Sons, Servants and Statesmen (5 page)

The married life of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert may have been idyllic but, like any other marriage, it had its stormy moments. In January 1842 their eldest child, Vicky, then aged fourteen months, suddenly fell ill, though the problem was nothing much more than indigestion – certainly no life-threatening condition. When they returned home from a visit to Claremont, they found the infant very white and thin. Understandably anxious, Albert made some impatient remark which drew forth a sharp comment from the nurse, Mrs Roberts. ‘That is really malicious,’ he muttered under his breath to the Queen, who immediately lost her temper.

For some time he had been alarmed about the slapdash attitudes of some of the nursery staff. The main offender was the Queen’s old governess and confidante, Baroness Lehzen, and his months of frustration with her and the over-mighty role she played in the royal household came to a head. The Queen accused him of wanting to drive Mrs Roberts away from the nursery while he as good as murdered their child. Horrified that his wife could ever say such a thing, he murmured to himself, ‘I must have patience,’ and went downstairs to cool off. When they met again there was a violent quarrel, the Queen retreating in floods of tears while her husband, seething with anger, wrote her a note claiming that their physician-in-ordinary, Dr James Clark, had ‘mismanaged the child and poisoned her with calomel’. Calling her bluff, he declared that he would have nothing more to do with it; ‘take the child away and do as you like and if she dies you will have it on your conscience.’
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Needless to say, Albert meant nothing of the kind. As the Queen would have been the first to know, he adored their daughter dearly and would never have done anything to jeopardise her health, or indeed that of any of their other children. Clark had been in royal service ever since being appointed the Duchess of Kent’s physician while Victoria was still heir to the throne. Though a kindly man, his medical competence was questionable. In later years Lord Clarendon, Queen Victoria’s plain-speaking Foreign Secretary, branded the royal doctors as unfit to attend a sick cat, Clark being the main butt of his verdict.

Albert wrote to Baron Stockmar that the Queen was ‘naturally a fine character but warped in many respects by wrong upbringing’.
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Lehzen, who has been acknowledged as ‘the last irresponsible favourite’ in British history,
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was prevailed upon to retire from royal service and return to Germany, and with her departure a barrier between husband and wife was removed. Later the Queen would admit ruefully that Lehzen, like her arch-enemy Conroy, was one of those ‘wicked people’ who had estranged her from her mother.

Queen Victoria had a fiery temper, and with a quiet, less outgoing husband whose inclination was to reason with her on paper rather than argue face to face, there were inevitably difficult scenes throughout their married life. Albert was melancholic by nature and to those who did not know him well often gave an impression of utter world-weariness. This should not be taken as the sign of an unhappy marriage. There is no reason to doubt that they did not enjoy an extremely good marriage. Any European prince who was marrying the Queen of England would have been aware at the outset that such a matrimonial union would not always run smoothly, but Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha was uniquely well-qualified in terms of temperament and intellect to make as successful a job of it as any of his contemporaries, had they been given the opportunity instead.

They knew that there would always be testing times. Another arose in 1853, when the Queen was suffering from postnatal depression and anxious about the condition of their newly born son, Leopold, who was puny and evidently not at all well. One evening, the Queen and Albert were compiling a register of prints, when Albert rebuked her for not paying attention to what they were doing. She lost her temper and was in hysterics, shouting and weeping, oblivious to his reasoning. When he tried to speak to her calmly about it, the result was another session of regal sulks, snapping and tantrums. Nonplussed, he sat down and wrote her a long letter, saying how astonished he was at the effect one or two hasty words from him could produce.

What the Queen needed was a man who would argue back, answer strong words with more of the same, shout her down, reduce her to tears, clear the air and then make it up with her. It was as if his reasonableness and his analytical turn of mind was counterproductive. Her tears unnerved him, probably undermined his self-confidence and made him fearful of losing his temper. The practice of writing notes to her was one he had learnt from Baron Stockmar as a means of cooling tempers. Regrettably, where Queen Victoria was concerned, it generally had the opposite effect and simply prolonged quarrels instead of having a short, sharp shouting-match which dealt with the matter at once. If such episodes emphasised Albert’s father-figure role, the Queen could not have failed to find them unduly patronising, notwithstanding the fact that he acted with the best of intentions.

Stockmar’s earnest analytical approach to such problems was responsible for Albert’s sometimes misguided solutions to the quarrels. The old Baron, in whom Albert confided more freely about his marital problems than anybody else, always dreaded – perhaps excessively – the possibility of incipient madness in the Queen. As a result, he advised his young protegé that tempers must always be kept calm and face-to-face confrontations avoided at all costs. Had Albert been able to confide in other men (or women) sufficiently to seek their advice, he might have received a very different answer.

Nevertheless, such scenes between husband and wife were always quickly made up. These arguments were no more common than in most happy marriages, and they never did anything to undermine the closeness of their relationship.

Three years into their marriage, with a growing family, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert decided that they needed a home of their own. Buckingham Palace, their state residence in the capital, was hardly private, and Albert’s regular requests for more funds from the public purse for rebuilding and improving it met with consternation from their ministers. Brighton Pavilion, so beloved by Victoria’s uncle, King George IV, was ugly, inconvenient and even less private. Windsor Castle was comfortable and imposing, but not homely enough.

In 1843 they visited the Isle of Wight and briefly considered buying Norris Castle, but they soon discovered it was beyond their means. Not long afterwards, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel learnt that the adjoining Osborne House and its estate were soon due to be sold. Within two years they had rented it, and eventually they were able to buy it outright. Here they had a place of their own, within sufficiently easy reach of the mainland for visiting ministers and dignitaries, but in a suitably unspoilt setting. Here Albert could indulge his passion for farming and planting ‘free from Departments, Crown, Woods & Forests etc’, and they could bring the children up in pleasant rural surroundings close to the seaside.

‘Here we are at the Whitsun holidays,’ Albert wrote to Baron Stockmar, ‘when the weary combatants in Parliament and the tired-out epicureans fly from town for a little fresh air. We do the same, exhausted partly by business, partly by the so-called social pleasures, and are off at noon to-day to the Isle of Wight . . . . Osborne is bought, and, with some adjoining farms, which we have also bought, makes a domain of 1,500 acres in a ring fence.’
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Two days later, the Queen noted in her journal that ‘It does my heart good to see how my beloved Albert enjoys it all, and is so full of admiration of the place, and of all the plans and improvements he means to carry out. He is hardly to be kept at home for a moment.’
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Albert was a man of diverse interests and talents. Whether he threw himself wholeheartedly into them because of dissatisfaction with his home life and a lack of friends at Court, even the difficulty faced by a naturally shy man of making friends in another country, can only be guessed at. Yet he worked hard at starting to bring the royal residences into the nineteenth century. He had the drains, sewerage and plumbing at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle modernised, and ensured that their new homes at Osborne and later Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands also benefited from such changes. He scrutinised the household accounts and was astonished to learn that hundreds of candles at the palace were snuffed out when only burned halfway down and then discarded, or else removed by the servants for their own use. This was one practice which he accordingly reformed, with the result that a substantial saving was made. He found a large collection of valuable paintings stacked and neglected in the cellars, and oversaw the restoration, cataloguing and in many instances rehanging of such works to full advantage.

Of Prince Albert’s many achievements during his lifetime, perhaps none could ever compare with that of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the culmination of his interest in science and manufacture. He believed passionately in industrial Britain and thought that man might use his techniques to create a better world. While some saw it as just an enormous British shop-window, full of the products of the new industry, it was an attempt to fuse together utility and beauty, a celebration of the British Empire and advances in technology. In this he was inspired partly by the success of a recent French Industrial Exposition and partly by the enthusiasm of Henry Cole, an active member of the Royal Society of Arts, of which Albert was already President. He was also appointed President of a Royal Commission, and a total fund of £230,000 was raised. The Commissioners set up a competition for designing the building for the exhibition: 233 architects sent in designs, 38 from abroad, 51 from around England and 128 from London. The winning entry, from Joseph Paxton, proposed a glass house on a huge scale, the like of which had never been seen before.

The exhibition was held in the Crystal Palace, erected in Hyde Park, London. It opened on 1 May 1851, remaining open six days a week, and closed on 15 October. The original admission fee of 5
s
was reduced to 1
s
on four days each week, and on Fridays – and Saturdays from August onwards – it was 2
s
6
d
. The first major event of its kind in England, it had an enormous influence on the development of many aspects of society, including art and design, education, international trade and even the tourist industry, and also set a precedent for many more international exhibitions over the following hundred years.

Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their family attended the opening of the exhibition. The day had been declared a public holiday, thousands lined the route the Queen would take, and inside the Palace were 25,000 invited guests and season ticket holders. Afterwards she wrote to King Leopold that it was ‘the
happiest, proudest
day in my life, and I can think of nothing else. Albert’s name is for ever immortalised with this
great
conception, his own, and my
own
dear country
showed
she was
worthy
of it.’
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She came to visit almost daily from its opening until she left Buckingham Palace for Osborne at the end of July.

By the time it closed, over 6 million visitors had passed through its doors, though the precise total figure of 6,063,986 includes those who visited more than once. The profits exceeded £180,000, and on Albert’s suggestion an acreage of land in Kensington Gore was purchased as a site for royal colleges and museums, notably the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Albert Hall. The Crystal Palace itself was moved to Sydenham, where it was eventually destroyed by fire in 1936.

As a demonstration of industrial progress and a bringing together of all classes, the exhibition was an undoubted success. Writing to Prince Albert in rather patronising terms which would seem politically incorrect in the extreme to later generations, the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, was particularly struck by the fact that it brought to London thousands of people who had never seen a train before, ‘people speaking the strange tongues of Lancashire and Durham, and the official reports of their behaviour as they flocked through museums and gardens are full of unconcealed pride. Not a flower was picked, not a picture smashed.’
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