Florence Nightingale had a knack for winning people over. It was September 1856 and she had come to Balmoral to meet the Queen to discuss the mismanagement of British forces in Crimea, where she had led a team of nurses.
Florence, then aged 36, was a national heroine and Victoria – just one year her senior – had followed her exploits closely. ‘I envy her being able to do so much good,’ the Queen admitted. Yet that day, Victoria was unable to keep up the conversation for more than ten minutes before she resorted to calling her husband Albert into the drawing room to help.
As Florence began to expound upon the need for the reform of the Army’s medical practice, Victoria watched and listened, while ‘Albert stated in his usual clear, comprehensive way, where, in his opinion, the root of the evil lay’. Florence later referred to Victoria as ‘the least self-reliant person she had ever known’.
ROMANTIC PORTRAYAL: The couple’s marriage is viewed as idyllic in TV dramas such as Victoria, starring Jenna Coleman and Tom Hughes
Victoria and Albert’s marriage is often portrayed as an idyllic love story, but in reality she lived in the shadow of his domineering personality. He encouraged her to believe that she was weak, inadequate and unable to cope without him.
And so strong was her desire to please him that she abdicated most of her responsibilities as monarch to him, even placing his needs above her love for her children. Albert’s subjugation of his bride began immediately after their wedding on February 10, 1840. He grumbled to a friend that he was ‘only the husband, and not the master in the house’, but he was biding his time before adjusting the balance of power.
He encouraged her to believe that she was weak
His opportunity came when Victoria gave birth to the couple’s first child – another Victoria, known as Vicky – in November that year. The young Queen had expressed ‘the greatest horror of having children, and would rather have none’. But she did enjoy her first daughter. Returning home after a day of engagements, she would rush up to the nursery, where she found ‘dear little Victoria, just out of her bath, looking like such a duck’.
This pleasure came at a price. A month after Vicky’s birth, Albert’s secretary George Anson noticed ‘an important advance in the Prince’s position’. Albert had the keys to the boxes that arrived daily, full of Cabinet documents, because everyone had got used to him doing ‘all the ministerial business during the Queen’s confinement’.
After the birth of their child, Victoria wrote that Albert’s care ‘was more like that of a mother, nor could there be a kinder, wiser, or more judicious nurse’.
In fact, Albert was infantilising his wife. Before their marriage, his letters began ‘Beloved Victoria’. But afterwards, he addressed her as ‘Dear Child’ or ‘Dear Good, Little One’.
‘Oh! If I only could make him King,’ Victoria exclaimed, ‘for I do so feel & recognise his superiority, & fitness to be such.’
Others secretly disagreed, noting that the tone of Albert’s official Royal memos gradually hardened. Albert did not really understand the British political situation. He thought that the sovereign was best placed to determine where the nation’s interest lay.
But the sovereign could only act in tandem with the Government. Albert was decisive, and commanded the detail that often eluded Victoria, but he was not acting in the best interests of a monarchy that worked through influence rather than power.
Victoria and Albert in 1854
Within a decade, Vicky had six siblings. Her tenth birthday in November 1850 was followed by preparations for Christmas at a wintery Windsor Castle – preparations dominated by Albert’s German background and taste.
His Christmas trees in particular became celebrated and much emulated. They would grow ever more lavish: by 1860, they were immense, and made to appear as if partially covered with snow.
For Victoria, decorating the tree was a welcome change from a life that was increasingly complex and stormy, with her consort taking ever more the leading role in matters of government.
‘Her Majesty interests herself less and less about politics,’ Albert’s secretary noted.
Her growing number of children, and her responsibilities towards them, had squeezed all that out of her mind. Instead, she deferred to her husband. If he were away for any reason, Victoria could hardly bear it. ‘I feel lonely without my dear Master,’ she admitted. ‘I pray God never to let me survive him.’
Charles Greville, clerk of the Privy Council, noticed how ‘he is King to all intents and purposes… while she has the title, he is really discharging the functions of the Sovereign’.
He is King to all intents and purposes
Victoria had made a swift recovery after the birth of her first child, but she struggled after her eldest son Bertie was born in November 1841. ‘My poor nerves,’ she wrote, ‘were so battered… I suffered a whole year from it.’
During this episode of severe post-natal depression, Victoria began to see visions, ‘spots on people’s faces, which turned into worms’, while ‘coffins floated’ before her eyes. Even Albert grew worried. ‘The Queen is afraid she is about to lose her mind!’ he told her obstetrician, Dr Robert Ferguson.
Victoria started to chafe against the inconvenience of being pregnant again so quickly, saying that ‘men never think… what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often’.
But it was Albert’s wishes that prevailed, insisting that childbirth was a Royal duty. Perhaps, too, he could see that having babies occupied his wife, weighed her down, and allowed him to assume more of her responsibilities.
‘You have again lost your self-control quite unnecessarily,’ he would tell her after an argument. ‘I do my duty towards you even though it means that life is embittered by “scenes”.’
In reaction to such admonishment and to avoid his anger, Victoria gradually began to check her feelings. As a result, she began to love her children a little less.
Where she had once rushed home to see Vicky being bathed, it was a ritual she witnessed only ‘once in three months perhaps’ with the younger children.
In a letter to one of her daughters she revealed she thought of maternity as ‘the shadow side’ of life. In their rows over their children, Albert could be bitter, devastating and unfair. Victoria’s doctor, Dr James Clark, he once claimed, had not looked after their daughter Vicky correctly: ‘He has mismanaged the child and poisoned her with calomel and you have starved her… if she dies you will have it on your conscience.’
In his defence, Albert had been just 22 when Vicky was born and living in a strange country. Yet these are not the words of the wise, kind, generous paragon that Victoria paints for us in almost every single one of the many words she was to write about him.
Indeed, she constantly excused her husband. ‘My chief and great anxiety is – peace in the House… God only knows how I love him,’ she wrote on the day of that particular outburst. ‘His position is difficult, heaven knows, and we must do everything to make it easier.’
It is striking that this was a woman whose courtiers had once thought indomitably self-willed. ‘I suppose,’ Victoria reflected, ‘no one ever was so completely altered in every way.’
In becoming King in all but name, Albert had created a Sisyphean task for himself. Matters of state dominated the time when he wasn’t with his wife and children. And he gradually began to sink under the weight of his self-imposed burden. Victoria’s children understood they came second best to Albert – and in consequence they grew up an unruly and dysfunctional lot. Albert wanted them to meet his own high moral and intellectual standards, and when his dullard sons Bertie and Alfred did not meet the mark, their father tried to beat his requirements into them.
As a result, Bertie gave up even trying. Even his mother complained about his ‘systematic idleness, laziness – disregard of everything’. Victoria feared her son would never be ‘fit for his position’.
Disaster struck in 1861 when, aged 19, Bertie lost his virginity to Nellie Clifden, a woman historians describe as an ‘actress’. The liaison became a matter of public scandal, with Albert declaring that his son had ‘sunk into vice & debauchery… deception & profligacy’. In contrast, Albert doted on Vicky – she had inherited his cerebral, logical nature, rather than her mother’s passion and emotion.
Albert died from what was believed to be typhoid fever on December 14, 1861, leaving Victoria distraught. She would come to blame his death on the anxiety caused by Bertie’s misbehaviour.
Just a day before the dreaded tenth anniversary of Albert’s death, a doctor was called out to Sandringham, where Bertie – later to become Edward VII – appeared to be suffering from typhoid fever himself.
The coincidence of the dates, Victoria wrote in her journal, ‘filled us & I believe the whole country with anxious forebodings and the greatest alarm’.
By now, some thought Victoria had grown incapable of doing her job. She’d been almost incoherent with grief since Albert’s death, remaining in mourning, taking the decision never to wear colour again. She had never even taken the trouble to visit her son’s home at Sandringham until reports came in of Bertie’s worsening condition.
Despite his marriage to Alexandra of Denmark, Bertie was still running around with the womanising ‘swells’ who had introduced him to Nellie. His behaviour did not play well with public opinion. By the time he became ill, relationships within the Royal Family had become so strained that Bertie’s doctors thought he should be shielded from Victoria’s presence.
Throughout the day, the nation expected Bertie’s death to be announced. ‘Many millions,’ claimed The Times, ‘are watching at a distance by this bedside.’
Albert’s attacks became bitter and devasting
But that evening, Bertie seemed to rally. ‘That lady,’ he whispered, ‘is very like the Queen.’
‘It is the Queen,’ said his doctor William Gull.
‘It’s Mama,’ she said. ‘Dear child.’
‘Don’t sit here for me,’ Bertie wheezed.
‘The gasping between each word was most distressing,’ Victoria wrote. But her son had understood that his mother was present.
As he began to recover, Victoria realised that, perhaps after all, she did love her wayward child. And her subjects surprised themselves by how much they minded so nearly losing the Prince of Wales.
‘There have been daily beautiful articles in the papers,’ Victoria wrote. Even at rock bottom, when her doctors had thought she would go mad with grief, Victoria had spoken of endurance and now, it seemed, a change of heart was under way.
She was determined, she wrote, that as a widow ‘no one person, may he be ever so good… is to lead, or guide, or dictate to me’.
She was saying that no one would ever again have the mastery over her that Albert had possessed. And she was right. From now on, she stood, and ruled, alone.
With Bertie’s illness, Victoria’s return to the self she had lost in Albert had begun.
- Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, by Lucy Worsley, is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £25. Offer price of £20 (20 per cent discount) until September 2. Order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640 – p&p is free on orders over £15. Lucy will be touring the UK from September 4. lucyworsley.com