We Two: Victoria and Albert (84 page)

157
Charles Greville, a cynical man
See Fulford, p. 81, citing Greville, vol. v, p. 229.

157
No Tories, not even the Duke
Hibbert,
Queen Victoria: A Personal Biography
, p. 116. Lord Ashley was the husband of Minnie Cowper, the elder daughter of Lady Emily Cowper, Lord Melbourne’s sister. Ashley succeeded to his father’s title and became the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the name by which he is known to history.

159
Thereupon, as she recorded later
One of Queen Victoria’s bridesmaids remembered Albert’s look of panic when, after the wedding ceremony, the bridesmaids went away, leaving him in charge of getting his wife and her long train into the carriage for the ride back to the palace.

160
Bride and groom did not get
All this we know because, day by day, Victoria recorded the events of her betrothal and marriage at length in her journal. Frank yet maidenly, factual yet superficial, fascinating yet free of literary artifice, these pages of Queen Victoria’s journal form a key document in Victorian social history. After February 1840, a veil is drawn over the intimate side of the royal marriage. We hear no more from Queen Victoria about the delights of watching Albert bare that beautiful white neck to shave or letting him help her put on her stockings. As a token of love and trust in the early days of the marriage, Victoria allowed Albert to read the entries she had written at the time of their engagement and wedding. She does not say how he reacted, but it seems likely that he was horrified by his wife’s frankness and begged her to be more discreet in the future. It is possible that the Queen continued to be frank in her journal but that, after her death and on her instructions, all the intimate passages were cut by her daughter Princess Beatrice.

160
The experienced men of her court
There are comments to this effect by Greville, Wellington, Stockmar, and King Leopold. Lord Melbourne, who saw the Queen every day, was obviously aware of her emotional state.

160
None of this bodes well
John Ruskin married late in life and on his wedding night was overcome by the sight of his wife Effie’s naked body. The two were finally divorced, on the grounds of nonconsummation. The Ruskin divorce case was one of the most sensational of the Victorian era.

161
Now, as if by a miracle
I seem to be the only biographer who finds it remarkable that the self-professed sexual neophyte Prince Albert performed so superbly on his wedding night. This to me is
prima facie
evidence that, in fact, he had explored his sexuality before marriage with consenting partners, probably males.

161
However, from the beginning, erotic passion
As Hector Bolitho, perhaps the most pampered
and prolific of twentieth-century royal biographers tactfully puts it: “Love, in the terms that appealed to [the Queen,] was alien to [the prince’s] almost celibate nature” (Hector Bolitho,
Albert-Prince Consort
, p. viii). This book is a revised version of the 1932
Albert the Good
. Bolitho, a New Zealander of Jewish background, managed in the 1920s to establish a close relationship with the descendents of Queen Victoria and was given extraordinary access to archival sources and to personal reminiscences in Germany as well as Great Britain. His most interesting and enlightened source was Queen Marie of Romania, daughter of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s second son. 161
As Victoria wrote in heartbroken fragments
Queen Victoria to her daughter Vicky, then Crown Princess of Prussia, letter of December 18, 1861
(Dearest Mama
, ed. Roger Fulford, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969, p. 23).

Chapter 13:
BEARING THE FRUITS OF DESIRE

163
In a letter to his university
To Prince William of Löwenstein, Albert wrote in May 1840: “In my home life, I am very happy and contented; but the difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is, that I am only the husband, and not the master in the house” (Jagow,
Letters of the Prince Consort
, p. 69).

164
As one of Queen Victoria’s ladies
Charlot,
Victoria—The Young Queen
, p. 188.

164
She wrote forthrightly
Charlot, p. 191.

165
To Uncle Leopold she was
Charlot, p.192.

165
Albert wrote to Stockmar
Charlot, p. 193.

166
This birth was too important
In 1838 it was Clark, examining Lady Flora through her clothes, as was usual at the time, who made the disastrous diagnosis that she was pregnant (she was, in fact, in the final stages of liver cancer), informed the Queen of this, and provoked a huge scandal.

166
Albert wrote enigmatically
Bolitho,
The Prince Consort and His Brother
, p. 34.

167
Lord Clarendon, writing to Lord Granville
Woodham-Smith,
p. 217
.

167
The Queen was sharply taken aback
Hibbert,
Queen Victoria
, p. 133.

167
“My sufferings were really
Charlot, p. 207.

169
When she was carrying Leopold
She was able to admit this to her daughter after Vicky had undergone her first pregnancy.

169
“Now to reply to your observation
Dearest Child
pp. 77–78.

170
Virtuous husbands like Albert
The Calvinist divine Lyman Beecher lost two young wives, worn out by childbearing, and married a third who survived him. Beecher had some eleven children in all. A generation later, Lord Shaftesbury and Patrick Bronte, to take only two famous examples, were deeply in love with their wives and felt fully entitled to the pleasures of the marital bed. When their wives died after bearing many children in quick succession, the husbands suffered but accepted the deaths as God’s will. Traditionally, a husband’s right to virtuous (that is, vaginal) sex trumped a wife’s right to life.

Chapter 14:
WHIGS AND TORIES

172
And whereas Albert, a married man
The scandal in the divorce courts over Melbourne’s relationship with Lady Caroline Norton occurred in 1835, only two years before Queen Victoria’s accession.

173
But under Albert’s influence
On October 1, 1842, just after Lehzen’s departure, Queen Victoria reread the diary entries for the first years of her reign when she and Lord Melbourne had been so close. She wrote: “Wrote & looked over & corrected one of my old journals, which do not
now
awake very pleasant feelings. The life I led then was so artificial & superficial & yet I thought I was happy. Thank God! I know now what real happiness means” (Longford,
Victoria R.I
. p. 207).

173
“A worse school for a young
Quoted fr
om Early Years
, p. 220, in Stockmar’s
Memoirs
, vol. ii, p. 4.

174
Albert had become so identified
Greville, vol. III, p. 129.

175
In token of his regard
When Wellington died in 1852, he was given a state funeral that cost the Treasury 29,968 pounds eighteen shillings and ninepence. Such an immense expenditure aroused no protests in press or parliament, and the whole country, including the Queen and the prince, engaged in a long period of extravagant mourning for the duke. At the Queen’s command, the court went into full black, and when the duke’s body was lying in state at Chelsea Hospital, she herself went to pay her respects. Rarely, if ever, had royalty paid such homage to a commoner. See Vera Watson,
A Queen at Home
, pp. 118–120.

175
The consort to the Queen of England
Jagow,
Letters of the Prince Consort
, pp. 156–157. The expression “peculiar and delicate role” is Prince Albert’s own from this letter.

Chapter 15:
DEAREST DAISY

179
He convinced himself
Charlot, pp. 208–209.

181
This process would shape the young
Stockmar’s influence on the parenting of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert is laid out in detail in his
Memoirs
, vol. ii, p. 48. Stockmar claimed that the organization of the royal nursery occupied a great deal of his time and “gives me more trouble than the government of a kingdom.”

181
The prince had no use
Quoted from Melbourne’s correspondence with Queen Victoria by Giles St. Aubyn
(Edward VII, Prince and King
, New York: Athenaeum, 1979, p. 17).

181
Far more fatefully
This incident is reported, I believe for the first time, by Daphne Bennett, who was given full access to the Windsor Archives and has interesting new information about life in the royal nurseries. See
Queen Victoria’s Children
, New York: St. Martins, 1980, p. 34.

183
The note read: “Dr. Clark
Charlot, p. 209.

184
On one occasion, Victoria reportedly
Strachey,
Queen Victoria
, p. 93, citing Jerrold. Strachey comments that the story “survives, ill authenticated, and perhaps mythical, yet summing up …, the central facts of the case.”

185
When apart, the two men corresponded
Prince Albert probably confided more in Stock-mar than anyone else, and our understanding of the prince is due in no small part to the parts of that correspondence that have been published. Neither Windsor nor Coburg was able to censor the Stockmar-Prince Albert letters directly, which is an advantage. Nonetheless, as is the case with all the prince consort’s papers, we have only a tiny, heavily edited, and quite possibly misleading selection. When Stockmar’s son Ernest prepared his father’s papers for publication, he was extremely careful to protect the baron’s reputation and avoid the wrath of the Saxe-Coburgs. Ernest Stockmar ends his biographical sketch of his father with these enigmatic words: “[Baron Christian Stockmar] was content to remain always half hidden before the eyes of posterity. Faithful to his spirit, this book also lifts the veil but a little” (vol. 1, p. cx). All the same, when
Memoirs
was published in 1873, it caused quite a sensation, and Queen Victoria was very displeased at what she regarded as a betrayal of confidence.

186
The German title of baron
In 1821 the then Prince Leopold secured a Saxon barony for his friend Stockmar. This was raised to Baron of Bavaria in 1831 and then Baron of Austria in 1840
(Memoirs
, vol. 1, p. liv).

186
In their private letters
“Nowhere in the records of history has Royalty been served with a devotion so purely noble and unselfish as that of this remarkable man [Stockmar] to the Queen and the Prince,” writes Martin, clearly expressing the judgment of his employer and collaborator, Queen Victoria (vol. i. p. 72). The encomium continues for three long pages.

186
This passage from one of his last
Memoirs
, vol. i, p. civ

187
He sired three children
Ibid, p. lv.

187
“[The Queen] was quite a girl
Stockmar confided this in a conversation with the Prince of Wales’s admiring young tutor, Frederick Gibbs, whom Stockmar had been instrumental in engaging. See “The Education of a Prince: Extracts from the Diaries of Frederick Wey-mouth Gibbs 1851–1856,
Cornhill Magazine
, spring 1951, p. 117.

188
“I expressed [to Peel, the new
Charlot, p. 208.

188
According to the memoirs
Bauer claimed that Stockmar’s wife was a miser as well as a harridan who actually kept her husband short of food. This may simply be malicious gossip, but Bauer lived in Coburg during her cousin Stockmar’s last years and had ample opportunity to observe him and his family. As editor of his father’s memoirs, Stockmar’s son says nothing about his mother and the relations between his parents.

190
They would be a formidable team
In the memoir she cowrote with General Grey, Queen Victoria describes this turning point in her relations with her husband thus: “Thanks to the firmness, but, at the same time, gentleness with which the Prince insisted on filling his proper position as head of the family—thanks also to the clear judgment and right feeling of the Queen, as well as her singularly honest and straightforward nature—but thanks, more than all, to the mutual love and perfect confidence which bound the Queen and the Prince to each other, it was impossible to keep any separation or difference of interests or duties between them. To those who would urge upon the Queen that, as sovereign, she must be head of the house and the family, as well as of the state, Her Majesty would reply that she had solemnly engaged at the altar to ‘obey’ as well as to ‘love and honor,’ [sic] and this sacred obligation she could consent neither to limit nor refine away”
(Early Years
, p. 256).