We Two: Victoria and Albert (3 page)

THE TWO CARRIAGES
sent to carry Victoria’s cousins to Windsor were finally reaching their destination. As the castle’s magnificent gray crenellated bulk loomed ahead in the dusk, Prince Albert looked anxiously across at his brother. Ernest had felt distinctly unwell even before the rigors of the English Channel. He would have to make great efforts this evening to stay up late and be agreeable. Even worse, in the hullabaloo of disembarking onto the quay at Dover, the groggy Coburgers had lost track of the baggage containing their evening clothes. This meant that they would be unable to take dinner with the Queen. What bad luck to arrive not only late but without the fashionable new outfits Uncle Leopold had paid for!

Albert refused to panic. He had given a great deal of thought to this English visit, and his course of action was clear. For years he had been encouraged to imagine himself consort to England’s queen. King Leopold and his chief adviser, Baron Christian Stockmar, had dedicated Albert’s late adolescence to the task of winning Victoria. They filled his mind with the information and wisdom that would allow him to become Victoria’s principal adviser—King of England in fact if not in name. After much walking, riding, swimming, and fencing, Albert’s body had grown strong and supple. In the salons of Paris, Brussels, and Rome, his manners had been refined and his drawing room talents developed. All these worldly graces shone now, without for a moment detracting from that moral purity that the Queen of England required. Conscientiously, Albert had transformed himself into the image of Victoria’s desire.

Marriage to a queen was still by far Albert’s best career option. His plan was to become king consort in England, as his cousin Ferdinand was in Portugal. This position would offer a suitably broad arena for the political and diplomatic talents he felt within him. Beneath his mask of calm and compliance, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was fiercely ambitious and competitive.

But Albert was not in the least in love with Victoria and in general had no regard for the female sex. He remembered his English cousin with little affection, and of late he had come to disapprove of her. He felt that the Queen of England’s young head had been turned by the adulation that greeted her on her accession. She liked late nights and dancing rather more than was proper. According to the grim doctrine that Stockmar had inculcated in him, Albert viewed marriage to Victoria less as a pleasure in store than as a burden to bear out of duty to his family, his caste, and his beloved Germany. If, in the end, the Queen of England decided not to marry him, his pride would be hurt, not his heart.

In the meantime, Victoria’s shilly-shallying was making him the laughingstock of European courts, and this was not to be borne any longer. The time had come to take the active role at last and deliver an ultimatum. As he gazed up at mighty Windsor, potent symbol of all he stood to gain or lose, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was ready.

AT SEVEN-THIRTY
, hearing that the Coburg princes had finally been sighted, Victoria walked to the top of the Sovereign’s Staircase. She composed herself for their entrance below. In the Queen’s childhood, her mother had adjured her to grow tall like her father and his royal brothers, but Victoria had been unable to comply. Her supporters claimed she was five feet one inch; her detractors gave her a bare four ten. In the gutter press, she was known as “Little Vic,” which rankled with her. Fortunately, horses, thrones, and sweeping staircases were standard issue for a queen, and Victoria made full use of them. Perched on high, she could look down on her subjects, as a reigning monarch should.

In the covered courtyard below, two young men appeared, both tall and well made, but the younger incomparably the more handsome. Prince Albert, when Victoria had last seen him at sixteen, was a pretty boy. Now he had grown into manhood. His shoulders were broad, his waist slim, his legs thick with muscle. Chestnut hair curled about his face, and he had a thin, elegant mustache. In his stained traveling costume, Albert was remarkable; in full dress uniform at the ball tomorrow, he would be any woman’s idea of Prince Charming. Uncle Leopold was quite right: Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was the handsomest young prince in all Europe.

Prince Albert looked up. The Queen gazed into his large, shining blue eyes; eyes astonishingly like her own. Followed by his brother, Albert ran up the stairs, knelt gracefully to kiss Victoria’s hand as queen and then kissed her on the cheek as cousins should. Albert, at five feet eight, seemed very
tall to Victoria, and suddenly she found it delightful to look up into a man’s eyes, clasp his hand, and feel his whiskers brush her face.

Victoria was a little flustered. The thought of spending the evening without these young visitors was not to be borne. The delays on the journey, the storm at sea, the late hour, the lost baggage—all was at once explained and forgiven. Let her cousins come in after dinner and spend the evening with her and her party.
En famille
, what did it matter if, just this once, they appeared in their traveling dress?

As the Queen recorded in her journal and again in a letter to her uncle Leopold that very evening, “Albert is beautiful!”

Three days later, on October 14, Victoria proposed marriage to her cousin Albert. He accepted. In the first week of February 1840, they were married. With their union, the Victorian age had begun.

OTHER ENGLISH MONARCHS
have lent their names to an age or a style— Elizabethan, Jacobean, Carolingian, Georgian—but “Victorian” has a special currency even today. It is an intensely affective word, since it relates to the things closest to all of us, to the way we run our sex lives and organize our families.

By 1914 the term
Victorian
had come to connote all that was stale, respectable, hypocritical, xenophobic, and oppressive for writers such as Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. It became fashionable to argue that the Victorians abroad had been jingoistic tyrants, and smug Philistines at home. A Victorian father was the stern patriarch who cast his daughter out on the street if she took a lover. A Victorian household was a lethal mix of parsimony and show, with a master, a mistress, and servants who knew their place. Victorian religion was a bah-humbug affair, narrow minded, censorious, and sectarian. The ugliness of Victorian art, architecture, and handicrafts was glaringly apparent.

When I was a student at Cambridge University in the 1960s, the received wisdom was still pretty much that the sun had long set over the Victorian empire—and thank goodness! But as the century wound down, the winds of opinion and taste began to shift. A new generation of scholars like Peter Gay and novelists such as A. S. Byatt rediscovered the pulsing vitality of Victorian life, unearthed a fascinating cast of characters, and built bridges between past and present. Young people in England queued up for exhibitions of the Pre-Raphaelites at the Victoria and Albert Museum, gladly voted funds for the renovation of that old monstrosity St. Pancras Station, and redecorated their houses with Liberty prints, lace antimacassars, William
Morris wallpaper, and aspidistras, aka rubber plants. And more fundamentally, by the 1990s, in the United States perhaps even more than in Britain, a lament had arisen over the loss of Victorian values: faith, thrift, discipline, patriotism, responsibility, stability, innovation, entrepreneurship, sexual continence, marital fidelity, parental control, social cohesion.

To tease out the many meanings of Victorian, there is no better way than to reexamine the relationship of the most influential and famous married couple of the nineteenth century. Unique yet representative, inhabiting a bubble of royal privilege yet tuned to the Zeitgeist, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert express many of the complexities and contradictions of the age.

Her marriage had been an idyll and a moral example to the nation, or so at least the Queen claimed after her husband’s untimely death. As a giddy, willful girl of eighteen, she, Victoria, had found herself on the throne of Great Britain and completely out of her depth. Then Albert came into her life, a modern Galahad, pure of thought, mighty in deed. As husband and consort, he had solved the problems she faced as queen and made her happier than any other woman before or since. Confronted by Albert’s God-given superiority, she had willingly given obeisance as a good wife should.

This was what the widowed Queen told the world, but it was at best a half-truth. To name but a few of the fictions, Victoria had emerged strong and enterprising from a very difficult childhood. Within days of her accession, England’s power brokers discovered to their astonishment that this young girl understood the business of monarchy better than any of her male ancestors. Albert, when Victoria married him, was hardly a fount of wisdom, just an overprotected youth fatally confident of his abilities to rule a kingdom. The Queen retreated into domesticity a year or so after her wedding not because she wanted to but because society demanded it, because she had lost her closest allies, because she could not allow her marriage to fail, and because, much against her will, she was pregnant with her second child and saw only more pregnancies in her future. Albert cast Victoria in the role of “kleines Fräuchen,” but it was never a good fit for the woman who stood at the very top of Europe’s steep social pyramid and always walked several steps ahead of her husband when they emerged each day from their bedroom.

Like so many famous and achieving women of the past, Queen Victoria felt the need to stress frailty, failure, and luck, not strength, competence, and ambition, when writing about herself. However, her fairy-tale account of living happily ever after with Prince Charming was also exceptionally
well calculated to serve her most cherished goal: to secure the future of the English monarchy. By playing into the prejudices and desires of her contemporaries, Queen Victoria kept her crown at a time when other kings were losing theirs. Today her great-great-granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II still rides through London every year in a golden coach to open parliament and give the speech from the throne.

The English in the nineteenth century
liked
to hear of female weakness and submission. They had seen Europe shaken to its foundations by a series of revolutions, and male hegemony was one ancient certainty that the vast majority of the population, male and female, was ready to defend at all costs. In 1840, the year that Victoria and Albert were married, no woman in the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland could vote, be elected to parliament or any other public office, attend the university, or enter a profession. If a woman married, her property, her earnings, her children, and her body legally belonged to her husband, to do with as he willed. The world of business was more hostile to women in 1840 than it had been in 1740 or 1640, and though many women were forced to work, a bare handful could make a living wage.

In its overt misogyny, in its passionate assertion of male superiority in its religious, political, legal, cultural, and religious institutions, Great Britain was typical of its time, but it had one strange constitutional quirk. It was a monarchy, and if an established dynasty failed to produce a legitimate male heir to the throne, England was prepared to allow a woman to reign and inherit the powers and wealth of her royal male predecessors. There was one unwritten but absolute proviso, however. The fabulous promiscuity of a Catherine the Great of Russia was out of the question in England. A man of marked libido such as King Charles II could be accepted, even popular, with the English nation, but, at a minimum, a queen regnant must be a virgin like the great Elizabeth, or a faithful spouse like Mary Tudor, Anne Stuart, and Mary Stuart. Optimally, a queen, if queen there must be, would, unlike her four predecessors, bear sons.

No one in Europe understood the constitutional anomalies and sexual imperatives of the English monarchy better than that inordinately ambitious German family the Saxe-Coburgs. If their plan to marry the heiress of England to one of her Saxe-Coburg cousins were to succeed, not only must the Queen’s virginity be unchallenged but her husband must come to the marriage chaste. Any sexual taint acquired in youth might endanger his reproductive success. Thus Albert, not his more mature and manly brother and cousins, was the young man finally designated by his family to win the
hand of the Queen of England. Albert was handsome and intelligent and ambitious. He had always done what his elders told him to do, and, above all, he had never shown a flicker of interest in women.