We Two: Victoria and Albert (44 page)

The dressers were subject to all of Prince Albert’s moral strictures, but in any case they had too little free time to stray far. An afternoon off was a rare treat, possible only if the Queen was sure to be away and gave her explicit permission. The wardrobe maids were on duty even at night. One of them was required to sleep on the makeshift bed in the dressing room next to the Queen’s bedroom. As Victoria interestingly remarked once to her daughter Vicky, she was so nervous at night that she always had a maid on call next door, “even when Papa is with me.”

The dresser on duty’s worst headache was probably not the endless dressmaking and mending and folding but the planning. She had to have the details of the Queen’s schedule well in advance in order to ensure that every item of apparel was ready to be put on in a hurry. Royal birthdays had to be carefully noted. If one fell while the Queen was in mourning, colored clothing would be laid out in place of the black for that one day. When the Queen went out of town, as she came to do more and more, everything she could possibly need had to be thought through in advance, checked with Her Majesty in person, collected, organized, packed, and then on arrival unpacked, pressed, and so on. Never one to waste time, Victoria became a whirlwind of activity when she was abroad, and her dressers were on their feet for most of the day and night.

Unsurprisingly, Victoria’s dressers were, for the most part, strong, young women, and they left her service after only a few years to marry or return to their native country. One exception was Marianne Skerrett, who entered the Queen’s service in 1837 when she was about forty and stayed until 1854, rising to be her head dresser. When Baroness Lehzen left England in 1843, Marianne Skerrett seems to have taken over many of her duties with the Queen and in some measure at least replaced her in the Queen’s heart. Skerrett, as she was known in the royal household, was a woman of humble birth and modest education, but, like her royal mistress, she could read and write fluently in French and German as well as English. As head dresser, Skerrett dealt with tradesmen, paid bills, answered begging letters, wrote for recommendations of other dressers and maids, and sometimes acted as the Queen’s amanuensis in corresponding with her family. Queen Victoria described Skerrett as “a person of immense literary knowledge and sound understanding, of the greatest discretion and straightforwardness.” Skerrett spoke her mind, and her power was respected.

Queen Victoria was a demanding employer, but people were eager to work for her. Domestic servants in the nineteenth century, especially women, were generally overworked and underpaid, and the Queen paid good wages: 200 pounds a year for the first dresser, 120 for the second, 100 for the third, and 80 for each of the wardrobe maids. In 1843 Charlotte Brontë was happy to get 16 pounds a year, plus room and board, as a teacher in Brussels, and her hours were also long and her holidays few. On the other hand, a senior lady-in-waiting got 500 pounds for her three months in the household.

Unlike many employers, the Queen could be counted upon to pay the wages every quarter, and the perquisites enjoyed by her personal servants were substantial. Food and lodging were free, and the dressers had decent rooms and ate very well. Within the whole household of servants in the royal palaces, a rigid hierarchy prevailed, and below stairs the Queen’s private servants were high in the order of precedence. At Christmas and on their birthdays, the dressers received thoughtful and substantial gifts from their royal employers such as a piece of clothing, a bolt of fabric, an elaborate etui, or a gold pin with a small pearl. The royal children, who treated the dressers like aunties, made them little things or bought trinkets out of their pocket money. If a dresser fell ill, she was given the best care that a royal doctor could provide and allowed ample time to convalesce. On leaving the royal service, a dresser received a decent pension, which, again, the Queen could be counted on to pay each quarter.

The publication in 1994 of a set of letters written by Frieda Arnold, one of Queen Victoria’s dressers, for the first time allowed a glimpse of life behind the scenes at the palace. Arnold was born into a middle-class German family, but after her father died, she was obliged to train as a seamstress and to enter service. Arnold was intelligent and well read despite her limited formal education, and she devoted her few hours of leisure to drawing and painting. Like Prince Albert, the dresser was desperately homesick for Germany and appalled by the dark, sooty atmosphere of London. However, she was interested in everything she saw in her new life and paints vivid word pictures of Windsor, Osborne, and Balmoral.

Even in these wholly private communications that the Arnold family kept to itself for over a century, Frieda scrupulously obeyed Prince Albert’s rules and maintained a vigilant silence about the lives of her royal employers. Though she and her fellow maids lived closer to the Queen and the prince than anyone else, though the wardrobe maids actually spent the night in the room next to the one where the Queen and the prince slept, Arnold is discretion personified. She recounts one innocuous little remark
Queen Victoria addressed to her in Paris. She says how delighted she was when, one Christmas, the Queen gave her “a circular box of colours … a roll-up case of pencils … and a block book.” But she describes no scenes between the Queen and her husband and other members of the royal family even though their intimate conversations were generally conducted in German, her native language. Arnold does not even say much about her work, except that it took all of her energy and intelligence.

Mary Ponsonby hated the fact that the Queen and the prince were distant toward members of the household like herself but close to their personal staff. “You felt that they [the Queen and the prince] were pretty nearly indifferent as to which maid of honour, lady-in-waiting, or equerry did the work, they were on more natural terms with the servants,” wrote Ponsonby. “One result was that their standard of taste ran the risk of being vulgarized.” Mary Ponsonby prided herself on her enlightened social views, but she was still a tremendous snob. As the documented examples of Marianne Skerrett and Frieda Arnold prove, the Queen’s dressers were cleverer and better educated than many of the maids of honor.

The Queen enjoyed the company of her dressers because they were like her—intelligent, good at their jobs, easy to talk to, unpretentious. They were cultured but not intellectual. She could relax with them. She could talk family problems with them. And she could trust them.

Perhaps the most famous diarist of the mid-Victorian era was Lord Charles Greville. He is said to have known many important people, witnessed many important events, and listened at many important keyholes. Historians still quote the racy anecdotes he recorded about the royal family. Frieda Arnold did not need to listen at keyholes. She helped the Queen of England out of her evening bath and into her thin silk nightdress. She heard the morning dialogue of the Queen and the prince and brought their children in to see them. She had the key to the drawer where the Queen’s journal was locked up every day. But unlike Lord Charles, Arnold, even posthumously, would not stoop to betray the Queen’s trust. She had nobility of soul, not blood, and she kept silent. This too is what is meant by Victorian.

VICTORIA’S MAIDS
were important to her but not even Skerrett mattered to her as much as the valet Isaac Cart did to Albert. When the prince came to England, the Queen allowed him to bring with him from Germany only his greyhound Eos, his librarian Dr. Schenk, and his valet, Cart. Eos died, much mourned, of old age. Schenk soon returned to Germany. Cart remained
in the prince’s service until August 1858, when he died. The Queen and the prince were in Europe at the time. “While I was dressing,” wrote the Queen in her journal, “Albert came in, quite pale, with a telegram saying ‘My poor Cart is dead, he died quite suddenly’ … I turn quite sick now writing it … I burst into tears. All day long the tears would rush every moment to my eyes … Cart was invaluable, well educated, thoroughly trustworthy, devoted to the Prince … He was the only link my loved one had about him which connected him with his childhood … I cannot think of my dear husband without Cart … we had to choke our grief down all day.”

Reportedly, Isaac Cart was a Swiss who in April 1829 became valet to both Coburg princes. Albert’s tutor Florshütz calls him “a faithful, attentive, and obedient servant” who “deserved the confidence reposed in him.” In October 1838, when Albert and his brother, Ernest, were threatened by a fire in a nearby room in the Ehrenburg Palace, Cart, according to Albert’s report, “lifted a marble table with incredible strength and threw it against the bookcase enveloped in flames, causing it to fall down,” thus helping to subdue the fire. In August 1840, Albert’s first year in England, the prince wrote to his brother: “My birthday passed by, but how different from what it used to be. Cart, with his embarrassed congratulations in the morning, when he always begins to laugh, and good old Eos, were the only well known faces.” In old age, Cart supervised the work of the prince’s staff of valets, many of them German. Frieda Arnold mentions in her letters that Cart was very kind and helpful to her as she adjusted to her new life in England.

This is about all the published information available about Isaac Cart. Unlike Arnold, he is not known to have left any letters or reminiscences. The valet is an almost invisible figure in Albert’s life, yet no one knew the prince so well; not his father or his brother, not even his wife. Was Cart a surrogate father? Surely. Was he a friend? Hardly But he was indispensable, even though other men could be trained to do his work. For the prince, Cart’s death was like a small coronary infarct, soon overcome but leaving a small area of the heart dead.

…

UEEN VICTORIA AND PRINCE ALBERT WERE OBLIGED TO SPEND MONTHS
of every year at their official London residence, Buckingham Palace, and at Windsor Castle, some thirty miles away. However, from the moment he arrived, Prince Albert literally could not stomach London. The city’s morals seemed to him as filthy as its air. The prince was a forward-thinking man, dedicated to promoting technology, commerce, and industry, but he had grown up among the green hills of Thuringia. The fertile, smoky monster that was London brought the costs of industrialization too close to him for comfort. As he wrote to his stepgrandmother in Gotha early in his marriage: “I felt as if in paradise in this fine fresh air [at Windsor], instead of the dense smoke of London. The thick heavy atmosphere there quite weighs me down. The town is also so large that without a long ride or walk you have no chance of getting out of it. Besides this, wherever I show myself, I am still followed by hundreds of people.”

Windsor Castle generally suited Albert much better than Buckingham Palace. Not only did its age and magnificence make it the proper setting for a great dynasty, but its huge estate afforded excellent sporting opportunities. But the castle had one important drawback in the prince’s eyes. It was situated in the heart of the busy little town to which the castle owed its name. Ancient public footpaths crossed the royal estates, and when members of the royal family walked out on the castle terrace to take the air, total strangers could stare at them.