We Two: Victoria and Albert (41 page)

Given these feudal methods, a nobleman could rack up astonishing statistics, all carefully noted in his game book to impress peers and posterity. Prince Albert’s father, who died at the age of forty-eight, claimed in his lifetime to have killed 75,186 birds and beasts. Albert’s brother, who traveled as far as Ethiopia in his search for wild game and had better guns, could not quite match their father’s statistics. He claimed in his fifty-six years of sport to have killed 3,764 red deer, 2,792 wild boar, 44,916 hares, and 13,202 pheasants.

In England, things were different, since England had an empire but few large, wild animals at home. Africa and India offered a range of big game that made the European sportsman salivate, and safaris were cheap and
reasonably safe and comfortable. An English peer who wished to impress his neighbors needed an Indian tiger skin on his hearth or an African wildebeest on the walls of his game room as well as a fat game book. But within the British Isles, the difficulty, discomfort, and danger of the hunt came to matter as much as the count.

The English national sport was foxhunting, in which men spent passionate hours on horseback, often drenched to the skin, jumping gates and hedges. Foxhunting was not a sport for sissies, but it was not exclusively a male sport. A few women hunted, seated sidesaddle in very long and tight habits that increased the difficulty and danger. In Scotland, the prey was different, but the principal was the same. Forsaking their beloved pink coats for tweeds, lairds, assisted by gillies, stalked deer over bare, rough terrain that, before telephoto lenses, set the odds in favor of the deer.

The prince’s hunting reputation took a severe blow in 1845 when he took his wife to Coburg and Gotha for the first time, and his brother, Ernest, organized a battue in his honor. When the reports of this event appeared in the English press, it was a public relations debacle for the Queen and the prince. Some doggerel from the pages of the satirical magazine
Punch
captures the scene of the battue and the English response:

Albert learned that battues were taboo in Great Britain, and he never indulged in one again.

MOCKED BY THE
London smart set, sneered at by the country squires, spied on by the press, caricatured in humorous magazines and penny dreadful broadsheets, Prince Albert took action. Once the cynical Lord Melbourne was out of the way and his new friend and political soul mate Sir Robert Peel was prime minister, Albert determined to be master of the court and the household. He carefully monitored the invitations to levees and drawing
rooms sent out by the Lord Chamberlain’s office to ensure that no unworthy persons appeared at the Court of St. James’s. He urged Victoria to do the same, and she obeyed.

The prince’s iron rule was that no persons could be admitted into the presence of the Queen if they had even the slightest blot on their characters. A girl suspected of an illicit liaison, a woman whose brutal husband divorced her, a youth falsely accused of cheating at cards, an unlucky man who fell into bankruptcy, could protest to the Lord Chamberlain or send pitiful letters to the Queen, but they were still barred from court. By 1844, the prince had set the pattern for court life that would prevail more or less unchanged until his wife’s death in 1901.

To their intense indignation, members of the English royal family were subject to Prince Albert’s new regime. The result was that, as a wife, Victoria was as alienated from her English uncles, aunts, and cousins as she had been as a girl. Partly this was the result of the uncles’ pride and intransigence. Ernest Cumberland, King of Hanover, Victoria’s eldest uncle, viewed the Saxe-Coburgs as a third-rank German dynasty, and flatly refused to walk behind Prince Albert. The king urged his brothers in England not to yield precedence. However, Prince Albert, convinced that Uncle Ernest had incited the Tory Party to heap insults on him before his marriage, was also out for revenge. On one of Ernest Cumberland’s rare visits to England for a family wedding, the king and the prince jostled for precedence, and Albert pushed the old man down some stairs. This incident appealed to Albert’s rather cruel sense of humor, and he and his wife accounted it a personal victory.

The family of Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, was also rude to the newly married Albert on various public occasions. Cambridge, like his brothers Cumberland and Sussex, was outraged when Prince Albert was appointed sole regent in the event that Queen Victoria died having left an heir to the throne. Tit for tat, the prince decided that Mary and Augusta Cambridge— large, loud, boisterous young women, admittedly, but first cousins whom the Queen had known since childhood—were quite unfit to be her friends. As for their brother George, he was not only an unprincipled rake with a string of acknowledged bastards but had also once been Victoria’s most touted and most reluctant suitor. Albert would have none of him.

Things came to a head between the two branches of the English royal family when Prince Albert learned that the Duchess of Cambridge had presented her lady-in-waiting Lady Augusta Somerset, daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, to Queen Victoria at a drawing room. The duchess had done so
specifically to clear the young lady of the charge of having borne an illegitimate child to her son, George Cambridge. The prince professed to be scandalized that such a young lady should be at court. He persuaded the Queen to turn her back on Augusta Somerset in public and refuse to speak to her. The Cambridges were furious at this slight, the whole court took the part of Lady Augusta, and the prince was obliged to back down. However, from this point on, the Cambridges came to the palace only to pay their court or for large family parties where their absence would have caused comment.

OBLIGED TO LIVE
constantly in the company of persons who represented an aristocratic elite he viewed with suspicion and hostility, Albert was especially vigilant toward the members of the household. He viewed his wife’s ladies-in-waiting and his own equerries as potential spies and traitors, not friends and confidants, and he enjoined Victoria to do the same. Even members of the Queen’s personal household were scrutinized and then minutely monitored by the prince.

Albert made it clear to equerries and maids of honor that he would regard it as treachery if, even in their private letters, they gave information to anyone about the domestic lives of their royal master and mistress. He forbade the members of the household to keep diaries during their years in waiting. Today these rules seem to be clear infringements on personal freedom, but they were apparently obeyed throughout the lifetimes of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria and, indeed, well into the twentieth century. A sense of noblesse oblige, sharpened by a fear of royal wrath, explains this loyal obedience, but a delight in exclusivity also came into play. Anything a courtier reported about the royal family in private conversations was all the more delicious and prized because it was forbidden.

Impeccable behavior was enforced even more fiercely on members of the household than on members of the court in general. The senior ladies-in-waiting were enjoined to chaperone the junior ones. Any hint of improper behavior that reached the prince’s ears would result in immediate dismissal and permanent disgrace. To ensure that there was no amorous dalliance at the court of Queen Victoria, individual members of the royal household were no longer allowed to walk the grounds of Buckingham Palace in their rare hours off duty. The young equerry Henry Ponsonby and the young maid of honor Mary Bulteel did manage to fall in love while in waiting, but they kept their relationship a close secret until they were ready to announce an engagement. They then took the Queen’s evident vexation
in good part—Victoria hated to lose people she enjoyed and were useful to her—got married very fast, and moved to Canada until Her Majesty forgave them.

As a result of the prince’s strict control, life at Queen Victoria’s court became tedious in the extreme. Imagine a regular evening party in which only a handful of those present, and those not the wittiest, are allowed to initiate conversation. The members of the household who were on duty spent hours leaning against a wall and hoping that the Queen or the prince would deign to address some comment to them. Henry Ponsonby who lived most of his adult life at Queen Victoria’s court, admitted that royal dinners were “awful.” At his first dinner with the royal family as an equerry, he waited until the fish course before daring to address the young lady seated next to him, since he suspected she was related to the Queen. Can one wonder that Queen Victoria ate very fast and Prince Albert retired to bed early?

The first month in waiting was a thrilling ordeal for a young woman who dreamed of becoming the Queen’s friend, but under the regime of Prince Albert, the thrill quickly wore off. The new maid of honor found that she was merely an extra on the royal stage, perfectly interchangeable with twenty-three other ladies. Little was required of her, the pay was excellent, the accommodation elegant, the sheets silk, the hot water for baths unlimited, but her work was wearisome. Since it was strictly forbidden ever to turn one’s back upon a member of the royal family, the key skill required of women at court was to walk gracefully backward, even when wearing a train and a headdress trimmed with ostrich feathers eighteen inches high. Since it was strictly forbidden to sit down in the presence of royalty unless expressly invited to do so, stamina was vital for the long evenings spent standing in tight corsets and high heels.

A new maid of honor was greeted with kindness by the royal family and carefully inducted by the senior ladies into the complex rituals of court life. Thereafter she barely registered on the royal consciousness unless she made a faux pas. Bored in the evening, the Queen might ask a lady for news of her family and seem fascinated by accounts of life outside the palace. Her Majesty gave excellent presents but no confidences. As for the prince, he might notice when one of his wife’s ladies played a wrong note or used the wrong case for a German preposition, but he had no interest in what she might say.

EVEN AS THEY
obeyed, the English social elite chafed at Albert’s rules and at the moral censure it implied. The High Tories, when they briefly came
into office in 1852, had a much harder time than the Whigs or the centrist Peelite Tories in coming up with lists of prospective household officials that would satisfy the prince. When presented with Prime Minister Lord Derby’s list—which included his close relative Lord Wilton, a gentleman with a checkered past—the prince was aghast. “For the Household appointments Lord Derby had submitted a list of young gentlemen of which the greater part were the Dandies and Roués of London and the Turf. I prepared a counter list of some twenty respectable Peers of property.” Nonplussed, the Earl of Derby, who firmly believed that he and his ultra-Tory supporters were the backbone of the nation, said it would be very difficult to follow the prince’s directives, it might even bring his embryonic ministry to an abrupt end, but he would try. He then referred with oblique humor to the famous remark made by Lord Melbourne twelve years earlier that the prince’s “damned morality” would ruin everything.