Behind the Palace Doors (34 page)

Other participants rivaled the clergy in their clumsiness, including Prime Minister William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne. Loaded on laudanum and brandy, he “looked very awkward and uncouth,” Disraeli wrote, “with his coronet cocked over his nose, his robes under his feet, and holding the great Sword of State like a butcher.” Then there was the Duchess of Sutherland, “full of her situation,” Disraeli noted, who “walked, or rather stalked up the Abbey like Juno.”

Victoria’s trainbearers certainly could have used some practice, for, as one of them acknowledged, “we carried the Queen’s train very jerkily and badly, never keeping step properly, and it must have been very difficult for her to walk, as she did, evenly
and steadily, and with much grace and dignity, the whole length of the Abbey.”

While the trainbearers were tripping over themselves in the procession, the peers of the realm, members of the highest social order, were doing the same as they paid ritual homage to their new sovereign. “The Queen complained of a headache, from having her crown very unceremoniously
knocked
by most of the peers,” recalled Lady Wilhelmina Stanhope—“one actually clutched hold of it, but she said she had guarded herself from any accident or misadventure by having it made to fit her head tightly.”

One elderly peer, Lord Rolle, had an unfortunate accident as he tried to make it up the stairs to pay tribute to the queen. “It turned me very sick,” recounted Harriet Martineau, who was observing from a balcony. “The large and infirm old man was held by two peers, and had nearly reached the footstool when he slipped through the hands of his supporters, and rolled over and over down the steps, lying at the bottom coiled up in his robes. He was instantly lifted up, and tried again and again, amidst shouts of admiration of his valour.” Victoria managed to salvage the situation when she rose from the throne and walked down two or three steps to meet Lord Rolle as he continued his struggle up. The incident was recalled in a bit of verse by Richard Harris Barham:

Another aspect of Queen Victoria’s coronation ceremony went wildly awry: the distribution of her coronation medals. “The noise and confusion were very great when the medals were thrown about by Lord Surrey, everybody scrambling with
all their might and main to get them,” Greville reported. Surrey was “nearly torn to pieces in the universal excitement,” Lady Stanhope wrote, and “with his temper entirely gone,” he “looked as red and voluble as a turkey-cock.”

After nearly five hours, the bumbling service mercifully came to an end. Victoria returned to Buckingham Palace and immediately went to wash her dog. Though her coronation was inelegant at times, she recalled it with pride. “It was a memorable and glorious day for me,” she wrote. “I likewise venture to add that people thought I did my part—very well.”

Queen Victoria married her first cousin on her mother’s side, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, on February 10, 1840. The couple had nine children, many of whom married into the various ruling houses of Europe and produced, among others, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Queen Maud of Norway, Empress Alexandra of Russia, and Queen Marie of Romania
.

Now that she was queen, the last thing Victoria wanted was a husband. She was young, powerful, and, for the first time in her life, independent. Having been dominated her entire life by her widowed mother, the Duchess of Kent, she found the prospect of ceding any of her newly found freedom odious indeed. “I said I dreaded the thought of marrying,” the queen wrote, “that I was so accustomed to have my own way that I thought it was 10 to 1 that I shouldn’t agree with anybody.”

Yet despite the queen’s most vigorous objections to the subject of marriage, no one expected she would remain, like her distant predecessor Elizabeth I, single forever. Even Victoria knew she would marry, just not right away. An early marriage, her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, assured her, was “not NECESSARY.”

King Leopold I of Belgium, the queen’s maternal uncle (and Princess Charlotte’s widower), thought otherwise. He also had a definite idea who Victoria’s consort should be: his nephew, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Leopold had been encouraging the match for years, but nothing had come of his efforts. In fact, there had been very few sparks when Victoria briefly met her cousin Albert in 1836, the year before she became queen. He was a tad too delicate for her tastes, even if he was handsome. “I am sorry to say,” Victoria wrote to her uncle, “that we have an invalid in the house in the person of Albert.”

Leopold was still pushing three years later when he suggested that Albert go to England again, as a prospective bridegroom. The queen was decidedly unenthused about the proposed visit, “which I am desirous should not transpire,” and expressed her feelings to her uncle. “First of all,” she wrote, “I wish to know if
Albert
is aware of the wish of his
Father
[Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha] and
you
relative to me? Secondly, if he knows that there is
no engagement
between us? I am anxious that you should acquaint Uncle Ernest, that if I should like Albert, that I can make
no final promise this year
, for, at the
very earliest
, any such event could not take place till
two or three years hence
. For, independent of my youth, and my
great
repugnance to change my present position, there is
no anxiety
evinced in
this country
for such an event, and it would be more prudent, in my opinion, to wait till some such demonstration is shown,—else if I were hurried it might produce discontent.”

The queen was moody and irate in anticipation of Albert’s visit, with her prime minister stoically bearing the brunt of her pique. But then suddenly everything switched. Albert arrived on October 10, 1839, and Victoria was almost immediately sent swooning. “It is with some emotion that I beheld Albert—who is
beautiful,
” she wrote, beginning an avalanche of superlatives about Albert in her diary.

“Albert really is quite charming,” she gushed in one entry,
“and so excessively handsome, such beautiful blue eyes, an exquisite nose, and such pretty mouth with delicate mustachios and slight but very slight whiskers; a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist; my heart is quite
going.
” Everything Albert did, he seemed to do “beautifully.” “It is quite a pleasure to look at Albert when he gallops and valses, he does it so beautifully, holds himself so well with that beautiful figure of his … dearest Albert … dances so beautifully.”

All the queen’s objections about marriage vanished instantly, and just five days after Albert’s arrival, she proposed to him. Both were trembling and uncertain before Victoria finally blurted out that it would make her “too happy” if he would consent to be her husband. She had barely finished before Albert took her hands in his and, while kissing and caressing them, whispered in German how pleased he would be to spend his life with her.

“We embraced each other over and over again,” Victoria wrote in her journal, “and he was
so
kind,
so
affectionate; Oh! to
feel
I was, and am, loved by
such
an Angel was
too great a delight to describe
. He is
perfection;
perfection in every way—in beauty—in everything!… Oh!
how
I adore and love him, I cannot say!!
how
I will strive to make him feel as little as possible the great sacrifice he has made.”

Albert was keenly aware of what the great sacrifice would entail. He would not only have to leave his homeland and loved ones for an alien kingdom, but he would have to sublimate his very identity to that of the British sovereign. “My future position will have its dark sides and the sky will not always be blue and unclouded,” he confided to his brother Ernest. Nevertheless, he was prepared to do his duty and to love Victoria the best way he could. “How is it,” he wrote to her, “that I have deserved so much love, so much affection? … I believe that Heaven has sent me an angel whose brightness shall illume my life.”

The young cousins, both twenty years old, spent many hours
together after their engagement, kissing tenderly, reveling in each other’s company, and planning their future. But it was soon time for Albert to return to Germany, briefly, before making the permanent move to Britain. “We kissed each other so often, and I leant on that dear soft cheek, fresh and pink as a rose,” Victoria wrote the day Albert left. “It was ten o’clock and the time for his going … I gave Albert a last kiss, and saw him get into the carriage—and drive off. I cried so much, felt wretched, yet happy to think that we should meet again so soon. Oh! How I love him, how intensely, how devotedly, how ardently! I cried and felt so sad.”

On November 23, 1839, just over a week after Albert’s departure, Queen Victoria made her Declaration of Marriage before an assembly of privy councillors at Buckingham Palace. Her hands trembled terribly. “It was rather an awful moment,” she wrote to her fiancé, “to be obliged to announce this to so many people, many of whom were quite strangers.” Still, she admitted, the anxiety of publicly announcing that she had selected a mate for herself did not compare with the nervousness she had felt in anticipation of proposing to him.

Not everyone was as ecstatic as Victoria over her choice of a spouse. “The ultra-Tories are filled with prejudices against the Prince, in which I can clearly trace the influence of Ernest Augustus of Hanover,” Baron Stockmar reported to King Leopold. “They give out that he is a Radical and an infidel, and say that George of Cambridge [Victoria’s first cousin], or a Prince of Orange, ought to have been the Consort of the Queen.”

It was indeed the queen’s uncle, Ernest Augustus of Hanover
^*
—the infamous Duke of Cumberland accused of
killing his valet (see
Chapter 22
)—who worked most assiduously against Victoria’s wishes. She wanted Albert to take precedence over all members of the royal family, but that “old wretch,” as the queen called her uncle Ernest, absolutely refused to yield to what he termed a “paper Royal Highness” from an insignificant duchy. The matter was finally resolved when it was determined that the queen could grant Albert precedence by use of the royal prerogative, which was a constitutional right retained by the sovereign, a vestige of the vast powers English kings once possessed.

Money was another matter, however. Only Parliament could approve of the fifty-thousand-pound income for Albert that the queen requested. And after years of funding the lavish lifestyles of Victoria’s debauched Hanoverian uncles, particularly George IV, the lawmakers were loath to indulge yet another royal parasite. Albert was given only a little more than half of what had been expected.

“Everybody … thinks the allowance proposed for Prince Albert very exorbitant,” Charles Greville noted. “Fifty thousand a year given for pocket-money is quite monstrous, and it would have been prudent to propose a more moderate grant for the sake of his popularity.” A bit of satirical verse reflected the mood of some toward the penniless German prince Victoria intended to import:

The queen blamed the Tories for most of her troubles, including the “wicked old foolish” Duke of Wellington, who had voted down Albert’s subsidy and even dared question whether he was Protestant. “Poor dear Albert, how cruelly they are using that dearest Angel! Monsters! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!”

Yet while the queen railed against all the indignities her beloved was made to suffer at the hands of those “abominable, infamous Tories,” she was herself thwarting Albert in a number of ways, lording her sovereignty over him. When, for example, he declared his wish to have a bipartisan household to reflect his political impartiality, “chosen from both sides—the same number of Whigs as of Tories,” as well as some German gentlemen, the queen sternly replied, “I must tell you quite honestly that it will not do.”