We Two: Victoria and Albert (45 page)

Once he took charge, Albert managed to close off the terrace and limit public access. Encouraged, he visualized razing much of the town of Windsor, leaving the castle in splendid isolation. He had plans and estimates
drawn up and submitted them to the appropriate government ministry. However, the notion of pulling down the town of Windsor was too much even for the prince’s friends in government, so the plans had to be shelved. Albert was forced to accept that Windsor Castle could never be his perfect retreat.

In contrast to her husband, Victoria initially had nothing against London. She had been born and bred in Kensington, and she moved into Buckingham Palace in the heart of the city as soon as she could. Though she had fond memories of her childhood visits to the seaside and to Claremont, her uncle Leopold’s country home, the young Queen’s idea of getting away was a three-day honeymoon at Windsor, and she did not like living at the castle much. It brought back traumatic childhood memories of her mother and her uncles quarreling. Above all, Windsor was, as the Queen once plaintively remarked,
a castle
, and no one expected to be comfortable in a castle.

It took barely two years of marriage for Victoria to accept that in London her husband could be neither healthy nor happy. Overnight, or so it seemed, she changed from town mouse to country mouse. The Queen now craved seclusion and clean air and preferred a pony cart on a country lane to a smart horse in Rotten Row, the exclusive circuit for riders in Hyde Park.

Calm, beauty, and unpolluted skies could, of course, be found on the large country estates of dozens of English noblemen who would have been delighted to entertain the royal couple. Sadly, the prince did not care to visit, and the Queen no longer went anywhere without him. One solution to the prince’s dilemma was to borrow a castle, and in 1842 he did just that. The Duke of Wellington, now in high favor, obligingly offered to move into an inn for a few weeks and allow the royal family to use Walmer Castle, the residence near Dover he used in his capacity of warden of the Cinque Ports. In late November, the Queen and the prince set off for the Kentish coast, bringing with them their two infants, a large staff, and a set of household goods worthy of a renaissance monarch on a progress through the Loire valley.

November is hardly a propitious month for a seaside holiday on the south coast of Great Britain, and even with all their things on hand, Victoria and her family were not entirely comfortable. Walmer was old, and even the Queen found it drafty All the same, she and Albert enjoyed the intimacy of life away from London, and came back feeling closer to each other and more relaxed. They’d had a family holiday and were keen to do it again.

The family holiday was a Victorian social institution, made possible for queen and costermonger alike by the swift development of the railway system. It was no accident that, returning from Walmer Castle, the royal party embarked on the brand-new line between Dover and London’s Charing
Cross. Around 1840, British private companies pushed out spurs of train track at a pace that matched the growing speed of the trains themselves. In 1830 a man who could afford to change horses every hour might travel perhaps fifteen miles an hour by post chaise. This was a lot faster than had been possible fifty years earlier and followed improvements in road engineering and coach design. But by the mid-1840s, the new express trains were able to cover a dizzying hundred miles in two hours, and they did not get tired or fear the dark. Suddenly London and Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol, even Glasgow and Dover, became hours instead of days apart.

The railways were a revolution that cut across class boundaries. The rich, who had always traveled, took quickly to trains, which offered both speed and privacy, and they found railway stock an excellent investment. But with three classes of carriage and the odd holiday special, even modest families could afford railway tickets. London barrow boys could have a day by the sea at Southend. Colliers from the Yorkshire pits could fill their lungs with the bracing air of Blackpool. Shopkeepers could pray for sun during their precious week of bed and breakfast in Margate. Artistic types could take a rundown cottage in the Cotswolds and paint hay wains like Constable. At Great Uncle Charles’s vicarage in the Lake District, the London literati could breathe the heady air of Wordsworth and Coleridge. For a long, leisured summer, Auntie Ethel on the Norfolk Broads would have her hands full with wind-burned young sailor nephews and nieces tracking mud through the house.

Before Victoria, monarchs did not take family holidays. A royal progress was certainly not a vacation. George III retired to the coast a few times to try to regain his health, and George IV liked Brighton, but both kings spent most of their lives in or near London. Government depended on constant and rapid communication between monarch and ministers, and from Roman times, the English government was centered exclusively in the capital city. Wherever they were, the kings held court every day and were on view to the public as soon as they walked out the door.

But the railways, together with the telegraph, made it possible for Queen Victoria to conduct her royal business far from the capital. This was a bureaucratic revolution upon which Prince Albert, in his constant search for privacy and fresh air, was swift to capitalize. The Queen was suddenly free to travel abroad when parliament was not in session. She and her husband could buy a private estate where it suited them, a place where their family could withdraw, protected by broad acres and high walls. They could invite whom they chose and needed no permissions from Woods and Forests to mend a pane of glass. The ministers of the Crown would come as visitors,
not masters. Above all, what Prince Albert called “the inquisitive and often impudent people” would have no right of access.

Their new preference for private family holidays further alienated the royal couple from the landed aristocracy one of whose functions in the past had been to offer regular splendid entertainments to royalty. However, it brought them closer to the hearts of the 99.9 percent of the population whom the Duke of Devonshire would never have invited to meet the Queen at Chatsworth. By reaching over the heads of the elite, Victoria and Albert connected with the middle and lower classes, whose social and political power, though still small, was growing. Nothing advanced the cause of monarchy in the British Isles better than snapshots of the royal family on holiday, as Victoria and Albert soon came to realize.

The German painter Franz Winterhalter in his oil portraits made both the Queen and the prince majestic in ermine and diamonds, tailcoat and silk breeches. The
Illustrated London News
produced fairy-tale drawings that enhanced the royal faces and elongated their figures. Such adroit flattery was startlingly absent from the new photographic images that were eventually reproduced and distributed to the general public. Here was Victoria, tiny and plain in shawl and sunbonnet, presiding over a picture-perfect family that would eventually include four little Alberts in kilts and five miniature Victorias in lampshade hats. Here was the prince, chubby and balding, in tweeds and boots ready for healthy outdoor fun or a planning session with the estate manager. The photos were amateurish, but their message was simple and powerful: Look, they are just like us!

THE ROYAL HOLIDAY
idyll was many years in the making. It began with a state visit to southern Scotland in 1842, followed by two private Scottish holidays. It continued with the Queen’s purchase of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight off the coast of Kent in 1844. It reached its culmination with the prince’s acquisition of Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands in the late 1840s. For Victoria, Osborne was paradise, and the times she spent there with Albert were bathed in a golden glow. At Balmoral Albert became the laird, a feudal dream come true. It was the only place he felt fully alive.

Victoria and Albert first went to Scotland in 1842. After bearing two children within twelve months, the Queen was up for an adventure, and the poetry and fiction of Sir Walter Scott she had read since girlhood convinced her that Scotland was romantic. The prince too liked the idea of Scotland, but Her Majesty’s ministers thought she was slightly mad to want to go.
Apart from a brief visit by George IV in 1822, no British monarch had been north of the border since the mid-seventeenth century.

Scotland, in the opinion of Sir Robert Peel and his colleagues, was far too dangerous for the Queen. For centuries, the country had been identified with the house of Stuart and had fiercely resisted the establishment of Victoria’s great-great-great-grandfather George I on the throne of Great Britain. Etched with blood into the Scottish psyche was the brutal defeat at Culloden in 1746 of “Bonnie” Prince Charlie and his mainly Scottish army by the British under the Duke of Cumberland, Victoria’s great-uncle. Worse yet, the terrible economic downturn of the 1840s was hitting Scotland hard, and there had been a good deal of civil unrest in the big towns and the industrial areas. What if the Scots proved to be better shots than the English and the Queen was assassinated as she drove through the steep and narrow streets of Edinburgh? Victoria laughed off all these fears and insisted on going.

The royal party proceeded by sea, sailing up the east coast of Britain to Grafton, the port of Edinburgh, on the yacht
Royal George
, accompanied by several other vessels loaded with servants and baggage. Victoria imagined a romantic excursion, “alone” on her yacht, sitting on deck sketching picturesque seascapes, but things did not turn out quite like that. The
Royal George
was a clumsy old tub that had to be towed much of the way, and all her passengers were violently ill. Victoria was normally a good sailor, but on this trip she was nauseous and spent much of the time belowdecks. She was, it turned out, in the first weeks of a third pregnancy. She had little privacy. A flotilla of boats put out from each of the various ports along the way, and telescopes were trained eagerly on the decks of the royal yacht for a glimpse of the Queen. Victoria could not wait to get off the yacht and gave no warning of her imminent arrival at Grafton, to the annoyance of her Scottish welcoming committee. However, once on dry land, the Queen recovered her spirits, and Edinburgh gave her and her husband a rapturous welcome. People were charmed by Victoria’s plain dress and friendly, unassuming ways.

This first excursion north of the border followed the medieval pattern of the royal progress. The Queen and the prince moved almost every day from one great nobleman’s house to another and were constantly in society. Even when they drove across barren hills, they were accompanied by gentlemen riding next to the carriage, and in each village a crowd gathered. All of this was familiar to Victoria. Her routes in town and out were always lined with people anxious to see her.

For Prince Albert, the crowds and constant social demands, however gratifying to his pride, were onerous. But once Edinburgh was left behind
and he could walk and hunt, he too cheered up. Scotland reminded him of his native Thuringia—mountainous, sparsely populated, untouched by the industrial revolution—and he found much in common with the Scots.

After that first trip in 1842, Queen Victoria was happy to get home to Windsor and consign the
Royal George
to the scrap heap. However, Scotland had a clear attraction for the royal couple, and they returned with their older children for private vacations in 1844 and 1847. Now they ventured farther north, touring the Highlands by carriage and boat, kept much more to themselves, and enjoyed solitude. Even days of torrential rain could not dampen their enthusiasm for Scottish holidays.

Albert took at once to the lowland Scots he met on his first visit. Like the Coburgers and Gothaners, they were strong in their Lutheran-Calvinist Protestant tradition, but they were also rich in the philosophical, economic, scientific, and legal achievements of the Scottish enlightenment. But it was in the Highlands that Albert felt truly at home. In his dealings with both lairds and gillies, Albert found that mixture of deference and intimacy that he remembered with nostalgia from his native Coburg. The rural Highland Scots, gallant in defeat, proud in their threadbare gentility, had an undying tradition of loyalty to their liege lord. They were willing, it proved, to honor the Stuart in Queen Victoria and forget that she was the butcher of Culloden’s great-niece. With these Scots Prince Albert found common cause in a scorn of England, where money, not blood and brains and bravery, made the man. He had a romantic vision of the Highlander as virile and independent, virtuous yet passionate, just like himself.

The lonely spaces of Scotland fed Albert’s soul. The hunting was hard but exhilarating, and he came home happy, hungry, and ready for bed. Though regularly wet to the skin, he had few colds. A contented man, Albert was more easy and natural with the people he met than he had ever been at the great English country houses. To his Scottish hosts, he felt able to unveil his talent for mimicry and invite their laughter with his comic imitations of Bonn university professors.