Queen Victoria: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ Lord Melbourne came up to congratulate her. ‘Nothing could have gone off better,’ he assured her. She pressed his hand and ‘he said, “God bless you, Ma’am” most kindly, and with such a kind look’.⁸ He, too, had done well, carrying the Sword of State with far more ease and confidence than he had shown at the coronation and wearing a magnificent dress coat which, to the Queen’s delighted amusement, he had claimed would be the ‘Thing most observed’ at the marriage ceremony.

      During the half hour which the Queen and Prince spent alone together before the wedding breakfast, the Queen gave her husband a wedding ring; and he said there must never be a secret which they did not share. After the breakfast, so the Queen recorded, ‘Dearest Albert came up and fetched me downstairs, where we took leave of Mamma and drove off at near 4, Albert and I alone which was SO delightful’.⁹

      Upon leaving the Palace for Windsor She and her young Husband were pretty well received [Charles Greville reported], but they went off in a very poor and shabby style. Instead of the new chariot in which most married people are accustomed to dash along, they were in one of the old travelling coaches, the postillions in undressed liveries, and with a small escort, three other coaches with post horses following. The crowds on the roads were so great that they did not reach the Castle till 8 o’clock.¹⁰

      ‘Our reception was most enthusiastic and hearty and gratifying in every way,’ the Queen confirmed. ‘There was an immense crowd of people outside the Palace, and which I must say never ceased until we reached Windsor Castle…the people quite deafening us; and horsemen and gigs etc. driving along with us. We came through Eton where all the Boys…cheered and shouted. Really I was quite touched.’¹¹

      On arrival at Windsor she inspected the apartments which had been prepared for them, changed her dress, then went into the Prince’s room where she found him playing the piano and wearing the Windsor uniform with which, as a clothes-conscious man, he had replaced the travelling outfit he had worn in the coach, this in turn having replaced the field-marshal’s uniform. He stood up, put his arms around her and was ‘so dear and kind’.

      We had our dinner in our sitting room [the Queen recorded], but I had such a sick headache that I could eat nothing, and was obliged to lie down in the middle blue room for the remainder of the evening on the sofa; but ill or not, I NEVER, NEVER spent such an evening!! 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 – really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband!…to 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! – May God help me to do my duty as I ought and be worthy of such blessings!¹²

      It was also bliss beyond belief to wake up next morning, after having, so she said, not slept very much, and to find that ‘beautiful angelic face’ by her side. ‘It was,’ she wrote, ‘more than I can express.’ ‘He does look so beautiful in his shirt only, with his beautiful throat seen.’¹³ It was bliss also to have him with her at breakfast and to gaze again upon his naked throat, exposed above the black velvet collar of his jacket, to walk with him arm in arm upon the Terrace where her grandfather King George III had paraded with Queen Charlotte and their several daughters, to write letters in her sitting room while he, exhausted and still suffering from the effects of his dreadful seasickness, dozed on a sofa, then rested his ‘darling head’ on her shoulder. It was delightful, too, to watch him shave in the morning and to have him put on her stockings for her.¹⁴

      On that first day of her honeymoon she wrote to Lord Melbourne to assure him how ‘very very happy’ she was; she ‘never thought she could be so loved’ as she was by ‘dearest, dear Albert’. And she told King Leopold that she was ‘the happiest, happiest Being that ever existed’. Really she did ‘not think it possible for anyone in the world to be happier’. Her husband was ‘an Angel’.¹⁵

      The Prince grew more and more tired as the days of the short honeymoon progressed; for, as Melbourne commented, it was quite ‘a whirl’. The first evening was the only one they spent alone. On Tuesday there was a dinner party for ten. The Queen thought it a ‘very delightful, merry, nice little party’; but the Prince was obviously still exhausted. The next evening she ‘collected an immense party…for a dance which she chose to have at the Castle’. This is ‘a proceeding quite unparalleled,’ Charles Greville wrote in high disapproval. ‘Even her best friends are shocked at her not conforming more than she is doing to English customs, and not continuing for a short time in that retirement, which modesty and native delicacy generally prescribe and which few Englishwomen would be content to avoid. But She does not think any such constraint necessary…Lady Palmerston said to me last night that she was much vexed that She had nobody about her who could venture to tell her that this [ball on Wednesday] was not becoming and would appear indelicate. But She has nobody who dares tell her, or She will not endure to hear such truths. [Lord] Normanby [the Home Secretary] said to me the same thing. It is a pity Melbourne did not tell her…He probably did not think about it.’¹⁶

      Prince Albert had, in fact, already suggested before their marriage that ‘it might perhaps be a good and delicate action not to depart’ from what he had been told was the ‘usual custom in England for married people to stay up to four to six weeks from the town and society’. Since this was so, he ventured diffidently, might they not retire from the public eye for ‘at least a fortnight – or a week’?

      The Queen had replied to this suggestion as sharply as she had done when the Prince had proposed being allowed to choose his own household:

      My dear Albert, [she had written] you have not at all understood the matter. You forget, my dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing. Parliament is sitting and something occurs almost every day for which I am required and it is quite impossible for me to be absent from London; therefore two or three days is already a long time to be absent…I must come out after the second day…I cannot keep alone. This is also my wish in every way.¹⁷

      While refusing to prolong the honeymoon, the Queen was determined to make the most of the three days she had allocated to it. On the Wednesday evening she stayed up dancing until after midnight when she went upstairs to find her husband fast asleep. She woke him up and they went to bed. On Thursday there was another dance at which she bounced around the floor with Prince Albert in a lively, graceful galop.

      Late nights did not preclude early rising. On the morning after their first night together it was ‘much remarked’, so Greville said, ‘that she and P A were up very early walking about [in fact, they were up at half past eight, and did not go out until the early afternoon] which is very contrary to her former habits. Strange that a wedding night should be so short; and I told Lady Palmerston that this was not the way to provide us with a Prince of Wales.’¹⁸

      The days, even so, the ‘very, very happy days’, were too short for the Queen. Prince Albert’s ‘love and gentleness’ were ‘beyond everything’: to ‘kiss that dear soft cheek, to press [her] lips to his’ was ‘heavenly bliss’. On СКАЧАТЬ