to the annoyance of the Duke of Cambridge, had ‘a perfect right to give her husband whatever precedence she pleased’. So, the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General concurring, Letters Patent granting the Prince the precedence she had wanted to give him were issued by the Queen. From then on the Queen’s attitude to the Duke of Wellington softened. He had, after all, supported her when she had expressed a wish to be accompanied only by her mother and one of her ladies in the state coach on her way to St James’s Palace to be proclaimed. Her Master of the Horse, Lord Albemarle, insisted that he had a right to ride with her as he had done with William IV. ‘The point was submitted to the Duke of Wellington as a kind of universal referee in matters of precedence and usage. His judgement was delightfully unflattering to the outraged magnate – “The Queen can make you go inside the coach or outside the coach or run behind it like a tinker’s dog.”’16 The Queen decided to ask the Duke to her wedding after all. She drew the line, however, at inviting him to the wedding breakfast. She had not entirely forgiven him yet. ‘Our Gracious,’ Wellington concluded, was still ‘very much out of Temper.’17
A problem which concerned the Prince far more than his title or his precedence was the composition of his Household which he hoped would be of perfect respectability, unlike the Queen’s which comprised a number of men whose morals were highly questionable, including the Lord Chamberlain, the Marquess of Conyngham, whose mistress was employed as Housekeeper at Buckingham Palace, and the Earl of Uxbridge, the Lord Steward, whose mistress had also been found a position in Her Majesty’s household. Indeed, there were so many Pagets living at Court, in addition to Lord Alfred Paget, the Clerk-Marshal, that it was known as ‘the Paget Club House’.
Prince Albert had assumed that he would be allowed to choose his gentlemen himself and that some of them might be German and all, of course, ‘well educated and of high character’. Believing as he did that the Crown should not display a preference for any political party, that King William IV had been much misguided to favour the Tories and Queen Victoria was equally in error to demonstrate her support of the Whigs, he had hoped that his own household would indicate his impartiality. ‘It is very necessary,’ he wrote, ‘that they should be chosen from both sides – the same number of Whigs as of Tories.’18
The Queen, encouraged by Melbourne, did not agree. ‘As to your wish about your Gentlemen, my dear Albert,’ she told him severely, ‘I must tell you quite honestly that it will not do. You may entirely rely upon me that the people who will be round you will be absolutely pleasant people of high standing and good character…You may rely upon my care that you shall have proper people and not idle and not too young and Lord Melbourne has already mentioned several to me who would be very suitable.’19
It was useless for the Prince to protest. ‘I am very sorry,’ he had replied, ‘that you have not been able to grant my first request, the one about the Gentlemen, for I know it was not an unfair one…Think of my position, dear Victoria, I am leaving my home with all its associations, all my bosom friends, and going to a country in which everything is new and strange to me…Except yourself I have no one to confide in. And it is not even to be conceded to me that the two or three persons who are to have the charge of my private affairs should be persons who already command my confidence.’20
The Queen was not softened by this appeal, although Lord Melbourne thought that it might now be better to give way, and King Leopold wrote what the Queen described as ‘an ungracious letter’ urging the Prime Minister to persuade the Queen to take a ‘correct view’. But, so she wrote to Prince Albert, that was just like Uncle Leopold: he was ‘given to believe that he must rule the roast [sic] everywhere…I am distressed to be obliged to tell you what I fear you do not like but it is necessary, my dearest most excellent Albert…I only do it as I know it is for your own good.’ It was conceded that a German whom the Prince did know, Herr Schenk, should be appointed to a minor post which did not entitle him to a place at the equerries’ table; but the appointment of Private Secretary, the principal post in his Household, was to be filled by George Anson who was not only a confirmed Whig and Secretary to the Whig Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, but whose uncle, Sir George Anson (chosen for an appointment as Groom of the Bedchamber), was also a Whig. In vain the Prince protested to his ‘dearest love’ that taking the Secretary of the Prime Minister as his own Private Secretary would surely from the beginning make him ‘a partisan in the eyes of many’. The Queen, however, was ‘very much in favour’ of the appointment: Mr Anson was ‘an excellent young man, very modest, very honest, very steady, very well informed’ and would be ‘of much use’ to him. Further objection was clearly useless: advised to do so by Baron Stockmar, the Prince gave way, on condition that Anson resigned as the Prime Minister’s Secretary before he became his own.21
The Prince submitted with a good grace, much to the relief of the Queen who had been warned by King Leopold that Prince Albert had seemed ‘pretty full of grievances’ when he had passed through Brussels on his way back to England. She had, in fact, been so worried that he would be resentful that she was feeling ill when he returned. But all was well. ‘Seeing his dear dear face again’ put her ‘at rest about everything’.22
Almost at once she spoke to him about Anson’s appointment and the ‘little misunderstandings’ that had arisen because of it. He accepted the fait accompli and was, so the Queen said, ‘so dear and ehrlich [honest] and open about it’. She ‘embraced him again and again’.23 Her recent peevishness evaporated in her love for him, in her pleasure at his having given way to her demands and in excited anticipation of their marriage. Yet she felt it impossible to agree with his suggestion that her bridesmaids must be selected only from those young ladies whose mothers were of unblemished character. Lord Melbourne had been aghast at this suggestion. As he told Greville, the Prince was ‘a great stickler for morality’ and ‘extremely strait-laced’. He did not seem to appreciate that the lower orders should, of course, be judged by moral standards but those of high birth must be deemed above such considerations. The Queen at first objected that there surely could not be one set of moral standards for the humble poor and another for the aristocratic rich; but she acknowledged the impossibility of submitting to Prince Albert’s severe proscriptions; and among the twelve tall, plain bridesmaids there were several whose mothers could not have passed his test.
‘I always think one ought always to be indulgent towards other people,’ the Queen explained to Prince Albert, ‘as I always think, if we had not been well brought up and well taken care of, we might also have gone astray.’24
The evening before the wedding the Queen and Prince Albert went through the marriage service together and, mindful of the painful embarrassment at the coronation, tried on the ring. The Prince, who had endured yet another fearful Channel crossing, seemed tired and rather nervous, still suffering from the effects of severe seasickness which had left his face, so he said, more the colour of a wax candle than that of a human visage. But the Queen was in high spirits and serenely happy. She went to bed excitedly conscious that it would be, as she wrote in her journal, the last time she would sleep alone. She slept peacefully, quite untroubled by the agitation she had noticed in her dear bridegroom’s manner, worried only by the thought that she might have a lot of children.
‘I am only the husband, and not the master of the house.’
THE QUEEN AWOKE on Monday, 10 February 1840 to a blustery morning with torrents of rain splashing against her bedroom windows; but the clouds soon cleared and, as was so often to happen on important days