Another of the incidents of 1839 was as much domestic as political. The famous Bedchamber question excited the Houses of Parliament and the country to a degree which it is difficult now to understand. It was one of Life’s little poems that the course which events took in this matter led the Whigs to champion Tory principles, and vice versa. Lord Melbourne’s Government was virtually defeated on his Jamaica Bill, in May, 1839. Lord Melbourne resigned, and advised the Queen to send for the Duke of Wellington. His opinion had been expressed on a former occasion, that he and Peel would not make good Ministers to a Sovereign who was a young girl. “I have no small-talk,” he had said, “and Peel has no manners.” The sturdy old lion had yet to learn that a woman could appreciate something beyond small-talk. When he saw the Queen after Melbourne’s resignation, she told him she was very sorry to lose Lord Melbourne, who had been almost like a father to her since her accession; the Duke was greatly pleased with her frankness, but excused himself from serving her, on the grounds of his age and deafness. He also said that the Prime Minister ought to be leader of the House of Commons, and advised her to send for Peel, which she accordingly did. The want of manners proved more serious than the want of small-talk, for Sir Robert Peel, mainly through a misunderstanding, presently found himself involved in what almost amounted to a personal quarrel with the Queen about the appointment of the ladies of her household. She thought he wanted to dismiss all her old friends, and even her private attendants. She imagined that it might be proposed to deprive her of the services of her former governess, Baroness Lehzen, who had now become one of her secretaries. She felt bound to make a stand against what she considered an encroachment on her independence. The Duke of Wellington and Peel saw her again together, but made no impression on her. If they had explained that Peel only wished to remove the ladies who held the offices that are now recognized as political, the dispute would never have arisen; but as it was there was a deadlock. The Queen wrote to Melbourne: “Do not fear that I was not calm and composed. They wanted to deprive me of my ladies, and I suppose they would deprive me next of my dressers and my housemaids; they wished to treat me like a girl, but I will show them that I am Queen of England!” Lord Melbourne and Lord John Russell advised the Queen that she was quite right, and supported her in her determination not to give way; so that the Whigs found themselves defending the principle that the will of the Sovereign is paramount over the advice of her Ministers and public considerations; while the Tories were defending the opposite doctrine. Angry discussions took place in both Houses; Lord Brougham in the House of Lords opening the sluice-gates in a three hours’ speech that Greville calls “a boiling torrent of rage, disdain, and hatred.” The end of it was that Sir Robert Peel declined to undertake to form a Government, and Lord Melbourne was recalled; he had been in a very weak position before; but he was still further weakened by the events that had just taken place.
In after years the Queen, with her accustomed generosity, took the whole blame upon herself. Curiously enough, it was Lord John Russell, who had, in 1839, encouraged the Queen in the line she took on the Bedchamber question, who asked her in 1854, if she had not been advised by some one else in the matter. “She replied with great candor and naïveté, ‘No, it was entirely my own foolishness.’”
These events excited the whole country to an extraordinary degree, and it is not astonishing that they were intensely absorbing to the Queen, and that she therefore, for the time, dismissed from her mind all thoughts of marriage. Indeed, she wrote to her uncle Leopold in July, 1839, stating very strongly her intention to defer her marriage for some years. To Stockmar also the Queen expressed the same intention. These diplomatists do not appear to have argued the matter with Her Majesty; but they thought they knew how to shake her resolution. She had only once seen her cousin Albert, when he had come over to England with his father and his elder brother, Ernest, for a few weeks’ visit to the Duchess of Kent, in 1836. He was then a boy, very stout, as the Queen herself has told us, but amiable, natural, unaffected, and merry. He had now (1839) greatly improved in appearance and developed in character, and Leopold determined on sending him to England again on a second visit to his cousin. After his first visit the Princess, as she then was, had written to her uncle Leopold in a strain which showed that she thought her future marriage with her cousin Albert was a practical certainty; she begged her uncle “to take care of the health of one now so dear to me, and to take him under your special protection;” and she added she trusted “all would go prosperously and well on this subject, now of so much importance to me.”
The Prince wrote immediately on the Queen’s accession to congratulate his “dearest cousin,” and to remind her that in her hands now lay “the happiness of millions.” But he said nothing of his own happiness; nothing was settled, and the correspondence between the cousins was suffered to drop. The Queen generously blames herself for this. A memorandum made by Her Majesty to “The Early Years of the Prince Consort” is very characteristic. “Nor can the Queen now,” she writes, “think without indignation against herself of her wish to keep the Prince waiting for probably three or four years, at the risk of ruining all his prospects for life, until she might feel inclined to marry! And the Prince has since told her that he came over in 1839 with the intention of telling her that if she could not then make up her mind, she must understand that he could not wait now for a decision, as he had done at a former period when their marriage was first talked about.”
It is probable that no one but the Queen herself thinks she was to blame in the matter. She had seen her cousin only when he was a boy of seventeen, and she a girl of the same age. She had acquiesced in the wish of her closest advisers that she should regard him as her future husband, but she had at the time of her accession no strong personal feeling in the matter. She did not feel then, as she felt afterwards, that the happiness of her whole future life was involved in this union; and absorbed as she must have been in the intense interest of being the centre of the inner circle of politics, and in learning the duties and going through the ceremonials of her new position, it is no wonder that for a time she dismissed all thoughts of marriage. Indeed, the happiness of what she so often called her “blessed marriage” might have been marred had she not waited till her heart spoke.
The Prince Consort’s was a singularly pure and disinterested nature. As a child he possessed a remarkable degree of beauty, and a natural disposition almost without flaw. All the associates of his youth agree in speaking of his perfect moral purity, combined with gayety and courage; but he was not one of those preternaturally perfect children who hardly exist out of books, and even these are generally destined to an early grave. His childish letters and diaries record that he fought with his brother and cried over his lessons like other little boys. When he was only five years old his father and mother separated, and were afterwards divorced. He was henceforth separated entirely from his mother, who died in 1831. Prince Albert resembled his mother in person and mind, and although so early taken from her, he retained through life the strongest feeling of affection for her, and one of his first gifts to the Queen was a little pin which had belonged to his mother. She was beautiful, intelligent, and warm-hearted, and had a great fund of drollery and power of mimicry, which her younger son inherited from her.
Two very affectionate grandmothers, or rather a grandmother and a step-grandmother, did what in them lay to supply the mothering of which the Prince and his elder brother were deprived through the unfortunate difference between their parents. The two children were fortunate in possessing as a tutor a Herr Florschutz, of Coburg, one of those men who have something of the woman’s tenderness for little children. He was often seen playing the part more of a kind nurse than that of a tutor, and carrying the little Albert in his arms.
The greatest care was bestowed upon Prince Albert’s education; his grandmother and his uncle Leopold kept constantly before their eyes and in their hearts the destiny for which they intended him. He pursued his studies of mathematics, jurisprudence, and constitutional government partly under tutors, but also at Brussels under his uncle’s own immediate supervision, and later at the University of Bonn. When it was decided that his education should be carried on in a somewhat wider atmosphere than the little Court of Coburg could afford, Berlin was not selected because it was both “priggish” and “profligate;” Vienna was rejected on account of its peculiar relations towards Germany; the choice fell on Brussels, because he could here study the constitutionalism which would afterwards be such an important factor in his life as husband of the Queen of England. As early as 1836 Stockmar congratulated Leopold that the young Prince was beginning to acquire “something of an English look.”
When Princess Victoria became Queen in 1837, her marriage with her cousin began to form a topic of gossip; and in order to divert attention from it, King Leopold sent Prince Albert and his brother for a prolonged tour over South Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. In 1838 King Leopold had a long conversation with his nephew on the subject of the projected marriage, and found that he looked at the whole question from the “most elevated and honorable point of view.” “If I am not mistaken in him,” wrote the King to Stockmar, “he possesses all the qualities required to fit him for the position which he will occupy in England. His understanding is sound, his apprehension clear and rapid, and his heart is in the right place.” The young Prince said he was quite ready to submit to any delay in the marriage which the Queen might desire, but that he felt that he had a right to demand some definite assurance from her as to her ultimate intentions. He had no fancy to play the ridiculous part so often forced upon Queen Elizabeth’s numerous suitors, of hanging about her for years, having his matrimonial prospects talked of all over Europe, in order at the end to learn that the lady had never had the least intention of marrying him.
It was either to obtain this definite assurance from the Queen herself, or to withdraw entirely from the whole affair, that he came to England, again accompanied by his brother, Prince Ernest, on October 10th, 1839. On the 15th he was the Queen’s betrothed husband. All the Queen’s reasons for desiring the postponement of her marriage with her cousin vanished in his presence; they were overwhelmed by the irresistible feeling inspired by the Prince. In the memorandum by the Queen previously quoted in part, she had stated that no worse school for a young girl, or one more detrimental to all natural feelings and affections, could be imagined than that of being Queen at eighteen. Very few persons are qualified to express an opinion on the point, but it is quite certain that being Queen at eighteen had neither destroyed Her Majesty’s capacity of loving, nor her power of inspiring love. The letters of the two young lovers to their friends, to announce their engagement, are full of the music of overflowing happiness. They both wrote to Stockmar. The Queen said: “Albert has completely won my heart, and all was settled between us this morning.... I feel certain he will make me very happy. I wish I could say I felt as certain of my making him happy, but I shall do my best.” The Prince’s letter says: “Victoria is so good and kind to me that I am often puzzled to believe that I should be the object of so much affection.... More, or more seriously, I cannot write. I am at this moment too bewildered to do so.