The marriage of Prince Ernest of Saxe-Coburg, then aged thirty-three, to Princess Louise, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Duke Augustus of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, on July 31st 1817 at Gotha had certain similarities to that of the Duke of Kent to his sister a year later, the dominant motivations being political and dynastic, although it began glowingly. Biographers and historians have tended to take a bleak view of this handsome, extrovert, selfish and self-indulgent man, but contemporary opinions, although often morally censorious, were considerably more tolerant. Ernest’s sons certainly revered him, and his mother-in-law, the formidable but warm-hearted Dowager Duchess of Gotha, does not appear to have blamed him for the eventual failure of the marriage, although it is evident that he was far from blameless. If he certainly lacked the intelligence, caution, and ambition of his younger brother, Leopold, there was a compensating warmth and spirit in his character that emerge clearly from his own letters and the memories of his two sons. His portrait is not easy to give, but the principal features are clear enough, and are not without their attractions.
His young wife is less difficult to discern. She was small in stature, widely regarded as singularly pretty, vivacious, and intelligent. She was precocious and vital, and was a sensitive and accomplished musician, a quality which her two sons – and particularly the younger – were to inherit. She was also of a romantic disposition, and there seems no doubt that she was genuinely in love with the dashing Prince Ernest. Her surviving letters give an impression of somewhat artless warmth, and her mother-in-law wrote of her immediately after the marriage that ‘It is a charming, tiny being, not beautiful but very pretty, through grace and vivacity. Every feature of her face has expression; her big blue eyes often look so sad from under her black lashes, and then again she becomes a happy wild child’. To a close friend Louise wrote after her marriage ‘to tell you how happy and contented and joyous I am . . . If one loves an Angel, one’s master and husband, one is much softer and more tender, more susceptible, and warmer also for friendship’. For Ernest’s part, in spite of the fact that marriage was a necessary requirement to preserve the Protestant succession to Coburg, his affections seem to have been fully engaged.
Late in 1817 the Duke of Saxe-Coburg died, and Ernest succeeded to his titles. Their first son – Ernest – was born in Coburg at the Ehrenburg Palace on June 21st 1818. The noise of the town in her confinement distressed Louise, and her mother-in-law insisted that her next should be in the family country home, The Rosenau, some few miles outside the town. There, on August 26th 1819, the Princess gave birth to her second son, subsequently christened Francis Charles Augustus Albert Emmanuel, but known in the family from his birth as Albert.
Many years later, dark rumours circulated both in Coburg and London as to whether this child was in fact the Duke’s son, and one rumour, of which Coburg had an inordinate quantity, selected the Court Chamberlain, the Jewish Baron von Meyern, as the real father. In July 1820 one of the ladies-in-waiting told the Duke that Louise was in love with a Count Solms, which she vehemently denied and which reduced the Count to derisive laughter. Ernest’s reactions were more ominous. ‘If he had been sensible’, Louise wrote to a close friend, ‘he would have laughed also, but he took it seriously and was angry with me. We talked about it and it all ended in tears . . . Now he watches me, which he has never done before’.
The first published allegation that Albert was not the legitimate son of Duke Ernest appears to have originated in a vicious anti-Semitic work by one M. L. W. Foss, published in Berlin in 1921, which stated that ‘Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, is to be described without contradiction as a half Jew’, and in the following year Lytton Strachey dealt with this wholly unsubstantiated statement with characteristic felinity:
There were scandals: one of the Court Chamberlains, a charming and cultivated man of Jewish extraction, was talked of . . .’7
The letters from Louise’s mother-in-law to her daughter, the Duchess of Kent, clearly indicate that the marriage was a happy one until Prince Albert was at least two years old, and Louise’s subsequent affair with Lieutenant von Hanstein appears to have been the only actual case of her infidelity; it was certainly the only one cited in Duke Ernest’s divorce petition, and, as Hector Bolitho has emphasised, ‘there exists no fragment of evidence in the letters written by either Louise’s enemies or her friends to prove or even suggest that she was unfaithful until the Princes were grown children’.8
There is no evidence that the marriage of Ernest and Louise was under any serious strain at this time until the rumours about Solms in 1820. But Ernest’s suspicions received justification subsequently when he discovered that she did have a lover, a young army officer, Alexander von Hanstein, on which discovery he demanded a separation, and despite popular clamour for a reconciliation she left Coburg for ever in September 1824, when Albert was five years old. Louise neither admitted nor denied the charge of adultery, but there was a divorce in 1826, after which she immediately married von Hanstein, who had become Count von Polzig.
Although Louise was sixteen years younger than Duke Ernest, and had a reputation, possibly, but not certainly, justified, for being flirtatious, no contemporary account that survives accuses her of being promiscuous, and her love for von Hanstein was clearly real. Whether Ernest’s own conduct with other women was as bad as some have claimed, and his frequent absences from Coburg and neglect of his wife gave her justification for her loneliness and infidelity, is a matter on which it is impossible to adjudicate. What does appear clear is that the allegations about the doubtful paternity of the second son circulated only after Louise’s subsequent liaison with von Hanstein was exposed, and developed when Albert’s character grew into a very different one from that of his elder brother. Accordingly, everything points to the emphatic conclusion that Albert was indeed the second son of Ernest, Duke of Coburg, and the rumours that gave him a Jewish father and a promiscuous mother may be safely rejected. Albert was not unaware of these rumours, which later became widely current in London and were crudely hinted at in hostile political tracts. Although he was to become sternly censorious of sexual licence, it was not with the glum intolerance of which he has been accused. One who came to know him well subsequently wrote that the presence of what he regarded as evil ‘depressed him, grieved him, horrified him. His tolerance allowed him to make excuses for the vices of individual men; but the evil itself he hated’. His lifelong devotion to his mother’s memory and name was one evidence of this tolerance.
Prince Albert loved his parents deeply, and always honoured and treasured them. After the death of his father in 1844 he and Ernest had his mother’s body brought back to Coburg to rest in the same mausoleum as that of his father, which the brothers had had built specially for them. This action has not often been remarked upon by Albert’s biographers; its significance may be regarded as very considerable. It may also be considered significant in any assessment of Duke Ernest’s own reputation, which has been somewhat harshly portrayed on occasions as that of a debauched and odious profligate. His elder son was to write of him that ‘he took the keenest interest in anything and everything which concerned our bringing up. A more beautiful bond between a father and his sons it would be difficult to find’. All the evidence justifies this tribute. Duke Ernest’s inadequacies and failings were many, but he received and always held the devotion of his sons.
The Duchess of Gotha wrote joyfully to the Duchess of Kent on August 27th 1819 from The Rosenau:
The date will of itself make you suspect that I am sitting by Louischen’s bed. She was yesterday morning safely and quickly delivered of a little boy. Siebold, the accoucheuse, had only been called at three, and at six the little one gave his first cry in this world, and looked about like a little squirrel with a pair of large black eyes.9 At a quarter to seven I heard the tramp of a horse (in the courtyard at Ketschendorf). It was a groom, who brought the joyful news. I was off directly, as you may imagine, and found the little mother slightly exhausted, but gaie et dispos. She sends you and Edward [the Duke of Kent] a thousand kind messages.
Louise is much more comfortable here than if she had been laid up in town. The quiet of this house, only interrupted by the murmuring of the water, is so agreeable. But I had many battles to fight to assist her in effecting her wish. Dr. Muller found it inconvenient. The Hof-Marshal thought it impossible – particularly if the christening was to be here also. No one considered the noise of the palace at Coburg, the shouts of the children, and the rolling of the carriages in the streets . . .
How pretty the May Flower [Victoria] will be when I see it in a year’s time. Siebold cannot sufficiently describe what a dear little love it is. Une bonne fois, adieu! Kiss your husband and children.
Augusta.
Albert was christened in the Marble Hall at The Rosenau on September 19th, the address being delivered by Pastor Genzler (whose daughter later married Albert’s tutor, Florschütz) and who had also officiated at the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. ‘The good wishes with which we welcome this infant as a Christian, as one destined to be great on earth, and as a future heir to everlasting life, are the more earnest when we consider the high position in life in which he may one day be placed, and the sphere of action to which the will of God may call him’.
Louise wrote of her children on May 22nd 1820:
Ernest est bien grand pour son âge, vif et intelligent. Ses grands yeux noirs pétillent d’esprit et de vivacité . . . Albert est superbe . . . d’une beauté extraordinaire; a des grands yeux bleus, une toute petite bouche – un joli nez – et des fossettes à chaque joue – il est grand et vif, et toujours gai: Il a trois dents, et malgré qu’il n’a que huit mois, il commence à marcher.
In July, 1820: Albert est toujours beau, gai et bon, et a sept dents. Il marche déjà, quelquefois tout seul, et dit ‘papa et maman’; n’est-ce pas un petit prodige pour dix mois?
When Albert was two:
Albert adore son oncle Léopold, ne le quitte pas un instant, lui fait des yeux doux, l’embrasse à chaque moment, et ne se sent pas d’aise que lorsqu’il peut être auprès de lui . . . Il est charmant de taille, et yeux bleus. Ernest est très fort et robuste, mais pas la moitié si joli. Il est beau, et a des yeux noirs.
A few months later:
Mes enfants ont fairs les délices de leurs aieuls. Ils sont beaucoup et deviennent très amusants. L’aîné surtout parait avoir de l’esprit, et le petit captive tous les coeurs par sa beauté et sa gentillesse.
From an early age, Louise made Albert her particular favourite, and as their tutor, Florschütz, later recorded:
Endowed with brilliant qualities, handsome, clever, and witty, possessed of eloquence and of a lively and fervid imagination, Duchess Louise was wanting in the essential qualifications of a mother. She made no attempt to conceal that Prince Albert was her favourite child. He was handsome and bore a strong resemblance to herself. He was, in fact, her pride and glory. The influence of this partiality upon the minds of the children might have been most injurious.
Albert was not as physically strong as he appeared. He had a slow and somewhat feeble pulse, low blood pressure, and even as a child fatigued easily. He was to develop into a boy, and then into a man, of quite remarkable application and intellectual energy in what was in reality a weak physical frame.
In 1839 Ernest wrote that ‘from our earliest years we have been surrounded by difficult circumstances of which we were perfectly conscious and, perhaps more than most people, we have been accustomed to see men in the most opposite positions that human life can offer. Albert never knew what it was to hesitate. Guided by his own clear sense he always walked calmly and steadily on the right path’.
Queen Victoria later wrote of her (and Albert’s) grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg (‘Grandmother Coburg’):
She was a most remarkable woman, with a most powerful, energetic, almost masculine mind, accompanied with great tenderness of heart and extreme love for nature . . . She was adored by her children, particularly by her sons; King Leopold being her great favourite.
She had fine and most expressive blue eyes, with the marked features and large nose inherited by most of her children and grandchildren. Both the Prince [Albert] and his brother were exceedingly attached to her, and they lived much with her in their younger days.
It was the Dowager Duchess’ great ambition that Albert – interestingly, not Ernest – should marry his cousin, Victoria, but she died when Albert was twelve years old.
Of all her children, Leopold was the favourite, and he subsequently wrote of her that ‘she was a woman in every respect distinguished; warm-hearted, possessing a most remarkable understanding, and she loved her grandchildren most tenderly’.
The Dowager Duchess kept her daughter, the Duchess of Kent, fully informed of the Coburg cousins, particularly about Albert. ‘He is not a strong child’ (February 10th 1821); ‘Little Alberinchen, with his large blue eyes and dimpled cheeks, is bewitching, forward, and quick as a weasel. He can already say everything. Ernest is not nearly as pretty . . .’ (July 11th 1821); ‘Leopold is very kind to the boys. Bold Alberinchen drags him constantly about by the hand. The little fellow is the pendant to the pretty cousin [Victoria]; very handsome, but too slight for a boy; lively, very funny, all good nature, and full of mischief . . .’ (August 11th 1821).
The Duchess of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (‘Grandmother Gotha’), the boys’ step-maternal grandmother (the second wife of Duke Augustus who was father of Louise) was equally devoted and beloved. In the summer of 1822 the boys stayed with her when their parents were away. Their mother wrote in their album that ‘Ernest is very much grown. He is not as handsome as his father, but he will have his good figure. Albert is much smaller than his brother, and lovely as a little angel with his fair curls’.
Grandmother Coburg recorded on February 14th 1823:
The little boys have interrupted me, for you know how little one can do during such a visit. A couple of boys always find means to be noisy, which, and the loud talking, calls for many a scolding from grandmama. They are very good boys on the whole, very obedient, and easy to manage. Albert used to rebel a little sometimes, but a grave face brings the little fellow to submit. Now he obeys me at a look.
She wrote to the Duchess of Kent on May 9th 1823:
The boys are very wild, and Ernest flies about like a swallow . . . Do not yet tease your little puss with learning. She is so young still.
In 1823 the boys – aged five and not yet four respectively – were put under the care and tuition of Herr Christoph Florschütz of Coburg.
This development was the direct result of the intervention of Stockmar, whom Leopold had asked to report upon the young Princes and their education. Stockmar had gone to Coburg, conducted his investigation, and reported favourably on the boys. He was struck by the fact that although Albert was aggressive and self-confident with other children in their games, and particularly when playing soldiers, he was strangely quiet and quick to cry at home, a difference which Stockmar considered ‘very marked’. He became convinced that the boys needed a male tutor, and Herr Florschütz, tutor to Alexander and Arthur Mensdorff, youngest sons of Emmanuel, Count of Mensdorff-Pouilly and his wife Sophie, sister of the Duchess of Kent and Leopold, was engaged. It was an inspired choice, one of Stockmar’s most remarkable, even by his standards.
Apparently Albert had disliked being under the care of women, and was happy at the event, despite his long-standing affection for his nurse, Miss Muller. Grandmother Gotha, solicitous for their health (‘Albert being so subject to attacks of croup’), opposed the development, but was swiftly reconciled to the conscientious and devoted Florschütz.
After Louise left Coburg for von Hanstein in 1824 she never saw her children again, and died seven years later. ‘Leaving my children was the most painful thing of all’, she wrote. ‘They have whooping cough and said, “Mamma cries because she has to go now, when we are ill”. The poor lambs, God bless them. The Duke was friendly towards me. We came to an understanding and parted with tears, for life. I am more sorry for him than for myself’. There were no subsequent contacts of any kind between her and her sons, which was part of the divorce agreement. Her stepmother wrote: ‘I told her that it was impossible for them to forget their mother, but that they were not told how much she suffered, for this would make them suffer also’. ‘The Prince never forgot her’, Queen Victoria later wrote, ‘and spoke with much tenderness and sorrow of his poor mother, and was deeply affected in reading, after his marriage, the accounts of her sad and painful illness. One of the first gifts he made to the Queen was a little pin he had received from her when a little child’. Florschütz subsequently recorded that when the Duchess left Coburg ‘there was no cheerfulness or happiness here’.
With singular heartlessness, Duke Ernest left Coburg immediately after his wife’s departure for a shooting holiday with Leopold and remained away for his birthday (January 6th), to the dismay and sadness of his sons. So powerful was Prince Albert’s desolation at this double separation that it remained vivid to Florschütz forty-five years later.
Grandmother Gotha wrote to Duke Ernest on July 27th 1831:
The sad state of my poor Louise bows me to the earth . . . The thought that her children had quite forgotten her distressed her very much. She wished to know if they even spoke of her. I answered her that they were far too good to forget her; that they did not know of her sufferings as it would grieve the good children too much.
When Louise died of cancer, Grandmother Gotha wrote to the Duke:
This also I have to endure, that that child whom I watched over with much love should go before me. May God soon allow me to be reunited to all my loved ones . . . It is a most bitter feeling that that dear house [of Gotha] is now quite extinct.
Thus the brothers, deprived of their mother, grew up at The Rosenau. Florschütz later recollected the great affection between them – which was to endure despite many vicissitudes – but also recorded:
Even in infancy, however, a marked difference was observable in their characters and dispositions. This difference naturally became more apparent as years went on, and their separate paths in life were definitively marked out for them; yet far from leading at any time to any, even momentary, estrangement, it seems rather to have afforded a closer bond of union between them.
Florschütz found Albert an eager pupil – ‘to do something was with him a necessity’ – and an enthusiastic athlete, although at this time ‘he was rather delicate than robust, though already remarkable for his powers of perseverance and endurance’.
All accounts of Albert’s early life, contemporary and subsequent, speak glowingly of Florschütz. He was only twenty-five when he assumed his responsibilities, but had already established himself in the family and thereby had come to the attention of Stockmar. He spoke English fluently, so that his charges became familiar with it from a very early age. An admirable teacher, exceptionally well read, and with a deep interest in science as well as literature and languages, he encouraged the boys to widen their own interests. Both were fascinated by natural history, and Florschütz arranged for regular instruction by an expert; their collection of rock specimens was later established as the Ernst-Albrecht Museum, and is maintained to this day. Albert’s love of music was also encouraged, and Florschütz became a guide, mentor, and companion as well as tutor, and his influence upon Albert was immense and beneficial.
Albert’s Journal in 1825 recorded his daily life with considerable vivacity and warmth (he was not yet six). There are frequent references to tears: ‘When I awoke this morning I was ill. My cough was worse. I was so frightened that I cried’ (January 23rd 1825); ‘we recited, and I cried because I could not say my repetition, for I had not paid attention . . . I was not allowed to play after dinner, because I had cried whilst repeating’ (January 26th); ‘During our walk I told the Rath [Florschütz] a story. When I came home I played with my companions. But I had left all my lesson-books lying about in the room, and I had to put them away: then I cried, but afterwards I played again’ (February 20th); ‘I cried at my lesson today, because I could not find a verb: and the Rath pinched me, to show me what a verb was. And I cried about it’ (February 28th); ‘I wrote a letter at home. But because I had made so many mistakes in it, the Rath tore it up, and threw it into the fire. I cried about it’ (March 26th). But there are happy references to expeditions and walks, and trips with ‘dear Papa’, including a visit to Ketschendorf where ‘I drank beer, and ate bread and butter and cheese’. On April 10th he recorded: ‘I had another fight with my brother: that was not right’.
His tutor later wrote that ‘In his early youth [childhood] Prince Albert was very shy, and he had long to struggle against this feeling. He disliked visits from strangers, and at their approach would run to the furthest corner of the room, and cover his face with his hands; nor was it possible to make him look up, or speak a word. If his doing so was insisted upon, he resisted to the utmost, screaming violently’. At a children’s fancy dress party, when he was five, Albert was dressed ‘as a little Cupid’ and urged to dance, but adamantly refused, ‘and his loud screams were heard echoing through the rooms’. What was regarded by others as obstinacy and aloofness was rightly discerned by Florschütz as a profound shyness and unease with strangers, while with those he knew and trusted ‘the distinguishing characteristics of the Prince’s disposition were his winning cheerfulness and his endearing amiability. His disposition was always to take a cheerful view of life, and to see its best side. He was fond of fun and practical jokes’.
Grandmother Gotha visited Coburg in June 1824, and recorded:
The dear children are, thank God, perfectly well, and as happy and merry as one could wish. They delight so much in driving and walking about that, if one were to ask them, they would say they never wished to go home.
In July 1825, when the boys were staying with her:
They had a very simple and regular life, and are out in the open air as much as possible. They are so good and gentle, and give me great pleasure . . . The ‘Rath’ really does all he can for them, and you have a real treasure in him.
She wrote to the Duchess of Kent, on August 17th 1826, that she had noted a report in the papers that King George IV had seen Princess Victoria at Virginia Water: ‘The little monkey must have pleased and amused him. She is such a pretty, clever child . . . Alberinchen looks rather pale this summer. He is delicate; the heat tries him, and he grows fast’.
After the extension of the Duchy, the pattern of the boys’ lives – centred in Coburg in the winter and The Rosenau in the summer – was changed in that Gotha and Reinhardsbrunn were added to their regular homes. But The Rosenau was their true home, ‘the place he most loves’, as his future wife subsequently wrote in her Journal. She also described the frugal circumstance of their childhoods: ‘It is quite up in the roof, with a tiny little bedroom on each side, in one of which they both used to sleep with Florschütz their tutor. The view is beautiful, and the paper is still full of holes from their fencing; and the very same table is there on which they were dressed when little’.
Grandmother Gotha wrote to the Duke, after a visit by the children, on January 30th 1828: ‘I cannot say enough in praise of their good behaviour, and I shall feel the separation from them very much . . . Do not let them take much medicine, nor hear much about their health; it only makes them nervous. A well-regulated diet and mode of life is much better than medicine, and as much air as possible’.
Arthur Mensdorff wrote in 1863 that: ‘Albert, as a child, was of a mild, benevolent disposition. It was only what he thought unjust or dishonest that could make him angry . . . Albert thoroughly understood the naïveté of the Coburg national character, and he had the art of turning people’s peculiarities into a source of fun. He had a natural talent for imitation, and a great sense of the ludicrous, either in persons or things; but he was never severe or ill-natured . . .’
The portrait that we receive from all quarters – and including Albert’s own notes, letters, and fragmentary Journal – is that of a happy and privileged childhood. It is, accordingly, strange to find his eldest daughter, Princess Victoria, writing many years later that ‘Papa always said that he could not bear to think of his childhood, he had been so unhappy and miserable, and had many a time wished himself out of this world’, as this is in complete contrast with all contemporary evidence, and Prince Albert himself later told his wife – perhaps somewhat tactlessly – that his childhood was the happiest period of his existence.
No doubt there was some loneliness, and periods of unhappiness that seem inseparable from all childhoods, and particularly one in a broken home. But the brothers were devoted to each other, the grandmothers were close and dedicated to them, and Duke Ernest emerges from all contemporary accounts as a genial, affectionate and indulgent father, whose enjoyment of his sons’ company severely interrupted Florschütz’s careful plans for their education. Neither the Gotha nor the Coburg grandmothers found fault with Albert, and this biographer is baffled by references in biographies of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert’s ‘stressful and unhappy childhood’ and ‘the traumatic experiences of his youth’, which ‘left him permanently wounded’. The loss of a mother under particularly sad circumstances obviously left its mark, and the gap could not be filled wholly by the delightful and loving grandmothers, but the gaiety and cheerfulness of the boy – to which so many contemporary accounts refer – belie these portraits of misery.
Grandmother Coburg wrote to the Duchess of Kent, on March 23rd 1829, that ‘Ernest is beginning to grow handsome . . . Albert is very good-looking, very clever, but is not so strong as his brother’. Again, after the death of George IV in 1830, and very shortly before her own death:
God bless Old England, where my beloved children live, and where the sweet blossom of May may one day reign! May God yet for many years keep the weight of a crown from her young head! and let the intelligent clever child grow up to girlhood before this dangerous grandeur devolves upon her!’
Leopold became King of the Belgians in 1831. Leopold owed his success as the British candidate for the throne of the somewhat artificial and highly divided nation principally to British dislike of the King of Holland, coupled with the realisation that the failure of the concept of a United Netherlands under the King’s sovereignty was a definitive political reality. When a French candidate – the Due de Nemours – entered the lists the British went firmly for Leopold’s candidature, and King William IV’s doubts about Leopold were far less powerful than his detestation and profound suspicion of the French. An acute European crisis passed, and by the spring of 1833 the independence of the new state of Belgium was assured by the major Powers. It was not a particularly glittering position to have achieved in some respects, but a significant advancement for a younger son of the small House of Coburg. In the summer of 1832 Ernest and Albert visited him at Brussels, which, according to Florschütz, made a great impression upon them. In the autumn of that year their father remarried, to Princess Mary of Würtemburg, but not happily, and her relations with her stepsons were distant.
Prince Albert was now marked by his tutor and his uncle Leopold as an exceptionally advanced, serious, and capable boy, with a remarkable range of interests and formidable self-discipline. He demonstrated, Florschütz noted, ‘rather too strong a will of his own, and this disposition came out at times even in later years. Surpassing his brother in thoughtful earnestness, in calm reflection and self-command, and evincing, at the same time, more prudence in action; it was only natural that his will should prevail’. Albert wrote in his Journal when he was eleven that ‘I intend to train myself to be a good and useful man’.
At the age of fourteen he drew up his own work programme. One day’s regime was as follows:
6 – 7 Translations from the French
7 – 8 Repetition and Preparation in History
8 – 9 Modern History
10 – 11 Ovid
11 – 12 English
12 – 1 Mathematics
6 – 7 French
7 – 8 Latin Composition
The Prince’s education was particularly strong in languages, history, the natural sciences, and music, with rather less attention to the classics and mathematics. It was also significant that the programme included five hours specifically set aside for outdoor activities and recreation.
The reality, however, was not as Prince Albert or his tutor had wished, and the principal difficulties were caused by Duke Ernest, now ‘much occupied with his new and splendid possession of Gotha’ in the words of Leopold, but also delighting in the company of his sons. The trouble was that he insisted on their company for breakfast – and later for lunch – when he was staying in Coburg, and the boys were at The Rosenau. As Roger Fulford has written so succinctly about Duke Ernest, he ‘was not a pleasant character, for he was fired with political ambition which he lacked the capacity to realise and in personal habits he was selfish and extravagant’.10
As he grew older Albert began to realise more clearly the deficiencies of his father, which were to be inherited to the full by Ernest, but his devotion to both of them was total and unwavering, even when they strained his patience greatly in later life. But Duke Ernest’s devotion to his sons meant that breakfast was taken between nine and ten with the Duke whenever he was at home, and the travelling involved often meant that, as Florschütz complained, ‘the greater part of the forenoon was inevitably wasted, to the interruption of useful studies and occupations. The Duke, however, was indifferent to this, and we can only wonder that the Princes, notwithstanding, retained their love for study’. Albert, also, was highly impatient at these interruptions in spite of his affection for his father, and Queen Victoria later wrote that he had often referred to this dislocation of his studies. Some of Prince Albert’s biographers have taken his plans and Florschütz’s schedule rather too literally, describing it as ‘relentless’, ‘unvarying’, and ‘inhumanly severe’, when in fact it was not excessive in terms of hours, and was varied with other activities, holidays, and companionship with other boys of the area. Furthermore, Albert loved Coburg, but particularly The Rosenau, and the glorious countryside around it, which he subsequently called ‘the paradise of our childhood’. That countryside has now become somewhat ravaged, but it is not difficult to recreate in one’s mind how beautiful it must have been. On The Rosenau itself, judgement may be more critical. ‘A lovely spot’, as one English visitor recorded, ‘– but the house, oh, so dreary and uncomfortable!’
Albert, who rose very early, also always retired early. In Florschütz’s words: ‘An irresistible feeling of sleepiness would come over him in the evening, which he found difficult to resist even in after life; and even his most cherished occupations, or the liveliest games, were at such times ineffectual to keep him awake. If prevented from going to bed, he would suddenly disappear, and was generally found sleeping quietly in the recess of the window – for repose of some kind, though but for a quarter of an hour, was then indispensable’.
After he was eleven the programme became even more difficult to maintain as the brothers regularly lunched with their father at three in the afternoon (‘the place of dinner being as uncertain as that of the breakfast’, as Florschütz sourly commented), and the time for regular lessons seldom exceeded five hours a day for six days a week, hardly an exceptionally severe regime, but interesting in its careful planning, balance, and Florschütz’s insistence on time set aside for ‘bodily exercises, also regulated at fixed hours, and amusement’. Although a carefully trained and excellent shot, Albert demonstrated little real interest in the great shooting expeditions so beloved by his father and the German gentry. The exercise, fresh air, and company appealed to him far more than the actual sport, and Florschütz was pleased that ‘The active life which the Prince thus led in the open air strengthened alike the mind and the body. His thirst for knowledge was kept alive and indulged, while under the influence of his bodily exercises he grew up into an active and healthy boy’. In fact his looks rather belied the reality; although never seriously unwell, his constitution was not a strong one, and his surviving grandmother was constantly concerned about the effects of fatigue upon him, as, subsequently, was his wife.
Florschütz also believed very much in what he called ‘self-imposed’ studies, at which Albert was particularly assiduous. The total of five hours a day formal learning was, accordingly, only a part of the whole.
Albert was devoted, and deeply beholden, to the kind and critical Florschütz, who was the dominating and beneficent influence of his childhood and early youth. These emotions were warmly returned. Many years later Florschütz wrote that Albert’s outstanding qualities were ‘his eager desire to do good and to assist others; the other, the grateful feeling which never allowed him to forget an act of kindness, however trifling, to himself. Stockmar, character-istically, was much more critical of the boy and doubted the reality of his application and constancy: ‘He has the same mobility and readiness of mind [of his mother]’, he severely noted, ‘and the same intelligence, the same over-ruling desire and talent for appearing kind and amiable to others, the same tendency to espiéglerie, to treat things and people in the same amusing fashion, the same habit of not dwelling long on a subject’.
It was at Albert’s specific request that he and Ernest were confirmed together on Palm Sunday (April 12th) 1835. It was an elaborate event, in which the two brothers had their public examination in the Giants’ Hall of the castle in Coburg on the 11th, in the presence of their father, Grandmother Gotha, relations, ministers, officials, and invited members of the public – but in the conspicuous absence of their step-mother. ‘The dignified and decorous bearing of the Princes’, it was recorded, ‘their strict attention to the questions, the frankness, decision, and correctness of their answers, produced a deep impression on the numerous assembly’. The actual ceremony was conducted by Pastor Genzler, and was followed by a special service in Coburg Cathedral, and on April 13th there was a grand banquet of celebration in the Giants’ Hall, when Florschütz was presented with a diamond ring in tribute to his devotion to the Coburg sons.
This event was more dominated by Albert’s devotion to his brother than to his actual piety. He was never, as a child or a man, excessively interested in religion, and was totally indifferent to abstract theology. He recorded Church quarrels in Bonn with a refreshingly sardonic amusement, and the subsequent endeavours to portray him as possessed of a profoundly religious character were categorised by his brother as for public consumption, and ‘suited him certainly even less than it did me’ – which is perhaps to take a good point too far, although an excellent example of what Roger Fulford describes as ‘that gentle malice which belies his very dull book of Memoirs’.11 Leopold took the view that ‘the real spirit of Christianity demands that man shall work every moment during life’, with which interpretation Albert was well content. His faith was real enough, and Florschütz described him as ‘instinctively devout’; certainly he had little interest in the formalities of religion, and his intellectual scepticism was to be fortified by the influence of Karl Gottlieb Bietschneider, an eminent and highly controversial critical theological scholar, at University. His subsequent compositions – and particularly his enchantingly colourful and warm Jubilate in A – testify to the minimal impact of the somewhat glum Protestantism in which he was confirmed. One detects in the tributes to his piety after his death by his contemporaries and friends, under the virtual command of Queen Victoria, an exaggerated note.
If formal religion was of relatively small significance, it is difficult to understand Prince Albert without an appreciation of the deep importance of music in his life and personality. This was partly as a result of family influences. Leopold was extremely knowledgeable, and was regarded as a singer of professional quality, while Ernest’s coarseness of character was partly redeemed by his compositions, of which one was an opera that enjoyed considerable popular and critical success in Germany. For his part, Albert’s interest and pleasure had been attracted early; he was a genuine scholar as well as a gifted organist, and his own compositions – especially his Jubilate in A, but also his Chorale, the tune now generally known as Gotha – demonstrate not only his real gifts as a musician, with much tenderness and warmth, which were perhaps seen to their best effect in his Lieder und Romanzen, of which he composed twenty-six, but also that gaiety in his personality which his family and close friends knew, but which was less obvious in many of his relationships with strangers, and particularly English strangers. After his marriage he was to obtain special pleasure from planning concerts of his favourite works and most esteemed performers, and a contemporary subsequently wrote that:
They seemed to take him into a dream-world, in which the anxieties of his life were for the moment forgotten. He would often stand apart in the Drawing Room, while some great work of Beethoven, Mozart, or Mendelssohn was being performed, rapt in reverie, but with a look on his face, which those could best understand, and most loved to see, who knew by it the pressure on a brain often too severely taxed was for the moment removed.
The confirmation of the Princes was followed by a visit to Berlin with their father to be presented formally at the Prussian Court, and thence on a tour to Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. Grandmother Gotha was concerned that the schedule was too intense and the travelling too constant, and Albert wrote to his new step-mother that ‘It requires a giant’s strength to bear all the fatigue we have had to undergo. Visits, parades, rides, déjeûners, dinners, suppers, balls, and concerts follow each other in rapid succession, and we have not been allowed to miss any of the festivities’.
To the Director of the High School at Coburg Albert wrote on February 5th 1836:
In spite of all the distractions of our life here at Gotha, in spite of innumerable visits, in spite of the howling of the wind and storm, in spite of the noise of the guard under our windows, I have at length completed the framework of my Essay on the Mode of Thought of the Germans, and I send it with this for your perusal, begging you not to judge too severely the many faults which your critical eye will doubtless discover in it.
You have my work without head or tail. I have sketched no form of introduction or conclusion, thinking it unnecessary, for my desire is to trace through the course of History the progress of German civilization down to our own times . . . The conclusion will contain a retrospect of the shortcomings of our time, with an appeal to every one to correct these shortcomings in his own case, and thus to set a good example to others.
On March 12th he reported that ‘the work on the History of German Literature gets on but slowly, owing to our Gotha engagements’. ‘It is painful’, he wrote from Brussels in December, ‘to see the mean idea which the French and Belgians, and even the English, have of our German literature.’
The position of King Leopold in the childhoods of Princess Victoria and Prince Albert was crucial. To each he was a trusted and loved uncle, to Victoria virtually a surrogate father, and his accession to the throne of Belgium had added not only to his formal position but to his glamour and attractiveness. The fact that he was at that time disliked and distrusted by the British Royal Family did not diminish his stature in her eyes, and always there was the influence and presence of Stockmar, in whom particularly Princess Victoria had begun to place much trust in a difficult childhood surrounded by swirling jealousies, personal antipathies, and political machinations. For some time Leopold had thought seriously of Victoire Kohary as a possible future wife for Albert, and it was only gradually that the idea of attempting to arrange a marriage with the eventual heiress to the English throne began to develop.
It was natural that such an ambition should have long been harboured by the children’s mutual grandmother, the Duchess of Coburg, but it is wholly excessive to state that ‘The plan of a marriage between the two first cousins existed from the moment of Prince Albert’s birth . . . Marriage to Princess Victoria was to be his vocation and he accepted it, never considering anything else’.12 There is no evidence whatever that Albert was even faintly aware of the possibility until he was nearly seventeen, and it is the fact that Leopold, although concerned about the uncertain prospects of the younger son of the Duke of Coburg with his little reasonable hope of succession to any title or possessions, and who was genuinely devoted to his English niece, was only slowly drawn even to the possibility of a marriage between Albert and Victoria. Mythology is a strong barrier to the biographer, but, however frequently this particular myth has been repeated, the facts are that Prince Albert and Princess Victoria did not even meet until they were both seventeen, and that although Leopold did eventually arrange this meeting the results, as will be related, were not totally successful.
It should also be remembered that there was no inevitability about Princess Victoria’s succession to the English throne until early 1830, and Leopold was on very bad terms with the British Royal Family. He kept his links open with Kensington Palace, and particularly with Princess Victoria, for whom his deep devotion was warmly returned, but even here the bitter disputes at Kensington Palace were as disagreeable to Leopold as they were labyrinthine. Leopold, moreover, was now a Continental monarch with more and substantial responsibilities, and the possibility of capturing the very considerable Kohary fortunes for the family was a very alluring one.
These ambitions were changed by two factors. The first was that it became gradually clear that Princess Victoria was virtually certain to become Queen of England, and was by far the greatest prize in Europe. The second was that Stockmar, whose experience with Leopold and Charlotte had had such a profound influence on him, had maintained his English political contacts very thoroughly and had developed a very real affection and admiration for England, where he was well-liked, respected, and taken seriously by intelligent politicians. As he wrote to Prince Albert in 1854:
I love and honour the English Constitution from conviction. I think that, with judicious handling, it is capable of realizing a degree of legal civil liberty which leaves a man free scope to think and act as a man. Out of its bosom singly and solely has sprung America’s free constitution in all its present power and importance, in its incalculable influence upon the social condition of the whole human race; and in my eyes the English Constitution is the foundation-, corner-, and cope-stone of the entire political civilization of the human race, present and to come.
Such emotions effectively countered King Leopold’s disgust with the Royal Family, and also played upon his feelings of responsibility for his fatherless niece and motherless nephew. Leopold was a schemer, and a calculating man, but he was much more than this. A marriage between Albert and Victoire Kohary was straightforward Realpolitik; a union between Prince Albert and Princess Victoria was a very different matter, and it was only gradually that Leopold became convinced of its feasibility. He also recognised that although Prince Albert might be relatively docile and be persuaded by his sense of duty, Princess Victoria was a quite different proposition.
The childhood of Princess Victoria was not happy. Her father had died on January 23rd 1820, Stockmar having been summoned by the Duchess of Kent too late to do little more than console the distraught widow. Kent had been, as Stockmar wrote, ‘a chivalrous husband’, but he died deeply in debt. Leopold had to come to the rescue of his sister and niece, as the new King George IV – the Prince Regent succeeded his father nine days after the death of the Duke of Kent – was not only indifferent to their fate but was actively anxious for them to leave the country. Leopold relieved them from hopeless penury, but their circumstances were, and remained, difficult and humiliating, while Leopold received little commendation for his generous assistance either from his sister or Parliament. Meanwhile, the ambitious and avaricious Captain John Conroy, the Duke’s Equerry, made himself so essential to the Duchess’ existence that she was unheeding of warnings about his immense personal ambitions and doubtful financial probity. Her relationship with the King and his brother, Clarence, the heir to the throne, degenerated from the embittered to the sulphurous. For the growing Princess Victoria the visits to her Uncle Leopold at Claremont were ‘the brightest epoch of my otherwise rather melancholy childhood’.
Another brightness was provided by an equally controversial personality, Louise Lehzen, who became the governess of both Victoria and her step-sister, Feodora, and was devoted to the child – a devotion warmly reciprocated. But Lehzen did not lack ambition either. It was at Conroy’s instigation that she was raised to the rank of a Hanoverian Baroness, while he became a Knight Commander of the Hanoverian Order. It was only gradually that Princess Victoria realised how she had become the object of Conroy’s ambitions that had nothing to do with her well-being, beyond her survival to become Queen of England. Leopold’s influence on his sister diminished sharply, and it was uncharacteristically unfair for Prince Albert to blame his uncle subsequently for the evil influence on the Duchess of Kent that the adventurer Conroy obtained: the truth was that the Duchess demanded too much of her brother Leopold and was impatient of his caution and difficulties, that he himself was deeply out of favour with the Royal Family and was the object of heavy criticism in Parliament and the popular Press, and Conroy poisoned the Duchess’ mind against him by alleging that he was seeking the Regency – if the Crown became vacant before Victoria inherited – for himself.
Princess Victoria grew up, principally in Kensington Palace, in unhappy and difficult circumstances, surrounded by intrigue, and never permitted to be alone. Her guardians were always adults – her mother, Lehzen, or Conroy – and it was a childhood of intense loneliness. But her surviving Journals give a clear indication of a fresh, sometimes critical and even acerbic personality, with much warmth and zest and enthusiasm and spirit, which had survived a singularly complex and lonely childhood.
But there was a severe price to be paid. She became understandably alienated from her mother and bitterly hostile to Conroy, and her devotion and gratitude to her uncle Leopold leap endearingly and movingly from her letters and her early Journals – the few originals that have survived the appalling holocaust after her death. But she also became a young woman with intense feelings and prejudices, so often the fate of an only child with no father or stable family life. Like Charlotte, she was headstrong and emotional, and, although talented, was hardly to be described as having notable intellectual qualities. She could be intolerant, was usually uninterested in the circumstances of others outside her immediate circle and concerns, and was not only ignorant through her education of the actual conditions of the nation she gradually realised she was likely to rule but at that stage remarkably lacking in serious inclination to learn more of them. In this sense, her surviving Journals make very revealing but somewhat depressing reading; there is an artless shallowness about them that reveals not only a selfishness, which is not uncommon, but a melancholy lack of imagination and sympathy for people outside her immediate knowledge. Individuals, towns, cities, and large tracts of the British countryside are bleakly assessed and curtly dismissed. As she grew up, and in spite of the severe restrictions of Conroy’s ‘Kensington System’, she acquired not only a precocious self-confidence but something very close to arrogance and personal vanity. None of this was to be wondered at, but her often over-sympathetic biographers have tended to minimise the unattractive aspects of this otherwise graceful, vivacious, and endearing girl brought up under unpleasant circumstances.
No fair estimation of the young Princess Victoria can exclude certain realities about her personality. She was highly emotional and very impressionable, was by no means a good judge of people, was often lacking in gratitude, and was profoundly self-centred and highly susceptible to flattery. She had a hard common sense, but even this was variable when it did not affect her own personal interests.
The similarities with Princess Charlotte are remarkable, both in circumstances – in effect both fatherless, and hostile to their mothers – and in personality, and it was not only Stockmar who commented upon the several common factors. The many portraits of Princess Victoria printed and published during the early years of her reign are mainly derivative, and the few drawn from life are clearly somewhat flattering. She was very small and Lady Wilhelmina Stanhope (later Lady Dalmeny, and the mother of the future Prime Minister Lord Rosebery), who was one of her train-bearers at her Coronation, wrote that she ‘never, at any time, could have been called pretty, but when she came to the throne she was distinctly attractive: her small fair head well set on extremely pretty shoulders, singularly graceful in all her movements, with a great charm of manner, the brightest and gayest of smiles, and a remarkably clear and musical voice’. But, for all her warmth, enthusiasm, and attractiveness, contemporaries also detected a coldness and an element of ruthlessness that troubled them. She had grown up in a hard school, and it appeared to many that this fundamental toughness and intolerance would remain her principal characteristics. And so they might well have been, had it not happened that she was temporarily released from the influences of her childhood, upbringing, and heredity by the warmth and ability of the one person whose quality she wholly appreciated and loved, and whose wise advice she eventually followed.
That King Leopold had decided that marriage between Princess Victoria and Prince Albert would be highly desirable, and a further major advance in the Coburg family fortunes, is incontestable. What would be wrong would be to conclude that his actions were dominated by calculation and cynicism. For one thing, his devotion to Princess Victoria was as strong and as genuine as hers to him. ‘What a happiness was it for me to throw myself in the arms of that dearest of Uncles’, she wrote in her Journal on September 29th 1835, ‘who has always been to me like a father, and whom I love so very dearly!’ Moreover, Leopold was acutely aware of his own personal unpopularity in England, the keen dislike of the Coburg influence, and the increasing rift between his sister the Duchess of Kent and his niece Princess Victoria. These were not propitious circumstances, and certainly not made easier by his marriage in 1832 to Louise Marie, Princess of Orleans, the daughter of King Louis Philippe of France, and a Roman Catholic. His letters to his niece were addressed to ‘My dearest love’, and, although they often contained earnest advice, radiated an affection that is manifestly sincere. He was also unsure about his nephew, Prince Albert.
Leopold’s visit to Coburg early in 1836 was deliberately planned by him and Stockmar to assess Albert’s development and to establish whether Florschütz’s enthusiastic reports were justified. Both were acutely aware of the low reputation of Duke Ernest and his entourage, and were genuinely – and very understandably – concerned at the possibility of moral and intellectual contamination from a Coburg hedonism. As Albert wrote to his brother in 1840, ‘You well know the events and scandals that had always happened in Coburg castle and in the town, and just this knowledge has made you indifferent to morality.’ Prince Albert was evidently not contaminated in this sense, but while Stockmar was impressed by Albert’s character and ability he considered that he was, not surprisingly, very deficient in his understanding of contemporary European political affairs – in which he demonstrated little interest – and was manifestly ill-at-ease with strangers. Albert’s shyness and reserve did not greatly trouble Leopold, and he shrewdly realised that they were not the result of lack of confidence and were also very attractive to women. Nonetheless, he agreed with Stockmar that Albert was not yet fully developed, and that there were gaps which had to be filled.
Stockmar’s assessment is so interesting that it deserves to be quoted at some length.
He is a handsome youth who, for his age, is tolerably developed, with pleasant and striking features; and who, if nothing interferes with his progress, will probably in a few years be a well-built man with a pleasant, simple, and yet distinguished bearing. Externally, therefore, he has everything attractive to women, and possesses every quality they find pleasing at all times, and in all countries. It may also be considered as a fortunate circumstance that he has already a certain English look about him . . .
He is said to be prudent, cautious, and already very well informed. All this, however, is not enough. He must not only have great capacity but true ambition, and a great strength of will. To pursue so difficult a political career a whole life through requires more than energy and inclination – it demands also that earnest frame of mind which is ready of its own accord to sacrifice mere pleasure to real usefulness. If simply to fill one of the most influential positions in Europe does not satisfy him, how often will he feel tempted to regret what he has undertaken. If he does not, right from the start, regard it as a serious and responsible task upon the fulfilment of which his honour and happiness depend, he is not likely to succeed.
This was a severe assessment indeed, and may be partly explained by Stockmar’s obstinate perfectionism. But it was an absolutely honest portrait, characteristic of the man and his relationship with Leopold. Furthermore, Stockmar was as worried about Princess Louise’s wayward character as he was about Duke Ernest’s reputation, and was alarmed that aspects of it – the charm, intelligence, and wit unaccompanied by application to any subject for very long – were evident in the younger son. Neither he nor Leopold trusted the influence of Duke Ernest, particularly when he had taken his sons to Berlin after their confirmation, a city whose materialism and low moral standard both men deplored. In this matter they had no need to trouble themselves; Prince Albert had hated it as well.
Stockmar was right to be cautious. The Coburg atmosphere was narrow, claustrophobic, gossip-ridden and at best amoral; Florschütz’s talents might have been considerable, but his range was necessarily and humanly limited; neither of Prince Albert’s parents were, in Stockmar’s eyes, estimable people, and Stockmar’s sense of heredity was as strong as his revulsion from scandal and loose moral and intellectual standards. Judged by these criteria, Albert was unpromising material for advancement in political life, and it was wholly characteristic of Stockmar that he laid these concerns and apprehensions clearly before Albert’s uncle. But he also detected some signs that were hopeful, and indeed the fact about Prince Albert that most surprised and impressed him was that so fine a developing character should have survived such a background, and ‘with such a father and such a brother, both equally unprincipled’. But at the time his hesitations were real, were merited, and are very understandable.
Albert was not his pupil, nor his protegé, as Leopold had been, and his admiration for Florschütz – although considerable – was qualified. What Stockmar could not discern in Prince Albert was the presence of any intellectual and moral strength behind a very agreeable and charming façade. Above all, Albert seemed to lack – and indeed at that time did lack – any ambition or resolution. He was evidently a genuine and natural scholar and devoted countryman, an accomplished musician and linguist, well read and clearly highly intelligent and well educated, but he was in Stockmar’s eyes a somewhat gauche, unsophisticated, cheerful and amusing sixteen-year-old boy. In tendering his advice to Leopold, Stockmar had a heavy responsibility to bear. He did not conceal his doubts, and they were fully justified. His portraits were sharp, but also fair. Between Florschütz’s eulogies and Stockmar’s severities one sees the clear portrayal of a talented and engaging boy of sixteen, but still reserved and immature.
Nevertheless, in spite of all reservations, time was pressing, and Prince Albert and Princess Victoria – who was now almost seventeen and might inherit the English Throne at any time – had never even met, and knew very little of each other. On this meeting Leopold was now determined, and Stockmar, despite his qualified approval of Albert, completely agreed for political reasons, as there were now other challengers in the field. When Prince Adalbert of Prussia advanced his claims to be included ‘in the list of those who pretend to the hand of HRH the Princess Victoria’ in May 1837 the Duchess of Kent sent the magnificent reply to Lord William Russell, the British Minister in Berlin who had communicated this possibility: ‘If I know my duty to the King, I also know my maternal one, and I will candidly tell your Lordship that I am of opinion that the Princess shall not marry until she is much older. I will also add that, in the choice of person to share her great destiny, I have but one wish – that her happiness and the interests of the country be realised in it’. ‘From this time onward the connection [between Victoria and Albert] was regarded as the one aim to which all energies should be directed’, Charles Prince of Leiningen, Victoria’s half-brother, subsequently recorded in a memorandum specially written for Albert in 1841, but although this was now the Coburg intention – certainly that of Leopold and the Duchess of Kent, with Stockmar giving his cautious support and advice – the actual difficulties remained formidable, and not the least of these was the tempestuous character of Princess Victoria herself.
But there were other problems in England. By this stage, King William IV was seventy-one and clearly ageing rapidly, but his intense hostility to the Duchess of Kent, Conroy, and to the Coburgs in general had not abated. These vehement emotions were wholly understandable, particularly where they concerned the ambitious and tactless Duchess of Kent and the even more ambitious and obnoxious Conroy. The King’s most recent biographer has admirably summarised the attitude of the Duchess:
The Duchess of Kent seems to have considered his reign as an undesirable and inconsiderately protracted interregnum between the black wickedness of the Georges and the radiant paradise to open with the accession of Queen Victoria.13
The attitude of the Duchess prompted the King to urge his Ministers to ‘keep a watchful Eye upon the Designs of the Duchess of Kent, who may not scruple to sacrifice the Interests of this Country to personal Considerations’. Greville recorded a dramatic outburst by the King at Windsor in August 1836 when, in the presence of the Duchess of Kent and her daughter and a large assembly, he expressed the vehement hope that there would be no Regency and that the Royal authority would not be vested, even briefly, ‘in the hands of a person now near me [the Duchess] who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed’.14
The King’s ambition to marry off Princess Victoria to one of the sons of the Prince of Orange, the eldest son of the King of the Netherlands and the man rejected by Charlotte for Leopold, was eagerly shared by the Prince of Orange himself, who, after Leopold had become King of the Belgians, now had a particular additional cause of hatred against Leopold. ‘Voilà un homme qui a pris ma femme et mon royaume’ he would remark with venom, and Leopold fully returned his antipathy. Thus, when it became known at Kensington Palace that the King was inviting the Prince of Orange and his two sons to London, the Duchess at once urged Duke Ernest to accelerate his proposed visit, and indeed to come at once.
A ferocious storm ensued. The King ordered the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to prevent the Coburgs from coming, but the Duchess of Kent stood firm. Palmerston’s relations with the King were markedly lacking in harmony, and the King had to accept the fact of the forthcoming visit, but with a very bitter grace.
King Leopold was incensed, and wrote to Princess Victoria to tell her what was afoot. It was an angry letter, but also a very shrewd one. ‘The relations of the King and Queen therefore are to come in shoals’, he wrote, ‘when your relations are to be forbidden . . . Really and truly I never heard anything like it, and I hope it will a little rouse your spirits . . . I have not the least doubt that the King, in his passion for the Oranges, will be excessively rude to your relations, this however will not signify much, they are your guests and not his’. The point was not lost on the Princess. In spite of all the endeavours of the King and the Prince of Orange, she viewed the two Dutch sons with bleakness. ‘The boys are both very plain’, she wrote to the intensely relieved Leopold, ‘and have a mixture of Kalmuck and Dutch in their faces, moreover they look heavy, dull, and frightened and are not at all prepossessing. So much for the Oranges, dear Uncle’.
Leopold also wrote at length to Lehzen, asking her to convey the contents to Princess Victoria. After emphasising their link of deep loyalty to the Princess amidst all intrigues, and reminding Lehzen with some bluntness that she owed her continued presence at Kensington Palace to him, he went on:
The Princess’s 17th birthday marks an important stage in her life: only one more year and the possibility of a Regency vanishes like an evil cloud. This is the perfect time for us, who are loyal, to take thought for the future of the dear, dear child. An immediate alliance is out of the question; she must reach her 18th birthday, perhaps even more – her health must decide that; but the Princess might perhaps do well, for the sake of composure and peace of mind, to find a choice and firmly anchor herself to it . . .
Thus, in May the Coburg Princes travelled to England with their father from Rotterdam. ‘It must be a sine qua non’, Stockmar wrote to Leopold, ‘that the object of the visit must be kept strictly from the Princess as well as from the Prince, so as to leave them completely at their ease’.
Victoria’s account in her Journal (May 18th, 1836) of her first meeting with Albert deserves to be given in its entirety:
At a ¼ to 2 we went down into the Hall, to receive my Uncle Ernest, Duke of Saxe Coburg Gotha, and my cousins, Ernest and Albert, his sons. My Uncle was here, now 5 years ago, and is looking extremely well. Ernest is as tall as Ferdinand and Augustus; he has dark hair, and fine dark eyes and eyebrows, but the nose and mouth are not good; he has a most kind honest and intelligent expression in his countenance, and he has a very good figure. Albert, who is just as tall as Ernest, but stouter, is extremely handsome; his hair is about the same colour as mine; his eyes are large and blue, and he has a beautiful nose, and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth; but the charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful; c’est à la fois full of goodness and sweetness, and very clever and intelligent.
Albert’s immediate reactions on meeting Victoria are not recorded, but they can hardly have been as enthusiastic, to judge by his letters. The crossing had not been agreeable – ‘the journey to England has given me such a disgust for the sea that I do not like even to think of it’, he wrote – and he wrote to his step-mother on June 1st that he had been suffering from a bilious fever. ‘The climate of this country, the different way of living, and the late hours, do not agree with me’. Nor did the succession of dinners, concerts, and leveés to which the young Princes were invited and compelled to attend. ‘You can well imagine that I had many hard battles to fight against sleepiness during these late entertainments’, he reported with feeling. This disability for public life was to prove enduring; ‘he never took kindly to guest dinners, balls, or the common evening amusements of the fashionable world; and went through them as a duty which his position imposed upon him, than as a source of pleasure or enjoyment’, his first biographer and secretary wrote, on which Queen Victoria commented defensively: ‘Yet nothing, at the same time, could exceed the kind attention he paid to every one, frequently standing the whole evening that no one might be neglected’.
The Duchess of Kent gave ‘a brilliant ball here at Kensington Palace’ at which the Duke of Wellington was present. The Princes visited the Duke of Northumberland at Sion House, and saw ‘at last some of the sights of London’. ‘Dear Aunt [Kent] is very kind to us, and does everything she can to please us; and our cousin [Victoria] also is very amiable’, Albert recorded, with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm.
Princess Victoria was pleased and impressed by her cousins whom she described as ‘very amiable, very kind and good, and extremely merry, just as young people ought to be; with all that they are extremely sensible and fond of occupation. Albert is extremely good-looking, which Ernest certainly is not, but he has a most good-natured, honest and intelligent countenance’. Her half-sister, Princess Feodora, preferred Ernest to Albert, but Ernest – perhaps as a direct result of the strongly expressed views of Leopold and Stockmar – was never seriously considered as a possible suitor by anyone except himself.
It was on this first visit to England that Albert met Benjamin Disraeli. His views have not been recorded, but they were probably very similar to Ernest’s, who commented upon him as ‘a vain young Jew of remarkably radical tendencies. He carried his left arm in a black sling, which peculiarity was sneered at by his enemies, who said that he only did it to make himself interesting’.
Prince Albert made an immediate and excellent impression on others – and not least upon King William, who both liked him and referred to him as one of the most handsome young men he had ever met. Indeed, the more one studies this neglected Monarch, the more one warms to him. Rough and blunt he may have been – and was – but his kindnesses to his obvious successor were unaffected by his loathing for her mother, and his equal detestation for the Coburgs did not prevent him from quickly developing a fair and very generous opinion of Prince Albert. For the King’s goodness towards her, Victoria was always deeply grateful. ‘He had a truly kind heart’, she wrote of him many years later, ‘. . . and of his kindness to herself and his wish that she should be duly prepared for the duties to which she was so early called, the Queen can only speak in terms of affectionate gratitude’. The formal meeting between the King and Albert – at a Royal Ball – reflected immense credit on the very nervous and unwell young German Prince and the tired, suspicious, anti-Coburg and irascible King. They liked and respected each other at once.
Princess Victoria was impressed by the fact that both her cousins played the piano excellently, and that Albert was a gifted amateur artist. But there are two particularly interesting aspects of Victoria’s comments on Albert. As a person particularly susceptible to beauty, she was very struck at once by the fact that Albert was a very handsome young man, although not yet as handsome as he was to become. But also, in a life that conspicuously lacked fun – ‘I am very fond of pleasant society’, she had written to Leopold on March 14th 1837, ‘and we have been for the last three months immured within our old [Kensington] Palace. I longed sadly for some gaiety’ – she responded with especial warmth to Albert’s lively humour combined with a seriousness and reflectiveness which she noted in contrast with Ernest. Both were ‘very, very merry and gay and happy, like young people ought to be’. Those who remorselessly insist on the alleged misery of Albert’s childhood must avert their gaze from these, and many other, indications of the opposite.
The visit was marred by the knowledge of the King’s deep anger against the Coburgs and by Prince Albert’s inability to cope with the whirl of the celebrations and the insupportable late hours which the strange English kept. At the birthday ball itself he nearly fainted – ‘turned as pale as ashes’, as Princess Victoria recorded – and took to his bed for a day; on at least two other occasions he had to excuse himself and leave early, prompting Victoria to write to Leopold, ‘I have only now to beg you, my dearest Uncle, to take care of one, now so dear to me’. It is not difficult to detect a clear note of disappointment, even of disapproval, in Victoria’s accounts of Albert’s regular ailments and disappearances. ‘I am very sorry to say’, she wrote somewhat tartly to Leopold, ‘that we have an invalid in the house in the person of Albert, who, though much better today, has had a smart bilious attack. He was not allowed to leave his room all day yesterday, but by dint of starvation, he is again restored to society, but looks pale and delicate’. She immensely enjoyed the celebrations, and after another Ball, when she danced until dawn, she felt herself ‘all the better for it next day’. ‘Poor dear Albert’, however, did not. ‘Poor dear Albert came to breakfast without eating anything, looking weak and delicate’; ‘Poor dear Albert was unable to leave his rooms’.
Prince Albert’s emotions on this, his first visit to England, were understandably very mixed. He was evidently now aware of the strong hopes of the Coburgs and Stockmar, and could not have been unconscious of the fact that Ernest was extremely interested himself in marriage with Victoria – an interest that had to be emphatically suppressed by Leopold and Stockmar. The clear and resolute hostility of King William to his aunt and uncle, and the harsh intrigues in the British Royal Family also shadowed the occasion. Beyond the political difficulties he disliked the food, the weather, and the succession of formal dinners with their associated dreadful hours. His English, although technically excellent, had never been tested so severely before. But it is also clear that he enjoyed the company of the young people invited for the celebrations, and was very struck by Victoria’s vivacity and attractiveness. There is no evidence at all that his feelings for her went beyond this point at this stage. For her part, Victoria wrote to Leopold that Albert ‘possesses every quality that could be required to make one perfectly happy’, but, also, one only detects cousinly affection, pleasurable amusement, and regard.
Thus, on neither side were there any indications of deeper emotions. As Prince Albert subsequently wrote in a personal memoir: ‘Princess Victoria and myself, both at the age of 17, were much pleased with each other, but not a word in allusion to the future passed either between us, or with the Duchess of Kent’. Victoria wrote to Leopold after Albert’s departure, saying that she accepted him as the husband whom he had selected for her, but did not consider herself bound to marriage in the near future. It was a tactful letter, pleasing to Leopold, yet clearly guarded, and Victoria subsequently made it clear that she did not consider herself committed to Albert at all. ‘He is so sensible, so kind and so good and so amiable too. He has besides the pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance that you could wish to see’. Leopold – and Stockmar – clearly understood that cousinly affection, although successfully created by this first meeting, was all that had been achieved.
Indeed, the visit had confirmed Stockmar’s doubts about the maturity of Prince Albert, and his inability to withstand the physical pressures of the entertainment and difficulty in casual social intercourse had been very marked. Thus, while it can hardly be regarded as a total failure, the meeting between the two cousins had fallen very far short of the most hopeful expectations.
It must be emphasised again that Princess Victoria’s life was at this time tedious and strained. Her half-sister, Feodora, later wrote: ‘When I look back upon those years, which ought to have been the happiest of my life, from fourteen to twenty, I cannot help pitying myself. Not to have enjoyed the pleasures of youth is nothing, but to have been deprived of all intercourse, and not one cheerful thought in that dismal existence of ours, was very hard’. It was an exaggerated portrait, but not one devoid of truth, and it made Princess Victoria especially receptive to the occasional exposure to pleasure and the company of young people, and particularly young men. The visit of her other Coburg cousins, Ferdinand and Augustus, in March 1836, had been equally welcome to her, and their departure – and particularly that of Ferdinand – had evoked much sadness. Nonetheless, Albert and Ernest had made a considerable impression. ‘Dearly as I love Ferdinand and also good Augustus’, Victoria wrote in her Journal, ‘I love Ernest and Albert more than them, oh, yes, MUCH more . . . Though I wrote more when Uncle Ferdinand and Augustus went, in my Journal . . . I feel this separation more deeply, though I do not lament as much as I did then, which came from my nerves not being strong then. I can bear more now’.
But while she wrote dutifully to Leopold thanking him for ‘the prospect of great happiness you have given me in the person of dear Albert’ the memory of his visit quickly faded. He occasionally wrote to her; she very rarely to him. There was no question even of an ‘understanding’ between the young couple, and certainly none whatever of an engagement.
Her interest in him was reduced even further when she became Queen on the death of William IV on June 20th 1837. The King’s last satisfaction was that Princess Victoria had come of age on May 24th, and the dreaded fear of a Conroy-dominated Regency had been averted. But he had achieved much more. When George IV had died in June 1830 The Times had commented that ‘no monarch will be less generally mourned’. The brief reign of William IV had been one of tempestuous political activity and tension, which had included his dismissal of two Administrations – one Whig, one Tory – and the passage of the 1832 Reform Bill, and yet when Alexis de Tocqueville came to England a year later he was struck by the absence of revolutionary feeling. William IV was no radical, but he had shrewd political sense, always sought sensible compromise, and in the public view was certainly not an enemy of Reform. His popularity had varied greatly, but at crucial moments he had actually been popular, which was in itself a striking novelty for the Hanoverians. ‘He inherited a monarchy in tatters, he bequeathed to his heir the securest throne in Europe’ is a fair assessment of his notable contribution.15
The new Queen was unaware of what had been done. ‘She is surrounded with the most exciting and interesting enjoyments’, Greville noted with truth; ‘her occupations, her pleasure, her business, her Court, all present an unceasing round of gratifications. With all her prudence and discretion she has great animal spirits, and enters into the magnificent novelties of her position with the zest and curiosity of a child’. Bewitched by her Whig Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, who disliked change and Germans and saw no need for an early marriage, Albert appears to have virtually vanished from her thoughts. In her own words, ‘the freedom, the gaiety and the excitements of becoming Queen at eighteen’ drove all thoughts of marriage away.
Three years were to elapse before the cousins were to meet again. Prince Albert’s education was resumed.
The next stage of that education was a period of ten months in Brussels, being prepared for entry to the University of Bonn by a Baron von Wiechmann, a retired German officer, to the dismay of Grandmother Gotha, who wrote to Duke Ernest to lament that ‘it makes me sad to think that you are coming back without them, and I cannot reconcile myself to this long separation from them’. This decision was not at all to the liking of the other German noble families, and represented a considerable triumph for Leopold and Stockmar. Prince Albert now came under the tutelage of the very eminent mathematician Quetelet, who subsequently shrewdly remarked that Prince Albert did not think enough of his own talents whereas Leopold never forgot his. There was also the influence of the Reverend William Drury, who had conducted a lengthy correspondence with Byron, but most subtle of all was the liberal atmosphere of Brussels itself and the close proximity of Leopold and Stockmar, with Florschütz still in close attendance. To his father, Albert wrote that ‘we live in a small but very pretty house, with a little garden in front, and though in the middle of a large town, we are perfectly shut out from the noise of the streets. The masters selected for us are said to be excellent, so that everything is favourable to our studies, and I trust there will be no lack of application on our part’. Their period with Baron von Wiechmann included visiting manoeuvres with Leopold and to Waterloo, where their tutor had fought, and a warm invitation by his father to spend Christmas at Coburg was politely declined by Albert on the grounds that ‘our course of study would be quite disturbed by such an interruption’.
Von Wiechmann was of a stiff and restricted personality, whose relationship with his young charges was not smooth. Albert’s gift for mimicking and his acute sense of the ridiculous evidently did not assist this relationship. In April 1837 the Princes entered Bonn University – ‘in search of more wisdom’, as Albert wrote – staying in a house specially rented for them under the approving eye of Florschütz, who reported that Albert ‘maintained the early promise of his youth by the eagerness with which he applied himself to his work, and by the rapid progress which he made, especially in the natural sciences, in political economy, and in philosophy . . . Music also, of which he was passionately fond, was not neglected, and he had already shown considerable talent as a composer’. He became consumed by what his brother later described as a ‘reading rage’. He also demonstrated great talent as a fencer, winning a University competition, and developed a close and enduring friendship with Prince William of Löwenstein, who was particularly delighted by Albert’s mimicry of the professors, his irreverent caricatures and bubbling humour. ‘Music was also a favourite pursuit of the students’, Prince William later recorded. ‘To the despair of Colonel von Wiechmann, we hummed several students’ songs, and even practised the “Glocke” of Romberg for four voices. In spite of many false notes, we went resolutely on and passed many an evening in song. Prince Albert was looked upon amongst us as a master of the art’, as he was in improvised amateur dramatics, in which ‘Prince Albert was always the life and soul’.
This was one of the most supremely happy periods of Prince Albert’s life. The University of Bonn was perhaps the most advanced and enlightened in Europe, matched only by Edinburgh in its standards and spirit of liberal scholarship. He had his studies, which absorbed him, his music, his new student friends, and, followed by his beloved greyhound Eôs, went on walking expeditions with his friends. ‘He liked above all things to discuss questions of public law and metaphysics’, Prince William wrote, ‘and constantly, during our many walks, juridical principles or philosophical doctrines were thoroughly discussed’. But Prince William’s abiding memory was of Albert’s merriment and the excellence of his company. ‘The Prince’s humour and sense of the ludicrous, found a natural counterpoise in his other great and sterling qualities; and the great business of his later life, the many important duties he had to fulfil, soon drove into the background the humorous part of his character, which had been so prominent at the University’. Another contemporary wrote shortly afterwards that ‘Prince Albert is kind, affable, and gay; joining freely in the mirth of those about him; sensible to any committed absurdity, but showing in his laughter that it proceeds from a really good-humoured temper’. It should not be forgotten that Princess Victoria had been particularly attracted by Prince Albert’s sense of humour, cheerfulness and merriment when they had first met.
When King William died Prince Albert wrote a courteous letter to his cousin, now Queen of England, in English.
My dearest cousin,
I must write you a few lines to present you my sincerest felicitations on that great change which has taken place in your life.
Now you are Queen of the mightiest land of Europe, in your hands lie the happiness of millions. May Heaven assist you and strengthen you with its strength in that high but difficult task.
I hope that your reign may be long, happy, and glorious, and that your efforts may be rewarded by the thankfulness and love of your subjects.
May I pray you to think likewise sometimes of your cousins in Bonn, and to continue to them that kindness you favoured them with till now. Be assured that our minds are always with you.
I will not be indiscreet and abuse your time. Believe me always, your Majesty’s most obedient and faithful servant,
Albert.
In Queen Victoria’s and Prince Albert’s voluminous and meticulously maintained papers there is no record of any acknowledgement or reply to this letter.
The persistent but wholly unfounded rumours that Prince Albert and Queen Victoria were in effect engaged were a source of real embarrassment to them both, and even to Leopold, who advised Albert to undertake a long tour through Switzerland and Northern Italy to divert speculation and attention that were not only undesirable and unwelcome but also could have been deeply injurious to Leopold’s own plans and ambitions. As Queen Victoria herself subsequently noted with severity of these rumours, ‘nothing was then settled’. At the time, her emotions were considerably more vehement. She had just become, at the age of eighteen, Queen of England. She had not been greatly impressed by her wan cousin at the occasion of their only meeting. She did not particularly wish to be married. Of her cousin Albert she wrote bleakly to her uncle Leopold in July 1839 that ‘one can never answer beforehand for feelings, and I may not have the feeling for him which is requisite to ensure happiness. I may like him as a friend, and as a cousin, and as a brother, but not more; 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’. Also, all that Albert heard about England from Leopold displeased him. ‘United as all parties are in high praise of the young Queen’, he wrote to his father, ‘the more do they seem to manoeuvre and intrigue with and against each other. On every side there is nothing but a network of cabals and intrigues, and parties are arranged against each other in the most inexplicable manner’. Prince Albert accepted Leopold’s advice that he should temporarily ‘disappear’ on a lengthy and unpublicised journey, and found his reasons ‘imperative and conclusive’.
The journey through the Alps and into Northern Italy with Ernest and Florschütz was in itself a great and enjoyable success. Albert carefully kept a small album, which in fact was a scrapbook of his journey, which he sent to Victoria, who was both surprised and touched. ‘Nothing had at this time passed between the Queen and the Prince’, she later wrote about what she described as ‘one of her great treasures’, ‘but this gift shows that the latter, in the midst of his travels, often thought of his young cousin’. There is little evidence of this, beyond the gift of the scrapbook.
The Princes returned to Bonn in November 1838. ‘How tall and handsome Albert is grown’, Grandmother Gotha noted, but he was already concerned and saddened by the prospect of his inevitable separation from his brother, and the extreme uncertainty about his own future after he left Bonn in the summer of 1838. For the first time the real possibility of marriage with Victoria had been brought home to him as a result of a conversation with Leopold in March, but the report from London was, Albert wrote to his father, that ‘the Queen had in no way altered her mind, but did not wish to marry for some time yet’. Leopold wrote to Stockmar of Albert’s reaction that: ‘He looks at the question from its most elevated and honourable point of view. He considers that troubles are inseparable from all human positions, and that therefore if one must be subjected to plagues and annoyances, it is better to be so for some great or worthy object than for trifles and miseries. I have told him that his great youth would make it necessary to postpone the marriage for a few years . . . I found him very sensible on all these points. But one thing he observed with truth. “I am ready,” he said, “to submit to this delay, if I have only some certain assurance to go upon. But if, after waiting, perhaps, for three years, I should find that the Queen no longer desired the marriage, it would place me in a very ridiculous position, and would, to a certain extent, ruin all the prospects of my future life” ’.
From Leopold’s point of view the reality was even less promising. The young Queen, riding high, had grown cold towards him; ‘dear Uncle is given to believe that he must rule the roast (sic) everywhere’, she tartly noted. Leopold, clearly sensing the tone of Queen Victoria’s letters, wrote cautiously to her (April 13th 1838) ‘concerning the education of our friend Albert’ and assuring her that ‘on one thing you can rely, that it is my great anxiety, to see Albert a very good and distinguished young man, and no pains will be thought too much on my part if this end can be attained’. Victoria’s letters to Leopold over the following months are notable in their absence of reference to Albert, and Leopold responded by never referring to him. In a somewhat voluminous correspondence, replete with family references, these omissions are noteworthy.
In London, Stockmar was concerned by her unexpected arrogance, her refusal to accept any advice ‘which does not agree with her opinion’, and a temperament ‘as passionate as a spoilt child’. But matters were in fact even worse than they realised. The Queen had become deeply suspicious of Leopold’s ambitions for her, ‘so as to be able to rule the niece through the husband’. She sent to Stockmar a letter from Albert ‘to show how badly he writes’, which Stockmar admitted. Before she became Queen she and Albert had maintained a very intermittent correspondence, which now virtually ceased. She was absorbed by her new position, by the persuasive Melbourne, by her enthralling independence – all of which, as she later wrote, ‘put all ideas of marriage out of her mind, which she now most bitterly repents’. Victoria thought Albert too young, and her heart had not been captured. Nor had Albert’s. His father attended Queen Victoria’s Coronation in June 1838 by himself, when he was made a Knight of the Garter; there was no invitation to the two Coburg Princes – nor to King Leopold.
In October, while they were staying at the Coburg Palace after leaving Bonn, the Princes were involved in a fire when a stove ignited material left on it, and which was eventually suppressed by them and Albert’s devoted valet, Cart, who had been in his service since 1830.
There were other indications of the end of childhood and adolescence. Albert was keenly and genuinely disturbed by the separation from Ernest, now destined for military training. ‘The separation will be frightfully painful to us’, he wrote to Löwenstein. ‘Up to this moment we have never, as long as we can recollect, been a single day away from each other. I cannot bear to think of that moment’. To Ernest he wrote immediately after the separation: ‘You cannot imagine how empty it seems to me since you left. I felt a lump in my throat and it was only with difficulty that I could hide my tears. It is the first separation; and it will not be the last. But I console myself with the old saying, “There must be a valley between two hills” ’. ‘The thought of the separation of such fondly attached brothers quite breaks my heart’, Grandmother Gotha wrote, while Albert lamented to her after Ernest had left for Dresden:
Now I am quite alone. Ernest is far off, and I am left behind, still surrounded by so many things which keep up the constant illusion that he is in the next room. To whom could I turn, to whom could I pour out my heart, better than to you, dear Grandmama, who always takes such interest in everything that happens to us; who also know and understand us so well? . . . I must now give up the custom of saying we and use the I, which sounds so egotistical and cold. In we everything sounded much softer, for the we expresses the harmony between different souls, the I rather the insistence of the individual against outward forces, though also confidence in its own strength.
The departure of Ernest also brought to an end the role of Florschütz in their upbringing. Since the boys were five and four respectively he had been their tutor, guide, constant companion, and eventually their close friend. Their gratitude and affection for him were strong and enduring, and it was to him even more than to his beloved father and grandmother that Prince Albert was subsequently to ascribe the true happiness of his childhood and youth.
After Ernest’s departure ‘in order to sacrifice himself to Mars’, as Albert wrote to Löwenstein, Albert travelled to Italy in the sombre and significant company of Stockmar at the end of 1838. Stockmar’s presence was far from coincidental, as his scepticism about Albert – not yet eradicated – remained. Leopold, however, was by now convinced. ‘If I am not very much mistaken’, he had written to Stockmar in March 1838, ‘he possesses all the qualities required to fit him completely for the position he will occupy in England. His understanding is sound, his apprehension clear and rapid, and his feelings in all matters appertaining to personal appearance are quite right. He has great powers of observation and possesses much prudence, without anything about him that could be called cold or morose’. Stockmar also accompanied Albert at the specific request of Queen Victoria, conveyed in a letter to Leopold on April 4th 1838, as ‘he knows best my feelings and wishes on that subject’. Stockmar had become one of Queen Victoria’s most respected counsellors. Invited by King William to deal with a possible Regency coup by the Duchess and Conroy he had acted swiftly and successfully, and had earned her profound gratitude. When she did become Queen he was in almost constant attendance with calm and sensible advice. Her impatience with Leopold’s attempts to interfere did not extend to Stockmar, on whom she had leaned at a very difficult time and in which he had not failed her.
This was a strange interlude. Stockmar faithfully reported to the Queen on their travels. It was a somewhat lengthy journey, and in Florence, at Leopold’s request, Albert was joined by Francis Seymour, later General, whose brother was to be in Prince Albert’s personal entourage for twenty-one years. Seymour was an agreeable companion who was to become a close friend. The real purpose of his presence was to keep an eye open for any signs of dissipation and indiscretion on the part of Albert, a fact which caused Victoria much indignation when she learned of the fact many years later. ‘God knows, vice itself would have recoiled from the look alone of one “who bore the lily of a blameless life” ’. Seymour was impressed by Albert, and noted his impatience with meals, considering that ‘eating was a waste of time’, a refrain that was to become very familiar to his future wife. Albert wrote to Löwenstein with mingled enthusiasm and sarcasm: ‘Oh! Florence, where I have been for two months, has gathered to herself noble treasures of art. I am often quite intoxicated with delight when I come out of one of the galleries. The country round Florence, too, possesses extra-ordinary attractions. I have lately thrown myself entirely into the whirl of society. I have danced, dined, supped, paid compliments, have been introduced to people, and had people introduced to me; have spoken French and English – exhausted all remarks about the weather – have played the amiable – and, in short, have made “bonne mine à mauvais jeu”. You know my passion for such things, and must therefore admire my strength of character that I have never excused myself – never returned home till five in the morning – that I have emptied the carnival cup to the dregs’.
The remainder of this odyssey was hardly less successful. He disliked Rome (‘but for some beautiful palaces, it might just as well be any town in Germany’) and had a curious audience with Pope Gregory XVI:
‘The old gentleman was very kind and civil. I remained with him nearly half an hour, shut up in a small room. We conversed in Italian on the influence the Egyptians had had on Greek art, and that again on Roman art. The Pope asserted that the Greeks had taken their models from the Etruscans. In spite of his infallibility I ventured to assert that they had derived their lessons in art from the Egyptians’.
In fact, the audience was even more comical. To Albert, the Pope looked ‘like a Pagoda’, and one devout Catholic who accompanied them tried to kiss the Papal toe. He lay down flat on the floor and grabbed the Pope’s ankle; the startled Pontiff was thrown off balance, and kicked the ardent supplicant hard in the mouth, to the barely-concealed delight of the Protestant Prince, Albert recording the scene for Florschütz.16
He attended the Pope’s blessing of the people from the Vatican balcony, ‘amidst the ringing of bells, firing of cannon, and military music’. He found the occasion impressive, although the ceremonies which followed the blessing were tedious ‘and savoured strongly of idolatry’.
Naples was little better; ‘the sky and the sea are so dull and grey that one might fancy oneself transported to the North Sea’. There then followed the lengthy journey north, eventually returning to Coburg in the early summer. ‘Italy is truly a most interesting country’, he wrote, ‘and an inexhaustible source of knowledge. One contrives, however, to taste extraordinarily little of the enjoyment which one there promises oneself. In many, many respects the country is far behind what one had expected. In the climate, in the scenery, in the study of the arts, one feels most disagreeably disappointed’.
‘Albert is much improved’, Leopold wrote to Stockmar on September 12th. ‘He looks so much more manly, and from his “tournure” one might easily take him to be twenty-two or twenty-three’. But he remained deeply concerned about Victoria’s insistence upon postponing any decision. ‘If he waits until he is in his twenty-first, twenty-second, or twenty-third year, it will be impossible for him to begin any new career, and his whole life would be marred if the Queen should change her mind’. For his part, Prince Albert noted that ‘my sphere of observation has been doubled’, a singularly cool comment on his exposure to the wonders of Italian civilisation.
What was to prove of real importance was that Prince Albert’s other companion was Ludwig Gruner, only slightly older than himself, but already regarded by his tutors as an outstandingly sensitive young appreciator of art and design. The two young men became close friends, and it was Gruner who opened Albert’s eyes to the glories of the Early Renaissance, then much ignored, and indeed despised in fashionable artistic circles. Thus began a friendship and a collaboration of incalculable value to English art and architecture.
The return to Coburg was marked by the joint coming-of-age of himself and Ernest – by special legislation – and the consequent public celebrations. ‘I am now my own master, as I hope always to be, and under all circumstances’, Albert wrote. To Stockmar, however, he wrote somewhat flippantly that he would follow his advice to ‘accustom himself more to society’ and ‘pay more attention to the ladies’. He was then obliged to accompany his father to Carlsbad before returning to The Rosenau ‘in order to enjoy some days of quiet and regular occupation’.
This letter was written to Stockmar on September 6th 1839. His respite was short-lived. Shortly afterwards his father told him that the Coburg trio was to travel to England at the invitation of the Queen. She had conveyed to Leopold by special courier a cold reminder in July that there was no understanding of an engagement, that there was ‘no anxiety’ in the country for her marriage – which was a highly questionable statement, considering that her heir was her Uncle Cumberland, King of Hanover – and that there was no question at all of any marriage for two or three years. To Florschütz Albert gloomily wrote that ‘Victoria is said to be incredibly stubborn . . . she delights in court ceremonies, etiquette, and trivial formalities. These are gloomy prospects’. Without any discernible enthusiasm whatever, Prince Albert prepared himself for his second meeting with his mercurial young cousin, absolutely resolved that a definite decision, one way or the other, must be reached.
Arthur Mensdorff later wrote to Queen Victoria:
Albert confided to me under the seal of the strictest secrecy that he was going to England in order to make your acquaintance, and that, if you liked each other, you were to be engaged. He spoke very seriously about the difficulties of the position he would have to occupy in England, but hoped that dear Uncle Leopold would assist him with his advice.
To his brother, Albert wrote on August 26th:
I am now twenty years old and it is the first time that I do not spend my birthday in your company. In the morning, when the well-known, touching hymn awoke me in The Rosenau, I thought you must come to my bed. I can well feel what you write and I thank Heaven that we were allowed to go side by side through the greater part of our lives. Our childhood is over, at least not to return here on earth; yet I can say that I retain my childlike soul, and this is the treasure that everyone should take with him into his future life. Let us try all the more to attain something perfect – general education, elasticity of the brain. That is what gives great men such power to rule over others.
You were born for a position that required such qualities. Fate seems to have chosen me for a similar or rather more difficult position. Whatever may be in store for us, let us remain one in our feelings. We have, as you correctly say, found what others seek in vain, during all their lives: the soul of another that is able to understand one, that will suffer with one, be glad with one: one that finds the same pleasure in the same aspirations.
From this commitment Albert never wavered. He loved his wayward and often dissolute brother as fervently as he did his parents, and his forgiveness had no element of sanctimoniousness. He accepted them as they were, and although angered by their financial importunities and dismayed by their blatant promiscuity was never censorious. When Ernest contracted an ‘illness’ almost inseparable from his dissolute habits in 1841 his brother wrote:
The cause of it made me very sad. So also did the death-blow which your reputation received, at least in this country. Yet, it would never occur to me to curse you or take away from you the love I owe you as my brother.
That love was reciprocated, and no documents in Albert’s papers are more genuine and moving than Ernest’s letters to Victoria about him during his lifetime and after his death. In them, if only for an instant, one feels the authentic note of love between these very different brothers and their veneration for their ill-starred parents.
It was thus with reluctance that Prince Albert agreed to return to England and to meet his cousin again.
7 Strachey: Queen Victoria, pp. 97–98.
8 Albert The Good, pp. 17–18.
9 They were in fact blue.
10 Fulford, The Prince Consort, p. 21.
11 Fulford, op. cit., p. 28.
12 C. Woodham-Smith: Queen Victoria, p. 37.
13 P. Ziegler: King William IV, p. 277.
14 Greville: Dairies, iii, p. 309.
15 Ziegler, op. cit., p. 294.
16 Fulford, op. cit., p. 32.