Victoria’s Secret, page 7
‘It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert – who is beautiful,’ she wrote, later that evening. ‘He is so handsome and pleasing.’21 The next morning, with the familiarity granted to close family, Albert and Ernest visited Victoria in her private rooms. ‘Albert really is quite charming,’ Victoria enthused in her journal, ‘and so excessively handsome, such beautiful blue eyes, an exquisite nose, and such a pretty mouth, with delicate moustachios, and slight but very slight whiskers; a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist. My heart is quite going.’22 Three days later, on 14 October 1839, Victoria made a confession to Lord Melbourne. She had decided to marry Albert, although not for at least a year. Melbourne was quick to try to dissuade her from a long engagement, keen to stress the stability her marriage would bring to the country and the throne. ‘I’m very glad of it,’ he encouraged her. ‘I think it is a very good thing, and you’ll be much more comfortable; for a woman cannot stand alone for long, in whatever situation she is; her position is very equivocal and painful.’23
At half past twelve the following day, Victoria sent for Albert, instructing him to meet her alone in her rooms. Here, she proposed and he accepted. ‘It was the happiest brightest moment in my life,’ Victoria declared. ‘Oh! how I adore and love him, I cannot say!!’24 She even kissed her cousin goodbye, after swearing him to secrecy.
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Now privately engaged, Victoria could do little to disguise her utterly overwhelming lust for her husband-to-be. On 1 November, dressed in her Windsor uniform and cap, and on her favourite charger, Leopold, the Queen set out for a military review of her troops. Gathered near Windsor Castle were squadrons from the 14th Light Dragoons, a calvary regiment from the 2nd Life Guards, and the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade.25 Albert rode alongside her, also in uniform, and although it was a piercingly cold day, Victoria could think of little else other than ‘my beloved Albert, looking so handsome in his uniform’.26 She took the utmost delight in his ‘tight white cazimere pantaloons (nothing under them) and high boots’.27 Throughout her life, and represented here by italics, Victoria would underline her most important thoughts in letters, journals and memoranda, often once and sometimes twice, for emphasis and emotion. Here, they show us her growing erotic obsession with Albert and her deeply passionate nature. Victoria was not a prude: she was lustful, sexual, with the insatiable curiosity of a young woman who was ready to experience both the physical and emotional sides of love. Her journal entries from this time are full of breathless admiration at Albert’s ‘beautiful figure’, how ‘those eyes of his are bewitching’,28 and of the many times she ‘embraced my beloved Albert … as we always do, one another, when we are alone’.29 The passion Victoria felt, her joy at the growing physical nature of their relationship, was one that many young courting couples experience. But at no point does she display a lack of confidence or bashfulness towards these early romantic overtures. Instead, she revels in them. ‘We stood by the fire, and dearest Albert took my hand and pressed it,’ Victoria recorded, in utter delight, ‘and pressed his lips so tenderly to mine! Oh! when I look in those lovely, lovely blue eyes, I feel they are those of an Angel!’30 They even exchanged lockets, holding a cutting of one another’s hair.
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Victoria and Albert’s engagement was announced to great fanfare in late November, and they married on 10 February 1840, in the Chapel at St James’s Palace. For Leopold, Victoire and Ernest, their mother’s grand dynastic plan had finally been realised. Yet, from the start, nothing about the royal marriage ran smoothly. ‘I asked Clark,’ recorded their doctor, Robert Ferguson, ‘… whether the Prince was in love, he said, he thought he liked her.’31 Albert, demonised by the Tory Party, fell victim to a very specific strain of British xenophobia that views any foreigner with suspicion and malice. While Victoria, still revelling in her new independence, was headstrong and controlling, refusing to allow him to bring any companion from his childhood or home, deciding his private secretary, allowance and titles with seemingly little care or concern for the wishes of her husband. For some time, they fought, resented and rebelled against one another’s perceptions of what a marriage should be. Victoria had to reconcile her power and duty as a queen with society’s – and her husband’s – belief in the natural submission of a wife. After the childhood domination of Conroy, it was not a position she quickly invited.
Yet there was one area in which they were in total harmony. Intimately, sexually, Victoria and Albert were made for each other. ‘I never, never spent such an evening!!’ Victoria wrote on their wedding night. ‘My dearest, dearest dear Albert sat on a footstool by my side, and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness, I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, and we kissed each other again and again! His beauty, his sweetness and gentleness … and at 20 m. p. 10 we both went to bed; (of course in one bed), to lie by his side, and in his arms, and on his dear bosom, and be called by names of tenderness, I have never yet heard used to me before – was bliss beyond belief! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!’32
‘We did not sleep much,’ she wrote the following morning. ‘He does look so beautiful in his shirt only, with his beautiful throat seen.’33 But within three months of their marriage, Albert found the confines of his new position chaffing. ‘I am only the husband,’ he wrote, ‘and not the master of the house.’34 He was ‘a plaything of the blue boudoir’ – Victoria’s private rooms at Windsor – a royal sperm donor brought into England to do one thing and one thing alone: secure the royal line.35 Wives had been traded, bought and paid for by male monarchs for centuries, yet for a man to be subjected to such a reduction of their autonomy was highly unusual. It chaffed for the entirety of his married life. Victoria attempted to reassure his fragile ego, calling Albert ‘my dearest Master’ in her letters, while he referred to her as ‘my dear child’, yet nothing could alter the reality of their situation.36 Victoria was monarch and he was not.
Denied his public authority, Albert committed himself to ruling their domestic sphere. He became a dedicated father, not only to their children, but also to the nation – orchestrating a grand scheme of social reforms, founding charities, taking great interest in education, politics and the moral welfare of the nation. He even bought Victoire back into Victoria’s heart, repairing much of the damage Conroy had wrought. Their first child, Victoria – ‘Vicky’ – the Princess Royal, was born ten months after their wedding, on 21 November 1840. What then followed was two decades of royal births in quick succession: Albert Edward, the heir to the throne and known to his family as ‘Bertie’, on 9 November 1841; Alice, born 25 April 1843; Alfred, ‘Affie’, born 6 August 1844; Helena, ‘Lenchen’, born 25 May 1846; Louise, born 18 March 1848; Arthur, born 1 May 1850; Leopold, born 7 April 1853; and Beatrice, ‘Baby’, born 14 April 1857.
After two years of independence and teenage queendom, Victoria spent her twenties and thirties pregnant and often absent from the daily life of monarchy, which happily rumbled on around her. To Albert’s credit, he realised Victoria had never experienced what a happy family home might actually be, and soon spent his time locating, rebuilding and creating their own; first at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, and then at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. It was here that everything began to change.
The royal couple had fallen in love with the unique spirit of the Highlands and its peoples soon after their marriage, leasing the Balmoral estate in 1848 and buying it outright by 1852. The old buildings were demolished to make way for the new royal Balmoral Castle and with their private hideaway came a host of new royal servants. Among them was a young Scottish Highlander named John Brown.
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When he was five years old, John’s family had moved from Crathienaird to the nearby Bush Farm where he spent the rest of his childhood. He attended the local parish school, learning to read and write, and became fluent in English – the language of the Crown – and both Doric and Gaelic, the languages of his community.37 His heavily accented Doric, the Scots language of Aberdeenshire, was something Victoria adored. Educated and resourceful, John was the quintessential outdoorsman, with a keen eye and knowledge of the seasons, the animals and the weather that surrounded him. By the time Victoria arrived at Balmoral in 1848, with six of her royal children in tow, John had worked his way up from stableboy to ghillie and spent his days learning from the older, gnarled hands of the ancient men who made the estate and its care their livelihood. He was strong, powerfully built and dressed in the tartan kilt of his countrymen, now no longer banned by British law.
It’s hardly a surprise that this strawberry-blond, blue-eyed, handsome 21-year-old Highlander made an impression on the Queen’s young family, as well as her retinue. He was certainly instantly eroticised by them. The Hon. Eleanor Stanley, one of Victoria’s maids of honour, told her mother of the arrival of ‘a most fascinating and good-looking young Highlander, Johnny Brown’, during one of her early trips to Balmoral, while Prince Albert was supposedly struck by his ‘magnificent physique, his transparent honest and straightforward, independent character’.38 Victoria would later confess that, even as a married woman, she felt ‘irresistibly drawn towards’ him.39
Queen Victoria as a young woman.
She first mentioned John in her journal on 11 September 1849, as the family explored Glen Muick, and shortly after this, Albert selected the handsome young man to attend especially to the Queen.40 Victoria found him to have ‘all the independence and elevated feelings peculiar to the Highland race, and is singularly straightforward, simple-minded, kind-hearted … always ready to oblige; and of a discretion rarely to be met with’.41 He corralled Victoria and her children across bogs and streams, on picnics and climbs, showing them the overwhelming beauty of Balmoral and its surroundings. ‘Travelling about in these enchanting hills,’ she wrote, delightedly, ‘in this solitude, with only our good Highlanders with us, who never make difficulties, but are cheerful, and happy, and merry, and ready to talk, and run and do anything.’42 John became an integral part of her life at Balmoral: ‘perfect – discreet, careful, intelligent, attentive, ever ready to do what is wanted … handy, and willing to do every thing and any thing, and to overcome every difficulty, which makes him one of my best servants any where’.43 She even had him immortalised in Evening at Balmoral Castle, Carl Haag’s striking 1854 watercolour depicting Victoria and her young family surrounded by torchlight, brought out onto the steps of Balmoral to witness Prince Albert’s triumphant hunt of three large red deer stags.
John stands at the front of the painting, holding a large, burning torch, the light and smoke whipped dramatically by the wind. Although his back is to us, he is the largest figure in view, and his presence focuses on his strength, his calves, his shoulders, his physical power. Victoria gave the portrait to Albert on his birthday – 26 August 1854 – and it now sits in the Royal Collection, alongside the individual studies of John that Haag worked from.44 So as Victoria and Albert settled into their marriage, as their family grew and as the Hastings Affair faded from memory, John was never far from Victoria’s mind. Little could she have known what fate had in store.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘I write to you with a heavy heart’
By the 1850s, Victoria and Albert heralded in a new fashion of domestic bliss. They had become the universal symbol of marital harmony, where a woman, no matter how high or powerful she might seem to be, readily gave herself over to the experience of motherhood and wifely duties, remaining subordinate to her husband. As the first signs of the suffrage campaign to give women the vote began to burst into life, Victoria became the emblem of feminine subservience. ‘Albert grows daily fonder and fonder of politics and business,’ she had told her uncle Leopold I in 1852, ‘and is wonderfully fit for both – showing such perspicuity and such courage – and I grow daily to dislike them both more and more. We women are not made for governing: and, if we are good women, we must dislike these masculine occupations!’1
Perhaps, if we were to empathise, it is not so hard to understand why she might feel this way. Victoria, the child of abuse at the hands of Sir John Conroy, fatherless, unprotected and desperate to be loved, found herself the victim of male rage on more than one occasion. In the first ten years of their marriage, she had survived six assassination attempts, which began while she was pregnant with her first child, Vicky, and often involved guns in the hands of lunatic or politically motivated men. Shots were fired as she was accompanied by her young children and, in 1850, one man gave her a black eye after attacking her with a cane.2 That Victoria wished to withdraw into the safety of her husband – the man she viewed as her protector – is not surprising. Victorian society only granted a woman security when she was the property of a man, and not even a crown could insulate Victoria from the problems of patriarchy. It is alarming, perhaps, to hear Albert’s voice behind her words, that coaching and criticism Victoria took so easily to heart, about what a ‘good’ woman should be: unpolitical, obedient, subservient – the opposite of her role as queen.
For the first seventeen years of her married life, Victoria endured a never-ending cycle of conceiving, pregnancy, weaning, toddlers, teenagers and more. It was not conducive to the reality of monarchy. Motherhood had diminished her independence, constantly removing her from the day-to-day business of state. But as their children grew, the couple’s vision of domesticity shifted. Victoria could not remain at home; her duties as monarch of an ever-growing empire required its queen to be present. New dynasties had to be forged.
Aged just 17, in 1858 Vicky, their eldest child, was to be wed to the heir to the Kingdom of Prussia. Frederick, known to his family as ‘Fritz’, was eight years older than Victoria’s gentle, sweet-natured daughter. But, continuing the family obsession with near-child brides and dynastic planning, Vicky had first been introduced to her future husband when she was just 11 years old. When she was 15, in 1855, Fritz had returned to visit the royal family at Balmoral and proposed three days after his arrival. Victoria and Albert accepted, on the agreement that the wedding would not take place for another two years. Although the age of consent in Victorian Britain at this time was just 13, with modern sensibilities, Victoria and Albert followed the growing universal feeling that such an age was much too young for the realities of married life.3 This was their first experience at securing the future of the monarchy, connecting the royal houses of Europe by blood to ensure peace and to protect against any new social or political revolution. They had, however, ignored one crucial factor.
The Crimean War had begun in 1853, as Russia, now ruled by Alexander Nikolayevich, Victoria’s former paramour, increased its territory and took on the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Arguments over the control of Palestine had previously brought France into the conflict, while England found itself drawn into the fight in an attempt to thwart Russian influence and halt imperial expansion. The war, which raged across the Crimean peninsula and beyond until 1856, left a brutal mark on the British consciousness, as newspaper reporters brought back stories of the horror and atrocities, and women such as Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale set out for the frontlines to nurse the wounded. Victoria had thrown herself passionately into supporting her soldiers, visiting military hospitals and personally awarding the Victoria Cross to all those who had committed an act of valour on the battlefield in her name. ‘My whole soul and heart are in the Crimea,’ Victoria wrote to Leopold I. ‘The conduct of our dear noble Troops is beyond praise; it is quite heroic, and really I feel a pride to have such Troops, which is only equalled now by my grief for their sufferings … to think of the number of families who are living in such anxiety! It is terrible to think of all the wretched wives and mothers who are awaiting the fate of those nearest and dearest to them!’4
Unfortunately for Fritz, Prussia had neglected to get involved in the Crimean War, and so when his engagement was announced to the British public, it was met with anger. Cowardice – as they saw it – was simply not the British way. But Victoria, undeterred, continued with the engagement. Vicky was duly married on 25 January 1858, two months after her seventeenth birthday. She was then packed off to Prussia to make her home in Berlin with Fritz. For Victoria and Albert, the symmetry of their eldest daughter’s marriage to their own would have made its complications and uniqueness all the more obvious. Vicky was playing the traditional role; she was a royal brood mare, traded across geographical and family lines to form alliances and further dynasties. This was the sole task asked of royal women. But, for her parents, it was Albert who had been traded. His position, his life and his entire world was shaped to be second to Victoria. He hadn’t even been granted the title of ‘Prince Consort’ until 1857 and had endured multiple humiliations at the hands of ministers and foreign aristocrats who regarded his position as nothing more than that of a minor member of an elite German family. He had grown to hate the English aristocracy, the press and the political parties, and had responded to his own feelings of alienation by spending much of his early married life making sure Victoria came to depend on him for everything. Advising his brother, Ernest, on the bonds of matrimony, he wrote: ‘The heavier and tighter they are, the better … a married couple must be chained to one another, be inseparable, and they must live only for one another.’5
