We Two: Victoria and Albert (56 page)

ONE OF THE MAIN
reasons why Victoria could at times be so difficult was that she saw less and less of her husband, missed him, and minded that he did not miss her. From the beginning, she had been the lover and he the beloved. As time went on, her love and need for him only grew, while he seemed to feel her love almost as a burden.

The growing friction between husband and wife is hinted at in two of the letters the prince wrote to his wife in 1851 and 1853. They had a binding covenant between them that he would write to her at least once every day he was away from home. Thus when Albert went to Ipswich to attend a scientific meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
in July 1851, he wrote Victoria a long and newsy letter, ending on a note of teasing affection: “You will be feeling somewhat lonely and forsaken among the two and a half millions of human beings in London, and I too feel the want of only one person to give a world of life to everything around me.” But in June 1853, a brief note signed “your devoted A” ends with a plaintive little German poem. The repetition of the pronoun
du
, which is used in German between lovers, stresses intimacy, but the poem ends in reproach. “Du, du liegst mir im Herzen / Du, du liegst mir im Sinn, / Du, du machst mir viel Schmerzen, / Weisst nicht wie gut ich dir bin.” (Thou, thou liest in my heart / Thou, thou liest in my soul / Thou, thou causest me great pain / knowest not how good I am to thee.)

Part of their unwritten contract had been that, in exchange for his becoming master of all aspects of their joint life, he would guarantee her comfort and her amusement. In her mind, this meant that he and she would be together as much as possible. As Victoria once told her friend Princess Augusta of Prussia: “I only feel properly à mon aise [at ease] and quite happy when Albert is with me.” To her daughter Vicky, Queen Victoria explained that Prince Albert “meant everything to me. I had led a very unhappy life as a child—had no scope for my violent feelings of affection, had no brothers and sisters to live with—never had a father—was … not … on an at all intimate, confidential footing with my mother … and did not know what a happy domestic life was!” All this changed thanks to her husband. “Papa’s position towards me is therefore of a very peculiar character, and when he is away I feel paralysed.”

After thirteen years of marriage, the Queen and the prince still breakfasted, usually dined, and habitually slept together. They worked on documents and correspondence side by side under identical green lamps copied from Albert’s beloved old student lamp. He still prepared elaborate presents for her, planned tours and vacations for her, and arranged for special treats. He hovered over her when she was pregnant. But as the years went by, like most married men, the prince became absorbed in his business.

As his responsibilities expanded, Albert found less and less time for the shared activities Victoria looked forward to: sketching, singing, playing piano, riding out, looking at albums, playing parlor games. Traditionally in royal courts, such minor social duties would fall to a married queen’s gallant male attendants, not her husband. They fell to Albert, since he was loath to allow any man to strike up a personal relationship with his wife.

Deprived of Albert, her ideal companion, Victoria was left feeling strangely lonely and neglected in the midst of her large and busy household, especially during the months she spent in London and Windsor. At
her husband’s insistence, she had a guarded relationship with the women in attendance on her, and, in any case, she was not fond of all-female society. The light went out of her life when the prince left the palace for the day.

For Albert the social isolation his wife felt so acutely did not register. He was very busy with his books and documents. He found the serious discussion of committee meetings and the manly conversation of hunting parties far more interesting than parlor chitchat in mixed society. Dreamy and indolent as a boy, Albert had turned into a workaholic, and even when purportedly vacationing at Osborne or Balmoral, he was consumed by politics and business. Though the royal couple had no public and ceremonial duties to cope with when living on their private estates, the flow of documentation continued unabated, and there was always at least one minister in attendance. The prince spent hours catching up on his reading and his personal correspondence, and he engaged in long discussions of domestic and foreign policy issues with his male guests. Hours of his day were devoted to estate management, building projects, and local development schemes. All this left little time for his wife. No wonder Victoria was delighted if Albert agreed to let her accompany him out deerstalking.

In letters to close kinfolk like Uncle Leopold or Sister Feodora, Victoria rhapsodized over Albert’s aptitude for business, but this exaggerated praise hid resentment. She remembered a time when she had been doing the business and liking it. She remembered a time when he had been less busy and more fun. To convey just how busy the prince was during the season, she wrote:

And so on for another half page. As this list makes clear, for at least the half year when parliament was in session and the royal family was in London, the Queen and the prince had very little time together. She was unhappy about this.

Their children constituted another point of friction. The Queen’s enduring need for the prince’s love was eloquently expressed by the babies she continued to produce, but she had no strong maternal feelings. “Abstractedly, I have no tender for them [babies] till they have become a little human,” Victoria wrote in 1859 to her daughter Vicky, who was in ecstasies over her own first-born son. “An ugly baby is a very nasty object—and the prettiest is frightful when undressed—till about four months; in short as long as they have their big head and little limbs and that terrible frog-like action.”

Even as they got older, her children bored Victoria. She told Princess Augusta of Prussia in 1856 that once her eldest daughter Vicky was married, she did not expect to miss her as Augusta missed her married daughter: “With me the circumstances are quite different. I see the children much less and even here [London], where Albert is often away all day long, I find no especial pleasure or compensation in the company of the elder children. You will remember I told you this at Osborne. Usually they go out with me in the afternoon … and only exceptionally do I find the rather informal intercourse with them either agreeable or easy … I am used to carrying on my many affairs quite alone; and then I have grown up all alone, accustomed to the society of adult (and never with younger) people.”

Albert, to the contrary, reveled in the company of his children, at least once they had learned to walk and talk. With the birth of the Prince of Wales in 1841, Albert became king of the nursery, and he was a far more active and engaged parent than his wife. He enjoyed swinging a baby in his huge dinner napkin, teaching a three-year-old to turn somersaults or an eight-year-old to skate. He loved to lead an excited group of tots on shell-collecting expeditions or to take teenaged sons out on the moors. It was usually the prince who read the daily reports from governesses and tutors, corrected the smaller children’s table manners, and grilled the older ones
about what they had learned that week. Victoria generously acknowledged Albert’s talents as a father in her journal and letters. She made their father’s perfection an article of faith for her children. But the subordinate role allotted to her in home life was irksome at times. As the older children entered their teens, she wanted to have a bigger say in their upbringing.

She rather resented the hours that Albert devoted to the children when they were all on vacation. Athletic and high spirited, the children brought out the boy in Albert, and he seemed unusually carefree and happy with them. At times Victoria joined in the fun. But “romping” with the children was not easy in the bell skirts and heavy layers of petticoat that women wore at that time, and when she was pregnant the Queen was forbidden to engage in vigorous exercise. Watching her growing family at play with their father, Victoria was more than a little envious, especially of Vicky, who was her father’s special pet.

LITTLE LEOPOLD QUICKLY
proved to be a new strain on his mother’s nerves and his father’s resilience. He was skinny and failed to thrive as an infant despite a change of wet nurse. When he began to move around, it became clear that there was something seriously wrong. When Leopold fell and bumped himself, he was horribly bruised, his joints swelled up, and he had to be put to bed, howling. The royal doctors had no difficulty in making their diagnosis. The disease the prince suffered from, though rare, had long been described in the medical literature. Leopold suffered from hemophilia.

A full understanding of hemophilia was reached only after the First World War when the ideas of Gregor Mendel had finally been accepted and developed into the modern science of genetics. However, even in 1854, certain key facts were well established, notably that the bleeding disease tended to run in families and that it affected only boys.

In 1803 John Conrad Otto, a Philadelphia doctor, made a major conceptual breakthrough. Otto published a paper entitled “An Account of a Hemorrhagic Disposition Existing in Certain Families.” Otto traced a single hemophiliac family back to 1720, when the first woman to be identified as what we would now call a carrier arrived in New Hampshire. He identified three key facts: (1) The sufferers, whom he called “bleeders,” were boys. (2) They inherited the disease from their mothers, who did not manifest any bleeding problems. (3) Some of the bleeders’ sisters had sons who were bleeders in their turn. Thus the disease was carried through the generations from healthy mother to healthy daughter. Otto was not the first medical observer to suggest that hemophilia was a disease that boys inherited from
their mothers, but his report was the most careful longitudinal study to date. In an 1828 paper called “Uber die Hämophilie oder die erbliche Anlage zu todlichen Blutungen” (“On Hemophilia or the Hereditary Tendency to Fatal Bleedings”), Friedrich Hopff of the University of Zurich went over the same ground as Otto. Hopff called the disease hemophilia, the name subsequently adopted by medical science.

Medical knowledge filtered into general practice very slowly in the early part of the nineteenth century, and, though Otto and Hopff are now famous in medical history, in their day they were not prominent physicians. However, their specific observations and conclusions may have been particularly slow to gain general acceptance because they posed a new and daunting challenge to the medical profession.

A diagnosis of hemophilia was simple for a doctor to make and terrible for a parent to receive. It meant that their baby son’s blood was failing to clot normally, filling his internal cavities and joints and causing excruciating pain. The disease was incurable and treatment at best inefficacious. Most afflicted boys died when very young. A hemophiliac baby who fell out of the crib or merely banged his head on a chair when he started to crawl suffered abnormally severe damage and could easily die. Case studies in the medical literature showed that even if a child survived infancy, his large joints gradually became deformed by arthritis as a result of internal bleeding. The few hemophiliacs who lived into their teenage years suffered chronic pain interspersed with periods of agony and were severely restricted in their activities. The extremely rare adult sufferer was haunted by the knowledge that he could kill himself with a careless slip of the razor, a stumble on the stairs, or a neglected hemorrhoid.