We Two: Victoria and Albert (76 page)

 

3
All afternoon Queen Victoria had been
We are fortunate to know in great detail what Queen Victoria was doing, saying, and thinking in the year of her engagement and marriage. There are numerous contemporary letters and memoirs, but above all there is the Queen’s journal. When she first began her journal, at the age of thirteen, the then Princess Victoria wrote a dutiful and dull account of her engagements, the people she met, the operas she saw, and so forth. The entries for the early years offer limited insight into her thoughts and feelings, since the princess wrote in the certainty that both her mother and her governess, Louise Lehzen, read everything she wrote. However, by the time she came to the throne, Queen Victoria had acquired the habit of diary writing, and so she wrote freely and often at length, almost every day, from 1837 to her death in 1901. In 1912, soon after the death of Victoria’s eldest son and heir, Edward VII, and with the full support of the new King George V and Queen Mary, Viscount Esher transcribed the diaries up to the year of the Queen’s marriage. Esher subsequently published a judiciously selective, extensively annotated two-volume work entitled
The Girlhood of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Diaries Between the Years 1832 and 1840
(London: Longmans, Green & Co.; New York: John Murray, 1912). Every transcription involves some amount of editing, and Esher was a man of the English courtier class, anxious to promote the interests of the royal family. But he was also a man of intelligence and finesse, committed to preserving the historical record. Esher was aware that Queen Victoria’s journals were one of the most precious documents in the history of the British monarchy and, even if they could not respectfully be published as written, must be kept in the archives for posterity. Sadly, however, Queen Victoria in her final years had read through her journals, marked the passages she wished to be preserved, and then committed the volumes to the care and discretion of her youngest daughter, Beatrice (Princess Henry of Battenberg). Beatrice was a Victorian in the worst sense of the word, and in the last years of her life, she took it upon herself to preserve her mother’s legend by censoring her mother’s work. She read through all the diaries, transcribed a text in her own hand, and then burned the original volume. The few sections of the Queen’s journals that were published in her lifetime prove how much precious information was lost when Princess Beatrice bowdlerized and abridged. Thus Queen Victoria’s journals exist only in the form of transcriptions and fragments.

4
Nemours made a rapid exit
Nemours subsequently married another Victoria, or Victoire,
as the name often became, the Queen of England’s first cousin Victoria of Coburg-Kohary, the eldest daughter of her uncle Ferdinand. 4

4
Given her druthers
This was the opinion of Lord Palmerston, then foreign secretary, who wrote to Lord Granville: “After being used to agreeable and well-informed Englishmen, I fear [the Queen] will not find a foreign prince to her liking” (Anthony Trollope,
Lord Palmerston
London: Isbister, 1882, p. 66).

4
But unfortunately, not one
By the late eighteenth century, it was already an article of faith in English political circles that the delicate balance between Whigs and Tories that made England a great nation would be destroyed if the monarch married into one of the main aristocratic families, most of which were firmly allied with one party or the other. The monarch, it was believed, must be above political party. As a result, no English monarch or heir to the English throne married a British commoner between 1660, when the future James II married Anne Hyde, until Charles, Prince of Wales, married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Charles’s grandfather George VI also married a commoner, Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, but their marriage occurred before anyone imagined that George would become king.

5
She herself had been officially entered
To take one example, by the age of seventeen, Maria da Glória, the queen of Portugal, had been married twice, and she was exactly Queen Victoria’s age. Queen Maria was first married to her stepmother’s brother, but he died within months of the marriage, thus further weakening her tenuous hold on the throne. In January 1836, Queen Maria was married by proxy to Ferdinand of Coburg-Kohary, Queen Victoria’s cousin.

5
If her maternal and paternal relations
The eldest son of a reigning English monarch is known as the heir apparent. Victoria was heir presumptive to her uncle William IV, the presumption being that King William and his wife, Queen Adelaide, would not produce an heir apparent.

5
He distrusted the ambitions
The dynasty composed of Georges I, II, III, and IV, and William IV is usually referred to as the house of Hanover, or, in earlier times, the house of Brunswick. However, as the future king William IV remarked to his fellow midshipmen when he was a fourteen-year-old boy sent to sea, the family name was Guelph.

5
William’s preferred candidate
Officially, members of royal families have no surname, even, apparently, on their passports. However, given that nineteenth-century royal persons tended to use the same Christian names over and over, in private correspondence they had various ways to distinguish between one family member and another, chiefly nicknames (Vicky, Bertie, Affie) and first name plus title (George Cambridge, Victoria Kent). When entering into the relationships between different members of the royal family, I found it useful at times to adopt the royal shorthand.

5
The Duke of Cumberland was heir
Salic law in Germany precluded women from inheriting lands and titles, so Victoria could not be Queen of Hanover.

5
Given the risk of hereditary blindness
George Cumberland eventually succeeded his father as King of Hanover. The Blind King, as he was known, did a creditable job until his kingdom was swallowed up by Prussia.

5
He was a tall, strong young man
George Cambridge did in the end prove the sire of kings and a queen. His granddaughter, Mary of Teck, a royal poor relation brought up at Kensington Palace, married King George V and was Queen Elizabeth II’s grandmother. Queen Mary was a redoubtable lady, far more intelligent and energetic than her husband.

5
He, or his mother, was assiduous
Queen Victoria’s early diary features meticulous lists of the numerous presents she received for Christmas and her birthday from relatives, friends, and attendants.

6.
He did not fancy his cousin
As a youth, George Cambridge emulated his uncle Clarence (William IV) by taking up with an actress and producing several illegitimate children, who were known as the FitzGeorges.

6
Their answer was a diplomatically expressed
This refusal to entertain the idea of a Prussian
marriage is somewhat ironic. In the next generation, alliance with the Hohenzollerns became a cornerstone of Prince Albert’s foreign policy. See chapter 24.

6
“I am really
astonished
Esher, vol. 1, pp. 47–48, King Leopold’s original emphases.

8
The Queen faithfully recorded
For these conversations on the subject of marriage, see Esher, vol. 2, pp. 207, 215, and 225–226.

10
In the meantime, Victoria’s shilly-shallying
Ibid, p. 139.

10
His shoulders were broad
There seems no doubt that at the time of his engagement and marriage, Prince Albert was at the peak of physical perfection. Even his enemies agreed that he was extremely handsome, though they criticized his legs as too heavy.

12
Albert cast Victoria in the role
“Es ist kleines Fräuchen” (“It is little wifey), Victoria said to Albert when he was close to death and failed to recognize her. Apparently this was one of the affectionate diminutives he used for her.

12
Like so many famous
I attribute to Jill Ker Conway the important observation that famous women find it necessary in their memoirs to downplay their talents and attribute their achievement to luck and the support of others.

PART ONE:
THE YEARS APART |
Victoria: A Fatherless Princess

Chapter 1:
CHARLOTTE AND LEOPOLD

18
She accused him, not unjustly
Charlotte once remarked to Stockmar: “My mother was bad, but she would not have become as bad as she was if my father had not been infinitely worse.”
Memoirs of Baron Stockmar
cited by Christopher Hibbert,
George IV
, Penguin Books, 1973, p. 484.

18
Three in middle age finally escaped
For the most complete and carefully documented account of the six, see
Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III
by Flora Fraser, New York: Knopf, 2005.

18
Orange was, admittedly, a drunken lout
In
Princesses
, Flora Fraser offers evidence that the king of Württemberg, husband to the Princess Royal, eldest daughter of George III, was a brutal homosexual who actively abused his wife.

19
Charlotte’s unexpected and stubborn refusal
Prince Leopold wrote that he was able to communicate with Princess Charlotte only with the help of her uncle the Duke of Kent, since “she was treated as a kind of prisoner.” Cecil Woodham-Smith,
Queen Victoria
, New York: Knopf, 1972, p. 13.

19
He had served valiantly
The portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence of Prince Leopold in his youthful military glory can be seen in the Waterloo Room at Windsor Castle, above one of the doors, on the same wall as the three kings of England George III, George IV, and William IV The standard work in English on King Leopold of the Belgians centered on his relations with Queen Victoria is
My Dearest Uncle: A Life of Leopold, First King of the Belgians
by Joanna Richardson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1961). The key book on Leopold’s early life is
Die Coburger Jahren des Prinzen Leopold bis zu seiner Englischen Heirat 1816
by Harald Bachmann, Sonderdruck aus des Jahrbuch der Coburger Landesstiftung (The Coburg Years of Prince Leopold, Up to His English Marriage in 1816), a special issue of the
Journal of the Coburg State Foundation
in 2005 to commemorate the 175th anniversary of Leopold’s accession to the throne of Belgium on July 21, 1831. Based on the extensive correspondence of the Saxe-Coburg family and their representatives in the Coburg archives, this book, unavailable in English, contains detailed new information.

19
Officially he was celebrating
The letters Leopold wrote to his family show that even before he set out for London, he intended to make a play for Charlotte. He wrote to his brother the Duke of Coburg in June 1815: “The Emperor [of Russia] has given me permission to stay here [England] as long as it suits me. I only decided to do so after much hesitation, and after certain very singular events made me glimpse the possibility, even the probability, of
realizing the project we spoke of in Paris. My chances are, alas, very poor, because of the father’s opposition”
(My Dearest Uncle
, p. 26). Leopold’s mistress Caroline Bauer claims in her memoirs that Leopold was promoted as a husband for Princess Charlotte by the Grand Duchess Catherine of Russia. The Russian government was anxious to prevent the strengthening in the alliance of England and Holland that would occur if Charlotte married the Prince of Orange, as her father wished. See
Caroline Bauer and the Coburgs
(London: Vizetelly), translated and edited by Charles Nisbet.

20
His belt and sword blazed
For the details of Charlotte’s wedding, see Joanna Richardson,
My Dearest Uncle
, pp. 39–42. Richardson quotes several admiring appraisals of Prince Leopold’s looks as a young man.

20
“I have perfectly decided
Richardson, p. 28.