Censoring Queen Victoria (14 page)

It seems that these politicians saw no reason to question the ambitions of a male consort to a sovereign; it was only natural that Albert should seek to exercise more power.
The response had been very different when Queen Adelaide
, consort of Victoria's uncle, King William IV, was thought to have influenced the King during the reform agitation. On one occasion, her carriage was assailed by an angry mob. When the government resigned in 1834,
The Times
declared, ‘The Queen has done it all'; the headline was placarded all over London. It was not all plain sailing for Albert. In 1854 he was
(falsely) accused of political meddling
and declared a traitor by the broadsheets; he was even rumoured to have been sent to the Tower of London. Nevertheless, the double standard persisted into the 1900s, and Benson and Esher saw nothing unusual in Albert's desire to expand his role.

Nor did Benson and Esher seek to downplay Albert's influence, as they had done with King Leopold. Albert was more foreign than Leopold, but as the Queen's husband and, to a lesser extent, as father of the heir, his growing power was perfectly acceptable. The part Victoria's pregnancies played in his ascension got no mention. Victoria did come to acknowledge how competent Albert was and increasingly deferred to his judgment. Their marriage remained a partnership, albeit one very different from the conventional Victorian vision of marriage, and one requiring more complex negotiation than the published letters would suggest.

B
ENSON FOUND WOMEN'S LETTERS
to be ‘very tiresome'. Consequently very few of the thousands of letters Victoria exchanged with her female relations and friends were included. She corresponded with many women, including: her half-sister, Princess Feodore of Hohenlohe-Langenburg; her aunt Louise, Queen of the Belgians, wife of Leopold and daughter of King Louis-Philippe of France; her cousin Victoire, Duchess of Nemours and sister of Ferdinand; her sister-in-law Alexandrine, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg from 1842; and Dona Maria, Queen of Portugal.

The small number of women's letters in the published volumes cannot be attributed to the editors' ignorance of their existence. As early as March 1904,
Benson described a set of letters from Princess Feodore
as ‘simple family letters, full of detail, such as the Queen loved. But the writing is troublesome … They would be interesting enough just to skim through if they were printed.' Feodore's handwriting is far easier to decipher than Lord Melbourne's, and Benson was more than willing to struggle with Melbourne's hieroglyphics. Excerpts from four of Feodore's letters were published, but there survive hundreds more, written weekly over a
forty-four year period, in the Royal Archives at Windsor and at the Hohenlohe-Zentral Archive in Germany. Surely such a long friendship would have revealed a unique side of Victoria's nature, especially given the intimacies of sisterhood and the particular circumstances of these two women? Feodore was married to an elderly, impoverished duke and struggled to raise her children in loneliness and isolation in Germany, far away from her mother, who remained in England, while Victoria became Queen, married and had a large number of children.

Another entry in Benson's diary confirms that women's letters were available: ‘finished the last vol. of documents – the letters of Q. Louise [of the Belgians] up to the end of 1841 …' Esher and Knollys discussed the whereabouts of Victoria's correspondence with Alexandrine in 1905. Esher also knew about the letters from Feodore and Queen Adelaide to Victoria's official governess, the Duchess of Northumberland, concerning Victoria's welfare under the Kensington System. These were drawn to the editors' attention very late in the editing. Even if they had been found earlier, however, it is unlikely that they would have been included, given their subject matter.

The Queen of Portugal's monthly letters to Victoria, written in a very idiosyncratic French with little or no punctuation, are held in the Royal Archives, Windsor. Benson and Esher included one letter from Maria, congratulating Victoria on her engagement, but Maria wrote many more over the following thirteen years. Only six of Victoria's replies have been found to date in Lisbon and discovering more is unlikely – as Maria confessed to Victoria, ‘I have the rather bad habit of tearing up letters after I have replied to them.'

Victoria and Maria met in person on only two occasions, both times in London as children. Maria, just seven weeks older
than Victoria, came to the Portuguese throne as a fifteen-year-old in politically tumultuous times. By the time she married Prince Ferdinand (Victoria's cousin), when she was seventeen, she had already been betrothed to her uncle and then married to her stepmother's brother, who died two months after their wedding. After negotiations between the various chancelleries of Europe, a marriage contract was signed in Coburg with Baron Stockmar as one of the signatories. Maria married Ferdinand first by proxy and then in person in Lisbon in 1836. Their first child was born the following year. (Bismarck was, later in the century, to characterise the
House of Saxe-Coburg as the ‘stud farm of Europe'
.)

At the start of their correspondence, the letters between Victoria and Maria were brief, and Maria mentioned Ferdinand only rarely. This may have been in deference to Victoria's still being a single girl. After Victoria's marriage, and especially after her first child was born, their letters became much more personal and familiar. Victoria was impressed by Maria's devotion, almost fealty, to Ferdinand. In a letter to Leopold before her accession in 1837, Victoria wrote of Maria, ‘One good quality, however, she has, which is her excessive fondness for, and real obedience to, Ferdinand.' After Victoria's wedding day, the more experienced Maria wrote:

I cannot stop myself from writing you two little words of felicitation on your marriage. I assure you that I have thought of you much during the 10
^th
. In truth a wedding day is a day quite solemn and quite disagreeable to pass. This always happens, even for anybody who loves such occasions a lot, but once this is over, one is entirely at one's ease. I have read in the newspapers [about] the whole
ceremony. It must have been quite beautiful, and I am certain that Albert has made a great impression and that he was much praised. Also I have much admired your enormous composure throughout the ceremony. I assure you that I was much more embarrassed than you. I hope that God will grant my wishes and you will be the happiest of women. I also hope that soon, too, you will give me little
cousins
whom I shall love with all my heart.

In 1905, no published letters by a woman would have included references to pregnancy or personal health, so it is not surprising to find that Benson and Esher omitted nearly all mention of these matters. Their belief that they could show the ‘full development of the character of the Queen' without these topics also reflected their particularly narrow understanding of female experience. They even went so far as to record the arrival of Victoria's first child in a footnote, several pages after its chronological place. This downplaying of the birth of the Prince of Wales – the first male heir to be born to a Queen regnant for hundreds of years – probably reflected specific directions from King Edward VII concerning ‘personal and private' material, particularly concerning himself.

As young queens, Victoria and Maria shared an unusual position. For them both, pregnancy, childbirth and recovery occupied much of their time during the early years of their reigns. During the twenty-one years of her marriage, Victoria gave birth to nine children, all of whom survived into adulthood. During the first five years of her marriage, Victoria was either pregnant or recovering from childbirth for all but sixteen of sixty months – that is, for nearly 75 per cent of the time (as illustrated on page 124).

These figures stated baldly hardly show the impact these pregnancies and births had on the queens' public and private lives.
Particular aspects of pregnancy and childbirth
, such as anxiety at the start of each new pregnancy, ailments such as nausea, bleeding, tiredness and changes in appetite, and the potential complications during and after birth, were not easily accommodated within a public life of levées, soirées, official visits and political crises. Rather dramatically, a major military challenge to Dona Maria's power coincided with the onset of her first labour in 1837 and remained unresolved for several weeks. In 1842, Victoria too experienced a collision of public and private:
arriving in Edinburgh in the first week of September
, she refused to take part in the customary welcoming procession through the city. The Scots were very critical. Her third child, Princess Alice, was born on 25 April 1843; calculating backwards suggests that Victoria's arrival in Edinburgh would have coincided with the symptoms of early pregnancy – probably exacerbated by the sea voyage from London – which may explain her reluctance. (She was persuaded to drive through the streets in procession several hours later to placate the waiting crowds. Perhaps the nausea had passed.)

Despite these women's privileged living conditions, rank and wealth in the nineteenth century provided no guarantee against disease and infection. The letters between these two royal mothers show their many anxieties concerning their own health and that of their children: breastfeeding and wet nurses, smallpox inoculations, weaning, teething, then education; anxiety about their husbands' health and the dangers of hunting, for example. The roles of queen, wife and mother all had their inherent dangers: these women experienced assassination attempts; epidemics of scarlet fever, cholera and typhoid;
the high incidence of tuberculosis; the deaths in childbirth of female friends and relatives. In addition, they each had to carry out their duties in public, with little allowance made for their worries or discomforts. In sharing their anxieties (as well as more frivolous gossip), Maria and Victoria exchanged support and information.

There was a delicate and poignant occasion in October 1840, just weeks before Queen Victoria's first confinement. Dona Maria had recently given birth to her third child, her first daughter, who was stillborn. Ferdinand wrote to Victoria and Albert to tell them the sad news before Maria wrote to Victoria a month later. In seeking to alleviate any alarm Victoria might have felt, Maria reverted to a more light-hearted style:

My dear Victoria

Well, for quite a long time that I have not been able to have the great pleasure of writing to you but you know the reason for that quite well from all of Ferdinand's letters. I hope that my affair will not have affected you too much, for in your state it is necessary to try and avoid this if that is possible. It hardly ever happens; but I am convinced now that you will be quite safe and that you will present us with a very beautiful and very bonny, little male Cousin …

Dona Maria was to experience the premature deaths of four babies. In all she gave birth to eleven children before she died in her thirty-fourth year following the birth of a stillborn child in 1853.

In their discussions of motherhood, the two women hid
, indeed were expected to hide, their true emotions and anxieties, both negative and positive: their fears of pain, of failure,
and of death, and their delight in parenthood. But they found ways to express, with humility and cheerfulness, their feelings, and this is particularly evident in Dona Maria's writing. Maria lifted the mask a little when she wrote to Victoria about the forthcoming confinement of Ferdinand's sister, Victoire, the Duchess of Nemours:

Victoire has written me a letter which has given us very great pleasure for she announces that she will present us a nephew or niece; she desires very much a boy, may God grant her that; she or he will be born at the same time as mine which I find very agreeable for us both; I wished that that were already over for her for I find that the first is a terrible event.

Writing about a third person, Maria could express her fears more openly than when describing her own experiences. Victoria was similarly direct when she wrote to her newly pregnant eldest daughter, Vicky, in 1858. In this correspondence she frequently raged against pregnancy and childbirth:

I think much more of our being like a cow
or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic – but for you, dear, if you are sensible and reasonable and not in ecstasy nor spending your day with nurses and wet nurses, which is the ruin of many a refined and intellectual young lady, without adding to her real maternal duties, a child will be a great resource. Above all, dear girl, do remember never to lose the modesty of a young girl towards others (without being prude); though you are married don't become a matron to whom everything can be said
and who minds saying nothing herself – I remained to a particular degree (indeed feel so now) and often feel schocked [sic] at the confidences of other married ladies. I fear abroad they are very indelicate about these things …