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.

A troubled childhood

Ernest had illegitimate children by previous marriages and marriage did not change his behaviour. He was unfaithful to Louise and she began to engage in initially harmless flirtations. In 1822 she met Lieutenant Alexander von Hanstein. In 1824 she wrote to her mother-in-law: ‘Don’t damn me completely… I have sacrificed everything, but don’t let me lose your friendly heart.’ On hearing of the relationship the duke demanded a separation and she was expelled from Coburg and never saw her children again. Ernest was six and Albert was five. Eighteen months later they were divorced. In 1832 Ernest married his niece.

Louise neither admitted nor denied the charge of adultery but on 31 March 1826 she married Hanstein. She began to suffer from gynaecological problems and on 6 March 1831 while watching Marie Taglioni at the Opera in Paris, she haemorrhaged and was carried unconscious from the theatre. She was suffering from uterine cancer. She died on 13 December 1832. Fourteen years later, after their father’s death, Ernest and Albert flouted his will and had her body removed to the ducal tomb in the church of St Moritz in Coburg.  In 1859 her body was removed to the ducal museum. 

Education

After his mother’s departure, Albert became quite and subdued, prone to fits of weeping. His sufferings were eased over time by the attentions of his tutor, Christoff Florschütz. He and Ernest became very close. The two boys were watched over by their uncle Leopold and his secretary and former physician, Baron Christian Friedrich Stockmar. 

Albert was a studious boy. He studied the traditional German curriculum of history, philosophy, Latin and games, and began to learn English and French. However, he did not have his brother’s robust constitution. As an adult he needed a great deal of sleep and disliked social occasions and late nights.

To marry a queen

From at least 1836 Leopold, now king of the Belgians was planning a marriage for him with the young Princess Victoria, his niece and Albert’s cousin. Without this marriage, Albert’s prospects were bleak. He was a younger son without possessions and the only other option for him was a military career. Yet Leopold had also been a younger son without an income and he had married Princess Charlotte. Would history repeat itself? In 1836 he took Ernest and Albert to England and on 18 May the princess met them for the first time. Victoria was favourably impressed but did not commit herself. You can read her comments in her journal, which is now online.

In the academic year 1836-7 Ernest and Albert studied at the university of Bonn.  On hearing of the death of William IV and the accession of Victoria, Albert did not wish to compromise himself and went on a European tour with Ernest and Florschütz. Meanwhile, Victoria was coming to see marriage as her only option. As a young and inexperienced queen, she felt she needed guidance, and there was also the imperative to produce an heir and prevent the succession of her uncle Ernest, now king of Hanover.

On 10 October 1839 Ernest and Albert arrived at Windsor. Victorian was now bowled over by Albert and wrote to Leopold ‘Albert's beauty is most striking, and he is so amiable and unaffected—in short, very fascinating; he is excessively admired here.’ On 14 October she proposed to him.

However, problems emerged from the start. Looking back on his marriage to Princess Charlotte, King Leopold of the Belgians wrote in 1839: 

‘The position of a husband of a Queen, who reigns in her own right, is a position of the greatest difficulty for any person and at any time.’ Quoted Rhodes James, p. 94.

Queen Victoria’s engagement brought into the open the problems of defining the status of the consort of a reigning queen. The only precedents were not happy ones: Philip of Spain, the husband of Mary I, had been deeply unpopular, and George of Denmark, Queen Anne’s husband, had been a nonentity.

The public announcement of the engagement was greeted with enthusiasm in Coburg and Gotha, but not in Britain. The queen had reluctantly accepted the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne’s advice that her husband should not receive the title of King Consort, which she had proposed, and she was surprised and hurt at the public criticisms of her choice. He had several negatives: he was German, he was Victoria’s first cousin and the nephew of the unpopular duchess of Kent, and he was poor, unknown and unimportant. The opposition Tories put about the rumour that he was a Radical, and many believed that he was a Roman Catholic. On the other hand, it was widely accepted that the queen must marry, if only to exclude her unpopular uncle, King Ernest of Hanover from the succession.

Albert in 1840, the year of his marriage
by John Partridge
Royal Collection
Public domain

Albert arrived in England in February 1840. He was naturalized on 8 February and married on the 10th. At her insistence, Victoria promised to obey. But this must have seemed an ironical promise to Albert. Would he really have the upper hand in their relationship? And would he ever be accepted in his adopted country?