We Two: Victoria and Albert (81 page)

110
Frederick had made various attempts
At the time of Louise’s marriage, her uncle Frederick renewed his efforts to find a bride and make an heir, but again he failed. See D. A. Ponsonby,
The Lost Duchess
, London: Chapman and Hall, 1958, pp. 121–122. This is still the standard biography available in English. Duchess Louise of Coburg indicated to Augusta von Studnitz (who herself was on Prince Frederick’s list of possible wives) that she had once aroused her uncle’s sexual interest. “I, too, had the good fortune to appear pleasing to him, but that signifies little, as I am his submissive niece” (Ponsonby, quoting Louise’s letter, p. 121). The idea of Frederick marrying his niece Louise seems grotesque except that, some ten years later, Duke Ernest I of Coburg, after his divorce from Duchess Louise, actually did marry one of his nieces, Marie of Württemberg.

111
Tall, athletic, and dashing
Duchess Louise gives a rapturous description of an actual tourney arranged by her husband in which he and other young men dressed in medieval armor and jousted. Duke Ernest appeared to perfection on horseback and in armor.

112
The two sons were known as
The order of Prince Albert’s given names is in some dispute. I use the order given in
Early Years
, p. 34. However, Ponsonby
(The Lost Duchess
, p. 106) says the prince’s birth entry in the
Almanach de Gotha
is Albert Francis Augustus Charles Emanuel. The prince consort was named Albrecht at birth, after his distant ancestor, but early on his name changed to the more modern Albert, and this is the name that appears on his German monuments.

112
Yet from Albert’s birth
In a letter solicited by Queen Victoria, King Leopold noted that he had seen Prince Albert in Coburg in 1822, 1823, 1824, 1826, 1827, and 1829, and that Albert “held a certain sway over his elder brother, who rather kindly submitted to it”
Early Years
, p. 46.

112
In letters, his mother and grandmother
Roger Fulford says that as an adult, Duke Ernest “was as unattractive as Prince Albert was attractive. His complexion was sallow with liver spots, his eyes were bloodshot and his lower teeth, like those of a bulldog, protruded far above his upper ones” (Fulford,
The Prince Consort
, London: Macmillan, 1949, p. 22). The many extant paintings of Ernest as a child and as an adult currently on display in Coburg and in Gotha barely indicate these defects.

112
Louise of Gotha wrote to her friend
Early Years
, pp. 85–86.

113
He learned to submit
In one of her memoranda in the book on the prince consort’s early years, Queen Victoria notes that as an adult, Prince Albert still had the scars from the leeches applied during his childhood. It is moving to see the Queen recalling every detail of that beloved body.

113
Once his mother had him dressed up
This event occurred after the boy had been entrusted to Herr Florschütz, and Duchess Louise seems to have blamed the tutor for Albert’s gauche conduct. She remarked: “This comes of his
good
education.” Quoted from Florschütz’s recollections,
Early Years
, p. 9 7

113
According to the testimony submitted
Early Years
, p. 90.

113
He spoke haltingly
Pauline Panam casually remarks on the duke’s stammer. She also says how frustrated the duke was because he had been ignored and snubbed during the peace negotiations following the close of the Napoleonic wars.

114
When he saw the teenage Prince
Memoirs of Baron Stockmar
, vol. II, p. 6.

114
He reported that whereas Albert
Richard Rhodes James,
Prince Albert: A Biography
, New York: Knopf, 1983, p. 26, apparently citing some unnamed archival source.

114
“Even as a child,” the Queen
Early Years
, p. 42.

115
After some negotiation, Duchess Louise
The terms of the “Trennungvertrag” (separation agreement) are given in
Das Haus vob Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha 1826 bis 2001
by Harald Sandner, p. 59.

116
In some aristocratic circles
See, for example, the careers of the first Lady Melbourne, of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and of Madame de Pompadour.

116
Then the crowd demanded
D. A. Ponsonby, the English biographer of Duchess Louise, suggests that Duke Ernest was not just a womanizer but a practicing homosexual, and that the men who served over the years as his personal aides were also his lovers. Ponsonby argues that when Duchess Louise discovered that Duke Ernest and Maximilian von Szymborski were lovers, she was revolted and felt obliged to leave her husband, even at the cost of losing her sons. When Szymborski took an active role in ending the duchess’s marriage and sending her into exile, the local people turned into what we might now call an antihomosexual lynch mob (Ponsonby, pp. 155–156). Ponsonby was writing in the 1950s, when homosexuality had been isolated from the sexual continuum and was commonly seen as pathological. Her main evidence for the assertion that Ernest and Szymborski were lovers is that, in her letter to Augusta von Studnitz at the time of her separation, Louise refers to Szymborski as Ernest’s “darling”
(Liebling)
. Another translation for
Liebling
would be “favorite,” but, of course, some version of the word
favorite
has been used in many languages to refer discreetly to the men with whom European kings such as James I of England or Henri II of France enjoyed especially intimate relations. I would doubt that Louise left Ernest because she could not stomach his homosexuality. The vast majority of gay men in the past married, and many had successful marriages. All the same, I think Ponsonby is to be trusted about Duke Ernest’s sexual proclivities. Her family had been associated with the English Crown for at least 150 years, and she would not launch an accusation of homosexuality against Prince Albert’s father casually at a time when to be called gay was a slur. Second, it seems to me that Pauline Panam’s
Memoirs
support Ponsonby’s assertion that Duke Ernest II was bisexual. It is surely suggestive that Duke Ernest asked his teenage mistress Panam to travel as a boy and to maintain male dress for some months after her arrival in Coburg. When describing her first meeting with Duke Ernest’s then chief aide, Baron Fichler, the predecessor to Szymborski, Panam refers to him as “Ami du Prince”— capital letters and underlined, as if it were a title. She mocks Fichler’s mincing walk, high, squeaky voice, exaggeratedly fashionable dress, and blinking eyes—in other words, his obvious effeminacy. Panam was a successful courtesan when she wrote her memoirs, and she had needed to acquire a sophisticated understanding of male sexual patterns and practices.

116
In the final letter to her friend
Ponsonby, p. 151.

116
Louise never again saw
Duke Ernest first exiled his wife and a few attendants he had chosen as his spies to St. Wendel in his personal fief
(Furstentum)
of Lichtenberg. There she acted for a time as a kind of regent and proved immensely popular with the people who were beginning to show signs of rebellion against their absent and exploitative duke. Duchess Louise’s body was first kept in a house in St. Wendel. A street, a pharmacy and a restaurant in the town are named for her. See Sandner, pp. 61–62 and also p. 47. Prussia purchased Lichtenberg from the Duke of Coburg in 1833 for 2.1 million talers.

116
In 1825 Louise’s uncle
The year 1826 saw a complicated reshuffling of the Ernestine domains between the five branches of the Thuringian Wettins. To gain Gotha, Duke Ernest had to give up the territory of Saalfeld and renounce any claim to Altenburg.

117
Others, of an anti-Semitic bent
According to royal biographer Hector Bolitho, who was himself Jewish, in 1921 Herr Max W. L. Voss, author of
England als Erzieher
(England As Educator) wrote, “Prince Albert of Coburg, the Prince Consort, is to be described without contradiction as a half Jew, so that, since his time, Jewish blood has been circulating in the veins of the English royal family.” See the introduction to Hector Bolitho’s
Albert—Prince Consort
, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964, p. 11. Also, in 1921 Lytton Strachey suggested more discreetly and sympathetically that Baron Mayern, “a charming and cultivated man, of Jewish extraction, was talked of” as the prince’s father.

117
He accused royal historian Theodore Martin
David Duff,
Victoria and Albert
, New York: Berkeley Medallion Book, 1972, pp. 30–35. Duff wrote a series of books on members of the English royal family and seems to have become progressively more disenchanted. No biographer has written a more scathing, or better referenced, indictment of the prince consort.

117
It is a canard that Prince Albert
In the recent book on the house of Saxe-Coburg that received the current duke’s imprimatur, Harald Sandner once again points to the enormous difference in character and looks among Prince Albert and his father and brother, and strongly suggests that Albert was not the Duke of Coburg’s son. Sandner has gone through the Coburg state archives with care, but he does not identify Duchess Louise’s supposed lover of 1818.

119
All the same, for a sensitive
These were among the documents that Queen Victoria collected, or had copied, after her husband’s death and that she had translated and published in her book
The Early Years
.

119
If they confided them to anyone
Frank Eyck, Prince Albert’s most informed and serious biographer, in his brief account of the prince’s youth, states: “The loss of his mother and the break-up of his home … had a profound influence on him. He still remembered vividly many years later what a shock it had been for him to have suddenly lost his mother, for whom he always kept an affection”
(The Prince Consort: A Political Biography
, Houghton Mifflin, 1959, p. 14). Eyck cites as support for this statement a letter written to Queen Victoria by Christoph Florschütz, January 7, 1863 (Royal Archives Z. 272.6). This letter has never been published.

120
“It is a satisfaction to me
Early Years
, pp. 90–91. Florschütz’s testimony as to Albert’s happiness as a child has been cited as definitive by most of the prince’s subsequent biographers, but to me it seems self-evidently unreliable. The tutor wrote from memory in the mid-1860s, he was deeply implicated in his own narrative, and he needed to protect his relations with the house of Coburg. When he arrived in Coburg in 1823, his position in the ducal household was, as he says, fraught with difficulties and stresses. Florschütz was a poor man who took no holidays, ate and slept with his pupils, and had barely a moment to himself. Until the princes came of age, his personal life was on hold, and his future depended on the bonds he could forge with the two boys. He and Duchess Louise were rivals for the affections of her sons. Seeing which way his bread was buttered, Florschütz gave his allegiance to the tall, manly, imposing man who employed him. After his fifteen years
of service to the princes, Florschütz retired on a pension and took up life in Coburg. He attended court, enjoyed the patronage of the dukes, and basked in the reflected glory of his famous pupil. Asked about the childhood of Albert, the Prince Consort, Florschütz unsurprisingly testified to an idyll.

Chapter 10:
THE PARADISE OF OUR CHILDHOOD

122
The older ladies would provide
Prince Albert to his father, 1826,
Early Years
, p. 52.

122
Grandmother Augusta was a sharp
Queen Victoria experienced her grandmother’s sharp tongue when Duchess Augusta paid a visit to Kensington Palace in 1826. “[Grandmama] was excessively kind to children, but could not bear naughty ones—and I shall never forget her coming into the room where I had been crying and naughty at my lessons and scolding me severely, which had a very salutary effect” (Hibbert,
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals
, p. 11).

122
The boys soon learned
The prince was known for his devotion to his stepgrandmother, Duchess Caroline, and he corresponded with her faithfully until her death. Duchess Caroline’s extravagant grief when Prince Albert left Gotha to be married features in many biographies. And yet, between 1835 and 1839, Albert spent little more than hours with the Duchess of Gotha, as she notes unhappily in her letters. She was one of the people of whom absence made his heart grow fonder.

122
As a result, in comparison
For example, the Darwins, Priestleys, Wedgwoods, Macaulays, Nightingales, Emersons, Beechers, Alcotts, or Peabodys. Queen Victoria was extremely impressed by a program of study that Prince Albert laid out for himself, though she admits he had little opportunity to pursue it. “The amount of work which the Prince thus traces for himself would probably not only seem excessive to the most studious English schoolboy … but was such as a hard-reading man at our universities might almost have shrunk from”
(Early Years
, p. 88). Maybe!