href="#litres_trial_promo">13 It was bliss also to have him with her at breakfast and to gaze again upon his naked throat, exposed above the black velvet collar of his jacket, to walk with him arm in arm upon the Terrace where her grandfather King George III had paraded with Queen Charlotte and their several daughters, to write letters in her sitting room while he, exhausted and still suffering from the effects of his dreadful seasickness, dozed on a sofa, then rested his ‘darling head’ on her shoulder. It was delightful, too, to watch him shave in the morning and to have him put on her stockings for her.14
On that first day of her honeymoon she wrote to Lord Melbourne to assure him how ‘very very happy’ she was; she ‘never thought she could be so loved’ as she was by ‘dearest, dear Albert’. And she told King Leopold that she was ‘the happiest, happiest Being that ever existed’. Really she did ‘not think it possible for anyone in the world to be happier’. Her husband was ‘an Angel’.15
The Prince grew more and more tired as the days of the short honeymoon progressed; for, as Melbourne commented, it was quite ‘a whirl’. The first evening was the only one they spent alone. On Tuesday there was a dinner party for ten. The Queen thought it a ‘very delightful, merry, nice little party’; but the Prince was obviously still exhausted. The next evening she ‘collected an immense party…for a dance which she chose to have at the Castle’. This is ‘a proceeding quite unparalleled,’ Charles Greville wrote in high disapproval. ‘Even her best friends are shocked at her not conforming more than she is doing to English customs, and not continuing for a short time in that retirement, which modesty and native delicacy generally prescribe and which few Englishwomen would be content to avoid. But She does not think any such constraint necessary…Lady Palmerston said to me last night that she was much vexed that She had nobody about her who could venture to tell her that this [ball on Wednesday] was not becoming and would appear indelicate. But She has nobody who dares tell her, or She will not endure to hear such truths. [Lord] Normanby [the Home Secretary] said to me the same thing. It is a pity Melbourne did not tell her…He probably did not think about it.’16
Prince Albert had, in fact, already suggested before their marriage that ‘it might perhaps be a good and delicate action not to depart’ from what he had been told was the ‘usual custom in England for married people to stay up to four to six weeks from the town and society’. Since this was so, he ventured diffidently, might they not retire from the public eye for ‘at least a fortnight – or a week’?
The Queen had replied to this suggestion as sharply as she had done when the Prince had proposed being allowed to choose his own household:
My dear Albert, [she had written] you have not at all understood the matter. You forget, my dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing. Parliament is sitting and something occurs almost every day for which I am required and it is quite impossible for me to be absent from London; therefore two or three days is already a long time to be absent…I must come out after the second day…I cannot keep alone. This is also my wish in every way.17
While refusing to prolong the honeymoon, the Queen was determined to make the most of the three days she had allocated to it. On the Wednesday evening she stayed up dancing until after midnight when she went upstairs to find her husband fast asleep. She woke him up and they went to bed. On Thursday there was another dance at which she bounced around the floor with Prince Albert in a lively, graceful galop.
Late nights did not preclude early rising. On the morning after their first night together it was ‘much remarked’, so Greville said, ‘that she and P A were up very early walking about [in fact, they were up at half past eight, and did not go out until the early afternoon] which is very contrary to her former habits. Strange that a wedding night should be so short; and I told Lady Palmerston that this was not the way to provide us with a Prince of Wales.’18
The days, even so, the ‘very, very happy days’, were too short for the Queen. Prince Albert’s ‘love and gentleness’ were ‘beyond everything’: to ‘kiss that dear soft cheek, to press [her] lips to his’ was ‘heavenly bliss’. On her return to London, Melbourne commented that she seemed very well. ‘Very,’ she said, ‘and in very high spirits.’ She ‘never could have thought there was so much happiness in store.’19
She delighted in walking with her husband in the grounds of Buckingham Palace when he would tell her the names of the trees and flowers. She obviously loved it when he would display his affection for her as he came into her room, as Lady Lyttelton, a Lady of the Bedchamber, saw him do one day, his cheeks flushed after riding in the Park, taking her hand in his. She was so pleased that he always got up from the dinner table as soon as he could, requiring the other gentlemen to follow him presently, having finished their wine. He then joined her in the drawing room where he would play and sing duets with her, or occupy himself with double chess, leaving her to talk to Lord Melbourne. Sometimes they would all play games together. One evening the whole court ‘took to playing spillikins and puzzling with alphabets’; another evening they ‘learnt a new round game’, and they ‘all grew quite noisy over it’ – it was called main jaune and they liked it better than mouche. When they played vingt-et-un or Pope Joan the stakes were never high, and it was rather tiresome always to have to remember to carry new coins so that court etiquette should not be broken by passing used money to the Sovereign, but the maids-of-honour, ‘all wearing their badge of the Queen’s picture surrounded with brilliants on a red bow, looked so cheerful when they were gambling and a haul of even threepence excited them.’20
Once they played a letter game in which Melbourne was given the word ‘pleasure’ to guess. The Queen gave the Prime Minister a hint: it was a common word, she said. But not, said the Prince, ‘a very common thing’. Melbourne suggested, ‘Is it truth or honesty?’ They burst out laughing.21
Prince Albert could not fully share his wife’s contentment. He confided in Baron Stockmar that he considered her ‘naturally a fine character but warped in many respects by wrong upbringing’. She was wilful and thoughtless, and while kind at heart, given to outbursts of temper and moods of sulky pettishness. There could be no doubt that he loved her; but he was deeply concerned not only to be denied her confidence in what he termed the ‘trivial matters’ of the running of their households, but also by her strong disinclination to allow him to take any part in political business. He was not asked into the room when she was talking to the Prime Minister; nor did she discuss affairs of state with him, changing the subject when he tried to talk to her about political matters. Nor did she allow him to see the state papers which were sent to her by the various government departments, whereas he learnt from his brother that Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Kohary, the husband of Maria da Gloria, Queen of Portugal, was King Consort and as such vetted all her visitors before they were allowed to see her and then to do little more than to kiss her hand. The English, however, so Victoria reminded her husband, were ‘very jealous of any foreigner interfering in the government of this country’.22
‘My impression,’ Lord Melbourne told George Anson, ‘is that the chief obstacle in Her Majesty’s mind is the fear of difference of opinion and she thinks that domestic harmony is more likely to follow from avoiding subjects likely to create difference.’23 A greater obstacle, no doubt, was her reluctance to share her authority with anyone, even her adored husband.
‘The Prince ought in business as in everything to be necessary to the Queen,’ King Leopold advised, ‘he should be to her a walking dictionary for reference on any point which her own knowledge or education have