We Two: Victoria and Albert (72 page)

Dissatisfied by such ephemeral tributes to its Queen’s dead consort, cities and towns and civic institutions rushed to inscribe them in stone for the long-term edification of the populace. Major cities like Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin, Aberdeen, and Liverpool launched vigorous subscription campaigns and then vied with one another in the Gothic extravagance of their Albert Memorials. Little towns like Tenby Denham, and Abingdon were not to be outdone in their commemorative zeal. Artists cheerfully set to the task of chiseling iconic Albert statues—standing in Perth, sitting in Aberdeen, on horseback in Wolverhampton, in Garter robes at Framingham College, in chancellor’s robes at Cambridge, in frock coat at Oxford, on top of a pillar in Abingdon, under a canopy in Manchester, exposed to the pigeons in Dublin, or nestled in a museum in Bombay. Albert libraries, infirmaries, clock towers, and drinking fountains sprang up like mushrooms. Even today it is hard to find a town in England without an Albert Street or— rather ironically, given the prince’s dislike of hard liquor—an Albert pub.

These ubiquitous public tributes continued for more than a decade, but they were an expression of guilt rather than sorrow. With the prince consort safely out of the way, the British nation was ready at last to celebrate his superior abilities, pure morals, and hard work. He was a pattern of the virtues that nineteenth-century English society professed to cherish, and to the end of the century, erring youths (his eldest son notable among them) were urged to model themselves after him.

But during his lifetime, Prince Albert had not been loved or even much admired by people outside his family, as those close to the Crown sadly acknowledged. The prince had only one close friend in the royal household, his secretary George Anson, and Anson died in 1851. In his frequent public appearances, Albert was received with more politeness than warmth, and he cut no ice with the English aristocracy. According to royal biographer David Duff, the Earl of Oxford exclaimed, on hearing of the prince’s death: “That at least is one foreigner safely out of the way.” Lady Dorothy Nevill’s husband put on a pair of light-check trousers, which he had been keeping specially for the occasion. Duff goes on: “As Lord Lennox remarked
to Sir Henry Cole in October 1862, ‘Truth to tell, the “Swells,” as a class, did not much care for the P.’” Queen Victoria herself summed it all up when she took her old friend the Duchess of Sutherland into the Blue Room for a last look at the dead prince and murmured, “Will they do him justice now?”

It was unfair of the British to refuse to take the prince consort to their hearts, especially since his wife enjoyed such immense popularity. Logically, the Queen’s husband deserved much of the credit for his wife’s success. But if the nation was willing to praise Victoria’s female submission, it steadfastly refused to take the female role and worship him as she did. To see their Queen in the arms of a German never sat well with the English. England liked the fact that the prince had given the Queen four healthy sons, solving the succession problem. It liked the cozy domesticity that now prevailed at Windsor and Osborne. It liked a court where sexual promiscuity, financial impropriety, gambling, heavy drinking, and coarse language were not permitted. But in their Queen’s consort, they were looking for a grand seigneur, not a professor; a stud, not a statesman; a sportsman, not a saint.

And the very idea that the Queen, in her official capacity, was a mere tool in the hands of her German husband, that he, not cabinet ministers, dictated state policy and conducted state business, was political dynamite. A king consort might be acceptable to the Portuguese, but it was anathema to the English.

The English political and social establishment—that tiny minority of the population that saw the royal family regularly—nursed a more nuanced and discrete form of the general animosity toward the prince, which, of course, it helped to shape. Over two decades, top politicians like Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Lord Clarendon, Lord Derby, Lord Granville, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Disraeli had been impressed by the prince. Given that even recent kings had found it necessary to rely on the services of trusted private secretaries, it was good to have an intelligent, able, and diligent man at the Queen’s shoulder. That the business of the Crown should be run by a man was, in the eyes of Victorian misogyny, self-evidently necessary.

But cabinet ministers and members of parliament, whether Tory or Whig, were aware that the prince had political goals that did not coincide with their own. It was no secret that the prince was aiming to rule in fact as well as name, to rule as William of Orange had ruled in mid-seventeenth-century England and William Hohenstollern still did in nineteenth-century Prussia. Prince Albert was not just a superior private secretary and a dedicated bureaucrat. He was a wily politician, an ambitious statesman, and a power-hungry diplomat. In the Queen’s name, acting on her behalf, the
prince was systematically undermining the sacred if unwritten constitutional principle of a cabinet of ministers invested by parliament with the responsibility for executive government. For the tiny political establishment of Great Britain, the prince consort’s combination of ambition and energy represented a grave threat—to the nation, to the monarchy as they had defined it, to the Queen they loved, and to themselves.

When they had gotten over the shock and sadness, when the mourning had been properly stage-managed, Prime Minister Palmerston and his brethren on both sides of the aisle in parliament breathed a secret sigh of relief. Providence had intervened. An intractable problem was solved deus ex machina. The beauty of British government was that no man, least of all a prince consort, was indispensable. Ministers knew that managing the Queen would be tricky, but they would cope.

For Benjamin Disraeli, the rising power in the Tory Party, the prince consort’s death was an opportunity to be seized with both hands. In his published work and parliamentary speeches, Disraeli advanced mystic ideas on monarchy, but he knew that his ministerial advancement was threatened because of the deep antipathy the prince consort felt for him. Thus, when Albert died, Disraeli treated the House of Commons to a brilliant funerary oration well calculated to win the Queen’s attention. In a private conversation with the Prussian minister in London, Disraeli was characteristically effusive and double-edged in his praise of the prince: “With Prince Albert we have buried our sovereign. This German Prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings has ever shown … If he had outlived some of our ‘old stagers’ [here Disraeli surely had the elderly Palmerston in mind], he would have given us the blessings of absolute government.”

It may be doubted how far the ambitious middle-class intellectual Disraeli actually endorsed absolutist government on the Prussian model. But he assumed that his remarks would be reported straight back to Berlin and were likely to find favor with Albert’s favorite and adoring daughter, now Crown Princess of Prussia, and thus with the Queen. Benjamin Disraeli subsequently rose to be Earl of Beaconsfield and one of the greatest prime ministers in English history. Though he gave up none of the powers that had accrued to his office, he also reprised Lord Melbourne’s role and became one of the Queen’s closest friends. Had Albert lived, England would not have had its first and only prime minister of Jewish origins.

If statesmen and politicians saw the death of the prince consort as something of a divine favor to a worthy country, even courtiers close to Victoria felt in their hearts that, perhaps, their beloved Queen, however bereft,
was safer on her throne with her husband dead. This was the view expressed privately and late in life by the liberal Mary Ponsonby who was not loath to imagine Great Britain as a republic. Jane Ely and Jane Churchill, ladies-in-waiting to the Queen for many years, were both Tories, but they were of the same opinion as Mary Ponsonby. All three ladies noticed that the prince consort, for all his manifest virtues, had driven the Crown on a collision course with English political leaders who happened to be their own close relatives and friends. Though of course this could never be said to Her Majesty, the prince’s notion of England’s good was not, in the end, England’s own.

And so, across the nation, in all classes, when Albert died, the mourning was as superficial as it was long, loud, and lavish. The nation wept
for
its Queen but not
with
her.

ONLY A SMALL
handful of people were deeply affected by the prince consort’s death. Baron Christian Stockmar in Coburg fell into black despair. He had staked so much on this young princely protégé. Now with Albert dead and the star of Bismarck already rising in the Prussian sky, Stockmar saw his liberal dreams turning to ashes. “I feel right well,” Stockmar wrote in March 1862, “that I cannot judge this matter [the death of the prince consort] as one in full possession of his senses; for the thought of the malignity of my personal fate, which has allowed me to live so long that I should endure this cruel blow, drives me at times half mad. An edifice, which, for a great and noble cause, had been reared, with a devout sense of duty … has been shattered to its very foundations.” Baron Christian Stockmar died the following year.

King Leopold of the Belgians was almost as heart-stricken as his old friend and confederate Baron Stockmar. He received the news of his nephew Albert’s death from the Queen herself. Albert had been dearer to him than his own children, the old king confided to Victoria in return. Though he was in poor health, Leopold rushed immediately across to England to support his niece and take charge at Windsor, since the Prince of Wales was obviously not up to the task. It was King Leopold, overruling Princess Alice, who insisted that the Queen should be moved immediately to the privacy of Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, a decision that many of Victoria’s ministers later regretted. In 1865 King Leopold died, a hard, sad, bitter man more lamented by his English niece than by his children and his court.

Within hours of the bereaved Queen’s arrival on the Isle of Wight on December 19, Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Albert’s brother,
arrived, soaking wet from the winter crossing. He took his sister-in-law in his arms in an agony of tears and, during the remainder of his visit, was as usual more trouble than comfort to her and his nieces and nephews. Ernest was a brilliant and complicated man, and his grief for his brother was intense. Since he and Albert had chosen for dynastic reasons to keep silent on their childhood and mythologize their youth, with Albert gone, Ernest lost two decades of intimately shared experience. On the other hand, Ernest had never enjoyed trailing in Albert’s wake, and there was comfort in the knowledge that he had the vitality and endurance that Albert lacked. Over the twenty-two years of Albert’s life in England, the two brothers had often been at odds over family and financial matters.

Albert’s premature death mattered above all for Ernest because it posed a threat to his own international status. The two brothers had always been political allies, constantly exchanging information and devising strategy. The brothers shared the contradictory goal of uniting Germany without losing the independent sovereignty of their duchy. Thus, even as he wept with his widowed sister-in-law, Ernest blamed her and England for killing his brother. For the rest of his life, Ernest sedulously kept up his relations with the English Saxe-Coburgs, exploited his sister-in-law’s status, relied on her generosity, and launched vicious attacks in the German press on her and his niece Vicky. Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, died, unlamented, in 1893.

All nine of Albert’s children were deeply marked by his early death, but in different ways. The prince had been a loving, attentive, involved parent from the moment each child took its first breath. For his family, Prince Albert had been fun, the clever mimic and cartoonist, the expert marksman, the gifted singer and accompanist, the master of the revels. He had made a palace into a home, and when he died, the fire went out and the lights dimmed. In their own marriages, his children would strive to re-create what could be called the Osborne experience.

When the prince consort died, four of his nine children were clustered around him: his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, and the princesses Alice, Helena, and Louise. The two youngest children at home, Princess Beatrice and Prince Arthur, were spared the death scene. The eldest child, the Princess Royal, was in Berlin. The second son, Prince Alfred, was away at sea. Prince Leopold, the youngest boy, was still marooned in the south of France, following the sudden death of the elderly courtier sent out to look after him. It must have been terrible for the sick and lonely boy to receive the news of his father’s death, yet Leopold was less haunted by his father’s legend than his elder brothers.

The prince consort’s death cast a very long shadow over relations between
the Queen and the heir to the throne. For months after her husband’s death, Queen Victoria could hardly bear to be in the same room as the Prince of Wales. “Oh! That boy—much as I pity I never can or shall look at him without a shudder,” she confided to Vicky in Berlin. To the end of her life, the Queen had little affection or regard for Bertie, refused to allow him any independent position of consequence, and conducted the business of the Crown with the help of his sisters and his brother Leopold.