Queen Victoria: A Personal History

‘Cousins are not very good things…Those Coburgs are not popular abroad; the Russians hate them.’

IT IS RUMOURED and confidently believed in the highest circles [The Watchman had informed its readers on 4 May 1828] that Prince George, Son of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Cumberland, will speedily be betrothed to his royal Cousin, the Princess Victoria, daughter of the late Duke of Kent; the Prince is a fine healthy boy, in his tenth year, and the Princess, a lovely child, within a few days of the same age.

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Wild as was this surmise, it was scarcely more improbable than some other conjectures about Princess Victoria’s future husband which were to appear in newspapers over the next few years. Indeed, the French press suggested that she was to be married to her uncle Leopold, ignoring the fact that the Church of England’s Table of Kindred and Affinity prohibited such a marriage in her own country. She was also, at one time or another, rumoured to be intended as a bride for the Duke of Nemours’s brother, the Duke of Orléans, for the Duke of Brunswick, nephew of King George IV’s unbalanced wife, Queen Caroline, for Prince Adelbert of Prussia, for Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, the future King Christian IV of Denmark, and for the eldest son of the Prince of Orange who, to the fury of King Leopold, had been invited to England by King William IV, a warm advocate of the match. ‘Really and truly I never saw anything like it,’ expostulated King Leopold, who had other plans for his niece. ‘I am really astonished at the conduct of your old Uncle the King; this invitation of the Prince of Orange and his sons, this forcing him upon others is very extraordinary…I am not aware…of the King’s even having spent a sixpence for your existence’.

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Fortunately the Princess did not at all like the look of the young men from Holland. ‘The boys are both very plain,’ she reassured her uncle, ‘moreover they look heavy, dull and frightened and are not at all prepossessing. So much for the Oranges, dear Uncle.’

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King Leopold’s opposition to the Orange match was prompted not only by the troubles he foresaw as King of the Belgians but also by his having a candidate of his own. This was Prince Albert, son of King Leopold’s eldest brother, Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, whom his family had long destined for the role of consort to the English Queen.

Born on 24 August 1819 at the Schloss Rosenau, his father’s modest Gothic castle on the edge of the forest of Thuringen a few miles from Coburg, Prince Albert had been an exceptionally good-looking child, ‘superb, extraordinarily beautiful’, in the words of his mother, though the Dowager Duchess of Coburg considered him ‘too slight for a boy’. Certainly he was rather feminine, sensitive and shy, far from robust and often in tears.

His early years had been overcast by the departure of his mother who, when he was no more than five years old and in bed with whooping cough, had left her profligate and much older husband, whom she had married at sixteen, for an army lieutenant two years younger than herself. He never saw her again; and his character, introspective, and given to melancholy, was for ever scarred by this painful separation from a beautiful woman who had petted and indulged him.

Yet his childhood was far from being as unhappy as he was later to describe it to his eldest daughter. He was much attached to his elder brother, Ernest; his father, stern with others, was not unkind to him, bestowing upon him an affection which was warmly returned; his good-natured grandmothers did their best to take the place of his mother; his tutor, Herr Florschütz, was sympathetic and understanding, his Swiss valet attentive and protective. He was an intelligent and painstaking pupil, preternaturally conscientious. At the age of eleven he wrote with earnest precocity in his diary, ‘I intend to train myself to be a good and useful man.’ And this assiduous determination to do well marked his every activity: he applied himself to sport and games with as much diligence as he brought to his lessons. When walking in the lovely countryside around the Rosenau, he made detailed and exact observations of all the natural objects he came across and formed comprehensive collections of stones and shells, stuffed birds, insects and butterflies, all neatly labelled and categorized.

After ten months studying in Brussels, where his uncle, King Leopold, kept a close eye on his protégé’s progress, he and his brother were sent, in April 1837, to undergo more advanced studies at Bonn University where Prince Albert was described as a model student, getting up at five o’clock to read his books and write his essays, diligently attending lectures, taking careful notes, fencing and skating with skill and grace. But it was felt that he did not yet display those social graces, that ease of manner which would be expected of him at the English Court: with strangers he was inclined to be distant, formal and stiff. So in October 1838 he was sent with Baron Stockmar on a continental tour, following the route which so many young gentlemen had taken before him through Florence, Rome and Naples. In Italy he was as conscientious in his studies as he had been in Germany, getting up early to read and to learn Italian, walking round galleries, museums and churches, studying paintings and sculpture.

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(#litres_trial_promo) He sketched; he played the piano; he went for long walks. Baron Stockmar could not fault his industry; but there was, it had to be admitted, more than a whiff of pedagogic pedantry in the evident pleasure he took in the dissemination of his knowledge, in his categoric pronouncements upon the merits or faults of whatever came under his observation, his readiness to correct the misapprehensions of others, to score points. In Rome, for example, he was granted an audience with Pope Gregory. ‘The Pope asserted,’ recorded the Prince, ‘that the Greeks had taken their models from the Etruscans. In spite of his infallibility, I ventured to assert that they had derived their lessons in art from the Egyptians.’

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The Prince’s humour, too, was of a rather heavy and ponderous kind. He was said to be a fairly convincing mimic but no one could have called him witty; and he had a distressing fondness for rather childish jokes; he was fond of one about a short-sighted man who came into a room and, mistaking a fat woman for a stove, turned his back on her with his coat tails turned up. He also enjoyed catching people out on April Fool’s Day and perpetrating practical jokes such as that which he and his brother played upon the inhabitants of a small German town through which they drove. Prince Albert held up the head of his dog at the window, while he and Prince Ernest crouched down in the bottom of the carriage out of sight of the people who had gathered to see them pass by.

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With the example of his parents and his brother – who was twice to contract a venereal disease – ever before his eyes, he had a horror of sexual irregularities. He was also subject to an occasional nervous irritability and a tendency to express opinions, in the words of his brother, ‘which are wont to arise from contempt of mankind in the abstract’.

What concerned Stockmar as much as anything else in Prince Albert’s character was his awkward manner with women, a gaucherie which the Baron attributed principally to his ‘having in his earliest years been deprived of the intercourse and supervision of a mother, and of any cultivated woman. He will always have more success with men than with women. He is too little empressé with the latter, too indifferent and too reserved.’

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When he had first arrived in England aged sixteen with his brother, Ernest, in May 1836, Prince Albert had been an undeniably handsome and prepossessing boy. His constitution was, however, not well adapted to the bustle and festivities, the dinners and balls, the concerts and levees which he was expected to attend. He was not accustomed to late nights: one evening he had felt compelled to go to bed at what the lively Princess Victoria considered an absurdly early hour; the next evening at a ball attended by over 3,000 guests to celebrate the Princess’s seventeenth birthday, after having danced only twice, the Prince had turned ‘as pale as ashes’ and looked as though he were going to faint. He had been obliged to take to his bed for two days. ‘I am sorry to say,’ the Princess had reported to her uncle Leopold the next day, ‘that we have an invalid in the house in the person of Albert.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Frequently in the future she was to refer in her journal to Prince Albert’s ‘delicate stomach’. Unlike the Queen, he had not been able to build up natural resistance to infections consequent upon the appallingly insanitary conditions which he encountered in England, having become used in his childhood and early manhood to the far more hygienic conditions of his native land.

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The ceaseless round of entertainments in England, so he had complained to his stepmother, were all too much for him: one concert had lasted until one o’clock in the morning, another had gone on until two. However, in letters to her uncle and his wife, Princess Victoria had assured them that she found Albert and his brother most agreeable, though it had to be said that Albert was rather fat:

They are both very amiable, kind and good. Albert is very handsome which Ernest is not, but he has a most good-natured countenance…I thank you, my beloved Uncle, for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me in the person of dear Albert. Allow me, then, my dearest Uncle, to tell you how delighted I am with him, and how much I liked him in every way. He possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy. He is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable too. He has, besides, the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you could possibly see.

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‘The charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful,’ she had written in her diary, ‘full of goodness and sweetness and very clever and intelligent.’

Prince Albert had been less enthusiastic. ‘Dear Aunt [the Duchess of Kent] is very kind to us, and does everything she can to please us,’ he had added in his letter to his stepmother, ‘and our cousin is also very amiable.’

(#litres_trial_promo) That was all. He had later expressed certain reservations about his cousin: they shared a love of music, but did they have much else in common? He was told she was ‘incredibly stubborn’, that she delighted in ‘ceremonies, etiquette’ and the ‘trivial formalities’ of court life, that she did not share his love of nature, that her pleasure in balls that went on all night was not in the least abated and that after these balls she liked to lie late in bed. Besides, he feared that he would be dreadfully homesick in England.

Princess Victoria herself, much as she had liked Prince Albert upon this brief acquaintance, had not wanted to marry so soon, not until 1840 and perhaps not even then; and she had grown rather annoyed with King Leopold for pressing the marriage upon her. She was ‘not yet quite grown up’; and Prince Albert was still a boy really: she would not want him as a husband until he was at least twenty years old. Besides, he ‘ought to be perfect in the English language; ought to write and speak it without fault, which is far from being the case now: his French too is…unfortunately…not good enough yet in my opinion.’ She had also been concerned by his habit of falling asleep after dinner. Had Lord Melbourne been told about that? Lord Melbourne, who disapproved of the Queen’s passion for dancing into the small hours of the morning, had merely replied that he was very glad to hear it.

After Prince Albert had gone home and she herself had become Queen, there was another reason for her not wanting to be married just yet. Once the Flora Hastings affair was in the past and she had contrived to retain Lord Melbourne as Prime Minister, she was much enjoying herself as a young, unattached queen. On her twentieth birthday the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, the 21-year-old son and heir of the Tsar Nicholas I, came to Windsor where a grand dinner in St George’s Hall was followed by a ball which did not finish until nearly two o’clock in the morning. ‘I never enjoyed myself more,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘We were all so merry’; and the Grand Duke was ‘a dear, delightful man’. She had loved dancing the mazurka with him: he was ‘so very strong, that in running round you must follow quickly, and after that you are whisked round like in a Valse, which is very pleasant…I really am quite in love with him…He is so frank, so really young and merry, has such a nice open countenance with a sweet smile and such a manly figure.’ After the Grand Duke, no one else was ‘seen to advantage’. When she went to bed on the night of that exciting ball she could not get to sleep until five o’clock.

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From time to time she and Melbourne discussed the question of her marriage and one day they considered all those of royal blood who might be considered as a husband for her. There was not one whom they thought suitable. Yet she did not think she ought to marry a commoner: it would not do, she thought, to make a subject one’s equal. There were, however, those who thought she might, even so, consider marriage to her equerry, Lord Alfred Paget, son of the cavalry commander, the Marquess of Anglesey, one of the most handsome young men at Court who wore her portrait on a chain round his neck, tied another portrait of her round the neck of his retriever, Mrs Bumps, and who took pains to ingratiate himself with Baroness Lehzen, calling her ‘mother’ as the Queen did.

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Lord Melbourne did not altogether approve of King Leopold’s choice of Prince Albert. ‘Cousins are not very good things,’ he said. ‘Those Coburgs are not popular abroad; the Russians hate them.’ The Duchess of Kent was a fair example of the breed. The men of the family were not so bad, the Queen objected, laughing. Melbourne, laughing too, said he hoped so. But what if the Prince were to take the side of his aunt, the Duchess, against her? In any case a marriage with a German cousin would not go down well in England. It would not go down well with himself, come to that: Germans never washed their faces and were always smoking, and he hated tobacco, the very smell of it made him swear for a good half hour. On the other hand marriage into an English family would not go down well, either, except with the particular family honoured. Indeed, if one were to create a man specifically for the purpose of marrying the Queen it would be ‘hard to know what to make’. It might be better ‘to wait for a year or two’. It was a ‘very serious question’. An early marriage was ‘not NECESSARY’.

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The more she thought about it the more she found the whole subject ‘an odious one’. She really ‘couldn’t understand the wish of getting married’ merely for the sake of it. She ‘dreaded the thought of marrying’. She was so accustomed to getting her own way that she ‘thought it was 10 to 1 she wouldn’t agree with anyone’. When she spoke, as she often did, of her unhappy relationship with her mother, who made it plain that she would never leave her daughter until she was married, Lord Melbourne had commented, ‘Well, then, there’s that way of settling it.’ To this solution of her troubles with her mother she strongly objected: she thought the idea of marrying for that reason a quite ‘shocking alternative’. Yet she was tired of living with people so much older than herself. When her young relations came to stay she realized how much she liked living with young people, for after all she was young herself, which she ‘really often forgot’.

In September some other young Coburg cousins came to stay, her uncle Ferdinand’s sons Augustus and Leopold, their sister Victoire, and yet another cousin, Alexander Mensdorff-Pouilly, son of Princess Sophia of Saxe-Coburg. Queen Victoria enjoyed their company immensely, their family jokes and high spirits, Victoire’s carefree gaiety, Alexander’s striking looks and pretty hair, his endearing habit of shaking hands at every fresh meeting. ‘We were so intimate, so united, so happy,’ she wrote after they had gone and she had been to Woolwich to wish them a tearful farewell aboard the Lightning before clambering down the ship’s ladder and calling out to an officer who offered his assistance, ‘No help, thank you. I am used to this.’

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Before having her young cousins, Albert and Ernest, to stay again, however, she thought it as well to make it quite clear that the visit must not be seen as compromising her in any way. Albert must understand that ‘there was no engagement between us’. She had never made any definite promise to marry him and would not do so now. She might like him as a friend and a relation but no more than that; and even if she did come to like him more than that, so she told her uncle Leopold, she ‘could make no final promise this year for, at the very earliest, any such event could not take place till two or three years hence’.

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Disturbed that Prince Albert might be put off by this apparent reluctance on the Queen of England’s part, King Leopold had already asked his nephew to come to see him in Brussels. The Prince was reassuring: he was prepared to wait on the understanding that the marriage would take place in the end. ‘I am ready,’ he said, so the King reported to Baron Stockmar, ‘to submit to this delay if I have some certain assurance to go on. But if after waiting, perhaps for three years, I should find the Queen no longer desired the marriage, it would place me in a very ridiculous position and would to a certain extent ruin all the prospects of my future life.’

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The King was reassuring in turn. All would turn out well when Prince Albert made his next visit to England.

This visit took place in October 1839. In anticipation of it the Queen was on edge, snappy with her servants and disinclined to concentrate on her paperwork. When she was told that her cousins were not able to leave quite as early as they had hoped, she wrote a sharp letter to King Leopold: ‘I think they don’t exhibit much empressement to come here, which rather shocks me.’

(#litres_trial_promo) She was also unusually sharp and impatient with Lord Melbourne who was more than ever liable to fall asleep after dinner and during the sermon in church on Sundays, snoring loudly. She wondered how he could do so before so many people. When he drank wine in an effort to stay awake, she told him it would make him ill. She was annoyed with him, too, for not telling her about some changes in the Home Office – she was ‘the last person’ to be told about what was done in her name – and for pressing her, as King Leopold had done, to invite some Tories to meet them when Albert and his brother came. She abruptly marched out of the room; and when she returned she looked more cross than ever. A fortnight or so before her cousins were due to arrive she was again ‘sadly cross to Lord Melbourne when he came in, which was shameful’. ‘I fear he felt it,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘for he did not sit down of himself as he usually does, but waited until I told him to do so.’ ‘I can’t think what possessed me’, she continued, ‘for I love this dear excellent man who is kindness & forbearance itself, most dearly.’

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A young person like her, who ‘hated a Sunday face’, ‘must sometimes have young people to laugh with’. She had missed that sadly in the lonely days at Kensington when she had longed ‘for some gaiety’, some ‘mirth’, and when she had looked admiringly at handsome young men at parties and had made lists of the prettiest girls in the room. ‘Nothing so natural’, commented Lord Melbourne with apparent unconcern yet with tears in his eyes.

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