We Two: Victoria and Albert (68 page)

One small indication of the growing coolness between the royal husband and wife can be found in the Queen’s day-by-day accounts of her stay at Balmoral in the fall of 1858. At the beginning, for the very first time, she was less than excited to be in Scotland. “I enjoy the scenery and being out very much but I hate the life here,” she reported to Vicky. But by October 18, she had quite changed her mind. “I and the girls lunched while Papa was after the stag—and good J. Brown was so attentive to us and so careful,” she wrote to Vicky. “He is now my special servant, and there can’t be a nicer, better or handier one … Brown has had everything to do for me indeed had charge of me on all, on all these expeditions, and therefore I settled that he should be specially appointed to attend on me (without any other title) and have a full dress suit … Altogether I feel so sad—at the bitter thought of going from this blessed place—leaving these hills—this enchanting life of liberty—these dear people—and returning to tame, dull, formal England and the prison life at Windsor.” It is clear that the prince consort was happy to see his wife personally attended by the handsome gillie. The J. Browns of the world were very useful, and he could make sure that they posed no threat to his marriage or to the monarchy.

…

N THE FALL OF 1860, THE QUEEN AND THE PRINCE SET OUT FOR COBURG
again. They were hoping this time to steer clear of Vicky’s Prussian in-laws with their protocol, endless military parades, formal concerts, and family feuds. They looked forward to having a quiet two weeks with their daughter and son-in-law, getting to know their grandson, Willy, now almost two, and discussing the ways of the world with dear old Stockmar.

One day, as the Queen and Vicky, armed with their sketchbooks, were happily chatting to local people in the castle park, Colonel Ponsonby rode up with news. The prince consort had been involved in an accident but was unharmed. Concerned but unafraid, Victoria rushed to her husband’s side and found him lying on his valet’s bed with a cold compress over his bleeding nose. He had been driving out in an open carriage when the driver lost control of the horses. The carriage was heading straight for the railway line, where a cart had stopped to allow a train to pass. The prince jumped out of the speeding vehicle, incurring cuts and bruises but no broken limbs. He picked himself up and rushed over to see to the driver, who had been seriously hurt. When Colonel Ponsonby, hearing of the accident, rode up, the prince consort directed him to the Queen to allay any unnecessary fears.

By presence of mind and physical agility, Albert had escaped a life-threatening incident, but he was profoundly unnerved. The accident had been a memento mori. Other men he had known had not been as lucky as he. In 1842 the young Duc d’Orléans had similarly leaped out of a runaway carriage, but he had died in the fall. Albert had not been particularly close to the young duke, but all the same his death plunged Albert into what he described as consternation and deep distress. “To my imagination it appears
as a mysterious enigmatic lesson full of deep significance, and will long exercise my mind and spirit,” Albert wrote about the duke’s death. Nine years later, Albert’s dear friend and mentor Sir Robert Peel was thrown by his horse and died a lingering and horrible death. Once again, Albert found it hard to recover from the shock and the sorrow of the sudden loss.

In 1860 his unexpected brush with death came at a time when the prince consort was extremely tired and overworked, close to what we would now call a nervous breakdown. He felt as if he was careering down the road to death but could not find the nerve to jump off. That Albert was both depressed and overwrought was quite apparent to those around him in Coburg that fall. “God have mercy on us!” Stockmar said to Duke Ernest. “If anything serious should happen to him, he will die.” On his final day in Coburg, Albert and his brother took a walk. “At one of the most beautiful spots, Albert stood still and suddenly felt for his pocket handkerchief,” Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg remembered. “I went up to him and saw that the tears were trickling down his cheeks … he persisted in declaring that he was well aware that he had been here for the last time in his life.” The scene Duke Ernest paints is dramatic. We can imagine Albert weeping, saying he was sure he was going to die; Ernest, taken aback, sputtering the kind of banalities we still use for severely depressed people. Don’t be absurd. You are only forty years old. You have everything to live for. For pity’s sake, get a grip on yourself, brother.

To his wife too, Albert sometimes talked about death. He often told her “Ich hänge gar nicht am Leben; du hängst sehr daran [I really do not cling to life; you cling to it very hard] … I feel that I should make no struggle if I were ill—that I should give up at once.” Such remarks would make the Queen shudder, and then the prince would pull himself together.

The prince consort’s steep decline into ill health and depression can be charted from hundreds of extant paintings, drawings, and photographic images of him. The man aged astonishingly fast. It is as if youth and beauty were a costume he wore for ambition and then put away with relief once the Queen was won and the Saxe-Coburg dynasty in England was secured. The slim romantic hero of the early portraits, with his light mustache and intricately curled hair, soon gave way to the portly, balding, bristle-whiskered stockbroker of the daguerreotypes. Red leather hunting boots were retired in favor of stout shoes. Trousers and long frock coats replaced the body-hugging jackets and breeches. In the first known photographic image of the prince alone, a daguerreotype taken when he was twenty-two or twenty-three, he is already losing his hair, putting on weight, and looking melancholy. An 1855 photograph of Prince Albert at Osborne in his
holiday clothes—short, cutaway coat, loud tweed trousers, checked waistcoat, and broad-brimmed hat—shows him strangely somber and preoccupied. At thirty-six years old, the man looks fifty.

Two astute female observers who were close to the royal couple peered behind the mask and suspected that all was not well with Prince Albert. Lady Lyttelton, the royal children’s governess, was startled to see the expression of melancholy that appeared on the prince’s face when he thought no one was watching him. Mary Bulteel Ponsonby Queen Victoria’s maid of honor and friend, was sure that Prince Albert was not a happy man.

Prince Albert aged so fast because he worked too hard and put far too much pressure on himself. His wife saw this but protested in vain. The prince’s labors at his desk were prodigious by any standards. During the Crimean War alone, his personal files amounted to forty bound volumes. Apart from the tiring state events he attended with his wife, the prince, as colonel to several regiments and chairman of a large number of charitable and arts organizations, also did a great deal of solo travel. Even for a man with a private train who could order a railway track cleared for his passage on any given day, these out-of-town engagements were an increasing drain. The ceremonial dinners, when the prince was obliged to respond to a string of long speeches and toasts, were both boring and stressful. Committed to reforming the English armed forces, Albert not infrequently found himself standing for hours in pouring rain on a parade ground or an artillery field. Chilled to the bone, he would develop a feverish cold, feel wretched for days, but continue with his crowded schedule. Albert was forever hurrying back to his wife late at night in foul weather, exhausted. His main relaxation was chasing stags.

By 1860, the demands on his time had ratcheted up so far that the prince consort had ceased to take pleasure in work. Insomnia troubled him more and more, and he found it impossible to relax. In May of that year, the royal family was as usual at Osborne, “in the enjoyment of the most glorious air, the most fragrant odours, the merriest choirs of birds, and the most luxuriant verdure,” as the prince reported to his daughter in Berlin. Osborne was the earthly paradise that Albert had created for his family, but he couldn’t just admit how desperately he needed to rest, soak up the sun, breathe in the scents from his beloved shrubs, and listen to the birds he could identify by call. “Were there not so many things that reminded one of the so-called world (that is to say, of miserable men) one might give oneself up wholly to the enjoyment of the real world,” he continued to Vicky. “There is no such good fortune, however, for poor me; and this being so, one’s feelings remain under the influence of the treadmill of never-ending
business. The donkey at Carisbrook [harnessed to a treadmill], which you will remember, is my true counterpart. He, too, would rather munch thistles in the Castle Well; and small are the thanks he gets for his labour.”

Yet no one bound Albert to a life of unending toil. Unlike the Carisbrook donkey, he could have unstrapped himself from the treadmill and munched daisies to his heart’s content. Other kings and princes had no problem getting away and relaxing. Even Uncle Leopold took time for himself and felt no guilt over his pleasures. England benefited from the prince consort’s dedication and intelligence, but it did not need his hand perpetually on the wheel. There were ministers and a parliament to steer the ship of state, and, by and large, they did a decent job of it. Even Palmerston and Gladstone, men of legendary strength, energy, and efficiency, did not work all the time. They knew a great deal but did not find it necessary to be expert on everything from Schleswig-Holstein to
sfumato
.

But to stop work for more than a few days, to refuse more responsibilities, to delegate, above all to ask his wife to take on more of the duties that were in fact hers constitutionally, would have destroyed the prince’s sense of self. He was Atlas, bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders.

The prince spent much of his day writing down the ideas and facts that teemed in his brain, but he was not prone to self-analysis or self-doubt. He considered his wife slightly mad because she dwelled so much on her feelings and needed to “have things out.” He graded Victoria in written memoranda on what he saw as her advances in sociability and self-control, sure he was doing her a service. But, once Stockmar retired to Coburg for good, no one performed the same service for him. Albert loved his brother, Ernest, but could neither trust nor respect him. After the deaths of Anson and Peel, there was no friend in England to suggest to the prince that he might be destroying his health, happiness, and long-term usefulness in the pursuit of the chimera of indispensability Albert certainly felt able to confide in his wife, but she mirrored his exalted opinion of himself and was usually ignored when she ventured to disagree or demur.

Albert criticized Victoria for being vain, self-absorbed, antisocial, neurotic, and weak, yet, ironically, these were more his faults than hers. The Queen, as Lady Lyttelton once observed, had a vein of iron. She was small, but she was strong, producing nine children without, apparently, a miscarriage. She was healthy even when she was pregnant, and she recovered quickly from colds and attacks of what she called rheumatism as well as from the mumps, measles, and scarlet fever she caught from her children. Above all, Victoria’s sense of self was strongly grounded in reality despite the isolation she complained of so often. She was spoiled and headstrong,
but she could listen, she could reach out, she could at times at least see herself as others saw her. She admitted her passionate nature and gave vent to her emotions. She knew she was not perfect and was quick to apologize and atone. She knew how to relax and delegate, rest and recover.

Convinced of his own perfections, injured by the world’s failure to recognize them, Prince Albert maintained a steely composure and was always unwell. He hid his hurt feelings under a smile that deceived no one and alienated many. He took refuge from emotion in an ever-accelerating workload. He had to feel master of his world. For a man whose health had always been precarious, this was double jeopardy.