We Two: Victoria and Albert (26 page)

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HE PRINCESS VICTORIA OF KENT WAS THE GREATEST HEIRESS IN EUROPE
. She was also half-Coburg, so the whole Coburg clan was focused on finding her a Coburg husband with whom she could found an English dynasty that would be three-quarters Coburg.

Albert Coburg was the sentimental favorite. Dowager Duchess Augusta, the family matriarch, had picked him out in his cradle as the ideal mate for her granddaughter, the little English mayflower, as she referred to Victoria in an early letter. However, by 1835, Albert faced some rivals in the family. His older brother, Ernest, as well as Duke Ernest of Württemberg (Duchess Marie’s brother and thus the Coburg princes’ first cousin/stepuncle) were pushed by different factions in the Coburg family.

In some ways Ernest Coburg, stronger, taller, and more mature, was more suitable than Albert, and Duke Ernest of Coburg pressed his elder son’s candidacy with vigor. Feodora of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Victoria’s half sister, who lived in Germany, also warmly recommended their cousin Ernest to Victoria in a letter. Prince Ernest himself was eager to try for Victoria’s hand. However, he and his father were unable to make any headway against King Leopold and Stockmar. Those two gentlemen refused to countenance a marriage between Victoria Kent and Ernest Coburg. Ernest had not inherited the fabled Coburg looks, but he had inherited the notorious Coburg libido.

In May 1836, much to the wrath of King William IV, who was busy fielding his own contenders for Victoria’s hand, Duke Ernest brought his sons to Kensington Palace for their first visit to England. The real purpose of
the visit was to arrange a secret engagement between Victoria and Albert, but Stockmar had insisted that the young people should be kept in the dark about their elders’ plans. Victoria was an experienced player of the courting game and did not need to be told what was afoot. Albert, it seems possible, did not understand what his mission in England was. Certainly he failed to play the part expected of him, and there was no engagement.

The elders who carefully observed the two young people together were in no doubt as to what had gone wrong. There was nothing of Cherubino in the makeup of Prince Albert at sixteen. The art of sweeping a damsel off her feet had not been part of the curriculum at the Rosenau. Rather the contrary. In the family circle, allowed to express himself in his native language, encouraged to play the piano and sing duets, permitted to shine, Albert could be interesting and “merry”—a key attribute for Victoria. But he showed not a flicker of interest in the opposite sex, and in his letters home, the best thing he could say about Victoria was that she was “agreeable.”

Duke Ernest and his sons traveled directly from England to Belgium to report back to Uncle Leopold. Their colt had been entered in a race before he was ready to run, but he still had excellent potential. Neither the Princess Victoria nor her mother seemed inclined to accept any of the suitors proposed by the ailing King of England. The Coburg family still had a few years to train Albert and bring him to physical maturity. King Leopold, who saw a lot of his own looks and intellect in Albert, now resolved to get his nephew away from his father’s court and small-town life in Coburg-Gotha. Leopold would organize his nephew’s education and invest in his future. Since kings are very busy men, especially when their thrones are new and tottery, Leopold instructed Stockmar to take Albert in hand. More remarkably, given his reputation for parsimony, he opened the royal checkbook.

Stockmar was persona much more grata at the Court of St. James’s than at the court of Coburg. Thus he knew Princess Victoria quite well but Prince Albert hardly at all. When he did have a chance to study Albert, he wondered whether the boy could succeed as Victoria’s husband and consort. Victoria was smaller and looked meeker than her ill-fated cousin Charlotte, but she had as much will and as much pride, and her husband would have no easy time of mastering her. Did Albert have any sense of what he was taking on, wrote Stockmar to Leopold, not only with Victoria but with England, which had no love of foreign princes, especially German ones called Coburg? Was Albert ready of his own accord “to sacrifice mere plea sure to real usefulness?” Was he just filled with boyish pride and naive ambition? “If simply to fill one of the most influential positions in Europe does not satisfy him,” Stockmar went on, “how often will he feel tempted to regret
what he has undertaken. If he does not, right from the start, regard it as a serious and responsible task upon the fulfillment of which his honour and happiness depend, he is not likely to succeed.” Poor Albert, just seventeen!

Despite his doubts, Stockmar accepted the assignment of facilitating the marriage of Victoria and Albert. He was bored at home in Coburg with his disagreeable wife. He enjoyed living in England, which he saw as the greatest nation on earth. For decades, long before the Crown of Belgium was won, Leopold and Stockmar had conceived a grand geopolitical plan in which enlightened European monarchs would lead their peoples toward economic and social progress through carefully controlled and limited democracies. England was the kingpin in this system, and the approaching accession of a new, presumably malleable, half-Coburg queen regnant offered all kinds of possibilities. If Stockmar indoctrinated Albert and Victoria, each in turn, if they then married and founded a new dynasty, they might change the future of Europe and realize the Leopold-Stockmar vision.

Therefore Stockmar emerged from retirement and, despite his notoriously frail health, started shuttling across the English Channel. He had been Princess Charlotte’s dear friend. Now he was Victoria’s. In the difficult weeks just before Victoria’s accession and for months afterward, Stockmar was at the Queen’s shoulder, vying with Prime Minister Melbourne for influence. At the same time, at first through correspondence and finally in person, Stockmar masterminded Prince Albert’s education—his
Bildung
, as the Germans say. From the fall of 1836, Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha grudgingly yielded to his brother Leopold the control of his younger son, Albert. Prince Ernest too yielded to his brother. For the next few years, Ernest was content to play second fiddle, offering support, encouragement, and social cover as Albert was trained to win Victoria’s hand.

First King Leopold dispatched the two Coburg brothers to his royal French in-laws for a short visit. Albert and Ernest were given a gratifying reception at Louis Philippe’s brilliant court, but Albert took no pleasure in Paris. The city, he found, was noisy and crowded, his hotel shabby and cramped. Then the Coburg princes returned to Brussels for eight months to stay in a quiet and comfortable house paid for by their uncle. Florschütz was still with the princes, but Baron von Wiechmann was also appointed as governor to supervise their lives. Wiechmann was a tedious old soldier, and Ernest quarreled with him a lot, but the high-ranking Wiechmann was a key indicator of Albert’s rising status and the expectations of his handlers.

In Brussels Albert’s political education began in earnest at the hands of
some of the most eminent men in Belgium, and he gave proof of exceptional intellectual mettle. A Belgian government minister gave him and his brother lessons in contemporary politics. The princes improved their French in the classroom and in the salons. The Reverend Mr. Drury, who had once had the honor of corresponding with Lord Byron, was retained to teach them English literature. The mathematician Adolphe Quetelet, often called the father of modern statistics, shaped Prince Albert’s thinking on economic issues in crucial ways. But almost more important to both young men than the lectures and tutorials was the experience of living in Brussels, the capital city of one of the richest and most modern nations in the world. Coburg-Gotha was still an oppressive semifeudal state. Now in Brussels Albert got a taste of the democratic ideas and social patterns he might expect to meet in England.

Ernest and Albert enjoyed Belgium. When Duke Ernest wrote that he would expect to see them at home in Coburg for the Christmas holidays, Prince Albert wrote back with extreme politeness and equal firmness that it was impossible for them to leave Brussels. “Such an expedition would require five or six weeks, and our course of study would be quite disturbed by such an interruption. We told dear uncle the purport of your letter, and he said he would write to you on the subject.” And that was that. The dreamy, passive boy of the Rosenau was emerging from his father’s shadow—into his uncle’s.

The next stage in Stockmar’s grand plan was for the princes to move on to a university. There, in Prince Albert’s phrase, they would “get more wisdom.” The Wettin elders in Saxony and Thuringia were apoplectic just thinking of the incendiary notions the Coburg princes would pick up at a university. Even Stockmar found it difficult to find the right academic environment for his two prize pupils. Berlin, Stockmar informed King Leopold, was inadvisable mainly because “a certain dissoluteness is as epidemic in Berlin as the influenza.” Conservative, autocratic Vienna was equally out of the question. In the end, Stockmar chose the University of Bonn, though it too was conservative by Belgian standards. The princes Ernest and Albert, together with the faithful Florschütz and the increasingly irritating Wiechmann, took up modest lodgings in April 1837 and began studying law.

Prince Albert did only two semesters at Bonn, but his eighteen months as a student prince were probably the most congenial of his life. He was not radicalized in either his political or religious views, but he loved the work, attended lectures conscientiously, and experienced a “rage for reading.” He and Ernest became friends with several other young aristocrats from families
close to their own: the Grand Duke of Weimar, Prince William of Löwenstein-Wertheim, Count Erbach, and the new, young Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. As Prince Albert wrote to his friend Prince William in October 1838, some months after leaving Bonn, “I believe that the pleasant days which we spent together [at the university], partly in useful occupations, partly in cheerful intercourse, will ever appear to me as the happiest of my life. In spite of our unrestrained intimacy
[Ungenirheit]
and our many practical jokes, the utmost harmony always existed between us. How pleasant were our winter concerts—our theatrical attempts—our walks to the Venusberg—the swimming-school—the fencing ground-! I dare not think back upon all those things.”

Albert still lived under the careful eye of his tutor and governor, who sent regular reports on him to King Leopold, Baron Stockmar, and Duke Ernest. The reports were laudatory and reassuring. Unlike the typical student, Prince Albert had a profound distaste for drinking, whoring, and fighting. When not studying, he played the organ in the local cathedral, composed music, took long walks in the company of friends, played with his beautiful greyhound Eos, swam in the river, fenced in competitions (careful not to scar his handsome face), sang lieder, and engaged in long discussions of philosophy and law. Thanks to Uncle Leopold, he also had a little money to spend at last and bought his first pieces of art: sketches by Dürer and Van Dyck, the beginning of a notable collection. Singing drinking songs with his aristocratic friends, doing wickedly accurate imitations of Wiechmann and his professors, and drawing lively caricatures were the full extent of the wild oats Albert is known to have sowed in these eighteen months of (comparative) freedom.

THIS IS THE CANONIC
portrait of Albert the Chaste drawn by Queen Victoria in her account of her husband’s early years. Faced with the mass of evidence the Queen presents, with her certainty that she was the only woman with whom Prince Albert ever had sexual relations, and his well-documented scorn for the female sex and discomfort in mixed society, a number of historians over the years have hinted that the prince was homosexual.

They insinuate that, given wholly into the care of a lonely, frustrated young man when he was very young, Albert developed an “unnatural attachment” to the tutor with whom he and his sexually precocious brother shared a tiny attic bedroom. As a student, his homosexual tendencies could
flower. Bonn in the early nineteenth century was not notorious for its male prostitutes like Berlin, but intense male friendships were as common at the university there as at Oxford and Cambridge. While his brother followed in their father’s brothel-hopping footsteps, Albert led a blissful social life with young men who, like himself, did not need female society to have a good time.