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.