Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ who came into a room and, mistaking a fat woman for a stove, turned his back on her with his coat tails turned up. He also enjoyed catching people out on April Fool’s Day and perpetrating practical jokes such as that which he and his brother played upon the inhabitants of a small German town through which they drove. Prince Albert held up the head of his dog at the window, while he and Prince Ernest crouched down in the bottom of the carriage out of sight of the people who had gathered to see them pass by.^*6

      With the example of his parents and his brother – who was twice to contract a venereal disease – ever before his eyes, he had a horror of sexual irregularities. He was also subject to an occasional nervous irritability and a tendency to express opinions, in the words of his brother, ‘which are wont to arise from contempt of mankind in the abstract’.

      What concerned Stockmar as much as anything else in Prince Albert’s character was his awkward manner with women, a gaucherie which the Baron attributed principally to his ‘having in his earliest years been deprived of the intercourse and supervision of a mother, and of any cultivated woman. He will always have more success with men than with women. He is too little empressé with the latter, too indifferent and too reserved.’⁷

      When he had first arrived in England aged sixteen with his brother, Ernest, in May 1836, Prince Albert had been an undeniably handsome and prepossessing boy. His constitution was, however, not well adapted to the bustle and festivities, the dinners and balls, the concerts and levees which he was expected to attend. He was not accustomed to late nights: one evening he had felt compelled to go to bed at what the lively Princess Victoria considered an absurdly early hour; the next evening at a ball attended by over 3,000 guests to celebrate the Princess’s seventeenth birthday, after having danced only twice, the Prince had turned ‘as pale as ashes’ and looked as though he were going to faint. He had been obliged to take to his bed for two days. ‘I am sorry to say,’ the Princess had reported to her uncle Leopold the next day, ‘that we have an invalid in the house in the person of Albert.’⁸ Frequently in the future she was to refer in her journal to Prince Albert’s ‘delicate stomach’. Unlike the Queen, he had not been able to build up natural resistance to infections consequent upon the appallingly insanitary conditions which he encountered in England, having become used in his childhood and early manhood to the far more hygienic conditions of his native land.⁹

      The ceaseless round of entertainments in England, so he had complained to his stepmother, were all too much for him: one concert had lasted until one o’clock in the morning, another had gone on until two. However, in letters to her uncle and his wife, Princess Victoria had assured them that she found Albert and his brother most agreeable, though it had to be said that Albert was rather fat:

      They are both very amiable, kind and good. Albert is very handsome which Ernest is not, but he has a most good-natured countenance…I thank you, my beloved Uncle, for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me in the person of dear Albert. Allow me, then, my dearest Uncle, to tell you how delighted I am with him, and how much I liked him in every way. He possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy. He is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable too. He has, besides, the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you could possibly see.¹⁰

      ‘The charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful,’ she had written in her diary, ‘full of goodness and sweetness and very clever and intelligent.’

      Prince Albert had been less enthusiastic. ‘Dear Aunt [the Duchess of Kent] is very kind to us, and does everything she can to please us,’ he had added in his letter to his stepmother, ‘and our cousin is also very amiable.’¹¹ That was all. He had later expressed certain reservations about his cousin: they shared a love of music, but did they have much else in common? He was told she was ‘incredibly stubborn’, that she delighted in ‘ceremonies, etiquette’ and the ‘trivial formalities’ of court life, that she did not share his love of nature, that her pleasure in balls that went on all night was not in the least abated and that after these balls she liked to lie late in bed. Besides, he feared that he would be dreadfully homesick in England.

      Princess Victoria herself, much as she had liked Prince Albert upon this brief acquaintance, had not wanted to marry so soon, not until 1840 and perhaps not even then; and she had grown rather annoyed with King Leopold for pressing the marriage upon her. She was ‘not yet quite grown up’; and Prince Albert was still a boy really: she would not want him as a husband until he was at least twenty years old. Besides, he ‘ought to be perfect in the English language; ought to write and speak it without fault, which is far from being the case now: his French too is…unfortunately…not good enough yet in my opinion.’ She had also been concerned by his habit of falling asleep after dinner. Had Lord Melbourne been told about that? Lord Melbourne, who disapproved of the Queen’s passion for dancing into the small hours of the morning, had merely replied that he was very glad to hear it.

      After Prince Albert had gone home and she herself had become Queen, there was another reason for her not wanting to be married just yet. Once the Flora Hastings affair was in the past and she had contrived to retain Lord Melbourne as Prime Minister, she was much enjoying herself as a young, unattached queen. On her twentieth birthday the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, the 21-year-old son and heir of the Tsar Nicholas I, came to Windsor where a grand dinner in St George’s Hall was followed by a ball which did not finish until nearly two o’clock in the morning. ‘I never enjoyed myself more,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘We were all so merry’; and the Grand Duke was ‘a dear, delightful man’. She had loved dancing the mazurka with him: he was ‘so very strong, that in running round you must follow quickly, and after that you are whisked round like in a Valse, which is very pleasant…I really am quite in love with him…He is so frank, so really young and merry, has such a nice open countenance with a sweet smile and such a manly figure.’ After the Grand Duke, no one else was ‘seen to advantage’. When she went to bed on the night of that exciting ball she could not get to sleep until five o’clock.¹²

      From time to time she and Melbourne discussed the question of her marriage and one day they considered all those of royal blood who might be considered as a husband for her. There was not one whom they thought suitable. Yet she did not think she ought to marry a commoner: it would not do, she thought, to make a subject one’s equal. There were, however, those who thought she might, even so, consider marriage to her equerry, Lord Alfred Paget, son of the cavalry commander, the Marquess of Anglesey, one of the most handsome young men at Court who wore her portrait on a chain round his neck, tied another portrait of her round the neck of his retriever, Mrs Bumps, and who took pains to ingratiate himself with Baroness Lehzen, calling her ‘mother’ as the Queen did.¹³

      Lord Melbourne did not altogether approve of King Leopold’s choice of Prince Albert. ‘Cousins are not very good things,’ he said. ‘Those Coburgs are not popular abroad; the Russians hate them.’ The Duchess of Kent was a fair example of the breed. The men of the family were not so bad, the Queen objected, laughing. Melbourne, laughing too, said he hoped so. But what if the Prince were to take the side of his aunt, the Duchess, against her? In any case a marriage with a German cousin would not go down well in England. It would not go down well with himself, come to that: Germans never washed their faces and were always smoking, and he hated tobacco, the very smell of it made him swear for a good half hour. On the other hand marriage into an English family would not go down well, either, except with the particular family honoured. Indeed, if one were to create a man specifically СКАЧАТЬ