We Two: Victoria and Albert (36 page)

Far more fatefully the prince also arrived unannounced in the nursery one day and discovered Baroness Lehzen seated with the royal baby in her lap. This was the kind of lèse-majesté that Prince Albert would not countenance in anyone and found unforgivable in Lehzen. Even the wet nurses were instructed always to breast-feed standing up, as a sign of respect to their august charges. According to the prince’s rules, servants did not rock the royal babies in their arms or cuddle them. Nursery personnel carried
the little princes and princesses around or held their hands only until they were capable of walking alone.

Queen Victoria was slow to regain her health and spirits after the birth of her second child, so after Christmas Prince Albert took her to their uncle’s house at Claremont for rest and privacy. On their return, the royal couple were horrified to discover that little Vicky, fourteen months old, was pale, gaunt, and feverish. Vicky had been unwell since the fall. She resisted weaning, found it difficult to digest solid food, and was dosed by the Queen’s doctor, Sir James Clark, with such toxic medications as calomel, a product loaded with mercury, and laudanum, a liquid opiate. Alarmed when the child went thin and listless, Clark fed her cream, butter, and mutton broth, which she promptly threw up.

Any pediatrician today would have connected Vicky’s illness with the advent of a little brother. The child’s decline coincided with the final months of her mother’s pregnancy, when the Queen was unwell and anxious about the childbirth ordeal ahead and Prince Albert was busy and worried. Vicky, as all observed, was an exceptionally sensitive and precocious infant, and she sensed something important and dangerous in the air. When she was first taken to see her newborn brother, sleeping in the crib that had only recently been her own, she howled in distress. The Christmas festivities were dominated by celebrations for the birth of the new heir to the throne, and Vicky found that she was no longer the center of attention and everyone’s pet. When both parents went away to Claremont without her, Vicky was far too little and far too upset to understand, and she expressed her feelings in the only ways open to her. Not eating was a sure way to attract attention and care, and her health plummeted.

But instead of understanding their tiny daughter’s distress and giving her the attention she craved, the Queen and the prince had a series of blazing rows over who was responsible for the child’s illness. Prince Albert was quite clear that he bore none of the blame. When Vicky was born, the prince was disappointed that she was not a boy, but he soon came to adore her. She was unusually pretty, lively, precocious, and affectionate, the very image of Albert himself as an infant. Like called to like, and there sprang up a special rapport between father and eldest child. Thus when Albert saw little Vicky so ill, he was heart-stricken. The deaths of the baby princesses born to Queen Adelaide and King William IV were much on Prince Albert’s mind, and he feared his darling Pussy was dying of consumption. Furious with indignation and fear, Prince Albert blamed his wife, Baroness Lehzen, and the nursery personnel they had hired for killing his child.

When Albert attacked her for what her chosen staff had done to their
child, Victoria was extremely hurt and defended herself with passion. She too found baby Vicky delightful and, though she refused to breast-feed her, gave her as much love and attention as the busy royal schedule permitted. She too was extremely distressed to see the child so sick. She did not believe that she or Lehzen had neglected Vicky. Victoria raged that Albert had a distorted view of her relationship with Lehzen. She accused the prince of envy and ambition. After two attempts to explain her feelings, the Queen became so angry that she told Albert she wished she had never married.

Prince Albert
with Vicky
,
his eldest child

Albert walked away, certain of being in the right and furious at being treated like a schoolboy. He holed up in his private apartments and for several days refused even to speak to his wife. Both husband and wife appealed by letter to Baron Stockmar for support and advice. Victoria, full of contrition, begged the baron to use his influence with Albert. Certain of Stock-mar’s sympathy and understanding, Albert narrated the scenes he had had with Victoria in detail, which is how we come to know about them. As his coup de grâce, the prince sent Stockmar a note that he had written for his wife and which he authorized Stockmar to give to Victoria when she seemed ready to surrender. The note read: “Dr. Clark has mismanaged the child and poisoned her with calomel and you have starved her. I shall have nothing more to do with it; take the child away and do as you like and if she dies you will have it on your conscience.”

The effect of this missive was decisive. Victoria burst into tears, capitulated, and repented her sins. Albert had been unhappy and was now mortally offended. She could no longer imagine a life without him. It was up to her to do whatever was necessary to regain his love and make him happy.

As in most violent quarrels between people who love and need each other, there was fault on both sides on this occasion. Albert was a devoted father, quite right to keep a close eye on Dr. Clark. He was right to argue that calomel is a terrible thing to give a sick child. Victoria’s choice of nursery staff had not been inspired. She was a busy woman, unenthusiastic about bearing children, and she spent less time in the nursery than her husband did.

But Victoria was also right to be upset when her husband criticized her management of the nursery and accused her of killing their child from neglect. She was right to accuse her husband of being ambitious and irrationally jealous of Baroness Lehzen. The prince was using Vicky’s illness to assert his control over the nursery and thus over the lives of his children from babyhood. Having increasingly surrendered the business of state to her husband, Victoria was now being asked to give up even her authority in the nursery. In fact, from this date the Queen distanced herself emotionally from the nursery and never gave her younger children the love and admiration she had given to Vicky.

The letters exchanged among Victoria, Albert, and Stockmar about the illness of the Princess Royal in early 1842 are precious evidence of the way Albert and Victoria struggled for dominance. According to Albert’s brother, this was not the only occasion when the Queen pursued her husband along the corridors and hammered at his door, begging him to come talk things through. On one occasion, Victoria reportedly stalked out of her husband’s room in rage, returned penitent some time later to find the door locked, and knocked at the door. “Who is there?” asked the prince. “The Queen of England.” No response. Another knock. “Who is there?” “Your wife, Albert.” The door was unlocked. In the end, Victoria was always the one to give in, beg pardon, and swear to be a better little wife in the future. Albert’s cool temperament, logical arguments, and fixed resolve proved far more effective in their battles than her fits of passion.

In the spring of 1842, husband and wife were once more in each other’s arms, happily reconciled. An intelligent and responsible new governess, Lady Sarah Lyttelton, was hired to the satisfaction of both parents, and the little Princess Royal thrived once more. The Queen still did not abandon her old friend Baroness Lehzen without a struggle. She begged her husband to see Lehzen as she actually was, a perhaps limited but capable woman who
was selflessly devoted to the royal mistress she had helped through very difficult days and who deserved to live out her life near her darling. But Albert was adamant. The mere sight of Lehzen in a corridor was anathema to him. He prided himself on being a fair master, but he had no scruples about securing Lehzen’s dismissal. She was a servant who had dared to rise above her place. She was personally abhorrent to him. She had to go.

In September 1842 Baroness Lehzen set off for Germany in a new carriage presented to her by the Queen, valiantly claiming that she was no longer needed and so preferred to return to her native land. Victoria could not face saying good-bye in person, but she gave her former governess a handsome pension of eight hundred pounds a year. Over the next years, the two women kept up a regular correspondence and had two private meetings when the Queen was on visits to Germany. The last time Queen Victoria saw her “dearest Daisy,” Louise Lehzen was standing on a station platform near her German home watching the train bearing the Queen and the prince go by, and waving her handkerchief. The train did not stop. Louise Lehzen continued to write to Queen Victoria, but at some point her letters became unintelligible, and in 1870 she died.

THE EXILE OF LEHZEN
confirmed the ascendancy of Baron Stockmar over the royal couple. It also showed the Machiavellian side of Stockmar’s nature.

Baron Christian Stockmar had been influential in the life of Queen Victoria ever since she was eight months old. He attended the deathbed of her father, the Duke of Kent, and ensured that the duke’s will supported the interests of his master, (the then) Prince Leopold, and the Coburg family. After 1838 Stockmar also played a key role in Prince Albert’s life, and when the prince became engaged to Victoria, he insisted that Stockmar come with him to England. From 1840 until 1857, the baron served as the prince’s political mentor and occasional agent. When apart, the two men corresponded regularly. It is not too much to say that, after the deaths in 1850 of George Anson, Prince Albert’s first private secretary, and of Sir Robert Peel, Christian Stockmar was the prince’s only friend.

Stockmar was in England for at least six months of almost every year, and he enjoyed a unique and privileged position in the royal household. The baron had his own rooms reserved for him at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Prince Albert dashed in to see his old friend almost every day for long conversations, and, as the royal children got older, they dropped in on Stockmar too, treating him like a surrogate grandfather. Stockmar came and went as he pleased, and without warning. When he left England, he was
always followed by urgent letters from his royal English patrons begging to know when he would return. Renowned for his ferocious dyspepsia and delicate state of health, Stockmar was the only man seated at the Queen’s dinner table who was permitted to wear long trousers instead of the knee breeches of court evening dress. He alone got up from table and ambled off to his own rooms before the Queen arose and released her guests. Stockmar’s position attracted a great deal of attention, and by the 1850s he had become a legendary figure in England and on the Continent.

Christian Friedrich Stockmar prided himself, not unjustly, on speaking his mind to the powerful. His extant letters to Prince Albert show clearly that he never hesitated to criticize and reprimand his royal masters. Even his enemies agreed that he was a man who could not be bribed, who kept to the shadows in all his dealings with royalty, and who asked for few material rewards. His expenses, it is true, were paid out of the civil list, either by King Leopold or by Queen Victoria, but when he finally retired to Coburg, he was not a rich man. The German title of baron accorded to him first in 1821 was the minimal qualification for attendance at court.

In their private letters and in their public statements, both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are effusive in their expressions of gratitude for all Baron Stockmar did for them and for their children, and this praise is not undeserved. His memoirs reveal him to be wise and humane, a dedicated public servant. This passage from one of his last letters gives the flavor of the man:

But for all his philosophical memoranda, retiring manners, and caustic tongue, Stockmar was a man of fierce ambition. He was aware of having unusual ability, he took risks, and he enjoyed early success. He wanted his place in history and consciously took on the role of éminence grise, first to King Leopold and then to Prince Albert. Like the famous royal counselors of seventeenth-century France, the Cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu, he had his share of ruthlessness and guile.