The Queen and Lord M (36 page)

‘Then Your Majesty will know that these matters have to be decided by Parliament.’

‘They shall be made to pay him £50,000 a year. He shall
not
be insulted.’

‘The state of the country at the moment is not good. There have been riots in various places. The Chartists are making a fuss. There is a great deal of unemployment. The Tories know this and if there is much of a storm about this money – which would seem untold wealth to some of Your Majesty’s hungry subjects – we could have a very ugly situation breaking out in the country.’

She was solemn. ‘Riots! Hungry people!’

He looked a little sheepish. He had never wanted their happy relationship spoilt by these unpleasant matters. He had laughed at those ardent reformers, the Earl of Shaftesbury and the Duchess of Sutherland. ‘Oh,’ he had said, ‘little children enjoy working in the mines.’ And: ‘Little boys have great fun climbing up chimneys.’ ‘People who are lazy go hungry.’ It was such a pleasant theory and she had been only too ready to believe him.

Now he realised he had been wrong. He should have made her see the facts. Looking back he saw so many things that he might have done. It was as it had been with Caroline … oh no, not such a disaster as that. Victoria was going to be a great Queen and his epitaph would be that he had helped to make her so.

She was grave at once.

‘The people are unemployed. They are hungry. We must do something. I will talk to Albert about it when we are married.’

She looked at Lord Melbourne and she thought: It is not his fault. He has been led astray by others and all this political jangling. It will be different with Albert because Albert wants to be good and Lord Melbourne only wants to be clever, witty, amusing and
comfortable
.

She said soberly: ‘I am angry that Albert should be insulted, but I see that he must accept this £30,000. When we are married I will explain to him and we will work together to help our people.’

The inevitable tears were in Lord Melbourne’s eyes. She was slipping away from him as he had known she must in time and he thought of the years ahead when he would still serve her perhaps, but it would never be the same. Those years to come looked bleak and empty.

How difficult life was, thought the Queen. She had been so blissfully happy when she contemplated her union and was finding the details which had to be settled so depressingly tiresome. Lord Melbourne was different; vaguely she understood why. Nothing is changed between us, she told herself; he is still my Prime Minister and very dear friend. But that was not quite true. Lehzen, too, was prickly. ‘Now you will not have need of me,’ she had said in that hurt, sad voice which was so distressing. ‘Nonsense, Daisy,’ she had replied briskly. ‘I shall always have need of you.’

Oh why must they be so tiresome! She loved Albert beyond everything – but she was affectionate by nature and certainly was not going to forget her old friends just because she had found the great love of her life.

There were faint disturbances even from that quarter. Dearest Albert did not altogether understand what it meant to be a queen. She hated to have to remind him but sometimes she feared it was necessary.

Albert wrote that he longed for their marriage and he thought that when the ceremony was over they should retire to Windsor for a week or so where they could be absolutely alone. He was going to insist that they do this.

Insist
. Dear Albert, he would have to learn that he could not insist.

How delightful of him, though, to
want
to be alone with her all that time and to think of such things. She was glad that he had; but he could not insist of course … to the Queen. Obviously he did not understand what being Sovereign of a great country entailed. How could he, the darling? He was only a Prince of little Coburg. She had to see her Prime Minister frequently. She had quantities of documents to go through and sign. How did she know what crisis was going to arise when her Government had such a tiny majority and were in some ways at the mercy of the wicked Tories led by that monster Sir Robert Peel in the Commons and that traitor the Duke of Wellington in the Lords. She wrote tender but chiding:

‘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.’

A silence greeted this letter and she began to grow anxious. But in due course Albert replied. He was affectionate but never quite so demonstrative as she was and the honeymoon was not mentioned.

Another distressing contretemps had arisen. Albert had heard of the Bedchamber Affair and it was impossible to be with Victoria for very long without discovering her dislike of the Tories and her partisanship for the Whigs. Albert wrote that he believed a Monarch should be impartial. In a Constitutional Monarchy the Government was the Government of the people and the Sovereign should stand aloof. He hoped that his household would not be composed entirely of Whigs as her own was.

Victoria was dumbfounded when she received the letter. She took it at once to Lord Melbourne.

‘And what does Your Majesty think of this?’ asked the Prime Minister.

‘That, dear Albert has a great deal to learn. Tories in my household! He has never understood, poor darling, what those monsters are like.’

‘Your Majesty will see,’ pointed out the Prime Minister, ‘that there should not be two separate households. This would lead to impossible rivalries. Look what happened with your mother’s household and your own. The Prince should have a private secretary and as this is the most important position I suggest my own secretary, George Anson, who is a man of skill, tact and outstanding ability.’

‘It is good of you, dear Lord Melbourne, to pass him over to Albert.’

‘Oh, settling into a new country as the Queen’s husband is a ticklish business. I can see it will have to be handled with care. Anson can serve us both, and that will prevent a great deal of misunderstanding.’

‘I’ll write to Albert and tell him not to worry his head about these matters and that we will settle them for him.’

When Albert received the Queen’s letter he was both hurt and angry. It was clear that the Queen and her Prime Minister were going to make a puppet of him. He wrote to Leopold and told him that he was rather uneasy because he felt that he was going to be of no account whatever in his new life.

He must write to Victoria and tell her that he did not wish the Prime Minister’s secretary to be his too. How could he have any independence if he were going to share the Prime Minister’s secretary? He would refuse to accept this. He and Victoria must come to some understanding about his position before the marriage. Delightful, affectionate and charming as she was, she was demanding too big a sacrifice of a man by asking him to jettison his freedom of thought and his independence for the price of marriage.

He was secretly aghast at what he thought of as the licence of the Court. A certain amount of scandal was whispered. The affair of Flora Hastings was disgraceful. It was true that Flora was not pregnant but in a moral Court – as Albert saw it – the subject of pregnancy should never have been mentioned. He had seen some of the truly disgusting lampoons and items of gossip in the press. And for the Queen to have been involved, shocked his Lutheran soul to the core. Then there was the Bedchamber Affair. It was most undignified and it showed him clearly that Victoria’s advisers were at fault to allow her to become involved in such a matter.

And this man Anson. He might be a good secretary but Albert had heard that he stayed up half the night
dancing
. He did not think he wished for a secretary who was noted for his dancing. The Queen, he knew, loved to dance. She would stay up half the night performing what seemed to Albert a somewhat pointless exercise. Albert liked to retire early to bed and rise at dawn. That was the best time for work for he grew very drowsy after ten o’clock. He could wean Victoria from her dancing – and other things – he had believed; but if she were going to behave all the time as though he were a humble subject and she was the Queen, how could he hope to do this?

He wrote to the Queen. He would like to appoint his own secretary and he thought that in their household a balance of Whigs and Tories would be a happy combination. He would like to appoint a man for the very important post of secretary who was of the highest
moral
standards.

The Queen received his letter at the same time as one from Leopold, in which were veiled criticisms of her treatment of Albert and advice on how to conduct their relationship. He and Princess Charlotte, he wrote, if ever there was a difference between them, never let the sun go down on their anger. It was a good rule and one of the most important for a happy marriage. He thought she should remember this in her relationship with Albert. He was surprised that he heard so little from her on the subject. She knew how dear both she and Albert were to him and he hinted as he knew them both so well and had been as a father to them, it was to him he expected them to turn for advice.

How distressing! She did not feel angry with Albert. That would have been impossible. The darling only had to learn. But Uncle Leopold
was
being rather tiresome.

She wrote to Albert:

‘Regarding your wishes about your gentlemen, my dear Albert, I must explain to you quite frankly that it will not do. You may rely upon me absolutely to see that the people who will be about you will be pleasant people of high standing and good character …

I have today received an ungracious letter from Uncle Leopold. He appears to be disgruntled because I no longer ask for his advice, but dear Uncle is inclined to believe that he must be in command everywhere …’

When he received this letter Albert’s melancholy increased.

There were further difficulties. Victoria was eager that dear Albert should receive the Order of the Garter without delay; she had written to him on the subject of Anson. Her letters to Albert were written half in English and half in German. To write in German was to show her devotion to him for although she spoke that language fluently it was naturally not so easy to express herself in it as it was in English. Thus she tried to explain the Anson controversy. She fully understood his feelings but it was absolutely imperative that he had an Englishman at the head of his affairs; and therefore although she would not
force
Anson upon him, she asked him whether it was not better to take a man whom the Queen could personally recommend than a stranger of whom she knew nothing.

Albert, realising that he must concede, accepted Anson (perhaps temporarily, he promised himself) but he did write and complain of the manner in which the Garter had been sent to him.

Surely his position as the Queen’s future husband warranted a little more respect? He had to tell his dear and splendid Victoria that she should have sent a worthy envoy and that his father was anxious – and Albert understood this anxiety perfectly – because he feared people – especially in Berlin – would think he was being slighted.