We Two: Victoria and Albert (32 page)

Though the first months of the marriage were delightful for Victoria, they left Albert deeply dispirited. The prince arrived in his new wife’s country prepared to find fault, and he did not have to look far. Court life was as little to his taste as ever, the polluted air around Buckingham Palace gave him constant sore throats, and English food turned his stomach. Winters in England were much less extreme than in Germany, and his father had trained Albert to endure cold without complaint, but the dank winter chill that prevailed inside his wife’s palaces seeped into the prince’s bones. Why
on earth did the English prefer fireplaces to stoves when most of the fireplace heat went up the chimney?

The frost on the inside windowpanes equaled the frosty welcome Albert received at court. He came to England convinced that Englishmen in general were inferior to Germans because they cared only about money and were indifferent to art, music, and philosophy. As he saw it, the English of the higher classes were either stupid and superficial—their heads crammed full of silly jokes, hunting anecdotes, and remarks on the weather—or else cynical and immoral. Either way, they were unworthy of his regard. Unsurprisingly, sensing the contempt and disapproval that lay beneath the prince’s glacial politeness, the great men of England did not warm to the Queen’s new husband.

Germany for Albert was already taking on a misty glow. When not actually in their company or answering their eternal begging letters, the prince was able to forget that his own father and brother were at least as promiscuous as certain English dukes, and spent a great deal of their time thinking about money, or, in their case, the lack of it.

As for the women who were introduced to the prince, very willing to be charmed by such a handsome young man, they too soon turned cold and censorious. A hint of flirtatiousness, a shadow of immorality were anathema to the prince, and he had nothing to say even to the virtuous and intelligent ladies of his wife’s household. Queen Victoria was conscious of her own plainness, was surrounded by beautiful women, and had been warned by her friend Lord Melbourne that all husbands had a roving eye, yet she never felt the need to be jealous. Albert’s fidelity to her was adamantine. No other woman made any impression on him.

Isolated, homesick, a fish out of water, Albert was very unhappy. His wife, while professing to idolize him, treated him more like a gigolo than a husband. He was allowed to blot her signature on state documents, and that was all. In a letter to his university friend Löwenstein, Albert complained that he was not “master in the house.” Fears he had entertained in Germany about Victoria’s stubborn nature and small mind revived. Albert confided in Stockmar that he found Victoria “naturally a fine character, but warped by wrong upbringing.”

Albert showed his discontent. He retired to bed early and sometimes fell asleep after dinner parties or even at the theater. When his wife chatted and joked with her former friends, he looked sour. When she accepted an invitation to some great man’s house, he made it clear that neither the company nor the entertainment provided was to his taste. Music was one of the passions that Victoria and Albert shared, and the Queen made much of her
husband’s superb musical talents. Yet when she asked the famous singers Giovanni Battista Rubini and Luigi Lablache to come give a private concert, Albert snoozed. As one of Queen Victoria’s ladies reported maliciously on this occasion: “Cousin Albert looked beautiful, and slept as quietly as usual, sitting by Lady Normanby”—incidentally one of the most celebrated beauties at court.

For months after his move to England, Albert remained as pale and ailing as on his first days. Parting with his father after the wedding caused him an agony of tears, even though Duke Ernest had made unpleasant advances to Victoria’s ladies and was already being a thorough nuisance about money. Brother Ernest’s sexual exploits and need for cash if anything outpaced his ducal father’s, but when he also left England, the Queen found her husband weeping in the corridor and deaf to her comfort. How could she understand his feelings, he said, when her own childhood had been so unhappy? The myth of Albert’s idyllic childhood and the close relationship he had enjoyed with his father was being born.

BUT ALBERT’S UNHAPPINESS
did not last long. Change was in the offing, and the balance of power between husband and wife was about to shift dramatically. Queen Victoria missed her second period after the wedding. When it became clear that she was pregnant, she was distraught. She had long understood that it would someday be her duty to give an heir to England, but she felt no desire to advance that day. The prospect of bearing a child was a nightmare all the more dreadful since the physical facts of pregnancy and labor had been scrupulously hidden from her.

Victoria was aware that labor was an ordeal and that women not infrequently died as a result of giving birth. This was bad enough, but she also observed that even a healthy and uneventful pregnancy was an immense bore. In the mid-nineteenth century, pregnant women of the leisure classes were enjoined to curtail their physical activities, to disappear discreetly from society once their condition could no longer be concealed by corsetry and to spend the last weeks before delivery under virtual house arrest. Victoria’s favorite daytime pastimes since her teenage years had been galloping across country and dancing until dawn. These activities would not be countenanced for a queen bearing the hope of the nation.

Victoria made no secret of the fact that she was unhappy to be pregnant. She said so even to German relatives she knew would be overjoyed by the news. She wrote forthrightly to Albert’s stepgrandmother, Duchess Caroline of Gotha: “I must say that I could not be more unhappy. I am really
upset about it and it is spoiling my happiness. I have always hated the idea and I prayed God night and day to be left free for at least six months, but my prayers have not been answered and I am really most unhappy. I cannot understand how anyone can wish for such a thing, especially at the beginning of a marriage.” To Uncle Leopold she was even more brutally frank:
“The thing
is odious and if all one’s plagues are rewarded only by a nasty girl, I shall drown it, I think. I
will
know nothing else but a boy. I never will have a girl.”

Albert’s reaction to the pregnancy could not have been more different. His hopes and ambitions in England hinged on his siring at least one heir to the throne, and he fancied himself as father to a large brood of adoring children, stamped with his own image. Encouraged to take the long view by Leopold and Stockmar, he already envisaged an English Saxe-Coburg dynasty that, with all Great Britain’s power and wealth behind it, could spread over Europe and change the course of history.

Until the late summer, Victoria persisted in living as much as possible as she had done before her marriage. Lord Melbourne continued to see almost as much of her during the day as her husband did. The Queen gave the prince no access to state papers and saw her ministers alone. In the evenings she preferred to play parlor games rather than discuss the issues of the day. She feared, she said, to open up subjects that might provoke disagreement with her dearest husband. What she meant was that the affairs of state were her business alone.

By the third trimester of Victoria’s first pregnancy, things took a decided upswing for Albert. Stockmar was back in England, to the prince’s delight and relief, and the two began to plan political and marital strategy in detail. Stockmar was able to negotiate with parliament that, should Victoria die after giving birth to an heir, Prince Albert would become sole regent, without a council. Victoria’s uncles were furious at being passed over, but for the first time Albert had his way.

In June when Victoria was to give the speech from the throne opening parliament, Albert rode by her side to the House and took a throne next to her own in the chamber. By August the prince was permitted to help his wife get through the paperwork that landed on her desk every day. Impressed by her husband’s talent for bureaucracy, Victoria ordered that he be given his own key to her dispatch box and made him a Privy Councillor. Albert wrote to Stockmar, who had returned to his own family in Coburg for a time: “I have come to be extremely pleased with Victoria during the last few months. She has only twice had the sulks … altogether she puts more confidence in me daily.” When Victoria was no longer able to appear in public,
the prince began to represent her at official events, and he gave his first speech in English, to the Society for the Abolition of Slavery.

As the Queen’s confinement approached, the death of Princess Charlotte one generation earlier was on the minds of everyone at the palace and indeed in the nation at large. Stockmar, who had observed that tragedy so closely, was in a good position to advise Albert. Clear on his strategies, happy in his duties, and filled with new energy, the prince made it a priority to monitor his wife’s physical condition and plan the lying-in. This birth was too important to be left in the hands of the women or of Sir James Clark, the Queen’s personal physician. Victoria adored Clark, but he had played a disastrous part in the Lady Flora Hastings affair. Albert selected Dr. Charles Locock, a Scottish obstetrician of excellent reputation, to supervise the delivery.

Throughout the pregnancy, Albert danced attendance on Victoria, appearing at her side whenever she required him, at the sacrifice of his own leisure and sport. When Victoria went into labor around one in the morning several weeks before her due date, Albert was by her side, together with the Duchess of Kent, and one maid. Baroness Lehzen was not present during the labor. The duchess’s attendance on her daughter was the first clear sign that Albert was successfully negotiating a rapprochement between his wife and her mother, his aunt. Locock was in charge of the delivery, but three other doctors sat in the next room with the door open. One further room away, Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other dignitaries waited and listened. Albert stayed with his wife until she vigorously pushed out a large, perfectly formed baby girl at two in the afternoon of November 21.

Locock, who thereafter became jocularly known in Britain as “the Great Deliverer,” had some very uncomplimentary things to say in private about the Queen’s fat, barrel-shaped body and her unembarrassed references to her condition. But Locock was competent and lucky enough to have a strong, healthy parturient, so all was well for mother, baby, and doctor. What Locock thought of the prince’s attendance at the bedside is not known. It was extremely rare for a nineteenth-century man of any class to be present at the birth of his children. Albert was not just present but actively involved. By putting aside social convention and taking on the modern role of childbirth coach, Prince Albert won his wife’s gratitude.

It was an immense relief that Queen Victoria had negotiated the treacherous shoals of pregnancy and childbirth so successfully. All the same, the royal couple was very disappointed that their child was only a girl. When Locock informed the Queen that she had given birth to a princess, Victoria stalwartly answered, “Never mind, the next will be a prince.” Albert wrote
enigmatically to his brother, Ernest, “Albert, father of a daughter, you will laugh at me.” Lord Clarendon, writing to Lord Granville in Paris, was more pragmatic: “Both the Queen and Prince were much disappointed at not having a son. I believe because they thought it would be a disappointment to the country, but what the country cares about is to have one life more, whether male or female, interposed between the succession and the King of Hanover [Victoria’s senior uncle, Ernest of Cumberland].”

King Leopold wrote to congratulate his niece on the birth of little Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa and to wish that this should be the first of many such happy events. The Queen was sharply taken aback: “I think you will see with me the great inconvenience a large family would be to us all, and particularly to the country, independent of the hardness and inconvenience to myself; men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this
very often
.” But within two months of arising from her weeks of enforced bed rest and being carried to and from her sofa by her devoted husband, Victoria was pregnant again, and on November 9, 1841, she gave birth to a healthy son.

The second pregnancy was more resented than the first, the labor longer and more painful. “My sufferings were really very severe,” wrote the Queen, “and I don’t know what I should have done but for the great comfort and support my beloved Albert was to me.” While the nation rapturously celebrated the birth of a Prince of Wales, the first since the birth of George IV in 1762, Victoria sank into postpartum depression. She felt trapped. The world’s congratulations, her family’s joy, her husband’s obvious delight, and the close bond of affection and care that had grown up between them over the past twenty-one months could not make up for her loss of the pleasures, energy, and freedom that pregnancy drained out of her life. For the first two years of her reign, she had been free, galloping her horse across Windsor Great Park, ready to take on the world. Now she seemed doomed to be hideous, swollen, and aching, chained to a sofa, hidden from the public view like a thing of shame, wheeled out every day for exercise like a dog. And since Albert delighted in his new role as father, hours that she and Albert had spent alone together now had to be devoted to their growing family.