We Two: Victoria and Albert (40 page)

There could be no king or queen without a court, and a regular part of a monarch’s time must be devoted to court functions. This the Queen and Prince Albert were quite clear about. The essential function of courtiers was to confirm by their own lofty social status the supreme status of their
master or mistress. The essential satisfaction of courtiers was to shine in the sovereign’s reflected glory. Each year the calendar of events at the Court of St. James’s, as the court of the ruling British monarch is called in the language of diplomats and royal officials, was fixed in advance. To levees, where the only woman present was the Queen, ambassadors, foreign dignitaries, dukes, country squires, and government officials were ceremonially admitted. At the so-called “drawing-rooms” at the palace, debutantes were escorted by their female sponsors to curtsy to the Queen or her representative and thus enter society officially State banquets were given for visiting dignitaries.

People came to these stiflingly formal events to be seen, to see friends, perhaps to do official business, but above all to come close to the Queen. If Her Majesty addressed a remark to them, they were gratified. If she was not there, they grumbled. If they knew her husband would be representing her, most were dissatisfied and one or two stayed away, declining to kiss the hand of a mere Prince of Coburg. Such abstentions never went unnoticed. Court events were reported in careful detail in the court circular, since the people who mattered wanted to know who attended.

A small group of courtiers composed the household, and their duty and privilege was to be close to the Queen and her family. This group was selected by Her Majesty and paid by the Lord Chamberlain’s office to attend the Queen and the prince from the moment they came down to breakfast to the moment they retired to their private suites at night, every day of the year. Even on their wedding night, court etiquette did not permit Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to be alone.

The traditional qualifications to become a member of the household were high birth and superb connections, but in so powerful and rich a country as England, the household by the nineteenth century attracted mainly a genteelly impoverished subset of the nobility. Younger sons like Lieutenant Seymour, widows in distress like Lady Lyttelton, and girls with more ambition than opportunity like Mary Bulteel went into the family business of waiting at court, rather as other Britons might go into plumbing or haberdashery. Though it was considered indelicate for them to say so, they needed a royal salary and free accommodation to keep up with their kin and educate their children.

Both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert saw the court as a fact of life, the price of royal privilege. The young Victoria had not been brought up at court, and in the first three years of her reign, she was thrilled to be always the center of attention and free to pick the members of her household. The young Queen assumed that, like all her royal predecessors, she would
choose her friends and companions from the ranks of England’s high aristocracy. She enjoyed paying country house visits and surrounding herself with young and beautiful people. But from the outset, Victoria was wary of the aristocratic attendants who surrounded her all day. She knew that their interests and her own only partly coincided, and she was always careful to keep her own counsel.

Court gossip, the young Queen quickly discovered, was a perennially irksome problem. Everything the royal family did was monitored, parsed, and, all too often, reported. Royal gossip was a rare commodity that courtiers peddled at London dinners and country house weekends, and that the popular press was increasingly eager to pick up. Lord Frederick Paget, for example, whose family had enjoyed great favor and privilege in the first years of Victoria’s reign, was deputed by the Queen to go to Germany as part of Prince Albert’s escort from Coburg. When scurrilous (and accurate) reports appeared in the English press about the prince’s paltry outfit and his fear of the sea, Lord Frederick was identified as the anonymous source and ceased to be welcome at court. Learning her lesson, Queen Victoria kept the great aristocratic families at arm’s length. Never in fifty-three years of reign did she have a male favorite like Queen Elizabeth I’s Earl of Essex. Never did she allow a wellborn woman to have power over her as Sarah, first Duchess of Marlborough, did over Queen Anne. After Albert’s death, she chose male favorites of humble birth who owed everything to her: the Scot John Brown and the Indian Abdul Karim.

If Victoria was wary of courtiers as a group but was fond of selected ladies and gentlemen in attendance, Albert regarded the English court as a whole with black distrust. As a boy at his father’s small provincial court, Albert was already a square peg in a round hole, a quiet, bookish prig in an aristocratic society dedicated to protocol, political intrigue, financial misappropriation, adultery, and gossip. As a teenager, the prince was quickly worn down by the social whirl at the French and German courts he visited. At the same time, simply because, as the son of a duke, he received such lavish praise at home and had privileged access to court life all over Europe, Albert came to feel a great sense of superiority. In Brussels and at the University of Bonn, he was encouraged to see himself as the cream of the German intelligentsia as well as the German aristocracy. Winning the hand of the Queen of England more than confirmed Albert’s high idea of his own worth. As his brother, Ernest, would later remark, Albert “was contemptuous of mankind in general.”

The prince, not without reason, viewed Germany as the cultural center of the world. Like most other Germans, he had little admiration, if great
envy, of the mercantile might of Great Britain. Furthermore, Albert had been primed by his uncle and Stockmar to regard his future wife’s court as a larger, richer, more powerful version of the court of Coburg—in other words, a pack of jackals in heat. Hence, even before his marriage, the prince envisaged a sweeping reform of the Court of St. James’s and of the royal household. For a man destined to spend his adult life in a foreign country, he had a toxic combination of arrogance and xenophobia.

ON HIS ARRIVAL
In England, Prince Albert was received warmly and courteously by courtiers and commoners alike, but his egotism received a painful reality check once the wedding was over. He had expected to attack England’s manifest defects from a position of strength but found himself at once on the defensive. The English were at least as chauvinist as the Germans, and they had international power to back their sense of national superiority. As the painful negotiations over the royal marriage proved, almost no one in England except its queen found the younger son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to be remarkable.

In his first year in England, Albert met noblemen at court and in the country whose amiable politeness masked a boundless scorn. What kind of man was beholden to his wife for his status and his fortune, they seemed to ask? Women at court were inclined to like the prince at first because he was handsome, but they soon turned hostile when he proved insensible to their charms. The prince’s skills and talents all too often told against him. A superior musician, talented painter, art connoisseur, and botanist, a man with a boundless appetite for facts and figures, Albert was met with barely concealed yawns and sneers in English society. To the average milord, the prince’s philosophical approach to problems was futile, his love of nature sentimental, his interest in science and technology incomprehensible, and his command of information pedantic.

Faced with this painful initiation into English social life, the twenty-year-old Prince Albert proved unequal to the task of smiling at the bad hand fate had dealt him, to use his own expression. He found Englishmen to be dissipated in town, and stupid, boring, and uncultured in the country. That so many of them had incomes far exceeding his measly thirty thousand from the civil list, and lived in homes that made Buckingham Palace look like a modern maisonette only made matters worse.

The prince could not hide the fact that the country house weekends he attended with the Queen were purgatory for him. Sensing his displeasure, the people who were presented to him on these occasions in their turn
found the Queen’s new husband less than charming. Not only did the prince have a German accent, he also had no small talk. His handshake was stiff and curt, his coat oddly cut, and he was obsessive about protocol even at times when it was customary for royal gentlemen to relax with members of their entourage. Unlike most men his age, in Germany as in Britain, Albert did not care to get drunk or eat large meals, and he did not smoke. He was good at billiards and cards, but he refused to partake in the high-stakes gambling that had been the chief diversion at court in the previous two reigns. It was obvious to all that the prince was ready to bolt when an amateur soprano of noble birth sat down at the piano.

NEITHER PRINCE ALBERT
nor the English aristocracy had any interest in letting the general public know how strained relations were between them. Unexpectedly, hunting was where the animosity became most apparent. On the foxhunting field, the English aristocrat’s passions ran too high for loyal silence, and the prince’s reluctance to run with the hounds was news. Odd reports appeared in the press questioning the prince’s sportsmanship and thus the English identity he had ceremonially assumed in 1839. His love of the European battue, where animals were rounded up for mass slaughter, was considered a sign of his secret allegiance to England’s enemies.

The furor over hunting was far from inevitable. When he arrived in England, Prince Albert was a superb all-around athlete. He hiked, he fenced, he swam, he skated, he played ice hockey. Above all, he was a fearless rider and a superb shot, capable of taking out a hundred grouse or hare in a single day. He surely anticipated that these skills would make him friends among the English sporting set. In fact, in December 1843, staying at Belvoir, home to one of England’s most famous packs, the prince won the admiration of the foxhunting fraternity by keeping up with the hounds while experienced riders were taking falls all around him.

This well-publicized exploit could have been the beginning of Albert’s rapprochement with the English country set, but it was an isolated experiment. For this the Queen was partly to blame. Riding to hounds was considered too dangerous for Victoria, even before she began to have children, and she turned sulky when Albert went off after the fox without her. To placate his wife, the prince agreed to go out only occasionally, on his home territory with the Windsor pack.

Albert could certainly have got around his wife’s objections if, to his methodical mind, chasing a pack of hounds across country at the risk of life and limb had made any sense. But it did not. So much time spent, so much
damage to the crops, for one fox, if the hounds managed to catch him! And foxhunters scorned the creature comforts. A hot lunch was crucial to the prince’s well-being, but English sportsmen never stopped for more than a cold buffet under a tent. Thus it was easy for Albert to indulge Victoria and hunt only on his own turf and his own terms.

Unfortunately, the prince failed to grasp the symbolic importance of foxhunting to the English. For him, as for most European aristocrats, the number of animals killed was the key to a good day’s hunting. When a French count or an Austrian baron went out with his guns and his loader, he expected that at the end of the day, regardless of his level of skill, he would have a pile of corpses to display to his admiring retainers and womenfolk. To a remarkable extent, a highborn man’s reputation and self-esteem hinged on how many deer, boar, rabbits, ducks, geese, quail, partridge, pheasants, sparrows, or whatever he killed in a day. To ensure that the numbers were impressive, the European upper classes perfected the battue.

At first, the creatures on a lord’s estate were treated with tender, loving care. Nests were protected, chicks were hand raised, pregnant does were cherished like favorite daughters; stags could feed to their hearts’ delight on a farmer’s crops. Then the hunting season arrived, and in a meadow below the forest, a large canvas enclosure was set up by the lord’s servants. At the center of the enclosure was a sturdy chest-high barrier behind which the hunters and their loaders would stand in safety. In a shady area, chairs were placed so that ladies could watch the sport at ease. Then beaters drove the game down to the meadow and into the enclosure. There the hunters waited, ready to shoot at point-blank range as the terrified animals ran to and fro, trying in vain to escape. For a more moderate day’s sport, hundreds of birds were caught, crammed into baskets, and then released in a dazed flurry.