admit she was wrong and to promise to try to do better in the future. Albert was both more rational and less gracious. In the end, the doctrine of Albert’s infallibility, to which both husband and wife subscribed, served neither of them well. It turned the prince into a sanctimonious monster and the Queen into a hysterical nag.

It was not silly for Queen Victoria to fear pregnancy and labor as a threat to her life. Many women in her time died in childbirth, and delivering seven healthy babies without serious complications was no guarantee that a woman would have as much luck with the eighth. Most mothers can attest that the pain of labor is not a figment of a nervous imagination, as Albert seemed to believe, and understand why Victoria became more anxious as her due date approached. Twentieth-century medicine has documented how repeated pregnancies drain a woman’s vitality and hormonal swings play havoc with her emotions. This is what Victoria felt in her body and tried in vain to make her husband understand.

To modern eyes, Victoria was a kind of heroine not just because she averaged a healthy child every two years but because she endured labor while an eager crowd of elderly statesmen and clerics peered through the door. In such circumstances, some complaint is surely in order. And despite the nervous anxiety that her husband reproved her for, she was quite capable of making rational choices. When her dear old friend and physician Sir James Clark told her that some doctors were experimenting with chloroform to dull the pain of labor, the Queen insisted on trying it.

Three weeks before the due date in the fall of 1853, when the royal family was at Windsor, a raging fire broke out in the dining room of the castle only two rooms away from where the Queen was sitting. Victoria stayed calm while Albert supervised the work of the firemen, getting soaked to the skin in the process. As usual in a crisis, both husband and wife reacted well, but the fire ratcheted up their anxiety. Getting so wet was not at all what Albert needed, given his susceptibility to colds, but the main worry was for the Queen. Both the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales had been several weeks premature at birth, so the prince called the Queen’s familiar old delivery nurse in early to be on the safe side.

In fact, the pregnancy proceeded normally, and Dr. John Snow, a pioneer in the use of anesthetics, was on hand for the birth. Every ten minutes or so during the third stage of labor, Snow poured half teaspoons of chloroform onto a handkerchief, folded it into a kind of filter, and held it to the Queen’s nose. Her fourth son, Leopold George Duncan Albert, was delivered safely, and Victoria was delighted with Snow’s ministrations. In 1857, for the delivery of her ninth child, Beatrice, she again had recourse to chloroform.

The birth of Prince Leopold was a milestone in the history of obstetrics. The use of the new anesthetic drugs for women during labor was extremely controversial. Clergymen denounced the practice as a sin, claiming that the pain women experienced in childbirth was God’s will, the punishment for the original sin of Eve in Eden. Eminent doctors warned that they had seen chloroform and ether transform respectable matrons into libidinous monsters who made improper advances to their physicians. But once Victoria, beloved monarch and epitome of respectability, announced how grateful she was to be spared delivery pain, the criticism died down in England. By her example, the Queen authorized other parturient women to request anesthesia without guilt.

But even the wonderful Dr. Snow could not stop Victoria from sinking once again into postpartum depression. She would fly into a passion for no reason at all, or so it seemed to Albert, and blame him for all her woes. In May 1854, after a violent scene over some inconsequential problem with the royal catalog, the prince was unable to calm his wife down. He went off to his own rooms and composed a memorandum, explaining his predicament, and adjuring Victoria to be reasonable and control her temper. Remembering the recent fire, he advised her to stop “imprudently heaping up a large store of combustibles,” by which he presumably meant the long list of grievances she held against him.