There was concealment, though; and there was much resentment when Prince Albert presumed to offer his advice. When, for example, a box of official papers arrived labelled tersely, ‘sign immediately’, he suggested she show her displeasure at receiving such peremptory instructions by not signing for a day or two. She signed at once.25
She was, in fact, prepared to limit the Prince’s role as partner to what she herself ingenuously called a little ‘help with the blotting paper’. He told his friend, Prince William of Löwenstein, ‘In my home life I am very happy and contented; but the difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband, and not the master of the house.’26
There were other problems, too. He could not share his wife’s passion for excitement, merriment and late nights. He preferred the peace of the countryside to the bustle of the town, and he liked to go to bed early. He told his brother that he sometimes wished he were back at Coburg ‘in a small house’ instead of living the life that his sense of duty had imposed upon him.27
When he was feeling tired or particularly frustrated, he became irritable over matters of little importance. Often he was seen to be asleep in the evening, and then the Queen would nudge him to wake him up, as Guizot, the French Ambassador, noticed her do at a concert soon after their marriage: ‘Prince Albert slept. She looked at him, half smiling, half vexed. She pushed him with her elbow. He woke up, and nodded approval of the piece of the moment. Then he went to sleep again.’28 He was often bored in the evenings, constantly disappointed that he was unable to fulfil his ambition to bring scientific and literary people about the Court, to make it a more general reflection of the life of the country.29
He was far from being a morose man: he did take pleasure in life, but his pleasures were far more restrained, less hectic than hers. He found it difficult to get used to the food and the climate in England, and a strain to have to speak English most of the time. The ordinary people of the country seemed quite happy to accept him; but the upper classes remained extremely wary of him, while several members of the old Royal Family were still openly antagonistic, the Duke of Cambridge making a ridiculous fuss when his Garter banner in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, was moved a few inches to make way for that of the ‘young foreign upstart’. The Duchess of Cambridge went so far as to remain seated when the Prince’s health was drunk at a dinner.
The quarrel between the Duchess of Cambridge and the Prince became more heated than ever when her son, that ‘odious’ boy as the Queen had described him, was rumoured to have made Lady Augusta Somerset pregnant. Prince George of Cambridge was a highly flirtatious though rather timid young man and Lady Augusta, eldest daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, a ‘very ill-behaved girl, ready for anything that her caprice or passions excite her to do’. So there were some grounds for the rumour, false though it was, and Prince Albert firmly believed it to be true. Both he and the Queen refused to speak to Lady Augusta when she appeared at Court and ordered the ladies there not to do so either. And when solemnly assured that the stories were unfounded, the Prince’s reply – that he supposed, therefore, ‘they must believe that it was so’ – left the Cambridges ‘by no means satisfied’ and the Beauforts ‘boiling with resentment and indignation’.30
The Prince was now more unpopular with the aristocracy than ever. His prudery, his obvious cleverness, his enterprise on the hunting field, his graceful accomplishment on the ballroom floor and as a skater on frozen lakes, his vigour as a swimmer, his talents as a musician and singer, all aroused dislike and jealousy rather than admiration. At dinner parties his competence, his conscientiousness, his intelligence and his honesty would alike be grudgingly conceded but then, as Baron Stockmar remarked, someone would be sure to add, ‘Look at the cut of his coat, though, and the way he shakes hands’ with his elbow held stiffly at his side. Even the way he rode a horse appeared determinedly, even arrogantly, German. With women, it was often observed, he was particularly ill at ease, concealing his shyness in their presence beneath a veneer of stiff formality or avoiding their eyes altogether as though aware of some grave fault of character that would not allow him to recognize their existence. When walking in the park at Windsor or in the gardens at Buckingham Palace, with his sleek greyhound at his heels, he would pass them by without a word. Later, in the drawing room, he would make it painfully plain that he was totally unmoved by their charms. He had ‘never feared temptation with regard to women’, he admitted to his secretary, having ‘no inclination in that respect’: such ‘species of vice disgusted him’. The Queen was far from displeased by this obvious ‘utter indifference to the attraction of all ladies’; but the ladies themselves naturally found his impassivity disconcerting, not to say demeaning; nor did the maids-of-honour like the manner in which the Prince walked out of the door in front of them and would not allow them to sit down in his presence: once when the pregnant Lady John Russell seemed to be overcome by fatigue the Queen whispered to her to sit down but took the precaution of placing Lady Douro in front of her so that the Prince should not notice this breach of etiquette.31
Well aware of his unpopularity among the upper classes and at Court, Prince Albert felt increasingly homesick. And on the return of his father to Coburg after a brief visit to England the Queen found her husband weeping bitterly in the hall. Embarrassed to be found in so unmanly a state, he ran upstairs to his room. She hurried after him, anxious to comfort him; but he was, for the moment, inconsolable: she had never known her father, he reminded her, and her childhood had been a miserable one in comparison with the past with which he had had so suddenly to break.
The Queen was moved by his nostalgia. ‘God knows,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘how great my wish is to make this Beloved being happy and contented.’32
‘I cannot understand how anyone can wish for such a thing, especially at the beginning of a marriage.’
WITHIN A FEW WEEKS of her marriage the Queen discovered herself to be pregnant; and this event was to mark a profound change in the Prince’s career as Consort. The Queen, however, was dismayed. It was ‘the ONLY thing’ she dreaded. She was ‘furious’. It was ‘too dreadful’, she told Prince Leopold. She ‘could not be more unhappy’, she confessed to the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. ‘I am really upset about it and it is spoiling my happiness; I have always hated the idea and I prayed God night and day to be left free for at least six months…I cannot understand how anyone can wish for such a thing, especially at the beginning of a marriage.’1 And if her ‘plagues’ were to be ‘rewarded only by a nasty girl’, she told King Leopold that she would drown it.2
Shortly before the birth she was to consult Charles Locock, the obstetrician, who confessed to his friend, Lady Mahon, that he ‘felt shy and embarrassed’ but that she ‘very soon put him at his ease’.
She had not the slightest reserve & was always ready to express Herself, in respect to her present situation, in the very plainest terms possible [Locock confided in Lady Mahon who told her friend, Charles Arbuthnot, who, in turn, passed the account on to his friend, the Duke of Wellington]. She asked Locock whether she would suffer much pain. He replied that some pain was to be expected, but that he had no doubt Her Majesty would bear it very well. ‘Oh yes,’ said the Queen, ‘I can bear pain as well as other People.’…Locock left Her Majesty without any very good impressions of Her; & with the certainty that She will be very ugly & enormously fat. Her figure now is most extraordinary. She goes without stays or anything that keeps Her shape within bounds; & that she is more like