Queen's House (22 page)

In those first years of their marriage, Prince Albert was not allowed to forget that she was Queen. He had his desk beside hers in her room
overlooking the garden in the north wing of Buckingham Palace, but at first he felt his sole function was to pass his wife the blotting paper. Melbourne still advised her – even when she had a Tory government. He should have firmly made a break, but he was reluctant to lose their unique friendship. Both Prince Albert and Stockmar chafed at this unconstitutional behaviour, and Stockmar tactfully and effectively protested to Melbourne, who saw the justice of the criticism.

Gradually Melbourne's influence faded. He was frequently ill and suffered a severe heart attack. Sadly driving in his carriage past the Palace, he saw a light in the room where he had sat so often with her. Now she no longer needed him. He consoled himself with his mistress, Mrs Norton, who remained his friend until his death.

In their early days the Queen and her consort were deeply happy. Queen Victoria had not only a lover but a most congenial companion, who could ride with her on her furious gallops – her Ladies-in-Waiting found it hard to keep up with her. Prince Albert was full of admiration for her energy, and in the frozen February of 1841 had reason to be grateful for her common sense and courage. The Queen and her Ladies-in-Waiting were watching Prince Albert skating on the frozen lake in the Palace gardens, Queen Victoria glowing with love and pride as Prince Albert gracefully pirouetted before them. Then he fell in. Prince Albert told the story in a letter to the Duchess Caroline of Saxe-Gotha-Altenberg on 12 February 1841.

The cold has been intense … Nevertheless, I managed, in skating, three days ago, to break through the ice in Buckingham Palace Gardens. I was making my way to Victoria, who was standing on the bank with one of her ladies, and when within some few yards of the bank I fell plump into the water, and had to swim for two or three minutes in order to get out. Victoria was the only person who had the presence of mind to lend me assistance, her lady being more occupied in screaming for help. The shock from the cold was extremely painful, and I cannot thank Heaven enough, that I escaped with nothing more than a severe cold.
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Above all she had someone to share what Melbourne had called her ‘inordinate fondness for music'. Just as George III and Queen Charlotte
had filled the Palace with music, had encouraged musicians of all kinds and had themselves been no mean performers, so Prince Albert and Queen Victoria played and sang together. The Queen now had a partner to join her in performing at her concerts in Buckingham Palace.

The printed programme of one such concert shows how talented they were.

How delighted Nash would have been, could he have seen his beautiful Music Room put to such good use.

In June 1842 Prince Albert invited the composer Felix Mendelssohn to the Palace to play his organ. Nothing better brings to life his and Queen Victoria's genuine pleasure in music than the account Mendelssohn gave in a letter to his mother of his visit. The composer wrote, ‘Queen
Victoria looks so youthful and is so friendly and courteous and … speaks such good German and knows all my music so well … She seated herself near the piano and made me play to her … first seven “Songs without Words”.' He drank tea with them in the ‘splendid grand gallery in Buckingham Palace … where two boars by Paul Potter are hanging'.

On 9 July Mendelssohn returned to the Palace. He described the occasion to his mother:

Prince Albert had asked me to go to him on Saturday at two o'clock, so that I might try his organ before I left England: I found him alone, and as we were talking away the Queen came in, also alone, in a simple morning dress. She said she was obliged to leave for Claremont in an hour, and then, suddenly interrupting herself, exclaimed, ‘But goodness, what a confusion!' for the wind had littered the whole room, and even the pedals of the organ (which, by the way, made a very pretty feature of the room), with leaves of music from a large portfolio that lay open. As she spoke she knelt down and began picking up the music; Prince Albert helped, and I too was not idle … Prince Albert played me a chorale by heart, with pedals, so charmingly and correctly.

Mendelssohn asked the Queen to sing his ‘Schöner und schöner', ‘which she sang beautifully in tune, in strict time and with very nice expression … The last long C I have never heard purer or more natural by any amateur.'

Before leaving, Mendelssohn played the organ for them, and ‘they followed me with so much intelligence … that I felt more at ease than ever before.' He remembered that before the Queen sang for him she said,

‘But first we must get rid of the parrot, or he will scream louder than I can sing.' Prince Albert rang the bell and the Prince of Gotha said ‘
I
'll take him out'; so I came forward and said, ‘Please allow me!' and lifted up the big cage and carried it out to the astonished servants.
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Queen Victoria and Prince Albert shared not only a love of music but also a deep interest in art. Queen Victoria was herself a competent artist, and Prince Albert had always loved art and had a particular interest in Italian paintings. Throughout Prince Albert's lifetime, both
were to be concerned with the care of the Royal Collection. They added to the collection and commissioned new works.

Queen Victoria was too busy in the first years of her reign to spend much time investigating the immense collection of paintings bequeathed by George IV. Many of the most valuable were still in store at Windsor Castle or elsewhere and until the arrival of Prince Albert the Royal Collection was in a state of utter confusion.

Now, under her husband's influence, the Queen began to take an interest in her inheritance. However, when, in December 1843, she went to St George's Hall, Windsor, ‘to look at some more old pictures', as she wrote in her Journal, she was

thunderstruck and shocked … in the way in which pictures, many fine ones amongst them and of interesting value, have been thrown about and left in lumber rooms at Hampton Court, while this castle and Buckingham Palace are literally without pictures. George III took the greatest care of them, George IV grew too ill to settle many things and William IV who was not famed for his good taste sent all the pictures away.

My care, or rather my dearest Albert's, for he delights in these things will be to have them restored, find places for them and to prevent, as much as it is in our power, pictures of the family and others of interest and value, from being thrown about again.
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Not only did Prince Albert supervise the restoration of the Royal Collection; he was to decide how the paintings should be hung, and his arrangement of pictures in the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace was to be sacred, never to be changed in Queen Victoria's lifetime.

Although Prince Albert's influence was profound and lasting, Queen Victoria had been interested in paintings even as a little girl. She had been well taught and drew quite well; her sketches of people and Scottish landscapes have a certain charm. She had, however, strong prejudices. Wilkie was condemned because he had wrongly portrayed her in a white dress at her first council and because the other portraits were not ‘like' – they were ‘too atrocious'. Sir Edwin Landseer was a firm favourite because he painted the animals she loved so exactly and with such a gloss. His
Free Kirk
was to give her great pleasure because of its Scottish
and Jacobite connections – Queen Victoria, like George III and George IV, was always conscious of what she called ‘the Stuart blood in my veins'. So the Prince of Wales pleased her with his birthday gift in 1860 of
Flora MacDonald,
painted by Alexander Johnston. Sir George Hayter's state portraits were much admired. But of all her artists the German painter, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, best represented all she admired in art – his clear, bright colours and his ability to catch the character of his subjects delighted her for many years. The portrait of the elderly Duke of Wellington on 1 May presenting a casket to his godson, the baby Prince Arthur, who offers the old Duke a spray of flowers, is a typical and famous example.

Late in life she praised the Austrian painter, Heinrich von Angeli, for his ‘wonderfully like portraits, his clear colours and correct drawing'. At the end of her life she chose the Danish painter, Laurits Regner Tuxen, to paint her with her vast crowd of descendants on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee. She insisted that they were ‘prettily arranged', not stiff and formal, and that the bust of her dead Albert should be represented.

As a collector of family portraits, Queen Victoria cannot be matched by any other British monarch. It was Prince Albert, however, who was the real connoisseur. As a young man in Italy, the Prince had become interested in early Italian art and after his marriage he collected the works of artists hitherto unfamiliar in England. After his death the Queen was lost, ‘always lacking his advice and working in the dark without his unerring and great taste'.
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Throughout their marriage Queen Victoria and Prince Albert delighted in giving each other paintings as birthday presents. The Queen allowed herself an annual sum, ranging from £2,000 in 1841 to £3,300 in 1855. From this account she bought Prince Albert many pictures, including Italian landscapes by James Roberts to remind him of the country which she herself had never visited and romantic studies such as W. E. Frost's
Una Among the Fauns and Wood Nymphs.

Contrary to popular belief, neither she nor Prince Albert were prudes and they obviously enjoyed Frost's lightly veiled, lovely damsels. She commissioned from Daniel Maclise the illustration of the German
romantic tale of
Undine.
Their favourite paintings often had lyrical or poetic subjects taken from the words of John Milton, William Shakespeare or Edmund Spenser.

The collection which Queen Victoria bequeathed to Buckingham Palace is not as important as those left by Charles I, George III or George IV. Critics have attacked, as George Moore did, ‘the limitation of the Queen's patronage'; he saw in them a sameness, ‘a staid Germanic, bourgeois quality, a lack of humour, a liking for the second rate'. In this there is some truth. However, as Sir Oliver Millar has written, ‘of all the motives that urged her to buy or commission pictures, the most powerful and pervasive was, simply, love'.
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As she wrote to her daughter, ‘how wrong it is not to paint things as they really are'.
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More daunting, however, than the organization of the Royal Collection were problems in the royal Household. One of these was the fact that the Queen had no official secretarial help. It seems incredible to modern observers that Queen Victoria, young and inexperienced as she was, did not have a private office. In addition to Lehzen taking care of some of her private correspondence, Melbourne, as Stockmar's son recorded, ‘gave himself up in a far greater degree than a Premier is wont to do',
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to work which today would be done by a Private Secretary; and if it had not been for Stockmar, who, for her first fifteen months of office acted as an unofficial Private Secretary, the chaos at the Palace would have been even greater than it was.

In fact, Queen Victoria had had less help than any of her predecessors. George III had worn himself out working without a Private Secretary until, when he became blind, he appointed Colonel Herbert Taylor to the post, paying him out of his private purse. This appointment was much criticized: it was considered dangerous for an outsider to have access to state secrets. The Prince Regent, too, was much attacked for making Colonel MacMahon his Private Secretary, especially as he paid him out of public funds. His ministers defended him on the grounds that he needed help to ‘get through the mass of mechanical labour which devolved on the crown'. William IV took on his father's former Secretary, Taylor, an appointment which went unchallenged since he had proved to be wise and discreet.

Queen Victoria was considered ‘both by the ministry and King Leopold, too young and inexperienced to be entrusted to the hands of any single man … whose influence might have become all the more extensive the more he was exempt from all control'.
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So Stockmar had been sent to help her at the beginning of her reign. It says much for his tact and discretion that a foreigner should have caused such comparatively little hostility. There was some: there were times when Queen Victoria was irritated by his lengthy memoranda. But he was widely respected. Melbourne considered him not only an excellent man, but also one of the most sensible he had ever met.