We Two: Victoria and Albert (86 page)

209
The Cambridges were furious
See Longford, p. 181.

209
Today these rules seem
Note that Greville’s diaries were published only after his death. Two of the most celebrated memoirists of the Victorian court, Mary Ponsonby and Marie Mallett, obeyed the royal rules while in waiting. However, they kept their letters, and in later life set down memories of life at court and the royal family that their children were able to discover after their deaths and eventually publish in the twentieth century. Tina Brown, in her 2007 book on Diana, Princess of Wales, asserts that the old compact of privacy and confidentiality between the royal family and members of the British aristocracy held until the late 1960s or early 1970s.

210
At his first dinner
Arthur Ponsonby,
Henry Ponsonby: His Life from His Letters
, London: Macmillan, 1943, p. 26.

210
The new maid of honor
Mary Ponsonby describes “the excitement and pleasurable mystery … in the first arriving into waiting; was it likely I should see the Queen alone and get to know her well?”
(Mary Ponsonby: A Memoir and a Journal
, p. 2).

211
“For the Household appointments
Eyck, pp. 191–192.

212
The prince “was in ability
For the lengthy dissection of the prince consort, see
Mary Ponsonby
, pp. 2–6. Magdalen Ponsonby’s 1927 memoir of her mother was followed in 1943 by Arthur Ponsonby’s memoir of their father
(Henry Ponsonby: His Life from His Letters)
. Henry was a consummate courtier and royal official, as Mary was not, and in his references to Prince Albert, he is much more circumspect. However, he does call the prince “the Snark,” a reference to the creature in Lewis Carroll’s poem who is “slow in taking a jest”
and “always looks grave at a pun,” and makes it delicately clear that he and the prince were never friends.

213
“It was a fine and gratifying
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals
, ed. Hibbert, p. 73.

213
He risked appearing
The hypocritical and villainous Mr. Pecksniff appears in
Martin Chuzzlewit
. The accusation of sanctimonious hypocrisy was peculiarly damaging in English high society as Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent, discovered in his dealings with ministers, parliament, the army top brass, and his family. The Duke of Kent was known to his mother and siblings as Joseph Surface, a reference to the hypocritical seducer and social climber in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play
The School for Scandal
.

Chapter 18:
FINDING FRIENDS

214
assassins might lurk in the crowd
Five assassination attempts were made on the Queen during Prince Albert’s lifetime: in June 1840, May 1842, July 1842, May 1849, and May 1850. In 1840, when she was pregnant with her first child, the Queen was shot at twice as she drove in an open phaeton through Hyde Park. (See the prince’s own account of this event to his stepgrandmother; Jagow, p. 70.) In 1842, when a man shot at his wife on the mall, with extraordinary bravado Prince Albert deliberately provoked the unknown assassin to make a second attempt, and this led to the man’s arrest. (See the prince’s narration to his father; Jagow, pp. 76–79.) In 1850, two weeks after the birth of her seventh child, a man fired at the Queen as she drove up Constitution Hill. Eight days later, a man came up and struck her on the face with the brass knob of his cane. Fortunately, the deep brim of her bonnet cushioned the blow.

214
As the Queen later wrote
Dearest Child
p. 77.

215
He not infrequently attended
Jerrold reports that in August 1840 the prince was given the freedom of the city and made a member of the Goldsmiths and Fishmongers Companies, the greatest honors in the gift of the City of London. He was scheduled to receive the freedom of the city at a splendid banquet given by the Lord Mayor. Only hours before the event, the prince wrote saying he could not attend the banquet, rode over to the Guildhall, where he received the freedom of the city, apologized verbally, drove back to Buckingham Palace for dinner, and then drove out to Windsor, where Queen Victoria, heavily pregnant, was awaiting him. This debacle in public relations was possibly the Queen’s fault, but it was blamed upon the prince
(The Married Life of Queen Victoria
, p. 76).

216
For her part, Victoria admitted
Elizabeth Longford gives the most detailed account of this rapprochement. See
Victoria R.I
. pp. 145–148.

221
Queen Victoria described Skerrett
My Mistress the Queen: The Letters of Frieda Arnold Dresser to Queen Victoria
, ed. Benita Storey and Heinrich C. Weltzien, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994, p. 8.

223
She says how delighted she was
My Mistress the Queen
, p. 24.

223
As the documented examples
One of the insights that Tina Brown in
The Diana Chronicles
provides about the British aristocracy is that, until the 1970s, girls of that class were given a minimum of formal education. The miseducation of the famous Mitford sisters in the 1930s was, it appears, more typical than exceptional.

223
They were cultured but not intellectual
Arnold’s letters, written in the mid-1850s and il lustrated by the author’s own drawings, bear a distinct resemblance to the
Leaves from a Journal of our Life in the Highlands
that Victoria herself would publish in the 1860s. Like Victoria, Arnold says a great deal but leaves out a lot more.

224
“While I was dressing,” wrote the Queen
Cecil Woodham-Smith,
Queen Victoria
, p. 395.

224
Reportedly Isaac Cart was a Swiss
Queen Victoria,
The Early Years
, p. 95. Some biographers say that Cart used to carry Albert upstairs at night when he was very little, but this seems not to be true.

224
In October 1838, when Albert
Prince Albert to his stepgrandmother; Jagow,
Letters of the
Prince Consort
, p. 17.

224
In August 1840, Albert’s first year
Bolitho,
The Prince Consort and His Brother
, p. 25.

Chapter 19:
A HOME OF OUR OWN

225
As he wrote to his stepgrandmother
Jerrold, p. 61.

226
The Duke of Wellington, now in
The Cinque Ports were an ancient confederation of southern seaports, originally composed of Hastings, Romney, Dover, Hyde, and Sandwich. The wardenship of the Cinque Ports was a lucrative sinecure.

227
This was a bureaucratic revolution
Before the telegraph, the railway, and the steamship, communications between London and Paris took a minimum of two days; London to Moscow, Rome, or Lisbon, ten to fourteen days; London to Washington or Constantinople, four weeks; London to Canton, five to seven months (Jasper Ridley,
Lord Palmerston
, p. 107).

228
Above all, what Prince Albert called
Prince Albert to his brother, October 18, 1844, Bolitho, p. 73.

228
After bearing two children
The Queen’s Scottish journals are full of quotations from and references to Walter Scott.

229
What if the Scots proved
See David Duff’s introduction to his excellent edition of selections from the Queen’s journals,
Victoria in the Highlands
, New York: Taplinger, 1968.

230
To his Scottish hosts, he felt
Alan Hardy,
Queen Victoria Was Amused
p. 39, quoting the book on Queen Victoria written by her Scottish son-in-law, the Duke of Argyll.

231
“Here we were with only
Duff,
Victoria in the Highlands
, p. 55.

232
As for Victoria, it would be
Osborne House is testimony to the love of Indian architecture and Indian people that Queen Victoria developed after the death of her husband. The Durbar Room, partly designed by Princess Beatrice, is rather a monstrosity, but the painted portraits the Queen commissioned of ordinary Indian folk are superb.

232
One of the jewels of Regency
George IV’s architectural legacy relies heavily on the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, since Carlton House, his fabulously expensive London residence as Prince of Wales and Regent, was torn down when he came to the throne.

233
By 1850, the Queen could leave
In 1855 Frieda Arnold traveled with her mistress Queen Victoria from Osborne to Windsor and noted that the journey took only three hours
(My Mistress the Queen
, p. 34).

234
With the technical assistance
See Martin,
Life of the Prince Consort
, vol. ii, p. 208.

234
For the Queen, with her long
A visitor to the Ehrenburg Palace in Coburg today is shown Queen Victoria’s water closet, the first ever to be installed in the building.

235
In this, their first real home
The statues were commissioned from Mary Thorneycroft, and in 1858 the same artist produced a study of the youngest child, Beatrice, in a shell. Another specially commissioned piece was John Gibson’s statue of the Queen in classical robes with a wreath in her hand, “set in a niche like a shrine,” as Frieda Arnold aptly notes
(My Mistress, the Queen
, p. 32).

235
There were also a number
Ibid, p. 32.

237
The prince consort, critics contend
See Mark Girouard on Osborne House in
The Victorian Country House, pp
. 147–153, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

237
“Dear Madam, you really must
Mary Ponsonby
, p. 8.

238
Then the two could retire
Victoria’s eldest son, the sophisticated, sybaritic Bertie, spent far too many of his days kicking his heels at Osborne in his mother’s last decades, and as Edward VII, he could hardly wait to get rid of it. His sisters, who adored Osborne and had separate properties on the estate, were most upset. Today Victoria and Albert’s first home belongs to the nation and is open to the public most of the year. To find Prince Albert’s
original Osborne, one must subtract the significant additions and alterations that the Queen made in the thirty years after her husband’s death.

238
The royal family’s first visit
All of these properties now form an integral part of the Balmoral estate. Prince Albert first purchased the lease on Balmoral for 2,000 pounds and then bought the property outright in 1852 for 30,000 guineas (a guinea was one pound and one shilling), apparently in his own name. In 1848 he bought Birkhall and its 6,500 acres in his son Bertie’s name. (See the letter to his brother, Ernest, of December 12, 1848: “I did not buy the estate in the Highlands, but Bertie. It seems to us to be a desirable purchase for him.” Bolitho,
The Prince Consort and His Brother
, p. 106.) According to David Duff, Queen Victoria acquired Ballochbuie some years after her husband’s death, but Abergeldie is still technically owned by the Gordon family, which leases it to the monarch
(Victoria in the Highlands
, pp. 84–85).

239
When Lord Canning almost shot
Fulford,
The Prince Consort
, p. 92.

239
But as a woman and a landowner
The 2007 movie
The Queen
shows that deerstalking is still a key sport for the men of the British royal family. When the princes William and Henry lose their mother in a tragic accident, their paternal grandfather, Prince Philip, can think of nothing better than a day of deerstalking to distract them.

239
The negotiations with the Fife trustees
There was a seventeenth-century tower, but otherwise the house dated to the 1830s.

239
In 1855 Queen Victoria was able
Duff,
Victoria in the Highlands
, p. 151.

240
On her six-hour carriage journey
My Mistress the Queen
, p. 125.

240
On a grander scale
On her first visit to Coburg in 1844, the Queen was ecstatic about everything at the Rosenau except the chamber pots that she was obliged to use there and indeed in palaces throughout Germany.