CHAPTER XII.
COURTSHIP AND BETROTHAL.
Desire of the Coburg Relatives for a Marriage between Victoria and Albert—Favourable Impressions mutually made by Victoria and Albert—Prince Albert’s Letter on the Queen’s Accession—Opposition of King William IV. to the Marriage—Correspondence between the Cousins—King Leopold urges on the Marriage—The Queen’s Reluctance to become Betrothed—Her subsequent Regret at this—The Prince craves a definite Determination—His Second Visit to England—Betrothed at last—Returns to Germany to say Farewell.
We have already seen that the marriage of Prince Albert with his cousin was strongly desired by their common relatives from a very early period of their lives. It was the “ardent wish” of their grandmother, and she freely communicated that wish to her son and daughter, Prince Leopold and the Duchess of Kent. There are strong indications that the astute King Leopold never lost sight of this end from the date of his mother’s death in 1831. Soon after the visit of the brothers to their “aunt Kent” in 1836, the rumour began to prevail in England that Prince Albert was the fiancé of the future Queen. The idea, however, was premature. So we know on the Queen’s authority, who has caused it to be stated that “nothing was then settled.”
In the letters which the Prince sent to his father and others, during his stay at Brussels and elsewhere, immediately after his first visit to England, he made frequent reference to the general impressions thence derived, and especially to his young cousin. Of such allusions, this is a fair specimen:—“A few days ago I received a letter from aunt Kent, enclosing one from our cousin. She told me I was to communicate its contents to you, so I send it on with a translation of the English. The day before yesterday I received a second and yet kinder letter from my cousin, in which she thanks me for my good wishes on her birth-day. You may easily imagine that both these letters gave me great pleasure.” And when the news of the death of King William and the accession of Victoria arrived, he informed his father, on the authority of his uncle Leopold, that the new reign had commenced most successfully (this, perhaps, in allusion to the anticipated attempt at a coup d’état by the Duke of Cumberland), that his cousin Victoria had shown astonishing self-possession, although English parties were violently excited, and that the Duchess of Kent had found strenuous support against “violent attacks in the newspapers.” This last statement we have, however, good reasons for saying had reached the young Prince in a somewhat exaggerated form; we mean, so far as the “violence” of the attacks was concerned.
To the Queen herself the Prince wrote a letter, consolatory in her bereavement, and congratulatory on her accession. This was the first letter which he sent her written in English. He prayed Heaven to assist her now that she was “Queen of the mightiest land in Europe,” with the happiness of millions in her hand, and asked her “to think sometimes of her cousins in Bonn [where they were then pursuing their University studies], and to continue that kindness you favoured them with till now.”
RUMOURS ABOUT MARRIAGE.
On the accession of the Queen, the rumour of her marriage with Prince Albert became ten times more prevalent. The judicious King Leopold thought it wise, for a time at least, to discourage this expectation, and to withdraw the attention of the English from the Prince. Hence it was that he counselled those journeys into Austria, South Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, in which we have already traced the steps of the Prince. This was chiefly dictated by the distracted state of parties in England, which the King of the Belgians thought it better to permit time to allay ere the matrimonial project was brought specifically forward. “United as all parties are,” wrote Prince Albert to his father, from the inspiration of his uncle, “in high praise of the young Queen, the more do they seem to manœuvre and intrigue with and against each other. On every side there is nothing but a network of cabals and intrigues, and parties are arrayed against each other in a most inexplicable manner.”
Whilst making his “grand tour,” the Prince kept up an occasional correspondence with his cousin. From Switzerland he sent her an album of the places which he visited, from the top of the Rigi a dried Alpine rose, and from Ferney an autographic scrap of Voltaire, which he received from an old servant of the great philosopher.
By the early part of 1839, the tour was concluded, and we find the Prince once more at Brussels with his uncle. Leopold now spoke to him more fully and definitely than he had hitherto done about his prospects in life and the state of his affections. It very clearly appears that the marriage with the Queen had been gradually becoming more and more an understood thing. It appears equally clear that the Queen was averse, as yet, to committing herself to a distinct and final engagement. She was willing to marry, but wished to defer the contraction of the union. She thought both herself and her cousin too young; and the interests of her people, rather than any personal backwardness, influenced her wish that both she and her husband should be older ere they became man and wife. She regretted afterwards this delay, and felt that the harassments of the Bedchamber Plot and other still more painful incidents which we have thought it preferable not to rake up and reproduce in these pages, would have been borne by her with more equanimity had she had the natural protection of a husband six months or a year ere the date of her marriage. It was probably this postponement of any definite settlement that occasioned Prince Albert’s absence from England at the Coronation, in June, 1838. His father was invited, and received at the hands of his niece the honour of the Order of the Garter. The Dowager Duchess of Gotha was very proud of this, and proud also to recollect that her son-in-law possessed the noblest knightly order of Christendom, which her own father of Hesse-Cassel, and her father-in-law of Gotha, had also worn and treasured.