unbalanced. ‘How could they,’ he asked, ‘let the Queen make such mistakes, to the injury of the Monarchy?’23
‘Cousins are not very good things…Those Coburgs are not popular abroad; the Russians hate them.’
IT IS RUMOURED and confidently believed in the highest circles [The Watchman had informed its readers on 4 May 1828] that Prince George, Son of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Cumberland, will speedily be betrothed to his royal Cousin, the Princess Victoria, daughter of the late Duke of Kent; the Prince is a fine healthy boy, in his tenth year, and the Princess, a lovely child, within a few days of the same age.1
Wild as was this surmise, it was scarcely more improbable than some other conjectures about Princess Victoria’s future husband which were to appear in newspapers over the next few years. Indeed, the French press suggested that she was to be married to her uncle Leopold, ignoring the fact that the Church of England’s Table of Kindred and Affinity prohibited such a marriage in her own country. She was also, at one time or another, rumoured to be intended as a bride for the Duke of Nemours’s brother, the Duke of Orléans, for the Duke of Brunswick, nephew of King George IV’s unbalanced wife, Queen Caroline, for Prince Adelbert of Prussia, for Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, the future King Christian IV of Denmark, and for the eldest son of the Prince of Orange who, to the fury of King Leopold, had been invited to England by King William IV, a warm advocate of the match. ‘Really and truly I never saw anything like it,’ expostulated King Leopold, who had other plans for his niece. ‘I am really astonished at the conduct of your old Uncle the King; this invitation of the Prince of Orange and his sons, this forcing him upon others is very extraordinary…I am not aware…of the King’s even having spent a sixpence for your existence’.2
Fortunately the Princess did not at all like the look of the young men from Holland. ‘The boys are both very plain,’ she reassured her uncle, ‘moreover they look heavy, dull and frightened and are not at all prepossessing. So much for the Oranges, dear Uncle.’3
King Leopold’s opposition to the Orange match was prompted not only by the troubles he foresaw as King of the Belgians but also by his having a candidate of his own. This was Prince Albert, son of King Leopold’s eldest brother, Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, whom his family had long destined for the role of consort to the English Queen.
Born on 24 August 1819 at the Schloss Rosenau, his father’s modest Gothic castle on the edge of the forest of Thuringen a few miles from Coburg, Prince Albert had been an exceptionally good-looking child, ‘superb, extraordinarily beautiful’, in the words of his mother, though the Dowager Duchess of Coburg considered him ‘too slight for a boy’. Certainly he was rather feminine, sensitive and shy, far from robust and often in tears.
His early years had been overcast by the departure of his mother who, when he was no more than five years old and in bed with whooping cough, had left her profligate and much older husband, whom she had married at sixteen, for an army lieutenant two years younger than herself. He never saw her again; and his character, introspective, and given to melancholy, was for ever scarred by this painful separation from a beautiful woman who had petted and indulged him.
Yet his childhood was far from being as unhappy as he was later to describe it to his eldest daughter. He was much attached to his elder brother, Ernest; his father, stern with others, was not unkind to him, bestowing upon him an affection which was warmly returned; his good-natured grandmothers did their best to take the place of his mother; his tutor, Herr Florschütz, was sympathetic and understanding, his Swiss valet attentive and protective. He was an intelligent and painstaking pupil, preternaturally conscientious. At the age of eleven he wrote with earnest precocity in his diary, ‘I intend to train myself to be a good and useful man.’ And this assiduous determination to do well marked his every activity: he applied himself to sport and games with as much diligence as he brought to his lessons. When walking in the lovely countryside around the Rosenau, he made detailed and exact observations of all the natural objects he came across and formed comprehensive collections of stones and shells, stuffed birds, insects and butterflies, all neatly labelled and categorized.
After ten months studying in Brussels, where his uncle, King Leopold, kept a close eye on his protégé’s progress, he and his brother were sent, in April 1837, to undergo more advanced studies at Bonn University where Prince Albert was described as a model student, getting up at five o’clock to read his books and write his essays, diligently attending lectures, taking careful notes, fencing and skating with skill and grace. But it was felt that he did not yet display those social graces, that ease of manner which would be expected of him at the English Court: with strangers he was inclined to be distant, formal and stiff. So in October 1838 he was sent with Baron Stockmar on a continental tour, following the route which so many young gentlemen had taken before him through Florence, Rome and Naples. In Italy he was as conscientious in his studies as he had been in Germany, getting up early to read and to learn Italian, walking round galleries, museums and churches, studying paintings and sculpture.*4 He sketched; he played the piano; he went for long walks. Baron Stockmar could not fault his industry; but there was, it had to be admitted, more than a whiff of pedagogic pedantry in the evident pleasure he took in the dissemination of his knowledge, in his categoric pronouncements upon the merits or faults of whatever came under his observation, his readiness to correct the misapprehensions of others, to score points. In Rome, for example, he was granted an audience with Pope Gregory. ‘The Pope asserted,’ recorded the Prince, ‘that the Greeks had taken their models from the Etruscans. In spite of his infallibility, I ventured to assert that they had derived their lessons in art from the Egyptians.’5
The Prince’s humour, too, was of a rather heavy and ponderous kind. He was said to be a fairly convincing mimic but no one could have called him witty; and he had a distressing fondness for rather childish jokes; he was fond of one about a short-sighted man who came into a room and, mistaking a fat woman for a stove, turned his back on her with his coat tails turned up. He also enjoyed catching people out on April Fool’s Day and perpetrating practical jokes such as that which he and his brother played upon the inhabitants of a small German town through which they drove. Prince Albert held up the head of his dog at the window, while he and Prince Ernest crouched down in the bottom of the carriage out of sight of the people who had gathered to see them pass by.*6
With the example of his parents and his brother – who was twice to contract a venereal disease – ever before his eyes, he had a horror of sexual irregularities. He was also subject to an occasional nervous irritability and a tendency to express opinions, in the words of his brother, ‘which are wont to arise from contempt of mankind in the abstract’.
What concerned Stockmar as much as anything else in Prince Albert’s character was his awkward manner with women, a gaucherie which the Baron attributed principally to his ‘having in his earliest years been deprived of the intercourse and supervision of a mother, and of any cultivated woman. He will always have more success with men than with women. He is too little empressé with the latter, too indifferent and too reserved.’7
When he had first arrived in England aged sixteen with his brother, Ernest, in May 1836, Prince Albert had been an undeniably handsome and prepossessing boy. His constitution was, however, not well adapted to the bustle and festivities, the dinners and balls, the concerts and levees which he was expected to attend. He was not accustomed to late nights: one evening he