Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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      The more she thought about it the more she found the whole subject ‘an odious one’. She really ‘couldn’t understand the wish of getting married’ merely for the sake of it. She ‘dreaded the thought of marrying’. She was so accustomed to getting her own way that she ‘thought it was 10 to 1 she wouldn’t agree with anyone’. When she spoke, as she often did, of her unhappy relationship with her mother, who made it plain that she would never leave her daughter until she was married, Lord Melbourne had commented, ‘Well, then, there’s that way of settling it.’ To this solution of her troubles with her mother she strongly objected: she thought the idea of marrying for that reason a quite ‘shocking alternative’. Yet she was tired of living with people so much older than herself. When her young relations came to stay she realized how much she liked living with young people, for after all she was young herself, which she ‘really often forgot’.

      In September some other young Coburg cousins came to stay, her uncle Ferdinand’s sons Augustus and Leopold, their sister Victoire, and yet another cousin, Alexander Mensdorff-Pouilly, son of Princess Sophia of Saxe-Coburg. Queen Victoria enjoyed their company immensely, their family jokes and high spirits, Victoire’s carefree gaiety, Alexander’s striking looks and pretty hair, his endearing habit of shaking hands at every fresh meeting. ‘We were so intimate, so united, so happy,’ she wrote after they had gone and she had been to Woolwich to wish them a tearful farewell aboard the Lightning before clambering down the ship’s ladder and calling out to an officer who offered his assistance, ‘No help, thank you. I am used to this.’¹⁵

      Before having her young cousins, Albert and Ernest, to stay again, however, she thought it as well to make it quite clear that the visit must not be seen as compromising her in any way. Albert must understand that ‘there was no engagement between us’. She had never made any definite promise to marry him and would not do so now. She might like him as a friend and a relation but no more than that; and even if she did come to like him more than that, so she told her uncle Leopold, she ‘could make no final promise this year for, at the very earliest, any such event could not take place till two or three years hence’.¹⁶

      Disturbed that Prince Albert might be put off by this apparent reluctance on the Queen of England’s part, King Leopold had already asked his nephew to come to see him in Brussels. The Prince was reassuring: he was prepared to wait on the understanding that the marriage would take place in the end. ‘I am ready,’ he said, so the King reported to Baron Stockmar, ‘to submit to this delay if I have some certain assurance to go on. But if after waiting, perhaps for three years, I should find the Queen no longer desired the marriage, it would place me in a very ridiculous position and would to a certain extent ruin all the prospects of my future life.’¹⁷

      The King was reassuring in turn. All would turn out well when Prince Albert made his next visit to England.

      This visit took place in October 1839. In anticipation of it the Queen was on edge, snappy with her servants and disinclined to concentrate on her paperwork. When she was told that her cousins were not able to leave quite as early as they had hoped, she wrote a sharp letter to King Leopold: ‘I think they don’t exhibit much empressement to come here, which rather shocks me.’¹⁸ She was also unusually sharp and impatient with Lord Melbourne who was more than ever liable to fall asleep after dinner and during the sermon in church on Sundays, snoring loudly. She wondered how he could do so before so many people. When he drank wine in an effort to stay awake, she told him it would make him ill. She was annoyed with him, too, for not telling her about some changes in the Home Office – she was ‘the last person’ to be told about what was done in her name – and for pressing her, as King Leopold had done, to invite some Tories to meet them when Albert and his brother came. She abruptly marched out of the room; and when she returned she looked more cross than ever. A fortnight or so before her cousins were due to arrive she was again ‘sadly cross to Lord Melbourne when he came in, which was shameful’. ‘I fear he felt it,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘for he did not sit down of himself as he usually does, but waited until I told him to do so.’ ‘I can’t think what possessed me’, she continued, ‘for I love this dear excellent man who is kindness & forbearance itself, most dearly.’¹⁹

      A young person like her, who ‘hated a Sunday face’, ‘must sometimes have young people to laugh with’. She had missed that sadly in the lonely days at Kensington when she had longed ‘for some gaiety’, some ‘mirth’, and when she had looked admiringly at handsome young men at parties and had made lists of the prettiest girls in the room. ‘Nothing so natural’, commented Lord Melbourne with apparent unconcern yet with tears in his eyes.²⁰