We Two: Victoria and Albert (85 page)

Chapter 16:
ALBERT TAKES CHARGE

191
He said he “was desirous
Woodham-Smith, pp. 217–18. Jones was finally sent away to sea, where he drowned.

192
The result was a lengthy
For a published extract of this document, see Stockmar’s
Memoirs
, vol. 2, pp. 116–125.

193
The Queen had her own stable
The Private Life of the Queen by a Member of the Royal Household
, New York: Appleton, 1897, p. 13. Originally the author of this book was not identified, but it is now known that he was C. Arthur Pearson.

193
Due to the fabulous extravagance
Queen Victoria’s income from the civil list remained the same until her death, but this fact is somewhat misleading, since Prince Albert pioneered new methods of getting money out of the Treasury.

194
Victoria was quite sure
Vicky, as Princess Frederick of Prussia, was amazed to view the collection of jewelry that the dowager Empress Charlotte (born a Hohenzollern princess, widow of Tsar Nicholas I) traveled with. “Hers are huge things and really in such profusion that it seems almost magic—sapphires, emeralds, pearls, rubies, etc., but the quality is not very fine—her diamonds excepted which are magnificent” (Hannah Pakula,
An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick, Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm
, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 137). English diplomats at the height of the power of the British Empire were at times struck dumb by the glittering profusion of gold and precious stones on display in foreign courts. For example, at the coronation of the tsar in 1883, the diplomat Everard Primrose wrote to his friend Mary Ponsonby: “The blaze of jewels was astonishing. The Archduchess from Austria glittered like the spray of a beautiful fountain, the Grand Duchess Constantine could scarcely support the weight of countless precious stones, while Princess Kotsoubey wore a wig of pearls” (Magdalen Ponsonby,
Mary Ponsonby: A Memoir and a Journal
, London: John Murray, 1927, p. 166). The Russian tsars, meanwhile, were competing with the fabulous heaps of jewels and gold and silver ornaments, including jewel-encrusted thrones, owned
by the sultan of Turkey, the emperors of China and Japan, and several Indian maharajahs. The wonders Aladdin discovers in a cave were not simply a fairy tale.

194
One of Victoria’s bridesmaids
Longford, p. 213.

194
Victoria did have a crown
The crown traditionally placed upon the head of a British monarch during the coronation ceremony is the massive St. Edward’s crown, containing elements that date back to the Middle Ages but first used in 1661 for the coronation of Charles II. This crown appears for a brief time only once in every reign. However, from the images taken of Victoria even at the actual moment of coronation, she was crowned not with St. Edward’s crown but with the crown that was made for her. This crown is an early version of what is now known as the imperial state crown.

194
The gallant Victoria allowed herself
Betty Askwith,
The Lytteltons: A Family Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century
, London: Chatto and Windus, 1975, p. 65.

194
However, by the early 1850s
George IV found the coronet too effeminate, but both Queen Victoria and her successor, Queen Elizabeth II, loved to wear it as young women. We see Victoria with this coronet in the blurred image taken at her daughter Vicky’s wedding, and again in the famous 1859 portrait of her in state robes, with the imperial state crown on a small table behind her. The coronet is familiar to us today from many photographs of Elizabeth as a dazzlingly beautiful queen and from the image chosen for the postage stamps early in her reign.

194
The British government decided
Queen Victoria kept the family jewels long enough to wear them at the brilliant festivities marking the Princess Royal’s wedding to Prince Frederick of Prussia in January 1858. But immediately thereafter, she sent the Guelph treasure to Hanover. The princess, on her honeymoon journey through Germany, attended a state banquet in Hanover and was horrified to find that she was eating off the gold dinner service she knew so well from Windsor. She kept this mortifying piece of information from her mother, but this German slight to English power was an early sign of the ferocious hostility that Vicky was to experience in her life abroad. See Pakula, pp. 88–89.

195
The 385,000 pounds a year
See Vera Watson,
A Queen at Home: An Intimate Account of the Social and Domestic Life of Queen Victoria’s Court
, p. 22. Watson based her valuable book on extensive research into the records of the Lord Chamberlain’s Department 1837–1885.

195
The royal household was a division
The areas of authority of the four departments in charge of the royal household were, it seems, divided up topologically Both the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Stewart ruled “inside” the royal residences, with the Lord Chamberlain “upstairs,” dealing with the members of the royal family in their official and ceremonial capacity. The Lord Steward conducted affairs “downstairs,” notably in regard to feeding the whole household. The Commissioners of Woods and Forests and the Master of the Horse had dominion “outside.” The commission was responsible not only for the gardens, parks, and farms surrounding the royal residences but also with the physical structure of the buildings. The Master of the Horse, the smallest of the departmental units, looked after the Queen’s horses and carriages, and supervised her travel, which, over the years, became more and more extensive.

195
Queen Victoria referred to them once
Queen Victoria to King Leopold, March 25, 1845, Martin, vol. i, p. 209.

196
Answer: because the Lord Chamberlain’s men
Memoirs of Baron Stockmar
, vol. 11, pp. 118–125.

196
No wonder the official name
See Watson, p. 19.

197
After the coronation, a decorous tussle
Watson, pp. 37–38.

197
His campaign for domestic reform
Martin, vol. ii, p. 5.

198
The butler was under notice
On her first visit to Germany, Queen Victoria expressed her delight in drinking beer. How much she drank at home is not clear.

199
By 1845, Albert had wrapped
In a speech in the Commons in 1845, Sir Robert Peel opined that in governing its finances the country could do no better than follow the example of
the Queen’s household. He noted that three great monarchs had visited Great Britain in one year, all were entertained magnificently, and all without incurring any debt or requesting any additional funds under the civil list (see Martin, vol. i, p. 213).

199
When the prince cut the wages
Queen Victoria was aware of the criticisms aimed at her husband and felt obliged to counter them in the biography of the prince she commissioned from Theodore Martin. “The Prince,” wrote Martin, “possessed no independent authority by right of his position, and could exercise none, even within his own household, without trenching on the privileges of others, who were not always disposed to admit of interference. This could scarcely fail to embarrass his position in the midst of a vast royal establishment, which had inherited many of the abuses of former reigns and where he could find much of which he could not approve, yet was without the power to rectify. And as behind every abuse there is always someone interested in maintaining it, he could not but be aware that he was regarded with no friendly eyes by those who were in that position, and who naturally dreaded the presence among them of one so visibly intolerant of worthlessness and incapacity” (Martin, vol. i, p. 68).

199
Judge published a stream of articles
Jasper Tomsett Judge of Windsor seems to be the source of many of the unflattering anecdotes about Prince Albert that are reported by negative biographers, notably David Duff in his
Victoria and Albert
. Clare Jerrold gives a long and admiring account of Judge and his associates in her invaluable book
The Married Life of Queen Victoria
.

Chapter 17:
THE COURT OF ST. ALBERT’S

202
The traditional qualifications
The Duchess of Sutherland, Queen Victoria’s first mistress of the robes, did not have any obvious need of the Lord Chamberlain’s salary, but as the reign proceeded, and the political power of the Crown waned, the wives of England’s greatest lords were apparently less and less inclined to serve in the royal household. Membership had ceased to be a passport to influence and wealth as it had been in the reign of Charles II. The issue of financial need is carefully skirted in the memoirs of nineteenth-century courtiers. Even the Ponsonbys in the correspondence the family chose to publish do not discuss money. Queen Victoria confirms that money was key. Hearing from her daughter Vicky in Prussia that it was very difficult to find any suitable people to form part of her household, Queen Victoria answered: “What you say about needy gentlemen and ladies wanting to be about the Court is the case everywhere. The nice ones are always more difficult to get”
(Dearest Child
, p. 254).

203
After Albert’s death, she chose
Queen Victoria’s close relationship in old age to her Indian servant Abdul Karim, often referred to as the Munshi, is fascinating.

203
As his brother, Ernest, would later
See Fulford, p. 99, citing Duke Ernest’s
Memoirs
without page reference. Fulford, pp. 90–100, is very good on why Prince Albert was so unpopular in England, and I am indebted to his analysis.

204
What kind of man was beholden
To quote one of the anonymous rhymes published in the English press at the time of the royal marriage, and which Prince Albert, apparently, collected: “Quoth Hudibras of old ‘a thing / Is worth as much as it will bring.’ / How comes it then that Albert clear / Has thirty thousand pounds a year?” (Clare Jerrold,
The Married Life of Queen Victoria
, p. 11).

205
He surely anticipated that these skills
An example of Albert’s passion for hunting occurred on a trip by yacht around the coast of Wales. Albert and his brother-in-law Charles Leiningen spotted a small island covered with sea birds, and rushed down for their guns only to discover to their dismay that the birds were out of range. One of Albert’s technical passions over the years was to find guns that were more accurate and had a longer range. Though she hated guns, Victoria gave them to her husband as presents.

206
To ensure that the numbers were impressive
The battue system had been in operation in Germany for centuries, as we can see from a precious set of seventeenth-century marquetry pictures that paneled the walls of a room at the Ehrenburg Palace in Coburg during Prince Albert’s youth. These great works of art, probably the most expensive things in his collection, were transferred by Duke Ernest I to the Veste fortress in Coburg sometime after his younger son’s marriage.

206
He claimed in his fifty-six years
See Sandner,
Das Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, 1826–2001
, p. 52 and p. 96.

207
Sing a song of Gotha
Clare Jerrold,
The Married Life of Queen Victoria
, p. 320. Queen Victoria in her journal says that she took no pleasure in the Gotha battue, which family courtesy obliged her to attend, and that the English gentlemen in her party thought it a slaughter, not a sport.

207
Albert learned that battues
Some hostile biographers like Duff report that Albert organized a battue on his Osborne estate because the deer were destroying his shrubs.

208
By 1844, the prince had set
Frank Eyck cites an egregious example of the royal intransigence in regard to persons who failed to meet the prince’s standards of personal morality. When the Tory Lord Derby became prime minister, he begged that the wife of his lord chancellor, Sir Edward Sugden (later Lord St. Leonards), should be received at court. The Sugdens had been married for fifty years, but they began their relationship as teenagers, when Lady Sugden ran away with her then schoolboy lover. The two lived together for a few years before they could be married. The Queen declined to lower her standards for Lady Sugden, and so, as Eyck remarks, “The faithful old husband requested that he should not be asked to Court as long as the prohibition on his wife continued”
(The Prince Consort: A Political Biography
, p. 192).

208
The result was that
This estrangement with members of her own family persisted throughout the prince’s lifetime, and even beyond. In her letters to her daughter in Berlin, Victoria constantly advised Vicky not to become close to her (QV’s) first cousin Augusta, by this point Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who was often at the Prussian court. Augusta, wrote Victoria, reported everything back to her mother, the Duchess of Cambridge—which, of course, was just what Victoria expected Vicky to do.