Victoria and Albert: The Noble Ally
Surely there can never have been such a union, such trust and understanding between two people.
QUEEN VICTORIA, DESCRIBING
HER RELATIONSHIP WITH PRINCE ALBERT
On Tuesday, June 22, 1897, a seventy-eight-year-old Queen Victoria emerged from the gates of Buckingham Palace in London—riding from the palace to St. Paul’s Cathedral in an open landau. England was celebrating Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. She had been on the throne for sixty years. As her carriage moved slowly through the streets, the cannon boomed in Hyde Park. Mammoth crowds thronged the route and roared their approval—and their love—as she passed. “‘How kind they are,” she said repeatedly to the Princess of Wales, who accompanied her in the open coach. Later, she would write in her journal, “No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those six miles of streets . . . The crowds were quite indescribable, and their enthusiasm truly marvelous and deeply touching. . . . every face seemed to be filled with real joy.”
“Real joy.” Indeed, that is most likely what those faces reflected. For the queen, in old age, was widely adored. (It is said that old queens and young queens are adored; middle-aged queens, not so much.) There was much here to adore, in fact: Victoria was passionate, independent of spirit, impatient, willful. She was intelligent, deeply well-informed about politics and foreign affairs. She was charming, composed, well-spoken, and at times magisterial. She was dowdy of dress, ate and drank like a sailor, and was very little interested in rank and social hierarchy. She abhorred the social prejudices of the English upper class. One of her ladies-in-waiting said that she “never lied or dissembled,” and that she had a “vein of iron” in her “extraordinary character.” She loved beauty, she loved men, and in her youth and middle age had been passionately—even extravagantly—sexual.
Does this sound like the Victoria you know? Certainly not.
No historical person, I think, has ever been so deeply and insistently misunderstood and misrepresented as Queen Victoria.
Victoria suffered an intensely lonely and remarkably deprived childhood—virtually imprisoned in Kensington Palace with a domineering, controlling, and at times abusive mother. She said herself that living with her mother was “like having an enemy in the house.”
And yet Victoria emerged from the scars of this serious early trauma to become a resilient, passionate, deeply openhearted woman—and in many ways a truly great queen.
How did this transformation take place?
Almost all the remarkable positive outcomes in her life were due to her conscious partnership with her husband and consort, Prince Albert. She fell in love with the handsome—almost beautiful—prince, virtually at first sight. They created a partnership of such strength and vitality that together they became a container for an entire empire. For twenty years they ruled together—“we two,” as she often wrote. And though Albert died suddenly at the age of forty-two, Victoria would rule for forty more years; and the power of their conscious, passionate, and deeply healing relationship would bear fruit in her personality throughout her long life. We can see now, in retrospect, that their partnership was a living monument to “broaden and build.”
The union of Victoria and Albert is one of the most fascinating partnerships in history—and certainly one of the most well-documented. It was a relationship built intentionally and systematically from the ground up. What must be particularly interesting to us about their relationship is that these two were consciously intent upon supporting one another’s happiness and thriving. At the outset, their consciously stated intention—written and spoken on many occasions—was “to make one another as happy as possible.”
Victoria and Albert built homes to accommodate the flourishing of their own endeavors—both the family’s and the country’s. (“Your home is your larger body.”) They collaborated on politics, affairs of state, and child rearing. They sketched together, sang together, and danced together. Together, they pulled off the Great Exhibition of 1851—a national and international triumph of unparalleled vision and creativity.
Theirs is a particularly dramatic, but very relevant, story of conscious partnership—a partnership that had, as Wilbur’s beautiful poem says it, “the quality of something made.”
Conscious partnership is in many ways the pinnacle of object seeking—the most mature form of object relationship. It is not the fairy-tale province only of princes and queens. Indeed, if you look deeply, you’ll see that happiness in marriage seldom comes to royal personages at all, in spite of our fondest projections. But it is more available to each of us ordinary folk than we think. We’ve already thought together at length about The Noble Adversary and its many salutary benefits. This is a story about The Noble Ally.
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I first became intrigued with Queen Victoria in graduate school because she was so often used as a prime example of “pathological mourning.” This naturally caught my attention. (You already know of my fascination with grief and mourning.) Then, several years ago, I was studying Queen Victoria’s life for another book I was writing, and I discovered, to my great surprise, that Victoria was not even remotely the person who’d been described in those seminars in grad school.
Oh yes, she was indeed very vulnerable to loss, as was I. This only endeared her to me, of course. But it turns out that her very remarkable twenty-two-year partnership with Prince Albert had so filled her up (we would say, with Kohut, “met her narcissistic needs”) that she was permanently transformed. Here was a very unhappy—and object-starved—girl, who had in early adulthood found just the right love object. (Again: a classic found object. A love object who filled Victoria’s idiosyncratic needs in almost every way—and who had, miraculously, just the right key to her heart.)
Victoria and Albert had twenty-two intensely happy and productive years together. The effect of these years of deep well-being, and the resilience created by their bonding, turn out to be the real story here. And this salutary effect is perhaps the unlikely thread that connects Sue’s and my story to Victoria and Albert’s.
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Both Victoria and Albert were lonely and object-starved kids, although she more profoundly than he. In later years—when she would even speak of it at all—Victoria described her childhood as “lonely and melancholy,” and Kensington Palace, where she was virtually imprisoned, as being “bleak in the extreme.” The little girl never had a room to herself. She was not allowed to play with other children. Adults related to her in the most formal fashion imaginable. She was object hungry.
In her extreme loneliness, the young princess had gathered together a collection of 132 little wooden dolls—painted mannequins that she dressed and decorated herself. Most of these dolls were made up to mimic real historical personages, and characters from theatre and opera. Little Victoria listed their names in a small copybook. She slept with them. She drank tea with them. These were her “friends.” These were, she said, her “relations.” She dressed up her little dog Dash in precisely the same way. (Remember Winnicott: We humans will use all of our creativity to find or to create precisely the right object environment for ourselves. We will create it out of whatever materials come our way. A volleyball if it must be.)
The young Victoria was strictly under the thumb of her ambitious mother, the Duchess of Kent, who actually did not want the little princess to understand her own personal strengths—or, God forbid, her true nearness to overwhelming political power. (Why? The Duchess coveted these for herself.) So, little Victoria experienced negative mirroring at its most fraught: “You are still very young,” her mother said to her, astonishingly, as Victoria approached her eighteenth birthday, “and all your success so far has been due to your Mother’s reputation. Do not be too sanguine in your own talents and understanding.” Ouch.
Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha—the handsome young prince of a small German state, and Victoria’s eventual love match—had had his own early object failures. He was widely considered a beautiful and talented boy, though perhaps too slight, too feminine, too sensitive, and too shy. He was said to be “far from robust, and often in tears.”
Prince Albert had plenty of reason for those tears. When he was five years old, his much-loved mother had left him (and her much older, and ridiculously profligate husband, Albert’s father, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg), and young Albert would never see her or hear from her again. His mother—the primary source of loving and holding in his life—virtually evaporated overnight. Young Albert was profoundly wounded by this abandonment, to say the least. Says one of Victoria’s most important biographers, Christopher Hibbert, “. . . [Albert’s] character, introspective, and given to melancholy, was for ever scarred by this painful separation from a beautiful woman who had petted and indulged him.”
Albert became precisely the fragile personality that Dr. Kohut predicts will emerge from an object-starved environment. As a boy and young man, Albert was famous for his so-called “nervous irritability.” He was fastidious. Rigid. Scared. In contemporary parlance: Albert was neurotic. He was eager to please, and always eager to prove himself worthy. (Does this sound familiar? The rat pressing the little bar over and over again, hoping for a scrap? Anxious attachment.) Young Albert was—perhaps predictably—extremely ill at ease with his own feelings for women, and his own sexuality. In fact, it was hard for him to bear the longing that any close relationship to women stirred up in him. His ambivalence, anxiety, and terror of abandonment were right there on the surface.
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But young Victoria and Albert’s lives would change dramatically in their late teens. They would meet one another and would discover at last the security of non-abandoning love in their lives.
Victoria and Albert’s introduction is the stuff of legend. The two young royals were “set up” with one another, as protocol—and their high stations in life—required. But at the moment of introduction, something happened that no one would have expected. A bonfire of passion was lit. (Keep in mind that both of these adolescents—exalted as they were in rank—were nothing less than hungry, object-starved, heat-seeking missiles.) And something else happened in those introductory moments. It is what we have called, in previous chapters, the phenomenon of “recognition.”
Recognition!
Victoria was immediately stunned by Albert’s beauty, his commanding presence, and, particularly, his kindness. They “got” each other on the spot. Victoria wrote right away to her Uncle Leopold—King of Belgium—who had made the initial introduction:
“Albert is extremely handsome . . .” Victoria offered candidly. “I must thank you my beloved Uncle, for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me in the person of dear Albert. Allow me, then, my dearest Uncle, to tell you how delighted I am with him and how much I like him in every way. He possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy. He is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable too. He has, besides, the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you can possibly see.” Read: the dude was hot! (And he was. Find a picture for yourself of the young Prince Albert.)
Later that night, Victoria wrote excitedly in her diary, “The charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful . . . full of goodness and sweetness, and very clever and intelligent.”
Victoria and Albert’s engagement scene was to become the stuff of legend. They had each found a best friend. A lover. A partner. A consort. Neither of them could even believe it; neither of them had dared to hope.
As the heir apparent of the British throne, it was up to Victoria to propose. Which she did, swiftly. And after the successful engagement conversation (Albert said yes right away), Victoria writes in her journal, “We embraced each other over and over again, and he was so kind, so affectionate. Oh! to feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel as Albert . . . He is perfection; perfection in every way—in beauty—in everything! . . . Oh! how I adore and love him . . .”
That evening, Albert sent his royal fiancée a letter addressed to “Dearest greatly beloved Victoria.” He wrote, “How is it that I have deserved so much love, so much affection? . . . I believe that Heaven has sent me an angel whose brightness shall illumine my life . . . In body and soul ever your slave, your loyal ALBERT.”
After reading it, the queen burst into tears.
Almost immediately these two formed a partnership—a partnership oriented around duty, to be sure, and around the country’s business, as we will see, but primarily organized around happiness, around the intention of making one another content, delighted, and fulfilled.
As I have said, Victoria and Albert sang duets together, and walked and rode together. As Hibbert tells us, “they gave each other rings and locks of hair; he sat beside her while she signed papers, blotting the ink; he accompanied her when she reviewed a parade of soldiers in Hyde Park, wearing, she noted with admiration, a pair of white cashmere breeches with ‘nothing under them.’” (Victoria was not a prude.)
Victoria was every bit as accomplished as Albert. She was by all accounts an extremely skilled horsewoman; she was very talented at sketching and watercolors (the Royal Archives are full of her very fine works of art); she played the piano and danced; she was a lively and well-informed conversationalist.
In the early months and years of their partnership, we can see the ways in which this rich relationship began to backfill some of the narcissistic needs that had gone unmet in these two lovers. Indeed, we can see in their early life together a wonderful recapitulation of containment and twinship. We can see the discovery of—and the joy in—reciprocity. We can see the gradual development of both physical and emotional alignment and profound attunement. The discovery of these possibilities in relationship must have been almost overwhelming to the young couple.
Remember the importance of mere proximity in the formation of early secure bonding? Well, in Victoria and Albert, we see the almost desperate need for proximity in their early years. During their first separation, Albert writes to Victoria, “Dearly beloved Victoria, I long to talk to you, otherwise the separation is too painful. Your dear picture stands on my table and I can hardly take my eyes off it.” And later, “Love of you fills my heart. Where love is there is happiness. Even in my dreams I never imagined I should find so much love on earth.”
Just before his marriage, Albert told Baron Stockmar, “Victoria is so good and kind to me that I am often at a loss to believe that such affection should be shown to me.”
Their honeymoon was a veritable explosion of discovery. There was the exultant discovery of sexuality, sensuality, affection, and tenderness—the discovery of the sheer beauty of the physical body in intimate embrace, and the resulting experience of oneness, attunement, and physical union. Victoria was fascinated with sex, and if truth be told, she was fairly voracious in her sexual appetites. I love this about Victoria: All of her hungers were right out in the open.
We have said that deep human connection produces a profound sharing of energy and information. Albert and Victoria were on a fast learning curve, and were thriving in the learning. There was a bonfire of energy and information passing between them.
And these were just the beginnings.
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What came later on is, quite honestly, most interesting to me, and most pertinent to our discussion. What emerged in their relationship after the first several years of passion was a very quickly growing sense in one another of the possibilities inherent in a “noble ally.” One hears in their communications a sense of the great blessing in having found one another, and a sense of what they could create together. “We two.” That was not, by the way (as it might well have been) “we two against the world.” But most emphatically, “we two for each other and for the world.”
Victoria and Albert were lit up by their aspiration to build something together. Albert was excited to ponder how much good they could do together for so many. Turns out that they had this entirely in common: a love of and devotion to duty.
Prince Albert, even as a boy, was described as preternaturally conscientious. Says Hibbert, “at the age of eleven he wrote with earnest precocity in his diary, ‘I intend to train myself to be a good and useful man.’” He applied himself to sport and games as much as to lessons. Albert was very interested in self-development: He had been immersed in the German philosopher Goethe—just as Thoreau had been—and particularly in Goethe’s ideas about Bildung. Bildung was Goethe’s term for thriving, for self-development, or “self-culture.” In short, for being all you can be.
Victoria shared these aspirations. The young queen was a woman of great charm and character. She could be willful, yes—and at times maddeningly headstrong. But above all, she was determined to do her duty to her country (albeit not with quite the neurotic scrupulosity of Albert). England, and the empire, were always uppermost on her mind. “I am very young,” Victoria wrote just after she became queen, “and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure, that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.”
The most interesting story here for me is the relationship between their intention to make one another happy, and the way that their resulting happiness exploded in the upward spiral of creativity and aspiration about which Barbara Fredrickson writes. Their particular spiral—because of their wide influence—gave rise to an enormously creative period not just for them, but for their family, and, indeed, for the entire country.
We will see how their brightness, joy, happiness, energy, and enthusiasm spread outward in concentric circles, and upward in a seemingly ceiling-less cycle of creativity.
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As their partnership matured, Queen Victoria experienced a contentment she had never known. Early on, it is clear that she was most content when it was just the two of them together. She felt utterly safe in Albert’s presence, and he in hers. As she herself wrote, “The times spent with him were ‘always her happiest moments.’”
Victoria describes these moments of contentment in each other’s presence in great detail, and abundantly, in her journals. She writes particularly of savoring the early mornings when they were dressing together, and the evenings when they were once more alone, and often read to one another. One can simply feel the contentment born of mere proximity. “I sit on a sofa, in the middle of the room with a small table before it,” she writes in her journal, “on which stand a lamp & candlestick, Albert sitting in a low arm-chair on the opposite side of the table with another small table in front of him on which he usually stands his book.”
One summer day in 1843 when expressing regret at having left one royal residence for another, she writes: “I have been so happy there, but where am I not happy now?”
What this happiness and contentment gave rise to was joy—just as Fredrickson predicts. And then joy itself gave rise to the impulse to play. Victoria’s journals are simply exploding with the beauties of play in those earlier years. Both the queen and the heretofore restrained and neurotic Prince joined into the play with passion. Says Hibbert: “The Prince now played more rowdy games and even joined in Blind Man’s Buff with the ladies, made puns, invented riddles, took part in charades, danced the ‘wildest, merriest’ dances, played games with the children, gave them magic lantern shows, arranged presents for them on their birthdays in the ‘present room,’ and once built a house for the Princess Royal with her wooden bricks, a house so tall that he had to stand on a chair to put the roof on.”
Hibbert continues: “[Albert] even was capable of laughing at himself now and had a large collection of caricatures, some of which lampooned him mercilessly.”
The queen, ever self-reflective (she wrote an average of 2,500 words a day in her journal, almost every day of her adult life) writes at some length about her own transformation. She is aware that she has been transformed by Albert’s presence and his love for her, and by her love for him.
Albert was “‘her adviser in all and everything; she might even say her mother as well as husband.’ She supposed ‘no-one was ever so completely altered in every way’ as she had been by her dearest husband’s ‘blessed influence.’”
Victoria reflects on the transformation in herself, but is not, I think, entirely aware of how much her love has transformed Albert—the previously shy, restrained, formal, Albert.
Albert, too, in his journals and letters, frequently describes the upwelling of joy. Upon his return to England after a brief trip to Germany to take care of family business, he writes, “I arrived at six o’clock in the evening at Windsor. Great joy!”
Does all of this sound like too much sweetness and light? Does it sound, perhaps, too ideal—too saccharine, and difficult for us mere mortals to relate to?
Well, fear not. Victoria and Albert had their fair share of conflict. There was, in fact, plenty of pepper as seasoning for this juicy noble alliance.
Victoria’s passionate nature was most often endearing. She lavished Albert with love and affection. But from time to time her passionate temperament veered entirely into a kind of hysteria—and an almost alarming emotional loss of control. These eruptions were usually stimulated by the most trifling oversight or misstep on the part of Albert. Months would go by in utter loving tranquility, and then, wham, out of the blue, Her Majesty would simply erupt with anger, and with overblown accusations. She would then rage, scream, slam doors, berate anyone within earshot, and doggedly follow Albert from room to room as she tried unsuccessfully to fight it out with him. She simply flew around the palace in hot pursuit of the prince.
Alas, Albert did not really like to fight. And this was a problem.
Albert, at these times, simply attempted to escape the storm—finding shelter in some remote part of the palace until the lightning and thunder had receded. Then, from his safe haven, he would write remarkably rational and endearing notes to send to his wife until she “recovered her nerves.”
At first, no doubt, these missives only fueled Victoria’s rage—as they might, indeed, have fueled mine. (They were a tad condescending.) Here is an example.
Albert writes, on May 2, 1853—from the safety of his own room—after one enormous explosion,
Dear Child. Now it will be right to consider calmly the facts of the case. The whole offence which led to a continuance of hysterics for more than an hour, and the traces of which have remained for more than 24 hours more, was: that I complained of your turning several times from inattention the wrong leaves in a Book which was to be [used] by us as a Register . . . of prints . . . This miserable trifle produced the distressing scene . . . in which I am accused of making things worse by my false method of treatment . . .
And on and on he goes for pages—with his rational, somewhat condescending response.
This was no doubt the best Albert could do, but I’m somehow sure that it was not exactly the right approach to the passionate Victoria. Better, perhaps, to have really had it out with her?
Well, whatever the case, these periodic scenes developed an entirely predictable pattern—and I can only imagine that there was a fair amount of eye rolling among the staff. (The staff, who, by the way, also made themselves as invisible as possible during these volcanic eruptions.) Finally, and sometimes after a very considerable amount of cooling off (days), Victoria would relent, and would send remorseful letters back to Albert, and they would once again seek out each other’s company, and make up.
At this point, Victoria would often, in fact—and with some real insight—explain to Albert what the real source of her vexation was. She was not at all averse to declaring her own responsibility for these scenes.
And then, the clouds passed, and it was all simply over. And the two of them would settle back into the routine of their ordinarily happy state.
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So, back to joy, and to broaden and build.
Joy leads to play, as we have seen. And contentment to savoring. Interest leads to deep investigation. Combined, these positive emotions lead to an expansion of creativity, of fluid intelligence, and of the energy required to manifest them in the world.
Within the first five years of their marriage, Victoria and Albert’s partnership began to burgeon into an immense outpouring of joint creativity—a kind of superabundant outpouring that would last the entirety of their remaining years together.
The outward flow of their joint creativity began with the design and construction of their very own home, Osborne House, on the remote Isle of Wight. (Your home is your greater self!) They both longed for a venue in which they could create their own idiosyncratic home, design it, furnish it, landscape it. Both Victoria and Albert poured themselves into the design and construction of what turned out to be a magnificent house on the remote island—on 800 acres overlooking the sea. Here at Osborne House, Albert (by his own account) became “partly forester, partly builder, partly farmer and partly gardener.” (“Does not your house dream,” wrote Kabir, “and dreaming, leave the city for grove or hilltop?”)
The house was primarily designed by Albert, specifically as a container for his unique partnership with Victoria, and for the family they were beginning to raise. The intertwined letters of V and A were everywhere. Victoria helped with the arrangement of copious works of art, many of them paintings of nudes, and nude statues. The art was as lush and sensual as the young Victoria herself.
Victoria felt able to be herself at Osborne. Here she could be earthy. Here she could be the lover of pleasure that she was. Here, most importantly, she could have fun. Said one visitor to the house: “[She] laughs in real earnest, opening her mouth as wide as it can go. She eats as heartily as she laughs. I think I may say she gobbles . . . she blushes and laughs every instant in so natural a way as to disarm anybody.”
We have talked in previous chapters about how the feeling of realness is deepened by secure attachment. In reading Victoria’s own account of her own life, one can feel her becoming more and more real, and less and less interested in pretense, posture, power, and status. “Every year,” she writes, “I feel less and less desire for the so-called ‘worldly pleasures,’ and if it were not my duty to give receptions and banquets, I should like to retire to the Country with my husband and children.”
Victoria and Albert were contained. They were both now—for the first time—safely and securely held and soothed. They had created a solid base for themselves and their family.
And now, inevitably, the explosion. Their combined creativity simply flowed out from here like a river. Victoria and Albert went on to design and build a great baronial castle in Scotland—Balmoral. There, they fell in love with the simple life, and with the Highlanders, whom Victoria described as being “so intelligent and warm-hearted, so well bred, so polite without being in the least subservient.”
Their interests expanded quickly beyond their own comfort. Both became passionately interested in housing and health, and the woeful plight of the poor in England. Against great outcry from their own class (“the poor will always be with us”), they turned their attentions to the ordinarily neglected underclasses of English society—actively supporting and contributing to plans to address the hardships of the hungry and poor, and calling upon the government to take a more active role, as well.
From there, their ambitions became even more expansive, particularly with the planning and execution of the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Great Exhibition was conceived by Albert himself—as president of the Royal Society of Arts—as “a means of demonstrating that the progress of mankind depended upon international cooperation, that the prosperity of one country depended upon the prosperity of others, and that Britain’s mission was ‘to put herself at the head of the diffusion of civilization.’” This was a forward-looking view to say the least. It was a view based in his new understanding of the visceral power of collaboration and connection.
The Great Exhibition featured thousands of exhibits from more than forty different countries around the globe. There had simply never been anything like it in the history of the world. On the grounds of the exhibition, one could see the latest machines of every variety (a machine that printed 10,000 sheets of paper an hour) not to mention the arts of Persia, France, Africa, the Far East. Exoticisms of every kind abounded. Victoria and Albert and their children visited regularly and drank in the expansive quality of it all.
By the time the exhibition closed on October 15, 1851, more than six million people had visited it. The exhibition had raised enough money for the purchase of thirty acres of land in South Kensington, on which were built museums, colleges, and other institutions, including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Albert Hall. During their joint reign, Victoria and Albert made massive contributions to the arts, and to the common good. But no single event generated more good will, and more “common wealth,” than the Great Exhibition.
We could go on and on. But you have surely seen the point: What began as authentic domestic happiness erupted into creativity, contribution, and love that spread among the people of England in the very same upward spiral of love and creativity described by Fredrickson, and experienced by citizens like Susie and me.
“They say no sovereign was ever more loved than I am,” wrote Victoria in her journal, “and this is because of our domestic home, and the good example it presents.” Victoria was largely right about this. She and Albert had created a strong home and a family container which then became a container for England, and finally, in some sense, a container for the whole world.
This is typical of the power of conscious partnership. It is contagious. First it transforms those closest to it, and then it expands in concentric waves to all those touched by it.
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Can you tell that I relate to this story? For me, it is an example—writ large, yes—of the story that Susie and I are creating. And perhaps of the story that you, yourself, are creating or aspiring to create every day in your own life.
To make this story even more real for me—and realness is so often found in the smallest details of life—I identify with the particular personalities of Victoria and Albert. Albert was Apollonian: intellectual, cerebral, highly disciplined, neurotic. Victoria was Dionysian: hearty, grounded in the earth, in pleasure, food, and sex, and in the things of daily life.
In so many ways, Victoria and Albert were Sue and me.
I also relate strongly to the increasing simplicity and palpable sense of enjoyment of “the little things” in their lives. For the most powerful woman on earth—which Victoria certainly was at the time—to be so very authentic and real is no small thing. But see how real she did in fact become: Increasingly, she did not have to, or want to, rely upon her exalted station in life. All agreed that in this way, she was not at all like the English upper classes. It seems strange to say, for such a powerful woman, but she was not in the least pretentious. She preferred a simple life. When at Balmoral, for example, she and Albert often eschewed the castle and lived in a simple workman’s house. Victoria came to love and appreciate the real things in life.
Victoria and Albert’s grand experiment, of course, ended in tragedy—the untimely death of the Prince at the age of forty-two.
Victoria was devastated. One can feel the depth of her pain in her journal entries in the years after Albert’s death. “There is no one left to hold me in their arms and press me to their heart.” She wondered if she could go on: “Truly the Prince was my entire self, my very life and soul,” she wrote in those years. “I only lived through him . . . Surely there can never have been such a union, such trust and understanding between two people.”
In the immediate aftermath of the prince’s death, Victoria sometimes referred to herself as “a deserted child.” But this was no longer accurate. Yes, she had been a deserted child when Albert had found her. But she had grown up. Her experience of twenty-two years of strong partnership had left her much more resilient than she—or anyone else—thought.
Perhaps Barbara Fredrickson’s most interesting discovery is that the systematic filling of narcissistic needs, and the intentional cultivation of joy, contentment, interest, and love, create durable and resilient structures in the personality—resilience that can be called upon in times of challenge.
Yes, it is true that Queen Victoria did have a long period of mourning—and her slightly hysteric character added to her tendency to dwell in and even to romanticize her grief. Still, the story of her broken spirit—the story that I heard so much about in graduate school—simply has to be rewritten. Victoria grew out of her grief. In fact, she grew through her grief. She survived the loss, and by 1873 Victoria was dancing again. She was drawing, writing poetry, and smiling, telling hysterically funny stories on herself, and delighting her family and courtiers once again with her with mischievous sense of humor. One visitor to Windsor Castle at this period in her life called her “irresistible.”
What was her secret? Victoria had learned how to use love objects in much the way Winnicott suggests and describes. In her later life, after the death of the Prince Consort, she would find two new, classic “found objects” of intimacy: her now-infamous groom, John Brown, and her beloved prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. She had learned how to use the love of a good man. And she savored the love of both Brown and the prime minister. She created around herself a surround of relationship that supported her.
By the time Queen Victoria had recovered from her grief, she was surrounded by an immense family—grandchildren, nieces and nephews, godchildren. She was said to be warm, loving, and indulgent with her grandchildren. One of her granddaughters remembers a hushed walk down a corridor to Grandmother’s room, the doors opened, “and there sat Grandmamma not idol-like at all, not a bit frightening, smiling a kind smile, almost as shy as us children.” And more than that, there was play at Osborne House once again: There are charming stories about grandchildren building walls around the Queen’s feet with empty dispatch boxes. One of her grandsons released his pet crocodile under her writing desk, which she found amusing and charming.
Christopher Hibbert describes a multitude of hilarious stories of the Queen late in her reign. On one occasion, for example, he writes,
. . . an old, deaf, garrulous Admiral was telling the Queen at inordinate length how a ship which had sunk off the south coast had been raised and towed into Portsmouth. Anxious to stop the Admiral’s flow of boring detail about this salvage operation, the Queen tried to change the subject by asking him about his sister. Mishearing her, the ancient mariner replied, “Well, Ma’am, I am going to have her turned over, take a good look at her bottom and have it scraped.” As the footmen in attendance withdrew behind a screen, the Queen “put down her knife and fork, hid her face in her handkerchief and shook and heaved with laughter until the tears rolled down her face.”
In these later, happier years, Victoria summed it all up herself, telling a lady-in-waiting, “After the Prince Consort’s death I wished to die, but now I wish to live and do what I can for my country and those I love.”
Many writers at the time attempted to sum up Victoria’s charm—and the fact that the wonderful contradictions in her character inevitably forced pretty much everyone in her household to fall in love with her, even if they did not at times like her. (In this, of course, she reminded me entirely of the regal Helen Harrington Compton.) Said one astute observer, Randall Davidson, then the dean of Windsor:
I think it was the combination of absolute truthfulness and simplicity with the instinctive recognition and quiet assertion of her position of queen . . . I have known many prominent people but with hardly one of them was it found by all and sundry so easy to speak freely and frankly . . . I have sometimes wondered whether the same combination of qualities would have been effective in a person of stately or splendid appearance. May it have been that the very lack of those physical advantages, when combined with her undeniable dignity of word and movement, produced what was in itself a sort of charm? People were taken by surprise by the sheer force of her personality. It may seem strange, but it is true that as a woman she was both shy and humble . . . But as Queen she was neither shy nor humble, and asserted her position unhesitatingly.
Queen Victoria died at Osborne House, at half past six in the evening, on January 22, 1901, holding a crucifix in her hand.
She asked that the following items be placed with her body in the coffin: Prince Albert’s dressing gown—which she had kept close to her these forty years—his cloak, and a plaster cast of his hand, which she had slept with for years. Transitional objects, all. Also, a photograph of John Brown, along with a lock of his hair. (We must be reminded here of the need for and sheer power of proximity in object seeking.)
Victoria’s coffin was interred next to Albert’s at Frogmore Mausoleum on the estate at Windsor. Above the mausoleum door, Victoria had had inscribed forty years earlier, at Albert’s death: Vale desideratissime! Hic demum Conquiescam tecum, tecum in Christo consurgeam. “Farewell most beloved! Here at length I shall rest with thee, with thee in Christ I shall rise again.”
On the evening of her death, the novelist Henry James emerged from his club to find the streets of London “strange and indescribable.” Passersby spoke in hushed, shocked, and reverent tones. The whole world seemed upside down. The loss of Queen Victoria was hard to fathom. But—ever the astute observer—James did understand the full extent of the loss better than most. He wrote to a friend: “I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl, and whose duration has been so extraordinarily convenient and beneficent.”
In the over sixty years of her reign, Queen Victoria had become a container for the entire country, and to some extent the world. The well-contained, the well-loved, the securely attached, had eventually become the container, the lover, the Great Mother of the country.
things to ponder: conscious partnership