We Two: Victoria and Albert (80 page)

83
In the evenings and at weekends
According to Clare Jerrold, at least six members of the Paget family were at the court of the young Queen Victoria. Matilda and Laura were maids of honor, Lady Sandwich was a lady-in-waiting, Lord Alfred Paget (who fell madly and very publicly in love with Victoria) was an equerry, the Earl of Uxbridge was Lord Chamberlain, following a Paget in-law, Lord Conyngham Lady Constance Paget was also at court in some capacity
(The Married Life of Queen Victoria
, London: Eveleigh Nash, 1913, p. 53).

85
As the second Lord Melbourne once remarked
Lord David Cecil,
Lord Melbourne: The Later Life
, London: Constable, 1954, pp. 177–178. The English oligarchs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led lives quite as sexually innovative as the Bloomsbury group in the early twentieth, but they were careful not to leave anything on paper that could affect their own social standing and political careers, or the inheritance rights of their children. Thus whereas contemporaries gossiped in letters and diaries, and historians have speculated that the first Lady Melbourne, her son Lord Melbourne, her daughter Emily, Lady Cowper, and her daughter’s second husband Lord Palmerston all had numerous affairs, there is no documentary proof. Lord Palmerston was rumored to have slept with at least three of the famous patronesses of Almacks—Lady Cowper and her friends Lady Jersey and Princess Lieven—but biographers have been unable to confirm this.

85
The young Lambs were brought up
See Amanda Foreman,
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
, Random House, 1998.

86
She expected Victoria to pay
Charlot, p. 109.

87
By the summer of 1839
Hibbert,
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals
, p. 55.

87
Melbourne agreed
Charlot, p. 149.

PART ONE:
THE YEARS APART |
Albert: A Motherless Prince

92
Queen Victoria’s crest appears
I am describing the 1867 Harpers American edition of the Grey book, which I have in my possession.

93
The regular correspondence between
Hector Bolitho, in preparation for his 1932 biography of the prince consort, was by his own account, the first person allowed to see the brothers’ correspondence. Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha wrote a two-volume memoir, but it deals almost exclusively with the years after his brother left for England.

Chapter 8:
THE COBURG LEGACY

95
“I shall, while tirelessly striving
Early Years of the Prince Consort
, p. 335, my own translation. At the back of this volume, Queen Victoria gives an invaluable selection of her husband’s early letters, in the original German.

96
Coburg, the state where Prince Albert
German historians have recently begun to comb through the archives of the city of Coburg and of the Saxe-Coburg family. They question, politely the claims of the Saxe-Coburg dynasty in Germany to have been a force for liberalism. They cast a severe eye on the relationship between the dukes and their Coburg and Gotha citizens. In the account of Coburg I give here and in succeeding chapters, I am deeply indebted to the following works that, unfortunately, have not yet been translated:
Das Haus von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha 1826 bis 2001
(The House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha from 1826 to 2001) by Harald Sandner (Coburg: Neue Presse, undated but around 2002);
Die Coburger Jahre des Prinzen Leopold bis zu seiner Englischen Heirat 1816
(The Coburg Years of Prince Leopold up to His English Marriage 1816) by Harald Bachmann (Jahrbuch der Coburger Landesstiftung, 2005);
Zwei Herzöge und eine Primadonna
(Two Dukes and a Diva) by Gertraude Bachmann, (Jahrbuch der Coburger Landesstiftung, 2003).

96
At the time of his birth, Coburg
See Stanley Weintraub,
Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert
, New York: Free Press, 1997, p. 2. Coburg and Gotha today are two little German cities off the main tourist map. They suffered little damage during two world wars and are still recognizably the cities that Prince Albert saw in his youth. Anyone interested in Queen Victoria and Prince Albert should spend some time savoring the charming medieval city centers nestled among wooded hills that the prince remembered with such passionate fondness. Formerly part of Communist East Germany, Gotha is at best ambivalent about its ducal heritage. To this day, however, Coburg advertises itself as the cradle of the English, Russian, Spanish, Romanian, Greek, and Albanian royal houses. My Coburg guide alleged that the town emerged intact from World War II because of Coburg’s strong ties to the English royal family. The Saxe-Coburg family still makes its main residence near Coburg and owns large estates in the area.

99
Charlotte took her dowry
See Flora Fraser,
Princesses
.

100
The army was the only career
Hessians, for example, formed an important part of the British army fighting in the American War of Independence.

100
The empress intended to choose
Grand Duke Constantine was heir to the Russian throne until he yielded his claims to his younger brother Alexander in order to marry his mistress. She was of inferior rank, so their marriage was morganatic. A morganatic marriage fulfills the usual requirements for legal union, but any children are debarred from inheriting their father’s titles and estates because of their mother’s low rank. Louis XIV’s marriage to Madame de Maintenon was morganatic. The Duke of Sussex’s marriage to Lady Cecilia Buggin (see chapter 2, note to p. 29) was morganatic. Some children of morganatic unions have succeeded in erasing the taint on their family, notably the German family of Battenberg. This branch of the Hesse family married two of its sons to a daughter and granddaughter of Queen Victoria. In 1914, at a moment of immense anti-German feeling in England, the English Battenbergs metamorphosed into the Mountbattens just as the reigning house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha metamorphosed into the house of Windsor. Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Philip, is a Mountbatten.

101
“That’s the one,” said Catherine
Caroline Bauer is the origin of this strange and oft-repeated story. It seems probable that she or her mother, who as a child played with the ducal children of Coburg, was told it by one of the sisters themselves.

101
“The brutal Constantine treated
Bauer, p. 22.

101
After some eight years, Juliana fled
Constantine did his best to make his estranged wife’s life difficult until it suited him to get a divorce. Juliana, it seems, led a fairly irregular life once she went into exile, and efforts were made by her brothers and nephews to keep the facts about her from Queen Victoria and the respectable English branch of the family.

101
Intimate and lasting connections
King Leopold maintained good relations with his former brother-in-law Grand Duke Constantine to the end, and defended him to posterity. In the Coburg family memoir he wrote for inclusion in Queen Victoria’s book on the early years
of Prince Albert, King Leopold represents Constantine as a wild youth who just needed a firm female hand.

101
Thanks to the good offices
Richardson,
My Dearest Uncle
, p. 18.

103
De Pouilly was largely responsible
The wartime diaries of Duchess Augusta of Saxe-Coburg document how much the whole family was inspired and supported by the brave and intransigent de Pouilly. Sophia adored him. Augusta relied on him. Ferdinand followed him to Vienna. Leopold aspired to be like him. See
Napoleonic Days: Extracts from the Private Diaries of Augusta, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Queen Victoria’s Maternal Grandmother, 1806–1821
, selected and translated by HRH the Princess Beatrice, London: John Murray, 1941.

104
With her he founded a new dynasty
To recapitulate, Ferdinand of Coburg-Kohary married his eldest son, also named Ferdinand, to Maria da Glória, the queen of Portugal, founding a dynasty there. Another son and a daughter married children of King Louis Philippe of France.

105
Duke Francis of Saxe-Coburg
A Coburg blacksmith once threatened to kill Duke Francis of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Prince Albert’s grandfather, for harassing his womenfolk. This incident was probably remembered because most citizens did not dare to protest their liege lord’s predatory ways.

105
The sexual mores that prevailed
Panam’s
Mémoires d’une jeune Grecque: Madame Pauline Adélaïde Alexandre Panam contre son Altesse Sérénissime le Prince Régnant de Saxe-Cobourg
appeared in 1823. Bauer’s
Nachgelassene Memoiren von Karoline Bauer
appeared after the author’s death in 1876 but was probably written twenty years or more earlier. I consulted the original French text for Panam, and
Caroline Bauer and the Coburgs
(London: Vizetelly), translated and edited by Charles Nisbet, the 1885 English abridged version of Bauer’s three-volume work. Rage and hatred against the Coburg family fill the pages of both memoirs, but the writers are intelligent, write well, and quote extensively from their correspondence with Coburg family members. These memoirs constitute an essential primary source on the Coburgs of the beginning of the nineteenth century.

105
As the girls stood gazing
Caroline Bauer’s description of Schloss Ehrenburg bears no resemblance to the handsome free-standing edifice, surrounded by gardens, that we see in Coburg today. But during the Napoleonic wars, the palace was uninhabitable, and Prince Albert’s paternal grandparents lived and had all their children in a modest town house around the corner. After the Coburg family started to move up the royal hierarchy in Europe, both Prince Albert’s father and his brother made it a priority to enlarge, remodel, and restore Schloss Ehrenburg, at one point employing the famous Berlin architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

107
As Grand Duke Constantine once sneered
Mémoires d’une jeune Grecque
, p. 211.

107
Caroline Bauer was a native Coburger
Caroline Bauer wrote three sets of memoirs; two (
From My Life on the Stage
and
Theatrical Tours)
were published during her lifetime, and the third, and most famous, the 1876
Nachgelassene Memoiren von Karoline Bauer
, was at once translated in whole or part in various languages. There is no doubt that Bauer gives a very slanted account of her relationship with King Leopold. Her protestations of sexual innocence were probably an attempt to protect her reputation posthumously. It is possible that she and Leopold, in fact, continued their relationship for some years after she returned to Germany. The Coburg Tourist Office guide who showed me around the city took me to a charming little country house where, he said, Leopold and Caroline met. There is no doubt that Bauer was close to Coburg all her life and obsessively collected every piece of information that came her way about the ducal family.

108
This, with a characteristic mixture
For an excellent description of “drizzling,” or “parfilage,” as it was first known at the court of Louis XV, see Bauer, pp. 261–263.

109
Father, uncle, and counselor
Monica Charlot in her biography of the young Queen Victoria notes Prince Albert’s “capacity for reconstructing reality” (Charlot, p. 216) and how
he manipulated the Queen by questioning her memories of her youth, and by feeding her the story of his own moral superiority from early childhood.

Chapter 9:
A DYNASTIC MARRIAGE

110
Louise’s mother, a princess of
Duchess Caroline was born in 1768 and died in 1848. If Duke Augustus married soon after the birth of his daughter Louise in December 1800, Caroline would have been about thirty-three at her wedding, old for a princess bride but still presumably capable of having children …

110
Under Salic law, Louise could not
The fact that (a) between them the brothers Augustus and Frederick of Gotha had only one legitimate child, (b) Augustus had to make do with a woman past her reproductive prime as his second bride and sired no children by her, (c) Frederick could never get any eligible girl to marry him, and (d) both gentlemen died suddenly in their forties suggests to me that they were infected with venereal disease. The remarks made by contemporaries about Augustus’s “eccentricity” and invalidism, and about Frederick’s moral turpitude, are probably couched in a genteel code, easily cracked at the time. Venereal disease of various kinds was rampant among the European aristocracy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and people understood that there was a link to infertility. Early stage syphilis and gonorrhea were not well distinguished, and the standard treatments involved mercury and arsenic, which certainly did not improve fertility. In its tertiary stage, the ravages of syphilis are hard to miss. A German aristocratic father, keen to see grandchildren, might marry his daughter to a drunken brute but would need compelling reasons to accept a man as his son-in-law who bore the marks of syphilis on his face.