Queen Victoria: A Personal History

Well aware of his unpopularity among the upper classes and at Court, Prince Albert felt increasingly homesick. And on the return of his father to Coburg after a brief visit to England the Queen found her husband weeping bitterly in the hall. Embarrassed to be found in so unmanly a state, he ran upstairs to his room. She hurried after him, anxious to comfort him; but he was, for the moment, inconsolable: she had never known her father, he reminded her, and her childhood had been a miserable one in comparison with the past with which he had had so suddenly to break.

The Queen was moved by his nostalgia. ‘God knows,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘how great my wish is to make this Beloved being happy and contented.’

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17 ROBERT PEEL (#ulink_6a3c93fa-8112-5594-a9d9-877543dd21e4)

‘I cannot understand how anyone can wish for such a thing, especially at the beginning of a marriage.’

WITHIN A FEW WEEKS of her marriage the Queen discovered herself to be pregnant; and this event was to mark a profound change in the Prince’s career as Consort. The Queen, however, was dismayed. It was ‘the ONLY thing’ she dreaded. She was ‘furious’. It was ‘too dreadful’, she told Prince Leopold. She ‘could not be more unhappy’, she confessed to the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. ‘I am really upset about it and it is spoiling my happiness; I have always hated the idea and I prayed God night and day to be left free for at least six months…I cannot understand how anyone can wish for such a thing, especially at the beginning of a marriage.’

(#litres_trial_promo) And if her ‘plagues’ were to be ‘rewarded only by a nasty girl’, she told King Leopold that she would drown it.

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Shortly before the birth she was to consult Charles Locock, the obstetrician, who confessed to his friend, Lady Mahon, that he ‘felt shy and embarrassed’ but that she ‘very soon put him at his ease’.

She had not the slightest reserve & was always ready to express Herself, in respect to her present situation, in the very plainest terms possible [Locock confided in Lady Mahon who told her friend, Charles Arbuthnot, who, in turn, passed the account on to his friend, the Duke of Wellington]. She asked Locock whether she would suffer much pain. He replied that some pain was to be expected, but that he had no doubt Her Majesty would bear it very well. ‘Oh yes,’ said the Queen, ‘I can bear pain as well as other People.’…Locock left Her Majesty without any very good impressions of Her; & with the certainty that She will be very ugly & enormously fat. Her figure now is most extraordinary. She goes without stays or anything that keeps Her shape within bounds; & that she is more like a barrel than anything else.

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Dr Locock went on to say that there would be nobody at the delivery except himself, Prince Albert and a maid. Lady Mahon commented that no doubt the Queen would be very relieved at this privacy, ‘upon which [Locock] remarked that he verily believed from Her manner as to delicacy, She would not care one single straw if the whole world was present.’

For Prince Albert, the pregnancy was a blessing. First of all it was considered necessary to provide for the contingency of the Queen dying and leaving a baby as heir to the throne. A regency was required; and after some proposals that a council of regency or, at least, a co-regent, should be appointed, Parliament passed a Regency Bill entirely to the Prince’s satisfaction and to that of the Duke of Wellington who had gained further favour with the Queen by declaring that the regent ‘could and ought to be nobody but the Prince’.

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‘In the event of Victoria’s death and her successor being under eighteen years of age, I am to be Regent – alone – Regent without a Council,’ the Prince told his brother with the utmost satisfaction. ‘You will understand the importance of this matter and that it gives my position here in the country a fresh significance.’

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The next month when Parliament was prorogued he rode with the Queen to the Palace of Westminster and there sat in a chair next to her throne; in September his writing table was moved next to hers, both at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. That month also he was appointed a Privy Councillor. By then he had also been made a Freeman of the City of London and had made his first public speech as President of the Anti-Slavery Society; and, although extremely nervous, he had delivered it very well. Lord Holland reported that it was ‘now all the fashion to praise Prince Albert’; while Lord Melbourne remarked to the Queen, commenting upon the readiness with which it had been agreed that Prince Albert should be appointed sole Regent in the event of her death, ‘Three months ago they would not have done it for him. It is entirely his own character.’

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The Prince complacently reported to Stockmar that he was now ‘constantly provided with interesting papers’, and to his brother he wrote that he had ‘come to be extremely pleased with Victoria during the past few months. She had only twice had the sulks…Altogether she puts more confidence in me daily.’

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A lingering source of trouble, however, was the continued and unwelcome presence of Baroness Lehzen who, now that she was no longer the most important person in the Queen’s life, attempted to exert with all the more authority her influence over her. This influence was still profound, for although the Queen loved Lehzen she was also rather frightened of her and was reluctant to stand firm against what her husband took to be her gross importunities and reprehensible delight in gossip. Time and again when the Queen and Prince were alone together, the sharp nose of the Baroness would appear round the door and, with the smell of caraway seeds on her breath, she would summon the Queen away to some business connected with the household, the nature of which was not divulged to the Prince whose dislike of the woman – the ‘old hag’ as he called her, or, in allusion to the jaundiced appearance of her skin, the ‘Yellow Lady’ – began to deepen into an almost obsessive hatred. He knew that she had opposed his being appointed Regent in case of the Queen’s death; he knew, too, that she had also opposed his being permitted to accompany her when she went to open the new Parliament and to sit beside her while she read the speech from the Throne. She told the Queen that her husband really ought to have no position of real power in the state, to fade into the background with no high official status, as she had done. Yet that hesitancy in his nature, which Stockmar had condemned, induced the Prince not to tackle the problem firmly but, as he himself put it, to ‘remain on his guard, and patiently abide the result’. He was also, so Stockmar thought, inhibited by his concern not to provoke the Queen’s anger which might bring on symptoms of that distressing, hereditary malady of mental derangement which had afflicted her grandfather, King George III, and, on occasions to a lesser degree, her uncle, King George IV.

So, in the meantime, according to Stockmar, the Queen continued to be ‘influenced more than she [was] aware of by the Baroness’.

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The Queen’s baby, a girl, to be christened Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa and to be known in the family as ‘Pussy’, was born at Buckingham Palace, a fortnight before she was expected, on 21 November 1840, a ‘dark, dull, windy, rainy day with smoking chimneys’, after a labour of twelve hours during which the mother ‘suffered severely’ but was ‘not at all nervous once it began’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Duchess of Kent and the Prince, holding his wife’s hand, were both in the room at the time with the obstetrician, Dr Locock, and a midwife. In the next room, the door to which was left open, were three other doctors; and, in a room beyond that, were various Ministers and dignitaries, including the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London and the Lord Steward of the Household, Lord Errol, who claimed that he could see the Queen plainly the whole time and hear what she said. The baby was brought into their room and placed, ‘stark naked’, upon a table for their inspection.

The Queen admitted to being ‘sadly disappointed’ it was not a boy. Her husband, too, was disappointed; but when Dr Locock had called out, ‘Oh Madam it is a princess’, the mother had cheerfully replied, ‘Never mind, the next will be a Prince.’

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She fervently hoped, however, that there would not be too many more babies of either sex; and when King Leopold tactlessly wrote to say that he hoped that the little Princess Victoria would be the first of several children, she responded crossly:

You cannot really wish me to be the Mamma d’une nombreuse famille for I think you will see with me the great inconvenience a large family would be to us all, and particularly to the country, independent of the hardship and inconvenience to myself; men never think, at least seldom think what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often.

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Throughout her confinement, and during the fortnight in which she was kept in bed after the birth, Prince Albert was ‘just like a mother’ to her; ‘nor could there be a kinder, wiser or more judicious nurse’. ‘He was content to sit by her in a darkened room, to read to her, or write for her. No one but himself ever lifted her from her bed to her sofa, and he always helped to wheel her on her bed or sofa into the next room. For this purpose he would come when sent for instantly from any part of the house.’ In the evenings he dined with the Duchess of Kent.

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He had his rewards. On the day of Princess Victoria’s birth he represented the Queen at a Privy Council meeting and ten days later he wrote contentedly to his brother, ‘I have my hands very full as I also look after Victoria’s political affairs.’

(#litres_trial_promo) According to his Private Secretary, George Anson, with whom the Prince was now (and would remain) on the best of terms, this advance in his status ‘had been brought about by the fact of the Prince having received and made notes of all the Cabinet business during the Queen’s confinement, this circumstance having evinced to the Queen his capacity for business and power to assist’. To the Duke of Wellington the Prince confessed that his aim was, in fact, to be far more than a kind of assistant to the Queen. He intended to be ‘the natural head of the family, superintendent of her household, manager of her private affairs, her sole confidential advisor in politics, and only assistance in her communication with the officers of the Government…her private secretary and her permanent Minister’.

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The satisfaction which the Prince felt at his growing influence was, however, soon overcast by his concern about the Queen’s political sympathies. Her dear friend Melbourne’s Government had been in trouble for some time when in the summer of 1841 the Tories won a decisive victory in a general election. During this election the Queen, choosing not to tell him of arrangements of which he was sure to disapprove, took the Prince on a tour of various Whig magnates to whose houses she had been introduced during those ‘royal progresses’ which had so exasperated King William IV. They went to Chatsworth and Woburn Abbey, to Panshanger, the house of Lord Melbourne’s nephew, Earl Cowper, and to Lord Melbourne’s own house, Brocket Hall. The Prince did not appear to advantage in any of them. He disapproved of the rivalries of adversarial politics which set ‘families by the ears’, ‘demoralised the lower classes’ and ‘perverted many of the upper’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Crown should be above such partisanship; and he told the Queen that it really was her duty to be so.

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Yet when the Tories won their resounding victory she could not disguise her disappointment; nor did she attempt to do so. She declared that she would never send for ‘that bad man Peel who had behaved so wickedly in the past’. She declined to attend the opening of the first session of the new Parliament; and did not conceal her strong reluctance to accept Sir Robert Peel as her Prime Minister in place of Lord Melbourne whom she had seen almost every day for four years. ‘Eleven days was the longest I was ever without seeing him,’ she told King Leopold, ‘so you may imagine what this change must be.’ She had grown so very accustomed to him, whereas Peel was always so shy and awkward with her. Charles Greville thought she would get on better with him if only he could keep his legs still.

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Melbourne tried to comfort and reassure her: he agreed to write to her regularly as what she termed a ‘very useful and valuable friend out of office’; and so he did for some time, much to the concern of both Peel and of Baron Stockmar who spoke about it to Melbourne who burst out angrily, ‘God eternally damn it!’ But when Stockmar warned him that Peel was threatening to resign and that Melbourne’s old friend, Mrs Norton, was entertaining dinner parties with stories based on what she was told of the correspondence, Melbourne wrote far less frequently and then not on delicate political matters.

Certainly, as Melbourne admitted to the Queen, he hated the idea of not seeing her regularly and did not at all relish the thought of losing office; but he was tired, he told her, and the rest would do him good. Besides, he was leaving her in excellent hands. ‘The Prince understands everything so well,’ he said, ‘and has a clever able head.’ She could rely upon his advice and assistance with confidence. He had, so he said, formed ‘the highest opinion of HRH’s judgement, temper and discretion’.

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To ease the way for them both, he had advice to give to Peel in his dealings with the Queen. Rather than give it to Peel himself, he asked Charles Greville, whom he met at a dinner at Stafford House, to pass it on for him.

Whenever he does anything, or has anything to propose [Melbourne said] let him explain to her clearly his reasons. The Queen is not conceited; she is aware there are many things she does not understand, and she likes to have them explained to her elementarily, not at length and in detail, but shortly and clearly; neither does she like long audiences, and I never stayed with her a long time.

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