Book Two: Constitution Hill Part One: The Wedding Characters
Chapter One
Queen's Weather
Prince Albert. London, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Monday, 10 February 1840.
His formal constitutional position was undefined: a consort had no office and no settled role, and Albert's authority, such as it was, rested on the Queen's confidence rather than on any law. The pairing of a serious young queen and an earnest, capable consort was widely felt to promise a particular kind of monarchy, domestic, dutiful, and morally weighty, and American ministers, newspapers, and churchgoers were only beginning to understand what such a monarchy might become when it was ended.
It was raining when he woke, and it was still raining at nine, when her note came along the corridor from her rooms to his.
What weather! she had written. I believe, however, the rain will cease.
He read it twice, standing at the window in his dressing-gown. The rain ran down the glass, and beyond the garden wall the Green Park had gone grey in the fog, so that its trees stood up out of it like men who had been told to wait and not told for how long. It was very like her. She believed that things would cease when she wished them to, because for nearly three years they had; and he had known her as his betrothed for a little under four months, and been under the same roof with her for five weeks of them, which was long enough to suspect that she was generally right and not nearly long enough to know what he was to do about it.
He put the note in the pocket of his dressing-gown and rang for his man.
He was to be married in the uniform of a British field marshal, which he had been since Saturday. It had been made in London to measurements sent from Gotha, and it fitted, which surprised him, since nothing else in England did. His man helped him into it and stood back, and Albert looked at himself in the long glass with what his brother called his professor’s face: the scarlet and the gold; the collar of the Garter, with the George hanging from it set in stones; the star in diamonds that she had given him yesterday after church; and below the left knee the garter itself, in diamonds too, in place of the plain one that had been buckled round it at Gotha eighteen days ago, in the throne-room, to a hundred and one guns.
He had been a great many things for a very short time. He had been a Knight of the Garter since the winter, and a Royal Highness since Thursday, by Order in Council. He had been an Englishman since five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, when the Lord Chancellor had come to a room downstairs before dinner and administered the oaths, by authority of an Act of Parliament that had received the royal assent the day before, while he was being cheered through the rain at Canterbury. He had been a field marshal since the same Saturday, though he had never commanded anything larger than his own horse, and that not always. He found that he did not mind any of it as much as he had expected to. They were forms. He understood forms. He had been brought up at a small court with a great many forms, and he knew that a form was only a way of agreeing in advance about something, so that nobody need be surprised.
What he minded was the other thing.
He had left Gotha on the last Tuesday in January in a hard frost, with snow on the ground and a north-east wind that came through the leather of the carriage as if the leather were not there. His grandmother had come to the window as the carriages went out, and thrown out her arms, and called after him down the street, Albert, Albert, until they carried her away from the window half fainting; she was very deaf, and he thought she had not known how loud she was calling. At the frontier there had been an arch of fir branches over the road and a row of girls in white muslin singing a hymn in the cold, with their breath going up, and he had got down and thanked them, and got in again. Then Cassel, and Arnsberg, and the Rhine crossed by boat at Deutz in pouring rain; and at Aix-la-Chapelle, at an inn whose name he never afterwards remembered, the letters from London.
The House of Commons had voted him thirty thousand pounds a year. Every consort of a Queen before him had had fifty. The ministers had asked for fifty, and a Radical had moved twenty-one, which nobody took seriously, and then a Colonel Sibthorp, of whom Albert had never heard, had moved thirty, and Sir Robert Peel and the Tories had gone into the lobby with the Radicals to show the Queen what they thought of her ministers, and of her; and thirty had been carried by a hundred and four votes.
He had minded it. He had been surprised how much. He did not care about the money: he had never had any, and did not expect to know what to do with it now. It was the thing itself, done in public, to him, by people who had never seen him, in order to strike at somebody else. His uncle Leopold, at Brussels, had been angrier than he had, and had written to her, as Albert learnt afterwards, that the young man did not care about the money but was much shocked and exasperated by the disrespect of the thing; and Albert had been grateful to his uncle for putting it so, since he could not have put it himself without sounding like a man who cared about the money.
Then the Lords. There had been a clause in the bill that was to make him an Englishman, letting the Queen give him a place next after her own, in Parliament and everywhere else. The Lords had argued about it for a week, and a week ago today they had struck it out altogether, and made him a plain naturalised foreigner with no place at all. The Duke of Wellington had done it, Stockmar said, and had been perfectly civil throughout. But it was the King of Hanover, the Queen’s uncle, who had refused his consent before the clause was ever debated, and who had let it be known why. The precedence of royal houses had been fixed at the Congress of Vienna, the King of Hanover said; and the King of Hanover did not give way to a paper Royal Highness.
Albert had laughed at that, when Stockmar told him, because it was so exactly what he had been told about the King of Hanover all his life. Then he had stopped laughing, because it was true. He had been a Royal Highness for four days, and he had the paper.
And there had been the other thing, which he had not laughed at at all. At Brussels his uncle had shown him the report of the Lords’ debate in the London paper, and in the middle of it a long sentence of Lord Brougham’s, who had been Lord Chancellor once and could not stop being clever about it. Suppose (which God forbid!), Lord Brougham had said, that the Queen had paid the debt of nature before any issue of the approaching marriage was born, we should have a King and a Prince of Wales, while Prince Albert would be placed in the anomalous position of a foreign naturalized Prince, the husband of a deceased Queen, with a higher rank than the Prince of Wales.
Albert had read it twice, slowly, as he read anything in English that he meant to understand. He had understood it perfectly well. The King in Lord Brougham’s sentence was the King of Hanover, and the Prince of Wales was the King of Hanover’s son George, who was blind, and who had been born in the same week as the Queen and the same year as Albert, so that the three of them were all of an age within three months; and the sentence had been framed to keep Albert below the Queen’s blind cousin in a procession that was never going to take place. It was a lawyer’s case. He had given the paper back to his uncle, and his uncle had said that Lord Brougham was a man who liked to hear himself suppose things, and they had talked of something else.
His father came in at eleven, in a dark green uniform faced with red, and boots like a Life Guardsman’s, and looked at him in the glass, and said that he looked very well, and that his mother would have been proud of him. His mother had been dead eight years, and had not been allowed to see either of her sons after she was sent away from Coburg, when Albert was five; and his father said it in the voice he kept for such things, which was a very good voice, warm and a little thick, and quite sincere for as long as it lasted. Albert thanked him.
His brother Ernest came in behind their father, in light blue and silver, with his helmet under his arm. Ernest was a year older than he was, and they had been brought up together as if they were twins, in the same rooms, by the same tutor, and Albert had never in his life wanted to leave a room that Ernest was in. Ernest was thin, and pale, and hollow under the cheekbones, and had been ill in the autumn in a way the brothers did not discuss. He looked at Albert for a long moment, in the field marshal’s coat with the diamonds on it, and did not say anything at all; and it was the kindest thing that anybody said to him that day.
Eos lay by the fire with her nose on her white foot and watched the three of them. She was black all over except for the foot and a streak down her nose, and she had been sent on ahead of him, so that she was at the Palace the evening before he was, and the Queen had made a great deal of her. Albert had thought, coming up the stairs on Saturday and seeing the dog at the top of them, that it was a strange thing to be welcomed into your own house by your own dog, and that it was very like the Queen to have arranged it.
They went down at a little before twelve.
The carriage windows were shut against the rain. There was a squadron of the Life Guards before and behind, in their cloaks, with the water running off their helmets, and the horses went at a walk down the Mall between two walls of people who had been standing in St James’s Park since nine. They stood on chairs and tables that had been let to them at a shilling and sixpence and upwards, and on carts, and on the railings, and in the trees: a branch went somewhere behind the carriage with a crack like a pistol, and there were screams, and then laughter, and the procession did not stop. They did not cheer much. Albert did not blame them. They had come to see the Queen, and what they were being shown was a closed carriage with a foreigner in it, and they could not see in.
The Chapel Royal was small, and hot, and full, and smelled of wet wool and candles. He went up it between his father and his brother with his prayer book in his right hand, and waited at the rail with his back to everybody, as he had been told to, and looked at the gold plate on the altar and listened to the organ. Sir George Smart was playing. It was a smaller instrument than Albert would have liked, and Sir George was playing it rather well, rather too loud, as the English played everything; and Albert stood and listened, and thought about the stops, because it was something to think about.
He knew without turning who was there. Queen Adelaide, the old King’s widow, in purple velvet and ermine, kind and plain and coughing. The Duchess of Kent, his aunt, the Queen’s mother, who was not on speaking terms with her daughter about half the time and was trying very hard today. The Cambridges, all of them. The two old princesses, George the Third’s daughter and George the Third’s niece, who were the last of something and knew it. Melbourne, the Prime Minister, who would come up the chapel before the Queen carrying the Sword of State, and about whom Albert had not yet made up his mind. And the Duke of Sussex, who was to give her away, in the black silk skull-cap he wore everywhere and would have to take off in church. There was no King of Hanover. Nobody had expected one.
Then the trumpets, and the chapel stood up, and she came.
He turned. He had not been told to, but he did. She came up the chapel very slowly, because there were twelve girls in white carrying her train and none of them wished to be the one who trod on it; and she was very small, and very pale, paler than he had ever seen her, and quite composed. She was in white satin, with orange blossom in a wreath on her hair and more of it on the dress, and a veil of lace from Honiton that came down to her shoulders and not over her face, because she had wished to see. She wore the collar of the Garter, as he did, and diamonds at her throat and in her ears; and on the white satin, where he could see it from the rail, the sapphire brooch that he had given her yesterday.
She did not look at him until she reached the rail. Then she did.
The Archbishop of Canterbury read the service, in the thin voice of a very old man who had read it a great many times and meant every word, and the Bishop of London made the responses. Albert said I will when he was asked, in English, clearly, because he had decided to say it clearly. She said I will clearly too. She promised to obey him. He had wondered whether she would, and whether anyone would think to strike it out for a Queen, as they had struck out his place; but nobody had, and she said it without the least hesitation, in the same small clear voice, and he found that he did not know what to do with it, and put it away to think about later. The Duke of Sussex, when he was asked who gave this woman, said I do with great satisfaction, and his skull-cap, Albert saw out of the corner of his eye, was back on his head before the end of the prayers.
The ring was plain gold. When he put it on her finger the guns began in the Park, and a moment afterwards, far off and muffled through the walls, at the Tower; and he heard them under the Archbishop’s voice all through the rest of it, going on and on, as if somebody were counting.
When it was over he took her hand to lead her out, and held it so that the ring showed. He did not altogether know why. It was not a thing he had decided. It was a thing a Coburg did.
They signed the register in the Throne Room, she first, as was right, and then he; and when they came out into the air the rain had dwindled to a drizzle.
By the time the procession was back at Buckingham Palace the clouds were going over in pieces, and before four o’clock the sun was out, low and gold over the wet park, shining on the puddles and the soldiers’ breastplates and the faces of the crowd, which had stayed. People were saying, he was told, that it was the Queen’s weather: that the sun had come out for her, as everything did. He thought of the note in the pocket of his dressing-gown upstairs. I believe, however, the rain will cease.
The crowd’s loudest cheer of the day, he was told afterwards, had been for the Duke of Wellington, who had struck out his place a week before and whom London loved. Melbourne had gone away from the chapel by another door.
There was a breakfast. He did not remember much of it afterwards except a great white cake, and his father’s face, very red and very happy, and Ernest’s, very white. At a quarter to four they went down to the carriage. She had changed into a pelisse of white satin trimmed with swansdown and a white bonnet with a feather, and he into a plain dark coat for travelling, and he was very glad to be out of the field marshal’s scarlet, though he would not have said so to anyone in the army.
They drove out of the Palace gates into the sun, and turned, and went up the hill between the long brick wall of the Palace garden on the left and the iron railings of the Green Park on the right; and the people who had been waiting along the railings all afternoon ran beside the carriage and cheered, and men on horseback and in gigs came after them up the hill, and the Queen held his hand under the rug and bowed, and bowed, and did not let go.
He asked her the name of the road.
“Constitution Hill,” she said. “I drive up it every afternoon. They always wait for me here, along the railings.”
He said that at home in Coburg they had a constitution, which his father had given them, and no hill named for it; and that in England, it seemed, they had the hill instead. She laughed, and squeezed his hand, and bowed to a man in a gig who had taken off his hat and was holding it out at arm’s length as if he were offering it to her.
At the top of the hill they went under the great arch and past the Duke of Wellington’s house, where somebody was at a window, and out along the road to the west, with the people still cheering on either side, all through Knightsbridge and Kensington, and the lamps being lit along the way as the light went; and then the houses grew fewer, and the lamps stopped, and there were dark fields on either side, and the noise fell away behind them, and they were alone in the carriage for the first time in their lives.
They came back to London on the Friday.
He had written to her from Gotha hoping for longer: a fortnight, perhaps, somewhere quiet, as other people did. Her answer had found him at Brussels. You forget, my dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing. Parliament is sitting. Two or three days, she wrote, was already a long time to be absent. He had read it twice, and thought that she was perfectly right, and that it was the first time anybody had used the word forget to him about something he had never known.
So it was three days. She had had a headache the first evening, and lain on the sofa in her sitting-room, and he had sat on a footstool beside her and held her hand, and she had told him that she had never been so happy in her life, and he believed her. They had walked on the terrace in the mornings, in a cold bright wind, with the river below and the Eton boys who had run beside the carriage all the way up to the Castle on Monday night now pretending, at a respectful distance, that they were not there. On the Wednesday his father and Ernest had come down, and the Duchess of Kent, and there had been dancing that night and the next; and on the Friday they were back at Buckingham Palace, and the red boxes were waiting.
The boxes went to her room and not to his. He had known that they would. He had not known what it would be like.
Melbourne came every afternoon. He was a tall, heavy, handsome man of sixty with a lazy voice and an easy way of sitting in chairs, and he was with the Queen an hour at a time, and sometimes two, behind a door, with the boxes; and when he came out he was charming to Albert, and asked after his journey, and his father, and the dog. The Queen’s letters, all of them, went through the hands of the Baroness Lehzen, who had been her governess since she was five, and had come with her from Kensington, and kept the keys, and the door, and the household, and whose rooms opened into the Queen’s. The household itself had been formed for him before he arrived. He had written in December asking that it might be made up of the best men, Whigs and Tories alike, so that the Queen’s husband should belong to no party; and he had been told that it was settled. His private secretary was to be Mr George Anson, who had been Lord Melbourne’s private secretary until lately. Mr Anson was a pleasant, sensible man not ten years older than Albert, and had plainly been told everything about him in advance, and was very civil, and Albert was very civil back.
They dined at eight and sat up until eleven, and breakfasted at ten, and the mornings were gone before they had begun. The air of London lay on the house like a wet blanket, smelling of coal. He was asked, very kindly, a great many times a day, whether he did not find everything very different, and he said that he did, which was true, and that he would soon grow used to it, which he hoped was.
He was the husband, he thought, on the fourth or fifth evening, sitting in the drawing-room after dinner while the Queen talked to Lord Melbourne on the sofa and the ladies talked to each other and Mr Anson talked to nobody in particular; he was the husband, and he was not the master in the house. He turned the sentence over. It was not a complaint. He was too honest to make it one, and she had given him everything she had to give: her hand, her heart, the diamond garter, the dog’s welcome on the stairs. It was a description. He had always found that he could bear a thing much better once he had described it accurately, and he sat with this one for some time, and found that he could bear it, and that he did not like it.
The first levee was on the Wednesday, at St James’s.
He led her in. Nobody had decided that he should; there was no rule, since Parliament had declined to make one, and the King of Hanover had declined to allow one, and the Duke of Wellington had been perfectly civil about the whole affair. The Queen had simply put her hand on his arm at the door, and walked in with him, and when she had taken her place she looked at him and moved her eyes very slightly to her left; and he went and stood there.
Then the gentlemen came by. They came in a long slow line, all afternoon: officers in every coat in the army, and clergymen in their bands, and judges, and members of both Houses, and lord lieutenants of counties he had never heard of, and men whose business with the Crown he could not guess at; and each of them bowed to the Queen, and then, a little uncertainly, to the young man at her left hand, who bowed back. Some of them bowed to him lower than they needed to, to show that they were on his side. Some of them hardly bowed at all, to show that they were not. Most of them did not know what to do, and did a little of each, and went by.
He stood on her left. Nobody had voted the place to him, and nobody could take it from him, since it was not a thing that anybody had given. It was only where she had put him. And it came to him, standing there through the long afternoon in the field marshal’s coat, with the gentlemen going by and the light going in the windows, that it was the only place in England that was his, and that it was exactly as large as she was.