What Happened to the Little Girl Sarah, Taken in by Queen Victoria ?
As Queen Victoria'southward periodical shows, from the moment she saw the prince arriving at the foot of the staircase at Windsor in 1839, she was smitten. Five days later she summoned him to her blue closet and proposed to him. But the wedlock was non the romantic happy-e'er-later story that Victoria constructed. It was far more complex than that.
Like all dynastic marriages, this was an alliance with a political agenda. As the 2d son of a small German duke (Coburg is smaller than the Isle of Wight) and a mere Serene Highness, the lowest class in the royal hierarchy, Prince Albert was Victoria's poor relation, although the two were first cousins. But what he lacked in rank and wealth, he made up for with pedagogy and self-confidence, and he had been trained from his teens past King Leopold of Belgium, the cousins' mutual uncle, to marry Victoria and take over the British throne.
Albert began his quest for power immediately after the union. Within months he had moved his writing desk-bound next to the queen'due south. At get-go, Victoria resisted Albert'southward attempts to remove her trusted governess, Baroness Lehzen, from control of the court. But as one pregnancy followed another in quick succession – 7 of Victoria's nine children were born in the first 10 years of the matrimony – the queen was in no condition to resist. Albert fired Lehzen and assumed control of the household, introducing much-needed reforms and economies.
Rex in all but name
In November 1840, when her offset child was built-in, Victoria gave Albert the key to the cabinet boxes. He started to attend meetings with ministers, dealing with the queen's correspondence and drafting business letters for the queen to re-create out. At dinners with politicians, Albert could be heard prompting Victoria in German before she spoke. Past now he had become her private secretary.
In 1850 he described his position thus:
"As the natural head of [the queen'southward] family, superintendent of her household, manager of her private affairs, sole confidential adviser in politics, and merely assistant in her communications with the officers of her government, he is, besides, the husband of the queen, the tutor of the royal children, the private secretarial assistant of the sovereign, and her permanent minister." Not only was Albert male monarch in all only name but he intervened in politics, pursuing an active role in foreign policy.
Victoria declared herself grateful to Albert for relieving her of the ho-hum piece of work of the sovereign. Women, she believed, were non fit to rule. "It is a reversal of the right guild of things which distresses me much and which no i, but such a perfection, such an affections as he is – could acquit and carry through." But Victoria had a vein of steel, and her commitment to her birthright was absolute. She was torn betwixt her passionate desire to be a perfect 'Victorian' married woman to Albert – an angel in the house, all sweet and light – and her Hanoverian inheritance.
The royals retreat
The epitome of the Victorian monarchy, crafted past Albert, and projected in paintings such as Winterhalter'southward The Majestic Family unit in 1846 was ane of a child-centred bourgeois family on the throne. But the fact was that the regal marriage was unlike any other. Information technology took place within the peculiar context of the court.
As a young maid of honour in Victoria's court in the 1850s, Mary Bulteel would lookout the door silently close on the queen'south individual apartments. How she longed to go to know the queen, her employer, but Victoria barely spoke to her.
The withdrawal of the royal family from the public space of the court into the private apartments was Albert'due south doing. Information technology meant that Victoria'due south life was no longer bounded by the court, as it had been in the early days of her reign, when her court was a Camelot, famed for its parties and youthful high spirits. The creation of a private sphere – of a space dedicated to domestic life – was one of the nearly far-reaching changes made by Albert in his drive to reform the monarchy.
Disliking London with its late nights, and sneered at by the aristocracy as a German beggar, Albert persuaded Victoria that her enjoyment of social club was wrong. True happiness, he claimed, was to be establish in the land with her dearest prince and her young family. Albert designed the new family dwelling at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, safely inaccessible from a prying public. Even more remote was Balmoral, the castle he created in the Scottish Highlands, 500 miles from London.
At Osborne House or Balmoral, the family could live the uncomplicated outdoors life that Victoria later depicted in her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. Victoria believed her "happy domestic dwelling" fabricated her more than popular than any other sovereign and gave a good example to her subjects.
At court, Albert introduced new rules, distancing the majestic family from the household – that is, the courtiers and officeholders such equally the Lord Chamberlain. He ordered that no human was to sit in the presence of the queen. Throughout Victoria's reign, prime ministers stood during audiences; just two were accorded the special privilege of sitting in the queen'southward presence – her favourite Disraeli, who declined the offer, and Lord Salisbury, who was too heavy to stand. The hated Gladstone was never asked to sit down, fifty-fifty in his eighties.
Albert forbade maids of honour from sitting in his presence or speaking to him unless spoken to. He went everywhere attended by an equerry, thus emphasising his imperial status. In his relations with the courtiers of the household, Albert was cold and stiff. "His fashion of giving orders and reproofs was rather also like a master of a house scolding servants to be pleasant for those who were leap to heed in silence," wrote Mary Bulteel. People noticed that the prince made not a single friend amidst ministers or the household. Such reserve in so young a man was "unpleasant", idea Mary: "It implied something of the cold egotism which seems to chill you lot in all royalties."
Memoirs of ladies-in-waiting agree that Albert was "detested" because he was "so strong", especially with women. Victoria, on the other hand, was adored because of her disarming frankness and her unquenchable marvel and interest in the diplomacy of anybody around her.
Albert's cold way derived in role from his upbringing at the small German courtroom of Coburg. When Mary Bulteel visited Coburg in 1860, she found the courtroom far stiffer than in Uk, and the equerries and household much more than "complanate before these little sovereigns than we are earlier the queen".
One result of withdrawing from the court was that the imperial couple were closer to their ordinary servants than they were to the aristocratic courtiers of the household. This is maybe why, after Albert'due south death, Victoria became intimate first with her Highland servant John Brown, and later with her Indian servant Abdul Karim – relationships that the courtiers plant especially upsetting considering they overturned the protocol of the court.
Hysterical tantrums
Backside the closed doors of the individual apartments, Victoria was often irritable and moody. She bitterly resented what she chosen "the shadow side of marriage", meaning pregnancy and childbirth, and she suffered from postnatal depression. She disliked babies, who she idea were "mere picayune plants for the first vi months" and "frightful when undressed" with their "big body and trivial limbs and that terrible frog-like activeness".
Victoria's 'nerves' became worse during the 1850s. Her last two pregnancies were marked by hysterical scenes. Albert was advised by the royal doctors that the queen's mood swings and trigger-happy Hanoverian tempers were symptoms that she had inherited the madness of her grandfather George Three. Rather than engage, he walked away and, every bit his wife stormed out of the room in a fury, the prince composed letters reprimanding her for unreasonable behaviour. "If you are violent I accept no other pick just to get out you lot… and retire to my room in order to give yous time to recover yourself, then you follow me to renew the dispute and accept it all out," he wrote.
Victoria kept a notebook in which she recorded her tempers, her selfishness, and her loss of self-control. Albert would read her confessions and issue her with a 'certificate' of improvement, reviewing her behaviour as he might a child. Albert's intentions were no doubt good. He was certainly a loyal and faithful married man. Victoria's adoration of her love was undimmed. But she was fabricated to feel that she was inadequate, his intellectual and moral inferior. "I owe everything to dearest papa," she told her daughter. "He was my begetter, my protector, my guide and adviser in all and everything, my mother (I might almost say) as well as my husband."
This was not a marriage of equals. It was as if the only style the couple could live with the bibelot (as they saw it) of Victoria being a woman on the throne and superior in rank to her husband was past making her feel that she was Albert'south inferior in every other respect. This artifice imposed unbearable stresses upon them both. Little wonder Victoria lost her temper now and and then.
Albert'southward reaction was to escape into piece of work. In the 1850s he consistently rose early in the forenoon to deal with his growing amount of paperwork. His meddling in politics fabricated him unpopular in the land, and he became a lonely, unhappy effigy. Photographs show him prematurely aged, balding and careworn. Queen Victoria's tragedy was that Albert's decease, aged 42, meant that these tensions were never resolved.
Jane Ridley is professor of history at the Academy of Buckingham and author of several works on the Victorian era, including Victoria (Allen Lane, 2015).
This article was outset published in the September 2017 event of BBC History Mag
Source: https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/queen-victoria-marriage-prince-albert-unhappy-husband/
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