Shooting Victoria (4 page)

The matter, however, did not end there. Both Doctors Clark still had their suspicions, and the day after the examination they brought them to Melbourne. Yes, they were sure that Lady Flora was a virgin. Nevertheless, they thought, she still might be pregnant—such a thing had been known to happen. Melbourne clung to this cynical theory of virgin pregnancy, and so did Victoria, writing to her mother that Sir Charles Clark “had said that though she is a virgin still that it might be possible and one could not tell if such things could not happen. There was an enlargement in the womb like a child.” The poisonous atmosphere only grew, and so did the rumors; soon, the press was involved, generally very unsympathetic to the Queen. Flora Hastings wrote frank accounts of her plight to her influential Tory relatives, who relayed details to the press. Soon there was a call for an investigation: Who had started this insidious rumor? Lehzen was the primary suspect, and Victoria could not help but think herself the victim of a campaign to remove her closest companion from her Court. (Her fears were only strengthened by the suspicion that Conroy was behind much of the press's clamor.) At the end of March, one of Lady Flora's letters, blaming “a foreign lady”—Lehzen, obviously—appeared in the
Examiner
: the entire affair,
according to Lady Flora, was a Whig plot to discredit herself and the Duchess of Kent.

By May, Lady Flora was gravely ill, but forced herself to go out into public, to dispel any rumors about her immorality. She was cheered, while Victoria found herself and Melbourne were hissed when in public—riding in Hyde Park, and at Ascot, where she was additionally mortified by cries of “Mrs. Melbourne.” Melbourne and Victoria held to their suspicions until very close to the end, laughing in early June at the excuse that illness was keeping Lady Flora from Court. When Victoria visited her in person at the end of the month, however, her suspicions were gone: Lady Flora was obviously dying. She died on 5 July 1839. A post-mortem revealed that she had of course never been pregnant. With Lady Flora's death, the newspaper attacks on the Queen redoubled, and her public image was seriously compromised. In accord with the tradition of the time, she sent her empty carriage to Lady Flora's funeral: some threw rocks at it.

In the midst of the Flora Hastings affair came another crisis, of shorter duration in itself, but of longer-lasting consequence. Melbourne's government existed by virtue of a tiny majority; it was sure to fall at any time. In early May 1839, it did, when radicals and Tories combined to defeat the government's motion to impose Parliamentary control over Jamaica. Victoria was thrown into a “state of agony, grief and despair,” both at the prospect at losing her Melbourne—whom she would obviously prefer to have as her minister forever—and at the unpleasant prospect of working with his successor. Sir Robert Peel was “stiff” and “close,” according to Melbourne. In her first interview with Peel, Victoria found him a complete contrast to Melbourne: he was cold and inflexible—someone, apparently, cut from the Conroy cloth.

Melbourne advised her fully during the negotiations for a new government, and did her a great disservice by appealing to her fierce Whig partisanship, encouraging her to make no changes whatsoever in her household, “except those who are engaged in
Politics,” by which he meant those male members of her household who were also members of Parliament. Conroy had imposed her companions on her; she should not let Peel do the same. And Melbourne had assured her that by precedent, queens had the power of choice over their ladies. Peel disagreed, holding that precedent—the constitution of the households of earlier queens—did not apply in this case for the simple reason that Victoria was a reigning queen, and for the monarch to surround herself completely with Whig ladies—who, after all, amounted in a sense to her most intimate advisors—during a time of Tory government would signify to the world that the Queen had no confidence whatsoever in that government. Victoria and Peel reached an impasse: unless she replaced the Mistress of the Robes, and some senior Ladies of the Bedchamber, with Tories, he simply could not form a government. Victoria was adamant: as she wrote in her Journal,

Sir Robert said, “Now, about the Ladies,” upon which I said I could not give up any of my Ladies, and never had imagined such a thing. He asked if I meant to retain all. “All,” I said. “The Mistress of the Robes and the Ladies of the Bedchamber?” I replied, “All.”

Melbourne met with Whig leaders and—encouraged by the Queen's stalwart accounts to Melbourne of her interviews with Peel—agreed to form another ministry. The Queen, then, held her ground and kept her Ladies and her beloved Melbourne—for another two years, as it turned out; Melbourne was still her Prime Minister as she sat for Mr. Hayden on this day in May. She would later admit that her partisanship was a mistake, but for now she was happy at the outcome, even though what became known as the Bedchamber Crisis further tarnished her public image and perpetuated a weak, unpopular, do-nothing Parliament.

Criticism of the Queen from the Flora Hastings scandal continued into the fall of 1839. But by that time, Victoria found a
complete distraction from the scandal: her cousin Albert came to England.

During the first two years of her reign, Victoria, freed from Conroy's oppression and intoxicated with the autonomy that came with the throne, buttressed with the affectionate support of Lehzen and by “dear” Lord Melbourne, was cool to the idea of marriage, and indeed had made up her mind to delay marriage by two or three years. Her sentiments shifted in an instant, however, when she stood at the top of the staircase on the evening of 10 October 1839 to welcome her cousin from Coburg. She had met him three years before, as Princess, when a number of her cousins had been brought before her for her consideration. He had been shorter, stockier—a boy, then: now, he was tall, very handsome—a man, and in an instant, he was the paragon of men to her. “It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert—who is
beautiful
,” she wrote; she was in love with an intensity far greater than she would ever feel for any other mortal. She was, she felt from the start, unworthy of his greatness, and her new object in life was, as she put it, to “strive to make him feel as little as possible the great sacrifice he has made.” Over the next three days, she sent encouraging messages to him, via Lehzen; on the 15th, she proposed to him.
(Her
proposing to
him
was a bit awkward, of course, but, as she was monarch and he was not, she realized it had to be that way: though overwhelmed by love for him, she could never, and would never, forget the prerogatives and responsibilities of her position.)

Albert accepted, the more enthusiastically as he too had very quickly developed a genuine affection for his cousin. His own emotions aside, he was eager to accept her hand; since the time he was an infant, he had been groomed by his family to be consort to Victoria. His cosmopolitan and rigorous education, coupled with his innate and powerful sense of duty, prepared him for this, and for nothing besides this. Indeed, he had caught wind of the Queen's plan to delay the marriage, and had come to England with the intention of putting an end to that notion, one way or another.
The simple sight of him convinced Victoria that her marriage to Albert—and marriage quickly—was her destiny.

He was a happy choice, in almost every respect. He grew up in a bitter, broken home—a place of mutual adultery, separation, and divorce—and he was at a very young age separated from his mother. His father was the ugly, dissipated, indebted Duke of Coburg, and his brother Ernest promised in every way to follow in the footsteps of his father. Albert hardly seemed to be related to them: he was fair (while they were dark), he was sober, studious, with a zealous sense of duty and a deeply held belief that a good life was one of good works. He was, in short, more a Victorian than Victoria was. And he was
hers
, Victoria felt, with the sense that this was too good to be true. Life at court quickly shifted so that now Albert and Victoria shared the spot at the center: he prominently rode beside her in her cavalcades and at a military review. They lunched several times a week with the Duchess. Albert, of course, was the Duchess's nephew, and the engagement itself began to lift Victoria's relation with her mother out of the depths into which it had dropped. Both Victoria and Albert, however, had decided that the Duchess would have to move out of the Palace when they married, and this—very much contrary to the Duchess's own expectation and desire—would create new tensions between Victoria and her mother. (The Duchess did indeed move out of the Palace two months after the wedding, and moved into a private residence in Belgrave Square.) For the most part, Victoria and Albert spent the first few days of their betrothal surprising one another, becoming familiar with one another's bodies: holding hands, embracing, kissing. Albert quickly took upon himself what had been Lehzen's task of warming the Queen's tiny hands with his own. He also found his place beside her while she worked, but in a way that made it clear to both that the political responsibilities were very much Victoria's: “I signed some papers and warrants etc.,” she wrote in her Journal, “and he was so kind as to dry them with blotting paper for me.”

By the time Albert left the Court, on 14 November, in order to spend two months in Germany before the wedding, the two were very much one.

The ambiguous nature of Albert's role in national affairs, however, placed public and private strains on the relationship. There was, first of all, the question of the Prince's allowance. Traditionally, male or female spouses of the reigning monarch were awarded £50,000 a year; Queen Anne's, George II's, and George III's spouses got that amount, as did Uncle Leopold when he married Charlotte, daughter and Heir Apparent of George IV. Leopold, however, hardly helped the Prince's cause: after Charlotte died in childbirth in 1817, Leopold continued to receive his allowance, until he gave it up in 1831 to become King of the Belgians: a huge public expenditure in return for no public duty. The British public knew very little about Albert at the end of 1839, but it did tend to see him as a penniless German princeling who had surely made an excellent financial move by this betrothal. A broadsheet of the time expressed the following unflattering and cynical sentiments:

Here comes the bridegroom of Victoria's choice,

The nominee of Lehzen's vulgar voice;

He comes to take “for better or worse”

England's fat Queen and England's fatter purse.

Melbourne had promised the Queen an allowance of £50,000 for Albert, but he was of course the head of a weak government, existing during a time of economic and political difficulty; Tories and Radicals turned down that sum, and instead awarded an allowance of £30,000. Victoria raged against the “vile, confounded, infernal Tories,” and particularly against that “nasty wretch” Peel, who had spoken in favor of the bill. Albert was far more complacent with the vote, regretting only that it would lessen his ability to do good to poor artists and intellectuals.

Then, there was the question of Albert's precedence: a serious question, given the many official appearances that Albert would be expected to make, with and without the Queen, over the next decades. Victoria felt deeply that her husband should take precedence over all except for herself, as monarch: take precedence, in particular, over her living royal uncles. While her uncles Cambridge and Sussex at first agreed with her, her wicked uncle Cumberland would have none of it—and he bullied his royal brothers into taking his side. The Tories, and particularly the Duke of Wellington, also objected—holding that the consort had precedence over all except the monarch and princes of the Royal Blood. Victoria responded with partisan, Jacobean rage: “this wicked old foolish Duke, these confounded Tories, oh! May they be well punished for this outrageous insult! I cried with rage.… Poor dear Albert, how cruelly are they ill-using that dearest Angel! Monsters! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!”

That Victoria fumed about Albert's rank might suggest that she foresaw that Albert, after the marriage, would be her political equal. But nothing could be further from the truth. Two disagreements that the two had, in making arrangements for the wedding and their life together, demonstrate clearly that Victoria saw the business of ruling as belonging to her alone. When Albert suggested that the two spend at least a week after the wedding away from business, on a true honeymoon, Victoria responded patronizingly to him, in a way that made it clear that there were strict political limits to their shared life: “You forget, my dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing. Parliament is sitting, and something occurs almost every day, for which I may be required, and it is quite impossible for me to be absent from London; therefore, two or three days is already a long time to be absent. I am never easy a moment, if I am not on the spot, and see and hear what is going on.…”

Just as serious was the question of the composition of Albert's household. Victoria, with the support of Lord Melbourne, believed
that Albert's household staff should, in composition, politically reflect her own staff; anything less would suggest a political difference among the couple—and could even suggest a political opposition within the Court. That meant a fully Whig household, of course; Melbourne attempted to soften the effect by appointing “non-political” Whigs—that is, Whigs not currently serving in Parliament. And he suggested as Albert's private secretary his own secretary, George Anson. Albert disagreed with Melbourne completely. He already saw himself as a stranger in a fairly strange land, and would very much have preferred to surround himself with a number of old (and of course German) acquaintances. Moreover, he disagreed vehemently with his betrothed and her prime minister on principle: he had already seen the reputation-damaging effect of the Bedchamber Crisis, and held as a bedrock belief that the monarch and the monarchy must remain above party. It would be a principle that would eventually triumph and reshape Victoria's reign and every reign that followed hers. But now, Albert was powerless: “As to your wish about your gentlemen, my dear Albert, I must tell you quite honestly that it will not do,” Victoria wrote him. Anson became Albert's secretary, and Victoria made it clear that her political autonomy in the marriage was to be total.