Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (2): uncrowned king

(I haven't referenced the quotations here as they're found in many of the biographies of Victoria and Albert and are firmly in the public domain.)

Albert in 1842 by Winterhalter
Royal Collection
Public domain

'Only the husband'

In May 1840 Albert wrote 

In my whole life I am very happy and contented; but the difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband and not the master of the house.

But his first breakthrough came in September when his heavily pregnant wife made him a member of the privy council. Soon afterwards she gave him a duplicate set of keys to her official boxes. Her nine pregnancies and her bouts of post-natal depression gave Albert the opportunity to have an ever-greater say in policy. He was soon carving out a role for himself and re-fashioning the hitherto undefined role of the consort of a reigning queen. He was also establishing his position as head of the family.

Albert takes control

Victoria and Albert had very different temperaments and this led to tensions within the marriage. In January 1842, when the Princess Royal became ill, Albert blamed his wife and the royal physician, Sir James Clark for mismanaging the nursery: ‘if she dies you will have it on your conscience’.  He also blamed Baroness Louise Lehzen, who had become Victoria’s governess after previously teaching Princess Fedora, calling her ‘a crazy, stupid intriguer, obsessed with the lust of power'.

In the same month he wrote to Stockmar, 

Victoria is too hasty and passionate… She will not hear me out but flies into a rage and overwhelms me with reproaches of …want of trust, ambition, envy etc, etc. 

But he secured his victory when Lehzen was retired with a pension in July 1842. 

This victory was to have significant implications for the couple’s marriage. It established Albert's dominance, with Victoria  happy to take a subordinate role. Had the wilful young woman become a clinging vine?

Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1)

For this and subsequent posts about Albert I have been indebted to the following (and many more!):
Robert Rhodes James: Albert, Prince Consort (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983)
Helen Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death that Changed the Monarchy (Windmill Books, 2012)
Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII (Chatto and Windus, 2012)
Stanley Weintraub, Albert: Uncrowned King (London: John Murray, 1997)
Stanley Weintraub, ‘Albert [Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha] (1819–1861)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A. N. Wilson, Victoria. A Life (Atlantic Books, 2014)

Albert with his mother, Louise, and his
elder brother, Ernest
Shortly after this was painted,
she was banished from court.
Public domain

The young prince

Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was born was born on 26 August 1819 at the ducal summer residence of the duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, the Rosenau, about four miles from Coburg. He was baptized Franz Karl August Albrecht Immanuel with water from the River Itze, which flowed through the duchy, but his name was immediately Anglicized to Albert, the only one of his given names that was ever used. 

He was the second son of Duke Ernest (1784–1844)  and his mother was Princess Louise (1800–1831) of neighbouring, but larger and richer, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. Seventeen years younger than her husband, she had married him at sixteen on 31 July 1817.

Coburg was a small duchy – Thackeray called it a ‘pumpernickel duchy - but they had made several advantageous marriages. (Bismarck was later to call the house of Coburg the stud farm of Europe!) In 1796 Ernest’s sister, Juliane, had married (unhappily) Constantine, the grandson of Catherine the Great. In 1816 his brother Leopold had married Princess Charlotte of Wales, though he had been left widowed by her death the following year. In 1819 his sister Marie Louise Victoria, known as Victoire, had married Edward, duke of Kent, and in May 1819 she had given birth to a daughter, Victoria.

Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen

For this post I am indebted to the article on Queen Adelaide in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and to Antonia Fraser, Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill (W&N, 2014).

Portrait of Queen Adelaide
by John  Simpson, 1832
Public domain

The quest for an heir

The death of Princess Charlotte in 1817 caused a crisis in the royal family. The succession was now in doubt and the royal dukes, the brothers of the Prince Regent, hastened to marry. The Regent was already married, and he and his estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick, were not going to produce any more children.  The next brother, the duke of York, was married but childless. The third son of George III, William duke of Clarence, was unmarried.

In 1791 he had begun to live with the actress Dora (Dorothy, Dorothea) Jordan, and between 1794 and 1807 she bore him five sons and five daughters while continuing to act. But in 1810 their relationship cooled. At the end of that year George III descended into his final illness, and Clarence moved nearer to the throne.  In December 1811 the couple formally separated, and she died in France in 1816. Clarence continued to live at their home, Bushy House, Teddington. 

The choice of a wife

Meanwhile, he was looking for a rich wife, although it was only after Charlotte’s death that he settled on Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meinengen, who had been recommended to him by his mother.  She had been born on 13 August 1792, the eldest child of George Frederick Charles, duke of the tiny state of Saxe-Meiningen and his wife  Louisa Eleanora of Hohenloe-Langenburg. In April 1818 the government proposed that an extra £7,000 per annum should be granted to him if her married, with £3,000 per annum for his wife, but, much to Clarence's fury, his income was reduced by £1,000 after parliamentary protests. 

Caroline of Brunswick

Caroline of Brunswick (1804)
by Sir Thomas Lawrence
Public domain

The essayist William Hazlitt described the Queen Caroline affair as 

‘the only question I have ever known that excited a thorough popular feeling. It struck its roots into the heart of the nation; it took possession of every house and cottage in the Kingdom.’

Caroline Amelia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel was born on 17 May 1768, the second daughter of Duke Charles William Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, a small vassal state of Prussia in north Germany, and his wife, Princess Augusta,  the elder sister of George III.  The marriage was unhappy. Caroline’s father said,  

‘Only private persons can live happily married because they choose their mates. Royalty must make marriages of convenience, which seldom result in happiness.’ Quoted Flora Fraser, The Unruly Queen (Macmillan, 1996), p. 15.

Caroline had a restricted education, her only skill being playing the harpsichord. At the age of fifteen, she was unable to spell or punctuate. By her twenties she had a reputation as a flirt and was notorious for her unbridled, often indecent conversation. Yet her mother was desperate for her to make a good marriage into her brother’s family.

In the summer of 1794 arrangements were made for Caroline to marry her cousin, George, Prince of Wales.  There were many reasons for the marriage: 

1. There was the need for an heir – the marriage of the second son, the Duke of York was childless. 
2. Caroline was a close relative and thought to be safe. She was also the requisite Protestant princess. 
3. The prince needed to settle his debts, which were over £½ million. Parliament decreed that if he married, his income was to be raised from £60,000 to £125,000, plus £26,000 for the completion of Carlton House.

On the other hand, the Prince had a skeleton in his cupboard, his secret marriage to Maria Fitzherbert, which had taken place in December 1785. Though valid in canon law, the marriage was illegal on two counts. In marrying without his father’s permission, the Prince had violated the Royal Marriages Act of 1772; and in marrying a Roman Catholic he would have given up his right to the throne. For this reason, though an open secret, the marriage was never made public.   

Dining at Kew

There's a lot of interesting material coming online about many aspects of the life of the Hanoverians that somehow never found their way into the main textbooks. If you ever wondered what the royal family actually ate when they sat down at table, here's what we've learned so far.

Queen Charlotte: later married life

The White House at Kew, where George III became ill
(now demolished). Public domain

The royal family: stresses and strains

Historians have often described the marriage of George III and Queen Charlotte as a happy one, and certainly the king believed that he was a loving family man. In fact, he chose not to notice the unhappiness of those around him. He kept his wife isolated in the early years of their married life, he did not appear to notice the strains imposed by her many pregnancies, and from the late 1790s he imposed on her his own love of travelling continually between his three residences. He believed he loved his daughters but he forced them to live extremely restricted and frustrating lives.

The Prince of Wales

George and Charlotte were the first British monarchs since Edward III to have a family of grown-up sons. These sons were notorious for their pleasure-loving lives. However, George was anxious for them to  be useful and this meant that apart from the eldest, they all had military and naval careers.

George, Prince of Wales, was deeply frustrated that he was denied a military career. Deprived of a useful role, he gambled, lived extravagantly and incurred huge debts. Much of his money was spent on two huge architectural projects, Carlton House and the Royal Pavilion, Brighton.

Carlton House
Public domain

On 15 December 1785 the prince secretly married the widowed Catholic Maria, Fitzherbert, whom he had met the previous year. The marriage was illegal according to three acts: the Act of Settlement (1701), the Act of Union (1707), both of which excluded a prince or princess married to a Catholic from succeeding to the throne, and to the Royal Marriages Act (1772). Though the couple initially kept separate establishments, the marriage was an open secret in London society, where they were constantly seen together. However the king and queen were ignorant of it.

Maria Fitzherbert (1756-1837), 
by Sir JoshuaReynolds. 
Public domain

The prince further embarrassed his parents by his open support of the parliamentary Opposition. While the king supported William Pitt the Younger, whom he had appointed prime minister at the end of 1783, the prince supported the Whig leader, Charles James Fox. George III detested Fox, not merely because of his radical politics, but because he believed that he had led his son into bad ways. Fox returned the dislike and hoped that the king would soon die. The prince would then become king and make Fox his prime minister. 

Hair powder

Anyone who would like to know more about hair powder in the Georgian period should enjoy reading this post.