We Two: Victoria and Albert (60 page)

Within weeks of returning to England from Paris, the royal family was welcoming dear Fritz to Balmoral for a lengthy private visit. The purpose of the visit was clearly understood by the young man, his parents, and his royal English hosts. Fritz had come to take a long, second look at Vicky and decide whether or not he wished to marry her. Only Vicky herself was, quite deliberately, kept in the dark as to the purpose of the visit.

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HE IDEA THAT VICTORIA, PRINCESS ROYAL, SHOULD MARRY THE HEIR
presumptive to the king of Prussia was apparently hatched by Prince Albert, King Leopold, and Baron Stockmar when the prospective bridegroom, Prince Frederick William of Hohenzollern (Fritz), was a sad, gangly, silent schoolboy of eleven and the prospective bride was a vivacious toddler, already babbling in three languages. A new Germany, united under Prussia, the strongest of the German states, was Prince Albert’s great dream. His personal mission as a diplomat was to convert the ferociously conservative, obsessively militaristic, and fanatically Anglophobic Prussian ruling class into the kind of enlightened autocracy that Great Britain and Belgium had pioneered. The Prussian alliance was to be the capstone of his European foreign policy.

Prince Albert’s intention to cozy up to the Prussians became apparent as early as January 1842. To the rage of his father the Duke of Coburg, of his wife’s uncle the king of Hanover, and of his uncle the king of the Belgians, Albert chose King Frederick William IV of Prussia to be the first baptismal sponsor to the newborn Prince of Wales. Prince Albert wrote, begging His Prussian Majesty to attend the christening in person. The king of Prussia rarely got farther from Berlin than Potsdam, but on this occasion he traveled to London, bearing a magnificent present for his godson, and prepared to be gracious.

For Albert, this visit was a dream come true. As a youth, he had spent a few days at the Prussian court in Berlin, but such was the force of hierarchy in Germany that a king of Prussia could not be expected to converse with a second son of a duke of Saxe-Coburg. Now Prince Albert was playing host
to the king in the magnificent medieval English castle over which he presided. He and His Majesty looked each other in the eye, chatted over breakfast, and rode out side by side in the afternoons. The prince’s adviser, Baron Stockmar, was granted personal audiences with the king of Prussia, and, to His Majesty’s obvious amazement, ventured to disagree with him.

After the christening of his first son, Albert felt empowered to start a regular correspondence with the king of Prussia. He also welcomed the Prussian minister (ambassador) in London, Chevalier Bunsen, into his exclusive family circle. All was plain sailing until the Queen and the prince paid a visit to Prussia and had a chance to see the Prussian court firsthand. By the 1840s, with the immense improvement in the speed and reliability of communications, the English political establishment was willing for Queen Victoria to travel abroad, and she was eager to visit Germany. For his part, Albert longed to show his wife Coburg and Gotha, where both he and her mother had lived as children, and Bonn, where he had been so happy as a student.

Thus in 1845 the Queen and the prince crossed to Antwerp in the royal yacht. There they were greeted by King Leopold, toured Belgium, carefully skirted the Queen’s ancestral Hanover (still ruled by awful Uncle Ernest), and crossed into Prussia. They spent several days on the Rhine and touring various Prussian cities, accompanied by their royal hosts. King Frederick William put on a glittering array of dinners, balls, and concerts, including one featuring Franz Liszt and the new Swedish soprano sensation Jenny Lind. The English royal party then proceeded to Coburg and Gotha, where cheering crowds turned out everywhere for the English Queen with flowers and songs and folk dances. The German relatives, including the Duchess of Kent and King Leopold and Queen Louise, descended en masse. It was hardly a vacation for Victoria, but she glowed with happiness and pride. How she would love to spend her life in a little German hunting lodge like Albert’s beloved Rosenau, she confided to her diary.

The one blot on the royal couple’s pleasure came at the Prussian king’s castle of Stolzenfels. There King Frederick William IV refused to give Prince Albert precedence over an Austrian archduke, the younger son of an uncle of the Austrian emperor. Victoria was separated from her husband, and her discontent was writ large on her face. The Prussian court took notice, and, to Victoria’s dismay, critical accounts of the Queen of England’s ungracious ways appeared in the press. Albert, whose nostalgia for his beloved Germany had received a reality check, affected stoicism and advised his wife to do the same. In a telling little scene witnessed by the royal governess Lady Lyttelton, Prince Albert put on a Cheshire cat smile and did a neat entrechat,
demonstrating to his wife how she should feign pleasure and thus avert adverse criticism in the future. If only for him it had really been that easy!

At last permitted to spend days in the company of the rulers of Prussia, Prince Albert was not impressed. He saw that they were ill educated and deeply prejudiced men, hypnotized by their own greatness and terrified of change. They were also twice his age and seemed stuck in the past. Frederick William himself, the eldest of the four royal Hohenzollern brothers, once admitted: “If we had been born as sons of a petty official, I should have been an architect, William an NCO, Charles would have gone to prison, and Albrecht would have become a drunkard.”

Frederick William, the brightest and most cultured of the four brothers, had long been wrapped in a mist of romantic feudalism. He was lapsing into dementia by the time Prince Albert first met him. William, next in line to the throne, was stupider and less educated, deeply neurotic, and at daggers drawn with his wife, Augusta. The army was William’s passion and his only area of expertise. The king and his brother heir were at once stubborn and indecisive, an unfortunate combination in an autocrat.

Prince Albert was confident that he could achieve ascendancy over these pitiful specimens. By force of personality, logic, and fact, leveraging his wife’s status and England’s power, he would convince the kings of Prussia to adopt his theory of monarchy and govern as he thought they should. It would be no easy task. Prussian kings ate flattery with their daily bread and drank obsequiousness with their beer. They did not listen, they pronounced. Albert would need to play the courtier and the hypocrite. For the sake of Germany and the world, he was ready to do it.

In 1848 Prince Albert had his chance to proselytize. Revolution came to Prussia, the mob ruled the streets of Berlin, and the king was forced to accept a program of democratic reform, at least for the time being. Prince William, who had advised shooting down the demonstrators, had to get out of Germany in a hurry. He left his wife, Augusta, and two children at his Potsdam castle to protect his interests and begged to be received in England. Against the advice of Palmerston at the foreign office, who sympathized with the forces of democratic reform, Prince Albert insisted on welcoming Prince William at Windsor. During the months that the Prussian prince was dependent on his hospitality, Prince Albert offered an extended seminar in constitutional monarchy. William appeared responsive and was encouraged to believe that Albert held the reins of England’s foreign policy.

When William returned to Prussia, Albert geared up the private Prussian correspondence. He and Victoria wrote not only to William and his
older brother, the king of Prussia, but to William’s wife, Augusta. She had been born a princess of Saxe-Weimar and was thus a distant kinswoman of Albert and Victoria. Weimar at the end of the eighteenth century had been the center of the German enlightenment. The Prussian court considered the princess to be a liberal and an intellectual and hence saw her as a threat. Prince Albert hoped that Princess Augusta might begin to wield more influence at the Prussian court, and he strongly encouraged a friendship between her and his wife. Letters flew between England and Prussia, carried mainly by private courier, since in Prussia all important mail was routinely opened by the state police.

A tiny fraction of Prince Albert’s vast Prussian correspondence has been published in English, and it makes for uncomfortable reading. His own letters prove that even as the prince was advising the Queen to insist that every foreign office document should be presented for his perusal and approval, he regularly divulged cabinet secrets to his royal Prussian friends. He believed, and convinced his wife, that in doing so he was acting out of principle and morality. All means, as he saw it, were noble to achieve the great cause—the reunification of Germany. At the same time, Albert begged his Prussian correspondents not to let anyone know the source of their privileged information. In the labyrinth of the Prussian court bureaucracy, where everything and nothing was secret, these requests were no doubt good for a laugh.

The flavor of Prince Albert’s style when writing in his native German to his royal correspondents in Prussia can be felt even in translation. Here are the opening paragraphs of a six-page effusion that he penned in April 1847:

Only days after Prince Albert wrote this letter, King Frederick William gave an impromptu speech to the Prussian assembly. This was 1847, democratic fervor was coming to the boil, and Europe once again faced bloody revolution. The king stated plainly to the elected members that his government consisted of ministers appointed by and answerable to him alone, the divinely anointed king. No elected body, he affirmed, could ever possess a legitimacy comparable to his own. These were the principles that the king sincerely held throughout his life. In 1848 he would give lip service to democratic reform only because his dynasty seemed likely to face the fate of the deposed Bourbons in France.

Learning of the speech, Prince Albert wrote in dismay and amazement to Stockmar: “I have today read with alarm the King of Prussia’s speech … Those who know and love the King recognize him and his views and feelings in every word and will be grateful to him for the frankness … but if one puts oneself in the position of a cool, critical public, one’s heart sinks. What confusion of ideas, and what boldness in a king to speak ex tempore; and at such a moment and at such length not only to touch on topics so terrible and difficult, to dispose of them in that slap-dash way.” So much for Prince Albert’s “absolutely frank and truthful” paean to the “brilliant qualities” of the king of Prussia.

The gap between what Prince Albert expected Prussia to do and what it actually did widened to a chasm in 1854. England and France went to war with Russia. Austria repulsed Russian advances into the Balkans and stood ready to defend the integrity of its empire. Piedmont, a small nation seeking to shake off the Austrian yoke and to become the nucleus for a new, united Italy, demonstrated its commitment to democracy and constitutional government by sending a contingent to fight in the Crimea. But Prussia, the sixth Great Power, whose well-financed army was being honed to a peak of readiness, adamantly remained neutral. The English government and the English nation were outraged by Prussia’s refusal to honor its treaty obligations to Turkey, send troops to the Crimea, and reinforce the English blockade of the Russian ports in the Baltic.