We Two: Victoria and Albert (28 page)

He was still the same Albert, indifferent to ladies, eager for solid instruction, and with a slightly mean sense of humor. In Florence at a ball, the Duke of Tuscany remarked of Albert to the wife of the British ambassador, “Here is a prince we may be proud of. The beautiful young lady waits for him to dance, while he is busy listening to the man of letters.” Granted a private audience with Pope Gregory XVI, Prince Albert found it necessary to correct His Holiness on the Greeks’ cultural debt to the Etruscans. When the official who had brought the Coburg party to the Vatican grabbed the pope’s
foot to kiss and was kicked in the mouth, Albert had a mad fit of the giggles and was shooed out of the room.

In February Albert and Stockmar were joined by a young English nobleman, Lieutenant Francis Seymour. This gentleman’s job was to speak English with the prince, offer some youthful (but not dissipated) companionship, and report back to Queen Victoria. Seymour, who went on to a successful career in the English army and at Victoria’s court as General Sir Francis Seymour, later wrote a description of the prince in Florence. Seymour claimed that Albert led an exemplary life, ate simply, drank only water, toured ruins and art galleries, took long country walks, enjoyed discussions over tea with Baron Stockmar, when that gentleman was well enough to come down, and was asleep by nine. “[Prince Albert] had been accustomed to such early hours in his own country that he had great difficulty in keeping himself awake when obliged to sit up late,” wrote Seymour.

Albert himself paints a rather different picture in a letter he wrote at the time to his friend Löwenstein. “I have lately thrown myself into the whirl of society. I have danced, dined, supped, paid compliments, have been introduced to people, and had people introduced to me; I have spoken French and English—exhausted all remarks about the weather—have played the amiable—and, in short, have made ‘bonne mine à mauvais jeu’ [pretended to look pleased when dealt a bad hand]. You know my
passion
for such things, and must therefore admire my strength of character that I have never excused myself—never returned home till five in the morning—that I have emptied the carnival cup to the dregs.” In the same bitter vein, Prince Albert wrote to Florschütz that he was under orders to “go into society, learn the ways of the world and vitiate my culture with fashionable accomplishments. And I will do it.”

Stockmar, meanwhile, was supplying the Queen, King Leopold, and Duke Ernest with his acerbic reports on the prince’s progress. Stockmar praised the prince’s talents, enjoyed his company, but bemoaned his lack of interest in politics and his poor stamina. He reported that the prince was not “empressé” (enthusiastic and attentive) in his dealings with women and lacked “les belles manières.” Stockmar attributed this fault to Albert’s motherless childhood and the lack of cultured, intelligent women in his life. He opined that the prince would “always have more success with men,” damning with faint praise.

In the summer, Albert returned to Coburg and, as he lamented to his friend Löwenstein, was obliged to dawdle around exchanging compliments before he could get away for a fortnight with his brother in Dresden. “Then
I must go to a place that I hate mortally,” he wrote, “that charming Carlsbad, where papa is taking the waters, and much wishes me to be with him. I hope this campaign will be over by the middle of August.” Carlsbad was a spa, one of the holiday resorts notorious for sexual dalliance. The visit may have been Duke Ernest’s own contribution to the “campaign” to win Victoria’s hand, a final attempt to prepare his son Albert for the reproductive duties that lay before him, and he may even have succeeded. More probably Albert, following the dictates of his uncle and of Stockmar as well as his own inclinations, managed to resist to the bitter end the “corrupt moral atmosphere” his father generated.

WITHIN THE YEAR
, Albert would marry—Ernest was his best man—and take up life in England. At the time of the wedding, Ernest disgraced himself by his sexual exploits in London, causing his brother much embarrassment at the English court. Even worse, Ernest in early 1840 was infected with venereal disease and was causing grave anxiety in the family. This fact is established conclusively by a passage from a letter Albert wrote to Ernest from Windsor Castle on January 1, 1841:

Albert’s solemn strictures made no impression on Ernest. Perhaps they never had. Ernest was determined to marry and, like his father before him, deludedly thought his marital prospects were brilliant. Duke Ernest I, Prince Ernest’s father, tried to marry him to a Russian grand duchess, but
this plan came to nothing. While Ernest was at Windsor at the time of his brother’s engagement, Queen Victoria floated the beguiling idea that he should marry her first cousin, Princess Augusta of Cambridge. This glittering prospect also came to nothing. Perhaps Augusta, an opinionated young woman, was not interested in Ernest Coburg. Perhaps Albert decided that having Ernest reside in England with an English wife would not be good for his own marriage or for the precious Coburg family reputation.

Obliged to fall back on a second-tier German princess, Ernest married Alexandrine, daughter of the Grand Duke of Baden on May 3, 1842. Prince Albert did not travel to Coburg for his brother’s wedding. He had already forbidden his brother to come to England during his wife’s second pregnancy in 1841, as Victoria had been seriously upset by her brother-in-law’s conduct at the time of her wedding. Prince Ernest was not invited to Windsor to attend the christening of his first nephew, the Prince of Wales.

Prince Albert’s gloomy premonitions about his brother’s marital prospects proved right on the mark. Alexandrine of Baden was not yet twenty-two, in excellent health, and certainly a virgin when she married, but she never had children and seems to have feared infertility early in her marriage. That she was infected by her husband’s disease and made sterile seems all too likely. In 1844 Alexandrine officially adopted her husband’s nephew Alfred, acknowledging him thereby as the heir presumptive to the duchy of Coburg. Ernest himself was not sterile, and throughout his life he apparently pursued women with the kind of zeal he devoted to shooting animals and birds. He had a succession of
maitresses en litre
at the court of Coburg, whom Alexandrine humbly countenanced, and he managed to sire at least three illegitimate children.

Royal biographers have not been anxious to establish exactly when and where Ernest Coburg was infected with venereal disease. This was especially true for Queen Victoria even though early in her marriage she discovered her brother-in-law was a cruel and licentious man. However, the question of Ernest Coburg’s venereal disease has an important bearing on our understanding of the young Albert. In the family correspondence of 1838 through 1840 and the Queen’s diary, there is a series of casual references to Ernest being seriously ill and causing concern—in Brussels, in Coburg, at Windsor when he famously had “jaundice” during the period of his brother’s engagement. The venereal disease could have been contracted as early as 1837 when, to the merriment of Albert, Ernest was incurring the wrath of General Wiechmann in Brussels and Bonn. But if Ernest contracted venereal disease when he and Albert were students, Albert must have known, since according to Albert’s own letters and diaries from the period,
he and Ernest were more like identical twins than brothers, sharing lessons, lectures, activities, and friends.

One part of Albert’s golden legend, as narrated and carefully documented by his widow, is that he had an ascendancy over his older brother from an early age. Men who knew the brothers in youth, like King Leopold, testified for the Queen that by force of will, character, and intellect, Albert took the lead in all the brothers’ affairs. Putting together Queen Victoria’s account of her husband’s early years and the facts now known about her brother-in-law’s adult life, can we really believe that as soon as Ernest got to Dresden on December 1, 1838, he stopped being a replica of his exemplary younger brother and metamorphosed into a carbon copy of their vain, philandering, egotistic, improvident father? Either Albert’s purity or his authority must suffer if it were proved that Ernest, his alter ego, the Jonathan to his David, the Damon to his Pythias, fell into vice as early as Brussels or Bonn, while he looked on in impotent acquiescence.

The relationship between Albert and Ernest before 1840 is a historical enigma. It suited both to have it so. We shall probably never know the truth.

…

ICTORIA AND ALBERT’S ENGAGEMENT AT WINDSOR IN OCTOBER 1839
was followed by a few weeks of bliss. Only the prince’s father and stepgrandmother, King Leopold, Baron Stockmar, and Lord Melbourne were told, and Victoria was especially insistent that her mother should not know. Albert’s brother, Ernest, the official chaperone, conveniently went down with “jaundice,” allowing the young couple to spend quite a lot of time alone. They did all the things the Queen liked best. They rode out together, sang and played duets, looked at albums of etchings side by side, and played with their dogs. Victoria adored Albert’s greyhound Eos, who followed them everywhere and was so perfectly tame. She was overjoyed to find that Albert had become a superb dancer. In private, in her fiancé’s arms and with Ernest at the piano, she at last tasted the delights of waltzing.