28
THERE HAD BEEN an understanding in the family that Victoria and her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the second son of the reigning duke, would marry. Born only a month apart, the two had been brought into the world by the same midwife. Once it became apparent, in the mid 1830s, that Victoria would inherit the throne, Leopold had decided that his nephew Albert would be the ideal husband for her and began grooming him for the role. Studious and intellectually curious, Albert had received the sort of first-class education of which Victoria was deprived because of her sex. The Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli later commented that the Prince was one of the best-educated men he knew. Leopold and Stockmar had seen to it that the young man was also well versed in politics and foreign affairs. Whether he would be able to handle Victoria, of course, remained to be seen.
King William IV had desperately tried to scotch Coburg ambitions by promoting an alternative suitor from the House of Orange; failing that, he would have liked to see either of his nephews, George of Hanover or George of Cambridge, married to his heir. In spite of the King’s vehemently expressed disapproval, Victoria entertained her Coburg cousins, Ernest and Albert, in England in 1836. She knew what was expected of her, writing to Leopold:
I must thank you, my beloved Uncle, for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me, in the person of dear Albert. Allow me, then, my dearest Uncle, to tell you how delighted I am with him, and how much I like him in every way. He possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy. He is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable too. He has, besides, the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you can possibly see.
Since that visit, however, her ardour had cooled. As queen she was relishing her independence and liked nothing better than to have her own way. She confided in Melbourne. ‘I said, why need I marry at all for 3 or 4 years? Did he see the necessity? I said I dreaded the thought of marrying; that I was so accustomed to having my own way that I thought it was 10 to 1 that I shouldn’t agree with any body. Lord M. said, “Oh! But you would have it still” (my own way).’ Underlying Victoria’s sudden nervousness about marriage, of course, was her dread of childbirth. Princess Charlotte had died; might she not die too?
Melbourne felt the couple were too closely related. ‘Cousins are not very good things,’ he cautioned. Victoria brushed this aside. ‘I don’t think a foreigner would be popular,’ he tried. Victoria baulked at marrying a subject: ‘I observed that marrying a subject was making yourself so much their equal, and brought you so in contact with the whole family. Lord M. quite agreed in this and said, “I don’t think it would be liked; there would be such jealousy.”’
Victoria’s nervous uncertainty can be gauged in a letter to Leopold, prior to Albert’s proposed second visit to England in the autumn of 1839:
First of all, I wish to know if Albert is aware of the wish of his Father and you relative to me? Secondly, if he knows that there is no engagement between us? I am anxious that you should acquaint Uncle Ernest, that if I should like Albert, that I can make no final promise this year, for, at the very earliest, any such event could not take place till two or three years hence. Though all the reports of Albert are most favourable, and though I have little doubt I shall like him, still one can never answer beforehand for feelings, and I may not have the feeling for him which is requisite to ensure happiness … and should this be the case (which is not likely), I am very anxious that it should be understood that I am not guilty of any breach of promise, for I never gave any.
Leopold must have been concerned that his carefully laid plans were unravelling, while Albert, apprised of Victoria’s reluctance, left his beloved home confident that he would soon be back. He had already decided, after Victoria had sent him a haughty response to his letter of congratulation on her accession, that she was an uppity miss and declared frankly that if she intended to delay their marriage, he would not wait for her.
The Queen was at Windsor when news of the arrival of Albert and his brother, after a storm-tossed Channel crossing, reached her. Albert had been a boy of seventeen when they last met, shy and a little gauche; now he was a young man of twenty, handsome, sensitive and refined. ‘It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert,’ she confided in her journal, ‘who is beautiful.’ Always susceptible to good looks in a man, she waxed lyrical about his ‘beautiful blue eyes, an exquisite nose, and such a pretty mouth with delicate moustachios and slight but very slight whiskers; a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist; my heart is quite going…’. Later, she was equally enraptured by his long legs in ‘tight cazimere pantaloons (nothing under them) and high boots’.
Victoria discussed her marriage plans with Melbourne before broaching the subject with Albert. ‘I think it is a very good thing,’ Melbourne assured her, ‘and you’ll be much more comfortable; for a woman cannot stand alone for long, in whatever situation she is.’ As sovereign, it was up to Victoria not only to choose a consort but also to propose – a notion that intrigued and sent shudders through the average Victorian male, who baulked at this unnatural show of female independence. Might this ‘sexual deviancy’ not set a dangerous example to the rest of the female population? A street ballad encapsulated the underlying concern:
Since the Queen did herself for husband ‘propose,’
The ladies will all do the same I suppose;
Their days of subservience now will be past,
For all will speak first, as they always did last!
Albert accepted immediately. It is unlikely that he was in love with her, but clearly, since they immediately fell into each other’s arms and showered each other with kisses, he felt affection and tenderness for her. Small and very feminine with huge blue eyes conveying an endearing innocence, she aroused his chivalrous, protective instincts. Soon afterwards, he wrote expressing his happiness that he would ‘be always near you, always your protector’. For a girl ever in search of a father figure, someone to lean on, it was irresistible. There can be no doubt of Victoria’s passionate feelings, so long pent up through what she chose to see as a sad, lonely and loveless childhood, which were now channelled into an all-consuming love for Albert:
Oh! To feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel as Albert was too great a delight to describe! He is perfection; perfection in every way – in beauty – in everything! I told him I was quite unworthy of him and kissed his dear hand – he said he would be very happy [to share his life with her] and was so kind and seemed so happy, that I really felt it was the happiest brightest moment in my life, which made up for all I had suffered and endured. Oh! How I adore and love him, I cannot say!! How I will strive to make him feel as little as possible the great sacrifice he has made; I told him it was a great sacrifice, – which he wouldn’t allow … I feel the happiest of human beings.
Given the strength of her feelings, it was fortunate for Victoria that Albert seemed uninterested in other women and was to remain faithful to her for life. The idea of marital fidelity seemed quaint to the raffish aristocracy – ‘Ought to pay attention to the ladies,’ Melbourne muttered – but from the outset Victoria and Albert were determined to break with the recent royal past. The debauchery of George III’s sons had undermined the standing of the monarchy. After her marriage, Victoria completely identified herself with the slightly prudish virtue of her husband’s family. Victoria and Albert’s court, if rather dull, was to be renowned for its high moral tone, while their happy marriage and family life were to be an inspiring example to the nation.
Meanwhile, there were plenty of teething problems. For all her professions of devotion and gratitude to Albert, Victoria remained as imperious as ever. ‘I signed some papers and warrants etc. and he was so kind as to dry them with blotting paper for me,’ she noted complacently in her journal. Once Albert returned to Coburg, the strain of separation and pre-wedding nerves led to many misunderstandings. Without consulting him, Victoria informed Albert that Lord Melbourne’s secretary, George Anson, was to be appointed his private secretary. As it happened, the two were to become firm friends, but Albert felt it was an affront not to be able to make his own choice.
‘Think of my position, dear Victoria,’ he pleaded. ‘I am leaving my home with all its old associations, all my bosom friends and going to a country in which everything is new and strange to me … Is it not to be conceded that the two or three persons who are to have the charge of my private affairs should be persons who already command my confidence?’ Victoria was adamant, replying in a letter in which virtually every word was underlined: ‘It is, as you rightly suppose, my greatest, my most anxious wish to do everything most agreeable to you, but I must differ with you respecting Mr Anson…’
His household, exclusively Whig, was also appointed without consultation. Albert’s precise, analytical German mind could not comprehend the obtuseness and intricacies of English party politics. Coached by Uncle Leopold and Stockmar, he was convinced that the crown’s strength lay in being above party politics, which surely meant that his household should be made up of both Whigs and Tories as evidence of royal neutrality. It was out of the question, Melbourne explained. Victoria, who was anything but impartial in the political arena, brushed aside his qualms, so that it seemed as if she cared more for Melbourne’s advice than Albert’s wishes. ‘As to your wish about your gentlemen, my dear Albert, I must tell you quite honestly that it will not do.’
Then there was the question of rank. There were few precedents to follow among previous queens regnant. Only the husband of Mary I, of unhappy memory, had been allowed the courtesy title of King. Queen Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, had received no new title on her accession, although by virtue of the fact that there were no other royal princes, he took precedence in rank straight after his wife. Leopold wanted his nephew to be given an English peerage, but again Victoria disagreed, informing Albert somewhat tactlessly that the English would never tolerate a foreigner interfering in the political life of the country. ‘Now, though I know you never would, still, if you were a peer they would all say the Prince meant to play a political part.’
Albert, a Serene Highness, would have to be content with being made a British Prince and a Royal Highness after his marriage and naturalization as a British subject. Victoria, who secretly cherished the idea of making her husband king consort, asked Melbourne if perhaps it could be done by Act of Parliament. ‘For God’s sake, Ma’am,’ he replied, ‘let’s have no more of that. If you get the English people into the way of making kings, you will get them into the way of unmaking them.’
The ‘old royal family’ bitterly resented the Coburg interloper and treated him with studied insolence. After all, the Hanoverian dynasty would have to give way to the new, as Victoria and Albert’s children would be of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. It seemed reasonable that the husband of the Queen should take precedence after her, at least until the birth of a Prince of Wales. The elderly royal dukes vigorously protested and there were some unseemly scuffles as they rushed to elbow Albert out of the way at every opportunity, even though Victoria had exercised her right as sovereign to declare the order of precedence she desired by the issue of Letters Patent.
When the question of Albert’s allowance was discussed in Parliament, the princes lent their weight to those who protested that the proposed £50,000 was too much. Leopold had been in receipt of that amount, as had Prince George of Denmark over two centuries earlier, but a combination of Tories, a few Whigs and the ultra radicals defeated Melbourne on the issue. Broadsheets galore repeated jibes about Germans, sausages and Albert who ‘comes to take, “for better or worse”, England’s fat queen and England’s fatter purse’.
‘Party spirit runs high, commerce suffers, the working classes are much distressed,’ Melbourne apologized to Leopold. It was the first indication that the new monarchy was going to be held closely accountable to Parliament in financial matters. In exchange for surrendering her hereditary revenues to the state for her lifetime, Victoria had been voted a civil list of £385,000 a year – considerably less than her predecessor – which included provision of £60,000 for the Privy Purse. In addition, she had the revenues from the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall; hitherto exempt as the sovereign’s private property, the duchies’ accounts were now to be submitted to parliamentary scrutiny.
At Victoria’s accession the crown was impoverished, but her upbringing had made her thrifty. In the first year of her reign she was able to devote £50,000 from her Privy Purse to paying off her father’s debts. After that, she had the whole sum – paid in monthly instalments of £5,000 by the treasury into her private account at Coutts – at her disposal to use as she liked. Few saw why, at a time of economic hardship, the Queen’s consort should be in receipt of an additional £50,000. After heated debate, Albert’s allowance was reduced to £30,000. It was considered a slap in the face and the Queen blamed the Tories, especially her old nemesis, Sir Robert Peel. ‘Monsters!’ she cried. ‘You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!’
It was not surprising, then, that in her current mood Victoria decided that she would not invite any Tories to her wedding on 10 February 1840. Only at the last minute did she make a concession and invite the Duke of Wellington and Lord Liverpool. The wedding, too, was something of a departure from royal tradition. Hitherto, royal weddings had taken place privately, often in the evening, and with no great ceremony. The wedding of the first queen regnant in living memory – an attractive young woman marrying the prince of her choice, a love match no less – naturally evoked popular interest. The burgeoning newspaper industry loved it. Victoria, who also broke with tradition in sleeping under the same roof as her bridegroom and seeing him that morning before the ceremony, went in procession the short distance from Buckingham Palace to St James’s, where the wedding was to take place at one o’clock in the Chapel Royal. She was given away by her father’s brother, the Duke of Sussex.
I wore a white satin gown with a very deep flounce of Honiton lace, imitation of old. I wore my Turkish diamond necklace and earrings, and Albert’s beautiful sapphire brooch. Mamma and the Duchess of Sutherland [Mistress of the Robes] rode in the carriage with me. I never saw such crowds of people as there were in the Park, and they cheered most enthusiastically. When I arrived at St James’s, I went into the dressing-room where my 12 young Train-bearers were, dressed all in white with white roses, which had a beautiful effect.
Typically, the ceremony had not been rehearsed and the bridesmaids formed an ungainly gaggle as they stumbled over each other as each tried to hold on to too short a train. Victoria, who had obviously been crying with happiness, was too wrapped up in her bridegroom to notice. ‘I felt so happy when the ring was put on, and by Albert,’ she wrote simply in her journal. Those who had not been invited consoled themselves by denigrating everything about the wedding, describing the wedding breakfast as ‘a mere Whig party’. But Victoria recorded that the crowd was immense and that ‘they cheered us most warmly and heartily’. Tories such as Charles Greville sneered that the couple left for their honeymoon at Windsor in ‘very shabby style’.
The honeymoon was another bone of contention. Albert was surprised and disappointed that he and his bride were to have only three days together at Windsor, before returning to Buckingham Palace and business. Even though she promised to obey her husband in the marriage ceremony, Victoria was unyielding: ‘You forget, dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing. Parliament is sitting, and something occurs almost every day, for which I may be required, and it is quite impossible for me to be absent from London; therefore two or three days is already a long time to be absent.’ How very different from the later days of her reign when nothing her ministers could say or do would induce the Queen to return to London.
The high-profile nature of Victoria’s wedding and the brevity of her honeymoon further provoked male suspicions about her brazen female independence. She had refused to play the blushing bride, but had put herself wantonly on display; nor had she hidden herself away on honeymoon, the sexual rite of passage which traditionally required the couple to stay out of circulation for a month. Not only that but she actually entertained at Windsor during those three days.
Misunderstandings between the couple were forgotten on the wedding night. They dined in their sitting room, but Victoria ‘had such a sick headache that I could eat nothing, and was obliged to lie down in the middle blue room for the remainder of the evening, on the sofa, but, ill or not, I never, never spent such an evening … He called me names of tenderness, I have never yet heard used to me before – was bliss beyond belief! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!’
The section of Victoria’s journal devoted to her wedding night – which it is not permitted to quote from – leaves the reader in no doubt that she enjoyed it. ‘When day dawned (for we did not sleep much),’ she continues, ‘and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express! He does look so beautiful in his shirt only…’
Marriage altered the way the Queen was perceived. She was no longer a maiden but a wife, and soon she would be a mother; all this served to downplay her regal and sexual independence. But there was no defined role for the husband of a queen regnant. While certain sections of the press congratulated Albert for winning ‘the grey mare’ – a common metaphor for a highly spirited woman – and the Satirist portrayed him as a fecund German stud brought in to sire an heir to ensure the continuation of the monarchy, the constitution did not recognize his existence. Victoria made it plain that politics were to be her preserve, not his. Albert chafed at his enforced idleness. Nor was he finding his relationship with Victoria easy. She was his wife, but also his sovereign.
The terms of Victorian masculinity were measured in part by the management of one’s wife. Albert was determined to be the master in his own home, but also to mould Victoria’s public image. He believed that there were many advantages to being a female sovereign; qualities associated with true womanhood – domesticity, motherhood and sympathy – transmitted in images of Victoria and her happy home life were to prove useful in securing the powers of a strong constitutional sovereign. His idea of exploiting Victoria’s womanhood depended for its success on a strong husband manager who did not compete for attention with his wife. In order to work, this formula ‘requires that the husband should entirely sink his own individual existence into that of his wife – that he should aim at no power by himself or for himself … but make his position entirely part of hers … continually and anxiously watch every part of business in order to be able to advise and assist her’.
Albert’s programme entailed the considerable task of making an already strong, independent woman follow his lead and as a consequence change her assumptions and behaviour. By sinking his existence into hers, Albert did not mean that he would accept Victoria as he found her. Being an only child with no father to observe as head of the household, Victoria did not immediately appreciate her subservient status as a Victorian wife. Moreover, she had enjoyed three independent years as an unmarried queen. Albert needed to make his will master of hers. It was not easy.
There were frequent scenes. Albert had been warned about Victoria’s violent temper; Stockmar feared that she took after her grandfather, George III, and that the outbursts indicated that she had inherited his ‘madness’. Guarding Victoria’s mind – ensuring that its precarious balance was never upset – became one of Albert’s abiding concerns. While his wife screamed and threw things, Albert tended to take refuge in chilly rationality, which enraged her all the more. He would leave the room and the corridors would echo to his wife’s fury and slammed doors. He would compose his response in writing, admonishing her as if she were a recalcitrant child. Victoria, once so blithe and buoyant a spirit, became accustomed to finding herself in the wrong, blaming herself for disputing with her husband and not showing him the obedience that was his due.
Fortunately for Albert’s plans, Victoria embraced wholeheartedly the prevalent view of the correct relationship between the sexes: women were by nature inferior and dependent. She would have no truck with female emancipation, not hesitating when the issue arose to express her hostility to women’s entry into the professions, never mind political life. She successfully concealed the extent of her own participation, by allowing an image of her to be presented that was almost entirely domestic. Like the previous queens regnant, she thought of herself as an exceptional woman, separated from others by the peculiarity of her anomalous position. Victoria was indeed exceptional, a complex character, a woman trying to do a man’s job as well as her own as wife and mother, always torn between her duty to her office and the lure of a private, domestic existence.
Seen in due course as a matriarchal figure, the mother of her people and the empire, the grandmother of Europe, no less, her example just might have strengthened the moral authority of women in the family. If the presence of a woman as the head of state worked at a deeper level to make that of women in public life more acceptable, or nudge the legal processes forward, change was a long time in coming. When Victoria died in 1901 her obituary in Reynolds’s Newspaper acknowledged:
Her life has had one great use. It has taught us the power we are wilfully allowing to go to waste in the womanhood of the nation. If Victoria has been all her flatterers say, then there are many thousands of possible Victorias in the kingdom. No longer can it be argued … that women are unfitted for public duties. The feature of the twentieth century probably will be the utilization of this rich reserve of force. If it be so, that will be the greatest result of the reign of Victoria.
Victoria readily admitted that marriage was a lottery. She was unique among married women, however, in never having been subject to the law of coverture, by which a woman was compelled to hand over her property to her husband on marriage. Unlike other British women, she was not prevented by marriage from entering into independent contracts or disposing freely of her own property. It was not until the late 1870s that the laws governing married women’s property began to be liberalized and it was the end of the century before women saw their legal status improved in a number of ways. Divorce became available, at least to the wealthy, through the law courts, instead of only through private Acts of Parliament, while legal separation offered some refuge for poor women from brutal and disastrous marriages.
To gain total domination over his wife, Albert saw that the influences of the past had to be broken. He had come to terms with Lord Melbourne, who receded gradually into the background, but Lezhen’s departure was more problematic. Albert thought her scheming and manipulative. He had been shocked at how much the Duchess of Kent, his aunt, had been marginalized, blaming Lehzen for coming between mother and daughter, and he suspected that she was trying to drive a similar wedge between Victoria and him. Certainly he did not seem to have Victoria’s entire confidence, whereas her old governess seemed to know all her secrets. Lehzen had to go. Albert systematically plotted her departure, which ultimately was brought about after a furious row between husband and wife about her former governess’s damaging influence in the royal nursery. Inevitably defeated, Lehzen packed her bags and returned to Hanover.
Only when she appreciated her feminine place could Albert disappear behind the newly subordinated Victoria. Nature came to his aid. A queen is as subject to the biological imperative as any other woman. Nine months after her honeymoon, Victoria gave birth to her first child, Victoria, the Princess Royal, known affectionately as Pussy and later as Vicky. The following year the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward or ‘Bertie’, was born. They were followed by Alice in 1843, Alfred or ‘Affie’ in 1844, Helena or ‘Lenchen’ in 1846, Louise or ‘Louischen’ in 1848, Arthur in 1850, Leopold in 1853 and Beatrice or ‘Baby’ in 1857. It was rare at the time, even for a well-to-do family, to lose no children in infancy, but all Victoria’s survived. Only the health of Leopold, who had inherited haemophilia through his mother, gave cause for concern.
Victoria had a strong constitution and there were no complications in any of her confinements. Superstitiously perhaps, she wore the same night shift for each confinement. Transferring from her bed to a sofa in her dressing room after a few days, she was soon up and about, but she was increasingly subject to post-natal depression. ‘One becomes so worn out and one’s nerves so miserable,’ she complained. As early as her second pregnancy, her accoucheur, Dr Locock, decided that ‘she will be very ugly and enormously fat … her figure now is most extraordinary. She goes without stays or anything that keeps her shape within bounds … she is more like a barrel than anything else.’ She bitterly regretted becoming pregnant so quickly after marriage, leaving her little time alone with Albert and, with no knowledge of or access to contraception, loathed the fact that she was so frequently pregnant. Could not she just have fun in bed, she asked her doctor after the birth of her last child, without the consequences?
Locock had been taken aback by what he called the Queen’s ‘indelicacy’. Victoria was modern enough to regard childbirth not as an illness, which was still the prevalent view, but as a natural process; always plain speaking, she did not see why she should not be frank with the doctor. This is not to say that she did not find the whole business of procreation – what she later described to her eldest daughter as ‘the shadow side’ of marriage – disgusting and degrading. ‘What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that,’ she wrote to Vicky. ‘I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments.’ To have children one after the other, she warned her daughter, was to be avoided. ‘I positively think those ladies who are always enceinte quite disgusting; it is more like a rabbit or a guinea pig than anything else and really it is not very nice.’
As for the agony of childbirth, she told her daughter, ‘those very selfish men would not bear for a minute what we poor slaves have to endure.’ The birth of her last two children was eased by the administration of ‘the blessed chloroform’, which Sir James Clark obtained through his contact with the Scottish doctors, Simpson and Snow. It was a revolutionary step, since traditionally in Christian society it was considered a woman’s lot to endure the pains of childbirth to atone for Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden. The Queen’s approval of the new panacea made it respectable for other women to follow suit.
Victoria’s fertility meant that Albert’s role was transformed from wielding the blotting paper to dictating the despatches. Given the keys to the boxes of confidential state documents, he would read and summarize papers for her, drafting replies for her to copy in her own hand. As he admitted to Lord Wellington, he had become her sole confidential adviser, her private secretary and her permanent minister. Soon ministers noticed that when they had an audience with the Queen, her husband would always be present. It was now a question of ‘We’ not ‘I’. Greville remarked that while Victoria had the title, Albert was discharging the functions of the sovereign.
In spite of a succession of babies, Victoria conscientiously fulfilled her ceremonial duties with the grace and dignity that the public had come to expect of her. She would attend the State Opening of Parliament, receive foreign royalty and review her troops. During the London season, between February and July, she would hold monthly court levees – afternoon assemblies at which only men were received – and about four drawing rooms, where debutantes and young married women were presented. Sometimes there were as many as 3,000 at these events. She attended balls, the opera, concerts and plays; she loved the circus, and invited the American performer Tom Thumb to Buckingham Palace.
Even so, Victoria seemed to collude in her own diminishment. ‘I am every day more convinced that we women, if we are to be good women, feminine and amiable and domestic, are not fitted to reign,’ she pronounced, after she had been sovereign for fifteen years. ‘If we are good women, we must dislike masculine occupations,’ she wrote to Leopold. She had become dangerously dependent on Albert.
Victoria was so much in thrall to her husband that she never put on a bonnet or a gown he did not approve. She dressed to please her man and obeyed him in this as in everything else. When the milliner came from Paris, Albert would be in the room making all the decisions. This was the beginning of Victoria’s lifelong love affair with the bonnet, which became almost the trademark of the Queen-Empress, but, according to Charlotte Canning, a lady of the bedchamber, Albert’s choice of bonnet made his wife look more like ‘an old woman of seventy’. Albert’s own taste in dress was questionable. To an English gentleman in his sombre, classically cut tailoring, there was something just a bit too foreign about Albert’s high leather boots, velvet coats and lace cuffs. It was the same sort of raffish eccentricity that marked the Jewish Disraeli as alien. Victoria would have been better advised by her good friend the Mistress of the Robes, the beautiful Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, whose taste was impeccable, but she never sought it.
From her appearance, Victoria’s subjects could be forgiven for thinking that she was not interested in clothes. The despair of her dressers, she confessed that she had neither the time nor the inclination to concentrate on her appearance, although her journal reveals that she took a lively interest in what other women wore. She was careless enough to appear on a state visit to Belgium with a pink petticoat showing beneath the hem of her muslin gown. Like many women who are not beautiful, do not have a fashionable physique, and have not had a thorough grounding in the art of dressing well, Victoria got her image wrong more often than right.
The Court Circular, which she corrected in her own hand, dutifully recorded what she wore. At official receptions she would wear a tiara sometimes including the Koh-i-noor diamond, which could be detached to form a brooch, and the crown diamonds. She had good shoulders and showed them to advantage in low-cut gowns. She would always wear the blue ribbon of the Order of the Garter across her chest. At court functions she wore a diadem – a coronet of opals and diamonds or a diamond circlet – and a court train, perhaps of white and gold moiré watered silk trimmed with gold blonde lace and red velvet bows, with a gown of white satin with trim to match the train. At the christenings of her children she wore her wedding lace and a white dress, in a way that celebrated the connection between the sacrament of marriage and the offering of this new life to the service of God.
Posterity thinks of Victoria as a black-clad widow, but as a young queen, wife and mother her cupboards were filled with gowns of softest white or lilac silk, rich brocaded court trains of red or gold or silver, riding habits of dove grey, ball dresses of pink or blue tulle over silk, worn with diamonds nestling in the roses, lilac or jasmine that adorned them, Honiton lace and gold and silver lace, and ribbons of all hues. Unfortunately, she had a propensity for draping herself in shawls, wearing over-decorated dresses cluttered with lace, ribbons, bows and flounces and, prompted by Albert, who would often be in her dressing room as she changed, had taken to swathing her dresses in huge floral trimmings. Sometimes at dinner she would wear fresh flowers in her hair. She also wore too great an array of jewellery, smothering her hands with rings in an attempt to hide their ugliness.
Nothing illustrates the clutter of Victoria’s appearance more than the descriptions of her during the reciprocal visits between the English royal family and the Emperor Napoleon III of France and his wife Eugénie in the mid 1850s. Entering Paris – the city of haute couture with the English couturier, Worth, at its pinnacle – Queen Victoria amazed and amused the sophisticated Parisians with her bizarre appearance. In the summer heat she was swamped by a massive white silk bonnet with streamers behind and a tuft of marabou feathers on top, weighted down by a mantle of crude green over a flounced white dress, and she carried a green parasol and a large silk reticule embroidered with a gold poodle – a hand-made gift from one of her daughters.
This was the age of the crinoline, that imprisoning garment which inhibited a woman’s mobility and yet whose sheer size indicated her growing centrality – not in entering a man’s world, but perhaps in occupying more symbolic importance in it. Its broad tiered skirts were most unflattering to a small, rotund woman like Victoria, while the tall, elegant Empress Eugénie carried the style superbly. A fervent admirer of beauty in either sex, Victoria showed no jealousy of Eugénie. The Queen of England did not have anything to prove.
The nation found the homely figure of the Queen and her subservience as a wife reassuring. Motherhood served to increase her status. Not that Victoria was particularly maternal. She found small babies most unappealing. ‘I have no tendre for them till they have become a little human,’ she confessed to Vicky, ‘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 body and little limbs and that terrible frog-like action.’ Small children were more tolerable, as long as they were pretty and well-mannered. In spite of the royal family’s cosy domestic image, Victoria’s children saw as little of their parents as any other upper-class children, confined to the nursery with their tutors, governesses and nursemaids. Albert, credited – wrongly, as it happens – with introducing the Christmas tree to England, and as a kindly and benevolent paterfamilias prepared to get down on the floor and play with his children, was in reality a stern, unbending and dictatorial father. He expected too much of his children. Only the eldest, Vicky, who had inherited his good brain and shared his intellectual interests, came anywhere near his exacting standards. The Prince of Wales, whom Albert expected to mould into the ideal prince, just as he had moulded Victoria, was a grave disappointment to both parents.
From the moment of his birth, a rigid educational programme was mapped out for Bertie, which took no account of his mental abilities or predilections. Victoria feared her son was a caricature of herself. He seemed to have inherited all the worst Hanoverian traits. She complained of his idleness, his laziness, the fact that he showed an interest in nothing but clothes, and his violent outbursts of temper – no doubt the result of his frustration at the over-strict regime imposed on him – and, in due course, the certainty that he would be as devoted to pleasure and debauchery as her wicked uncles. Neither Victoria nor Albert was prepared to acknowledge or encourage their eldest son’s merits, which later manifested themselves in a real talent for friendship and for communicating with men from many different walks of life and shades of political opinion.
Even Vicky, the paragon, was not exempt from Victoria’s criticism. She was only fourteen when she fell in with her parents’ known wishes and accepted the proposal of Prince Frederick William ‘Fritz’ of Prussia. It was a cruel sacrifice of a young girl to Albert’s impossible dream of a peaceful, liberal Prussia presiding over a united Germany in friendship with England. As a young married woman trying to get to grips with a difficult new family and political situation in Berlin, Vicky was bombarded by pestering and reproachful letters from her mother and then attacked for becoming pregnant far too soon and far too young.
As the younger children were unlikely to inherit, less was demanded of them, but Victoria, always jealous of anyone or anything that took Albert’s attention from her or intruded into their intimacy, often resented their presence. She had little patience with them. She seemed to think that being a mother meant being a scold. ‘It is indeed a pity that you find no consolation in the company of your children,’ Albert admonished her.
The distinction between private and public life was drawn more firmly than in previous reigns. Albert taught Victoria to appreciate the countryside. Soon the search was on for a home of their own, where they could bring up their children in more salubrious surroundings than smoke-infested London with its stinking, sewage-filled river. With the memory of seaside holidays in her childhood, Victoria chose Osborne House near Cowes on the Isle of Wight as a summer retreat. The original house was pulled down and Albert designed a new one in the Italianate style. Government ministers now had all the bother of taking one of the new trains from London and crossing the Solent to see the Queen.
But Osborne was still not private enough for the royal couple. A visit to the Duke and Duchess of Atholl at Blair Castle in Perthshire opened their eyes to the beauty of Scotland, so like Albert’s ‘dear little Germany’. Learning that the climate on the east coast, Deeside in particular, was more temperate, the couple rented Balmoral in Aberdeenshire with its relatively small estate of 17,000 acres. A good businessman who had restored the royal finances, Albert eventually persuaded the owner to sell for £30,000 in 1852. After the profligacy of Victoria’s predecessors, it was impressive that Victoria and Albert could buy both these private homes out of their savings. They were exhibiting the sort of good financial management their middle-class subjects thoroughly approved of. The original house was demolished and Albert designed a new castle; wholeheartedly embracing all things Scottish, they decorated the rooms in wall-to-wall tartan which made visiting ministers wince.
Years later, Victoria reinforced the idea of the royal family’s domestic idyll with the publication of her book, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, which describes family picnics, walks, Albert’s deer stalking and her sketching, building a cairn and dancing round a hillside fire to celebrate the fall of Sebastopol while imbibing copious quantities of whisky, the gillies’ ball, good faithful servants such as John Brown, and many other Highland delights. Written in the most mundane style, the public lapped it up. Why, the Queen was just like an ordinary person. It was so reassuring to have such an exemplary figurehead, a monarch who left politics to the politicians. Few realized just how busy the Queen was behind the bland façade and how involved she still was in the political process.