We Two: Victoria and Albert (23 page)

Was Duchess Louise a feckless woman who sacrificed her sons in order to be with her young lover? Queen Victoria, who certainly did not approve of adultery, did not think so. She sympathized with her husband’s young mother, understanding that once her husband accused her of adultery Duchess Louise had little choice but to accept his terms, which were relatively lenient. Duke Casimir, a sixteenth-century ancestor of Duke Ernest I,
upon whose portrait Duchess Louise as a young bride once gazed in horror, locked up his unfaithful wife for life in a fortress, put her lover in another, and let them both rot.

Even in 1824, women in Europe were still virtually the possessions of their husbands. However misused, they had no legal right to divorce, and, in the event of a separation, they had no rights to their minor children. In some aristocratic circles, an adulterous man might turn a blind eye to his wife’s affairs, or even encourage them if it suited his pocket or his political ambitions. But a woman had always to exercise discretion. A hint of scandal could destroy her social position, and proof of misconduct could endanger her life. Louise of Gotha was not discreet, her husband wanted to be rid of her, and she suffered the consequences.

Duke Ernest had planned for his wife to make a quick and quiet exit from Coburg, but in this at least he was thwarted. Duchess Louise was the last descendent of the ancient house of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, and even in Coburg she was far more popular than her husband. When the people of Coburg heard that she was being forced into exile, they acted. A crowd of men came to the castle at Rosenau, put the duchess in her carriage, got between the shafts, and pulled her all the way back to Schloss Ehrenburg, just as if she had been a bride. After that, the mob went off to Ketschendorf, the home of the dowager Duchess Augusta on the outskirts of the town, and forced Duke Ernest to drive with his two sons back to the Ehrenburg, where his wife was waiting. Then the crowd demanded that Szymborski, who was widely hated, should be delivered up to them. Szymborski managed to escape with his life, but only by a trick.

The Coburgers’ extraordinary demonstration of love and support for his wife did nothing to sway Duke Ernest. Duchess Louise left Coburg on September 4, 1824. In the final letter to her friend Augusta, she writes: “Parting from my children was the worst thing of all. They have whooping cough, and they said, ‘Mamma is crying because she has to go away while we are ill.’ Poor little mice, may God bless them.” Louise never again saw her native Gotha, her friend Augusta, her adoring stepmother, or her sons.

In 1825 Louise’s uncle Duke Frederick died, and, after some long and acrimonious negotiations among the five ducal families, Gotha was officially united with Coburg. Duke Ernest and his sons changed their name to Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. In 1826 a divorce was secretly put through, and Louise married Alexander von Hanstein. She and her husband lived comfortably on the income from her estates, and Louise’s kinsman, the Duke of Saxe-Hildburghausen, gave Hanstein the title of Count of Pölzig and
Baiersdorf. Pölzig went on to have a distinguished career as an officer in the Prussian army.

Louise found happiness in her second marriage, but she had few years to enjoy it. Already in 1822, two years before her exile, she reported to her friend Augusta that she had severe stomach pains and inflammation of the bowels, and had suffered a hemorrhage. In February 1831, she went to Paris to consult the famous Dr. Antoine Dubois and was told she had inoperable cancer of the womb. After five months of agony, Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, Countess Pölzig, was dead, about a month before her thirty-first birthday.

One of the strangest things in the biographical literature on Albert, prince consort, is the recurring allegation that he was not the child of Duke Ernest. The rumor of Albert’s bastardy may have been spread by word of mouth in the gossipy courts of nineteenth-century Europe. In the twentieth century, the rumors began to appear in print from the pen of men who, for one reason or another, disliked the prince consort. The allegation was based on the known fact of his mother’s adultery with Hanstein and on the observed fact that in his sexual mores and his financial management Albert was remarkably unlike his father and his brother.

Some writers argued that the prince consort’s father must have been Jewish. As evidence of this, Jewish writers alleged the prince consort’s great intelligence and vast culture. Others, of an anti-Semitic bent, pointed to the large sums of money the prince was able to amass and the large properties he was able to purchase during his two decades in England.

Veteran royal biographer David Duff was also convinced that Prince Albert was not the son of the Duke of Coburg and advanced an even more audacious hypothesis: that Albert was the illegitimate son of his uncle Leopold. Albert’s life paralleled and extended his uncle’s in extraordinary ways, Duff pointed out. The two were very alike. Albert became virtually Leopold’s adopted son in his late teens, and all his life he was closer to Leopold than were Leopold’s Belgian sons and daughters. Using the evidence of Leopold’s own letters, Duff placed Leopold in Coburg around the time of Albert’s conception. He accused royal historian Theodore Martin of a cover-up, since, in his official five-volume biography of the prince consort, Martin denies that Leopold was there at that time.

But the idea that Albert was not his father’s son is nonsense, a tissue of innuendo and prejudice floating free of fact. The evidence of Duchess Louise’s extant letters is that she was deeply in love with and faithful to her husband until at least 1822. (Albert was born in 1819.) It is a canard that
Prince Albert was a bastard, but how fascinating that so many upstanding biographers and historians of royalty have found it irresistible!

Family likenesses are funny things. Sometimes sons are like their grandfathers or their uncles. Sometimes, though male historians have trouble with this, sons are like their mothers and grandmothers and aunts. All the evidence suggests that Prince Albert inherited his tall, handsome body from his father; his brilliant mind, his love of learning, and his sensitivity to social wrongs from his mother.

THE COBURG PRINCES
, aged five and six, were eyewitnesses to the extraordinary events of 1824. Intelligent little boys, they surely had some intimations that their father and mother had for some time not been in agreement. They were watching when a crowd of angry citizens forced their father to drive back to the Ehrenburg Palace. They were in the palace when the mob outside howled for Szymborski’s head. Soon after, when they were both ill with whooping cough, their mother came and wept to tell them she was going away. They never saw their mother again and apparently were never given any news of her during her life. Even news of her death probably came to them in the extraordinary form of the announcement of their father’s wedding. According to Queen Victoria, it was not until after his own marriage that Prince Albert was told how much his mother had suffered in her last year, and he wept for her.

Within days of their mother’s departure, the princes’ father went away too. For five months the two little boys were left in the care of “der Rath.” What the duke instructed the tutor Florschütz to tell his sons about their mother, when it dawned upon them that she was not coming back, is not known.

The idea that his small sons might need him after all the distressing events they had experienced seems not to have occurred to the Duke of Coburg. Children, for men like him, existed for the benefit of their parents, not vice versa. Having got rid of his wife, the duke had to mend his bridges with relatives abroad, and he was in need of pleasure. He had provided his sons with a capable young tutor. After a year’s trial, the duke felt confident that Florschütz understood his duty. Duchess Louise had babied Albert and hurt Ernest, who was a real chip off the old Coburg block. What the boys needed was a firm male hand.

Duke Ernest’s sense of responsibility for his sons extended to a request that they write to him regularly and keep a diary of their daily activities that
he could read on his return. Letters to absent parents and diaries were a common educational exercise for upper-class schoolchildren in this period, to be carefully supervised and scrutinized by tutors and governesses. All the same, for a sensitive, articulate child like Albert, they were a precious link and a needed outlet for emotion.

Albert’s letters and diary are full of sadness and loss. He makes no reference to his mother, but he is free to say how much he misses his father. The five-year-old prince artlessly records how often he cried. He cried because the Rath pinched him to explain that
pinch
was a verb. He cried because his cough was so very bad and worrisome, because he was punished for not putting his books away, because he wrote a letter so full of mistakes that the Rath tore it up. Albert ends each letter to his father: “Think of me with love, your Albert.” Once he begs the duke to bring him a doll that nods its head.

Is it any wonder that Albert cried? Both his parents were gone in bizarre circumstances, and he did not know when they would be back. For a five-year-old, this was already tragic. If, as is all too likely given his intelligence, Albert gathered from adult conversations that his mother had been sent away in disgrace, and he feared that she would not be returning, this would have been traumatic. Duchess Louise was young, pretty, witty, capricious, and fun. Everyone except her husband and his henchmen loved her. Albert was like his mother—everyone said so—and that had been a source of deep happiness to the boy. She made no secret of the fact that she loved him more than his big brother, that he was her “pride and glory.”

What happens to a sensitive, precocious boy when such a mother suddenly disappears? Surely the bottom drops out of his world. Did Albert blame himself for his mother’s disappearance? Did he hate her for abandoning him? These would be normal reactions for a small child hit by inexplicable loss. Did Albert identify with his mother, so small and childlike? Did he remember that she had dared to quarrel with his father before she suddenly disappeared? Did he begin to fear his father?

None of these questions has an answer. Neither Albert nor his brother, Ernest, in all their yards of letters, memoirs, and memoranda, ever recorded memories of the time when they lost their mother. If they confided them to anyone, their secrets were faithfully kept.

According to the 1866 testimony of Florschütz, testimony solicited by Queen Victoria and sanctioned by Albert’s brother (by this time Duke Ernest II of Coburg), the princes did not miss their mother. In fact, the duchess’s departure was more a cause of relief than sorrow to the boys, since she was not a good mother. “Duchess Louise was wanting in the essential qualifications
of a mother,” wrote Florschütz. “She made no attempt to conceal that Prince Albert was her favorite child … The influence of this partiality might have been most injurious.”

If Florschütz is to be believed, the Coburg princes swiftly got over the “difficulties” caused by their parents’ dispute in 1824 because they received far better care from him than they had from their mother. “It is a satisfaction to me to reflect that these sad events did not interfere permanently with the happiness of my beloved pupils, and that, with the cheerfulness and innocence of childhood, they retained their respectful and obedient love for their parents. Thus deprived of a mother’s love and care, the children necessarily depended more entirely on that shown by their tutor; and he is conscious of … having given himself up with unceasing solicitude … to the good of his pupils. And he was rewarded by their … love and confidence, their liking to be with him, and the entire unreserve with which they showed their inmost thoughts and feelings in his presence.”

Today mothers are expected to raise their small children of both sexes. Biologists, psychologists, and therapists as well as parents all agree that a young child’s mother, however imperfect, is the center of its world and the object of its passionate adoration. There is also a consensus in the social sciences that the early mother-child relationship forms a template for adult relationships. If the course of a child’s love for its mother is interrupted in some way by death, separation, or betrayal, the effects on the child’s development are deep and permanent.

Who can believe that Prince Albert was unaffected by his mother’s disappearance? On the contrary, the prince’s development as a sexual being and all his subsequent relationships with women were shaped by the fact that at the vulnerable age of five he was abandoned by the person he loved most.