relation but no more than that; and even if she did come to like him more than that, so she told her uncle Leopold, she ‘could make no final promise this year for, at the very earliest, any such event could not take place till two or three years hence’.16
Disturbed that Prince Albert might be put off by this apparent reluctance on the Queen of England’s part, King Leopold had already asked his nephew to come to see him in Brussels. The Prince was reassuring: he was prepared to wait on the understanding that the marriage would take place in the end. ‘I am ready,’ he said, so the King reported to Baron Stockmar, ‘to submit to this delay if I have some certain assurance to go on. But if after waiting, perhaps for three years, I should find the Queen no longer desired the marriage, it would place me in a very ridiculous position and would to a certain extent ruin all the prospects of my future life.’17
The King was reassuring in turn. All would turn out well when Prince Albert made his next visit to England.
This visit took place in October 1839. In anticipation of it the Queen was on edge, snappy with her servants and disinclined to concentrate on her paperwork. When she was told that her cousins were not able to leave quite as early as they had hoped, she wrote a sharp letter to King Leopold: ‘I think they don’t exhibit much empressement to come here, which rather shocks me.’18 She was also unusually sharp and impatient with Lord Melbourne who was more than ever liable to fall asleep after dinner and during the sermon in church on Sundays, snoring loudly. She wondered how he could do so before so many people. When he drank wine in an effort to stay awake, she told him it would make him ill. She was annoyed with him, too, for not telling her about some changes in the Home Office – she was ‘the last person’ to be told about what was done in her name – and for pressing her, as King Leopold had done, to invite some Tories to meet them when Albert and his brother came. She abruptly marched out of the room; and when she returned she looked more cross than ever. A fortnight or so before her cousins were due to arrive she was again ‘sadly cross to Lord Melbourne when he came in, which was shameful’. ‘I fear he felt it,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘for he did not sit down of himself as he usually does, but waited until I told him to do so.’ ‘I can’t think what possessed me’, she continued, ‘for I love this dear excellent man who is kindness & forbearance itself, most dearly.’19
A young person like her, who ‘hated a Sunday face’, ‘must sometimes have young people to laugh with’. She had missed that sadly in the lonely days at Kensington when she had longed ‘for some gaiety’, some ‘mirth’, and when she had looked admiringly at handsome young men at parties and had made lists of the prettiest girls in the room. ‘Nothing so natural’, commented Lord Melbourne with apparent unconcern yet with tears in his eyes.20
‘I believe that Heaven has sent me an angel whose brightness shall illumine my life.’
ON THE MORNING of 10 October 1839 Queen Victoria awoke in her bedroom at Windsor with a headache and feeling rather sick: the pork she had had for dinner the night before had disagreed with her. It was not a propitious beginning to her cousins’ visit; nor was the news that some lunatic had smashed a few of the Castle’s windows. She went out to get some fresh air, and was walking along a path when a page ran towards her with a letter. It was from King Leopold who told her that her cousins would arrive that evening.
Accordingly, at half past seven, she was standing at the top of the stairs to greet them. She watched them as they climbed up towards her, pale after a tempestuous Channel crossing in a heaving paddle-steamer, and she was immediately overcome by a coup de foudre – Prince Albert was ‘beautiful’. His blue eyes were ‘beautiful’; his figure, too, was ‘beautiful’, no longer rather too fat as she had thought when they first met but broad in the shoulders with a ‘fine waist’. All in all, he was so ‘excessively handsome’, his moustache was so ‘delicate’, his mouth so ‘pretty’, his nose ‘exquisite’. He really was ‘very fascinating’. He set her heart ‘quite going’. Everything about him seemed perfect. He was just the right height, attractively tall as she liked men to be but not so tall as to emphasize her own diminutive size.1
On further acquaintance he proved to be so ‘aimiable’ and ‘unaffected’, so clever, so graceful in his movements, so elegantly dressed. His voice was charming, his manner delightful, his red leather topboots so unusually smart, his beautiful greyhound, Eos, so splendidly groomed, obedient and picturesque.
Unfortunately his trunks had not yet arrived and so he and Prince Ernest felt unable to appear at dinner, which Lord Melbourne thought they ought to have done. They did appear after dinner, however, and the Queen was further entranced by Prince Albert who danced ‘so beautifully’, holding himself so well with that ‘beautiful figure of his’. Two days later she learned, as she listened to him playing Haydn symphonies with Ernest in a nearby room, that he played the piano as well as he danced. He did not enjoy dancing as much as she did, however. He seemed happier on Sunday evening as he looked through an album of drawings by Domenichino while the Queen sat by his side.
She recited his praises to Lord Melbourne who listened patiently and kindly, endeavouring to suppress the sadness and anxiety he felt at the prospect of the changes in his life which now seemed inevitable. Yes, Prince Albert was ‘certainly a very fine young man, very good looking’; and handsome looks, as he well knew, were important to her. She had readily admitted when he had teased her about her admiration for Prince Alexander Mensdorff-Pouilly that she was ‘not insensible to beauty’. She had made a good choice in Prince Albert, Lord Melbourne assured her. His ‘strong Protestant feelings’ would be an additional asset, provided he was not bigoted. Oh, no, the Queen replied, he was certainly not bigoted. Well then, Melbourne assured her in so ‘fatherly’ a way, with tears yet again in his eyes, ‘I think it is a very good thing and you’ll be much more comfortable; for a woman cannot stand alone for long, in whatever situation she is.’2 He suggested only that she should take a week before she definitely made up her mind. But she did not need a week; she could not wait so long:
‘I said to Lord Melbourne, that I had made up my mind (about marrying dearest Albert) – “You have” he said; “well then, about the time?” Not for a year, I thought; which he said was too long…Then I asked if I hadn’t better tell Albert of my decision soon, in which Lord Melbourne agreed. How? I asked, for that in general such things were done the other way – which made Lord Melbourne laugh.’3
On the afternoon of 15 October, five days after Prince Albert’s arrival, having accepted the fact, as she told her Aunt Gloucester, that Albert ‘would never have presumed to take such a liberty to propose to the Queen of England’, she sent him a note asking him to come to her in the Blue Closet. He arrived nervous and trembling. She too was trembling, although the squeeze he had given her hand when they had parted the night before gave her hope that all would be well. At first they talked self-consciously in German of other things, though both knew what was to be said. At length, she said in a rush that it would make her ‘too happy’ if he would consent to what she wished. The quickly spoken words ended their nervousness. Before she had finished uttering them he took her hands in his, covering them with kisses and murmuring in German that he would be very happy to spend his life with her. ‘He was so kind, so affectionate,’ the Queen wrote when she was alone again. ‘Oh! to feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel…He is perfection; perfection in every way – in beauty – in everything…Oh! How I adore and