We Two: Victoria and Albert (62 page)

On a pony trek up a mountain near the castle, the Queen and the prince allowed the young couple to fall behind unattended. Fritz told Vicky that he would like her to come to Prussia. In fact, he would like her to come to Prussia for good. Vicky blushingly admitted that she would like this too. The two exchanged sprigs of white heather for good luck. As soon as the party got home, Fritz rushed in to tell the Queen and the prince what had occurred.

Then Vicky went into her mother’s sitting room, where her parents were anxiously awaiting her. The Queen recorded the scene in her journal that night. “Her Papa asked her if she had nothing more to say. Oh, yes, a great deal.’ We urged her to speak and she said: Oh, it is that I am very fond of the Prince.’ We kissed and pressed the poor dear child in our arms then Albert told her how the Prince … on the 20
^th
had spoken to us … [how he wished] to see more and more of her. I asked her if she wished the same? Oh, yes, everyday’ looking up joyously and happily in my face—she was kneeling. Had she always loved him? Oh, always!’ Albert came in to say that Fritz was there, and I took her in. She was nervous but did not falter in giving her very decided answer … He kissed her hand twice. I kissed him and when he kissed her hand again … she threw herself into his arms, and kissed him with a warmth which was responded to again and again … It is his first love! Vicky’s great youth makes it even more striking, but she behaved as a girl of 18 would, so naturally, so quietly and modestly and yet showing how very strong her feelings are.”

GIVEN THE NUMBER
of persons apprised of the secret engagement, it was inevitable that the news would be leaked. The
Times
newspaper wrote a series of scathing editorials in which it described Prussia as “a paltry German dynasty dependent on the major tyrannies of Austria and Russia” and excoriated the very idea of dynastic alliance between Great Britain and Prussia. “What sympathy can exist between a Court supported like ours on a solid basis of popular freedom, and a camarilla … engaged … in trampling on the last embers of popular government?” The
Times
expressed doubts that the Princess Royal, already an engaging presence on the national
landscape, could find happiness in Berlin. “For our part we wish for the daughter of our Royal House some better fate than union with a dynasty which knows neither what is due … to the rights of the people over which it presides, nor the place it occupies in the great European confederacy.”

If the
Times
had hoped to influence the Princess Royal’s parents, it failed. Prince Albert had no love for the British press in general. He was convinced that the
Times
in particular, commonly and incorrectly seen abroad as the organ of the British government, was a danger to national security. No insult in the
Times
of London went unremarked in Berlin, and the prince saw his Prussian project constantly driven off course by the English press. That a newspaper should attempt to intervene in royal family matters over which he alone had jurisdiction was offensive. As Albert saw it, in affecting to protect the Princess Royal, the
Times
was raising difficulties for her in the new life her loving father had planned out for her.

Fortunately, there was now no turning back, and Prince Albert had no regrets. Though by English law his daughter was too young to commit herself to marriage, the prince regarded the engagement as binding. He knew that the Prussians saw it so. While he was certainly anxious for the happiness of his favorite child, Prince Albert became firmly committed to the prospect of the Prussian alliance in 1851 and never thereafter considered any other suitor for his eldest daughter. He hurried the match in 1855 because there was a nine-year gap in the ages of the prospective bride and groom, and Fritz was obviously ripe to fall into the hands of a wife or a mistress. The attraction between Vicky and Fritz only confirmed his view that this was a marriage made in heaven.

The
Times
campaign against a marriage with Prussia upset Queen Victoria. As the months went on, the romantic mist that Balmoral had cast over Fritz’s marriage proposal cleared. The Queen received a disturbing letter from Lady Bloomfield, wife to the British minister (ambassador) in Berlin: “I fear Her Royal Highness’s position here will be more difficult than perhaps Your Majesty is fully aware of … the real fact is, without living here and seeing the curious anomalous state of this country and the violence and bitterness of political party spirits it is almost impossible to value the true state of affairs at this Court … the unhappy divisions and jealousies which exist in the Royal family itself.”

Once Vicky was confirmed at sixteen, Berlin demanded that the engagement should be officially announced in the Prussian court circular. This required that an official announcement be issued in England also. When the lord chancellor learned of the engagement, he commented that people
would feel it was not right to commit a barely sixteen-year-old girl to a marriage that was to be delayed at least a year. Cut to the quick, Queen Victoria wrote to Prime Minister Lord Palmerston: “The Princess’s choice altho’ made with the sanction and approval of her Parents has been one
entirely
of her
own heart
, and she is as
solemnly
engaged by
her own free will & wish
to Prince Frederick William of Prussia as anyone
can be
and that
before God
, she has pledged her word … The Princess is Confirmed and
old
enough to
know
her own feelings & wishes, tho’ she may
not
yet be old enough to consummate the marriage and leave her parents’ roof.”

Queen Victoria had begun to see that love might not be all her daughter needed in life. She was all too aware that in Berlin her German-born friend Princess Augusta had become a bitter, loveless, paranoid woman. Could the same fate be Vicky’s, especially since the Prussians had such hatred for the English?

Baron Stockmar also began to have cold feet. He was now settled in Coburg. However, apprised of the secret engagement, the wizened old diplomat traveled to Berlin at Prince Albert’s behest to report on the reception of the English alliance. Stockmar had known Vicky from birth, and he loved her like a granddaughter. She was also the rare female being Stockmar could admire. “From her youth onwards, I have been fond of her,” he wrote, “have always expected great things of her, and taken all pains to be of ser vice to her. I think her to be exceptionally gifted in some things, even to the point of genius.” Deeply invested in Prince Albert’s dream of a united and constitutional Germany, Stockmar from Berlin gloomily prognosticated that though the princess “has the qualities of feeling and mind required … that will not be enough … For I foresee that she would have to suffer her whole life from mistakes and faults which are to be feared at the very beginning.” Like the
Times
, Stockmar was eerily prescient.

If Prince Albert had dispatched Stockmar to report from Berlin before young Fritz arrived at Balmoral ready to propose, the visit might have been of some use, but probably not. The prince’s mind was made up, and he was not a man to second-guess himself. All the same, now officially apprised of the difficulties that Vicky would encounter in her married life, Prince Albert took on the duty of preparing her himself. Each day he tried to dedicate an hour exclusively to Vicky, acting as her professor and her political mentor. Vicky was an outstanding student, able to match her father in intellect and in diligence. She was ready for what amounted to a graduate course in international politics, history, and law. She read his vast memoranda with passionate interest, and wrote essays and reports and historical digests of her own. Vicky adored her father and was desperate to earn his approval.
As she later wrote to her mother, she saw him as inerrant, the oracle, the fount of wisdom. Nothing made her happier than to sit at her father’s knee, gazing up as he discoursed in his beloved German on the English constitution, German political movements, and European diplomacy. For two years, fierce and focused, proud and principled, Albert and his daughter plotted the future of Germany, confident that their vision must prevail because it was right.

The intensified bond between the prince and his eldest daughter inevitably sent ripples through the royal family. To spend an hour taking lessons one-on-one from his father was Bertie’s idea of torture. All the same, the eldest son found it galling to see his big sister shine in the glow of their father’s approbation. Unsurprisingly, the Prince of Wales’s tutor, in his daily reports to Prince Albert, could report no improvement in his young charge’s conduct.

In her journal, Queen Victoria described the day when Fritz asked Vicky to marry him as one of the happiest days of her life, but she found the two years between the proposal and the marriage unexpectedly difficult. When Fritz came over to England, which he did as often as his military responsibilities allowed, the Queen was pushed into the role of chaperone and found it irksome. The physical attraction between Fritz and Vicky was almost shocking to observe. How, Victoria wondered, could her teenaged daughter inspire such passion in a man?

The Queen resented the increasingly close relationship between her husband and her eldest daughter. It was part of the family dogma that Vicky was the image of her father, while Bertie was a caricature of his mother. In Albert’s eyes, his daughter Vicky could do no wrong, and it was plain that his greatest pleasure in life was to nurture her young mind. His wife, Victoria, by contrast, was a mass of Hanoverian faults, which it was the prince’s sad duty to correct.

Once Vicky was confirmed and officially “out,” she was allowed to have dinner with her parents. Albert enjoyed this, Victoria did not. By the end of 1856, the Queen was pregnant with her ninth child. She wanted more time alone with her husband, not less, and found the intelligent scrutiny of her affianced daughter unnerving. If she and Albert agreed about anything, it was that Vicky must be given no sense of what awaited her once she was married. But how was Victoria to account for her swelling body and constricted lifestyle? “We dined with Vicky, who generally leaves us at 10,” wrote the Queen in her journal, “and then I have the rare happiness of being alone with my beloved Albert.” The prince, exhausted by his wife’s litany of complaints and upset by her apparent hostility to their daughter,
offered to send Vicky back to the nursery for her meals. The Queen could only capitulate and beg pardon.

Now that she saw so much more of her parents, Vicky grasped how the land lay between them and was as ready as any teenager to capitalize on their differences. The Princess Royal had always had what her mother called “a proud, high spirit,” and she resisted the vigorous efforts her parents had made to subdue her will. Her engagement gave Vicky the prominence she felt she deserved, and, though she dreaded losing her father, she looked forward to marriage. As a wife, she would be able to enjoy Fritz’s embraces undisturbed. Confident in the adoration of her fiancé, conscious of being cleverer and stronger willed than he, she imagined she would be able to do as she liked in Berlin. She would take charge, just as her father had done.

Vicky began to criticize her mother and refuse to obey her. The Queen, in turn, complained bitterly about her disrespectful behavior. As Queen Victoria remembered this period, Vicky had such an “uneven temper” and was “so unpleasant and unamiable” toward those she lived with and to whom she owed respect, obedience. Caught between the two women, Prince Albert’s domestic life was even more fraught.

AS THE TIME
for the wedding approached, the Prussian government wrote stating that crown princes of Prussia were always married in Berlin. Her daughter’s wedding was an area over which Queen Victoria claimed jurisdiction, and she wrote an official letter back that brooked no debate. “Whatever may be the usual practice of Prussian Princes, it is not every day that one marries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England. The question therefore must be considered settled and closed.” Vicky would be married in England. Victoria, in her communications with Prussia, was indeed “absolutely frank and truthful,” so very different from her husband. One can imagine Lord Palmerston applauding his sovereign’s letter.