We Two: Victoria and Albert (27 page)

In mid-nineteenth-century Europe, both men and women of all classes moved effortlessly and without censure across a range of emotions and practices that today would be categorized as either homosexual or heterosexual. Boys and girls, men and women, habitually shared their beds with friends, relatives, and even complete strangers of their own sex. Males and females openly kissed, embraced, walked arm in arm or arm around waist, and expressed passionate love for members of their own sex without attracting adverse notice. Among aristocrats, who had the money and the leisure for advanced erotic exploration, homosexual acts were common and celebrated in a flourishing pornography industry. It is not incidental that Donatien de Sade was a marquis.

Throughout Europe, upper-class boys in exclusive schools and regiments were routinely exposed to homosexual advances. Some unfortunates were raped by masters or older boys. Some had youthful affairs without feeling guilt or anxiety. Many men who had shown a pronounced preference for sex with other men eventually married and sired children. Very, very occasionally men were hideously punished for “unnatural acts,” but overall society’s preference was to respect the privacy of the bedroom and ask no questions. As the writer and critic J. M. Coetzee has put it, people in the nineteenth century by and large “did not feel they needed to ask themselves what the amative content of intimacy [between men] might be … because their notion of intimacy did not boil down to what the men in question did with their sexual organs.”

Nonetheless, even if it is easy to document that after the age of five Albert’s intimate relationships were all with men (except for his love of his wife, the Queen), even if it is possible to argue that the young Albert could have experienced homosexual love, there is not one scrap of hard evidence that he did. This is not surprising. He was a man of great renown, major achievement, and small popularity who died tragically young and had a loyal band of friends and relatives. In the years following his death, the person who assiduously collected and lovingly savored the records of Prince Albert’s boyhood was his wife. Queen Victoria was the last person likely to uncover evidence that her husband had not slept with women because he preferred to sleep with men.

NEWS FROM ENGLAND
intruded on Prince Albert’s idyllic time in Bonn. In June 1837, William IV died and Victoria became Queen. Albert wrote her a dutiful letter of congratulations in English, to which she dutifully replied. But for the next eighteen months, Victoria gave only a cursory thought to her cousin Albert. She complained to Uncle Leopold that when Albert wrote to her, neither his English nor his French was up to par. Leopold felt it wiser not to mention Albert anymore.

Nonetheless, all Europe buzzed with reports that the Queen of England planned to marry Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. For a young man, it was demeaning to have to wait for a woman to give him the nod. Therefore, on the advice of his uncle Leopold and with the consent of Queen Victoria, who was kept abreast of every stage in her cousin’s Bildung, Albert did not go back for his summer vacation to Coburg or to Brussels. Instead, with his faithful brother, tutor, and valet in tow, he disappeared into the Alps for a long walking tour through Switzerland and then continued on for a visit to Northern Italy.

Long, strenuous walks in beautiful mountains were infinitely more to Albert’s taste than hobnobbing at the court of the French king. With his favorite companions since childhood, Albert was very happy during that summer. Even when the weather turned bad, Albert insisted on doing each stage of the journey through the mountains on foot. But he did not completely forget his duties as a Coburg prince. He compiled a scrapbook of his travels that he sent to his cousin Victoria at her request. It contained an edelweiss he had picked and a scrap of paper in Voltaire’s handwriting for his royal cousin’s increasingly famous collection of autographs.

After months away, the princes Albert and Ernest paid a cursory visit to their relatives in Coburg and Gotha. Their grandmother Caroline noticed appreciatively that dear Albert was now in superb physical shape. All the same, the grandsons spent a total of nine and one quarter hours in her house, most of them asleep in bed. Back at Bonn by the beginning of November, the princes planned to spend Christmas in Brussels but had to defer the visit until January. Prince Albert had seriously injured his knee and was unable to travel. No doubt under orders to bring his equestrian skills up to Queen Victoria’s high standards, Albert missed a jump when riding in an indoor arena and banged his leg against a wall.

By late January, however, he was once again able to take long walks, and he and his brother spent the whole of February in Brussels. As Albert explained to his grandmother, who he knew would be upset not to see him in Coburg for the holidays, going to Brussels was important for his future. The
visit would give him and Ernest “the opportunity of learning more distinctly what uncle [Leopold] thinks of the coming separation, next spring, of our [his and Ernest’s] hitherto united lives, and also of giving him, at the same time, our own views of it. That moment [of separating] is, in its saddest form, ever before me. We would, therefore, as long as time allows us, do all we can to soften its pain and to gild the pill.”

In fact, Leopold was especially anxious to explain viva voce to Prince Albert where he stood with his royal English cousin. Stockmar at the English court was reporting that Victoria was a confident and conscientious monarch. She loved her work and was deeply absorbed in her relationship with her prime minister, Lord Melbourne. She saw Melbourne every day, often several times a day, and corresponded with him constantly. She was in no hurry at all to see Albert. “The chief question,” wrote Prince Albert to his father from Brussels in February 1838, “is now as to my mode of life in the meantime [until Victoria finally made her mind up, one way or the other]. For the first half year it is settled that I should remain at Bonn. We have now got through the most difficult of our studies, and intend to turn the summer to account in learning modern languages, and reading political works. After that I am to travel in accordance with your wishes and those of my uncle, in order to learn to depend more upon myself. This plan is also most agreeable to myself, and uncle is trying to get for me as traveling companion a well-informed young Englishman—a Mr. Seymour.”

The phrase “in order to learn to depend more upon myself” is significant. Finally it seems to have dawned on Duke Ernest, King Leopold, and Baron Stockmar, all men who formed their closest relationships with men and vastly preferred male company, that Prince Albert’s “pure” life with his brother, his tutor, and bosom friends like Prince William of Löwenstein came to him a little too easily. His patterns of behavior to date were indeed an excellent preparation for monogamous married life in puritanical England. In a world where venereal disease was endemic, they boded well for his reproductive success. But they were not good training for courtship. Queen Victoria had more power and autonomy than any other woman in the world. She could not be led obediently to the altar by her family like an ordinary princess.

But Albert was far less preoccupied with Queen Victoria than with the impending separation from his brother. He was faced with the dissolution of the familiar and deeply comforting intimacy with Ernest and Florschütz that he had known since he was five years old. The prospect almost broke his heart. Only Cart would remain with him, and Cart was only his valet. As soon as the academic semester was over, Florschütz would retire after fifteen
years of selfless service. In November Prince Ernest of Coburg would move out of his brother’s shadow and begin an independent life, taking up his commission in the army of their kinsman, the king of Saxony. As Albert wrote to his friend Prince William of Löwenstein: “The separation will be frightfully painful for us. Up to this moment we have never, as long as we can recollect, been a single day away from each other. I cannot bear to think of that moment.”

As they had as boys, Prince Ernest and Prince Albert spent the late summer and fall of 1838 together in Coburg, mainly at the Rosenau. Ernest was unwell, causing his family great anxiety. Both young men were sadly conscious that things would never be the same again. As Albert wrote to Ernest on August 29, 1839: “Whatever may be in store for us, let us remain one in our feelings. We have, as you correctly say, found what others seek in vain, during all their lives: the soul of another that is able to understand one, that will suffer with one, be glad with one: one that finds the same pleasure in the same aspirations.”

In fact, they almost died together. When staying overnight at the ancient and largely unoccupied Ehrenburg Palace, Prince Albert was awakened by a strange smell. A servant had left some papers on top of a stove in a room some four doors away from the one where he, his brother, and Isaac Cart were sleeping. The old timbers and easily flammable paintings and draperies were already burning when Prince Albert got to the room. Instead of leaving as quickly as possible, he and Cart recklessly closed the windows and doors and fought the flames with jugs of water, bedding, and clothes while Ernest ran downstairs to get help. It was probably thanks to the rapid reaction of Prince Albert and Cart that the Ehrenburg Palace suffered only minor damage. On this occasion, as on many others subsequently, Prince Albert showed bravery, leadership, and presence of mind.

At last November came, and Duke Ernest and Prince Albert with due pomp accompanied Prince Ernest some way on his road to Dresden. The parting was wrenching—Albert wrote that he could barely hold back his tears before the assembled princes and princesses—and on his return home, Albert wrote to his stepgrandmother Duchess Caroline:

ALBERT WAS NOT ALLOWED
to stay at the Rosenau and mope. Within days of Ernest’s departure, he began a three-month tour that would take him all through Italy and then back into Switzerland to meet up with his father and some of his Mensdorff relatives. Albert had a new and unexpected traveling companion: Baron Stockmar. Though he dreaded cold and fatigue, Stock-mar was dispatched from England to undertake this lengthy tour in the depths of winter at the joint behest of King Leopold and of Victoria herself. The final stages in Albert’s Bildung were now at hand. No one better than Stockmar himself could prepare him for the complex and difficult new life that seemed likely to open before him.

Six months earlier, Prince Albert had loved walking through the Alps, even when it snowed. He had enjoyed his ten months in Brussels and his two semesters at Bonn. But he did not much like Italy, probably because he was unhappy and could not even say it. He felt the cold at least as sharply as Stockmar. Rome was a disappointment, and, though he appreciated Italian art, architecture, and music, he hated Italian society and the Catholic religion. “In many, many respects the country is far behind what one had expected. In the climate, in the scenery, in the study of the arts, one feels most disagreeably disappointed,” he wrote pompously to his friend Löwenstein.