We Two: Victoria and Albert (69 page)

AS AN ADULT
, Albert was a tall and strong man, a dedicated and accomplished sportsman famous for dashing full tilt along the endless corridors at Windsor. To attract the young Queen Victoria, he had needed to be in superb physical shape. But the prince’s strength and vigor in 1839 had been acquired by a massive effort of will. As a child, he had often been ill with colics, coughs, and fevers, and therefore subjected to the debilitating medical procedures and pharmaceuticals of his time. He needed an unusual amount of sleep. Even as a late teenager, Albert was so easily tired that Stockmar wondered if he was up to the destiny his family planned for him.

Gastric problems troubled Albert all his life. Once he arrived in England, these were exacerbated by the local cuisine, though he soon began to gain weight. In England he also suffered chronically from what he called “catarrh,” “fever,” and “rheumatism.” The polluted air of London probably accounted for the chronic catarrh, or runny nose. The constant fevers and chills may have been due to a contaminated water supply, since the waste-disposal systems at both Windsor and Buckingham Palace were recognized by sanitation experts to be quite inadequate. Only in his personally designed new homes at Osborne and Balmoral, where the air was clean and the water pure, did the prince feel perfectly fit. As for the “rheumatism,” it also plagued Queen Victoria and their daughter Vicky at a very young age. Spending so many hours every day reading handwritten documents in poor light and writing with a quill pen was calculated to produce stiff joints and sore tendons.

After ten years of marriage, Prince Albert’s health got worse. By his own and his wife’s account, the prince’s labors over the Great Exhibition of 1851 left him close to collapse. From the end of 1854, when he was assailed in the press as a traitor, Albert remarked more and more often, especially in his letters to Stockmar, how very “fagged” and unwell he was feeling. He
suffered appallingly from toothache and gum abscesses. At one point, he apologized to Prince William for not writing, saying that his arm and shoulder were so sore he could not hold a pen.

That his “kleines Fräuchen” was so much more resilient was a constant spur to the prince and an irritation. Victoria was both worried and annoyed by her husband’s unending stream of complaints about his health. Her diagnosis was that, like most men, he was a hypochondriac. The Queen had her own health fetishes, and they did not fit well with her husband’s ailments. Victoria insisted that her husband, and indeed all her family, open the windows and keep the rooms nice and cold. Fresh, cold air was her sovereign recipe for keeping well, and it certainly worked for her.

Albert never accustomed himself to the icy indoor conditions in the English royal homes. It is true that he had been trained as a child to suffer extreme cold without complaint, since riding for hours through a blizzard in a short jacket was Duke Ernest’s idea of manliness. But stoves kept the temperatures cozy inside German palaces. Eighteen years into his marriage, Prince Albert was rising at seven, donning a wig and a padded dressing gown, and shivering over the day’s documents. If he dared to have a small fire lit in his rooms, it had to be hastily extinguished as soon as his wife was up.

This matter of lighting fires was one of the silly knots that married people can get entangled in. Albert controlled all aspects of the royal household, and he was not slow to contradict his wife or give her orders. He could certainly have insisted on having a fire in his room. Instead he more or less obeyed his wife but felt free to complain to their daughter about her.

IF ALBERT HAD BEEN
deeply depressed in October 1860, at Christmas that year he pulled himself together. The prince had wonderful memories of Christmases in his childhood, which his own father had stage-managed. For his wife, his children, and the entire household, he made Christmas into a fairy-tale event at Windsor Castle, with a huge tree glowing with candles, separate tables heaped up with presents for everyone, dancing, games, carols, and splendid feasts. The prince was the life and soul of the party as always, but the release in pressure lasted for days at most. In the New Year, as usual, one political crisis followed another, either at home or abroad, all requiring his constant attention, or so it seemed.

Family affairs also demanded more of the prince’s time than ever. Alice was now engaged to Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, and, to prepare her for her life in Germany, her father was trying to give her an hour of his time every night. Alice, like her older sister, was a talented and willing student,
quite unlike her brother Bertie, and both father and daughter looked forward to their sessions. Unfortunately, the prince was often so busy that he had to cancel.

Leopold’s chronic ill health entered a critical phase. On one of his visits to London, Louis of Hesse came down with what the doctors diagnosed as measles. The illness was passed to the Queen and to eight-year-old Prince Leopold, who was ill for several weeks. Then, late in the fall, Leopold had a bad accident and a serious bleed. The Queen wrote to the Princess Royal in Germany how cross she was that the prince consort had insisted she attend a horticultural meeting with him, since Leopold had suffered one of his “bruises” and was very ill. “You say no one is perfect but Papa,” wrote Queen Victoria on October 1, 1861, “but he has his faults too. He is often very trying—in his hastiness and over-love of business.” On the advice of the doctors, the prince consort sent his ailing son off to the south of France for the winter, entrusting Leopold to an aging courtier, General Bowater. Within a day of arriving in Cannes, Bowater, aged seventy-four, was dead, leaving the child stranded in the care of servants and foreigners.

The problem with Leopold could not have come at a worse time, as Prince Albert was already coping with a full-scale domestic crisis. In March 1861, the Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mother, died. Her health had been poor for some years, but her death was nonetheless a shock. During her mother’s final illness, Victoria hovered by the bedside night and day, listening to the tick of her dead father’s watch. The duchess had always kept the watch by her, and it was the sound that had punctuated Victoria’s every night until her accession. The Queen was holding her mother’s hand when the duchess died. This was the first time Victoria had seen death at firsthand, and she was traumatized as well as bereft. Her husband led her gently away, in an agony of weeping.

Over the years of her marriage, the Queen had become increasingly fond of her mother. The duchess was always there in the background of her life, and she came to depend upon her more and more. With her mother as with no one else at court, the Queen could chat in confidence about her husband’s latest cold, problems with the children, scandals abroad. The duchess was very game for an old lady, and she still had fashion sense. For her May birthdays, the Queen could count on her mother to give her an especially becoming summer dress.

Victoria suffered a nervous breakdown after her mother died. As the prince consort reported grimly to his brother, the rumor that the Queen of England was going mad was circulating in the courts of Europe. Everywhere the Queen went, she missed the duchess’s familiar face and wept inconsolably.
For some time, she would not come out of her rooms even for meals. She refused to engage in the business of state and found her children too irritating to bear. She was happiest making detailed plans for her mother’s tomb and going through her mother’s affairs. She read for the first time the letters her parents had exchanged in their brief marriage and discovered just how much she herself had been loved as a small child. She passionately regretted the ten years or so when she and her mother had been estranged.

The Queen’s twentieth-century English biographers found her grief weird and excessive, a prime example of the outdated sentimentality of the Victorian era. Today we are more inclined to believe that mothers and fathers must be mourned, since they cannot be replaced. We see that the death of even an unloving parent can occasion an emotional crisis and a deep reevaluation of life. Today the Queen’s wrenching sorrow seems natural and right, since she and her mother had been so close for so long. Victoria was perhaps self-indulgent and extreme in her weeping, but her loss was great, and, in the end, she healed herself with tears.

The prince consort had also been very fond of the mother-in-law, who was also his aunt. The two had been friends and allies. She was one more lost link to his Coburg past. It was the first time he too had seen death at firsthand. But, unlike his wife, he had no time to dwell on his emotions. He had to comfort his shattered wife and try to get her back on her feet. He had to take up the administrative slack caused by Victoria’s breakdown. He had to settle his mother-in-law’s estate, since only two weeks before the duchess’s death, her old and trusted man of affairs Sir George Couper had died. People began to remark on how ill the prince consort looked. In his diary he wrote in June: “Am feverish, with pains in my limbs, and feel very miserable.” He kept going, but such bouts of illness recurred throughout the summer.

In August the Queen and the prince made a visit to Ireland, largely to visit their eldest son. By this point in his life, the Prince of Wales had been moved by his father from Oxford to Cambridge. Learning from his Oxford mistakes, the prince consort installed his son and entourage of governor, equerries, private tutors, and servants at Madingley Hall, some distance from the town. Albert went down to Cambridge as often as he could to check on his son and make sure that his instructions were being carried out.

But the Prince of Wales was fast approaching his twentieth birthday, and in a year he would have control over his personal fortune and his income under the civil list. Then he would be free to lead his life as he chose.
To keep him in such tight leading strings seemed ill advised even to stern General Bruce, Bertie’s governor. An old military man who believed exposure to army life would be beneficial to the young man, Bruce persuaded Prince Albert to allow Bertie to spend the long vacation at the Curragh, a military camp in Killarney The price Albert had exacted for this indulgence was high. Bertie would have to show real good will in his studies and pass his exams. In Ireland, where he would be brevetted colonel without a regiment, he would be expected in ten weeks to acquire information and skills that career officers took years to master. He would once again have a separate household, not live with the other officers.

Leaping so many high hurdles would be a remarkable feat for anyone, and the Prince of Wales was an ordinary young man. He had been set up for failure, and, given his parents’ visit, the failure was horribly public. For a young man of great pride who had always hated even to be “chaffed” about his faults, the summer in Ireland was a cruel disappointment. Bertie saw himself as a soldier. As a boy, he had idolized the Duke of Wellington and read about the Napoleonic campaigns with passionate interest. Now he found it impossible even to get the men through a drill competently. The Queen commended the superior officers who in their reports on Bertie’s progress had refused to show preference to the heir to the throne. It was not a happy trip for parents or child.

In the fall, minus Vicky, Bertie, and Leopold—but plus Louis, now officially engaged to Alice—the royal family was again at Balmoral. The Queen began to revive. Remembering how their first “Great Expedition” in the Highlands had delighted his wife, the prince organized three more. These expeditions were challenging pony treks in the mountains, and two of them again involved incognito overnight stays at country inns. The Queen loved being outside all day on her darling Inchrory or some other pony, with Brown leading her over all the difficult places. She was cheerful when the rain came down and scrambled quickly up when she took a tumble walking on slick rock. She gloried in the scenery and tried to memorize the Gaelic name of every peak spread before her. She loved meeting strange innkeepers who were at first deceived by her assumed identity. Inevitably, to the Queen’s great hilarity, someone in the party would slip up and say “Your Majesty,” and the next morning a hurriedly assembled pipe band would salute their sovereign lady at breakfast. Victoria had the most fun ever, she wrote, and was ready at last to put aside her mourning.

Back at Windsor, the royal family celebrated the Prince of Wales’s twentieth birthday on November 9, but their joy was short lived. News came from Lisbon that King Pedro V of Portugal, twenty-five, and his brother and
heir, Prince Ferdinand, had died of typhoid. The Court of St. James’s always went into deep mourning for a dead monarch, but this time the royal family’s mood matched the black of their dress. The two young men were the eldest sons of Victoria and Albert’s first cousin, Ferdinand Coburg-Kohary On his occasional meetings with his English relatives, Pedro managed to impress the prince consort as a golden young man. To Albert, Pedro seemed to be all that he wanted in a son and heir, all that Bertie was not. “The death of poor, good Pedro … has shaken me in an extraordinary way,” Albert wrote to King William of Prussia, “for I loved and valued him greatly, and had great hopes that his influence might contribute towards setting on its legs a State and a nation which has fallen low.” Queen Victoria confided to her diary: “My Albert loved [Pedro] like a son.” The prince consort was unable to sleep, felt horribly cold, and was racked with pain.