We Two: Victoria and Albert (83 page)

136
Very, very occasionally men were
See Graham Robb,
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century
.

136
As the writer and critic J. M. Coetzee has put it
J. M. Coetzee, “Love and Walt Whitman,” the
New York Review of Books
, September 22, 2005, p. 24.

137
It contained an edelweiss
The Queen kept and treasured the flower, and she notes that, thanks to the scrapbook and to a diary kept by Florschütz, her younger son, Prince Arthur, was able to retrace his father’s steps exactly in 1865.

137
All the same, the grandsons spent
Early Years
, p. 137.

137
Prince Albert had seriously injured
Again, in a note that allows her to remember each tiny feature of her husband’s body, Queen Victoria reports that Albert had a large scar on his knee from this accident.

137
The visit would give him
Letters of the Prince Consort
, ed. Jagow, p. 15.

138
“The chief question,” wrote Prince Albert
Ibid, p. 144.

138
As soon as the academic semester
Within months of saying good-bye to his ducal charges, Rath Christopher Florschütz, aged forty, married the daughter of Herr Superintendent Genzler, a Coburg divine. Prince Albert was astonished at the marriage, as he told his brother.

139
As Albert wrote to Ernest
The Prince Consort and His Brother
, ed. Bolitho, p. 11.

139
On this occasion, as on many
Astonishingly, another fire broke out at the Ehrenburg Palace a year later, when, during the feast to celebrate Albert’s betrothal, the gauzy curtains in the great hall blew into the candles and went up in flames. Such minor accidents were taken in stride.

139
Now I am quite alone
Early Years
, pp. 156–157. I have preferred to do my own translation from the German text Queen Victoria included in appendix C to her book, rather than cite the overly cautious translation done by her daughter that appears on pp. 156–157. In general Albert has not been well served by his translators.

140
No one better than Stockmar
King Leopold wrote to Queen Victoria on April 13, 1838: “Concerning the education of our friend Albert, it has been the best plan you could have fixed upon, to name Stockmar your commissary-general; it will give
unité d’action et de
l’ensemble …
I have communicated to him what your uncle [Duke Ernest], and the young gentleman seem to wish, and what strikes me as best for the moment. Stockmar will make a regular report to you on this subject” (Raymond,
Queen Victoria’s Early Letters
, p. 29). 140
“In many, many respects
Eyck, p. 18.

140
In Florence at a ball
“Voilà un prince don’t nous pouvons être fiers. La belle danseuse l’attend—le savant l’occupe.”
Early Years
, p. 120

141
“[Prince Albert] had been accustomed
Early Years
, pp 164–165.

141
Albert himself paints
Early Years
, pp. 166–167.

141
In the same bitter vein
Cecil Woodham-Smith,
Queen Victoria
, p. 186.

141
He opined that the prince would
Memoirs of Baron Stockmar
, vol. ii, p. 7. It was presumably the publication of comments like this about the young Albert that led Queen Victoria to deplore the publication of the baron’s memoirs.

141
“Then I must go
Early Years
, p. 326.

142
The visit may have been
Harald Sandner reports a fascinating rumor that Albert in Carlsbad had an affair with a certain Countess Resterlitz, but he offers no supporting evidence (see Sander, p. 70).

142
This fact is established conclusively
Guardians of the reputation of the English royal family, notably Hector Bolitho, editor of the brothers’ correspondence, successfully kept this incriminating letter out of print. The quoted passage was published only in 1959 by Frank Eyck, one of the rare British historians capable of reading nineteenth-century German handwriting.

142
I am deeply distressed and grieved
The Prince Consort: A Political Biography
, Frank Eyck, p. 19.

143
In 1844 Alexandrine officially adopted
Sandner, p. 106.

143
He had a succession of
According to Harald Sandner, these illegitimate children were Helene von Sternheim, born around 1839, of Fräulein Steinpflug; Karl Raymond, Freiherr von Ketschendorff, born of the opera singer Victorine Noel; and Graf Razumofsky von Wigstein, born 1852 of Baroness Rosa Löwenstein (Sander, p. 103).

143
Either Albert’s purity or his authority
Even the most loyalist of English royal biographers have been obliged to admit, when pressed, that Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Albert’s brother, had a scandalous private life, but it was a subject they preferred to avoid. Facts were hard to come by until the German scholars Harald Sandner, Harald Bachmann, and Gertraude Bachmann explored the Coburg state archives in the late 1990s. Anecdotal attacks on Duke Ernest II are found scattered in various English memoirs. Lt. Col. Arthur Haig, in a letter written in the early 1880s to Henry Ponsonby, one of Queen Victoria’s most trusted aides, was scathing: “Ernest the Great, the Good, the Chaste, the Second, the Father, the Grandfather now of many of his subjects, will appear in state. His Consort and all his other Consorts will be there—all those that have been—that are—and that are going to be—all … Send out a Hogarth quick to paint the picture of ‘La Famille ducale et demi-ducale.’” Haig then goes on to say that the duke had found a bourgeois husband for his most recent
maitresse en titre
at the lady’s own request. She had decided that she needed a respectable exit from Coburg, since her lover the duke seemed likely to die soon and his heir, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s second son, was sure to send her packing (Arthur Ponsonby,
Henry Ponsonby
, London: Macmillan, 1942, p. 350). Dean Stanley, an intimate of Queen Victoria accompanying the Prince of Wales on a tour of the Near East following the death of the prince consort, met the Duke of Saxe-Coburg in Egypt in 1862 and confided to his diary: “If anything could increase the respect for Prince Albert and the thankfulness for what he has been to England, it may be the reflection of what would have been the difference had the Queen married the older brother. He [Ernest II] is going to hunt in Abyssinia and I trust I may never set eyes on him again” (Bolitho,
Albert—Prince Consort
, p. xi). Lady Marie Mallet wrote around 1890: “The old Duke of Saxe-Coburg has been here [Balmoral] today with his wife. He is the Prince Consort’s only brother and an awful-looking man, the Queen dislikes him particularly. He is
always writing anonymous pamphlets against the Queen and the Empress Frederick [Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter] which naturally cause a great deal of annoyance in the family”
(Life With Queen Victoria: Letters from Court
, ed. Victor Mallet, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968, p. 52).

PART TWO:
TOGETHER

Chapter 12:
VICTORIA PLANS HER MARRIAGE

147
He called her
Vortrefflichste
This may have been less extravagant a compliment than it seems. Extracts from the correspondence and journals of members of the Coburg family show that
vortrefflich
was a favorite adjective rather like the English “delightful,” used to describe almost anything enjoyable.

148
“An experienced man
John Plunkett,
Queen Victoria, First Media Monarch
, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 213.

149
These were the facts
After his marriage, Albert received tuition in the English constitution from Mr. William Selwyn, an acknowledged English legal expert. See Martin, vol. i, p. 87. This older gentleman shocked the prince by daring to sit down in “the presence” without authorization and delivering long, rather meandering and haphazard lectures, sadly lacking in the kind of abstract political principles the prince admired. See Fulford,
The Prince Consort
, p. 65. Also in 1842, the Queen and the prince together read Hallam, a standard authority on the English constitution.

150
He would leave her queen
A good example of the advice given to the prince is the following remark by King Leopold recorded by Prince Albert’s private secretary George Anson at Windsor in August 1840: “The Prince ought in business as in everything to be necessary to the Queen, he should be to her a walking dictionary for reference on any point which her own knowledge or education have not enabled her to answer. There should be no concealment from him on any subject” (quoted by Frank Eyck, p. 22, from a memorandum by Anson, Royal Archives Y.54.8).

151
There, according to Stockmar’s memoirs
Stockmar,
Memoirs
, vol. ii, p. 18.

152
The Coburg party, which comprised
For a brief summary of these events (which are covered in detail in all biographies of Queen Victoria), see chapter 7, p. 87.

153
It was a point of honor
In the fifteenth century, Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, one of Prince Albert’s ancestors, took up the cause of Martin Luther, and suffered a permanent loss of land, wealth, and status as a result. See the opening section of
Early Years
.

154
She duly issued letters patent
This is the version I have found in standard biographies, but Stockmar in his memoirs claims to have advised the Queen to issue the letters patent establishing Albert’s precedence.

154
As a loyal wife-to-be
She raised the issue on at least three separate occasions: with her Whig prime minister Melbourne before her marriage and with her Tory prime minister Peel in late 1841 and again in 1845. Though Peel was a close ally of the prince’s, he saw quite as clearly as Melbourne that a motion to make Albert king consort was doomed to fail in parliament and risked bringing down the monarchy if it were made public.

154
“For God’s sake, say no more
Jerrold,
The Married Life of Queen Victoria
, p. 43.

155
The Tories unearthed their social conscience
A general dislike of the Coburg family among the British ruling classes was more probably the reason for the cut in Prince Albert’s appanage than the poverty of the masses. Leopold, by clinging to his parliamentary income even after he was given the Belgian throne, had queered the pitch for his nephew, and both knew it.

155
They laid the blame squarely
Stockmar, who was in London as the Coburg family’s agent during the time of the engagement, blamed Melbourne’s careless handling of the negotiations with parliament for the slights suffered by Prince Albert. He also believed that the
opposition to the prince expressed by the High Tory faction had been fomented by Victoria’s senior uncle, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, king of Hanover. Whether or not this allegation was true, Albert believed it, and his relations with Cumberland were always extremely hostile.

155
In fact, the Tories could afford
As Prince Albert recalled to Baron Stockmar in 1854: “When I first came [to England], I was met by this want of knowledge and unwillingness to give a thought to the position of this luckless personage [the husband of a queen regnant]. Peel cut down my income, Wellington refused me my rank, the Royal family cried out against the foreign interloper, the Whigs in office were only inclined to concede to me just as much space as I could stand upon” (Jagow,
Letters of the Prince Consort
, p. 205).

156
Determined that this money at least
David Duff gives a detailed analysis of the correspondence between Victoria and Albert during the engagement period. He quotes the following unpublished letter from Albert: “As the Queen’s husband, I shall be in a dependent position, more dependent than any other husband in my circumstances. My private fortune is all that is left to me to dispose of. I am therefore not unfair in requesting that that which has belonged to me since I came of age a year ago shall be left under my control” (Duff,
Victoria and Albert
, p. 182). Duff says that Albert gave Ernest the money he had inherited from their mother. My reading of the published letters between the two brothers leads me to believe that Albert merely designated Ernest to act for him in the matter of the property.