We Two: Victoria and Albert (82 page)

122
Florschütz himself did much
Eyck reports that some notables in the German duchies believed that Florschütz had radical political ideas and proselytized to his pupils
(The Prince Consort: A Political Biography
, p. 16).

123
From the little attic bedroom
When Queen Victoria first visited the Rosenau in 1844, she was struck by the extreme modesty of the attic sleeping quarters the princes Albert and Ernest had shared with their tutor as boys. Unfortunately, despite the recent renovations, this section of the house is still not opened to the public.

124
His native landscapes were etched
In
Early Days
, Queen Victoria devotes several pages to describing the countryside around the cities of Coburg and Gotha.

125
This was excellent revenge
The first edition of Grimms’ folk tales appeared in 1812, and Prince Albert read them as a child. In one tale, a princess is obliged to marry an ugly frog. When she finds the creature in her bed, she smashes it against the wall in fury and discovers that the frog is a handsome prince under a spell.

125
“Is it not too long
Early Days
, p. 60.

125
In his memoir, Duke Ernest II
Stanley Weintraub,
Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert
, p. 33.

126
Florschütz, who also had to
Early Years
, p. 46.

126
But only by taking part
Biographers of Prince Albert have tended to assume that he could not have loved his father when he was a boy and that the constant expressions of love that appear in Prince Albert’s letters to Duke Ernest were insincere or coached. I take his letters at face value. Just because a parent is abusive does not mean that a child does not love that parent.

126
The letters and journals
Even in childhood, Albert seems to have taken “Discretion is the better part of valor” for his motto. From the age of eleven until his death, he kept a diary, but not for the purposes of confession or self-analysis. All Albert’s correspondence as a boy
was subject to review by his father and his tutor. For eighteen years, he and his brother were never apart and so had no need to write until Albert went to Bonn. The most candid extant letters were written to his stepmother and his stepgrandmother. The letters between the two brothers are presumably still in the private archives of the Coburg family. Hector Bolitho was allowed to see the letters for his 1932 biography and was then permitted to edit and publish a small selection. Bolitho’s 1934 volume
The Prince Consort and His Brother
is a model of discretion—in other words, it gives us frustratingly little that was not available to Queen Victoria and Grey. Nothing would advance our knowledge of Prince Albert more than a new, uncensored edition of his correspondence with his brother.

126
In sympathetic response
Weintraub,
Uncrowned King
, p. 36.

126
In youth, he suffered
In their private correspondence, Stockmar and Leopold drop the occasional casual remark about the execrable moral tone of the people around Duke Ernest, although they offer no details. It is clear that they both agreed that it was essential to remove Albert from Coburg as a teenager to prevent him from being corrupted.

126
“From our earliest years,” wrote
Early Years
, p. 213.

127
“You well knew the events and scandals
Hector Bolitho,
The Prince Consort and His Brother
, New York: Appleton, 1934, p. 17.

127
“I longed to be with you
Ibid, p. 173.

127
In short order, the new king
Louise, first queen of the Belgians, wept uncontrollably at the time of her marriage, and her life was tragic and short. Queen Louise was another Coburg woman victim.

127
“I wish I was with you
Early Years
, p. 82.

128
It says something of the unhappy
According to Monica Charlot, several French newspapers reported that the new king of the Belgians planned to marry his niece, the Princess Victoria of Kent (Charlot, p. 75). Given the fact that his older brother Ernest did marry their niece Marie of Württemberg, it is not inconceivable that Leopold may at one point have entertained the idea of marrying his darling niece Victoria.

128
She bore him no children
By 1843, Duchess Marie had adopted a child of humble parentage and was bringing him or her up as her own. Prince Albert wrote to her, agreeing on the pleasures of seeing a child grow up, but cautioning her on giving the child expectations that could not be realized. “I wish you more success than generally attends the education of poor children of the lower ranks by persons of our own,” remarked Albert pompously
(The Letters of the Prince Consort 1831–1861
, ed. Kurt Jagow, trans. E.T.S Dug-dale, New York: Dutton, 1938, p. 83). The definitive book on Marie, based on extensive research in the Coburg state archives, is
Herzogin Marie von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha
by Gertraude Bachmann (Historischen Gesellschaft Coburg, 1999).

128
History has been grateful for this
. Duchess Marie decamped to Paris soon after her husband died, returning to Coburg mainly to see her visiting English relatives. Prince Albert continued to correspond with her until her death. These letters are often quoted, but Prince Albert’s biographers in English at least have not probed the relationship between the two. Bolitho in Germany was shown an interesting letter from Marie to Albert, written probably when the Coburg princes had left Coburg for Brussels and Bonn, which indicates that the cousins were at one time close allies. Marie wrote: “You think of me no more; you do not love me properly; and you do not consider my advice as being well intentioned.” Albert replied: “This doubt of our enormous love for you, and our gratitude, downright affection and care, cannot do otherwise than disturb us” (Bolitho,
Albert—Prince Consort
, p. 19).

128
“So you go to England
Early Years
, p. 145. Duchess Marie was Victoria’s first cousin too, before becoming her stepmother-in-law.

129
They went first to Mecklenburg
Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III and mother to his fifteen children, was a princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, which gave her paternal family a luster it had hitherto lacked.

129
To his stepmother/cousin
Early Years
, p. 113.

129
Duke Ernest could afford
At this time, virtually all army officers in England as well as in Germany came from the ranks of the aristocracy or landed gentry and officers generally had to find the money to buy their commissions and to maintain themselves in the service.

130
Victoria dreamed of a partner
Queen Victoria confided as much to Lord Melbourne in the week of her engagement.

Chapter 11:
TRAINING FOR THE BIG RACE

131
His older brother, Ernest
Duke Ernest of Württemberg married Princess Marie of Bourbon, another of the sisters of Queen Louise of the Belgians. The two cousins called Ernest were also in the late 1850s rivals for the love of the German opera star known as Natalie Frassini. See Gertraude Bachmann,
Zwei Herzöge und eine Primadonna (Two Dukes and a Diva)
, Sonderdruck aus Jahrbuch der Coburger Landesstiftung, 2003.

131
Feodora of Hohenlohe-Langenburg
See
Memoirs of Baron Stockmar
, vol. 1, pp. 364–365.

131
Ernest had not inherited
King Leopold until early 1836 favored the marriage of his nephew Albert to another of his nieces, also, confusingly called Victoire/Victoria but three years younger than Victoria Kent. Victoria Coburg-Kohary was the daughter of Leopold’s brother Ferdinand and of Maria Antoinette Gabriella Kohary Victoire Kohary’s mother was a Hungarian princess who, through some legal hocus-pocus, had been declared a male and thus enabled to inherit the estates of her fabulously wealthy father. The family took the name Coburg-Kohary, and Ferdinand had higher ambitions for his children than marriage to an impoverished Coburg cousin like Albert. In due course, Leopold and Stockmar successfully negotiated the marriage of the eldest Kohary son, also named Ferdinand, with the queen of Portugal. The second Kohary son married Clementine of Bourbon, younger daughter of King Louis Philippe of France and sister of Queen Louise of the Belgians. In 1840 Victoire Coburg-Kohary married another Bourbon, Louis, Duc de Nemours, Queen Louise’s brother, the young man who found Queen Victoria’s table manners unacceptable.

132
“If simply to fill
Memoirs of Baron Stockmar
, vol. 1, pp. 336–337.

133
For decades, long before
I am greatly simplifying the congruence in views between Leopold and Stockmar, especially after Leopold went to Brussels in 1831. Frank Eyck, the most sober and lucid guide to Coburg political ideas, notes how different the two men were both in personal morality and in political worldview.

133
At the same time
The evidence on Stockmar’s astonishing influence over the lives of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert can be gained from his memoirs, his correspondence with King Leopold, the Queen’s own testimony, and an unpublished memorandum by Prince Albert’s private secretary, Sir George Anson (Royal Archives, Y.54.15).

133
Wiechmann was a tedious old soldier
Prince William of Löwenstein wrote to Queen Victoria: “The somewhat stiff military nature of the princes’ governor, Colonel von Wiechmann, gave occasion to many disputes with the young princes, and frequently led to most comical scenes. It is impossible to give an idea in writing of the many trifling occurrences of this kind, for the ludicrous effect depended more on the mimicry and accentuation than upon the subject itself”
(Early Years
, p. 147).

134
The mathematician Adolphe Quetelet
Quetelet once observed that whereas Prince Albert did not think enough of his own talents, King Leopold never forgot his.

134
“Such an expedition would require
Early Years
, p. 126.

134
Berlin, Stockmar informed King Leopold
,
Memoirs of Baron Stockmar
, p. 369. In
Strangers
(New York: Norton, 2003), his book on nineteenth-century homosexuals, Graham Robb notes that Berlin was famous for its male prostitutes.

135
As Prince Albert wrote
Early Years
, pp. 154–155.

135
Faced with the mass of evidence
Lytton Strachey in his biography of the Queen, comments:
“In one particular, it was observed, [PA] did not take after his father;
owing either to his peculiar upbringing or to a more fundamental idiosyncrasy he had a marked distaste for the opposite sex
[my italics]”
(Queen Victoria
, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1998/1921, p. 88). Strachey offers a sympathetic portrait of the prince as, implicitly, a gay man like himself; a brilliant, sensitive intellectual tragically immolated on the altar of his family’s dynastic ambitions and his wife’s predatory sexuality. Edward. F. Benson
(Queen Victoria
New York: Longmans, 1935) comments over and again on Prince Albert’s feminine traits and the reversal of roles between him and the Queen. Discussing Prince Albert’s decision to fire the tutor whom his eldest son Bertie had begun to trust and obey, Benson asserts that Albert “remembered his own affection for Herr Florschütz, a disordered unnatural fancy” (Benson, p. 190). Benson gives no supporting reference for this assertion, but it was taken up and cited in 1972 by maverick royal historian David Duff. He accuses the prince of having had “strange and unnatural feelings” for his tutor that had to be “sternly repressed” (Duff,
Victoria and Albert
, p. 70). Monica Charlot, in her 1991 biography of Queen Victoria, notes that Florschütz was “obviously attracted” to the boy Albert, repeats Duff’s assertion of an improper relationship between the two, and concludes that given the traumatic incidents in the boy’s early childhood and the fact that tutor and pupils lived together in close quarters night and day for fifteen years, it would be “scarcely abnormal” if indeed they had developed some kind of homosexual relationship
(Victoria: The Young Queen
, pp. 153–154).

136
Bonn in the early nineteenth century
For a fascinating account of Cambridge student life for Prince Albert’s English contemporaries, see James Pope-Hennessy’s two-volume biography of Richard Monckton Milnes.