Shooting Victoria (23 page)

From the moment she beheld him from the steps of Buckingham Palace in 1839, Victoria's love for Albert was a fact, and she would never stop loving him until the day of her death. Nevertheless, Albert had suffered greatly during the first two years of their marriage, struggling to establish himself socially and politically in the face of Victoria's tenacious conviction that she would rule
alone
: that Albert would be her lover and husband, but never be the master of the Royal Household and never play a role in politics. He had scored a victory with the Regency Bill—but it was a victory more symbolic than actual, where gaining power depended upon
Victoria's death. To become powerful in the Royal Household and in affairs of state, Albert had to change Victoria's mind about her own self-sufficiency. And to do that, he faced two obstacles, two people who jealously guarded their own influence over Victoria and promoted Albert's exclusion from power: Victoria's political mentor and chief political adviser, Lord Melbourne, and her chief confidante, with full sway over household affairs, Baroness Lehzen.

Of the two, Melbourne had been the easier to deal with. His genial hegemony over her political affairs was necessary to Victoria when, throwing off Conroy's and her mother's oppressive influence, she first became queen. Melbourne's influence over her weakened considerably when she fell in love with Albert, and weakened further as she learned of, and fell in love with, his mind and his ways. During the first months of their marriage, Victoria, to Albert's great frustration, preferred to meet with her ministers alone, keep to herself the key to the government dispatches, and spend her evenings with Albert, wishing to talk about anything but politics. Albert refused to humor her in this way. By the end of 1841, she regularly used the term “we” in setting out her opinions—not a haughty royal we, but rather a simple acknowledgment that she and Albert were politically of one mind. When their daughter Victoria, the Princess Royal, was born on 22 November 1840 (with Albert—unusual for the time—in the room), the Prince hurried from Victoria's side to lead the Privy Council in her stead. Victoria found him indispensable in dealing with government business during her confinement and recovery, and, soon after Vicky's birth, she entrusted Albert with the keys to the boxes containing Cabinet and confidential documents. He became, according to his own secretary Anson, “in fact, tho' not in name, Her Majesty's Private Secretary.” At both Buckingham Palace and Windsor by this time, their desks were joined so that they could work as one.

Party politics completed the process of Melbourne's removal. In June 1841, the Whig government lost a vote of no confidence by a single vote and Melbourne called for elections. The results were a
disaster for the Whigs: the Tories gained fifty seats, and Peel took Melbourne's place. With Peel's coming, Albert and Victoria became full political partners. He attended all ministerial meetings, read his wife's correspondence, and conducted an extensive political correspondence of his own.

Lehzen might have been a far less significant opponent on a national scale, but she proved to be a much trickier and tenacious one. For two years, she and Albert warred with one another, covertly and overtly, with ferocious intensity. If Lehzen at first welcomed a Coburg consort for Victoria, she quickly and accurately saw him as an enormous threat to her privileged position in Victoria's court. In the dark days of the Kensington regime, Lehzen was Victoria's sole ally, and the grateful Queen repaid her loyalty by giving to her complete control over her daily affairs—writing Victoria's correspondence, holding the keys and the Privy Purse, acting as go-between in dealings with the Queen's household officers. And when Princess Vicky was born, Victoria naturally gave Lehzen—once her own governess—oversight of the nursery. Lehzen fiercely resisted every attempt by Albert to take control of his household as an attack on her own prerogatives. Less than two weeks after Oxford's attempt, for example, Albert confronted Lehzen, through Anson, about not reporting to him that a certain Captain Childers was stalking the Queen with “mad professions of love.” Lehzen resisted Albert's intrusion, telling Anson that Albert had once told her to leave the Palace, but “he had no power to turn her out of the Queen's house.” Albert, to her mind, had no power whatsoever over palace affairs: “the Queen would brook no interference with the exercise of her powers of which she was
most jealous.
” Albert responded to Lehzen's opposition with an obsessive bitterness and loathing. She was to him “
die Blaste
”—the hag, the “Yellow Lady” (a reference to her jaundice), “a crazy, stupid intriguer, obsessed with the lust of power, who regards herself as a demi-God.” Albert considered her the single cause of every dysfunction in the royal household, including all tension
between him and Victoria. Certainly, she took advantage of her position as
confidante
to pour poison in Victoria's ear about Albert; Anson noted her “pointing out and exaggerating every little fault of the Prince, constantly misrepresenting him, constantly trying to undermine him in the Queen's affections and making herself appear a martyr.”

Once again, time—and biology—were Albert's allies as Victoria's dependency upon Albert as husband and father grew. During her first pregnancy, Albert attended upon her constantly and arranged for her obstetrician. After Vicky was born, he read to Victoria and wrote for her—and carried her from bed to sofa, and back. Lehzen found herself increasingly shut out.

An assault of sorts upon the Queen, occurring less than two weeks after Vicky's birth, resulted in a considerable jump in Albert's influence over the household. On the evening of 3 December 1840, palace servants were startled to discover an unkempt young man hiding under a sofa in the Queen's dressing room—a sofa upon which just hours before the Queen had been sitting. The boy—Edward Jones—had been roaming the palace for two days, from kitchens to royal apartments. He claimed that he “sat upon the throne, saw the Queen, and heard the Princess Royal… squall.” Jones had broken into the Palace two years before, but then the Queen was at Windsor. This time, the breach in security—literally trespassing under the Queen's nose—caused a public sensation, and Jones—dubbed “the Boy Jones” (or “In-I-go Jones”)—became a nine-day's comic wonder in the Sunday papers and in
Punch
: the epitome of enormous if inappropriate ambition.

In the palace, though, no one was laughing. Baron Stockmar, in a memorandum he wrote for Albert on the deplorable state of the Royal Household, attributed Jones's intrusion to “the absence of system, which leaves the palace without any responsible authority.” And indeed the Palaces were in a state of sometimes quaint but more usually maddening dysfunction—working according to an archaic structure that would have been familiar to Henry VIII.
Servants worked under one of three masters—the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward, and the Master of the Horse—who rarely supervised directly or coordinated their servants' duties with one another. The results were predictably chaotic. The Lord Chamberlain's servants, for instance, were in charge of cleaning windows inside the palace, while the Master of the Horse's servants cleaned the outside—and palace windows were consequently never quite clean. The Lord Steward's servants laid fuel in fireplaces; the Lord Chamberlain's servants actually lit fires—and rooms thus remained cold. Repairs were subject to a byzantine process of signature and countersignature—and thus many palace fixtures, once broken, remained broken. Servants, largely unsupervised, were often less than diligent. Moreover, archaic expenses drained money from the royal purse; servants, for example, regularly sold off the day's unused candles for their own profit. Albert, in going over Palace expenditures, discovered a weekly charge of 35 shillings for guards at Windsor who hadn't actually served since George III's day—and now going into the pocket of a half-pay officer who did nothing. Jones's intrusion gave Albert the excuse that he needed to commence the long process of Palace reform, centralizing authority in the position of a single Master of the Household. Lehzen's influence over the household faded further.

Albert's genuine fears about the health of his children led to the final explosion. The royal couple's second child, Bertie—the future Edward VII—was born on 9 November 1841, the first Prince of Wales born in eighty years. The public was jubilant, not least because the specter of that reactionary, constitution-busting bogeyman, Victoria's uncle Cumberland, ever taking the British throne now faded into near-nothingness. Victoria herself, however, slipped into a serious post-partum depression, of which Lehzen attempted to take advantage: she “lets no opportunity of creating mischief and difficulty escape her,” Anson wrote. Attempting to raise her spirits, Albert took Victoria away to Claremont in the countryside, leaving the children at Windsor. Within four days,
Stockmar called them back; the Princess Royal was seriously ill—thin, pale, and feverish.

Albert was livid. All connected with the children—their nurse Mrs. Southey, Dr. Clark, the Queen herself—he considered responsible, but that meddling
Blaste
was at the bottom it all: “All the disagreeableness I suffer,” he wrote, “comes from one and the same person.” He and Victoria had the worst argument of their married lives, the Queen accusing Albert of wishing to kill their children, and screaming that she wished they had never married. Albert stormed off, and the couple continued their argument through missives sent to Stockmar. In one of these, Albert enclosed a ferocious note to Victoria: “Dr. Clark has mismanaged the child and poisoned her with calomel and you have starved her. I shall have nothing more to do with it; take the child away and do as you like and if she dies you will have it on her conscience.” He had reached the breaking point; as he told Stockmar “the welfare of my children and Victoria's existence as sovereign are too sacred for me not to die fighting rather than yield them as prey to Lehzen.”

The Queen gave way. Albert was to have total control of the nursery and their children's upbringing. He quickly replaced Mrs. Southey with Lady Lyttelton, the Queen's Lady of the Bedchamber, who adored the Prince. Lehzen was now in an internal exile, inhabiting a room in the Palace but removed from Victoria's daily life. Significantly, she did not attend the
bal masque
, or this ball at Her Majesty's. By the end of the coming summer, realizing that the Queen had no need for her anymore, she would retire to a small house in Hanover. Albert had successfully become everything a man could be to Victoria. Her esteem for him could only grow if he could become superhuman—godlike—in her eyes.

For two hours that night at Her Majesty's Theatre, the Queen and Albert performed on their pavilion stage. One reporter empathized with the fatigue Victoria must feel, when she and her court had to rise, turn, and curtsey with the arrival of every one of her many
honored guests. Soon after midnight she rose and curtseyed to the crowd. The two bands struck up the national anthem, and “amidst loud cheering and clapping of hands” the royal party returned to their carriages and to the Palace. Once the royal couple left, the crowd thinned, giving room to all on the floor to dance, which they did until the early hours, caring for the destitute weavers by forgetting about them. Those last to leave could not have gotten to bed before dawn, not long before respectable shopkeepers like John Francis woke to the new day.

Francis continued to play the charade that it was just another day of business, setting out early to open his shop. He waited in the aromatic stillness until he knew William Elam had risen and set out for his own place of work. Then, he shut up shop and returned to Titchfield Street, crept up the two flights to his room, and broke open a locked box containing all of his roommate's possessions. If he expected to find the full ten pounds there, he was disappointed: Elam's box contained less than half of that, four pounds and ten shillings in gold. It would have to do—or it wouldn't. He returned to his shop to wait for Johns.

When the door with his name on it opened, however, he looked up not to see Johns, but instead his landlord, Mr. Foster, angrily bearing down upon him. William Elam had returned to his room at Great Titchfield Street, discovered that his box had been rifled, and reported the theft immediately to Foster, who had seen Francis's return and suspected him immediately. Francis knew why Foster had come, though he attempted to appear unconcerned.

“What have you been about?” Foster asked him. “I suppose you know what I have come here for?”

“Oh,” said Francis, “I suppose you want the money.” He pulled the gold from his pocket and gave it to Foster. Foster had always had a good opinion of Francis, but in an instant that was destroyed. He told Francis never to return to his home again. Francis, however, had boxes containing all his possessions at Foster's: what
about those? he asked. Foster refused to hand them over, thinking that they might contain evidence of other crimes Francis had committed. He left Francis alone to contemplate the impending ruination of his business.

Johns, again accompanied, came later that day. Francis gave up, telling him at last that he could not pay a penny. Johns and his men then emptied the shop: trundling cigars, tobacco, snuff, pipes, Grimstone's Eye Snuff into a cab, leaving Francis with nothing but the lingering odor of tobacco, a few coppers, and his name on the door to a room he had almost certainly not paid for. His great project had ended, and he had lost everything—all his clothes (besides those on his back), his carpentry tools, his poetry, his room, and his friends, gone. In the afternoon, he closed up shop, and walked out and away from this neighborhood forever.

He set out south, down past Buckingham Palace, Green Park, and St. James's, to Tothill Street, to the pawn shop of a Mr. Ravenor. There, he told the clerk he wanted to buy a pistol—a cheap one. The clerk, James Street, found two for him to look at. Both were old—older and in far worse shape than the pistols Oxford had bought: flintlocks missing flints, and with rusted screw barrels, which, when new, could be removed with a key for more effective loading. Each was missing its key, however, and could only be loaded through the barrel. Francis chose the smaller of the two, one seven inches long. Well aware of its low value, he offered three shillings for it. Street wanted more, but quickly agreed to Francis's price. Francis paid with his small change: three fourpenny pieces, a sixpence, and the rest in pennies, halfpennies, and farthings. “It appeared to be all he had in the world,” Street later told police.