Page 24 - BBC History - September 2017

Victoria and Albert

Effigies of Victoria and Albert at
the mausoleum that Victoria
commissioned at Frogmore, near
Windsor, after Albert’s death.
This was integral to the carefully
crafted image of a perfect union
“His way of giving orders and reproofs was
rather too like a master of a house scolding
servants to be pleasant for those who were
bound to listen in silence,” wrote Mary
Bulteel. People noticed that the prince made
not a single friend among ministers or the
household. Such reserve in so young a man
was “unpleasant”, thought Mary: “It implied
something of the cold egotism which seems to
chill you in all royalties.”
Memoirs of ladies-in-waiting concur that
Albert was “detested” because he was “so
stiff”, especially with women. Victoria, on
the other hand, was adored because of her
disarming frankness and her unquenchable
curiosity and interest in the affairs of
everyone around her.
Albert’s cold manner derived in part from
his upbringing at the small German court of
Coburg. When Mary Bulteel visited Coburg
in 1860, she found the court far stiffer than in
Britain, and the equerries and household
much more “collapsed before these little
sovereigns than we are before the queen”.
One result of withdrawing from the court
was that the royal couple were closer to their
ordinary servants than they were to the
aristocratic courtiers of the household. This is Victoria kept a notebook in which she anomaly (as they saw it) of Victoria being a
perhaps why, after Albert’s death, Victoria recorded her tempers, her selfishness, and her woman on the throne and superior in rank to
became intimate first with her Highland loss of self-control. Albert would read her her husband was by making her feel that she
servant John Brown, and later with her Indian confessions and issue her with a ‘certificate’ was Albert’s inferior in every other respect.
servant Abdul Karim – relationships that the of improvement, reviewing her behaviour as This artifice imposed unbearable stresses
courtiers found especially upsetting because he might a child. Albert’s intentions were no upon them both. Little wonder Victoria lost
they overturned the protocol of the court. doubt good. He was certainly a loyal and her temper now and then.
faithful husband. Victoria’s adoration of her Albert’s reaction was to escape into work.
Hysterical tantrums beloved was undimmed. But she was made to In the 1850s he consistently rose early in the
Behind the closed doors of the private feel that she was inadequate, his intellectual morning to deal with his growing amount of
apartments, Victoria was often irritable and and moral inferior. “I owe everything to paperwork. His meddling in politics made
moody. She bitterly resented what she called dearest papa,” she told her daughter. “He was him unpopular in the country, and he
“the shadow side of marriage”, meaning my father, my protector, my guide and adviser became a lonely, unhappy figure. Photographs
pregnancy and childbirth, and she suffered in all and everything, my mother (I might show him prematurely aged, balding and
from postnatal depression. She disliked almost say) as well as my husband.” careworn. Queen Victoria’s tragedy was that
babies, who she thought were “mere little This was not a marriage of equals. It was as Albert’s death, aged 42, meant that these
plants for the first six months” and “frightful if the only way the couple could live with the tensions were never resolved.
when undressed” with their “big body and
little limbs and that terrible frog-like action”. Jane Ridley is professor of history at the
Victoria’s ‘nerves’ became worse during the University of Buckingham and author of
Albert would read
1850s. Her last two pregnancies were marked several works on the Victorian era
by hysterical scenes. Albert was advised by the
royal doctors that the queen’s mood swings Victoria’s confessions DISCOVER MORE
and violent Hanoverian tempers were BOOK
symptoms that she had inherited the madness and issue her with E Victoria (Penguin Monarchs):
Queen, Matriarch, Empress
of her grandfather George III. Rather than a ‘certi!cate’ of
engage, he walked away and, as his wife by Jane Ridley (Allen Lane, 2015)
stormed out of the room in a fury, the prince improvement, TELEVISION
composed letters reprimanding her for unrea- E The ITV drama Victoria is due to return
for a second series in the autumn
sonable behaviour. “If you are violent I have reviewing her
no other choice but to leave you… and retire ON THE PODCAST
to my room in order to give you time to behaviour as he Jane Ridley explores Victoria and Albert’s
recover yourself, then you follow me to renew retreat, Osborne, on our podcast BRIDGEMAN
the dispute and have it all out,” he wrote. might a child E historyextra.com/podcasts

24 BBC History Magazine