evening, after Prince Albert had appeared at dinner in the Windsor uniform of blue and red designed for the Royal household by George III, the Queen was handed a letter before she went to bed addressed to ‘Dearest greatly beloved Victoria’. ‘How is it,’ she read, ‘that I have deserved so much love, so much affection?…I believe that Heaven has sent me an angel whose brightness shall illumine my life…In body and soul ever your slave, your loyal ALBERT.’ After reading it the Queen burst into tears.5
It was clear to all at Court that she was blissfully happy. Her passion was plain to see: her eyes followed Prince Albert round the room as they had once followed Lord Melbourne. Victoria and Albert sang duets together; they walked and rode together; they gave each other rings and locks of hair; he sat beside her while she signed papers, blotting the ink; he accompanied her when she reviewed a parade of soldiers in Hyde Park, wearing, she noted with admiration, a pair of white cashmere breeches with ‘nothing under them’.6 They gazed at each other longingly, obviously dying for the moment when they could be alone together, to hold each other and to kiss; and, when they were alone, tears of happiness and pleasure poured down her cheeks as he took her face in his hands, whispering endearments, kissing her mouth ‘repeatedly’.
‘I love him more than I can say,’ she wrote to King Leopold that same day. ‘These last few days have passed like a dream to me, and I am so much bewildered by it all that I hardly know how to write. But I do feel very, very happy.’7 When they had to say goodbye on his return to Coburg she ‘cried much, wretched, yet happy to think we should meet again so soon! Oh! how I love him, how intensely how devotedly, how ardently!’8
Prince Albert’s affection for her was already deep and unfeigned. ‘I need not tell you that since we left all my thoughts have been with you and your image fills my whole soul,’ he wrote to her from Calais. ‘Those days flew by so quickly, but our separation will fly equally so.’9
‘Dearly beloved Victoria, I long to talk to you,’ he told her a fortnight later, ‘otherwise the separation is too painful. Your dear picture stands on my table and I can hardly take my eyes off it.’10 ‘Victoria is so good and kind to me,’ he told Baron Stockmar, ‘that I am often at a loss to believe that such affection should be shown to me. I know the great interest you take in my happiness, and therefore pour out my heart to you.’ ‘Love of you fills my heart,’ he wrote to the Queen herself. ‘Where love is there is happiness…Even in my dreams I never imagined I should find so much love on earth.’ He wished to walk through the whole of life, ‘with its joys and its storms’ with Victoria at his side.
Prince Albert’s letters to his friend, Prince von Löwenstein, and to his tutor and family in Germany, however, reveal that he did not view the future, and its expected ‘storms’, without concern. He spoke of the ‘firm resolution’ and ‘courage’ he would need in the position he would have to occupy, of the tribulations that marriage to the Queen of England would be bound to bring, of his ‘dread of being unequal’ to his position. He ended a letter to his grandmother: ‘May God be my helper.’ His future lot was ‘high and brilliant but also plentifully strewn with thorns’.11 To his stepmother he wrote that Victoria was ‘good and amiable’; and he was sure that heaven had not given him into evil hands; but the skies above him would ‘not always be blue and unclouded’. Life, wherever one was, had its storms. It was consoling to contemplate the future opportunity for ‘promoting the good of so many’. He would be untiring in his efforts on behalf of the country to which he was to belong; but he would never cease to be ‘a true German, a true Coburg and Gotha man’. Soon after his return to Coburg, he had a foretaste of the difficulties that lay ahead.
‘You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!’
ON 23 NOVEMBER 1839 the Queen made her Declaration of Marriage at Buckingham Palace before an assembly of Privy Councillors. She appeared before them in a simple dress and wearing a miniature of Prince Albert in a bracelet on her wrist. It was ‘rather an awful moment’, she confessed; and her hands were so fluttering that she nearly dropped the paper on which the Declaration was written.1 But, as at her first Council meeting, her voice was clear and true. J. W. Croker, the politician and essayist, thought her ‘as interesting and handsome as any young lady’ he had ever seen.2
News of the engagement had already reached Coburg and Gotha where it had been received with great pleasure. In Coburg the sounds of gunfire and pistol shots in the streets could be heard throughout the night; and in Gotha cannon thundered as the Prince, standing in the throne room before the ladies and gentlemen of the Court, was invested with the Order of the Garter by his father, the Duke, and Queen Victoria’s half-brother, Prince Charles of Leiningen, both Knights of the Garter themselves. At the subsequent banquet the band of the Coldstream Guards, which had sailed from England for the occasion, played ‘God Save the Queen’.3
In England, where the Prince landed at Dover on 7 February after a stormy, five-hour crossing, crowds gathered to cheer him on his way through Kent in the pouring rain, escorted by the Earl of Cardigan’s 11th Light Dragoons, henceforth known as the 11th Prince Albert’s Own Hussars4. At Canterbury, where he and his brother stayed the night and attended a service in the Cathedral, the city was illuminated in his honour.5
The enthusiasm of the populace was not, however, universally shared at Queen Victoria’s Court or in Tory aristocratic circles, though it was generally conceded that, ‘if her political partisanship were to be limited, she undoubtedly needed a husband’s guidance and support’. Yet this husband was only twenty, the same age as herself; and, so The Times observed, ‘one might without being unreasonable, express a wish that the Consort selected for a Princess so educated and hitherto so unfairly guided as Queen Victoria – should have been a person of riper years, and likely to form more sound and circumspect opinions.’6
The Queen’s uncles were scornful of the match; so were many of the prosperous middle classes. Newspapers reported it with lukewarm approbation or with unconcealed disapproval. Versifiers proposed that Prince Albert had come to England to marry the Queen for money:
He comes the bridegroom of Victoria’s choice
The nominee of Lehzen’s Voice;
He comes to take ‘for better or for worse’
England’s fat Queen and England’s fatter purse.7
The question of money had, in fact, already arisen as one of the first problems to blight the Queen’s happiness. Lord Melbourne had assured her that there would be no difficulty in getting Parliament to agree that the Prince should receive the same provision of £50,000 a year which Prince Leopold had received upon his marriage to Princess Charlotte, and which Prince George of Denmark had had when he married the future Queen Anne in 1683. But there was difficulty. The Radical, Joseph Hume, protested that, having regard to the financial state of the country and the distress of the poor, £21,000 would be quite sufficient. The House of Commons did not think so; but when a Tory Member proposed that £30,000 a year would be a fair compromise this amendment was accepted by a large majority.