We Two: Victoria and Albert (18 page)

By the summer of 1839, Victoria was confessing to Lord Melbourne that she felt bored and disinclined to work hard. Perhaps she was wrong to enjoy what she called “business.” Melbourne agreed: “You lead rather an unnatural life for a young person; it’s the life of a man.” The arrival in London on a state visit of Grand Duke Alexander, the tall, handsome, attentive heir to the tsar, made it all too plain to the Queen, and indeed to the whole court, what she was missing in her life. But even as she was dancing till dawn and falling a little in love with the grand duke, domestic policy and international diplomacy were still of vital interest to her. As soon as some great issue was being debated in parliament, Victoria’s passion for public affairs flared up, and she was awake until the small hours, writing letters and journal entries.

It was four and a half months after Victoria waved a tearful good-bye to her imperial Russian guest when Prince Albert appeared at Windsor Castle. This second time, the youth her whole family was crazy for her to marry turned out to be,
mirabile dictu
, the incarnation of her desire. Albert was so
beautiful, and they had so much in common. He was so very tender and loving, and assured her that he had never loved any other woman. They would live happily ever after.

But even when she lost her heart, Victoria did not lose her head. Her happiness now depended on Albert, yet all the same she was determined to have him and everything else as well. She would rule England, manage an independent income of 385,000 pounds, hold sway at Windsor and Buckingham Palace, possess enough diamonds to cover her from head to toe, and enjoy her Prince Charming too. The marriage, as the Queen saw it, was to be on her terms, and Lord Melbourne reassured her it would be. Both, however, were deceiving themselves.

NTIL DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES, CAME ALONG, FULL DISCLOSURE
and transparency were not to be expected from royal persons. Almost from the cradle, princes and princesses realized just how interesting they were to the world and became intent on controlling their legacy and swathing their lives in the mystic aura of majesty. Members of royal families zealously built up a trove of documentation for posterity and regularly purged it of items they were unwilling to imagine in a memoir or a history book. When Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, produced a heavily cut and censored transcript of the handwritten volumes of her dead mother’s journals, and then burned the originals, she was a case study in this dual royal compulsion to keep and destroy records.

For Queen Victoria the record kept was so large, so detailed, and so frank that censorship failed even in regard to the Queen’s unhappy early years over which the English royal family sought for two generations to draw a veil. A clear, comprehensive, and nuanced account of Queen Victoria’s youth has become possible in the last half century and greatly enhances the Queen’s reputation. It humanizes Victoria when we know the challenges she faced as a girl. It adds to her stature when we learn of the abusive collusion of her mother and Sir John Conroy Unlike the Wizard of Oz, Victoria had nothing to fear if a little dog pulled the curtain back. Here in the temple reserved for royalty was a formidable woman whom people idolized whether she emerged in a diamond tiara or a poke bonnet.

Unfortunately, the same is not true for her husband. The deeper one plumbs the biographical literature on Albert, prince consort, the more likely it seems that the standard account of the prince’s life before his marriage
is a myth that even the nineteenth century found hard to credit. Albert as child and youth remains a puzzle because only timid steps have been taken to move beyond the account left us by his first, best informed, most dedicated, and certainly most influential biographer: his wife, Victoria.

AFTER ALBERT’S DEATH
, Victoria’s mission was to inscribe Albert’s name upon the world’s consciousness and claim for him a place among the great of history. A full-scale biography of her husband was an obvious priority, and since the Queen liked order and chronology, the first biographical task she set herself was to recapture her husband’s German years. She zealously collected every piece of paper relating to the prince consort that she could find at Windsor or could call in from Germany. She lovingly set down for the record little things that Albert himself had told her about his youth. She solicited the recollections of those who had known him then. She collaborated actively with Albert’s private secretary, Charles Grey, in compiling and writing a book.

The resulting work, published in 1867, is usually known as
The Early Years of the Prince Consort
and attributed in bibliographies to General Sir Charles Grey. However, it is more useful and accurate to identify it as Queen Victoria’s first major foray into print. The book is identified on its spine as Queen Victoria’s Memoirs of the Prince Consort: His Early Years. The title page reads: The Early Years of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort compiled under the Direction of Her Majesty the Queen, by Lieut.-General the Hon. C. Grey. Queen Victoria’s crest appears on the book’s spine, and her 1867 signature, Victoria R, is written in gold on the cover.

Most of the information we have today about the prince consort’s youth is derived from
Early Years
. The documentation it presents is invaluable. But, as the biographer of a German boy, Queen Victoria suffered from crippling handicaps.

In the first place, she did not know her husband as a boy and had few firsthand memories of him to share. In their first twenty years, Victoria and Albert saw each other only for a few brief, tense, and closely chaperoned weeks in 1836. The Queen was also singularly ill equipped to tell the story of a boy growing up in Germany. Until she was a grandmother she did not really know any boys, and she did not have an in-depth knowledge of Germany. She visited there for the first time in 1845, four years after her marriage, and, surrounded by German royalty and by some sixty-one of her Coburg relatives, she got a luxury tourist’s view of the country.

Victoria assumed that Albert had given her an accurate picture of himself
as a boy. In fact, though the prince consort often wept nostalgic tears for his lost German home, he was remarkably reticent about his life before coming to England. Whereas Victoria was committed to putting every detail of her life down on paper so she could relive it later, Albert was not. For a royal person, the autobiographical urge was, in fact, singularly absent in him. As an adult, he wrote volumes and volumes of memoranda as well as thousands of letters, but no memoir, not even an autobiographical sketch. His diary is resolutely impersonal. Even to his wife, Albert imparted only tiny shards of memory.

To supplement and give life to her account of her husband’s youth, Queen Victoria turned to those who had known him. Certain people came forward, but more did not. In many ways, the most fascinating thing about
The Early Years of the Prince Consort
is identifying those who either chose not to collaborate with the royal biographer or, conceivably, were not asked. The most deafening silence comes from the prince’s brother, Ernest, the man who, Albert once wrote, spent not even one night apart from him in his first nineteen years.
Early Years
contains no reminiscences and only one letter from Duke Ernest—written to Queen Victoria just before her wedding and thus in her possession—and a handful of letters from Albert to Ernest for which the prince had presumably kept copies. The regular correspondence between the two brothers that began in the fall of 1839 and ended only with the prince’s death was not made available to the Queen, to Charles Grey, or to Theodore Martin, the man commissioned to write up the prince’s years in England.

The male friends from Albert’s childhood and youth who contributed to the Queen’s volume were those willing to substantiate its author’s exalted opinion of her husband. These German men grieved for Albert, their lost friend or kinsman. They had an interest in promoting the fortunes of the Saxe-Coburg family. They understood Queen Victoria’s power and knew how fiercely loyal she was to friends. What sense did it make to challenge the preconceptions and shade the sunny vision of the most important woman in Europe?

But the Queen’s golden legend of her husband was severely tailored not only to her needs but to Albert’s own neuroses, and in the end it served him badly. Behind the gilt and incense, the real Albert Coburg was far more complicated and interesting than the man portrayed in his wife’s adoring book.

THE KEY TO PRINCE ALBERT’S
life lay in fact, in the duchy of Coburg and the history of the Saxe-Coburg family, just as Queen Victoria suspected. But
it was the key to a coded text that was intentionally kept hidden. What Duke Ernest II, King Leopold, Baron Stockmar, and the other men who had been close to Albert in youth wanted to conceal, what Albert himself wished to forget, was that in his Coburg years, he hated Coburg and all it stood for. Far from the fairy-tale kingdom the Queen saw on her visits, Coburg-Gotha throughout the prince’s lifetime and beyond was a tiny, poor, feudal polity ruled by licentious, frivolous, self-absorbed, debt-ridden dukes: Albert’s father and brother. Albert came to England determined to shake off the evils of the past, start from scratch, and realize his own idyll of the King. Hence he boarded up the door to his past.