they were among the things she most disliked in all the world. The Prince, who greatly regretted that he would not now be able to do so much as he had hoped for poor scholars and artists, was also much put out. ‘I am surprised that you have said no word of sympathy to me about the vote of the 28th,’ he wrote to the Queen in a letter far sharper than any he had yet sent her, ‘for those nice Tories have cut off half my income…and it makes my position not a very pleasant one. It is hardly conceivable that anyone could behave as meanly and disgracefully as they have to you and me. It cannot do them much good for it is hardly possible to maintain any respect for them any longer. Everyone, even here [Coburg], is indignant about it.’9
The Queen became even angrier with the Tories, and with their standard bearer the Duke of Wellington, when it was suggested that Prince Albert, like many of his Coburg relations, had ‘papistical leanings’. In Victoria’s Declaration of Marriage to the Privy Council, the Prince had not been specifically described as a Protestant prince and therefore able to receive Holy Communion in the form prescribed by the Church of England, since Lord Melbourne had thought it best not to mention religion at all. He did not want to upset the Irish Catholics, who supported him in the House of Commons, and he could not employ the usual formula about ‘marrying into a Protestant family’ because a large number of Coburgs were either Roman Catholics themselves, or, like King Leopold, had married into Catholic families.
The Duke of Wellington – who, while not really caring a fig about it, according to his private secretary, had expressed the opinion that the annual income of £30,000 was quite sufficient for Prince Albert – now rose in the House of Lords to declare that the people ought to know something about the Queen’s future husband other than his name, that they should be given the satisfaction of knowing that he ‘was a Protestant – thus showing all the public that this is still a Protestant State’.10
‘Do what one will,’ the Queen protested to King Leopold, ‘nothing will please these most religious, most hypocritical Tories whom I dislike (I use a very soft word), most heartily.’ It was absurd of them to make this fuss, seeing that, by the law of the land, she could not ‘marry a Papist’ anyway. Sir Robert Peel was ‘a low hypocrite’, a ‘nasty wretch’; as for that ‘wicked old foolish’ Duke of Wellington, she would never speak to him or look at him again; she would certainly not ask him to her wedding. ‘It is MY marriage,’ she protested when Melbourne endeavoured to dissuade her from slighting the Duke in this way, ‘and I will only have those who can sympathize with me.’ Nor would she send a message to Apsley House when it was reported that the Duke was ill. Charles Greville called there and found ‘his people indignant that, while all the Royal Family have been sending continually to enquire after him, and all London has been at his door, the Queen alone has never taken the slightest notice of him’. Greville immediately sent Melbourne a note ‘representing the injury it was to herself not to do so’. Melbourne asked Greville to come to see him without delay and told him when he arrived that the Queen was ‘very resentful, but that people pressed her too much, did not give her time’. To this Greville replied that it ‘really was lamentable’ that she did the things she did, that she would get into a great scrape. The people of England would not endure that she should treat the Duke of Wellington with disrespect. Greville had no scruple in saying so to Melbourne since he knew that he was doing his utmost to keep her straight. ‘By God!’ Melbourne said, ‘I am moving noon and night at it.’
He wondered, though, if it were not too late now for the Queen to send a message to Apsley House. ‘Better late than not at all,’ Greville advised him; so Melbourne sat down and wrote to the Queen. ‘I suppose she will send now?’ Greville asked. ‘Oh, yes,’ Melbourne replied. ‘She will send now.’11
Then there was trouble over the precedence to be granted the Prince. King Leopold, who regretted not having accepted the offer of an English peerage as Duke of Kendal himself, had suggested that Prince Albert should be created an English peer so that his ‘foreignership should disappear as much as possible’. But the Queen dissented. ‘The whole Cabinet agrees with me in being strongly of the opinion that Albert should not be a Peer,’ she replied to her uncle. ‘I see everything against it and nothing for it.’ She told the Prince why:
The English are very jealous of any foreign interference in the Government of the country and have already in some of the papers…expressed a hope that you would not interfere: – now, tho’ I know you never would, still, if you were a peer they would all say the Prince meant to play a political part – I am sure you will understand.12
The Prince himself had no wish to be an English peer: ‘It would be almost a step downwards, for as a Duke of Saxony, I feel myself much higher than as Duke of Kent or York.’ He was quite content to have no title other than his own. ‘As regards my peerage and the fears of my playing a political part, dear, beloved Victoria,’ he wrote, ‘I have only one anxious wish and one prayer: do not allow it to become a matter of worry to you.’13
Though Albert had expressed his own opposition to receiving a peerage, the Queen was strongly of the view that he should have precedence over all other peers in the country, including the royal dukes. If she had her way he would be King Consort.
Once again the Duke of Wellington, now recovered from his illness, opposed her: the precedence of the Royal Family, he pointed out, was fixed by Act of Parliament. It was well known that he held no brief for the royal dukes; but it would be unfair to ask them to support a change in the law to interfere with their rights. When Charles Greville asked the Duke what he thought should be done about the Prince’s precedence, he answered emphatically, ‘Oh, give him the same which Prince George of Denmark had: place him next before the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ ‘That will by no means satisfy her,’ Greville objected. At this the Duke ‘tossed his head and with an expression of extreme contempt said, “Satisfy her! What does that signify?”’14
Upon hearing Tory objections to her granting the Prince the precedence she had in mind for him, the Queen was quite as cross as Melbourne had feared she would be. She ‘raged away’, perfectly ‘frantic’, in her own words, railing at her uncles and the vile, confounded, ‘infernal Tories’ responsible for this ‘outrageous insult’. They were ‘wretches’, ‘scoundrels’ ‘capable of every villainy [and] personal spite’. ‘Poor dear Albert, how cruelly they are ill-using that dearest Angel! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!’15
In her anger she turned upon Melbourne himself. She was forced to concede that the state of feeling in the country, the unemployment and the unrest – the plight of the poor which he usually did not care to think or talk about – made the reduction of Albert’s allowance at least tolerable. But there could be no excuse for this cruel slight over the matter of precedence. Lord Melbourne really ought to have foreseen the trouble that there might be. He should not have led her ‘to expect no difficulties’.
Melbourne unwisely commented that there would not have been such difficulties were Prince Albert not a foreigner: foreigners always caused trouble, particularly from Coburg. They had been through all this before, the Queen crossly rejoined. She could never have married one of her own subjects, and she was not marrying Albert because he was a Coburg but because she loved him and he was worthy of her love. Later Melbourne tactlessly stumbled into trouble again when the Queen remarked that one of the things she most loved about Albert was his indifference to the charms of all women other than herself. ‘No,’ said Melbourne carelessly, ‘that sort of thing is apt to come later.’ It was ‘an odd remark to make to any woman on the eve of marriage, let alone the Queen’, Lord Clarendon observed when Melbourne told him of this gaffe, chuckling ‘over it amazingly’. Certainly the Queen took it very ill. ‘I shan’t,’ she said, ‘forgive you for that.’
She did, of course, and she came close to forgiving the