HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-04-04T14:31:04.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00The Victorians were facing a population crisis, until this ‘obscene’ invention turned out to be the solutionhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-victorians-were-facing-a-population-crisis-until-this-obscene-invention-turned-out-to-be-the-solution/2026-04-04T14:30:20.000ZThe air in Victorian London was thick with smog. In the narrow streets of the rapidly industrialising city, where the city’s poorest families lived cheek by jowl, every child born stretched meagre resources thinner still. For those in the working class, wages were uncertain and the cost of living presented constant challenges. Yet, despite the hardship, children kept coming – one after another, year after year. With most families lacking access to contraception, there was no realistic alternative.
Big families: the Victorian ideal?
“One of the things that we all think we know about Victorian families was that they all had huge numbers of children”, explains historian Ruth Goodman in her HistoryExtra Academy series on Victorian Life.
This is true: between 1800 and 1850, England’s population had doubled, and by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, families across the social spectrum were getting bigger. Victoria herself had nine children with her husband, Prince Albert, providing an example for others to follow. But outside of the royal family, this birth rate boom placed huge pressure on the resources of families who were scraping by on meagre livings amid the industrial revolution.
But as the century progressed the image of the archetypal Victorian family – respectable, hardworking and moral – began to change. Now, smaller, controlled families were becoming the ideal. This had a noticeable effect on the population.
“From the 1880s, you can actually see the effects of contraception turning up in family size,” Goodman says. “In the census and the records, you can see that middle class families are getting smaller.”
Early Victorian contraception
This was largely down to new discussions about family limitations. Shrouded in euphemism, the understanding of sex and how to prevent pregnancy was starting to be framed as a health concern.
Goodman explains how it was often covered by the phrase: “Being kind to your wife”.
Framing contraception in this way placed the onus on parents to prevent excessive numbers of children for their own good. The idea was that a respectable family wouldn’t have more children than they could feed, and a decent father would ensure his children had a mother to look after them.
“Quiet discussions are had within certain groups of society about [not letting] your wife have too many children,” says Goodman. One argument was that “it’s not healthy for her, she should be around in good health to bring up the children you already have.”
What contraception was available?
In today’s world, there’s an array of accessible contraception.
In the Victorian era, the options were more limited. However, there was one development that changed the game: the vulcanisation of rubber.
Vulcanisation – the process of improving the durability and pliability – of rubber was patented by British inventor Thomas Hancock in November 1843 and became more widespread in the mid-to-late 19th century. The progress and innovation that characterised the Industrial Revolution helped accelerate its commercial success – and one of its most practical uses was for condoms.
Condoms in some form had been available for centuries. They had variably been made from sheep guts, linen or other materials – intact condoms made from animal membrane dating to the 1640s were discovered at Dudley Castle – and were almost exclusively used for preventing the spread of venereal disease.
The vulcanisation process made rubber “flexible and soft” says Goodman, “so then condoms became made of a softer, more cleanable material.”
The introduction of cleanable, reusable rubber condoms in 1855 was revolutionary – and people started to see the possibilities for using condoms in family planning too.
Vulcanised rubber also led to the creation of the female cap – a forerunner to diaphragms and cervical caps – which, as Goodman states, “made it possible for a woman to begin to take control of her own fertility”.
Due to the hierarchical ‘male breadwinner’ structure of Victorian families, the reality was that decisions regarding reproduction, or lack thereof, were still primarily made by men. However, this development in female contraception did allow women a little more autonomy over their bodies and futures.
A mirror of the class divide
Despite the incredible innovations, access to these new methods of contraception was far from equal.
“Doctors found their way to manage their own families”, explains Goodman, “but they were not keen on passing that information on to the working classes.”
While there was a widespread belief in the need to reduce family sizes, many of those in power tried to stop it. Attempts to make contraceptive advice more accessible through pamphlets were often unsuccessful as it was “decided that these were obscene publications”. Ideas of propriety and morality – as well as objections from the Catholic Church to any ‘unnatural’ birth control – prevented access to communication about sex in any straightforward terms, and in turn, limited people’s understanding of it.
In 1877, The Fruits of Philosophy (an 1832 book that advocated for birth control) was the subject of a sensational obscenity trial in London. Activist Annie Besant stood in her own defence, dubbed a “filthy woman” for selling it. As Michael Meyer explained on a previous episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “[the jury decided it was a] dirty, filthy book, [but] absolved the defendants of any malicious intent in publishing it”. Regardless of intent, Besant and her co-defendant Charles Bradlaugh were found guilty under the Obscene Publications Act 1857.
Later, their convictions were overturned, and both continued to campaign, with Besant publishing her own birth control pamphlet, The Law of Population.
The problem with The Fruits of Philosophy wasn’t its contents – the information inside was nothing that Victorian medical professionals didn’t already know – but that it was being sold at a low enough price for the average person to buy it. The middle classes believed that the pressure of rising population numbers forced the working classes (who they presumed were naturally lethargic) to work harder. This prejudiced – and incorrect – assumption about the nature of working-class people led to deliberate limitations on their access to contraceptive information.
Even with these rather aggressive attempts to prevent contraceptive advice from being disseminated, the knowledge did spread. Throughout the later years of the 19th century and into the 20th, medical pamphlets, marital guides and private consultations offered methods to regulate conception.
For those who could afford discretion and access to physicians, family planning became a means of greater control over their future. For those who couldn’t afford it, though, nothing much changed.
In Victorian England, birth control was a mirror of the class divide. It revealed who had enough money to dictate the size of their family, and who had no such luxury.
]]>A brief history of curling – from medieval Scotland to the Winter Olympicshttps://www.historyextra.com/period/general-history/curling-sport-history-when-invented-scotland-origins-timeline-olympic-stones/2022-02-19T06:45:24.000ZHere we chart the history of the so-called “Roarin’ Game”, which Scotland’s national bard, Robert Burns, wrote about in his poetry…
When was curling first invented?
The exact origins of curling remain a mystery, but it was the Scots who first embraced the sport and drew up the early official rules of the game.
Curling seems to have started out as a fun Scottish pastime of throwing stones over ice, played informally on frozen lochs and ponds in the medieval period. Today, every Olympic curling stone is made from granite hewn from a quarry on the island of Ailsa Craig off of Scotland’s Ayrshire Coast, and their size has been standardised. But the earliest curling stones were made from a variety of different stones and came in all shapes and sizes. “Players would choose the most useful variation to sneak through a gap on the ice or cover the target, all with the aim of strategising victory,” according to the Beijing 2022 website. The world’s oldest curling stone dates from 1511 and can be found today in the collection of the Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum.
The earliest surviving reference to curling, written in Latin, dates from 1541, “when notary John McQuin recorded a challenge that occurred in Paisley, Scotland, between John Sclater, a monk from the local abbey, and one Gavin Hamilton,” writes Jeff Wallenfeldt for Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Apparently Sclater took three practices throws with a stone on the ice, and then the contest was on.”
Paintings by a 16th-century Flemish artist, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c1525–69) seem to depict “an activity similar to curling being played on frozen ponds,” according to the Word Curling Federation. And poets across the ages from the Scottish regions of Kirkcudbrightshire, Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire have celebrated the game in published poems.
Curling even features in the poetry of Scotland’s national bard, Robert Burns. The opening lines of his 1785 poem ‘The Vision’ read:
The sun had clos’d the winter day,
The Curlers quat their roaring play…
Meanwhile, two stanzas of ‘Tam Samson’s Elegy’, written by Burns the following year, read:
When Winter muffles up his cloak,
And binds the mire like a rock;
When to the loughs the curlers flock,
Wi’ gleesome speed,
Wha will they station at the cock?
Tam Samson’s dead!
He was the king of a’ the Core.
To guard, or draw, or wick a bore,
Or up the rink like Jehu roar
In time o’ need;
But now he lags on Death’s hog-score,
Tam Samson’s dead!
There is even evidence that Burns himself took part in a ‘bonspiel’ (a curling tournament) in January 1789.
The Grand Caledonian Curling Club
Records show that by the 18th century curling was being played throughout the Lowlands of Scotland. Different forms of the game existed – the most popular involved rinks of seven, eight, or nine curlers throwing only one stone. Curling clubs and societies sprang up across the country, and by the 1830s curling had become so popular and so widespread that there arose demand for the founding of a national club to regulate the game.
The Grand Caledonian Curling Club was born in 1838 and became the sport’s governing body. Set up with the purpose “of regulating the ancient Scottish game of Curling by general laws”, the club formally adopted the ‘four by two’ (meaning four people in a rink, each throwing two stones) form of the game as the standard, the official Scottish Curling website explains. “By the early 1860s this form had ousted all the others.”
Curling has been dubbed the “Roarin’ Game”, with the ‘roar’ referring to the noise of the granite stone as it travels over the ice.
- Listen | Author Juliet Nicolson tells the story of the frozen winter of 1962. As Britain shivered under a blanket of ice and snow, new political and cultural forces were emerging that would shake up the nation
Is it true that Queen Victoria liked curling?
Yes! During a visit to Scone Palace near Perth in 1842, Queen Victoria watched a demonstration of the game by the Earl of Mansfield – who was the president of the Grand Caledonian Curling Club – on his polished ballroom floor. “The Queen was so fascinated by the game that in 1843 she gave permission for the Club’s name to be changed to the Royal Caledonian Curling Club [RCCC],” the World Curling Federation explains.
According to The Curling History Blog, “her Majesty herself ‘tried her hand’ at throwing the Stones, although they proved to be too heavy for her delicate arm. Both her Majesty and the Prince [Albert] expressed surprise when informed as to the usual length of a ‘rink’, and appeared to imagine that it must require a very great degree of strength to propel the stones to such a distance.”
During the visit to Scone Palace, the queen’s husband, Prince Albert, was gifted a number of personalised curling stones. The silver handles were engraved: “Presented to His Royal Highness Prince Albert. By the Grand Caledonian Curling Club on the occasion of His Royal Highness’ First Visit to Scotland. Edinburgh, 1st. Septr. 1842.”
The stones can today be found in the Royal Collection at Frogmore House.
When was curling first played indoors?
From 1838 onwards the game exploded in popularity – by the final decades of the 19th century, every county in Scotland had at least one club affiliated with the RCCC, and almost every parish had its own custom-made curling pond, according to the official Scottish Curling website.
Curling was traditionally played outdoors and could draw impressive crowds, in gatherings known as ‘Bonspiels’. The Royal Caledonian Curling Club helped to organise ‘Grand Matches’ which divided players into teams representing the north of Scotland and the south (an imaginary line was drawn between the River Forth and River Clyde to decide the two sides). The first Grand Match was held on Penicuik Loch on 15 January 1847 and 300 curlers took part, according to the Scottish Curling website. The next Grand Match was held on Linlithgow Loch in 1848, with 680 curlers turning up to play.
But the weather had to be sufficiently cold for ice to form in order to play – and because such conditions were not always guaranteed, indoor ice rinks were introduced to Scotland in the early 20th century (the first having been built in Manchester and Southport in the latter part of the 19th century). The first indoor rink in Scotland – Crossmyloof in Glasgow – opened in 1907, followed by rinks in Aberdeen and Edinburgh in 1912.
The 1960s saw a boom in ice-rink building, and today Scotland has 21 rinks that have facilities for curling. Sadly, the Crossmyloof ice rink closed in 1986.
How did curling become an international and Olympic sport?
During the 19th century, the game was “exported wherever Scots settled around the world in cold climates, most notably at that time in Canada, United States, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand,” the World Curling Federation explains. The game was particularly popular in Canada, where today the Royal Montreal Curling Club – founded in 1807 – claims to be oldest active athletic club in North America. Curling in the United States is believed to date to the 1830s, when Scottish soldiers and settlers brought the game to Michigan, says Sports Heritage Scotland.
International curling events took place in the 19th century in Europe and North America, but it was not until the inaugural Olympic Winter Games in 1924, in Chamonix, France, that any form of official international competition took place for men’s teams. However, curling then went on a 56-year Olympic hiatus until it was brought back as a demonstration sport [a sport which is played to promote it, rather than as part of standard medal competition] at the 1988 and 1992 Winter Games. It then returned as an official medal sport at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, with both men’s and women’s competitions.
Curling was only re-introduced to the Winter Olympics in 1998, and as such it has featured as a medal sport at only nine editions of the Games (1924, 1932, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022). To date, Canada is the most successful curling nation in Winter Olympic history with 11 medals, including six golds, followed by Sweden with eight medals. Team GB – made up primarily of Scottish curlers – has only ever won four Olympic medals for curling in its history. It remains to be seen which nation will be the most successful at the 2022 Games.
]]>‘Two steps behind’: male royal consorts through historyhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/male-royal-consorts-history-prince-philip-albert-role/2021-04-16T07:42:36.000ZBefore Prince Philip married the future Queen Elizabeth II, he read up everything he could find on Prince Albert. The life of Queen Victoria’s consort seemed to offer the nearest thing to an instruction manual for the anomalous position he knew lay ahead – that of consort to a reigning queen.
Standing those few steps behind his wife, neither Philip nor Albert found the position easy. In fact, as Philip came to realise, the changing times, and an increasingly elaborate apparatus around the sovereign, meant he would find himself even more constrained than his predecessor.
Nonetheless, the challenges he faced echoed to a remarkable degree those of other male consorts through history. Perhaps it’s only looking back after his recent death that we realise just what an extraordinary job he did in surmounting them – and how that may reflect wider changes in society.
When Elizabeth II ascended the throne, her reign was hailed as a new Elizabethan age, although she rejected the notion during her second Christmas broadcast in 1953. The first Elizabeth, the Queen said, had ruled as a despot – and had never enjoyed the blessing of husband and children. All the same, the accession of both queens regnant posed the same problem as to their marriage. In an echo from the days of the Tudor queens, the power a foreign husband might wield over his spouse was one of the chief fears about a female monarchy.
As Henry VIII wrote, if a woman shall chance to rule: “she cannot continue long without a husband, which by God’s law must then be her governor and head, and so finally shall direct the realm.” The deeply unpopular marriage made by his eldest daughter Mary to Philip of Spain seemed to fulfil his worst fears when it dragged England into a foreign war. Marriage to a subject rather than a foreign prince would bring the risk of faction in the country.
Britain’s reigning queens
Mary I (1516–58) m Philip of Spain (1527–98)
Great care was taken during the marriage negotiations to ensure that Philip should not exercise too much control in England, but it nonetheless remained deeply unpopular.
Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
Though the ‘Virgin Queen’ famously decided never to marry, her favourites – notably Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester – exercised some of a consort’s functions, receiving foreign dignitaries and taking the lead in military ventures, from which her sex debarred her.
Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–87) m François II of France (1544–60); Lord Darnley (1545–67); The Earl of Bothwell (c1535–78)
Mary’s first, childhood, marriage to the French Dauphin would have positioned her as the queen consort of France. But after François’s early death and her return to Scotland, her rash choices offered an object lesson in the difficulties of marriage for any reigning queen. In an age where the husband expected to rule the wife, Elizabeth I needed only look north to see how Lord Darnley, and then Bothwell, expected to lord it over her cousin. “Suppose I be of the baser degree, yet am I your husband and your head,” Darnley told Mary.
Mary II (1662–94) m William ‘of Orange’ (1650–1702)
The arrangement that made William also William III of England saw him take the leading role in government of a country to which his wife had a superior claim; and even continue to rule it after her death.
Anne (1665–1714) m George of Denmark (1653–1708)
The forgotten man of British consorts, George seems to have existed only to sire some 17 short-lived, miscarried or stillborn children on his wife. Nonetheless – despite Anne’s female favourites – the marriage was personally strong.
Victoria (1819–1901) m Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819–61)
Often cited as a model for the marriage of Elizabeth and Philip, it in fact saw the consort play a very different role, until Albert’s early death threw Victoria into prolonged mourning and a damaging seclusion.
Elizabeth II (1926–) m Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921–2021)
Prince Philip’s death within weeks of his centenary, after more than 70 years of happy marriage, came at a time of difficulty for the Royal Family amid a global pandemic and family upheaval. But his and the Queen’s partnership is the longest in British royal history.
A “peculiar and delicate position”
The fundamental question was how to navigate the issue of a husband being expected to ‘rule’ his wife, when she was queen regnant. When it came to Elizabeth I, English bishop John Aylmer (1521–94), tried to rationalise a solution that would have allowed Elizabeth I to marry, arguing that: “so far as pertaining to the bands of marriage, and the offices of a wife, she must be a subject: but as a Magistrate she may be her husband’s head.” Ie, a ruling queen could be his inferior in “matters of wedlock”, and yet his leader in “the guiding of the commonwealth”. It was a claim fraught with difficulty. But it was in a way the model Elizabeth II would try to follow in encouraging Prince Philip to act as the head of the royal family. As the Duke of Edinburgh’s friend and biographer Gyles Brandreth put it colloquially, she wore the crown, but he wore the trousers.
Of course, as the second Elizabeth said in her Christmas broadcast of 1953, the position of any British sovereign in the 20th century was very different to what it had been in the 1500s. The European family of Philip of Greece, unlike that of Philip of Spain, would never be able to force Britain to follow their own interests. But when Philip married Princess Elizabeth, there had nonetheless been concern over his ‘foreignness’ and, so soon after the Second World War, particularly his German connections (just as there had been over those of Prince Albert). Those concerns were surely given added weight by the dominance a husband might still, in the 1940s and ’50s, be expected to exercise over his wife.
A female consort might expect to be crowned in the same ceremony as her husband, but planning Elizabeth II’s coronation, the authorities had to look back to that of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch, to find a role for Philip. The problem had not arisen over Albert, since Victoria was already queen when they married. But Albert’s chagrin – when, in the early days of their marriage, Victoria famously suggested his role in her state paperwork would be dealing with the blotting paper – echoed Philip’s early difficulties in finding a role.
Prince Albert once wrote that his “most peculiar and delicate position” required “that the husband should entirely sink his own individual existence in that of his wife”. In fact – in light of Queen Victoria’s character and her many pregnancies – Albert would eventually become not only officially Prince Consort but, in Benjamin Disraeli’s opinion, the virtual ruler of England. Prince Philip never sought a similar title or opportunity. When in the mid-1970s he was asked by the republican MP and author Willie Hamilton to compare his position with Albert’s, he replied that “times, circumstances and personalities are entirely different”. He quoted Albert boasting that he eventually became not only “the natural head of the family” but Victoria’s “sole confidential advisor in politics… her private secretary and her permanent Minister”. Elizabeth already had a trio of private secretaries – she didn’t need her husband to fulfil this duty. Instead, Philip found other ways to accommodate himself to the situation, to find influence and use his role: his awards scheme, his foreign journeys, his interests in science and technology.
Consorts abroad
Of course, even in wider Europe and Asian kingdoms, the history of the female ruler and her male consort did not begin in the Tudor century. Hungary and Sicily, Navarre and Burgundy had all known female rulers, and various solutions to the issue of their marriage; from the youthful heiresses whose husbands were themselves crowned and subsequently conducted most of the government, to the rare older woman who managed to keep her husband ‘under her thumb’, or the successful joint (if not entirely equal) rule of Ferdinand and Isabella.
But considering the male consort on our minds at the moment, we might look to the future as well as past. We’ve heard a lot in recent days about the modernising influence that a young Prince Philip exercised within the royal family. Perhaps this – the willingness, in the end, to play second fiddle to a prominent woman – is just another instance of his being ahead of his day.
]]>6 history articles about the Victorian erahttps://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/recommended-history-articles-victorian-era/2021-02-23T17:19:25.000Z
Queen Victoria and Albert’s relationship
The love story of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert is a tempestuous romance known the world over. But do you know about any of the men in Victoria’s life before Prince Albert? Author Helen Rappaport explores the suitors who attempted to win the hand of one of Europe’s most eligible women.
Read more about Queen Victoria's suitors
The horrors of Victorian medicine
In the modern age, we are fortunate to have such advances in medicine that surgery no longer carries such high risks as it once did. Anaesthetic was only coming into use during the mid 19th-century and before this people underwent amputations, tumour removals and other hideous procedures with no pain relief. Dr Lindsey Fitzharris takes us through the gruesome world of the Victorian hospital.
Read more about Victorian hospitals
Queen Victoria’s Indian confidant
Abdul Karim – whose story is told in the 2017 film Victoria and Abdul – was Queen Victoria’s Indian confidant and their friendship sent shockwaves through the royal household. Historian Shrabani Basu explores the fascinating story of this young man who became teacher and confidant to the ageing queen.
Read more about Abdul Karim
Charles Dickens: champion of the poor
Victorian writer Charles Dickens highlighted the plights and grim reality of the lives of Britain’s in his novels Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. Rosalind Crone uncovers how Dickens fought for social justice through his words.
Read more about Charles Dickens
Victoria, the warrior queen
During Victoria’s reign, the British empire underwent a massive period of expansion. This was achieved by a series of wars and conquests and Saul David explains how the young queen navigated these conflicts.
Read more about Queen Victoria's wars
Queen Victoria’s children
One fact that almost everyone knowns about Queen Victoria is that she had nine children. As monarch, it was her duty to ensure the future of her dynasty and set an example of the ideal family, but this didn’t mean her family life was all plain sailing. On the outside, the royal family exemplified the epitome of a traditional Victorian family but underneath, there were many tensions. Denys Blakeway explores the often-turbulent relationship Victoria had with her children.
Read more about Queen Victoria's children
Emma Slattery Williams is Staff Writer on BBC History Revealed
]]>Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: what was their relationship like?https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/queen-victoria-albert-relationship-marriage-happy-rivalry-love-story/2021-02-10T12:00:36.000Z"My dearest dearest dear Albert… and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness, I never could have hoped to have felt before”, wrote Queen Victoria of her wedding night. “His beauty, his sweetness and gentleness… Oh! This was the happiest day of my life”, she continued ecstatically. Coming from a woman who, from the moment she had ascended the throne in 1837, had resisted all attempts to force her into wedlock – despite some of Europe’s most eligible bachelors being paraded before her – it was clear that marriage to Prince Albert was borne out of love rather than duty.
Albert was Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in the present-day states of Bavaria and Thuringia in Germany. He was also Victoria’s first cousin, son of her mother’s brother, Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Despite being delivered by the same midwife within three months of each other, the pair had had little contact as children, yet each knew of their family’s desire to see them married one day.
A brief encounter at celebrations for Victoria’s 17th birthday in 1836 had planted the seeds of an attraction between the pair. She writes passionately in her diary of Albert’s “beautiful nose and… sweet mouth with fine teeth” as well as the “charm of his countenance”, which she describes as being “full of goodness and sweetness, and very clever and intelligent”. But Albert, unused to the late nights and whirl of fashionable gaieties of the English court was forced to leave several balls early, feeling sleepy and faint, leaving his lively young cousin to dance on into the night.
Albert was one of several suitors introduced to Victoria in the months before she turned 18 and inherited the throne from her uncle William IV, bringing to an end more than 120 years of male Hanoverian rule. Another first cousin, Prince Augustus of Saxe-Coburg, made a favourable impression on the young princess, more so than Princes William and Alexander of Orange whom Victoria described as being “very plain”.
Victoria and Albert’s relationship: a timeline
10 October 1839: Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg- Gotha, aged 20, arrives at Windsor on a visit to Queen Victoria, his first cousin, three months older than him. 15 October 1839: Victoria, who considers that Albert “is beautiful” and declares that “My heart is quite going”, proposes to Albert. She tells no one beforehand, except the prime minister, Lord Melbourne. 10 February 1840: Victoria and Albert are married at the Chapel Royal, St James’s. 21 November 1840: Vicky, Victoria’s first child, is born. Around this time, Victoria gives Albert the keys to the cabinet boxes. 9 November 1841: Birth of Albert Edward (Bertie), Prince of Wales. This is followed by the birth of Alice, 25 April 1843; Alfred, 6 August 1844; Helena, 25 May 1846; Louise, 18 March 1848; and Arthur, 1 May 1850. In total, that’s seven children in 10 years. 1842: Baroness Lehzen, Victoria’s former governess, who has been charged with the running of the court, is dismissed. Albert takes over and introduces important reforms, making the court more efficient and cutting waste. 1842: Albert starts to attend the queen’s meetings with ministers, and writes notes of the meetings. Victoria now talks of “We”, not “I”. 1845–51: Osborne on the Isle of Wight is built under Albert’s supervision as a holiday retreat for the royal family. 7 April 1853: Leopold is born. Beatrice follows on 14 April 1857, completing the family. 1853–56: Balmoral Castle is built, once more under Albert’s supervision. Here the family enjoy a romantic mountain life which reminds Albert of his native Germany. 1857: Victoria makes Albert Prince Consort. This gives him precedence over everyone, including his son the Prince of Wales, second only to the queen. 14 December 1861: Albert dies at Windsor, aged 42. The cause of death was allegedly typhoid fever, but modern historians speculate that he suffered from an underlying illness such as stomach cancer or Crohn’s disease.
Cupid's arrow strikes
By 1839, Victoria was relishing the relative freedom of being an unmarried young queen and once again declared herself reluctant to marry. But in October 1839, Albert visited England again. This time, Victoria was smitten.
“It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert – who is beautiful”, she scribbled in her diary that night. Just five days later, on 15 October, in accordance with royal protocol, Victoria proposed, exclaiming: “Oh! to feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel as Albert, was too great delight to describe! he is perfection; perfection in every way”.
- Love before Albert: Queen Victoria’s suitors
The marriage ceremony, which took place on 10 February 1840 in the Chapel Royal at St James’s, was everything a royal wedding should be. Dressed in a white satin gown with lace veil, a wreath of orange blossom, and attended by 12 bridesmaids, Victoria married her Albert.
Victoria fell pregnant almost immediately, giving birth to their first child, Princess Victoria, nine months after the wedding. The future Edward VII (Bertie) was born the following year. The physical attraction between the pair never faded and, between 1840 and 1857, Victoria gave birth to nine children.
Unhappy childhoods
However, Victoria was not a natural mother. Princess Victoria's childhood had been an unhappy one, kept in seclusion at Kensington Palace by her own domineering mother with little in the way of companionship or affection. The death of Victoria’s father when she was just eight months old had a profound impact and the only male influence she had had as a child was that of her mother’s despised advisor Sir John Conroy. “I had led a very unhappy life as a child – had no scope for my very violent feelings of affection… and did not know what a happy domestic life was,” admitted Victoria in later life
Albert, too, had suffered an unhappy childhood. His father had been a serial philanderer who paid little attention to either of his sons. Albert’s mother, Princess Louise, had been forced into exile following an affair and the breakdown of her marriage, and Albert had grown up determined to be the type of father he had never had.
Victoria and Albert were united in their desire to create a model, loving family that would set an example to the world. But neither were quite sure how to do it. Victoria hated being pregnant and found babies equally repugnant. “An ugly baby is a very nasty object; the prettiest are frightful when undressed… as long as they have their big body and little limbs and that terrible froglike action”. Breastfeeding, too, was deemed a repulsive act and a wet nurse was employed for all of her nine children, allowing Victoria more time to devote herself to matters of state, and to her beloved Albert.
Their children were spoilt and lavished with every describable luxury from birth, yet expected to adhere to their parents’ ideals of a model family. Countless works of art depicting royal domestic bliss are testament to the public relations campaign Albert sold to the world.
Behind closed doors, however, royal relationships were often strained – none more so than that of Victoria and Albert.
Victoria and Albert: the grandparents of Europe
Victoria and Albert were rulers of a vast empire that dominated global politics by the end of the 19th century. It included Australia, Canada, the Indian subcontinent and much of Africa. Extending British influence and keeping allegiances closer to home in Europe was an equally important, albeit more delicate matter, and was achieved through marriage. Victoria and Albert’s nine children married into royal houses across Europe – from Denmark to Russia – and Victoria was eventually grandmother to 40 grandchildren. Eight of these would eventually sit on the thrones of Britain, Prussia, Greece, Romania, Russia, Norway, Sweden and Spain. George V of Britain, Tsarina Alexandra of Russia (wife of Tsar Nicholas II) and Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm – the three warring royals of World War I – were actually all grandchildren of Victoria and Albert. During her lifetime, Victoria had successfully managed the difficult relationships between her grandchildren and their respective nations, but after her death in 1901, peace faltered and Europe began to edge closer to war. Kaiser Wilhelm is reported to have remarked that had Victoria still been alive, World War I may never have broken out – she simply would not have allowed her relatives to wage war with one another. But Victoria and Albert shared more than just their children and grandchildren across the royal dynasties of Europe. They also introduced a devastating genetic condition. Victoria is believed to have been a carrier of haemophilia – a hereditary condition that affects the blood’s ability to clot. The couple’s eighth child, Leopold, was a haemophiliac and died aged 30 after a minor fall triggered a cerebral haemorrhage. Two of the couple’s five daughters – Alice and Beatrice – are confirmed carriers and unknowingly passed the disorder to the royal families of Spain, Germany and Russia.
Role reversal
Albert was not a popular choice of husband for Victoria with the British public. He had come to the marriage an impoverished and relatively low-standing prince, despite his royal connections. And he was German to boot. “He comes to take for ‘better or for worse’ / England’s fat queen and England’s fatter purse” were two lines from a popular, if insulting, song of the day.
The traditional sum of £50,000 as an allowance for the consort of a monarch was reduced to £30,000 for Albert by Robert Peel’s Conservative party – the smallest sum ever to be offered. He was refused both a peerage and a seat in the House of Lords – a mixture of anti-German sentiment and an attempt to limit Albert’s political power. In fact, it was not until 1857 that Albert was finally granted the title of Prince Consort.
As a champion of the rights of workers, improvements in social welfare, education, the abolition of slavery, as well as a patron of the arts and technology, Albert must have been bitterly disappointed not to have had a bigger say in government affairs.
With his wife distracted by regal duties and himself lacking a formal role, it was Albert, then, who initially took on much of the responsibility for the upbringing of their children. But from the start he wanted more.
“The difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband, not the master in the house”, Albert is said to have uttered to his university friend William von Lowenstein. And he was right. Albert entered a royal household that was governed by his wife and run by her former governess, Baroness Lehzen.
But within a couple of months of the wedding, Victoria reluctantly began to hand some of her official duties over to Albert as she was forced by continued pregnancies to take more of a backseat. Privately, he became her most trusted advisor and the pair worked side by side attending to royal business.
Albert was Victoria’s rock and she looked up to him as her intellectual superior, encouraging his ideas. But although she was happy to share power with her husband – within reason – Victoria had a strong sense of her own hereditary right and resented having to hand over her powers while restricted by childbirth.
Behind the public image
The issue of sharing power was a constant thorn in the marriage. Albert was an accomplished polymath with deep interests in the arts, science and new technologies of the day. He used his influence as Victoria’s husband to further some of his passions, adding President of the Society for the Extinction of Slavery and Chancellor of Cambridge University to his titles. He was the driving force behind the Great Exhibition of 1851, which shone a light on British engineering and technology, and was a staunch promoter of British manufacturing.
But behind closed doors, the carefully crafted public image of the perfect family was showing signs of strain. Locked in an endless power struggle, terrible rows broke out between the lovers. For his part, Albert was terrified of Victoria’s violent outbursts, fearing that she had inherited the madness of her grandfather George III, whose near 60-year reign was peppered with periods of mental ill health. Advised by the royal doctor not to argue with his wife in case his fears proved true, Albert was forced to communicate during her periods of rage by means of handwritten notes meekly posted under her door.
Life after Albert: what happened when he died?
After Albert’s death, Victoria fell into a deep depression and mourned her husband for the rest of her long life. But, as the decades passed, she did find solace in the company and friendships of several men. One notably close relationship was with her servant John Brown, the hard-drinking, bearded son of a Scottish crofter. The controversial friendship between queen and servant caused great rifts in the royal family, and Brown’s influence over Victoria was much criticised. Some have speculated that the relationship was more than platonic with a supposed deathbed confession from Scottish clergyman Norman Macleod that he had married the pair.
Victoria’s passion for India and her longing for Albert saw her strike up an intimate friendship with another servant, 24-yearold Abdul Karim, a young Indian man who had arrived in England for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 to wait on tables and attend the Indian princes in residence for the celebrations. Arriving as he did some four years after John Brown’s death, Karim instantly charmed the Queen. Within a year, he had become Victoria’s teacher, instructing her in Urdu and Indian affairs, introducing her to curry and, like Brown, becoming one of her closest confidants. Lavished with gifts and promotions, Karim became even more hated by the royal family than Brown. After Victoria’s death, her eldest son, Bertie, ordered all records of their relationship, including correspondence and photographs, to be destroyed.
The couple’s eldest son Bertie, the future Edward VII, also caused tension within the family and was something of a disappointment to his parents. Neither gifted intellectually nor especially handsome – his own mother described him as having a “painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin” – Bertie rebelled against his parents’ grand expectations for him. The young prince devoted himself to a life of pleasure and, when word of their son’s tryst with ‘a lady of easy virtue’ reached his parent’s ears, Albert took it upon himself to meet with his wayward son to deal with his reckless behaviour before it became public knowledge. It would be the last time father and son would ever meet – feverish, racked with pain in his legs and wet through from their long walk in the rain, he returned to Windsor where, just weeks later, Prince Albert died. He was aged just 42.
Victoria never fully recovered from Albert’s death. For the rest of her life, she dressed in black and appeared infrequently in public. She surrounded herself with memorabilia to remind her of her beloved husband, taking his dressing gown to bed with her each night and continuing to have hot water for shaving brought up on a daily basis, as it had been when he was alive.
Albert had been everything to Victoria – confidant, husband, lover, closest advisor – and his death dealt a devastating blow to the Queen and the British monarchy. After his death, Victoria papered over the cracks in their marriage, memorialising her husband as an almost saintly figure. In a letter written 15 months after Albert’s death, Victoria wrote: “The poor Queen… can only hope never to live to old age but be allowed to rejoin her beloved great and loyal husband before many years elapse”. It was a wish that would be denied her.
Charlotte Hodgman is the editor of BBC History Revealed magazine
This article was first published in the June 2017 edition of BBC History Revealed
]]>“For Queen Victoria, food was a way of exploring the world”: Annie Grey on Queen Victoria's eating habitshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/for-queen-victoria-food-was-a-way-of-exploring-the-world-an-interview-with-annie-gray/2021-01-23T06:05:00.000ZAfter a childhood constrained by draconian strictures – including on her diet – Victoria was determined not to deprive herself in later life. Her appetite would earn her scorn as “England’s fat queen”. Producing food and drink for the royal household was a vast enterprise and, with regular banquets and six-course meals, Queen Victoria put on a significant amount of weight in mourning – at a time when many in her country suffered malnutrition. As Annie Gray’s book reveals, her diet also brought several unpleasant health problems to the queen.
How much did you know about Queen Victoria’s eating habits before you started writing the book?
I had a sense that she may have had a complicated relationship with food just by looking at photographs of her in later life, when she was boasting her famous 45-inch waistline. But I had no idea of the excitement she had about food, nor that it was a lifelong love.
Do you think that Victoria’s strict upbringing impacted her later eating habits?
Definitely! There’s no doubt that Victoria was affected by her childhood experiences in ways that stretched far beyond food.
As a young princess, kept in virtual isolation at Kensington Palace under the critical eye of her mother, Victoria’s life was under constant scrutiny, especially her eating habits. She was repeatedly told not to gobble her food, not to be greedy, not to mix salt in with her gravy, and so on.
- Did Queen Victoria have an unhappy childhood? Read more about the future monarch’s life under the ‘Kensington System’
From an early age, food – and her own appetite – became something that Victoria could control and she developed a relationship with food that was very much about her and the plate in front of her.
As a teenager, Victoria chose to go on a diet and gave up lunch for a year or so. She would also – rather ostentatiously – refuse to eat dinner after arguing with her mother, stomping off to her room. She had so little control over anything else in her life that food became a crutch and a way of asserting control in a world where she had none. It was a weapon she would use throughout her life.
Annie Gray is the author of The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria (2017, Profile, 288 pages, £16.99) Available from Amazon
How did her friends and family feel about Victoria’s food intake?
Just about everyone seemed to have an opinion on Victoria’s eating. Even her mentor Lord Melbourne would tell her off for overeating and drinking too much beer. Uncle Leopold, king of the Belgians, was particularly concerned about her and we have some wonderful correspondence between the pair. “I hear a certain little princess is gobbling again,” he writes in one letter, rather patronisingly. He also believed, quite bizarrely, that if Victoria controlled her diet and took more exercise she would grow taller!
Did she really eat that much?
She could certainly pack it away when she wanted to, but again this was often done as a way of controlling those around her. Victoria was notorious for being able to eat seven or eight courses in half an hour, but she could also do the same over two-and-a-half hours if she wanted. The pacing of a meal was very much set by the queen.
We don’t really know too much about Victoria’s favourite foods. There are a lot of secondary sources that state she enjoyed a boiled egg for breakfast and ate plain food, but this is mainly based on hearsay. Even her journals can’t be relied on too heavily as, in the early years, they were overseen by her mother and later edited by her daughter Beatrice, both of whom may have removed any overly gluttonous food references. We do know that she loved fruit and she would often visit the kitchen gardens to inspect the freshness of the fruit before a state banquet. Mutton, too, was a food she enjoyed immensely, as was curry.
Victoria constantly sought out new challenges in food and was quite adventurous in her tastes. For her it was a way of exploring the world when – as queen, as a woman and as a Victorian – the world was actually quite a restricted place for her.
How did Prince Albert influence the queen’s eating?
By the time she married Albert in 1840, 20-year-old Victoria was something of a party animal, staying up until 5am, getting drunk and staying in bed until late morning. Prince Albert, on the other hand, found entertaining exhausting and regarded food as fuel rather than something to be enjoyed for its own sake. Albert certainly calmed Victoria down and probably did control her eating to some extent. During their 21-year marriage, Victoria maintained a very trim figure and didn’t feel the need to yo-yo diet as she had as a teenager. But when Albert died she turned back to her first love – food – and put on weight incredibly rapidly.
Was Victoria regarded as overweight by her contemporaries?
People were pretty cruel about Victoria’s figure, describing her as podgy and plump and declaring that she was growing “enormously fat”. But by modern standards she was far from overweight. There are two occasions in her journals where Victoria mentions her weight, so we know that just before her wedding she had a modern BMI of 18.8. Today that would put her at the lower end of ‘Normal’ weight, and to modern eyes she would, at 5ft 1ins, have seemed absolutely tiny. But in the 19th century, when so much of the population was malnourished, she certainly wouldn’t have looked dangerously thin.
Was Victoria interested in where her meals came from or did she just like to eat?
We have to remember that even if she hadn’t become queen, Victoria, as a member of the aristocracy, would never have been expected to have any knowledge of how food was prepared. But she did have an interest in the food that she ate and almost certainly kept a cookery book. She also had her children taught to cook and there are records of the royal family watching ice being harvested and of visiting farms, during a stay at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, to see the cattle before they were slaughtered. Her interest in food clearly extended beyond simply eating it.
Was Victoria a healthy eater?
The queen wasn’t a setter of food fashions: she ate fashionable food but only once it had become fashionable. In the 1850s, if she wasn’t entertaining, she would probably have had soup, fish, perhaps a couple of meat dishes, vegetables, a couple of puddings and ended the meal with some fruit – a fairly muted meal of about six different dishes. Meals were very meat-heavy, with few carbohydrates and vegetables as a garnish.
We know that Victoria did have some digestive problems and suffered from gout on at least one occasion. One of the most interesting documents I found was her doctor’s notes from the mid-1830s, which make reference to her constipation and terrible indigestion. People suggested she cut out certain foods from her diet, but she seems to have ignored them.
Looking at the menus from some of the state banquets, though, it’s not surprising she suffered from digestive complaints. There is evidence of some quite extraordinary dishes being created for the royals. One example, which became the centrepiece for a banquet in York in the 1850s, is chef Alexis Soyer’s ‘Hundred Guinea Dish’ – his elaborate take on the common mock turtle soup. He created a dish that, if cooked from scratch, would have cost an incredible 100 guineas to make. Enormous turtle heads form the main structure of the dish, with skewers of turkey sticking out of their mouths, quails, and bread carved into a dish containing prawns. The level of effort required and the beauty of some of the dishes created was just unbelievable. He was a real showman.
Your book also goes below stairs into the royal kitchens. What did you discover there?
When we look at royal dining it’s very easy to be distracted by menus, the numbers of diners, the settings and so on, and to assume that it was all fine dining. But the royal kitchens were catering not just for the queen’s table, but for thousands and thousands of other people. The people being fed each month by Victoria’s royal kitchens always numbered several thousand. If Victoria was putting on a ball supper, for example, there could be as many as 2,000 people being fed incredibly elaborate high-end food.
The kitchens worked liked factories, churning out elaborate food and drink and feeding the royal household – down to the lowest chambermaid. Windsor Castle kitchens, rebuilt by George IV in the 1820s, were the hub of food preparation, often sending baked goods out to the queen wherever she may be in the country.
Buckingham Palace kitchens, on the other hand, were in an appalling mess when Victoria moved in. Badly ventilated, with open drains nearby and overflowing rubbish, the smell from the kitchens was so bad that the neighbours complained that the palace was bringing the area into disrepute.
How well did the royal household eat compared to the rest of Victorian society at the time?
When you look at Victoria’s palaces, you almost see 19th-century society in microcosm. With the exception of the very poor, everyone was represented in the palace household. There was an incredible variety of people eating at the expense of the crown – from the queen’s ladies in waiting, dressers and maids, to gardeners and the lowest servants.
But perhaps the most surprising thing is that everyone in the palace ate meat on a daily basis, two or three times a day. As a comparison to the fare of the general population at the time, it’s almost unbelievable.
Annie Gray is a historian, cook, broadcaster and writer who specialises in the history of food and dining in Britain from c1600 to the present day, conducting her research both in libraries and in kitchens. She is resident food historian for BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet, presented Victorian Bakers and has consulted on several TV series, including The Great British Bake Off and Royal Recipes.
This interview was first published in the May 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine.
]]>Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: was their union a marriage of misery?https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/queen-victoria-marriage-prince-albert-unhappy-husband/2021-01-15T05:05:00.000ZAfter the sudden and tragic death of Prince Albert in 1861, the grief-stricken Queen Victoria dedicated herself to memorialising her marriage as a perfect union. She herself composed large parts of the first biography, The Early Years of the Prince Consort (1867). At Frogmore, the royal burial ground at Windsor, she built a mausoleum and commissioned the sculptor Marochetti to create effigies of herself and the prince lying side-by-side – though it would be another 40 years before she would take her place beside her beloved Albert. Thanks, in part, to the queen’s efforts, her marriage to Albert, prince of the German duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, came to be seen as one of the great love matches of all time, celebrated (with varying degrees of accuracy) in films such as The Young Victoria and, more recently, the ITV drama Victoria.
As Queen Victoria’s journal shows, from the moment she saw the prince arriving at the foot of the staircase at Windsor in 1839, she was smitten. Five days later she summoned him to her blue closet and proposed to him. But the marriage was not the romantic happy-ever-after story that Victoria constructed. It was far more complex than that.
Why did Victoria and Albert marry?
Like all dynastic marriages, this was an alliance with a political agenda. As the second son of a minor German duke (Coburg is smaller than the Isle of Wight) and a mere Serene Highness, the lowest grade in the royal hierarchy, Prince Albert was Victoria’s poor relation, although the two were first cousins. But what he lacked in rank and wealth, he made up for with education and self-confidence, and he had been trained from his teens by King Leopold of Belgium, the cousins’ mutual uncle, to marry Victoria and take over the British throne.
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Albert began his quest for power immediately after the marriage. Within months he had moved his writing desk next to the queen’s. At first, Victoria resisted Albert’s attempts to remove her trusted governess, Baroness Lehzen, from control of the court. But as one pregnancy followed another in quick succession – seven of Victoria’s nine children were born in the first 10 years of the marriage – the queen was in no condition to resist. Albert fired Lehzen and assumed control of the household, introducing much-needed reforms and economies.
Did Albert become king when he married Victoria?
In November 1840, when her first child was born, Victoria gave Albert the key to the cabinet boxes. He started to attend meetings with ministers, dealing with the queen’s correspondence and drafting business letters for the queen to copy out. At dinners with politicians, Albert could be heard prompting Victoria in German before she spoke. By now he had become her private secretary.
In 1850 he described his position thus:
“As the natural head of [the queen’s] family, superintendent of her household, manager of her private affairs, sole confidential adviser in politics, and only assistant in her communications with the officers of her government, he is, besides, the husband of the queen, the tutor of the royal children, the private secretary of the sovereign, and her permanent minister.” Not only was Albert king in all but name but he intervened in politics, pursuing an active role in foreign policy.
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Victoria declared herself grateful to Albert for relieving her of the tiresome work of the sovereign. Women, she believed, were not fit to rule. “It is a reversal of the right order of things which distresses me much and which no one, but such a perfection, such an angel as he is – could bear and carry through.” But Victoria had a vein of steel, and her commitment to her birthright was absolute. She was torn between her passionate desire to be a perfect ‘Victorian’ wife to Albert – an angel in the house, all sweetness and light – and her Hanoverian inheritance.
How did Prince Albert craft the image of their marriage?
The image of the Victorian monarchy, crafted by Albert, and projected in paintings such as Winterhalter’s The Royal Family in 1846 was one of a child-centred bourgeois family on the throne. But the fact was that the royal marriage was unlike any other. It took place within the peculiar context of the court.
As a young maid of honour in Victoria’s court in the 1850s, Mary Bulteel would watch the door silently close on the queen’s private apartments. How she longed to get to know the queen, her employer, but Victoria barely spoke to her.
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The withdrawal of the royal family from the public space of the court into the private apartments was Albert’s doing. It meant that Victoria’s life was no longer bounded by the court, as it had been in the early days of her reign, when her court was a Camelot, famed for its parties and youthful high spirits. The creation of a private sphere – of a space dedicated to domestic life – was one of the most far-reaching changes made by Albert in his drive to reform the monarchy.
Disliking London with its late nights, and sneered at by the aristocracy as a German beggar, Albert persuaded Victoria that her enjoyment of society was wrong. True happiness, he claimed, was to be found in the country with her beloved prince and her young family. Albert designed the new family home at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, safely inaccessible from a prying public. Even more remote was Balmoral, the castle he created in the Scottish Highlands, 500 miles from London.
At Osborne House or Balmoral, the family could live the simple outdoors life that Victoria later depicted in her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. Victoria believed her “happy domestic home” made her more popular than any other sovereign and gave a good example to her subjects.
At court, Albert introduced new rules, distancing the royal family from the household – that is, the courtiers and officeholders such as the Lord Chamberlain. He ordered that no man was to sit in the presence of the queen. Throughout Victoria’s reign, prime ministers stood during audiences; only two were accorded the special privilege of sitting in the queen’s presence – her favourite Disraeli, who declined the offer, and Lord Salisbury, who was too heavy to stand. The hated Gladstone was never asked to sit, even in his eighties.
Albert forbade maids of honour from sitting in his presence or speaking to him unless spoken to. He went everywhere attended by an equerry, thus emphasising his royal status. In his relations with the courtiers of the household, Albert was cold and stiff. “His way of giving orders and reproofs was rather too like a master of a house scolding servants to be pleasant for those who were bound to listen in silence,” wrote Mary Bulteel. People noticed that the prince made not a single friend among ministers or the household. Such reserve in so young a man was “unpleasant”, thought Mary: “It implied something of the cold egotism which seems to chill you in all royalties.”
Memoirs of ladies-in-waiting concur that Albert was “detested” because he was “so stiff”, especially with women. Victoria, on the other hand, was adored because of her disarming frankness and her unquenchable curiosity and interest in the affairs of everyone around her.
Albert’s cold manner derived in part from his upbringing at the small German court of Coburg. When Mary Bulteel visited Coburg in 1860, she found the court far stiffer than in Britain, and the equerries and household much more “collapsed before these little sovereigns than we are before the queen”.
One result of withdrawing from the court was that the royal couple were closer to their ordinary servants than they were to the aristocratic courtiers of the household. This is perhaps why, after Albert’s death, Victoria became intimate first with her Highland servant John Brown, and later with her Indian servant Abdul Karim – relationships that the courtiers found especially upsetting because they overturned the protocol of the court.
Did Victoria have hysterical tantrums?
Behind the closed doors of the private apartments, Victoria was often irritable and moody. She bitterly resented what she called “the shadow side of marriage”, meaning pregnancy and childbirth, and she suffered from postnatal depression. She disliked babies, who she thought were “mere little plants for the first six months” and “frightful when undressed” with their “big body and little limbs and that terrible frog-like action”.
Victoria’s ‘nerves’ became worse during the 1850s. Her last two pregnancies were marked by hysterical scenes. Albert was advised by the royal doctors that the queen’s mood swings and violent Hanoverian tempers were symptoms that she had inherited the madness of her grandfather George III. Rather than engage, he walked away and, as his wife stormed out of the room in a fury, the prince composed letters reprimanding her for unreasonable behaviour. “If you are violent I have no other choice but to leave you… and retire to my room in order to give you time to recover yourself, then you follow me to renew the dispute and have it all out,” he wrote.
Victoria kept a notebook in which she recorded her tempers, her selfishness, and her loss of self-control. Albert would read her confessions and issue her with a ‘certificate’ of improvement, reviewing her behaviour as he might a child. Albert’s intentions were no doubt good. He was certainly a loyal and faithful husband. Victoria’s adoration of her beloved was undimmed. But she was made to feel that she was inadequate, his intellectual and moral inferior. “I owe everything to dearest papa,” she told her daughter. “He was my father, my protector, my guide and adviser in all and everything, my mother (I might almost say) as well as my husband.”
This was not a marriage of equals. It was as if the only way the couple could live with the anomaly (as they saw it) of Victoria being a woman on the throne and superior in rank to her husband was by making her feel that she was Albert’s inferior in every other respect. This artifice imposed unbearable stresses upon them both. Little wonder Victoria lost her temper now and then.
Albert’s reaction was to escape into work. In the 1850s he consistently rose early in the morning to deal with his growing amount of paperwork. His meddling in politics made him unpopular in the country, and he became a lonely, unhappy figure. Photographs show him prematurely aged, balding and careworn. Queen Victoria’s tragedy was that Albert’s death, aged 42, meant that these tensions were never resolved.
Jane Ridley is professor of history at the University of Buckingham and author of several works on the Victorian era, including Victoria (Allen Lane, 2015)
This article was first published in the September 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>Queen Victoria’s childrenhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/queen-victorias-children/2020-06-17T15:10:00.000ZQueen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert, were passionate lovers with a mutual physical attraction but with seemingly no understanding of family planning. The result was nine children born between 1840 and 1857. Albert, intelligent and ambitious, was determined to put this burgeoning brood to good use. He and Victoria were united in the desire that they should not just be a model, loving and happy family, but that they would also set a moral example that would redefine royalty and be the foundation of a dynasty that would stretch across Europe, bringing peace and harmony to the fractious continent.
It was a noble plan, motivated by the highest ideals, and one that was to lead to the creation of the modern idea of the royal family so familiar to us today. But like so many of the best-laid plans, human nature got in the way.
It was Albert, the intellectual, who was responsible for shaping and modernising the royal family in the 19th century; his influence would last well into the next. From the moment of his marriage to Victoria in 1840 to his untimely death 21 years later, he saw his purpose as protecting and nourishing the British monarchy at a time when political turmoil threatened at home and revolution was sweeping Europe. Albert believed that in order to survive and prosper, royalty should be presented as a respectable and close- knit, loving family. As the historian Miranda Carter says: “It’s as if Albert and Victoria are trying to reach out to their middle class subjects and say, ‘look, we are like you, trust us’.”
But of course the royal family was not like the middle class. It existed in the enclosed bubble of the court where tensions and hostilities festered and where children were fawned over and flattered from the moment they were born. Yet at the same time these youngsters were expected to be model children, utterly obedient to their parents. It was an intolerable tension.
- Victoria and Albert: a marriage of misery?
Troubled childhoods
A fraught family life was perhaps unsurprising, given the couple’s own experiences. They were both the product of unhappy childhoods. Albert’s upbringing in Germany had been overshadowed by the breakdown of his parents’ marriage. His father, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield (and then, from 1826, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) was a serial philanderer who paid little attention to his son. Albert grew up longing for his father’s love while detesting his behaviour. He was determined when the time came to be a model father and everything that his father was not. But when he became a parent the problem was that he had no example to follow.
Victoria, too, had much to react against. She had grown up secluded at Kensington Palace under the control of her domineering mother, the Duchess of Kent. Later she admitted, revealingly, “I had led a very unhappy life as a child – had no scope for my very violent feelings of affection… and did not know what a happy domestic life was”.
- Did Queen Victoria have an unhappy childhood? Lucy Worsley on the monarch’s life under the ‘Kensington System’
The couple, deeply in love and physically well suited, were united in the wish to create a family that would serve not just as an escape from their own unhappy pasts, but also as a pan-European dynasty and a model for a nation.
Unsurprisingly, given the couple’s physical infatuation, their first child, Princess Victoria, called Vicky, was born nine months after their wedding. The queen was busy with her duties as monarch and could spare little time for her baby, seeing her only twice a day. Within a year of Vicky’s birth Albert Edward, known as Bertie – the future King Edward VII – was born. The queen now had a healthy male heir. “Our little boy is a wonderfully strong and large child,” she wrote proudly. “I hope and pray he may be like his dearest Papa.” With the succession reasonably assured, it might be thought a rest from the risk of childbearing would be appropriate. Not so. Over the next five years another three children were born: Alice, Alfred and Helena.
While Queen Victoria gave birth to many children, she hated being pregnant, and historians have suggested that she may have suffered from post-natal depression. She compared pregnancy to feeling like a cow and wrote that “an ugly baby is a very nasty object – and the prettiest is frightful when undressed”.
Nor did Victoria necessarily like babies. “An ugly baby is a very nasty object,” she protested, “the prettiest are frightful when undressed… as long as they have their big body and little limbs and that terrible froglike action”. Nor could she contemplate breastfeeding them, finding the whole process repulsive. A wet nurse was therefore employed for all her children, as Victoria devoted herself to Albert. The result was four more children: Louise, Arthur, Leopold and Beatrice. Victoria had nine babies over 17 years – a tremendous physical feat, and a dangerous one given the high rates of maternal mortality at the time.
The model family
The royal couple set to work putting their plan for a model family into action. It was essential for them also that they were seen to be doing so. With the birth of mass communication, Albert well understood the need for the public to be made aware of the ideal for which they were striving. Under the Hanoverians the monarchy had fallen into disrepute, torn apart by feuding and scandal. Now, in countless paintings and photographs, Victoria and Albert were shown in harmonious family group portraits. Today they are a lovely record, if not a strictly true one, of the development of the royal family. The publicity worked and Victoria was delighted: “They say no Sovereign was ever more loved than I (I am bold enough to say), and this because of our happy domestic home and the good example it presents”.
In a reversal of the typical roles of the time, Victoria devoted herself to regal duties while Albert took responsibility for the upbringing of the children. He was a new type of father, ahead of his time, with a hands-on approach to child rearing. From the beginning his relationship with his first child, Vicky, went well. Lady Lyttleton, a governess, remembered seeing him playing with her: “Albert tossed and romped with her, making her laugh and crow and kick heartily”.
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Victoria, by contrast, was far more distant and guarded. She looked on as Albert took control of all aspects of the children’s development. At first Albert found this task fulfilling and stimulating, appealing to his sense of himself as an expert in human behaviour: “There is certainly a great charm, as well as deep interest, in watching the development of feelings and faculties in a little child,” he once remarked.
An education
Albert was the product of an intensive German education that had made him into an accomplished polymath. He expected the same of his children – and more. He developed a punishing educational programme to create the model prince or princess that took little account of the abilities of an average intellect. According to Baron Stockmar, his advisor, the regime would give any child brain fever.
- Who were Queen Victoria’s children? Everything you need to know about her sons and daughters
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The plan began when the children were infants, with the instilling of discipline. “The chief objects here,” the prince opined, “are their physical development, the actual rearing up, the training to obedience”. Corporal punishment was at the heart of this training. The children frequently received “a real punishment by whipping” if they stepped out of line and Albert himself would hit his children’s fingers during piano lessons when they played the wrong notes.
There was instruction, too, in manners and, as the children grew older, lessons in the languages of the courts of Europe, especially German and French. On top of this there was tuition in Latin, geography, maths and science. The education would have been tough even for the most able child, but for the mostly very average young princes and princesses it was purgatory. Fortunately Vicky, the eldest child, was extremely bright and the strict regime got off to a good start. She began her French lessons at the tender age of 18 months; soon she was speaking Latin and reading Shakespeare. Naturally, given her parents’ heritage, she was also fluent in German.
The queen fully backed her husband’s plan. She idolised him to the children, telling them “none of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of such a father who has not his equal in this world”. It followed that she would want them, especially the boys, to be brought up as mini-replicas of the man she adored so ardently. She prayed that her baby Bertie would grow up to “resemble his angelic dearest Father in every, every respect, both in body and mind”. Of course, life being what it is, the heir to the throne turned out in every respect to be the opposite of his father. His parents believed he could be a blank slate on which they could draw a perfect little Albert – they were utterly wrong.
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From an early age Bertie obstinately refused to conform to his father’s plan for the royal children’s education. Here was no renaissance prince in the making: despite being stuffed with facts and theory he found learning difficult and was unable to concentrate. The intense pressure on the backward young prince produced a negative reaction. His tutor Frederick Gibbs remembered the frequent schoolroom tantrums during arithmetic lessons with the Prince of Wales: “He became passionate, the pencil was flung to the end of the room, the stool was kicked away and he was hardly able to apply himself at all”.
Albert’s plan for the heir to the throne of the greatest empire the world had ever seen turned out a complete failure. Instead of the longed for polymath his son turned out to be a dunce. Victoria complained about his “systematic idleness, laziness – disregard of everything”. The worried parents consulted a phrenologist, a modish quack who claimed the shape of the head affected the brain. His diagnosis confirmed everything they feared: “The feeble quality of the brain will render the Prince highly excitable… intellectual organs are only moderately well developed. The result will be strong self-will, at times obstinacy”.
The Prince of Wales was not the only one of the nine children who played up and refused to conform to Albert’s plan for a perfect royal development. As each grew up, he or she displayed the quirks and characteristics of individual human nature. Albert was perplexed and dismayed and he came to suspect that his children were suffering from their Stuart inheritance – certainly they could not have inherited their frailties and foibles from his princely blood! But the plan had to go on.
Royal marriages
As time passed, eight of the children were married off to European princes and princesses, in order that a pan-European dynasty be created. First to go was Princess Victoria, the eldest, to Fritz of Prussia. Both parents were devastated to lose their 17-year-old, especially Albert who wrote “the pang of parting was great on all sides, and the void which Vicky has left in our household and family circle will stand gaping for many a day”. But dynastic duty had to override human feeling, and his favourite daughter was taken away to a new and bewildering life in the Prussian court.
The pressure on Albert to carry out all his many royal duties and to bring up the family according to his plan was immense. He found his work exhausting. In 1860 he compared himself to a donkey on a treadmill, complaining: “He, too, would rather munch thistles in the castle moat. Small are the thanks he gets for his labour”. Victoria, ever self-centred and emotional, came to resent the attention he paid to the children. There were frequent outbursts and marital rows. The strain took its toll on the Prince Consort’s health. He suffered toothache, insomnia and fits of shivering. The doctors were mystified, unable to make a proper diagnosis. Victoria failed to empathise with her husband. In one of her many letters to her daughter Vicky, she wrote: “Dear Papa never allows he is any better or will try to get over it, but makes such a miserable face that people always think he is very ill”.
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Albert soldiered on, desperate to realise his vision for the royal family. In 1860 he arranged the key dynastic marriage of the Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra of Denmark. In a changing world it was crucial that this be portrayed both as a worthwhile diplomatic alliance (which it was), and a love match. The Victorian public, in an era of pious rectitude, demanded a pure marriage in which the heir to the throne appeared to be virtuous and chaste.
- Listen | Jane Ridley, biographer of Queen Victoria, guides us around Osborne on the Isle of Wight where the queen and Prince Albert used to reside
The Prince of Wales, however, was anything but chaste. His life from an early age was devoted to pleasure, much to his parent’s desperate alarm. In the summer of 1861 Bertie attended a training camp with Grenadier Guards in Dublin. His fellow officers arranged for a ‘lady of easy virtue’ to join him for the night. The story of the prince’s trysts got back to his parents and provoked in Albert a furious, almost hysterical, response. How could his son, he demanded, “thrust yourself into the hands of one of the most abject of the human species, to be by her initiated in the sacred mysteries of creation?”. Everything that Albert had been working for seemed threatened. He warned Bertie that “you must not, you dare not be lost; the consequences for this country and the world at large would be too dreadful”.
A tragic death
Albert’s plan for perfect children seemed to have failed utterly. Sickening and feverish, Albert travelled to meet the Prince of Wales at Cambridge to harangue him on the error of his ways. Father and son went for a long walk in the rain. Bertie apologised, Albert forgave and then returned to Windsor wet through, racked with pain in his legs and suffering from fever. He retired to bed, where his symptoms worsened. In December 1861, aged only 42, he died. Queen Victoria’s grief was so great that it would dominate her family and the nation for decades to come. And of course she blamed her eldest son Bertie for her beloved’s death. For years she could hardly bear to bring herself even to look at him.
With Albert’s death the idea of raising perfect children died too. Victoria managed as best she could, relying on her position as queen and her domineering character to make her children bend to her will. In this she was generally successful, though she and the Prince of Wales gave each other a wide berth. And her many letters show she was – if a mixture of egocentric martinet and self-pitying widow – always at heart a loving mother.
Like all parents before and after, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert learned that children have an extraordinary ability to perplex, frustrate and amaze at their individuality and their obstinate refusal to turn into little paragons. Years later Victoria was honest enough to say this herself in a surprising yet characteristic admission: “You will find as your children grow up that as a rule your children are a bitter disappointment – their greatest object being to do precisely what their parents do not wish and have anxiously tried to prevent”. The great matriarch concluded with an eternal truth that it had taken her years to come to appreciate that “often when children have been less watched and less taken care of – the better they turn out! This is inexplicable and very annoying!”.
Certainly her own children, in the main, turned out well enough despite the untimely death of their father and the failure of his plan. Even Bertie, a libertine and prince of pleasure, was as Edward VII a very successful king whose easy charm and diplomatic skills ensured the continuing popularity of the British royal family and brought Britain closer to France on the eve of the catastrophe of the First World War. In a surprising and all too human way, Albert’s plan had worked out after all.
Denys Blakeway is a documentary producer and writer. He was the executive producer of Queen Victoria’s Children, a three-part series made for BBC Two that aired in 2016.
This article was first published by HistoryExtra in September 2016
]]>The Victorians: everything you wanted to knowhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-victorians-facts-guide-queen-victoria-podcast/2020-05-03T11:04:27.000ZIn the latest of our new series tackling the big questions on major historical topics, historian Sarah Richardson responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about Queen Victoria and the age that bears her name.
Check out the rest of the series:
- Episode 5: David Miles responds to listener queries about Britain’s distant past
- Episode 4: Peter Caddick-Adams fields your questions on D-Day
- Episode 3: Miles Russell answers the big questions about Roman Britain
- Episode 2: Tracy Borman takes on questions about the Tudors
- Episode 1: Marc Morris tackles some of the big questions about the Normans
]]>Who were Queen Victoria's children? Everything you need to know about her sons and daughtershttps://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/queen-victoria-prince-albert-children-who-names-sons-daughters-facts-motherhood-parents/2020-04-14T14:25:00.000ZWhen Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha on 10 February 1840, she wanted at least one year of “happy enjoyment” before starting a family. She hated and dreaded the thought of childbearing, and yet within a few weeks of her wedding she was pregnant. On 21 November that year, a child – the first of nine – was born. When the doctor informed Victoria that she had a princess, she answered firmly that “the next will be a prince”.
Despite any initial disappointment at not immediately presenting her husband and kingdom with a son and heir, Victoria was delighted to have a daughter. Later she would tell this princess – who was by then a mother herself – that “sometimes one buys experience with one’s first child and therefore a girl is sometimes better”. Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, Princess Royal – briefly nicknamed ‘Pussy’ and then a few years later ‘Vicky’ – was the delight of her parents, and would always remain her father’s favourite child.
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- Queen Victoria’s voracious appetite for food and sex
The queen did not intend to fulfil her promise of a prince so quickly, and was furious to discover soon after the first was christened that she was expecting again. Within less than a year, on 9 November 1841, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, joined the nursery. This time, Victoria suffered from severe postnatal depression, and many months elapsed before she became pregnant with her next child. Alice Maud Mary was born on 25 April 1843, and Alfred Ernest Albert on 6 August 1844. Two daughters followed: Helena Augusta Victoria on 25 May 1846, and Louise Caroline Alberta on 18 March 1848. The two youngest sons were Arthur William Patrick Albert, born on 1 May 1850, and Leopold George Duncan Albert, on 7 April 1853. The baby of the family was Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore, born on 14 April 1857.
Despite their differences in personality and occasional sibling jealousy, the children of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert remained close. They were always mutually supportive – even after marriages to European princes and princesses sometimes led to differing national loyalties.
But how much do you know about each of Queen Victoria’s sons and daughters? Here’s a brief guide to each of the monarch’s children…
Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, Princess Royal
Born: 21 November 1840
Died: 5 August 1901 (aged 60)
Victoria and Albert’s first born, Victoria, or ‘Vicky’, was a precocious child with a passion for learning and a mischievous sense of humour – although she could also be emotional and highly-strung. She inherited her father’s analytical mind and love of reading, and always remained the apple of his eye. Although Queen Victoria was very fond of her, with characteristic honesty she admitted that her first born was sometimes a difficult daughter: “A more insubordinate and unequal-tempered child and girl I think I never saw!” the queen once wrote to a 17-year-old Vicky.
In 1858 the young Victoria married Prince Frederick William of Prussia, later German Emperor Frederick III. The marriage brought her into conflict with two of her siblings – the Prince of Wales and Alice – whose marriages into the royal and ducal families of Denmark and Hesse respectively placed them on the losing side during the wars of conquest of the Prussian minister-president and later German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Although the bonds between brother and sisters always remained strong, the division of national loyalties resulted in some painful moments during family visits when all three were staying at Windsor at the same time, to the extent that Queen Victoria sometimes had to forbid any conversation about contentious issues in her presence.
Some 30 years after marrying Victoria, Frederick would ascend the throne while dying from throat cancer, no longer able to speak above a whisper. He died following a reign of just three months, taking with him hopes of a united liberal Germany that would be a staunch ally of Britain. In Frederik’s place came William II, Europe’s unstable bête noire, who professed to admire Britain while secretly regarding her as a rival for German supremacy in Europe. It would later be the fate of another grandson of Queen Victoria, King George V, to witness Britain and Germany declare war on each other in 1914.
When Queen Victoria died at Osborne House in January 1901, she was surrounded by most of her surviving children and several grandchildren. However, Vicky – now the widowed Empress Frederick – was notably absent from her mother’s deathbed. Suffering from cancer of the spine and too ill to travel back to England from Germany, she died seven months after her mother, on 5 August 1901.
Albert Edward, Prince of Wales
Born: 9 November 1841
Died: 6 May 1910 (aged 68)
Victoria and Albert named their second child Albert Edward, although he was known as ‘Bertie’ and then Edward VII after he succeeded the throne. As a child, Bertie was an outgoing prince who did not respond well to his lessons – much to the disappointment of his parents, who wanted him to be just like his studious, well-read father. In personality Bertie resembled his mother more, and she would lament that he was her “caricature”.
As heir to the throne, Bertie was not allowed to pursue an active career in the army, although he was granted honorary appointments and briefly attended manoeuvres in Ireland at the age of 20. While there he had a brief liaison with an actress, Nellie Clifden. When the relationship came to the notice of his parents, Prince Albert – whose morals were always above reproach –took the transgression very much to heart. Already seriously ill at the time, Prince Albert died on 14 December 1861, probably from typhoid fever. At first Victoria hysterically blamed their son for breaking his father’s heart, and relations between the pair were distant for a while. Victoria never ceased to bemoan his love of society and ‘good living’, but in time she readily admitted that he was “so full of good and amiable qualities that it makes one forget and overlook much that one would wish different”.
- Listen | Jane Ridley reveals some lesser-known aspects of Queen Victoria's life
Following the death of his mother in 1901, Bertie – now King Edward VII – defied expectations by proving himself to be a very successful and well-loved monarch, paving the way for an alliance with France. The French had been wholeheartedly on the side of the Boers during their war with Britain at the turn of the century, but the king charmed president, ministers and citizens alike on a goodwill visit to Paris in 1903.
Notorious for his hearty appetite, King Edward was in increasingly poor health during his later years – he suffered in particular from a chronic bronchial condition – and died from heart problems in May 1910, at the age of 68.
Princess Alice Maud Mary, Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhine
Born: 25 April 1843
Died: 14 December 1878 (aged 35)
From an early age, Alice was an exceptionally caring individual, always keen to help others less fortunate than herself. When the family stayed at Balmoral, their private home in the Scottish Highlands, she would sometimes visit the local cottagers, taking them food and clothing. Later, when her father, Prince Albert, was clearly dying, she spent much of her time looking after him and trying to make his last days comfortable. After his death, she provided unstinting moral support to her grief-stricken mother.
Alice married Prince Louis of Hesse and the Rhine in 1862, and in 1866 and 1870 Alice’s nursing skills were put to good use during Germany’s wars against Austria and France. A thoughtful, ever-questioning personality, she became friends with the theologian David Friedrich Strauss. His unorthodox views on Christianity made him a controversial figure, and Alice’s association with him led to her being dismissed by some as an atheist.
A combination of overwork and profound depression after the death of her young son Frederick – a haemophiliac who died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of two – left Alice world-weary and in poor health. In 1878, at the age of 35, she succumbed to diphtheria – on the anniversary of her father’s death. She was the first of Victoria and Albert’s children to die.
Alfred Ernest Albert, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
Born: 6 August 1844
Died: 30 July 1900 (aged 55)
Victoria and Albert’s second son, Alfred – or ‘Affie’ – was a cheerful, industrious boy; a keen learner who particularly liked geography and the sciences, experimenting with toys and later building his own. In letters to close family and confidantes, Prince Albert occasionally remarked with regret that this second son would never inherit the crown, unless anything happened to his elder brother. Alfred was made Duke of Edinburgh in 1866.
Having joined the navy at the age of 14 in 1858, Alfred steadily rose through the ranks to become an admiral of the fleet. In 1862, after the Greeks deposed their unpopular and childless king Otho, Alfred was overwhelmingly elected in a plebiscite to succeed him, but political considerations ruled out the possibility of a British prince accepting such a position.
Alfred shared Bertie’s taste for society life: in 1867, partly to keep him out of mischief, he was sent on an extensive round-the-world voyage during which he visited several countries as the queen’s representative. At an official function in Sydney, Australia, he almost fell victim to an assassination plot. Henry James O’Farrell – an Irishman seeking vengeance after the execution of three members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood for their role in a terrorist explosion in London – shot and wounded him. Although Alfred recovered quickly, he nonetheless curtailed his world trip and was sent back to England to recover. He resumed his travels in 1868, visiting Australia again; Fiji; Japan; India and South America, returning to England nearly three years later.
Alfred played the violin throughout his life (having taught himself as a child) – although he reputedly sometimes played “with exuberant originality, but with little regard for the score”. The first member of the royal family to take an interest in postage stamps, he laid the foundations for the Royal Philatelic Collection. Having been chosen as heir to his childless uncle Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Alfred succeeded to the duchy on the latter’s death in 1893.
Alfred’s marriage to Grand Duchess Marie of Russia (whom he married in 1874) proved unhappy, and in his later life he suffered from alcoholism. He died from cancer in July 1900, predeceasing his mother by six months.
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Princess Helena Augusta Victoria
Born: 25 May 1846
Died: 9 June 1923 (aged 77)
Helena, described as the plainest of Victoria and Albert’s five daughters, was a level-headed, relatively unemotional child; a tomboy who preferred outdoor life, long walks and rides, and cared little for her personal appearance. In 1866 she wed the impoverished German Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, who was content to make his home in England with her under the ever-watchful eye of Queen Victoria. As a result, Helena was spared the sadness that her sister Alice had known of living in a small defeated German state.
Helena worked extensively with a number of charities – including the Ladies' Committee of the newly-founded British Red Cross; the Royal British Nurses' Association; and the Royal School of Needlework – and helped to provide free dinners for children and the unemployed in the Windsor area. She also helped to write a biography of Prince Albert, translating letters from German to English for the author Charles Grey, and published an English translation of The Memoirs of Wilhelmine, Margravine of Bayreuth, a distant relative.
After a severe bout of influenza and several heart attacks, she died in June 1923.
- “Nothing could have gone off better”: the wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert
- Who was Queen Victoria’s sister Feodora? (from RadioTimes.com)
Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, Duchess of Argyll
Born: 18 March 1848
Died: 3 December 1939 (aged 91)
In contrast to Helena, Louise was considered the prettiest of Victoria’s daughters. She was always lively – sometimes sharp-tongued and moody – and was a skilled artist who excelled at drawing, painting and sculpture. She was a fervent supporter of the arts and higher education, and was in some ways the most forward-looking of the family, supporting female equality in education and employment.
Determined to pursue an artistic career (as much as her royal status would allow), Louise was the first member of the family to attend a public education institution – the National Art Training School. Among her greatest works are a statue of Queen Victoria in her coronation robes, erected in Kensington Gardens; a memorial on the Isle of Wight to her brother-in-law Prince Henry of Battenberg, who died from malaria in January 1896; and memorials to colonial soldiers killed in the Boer War, which can be found in St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
Louise married John Campbell, later the 9th Duke of Argyll, on 21 March 1871. Campbell sat at Westminster as a Liberal MP and later as a Liberal Unionist, and also served as governor general of Canada. It was a childless marriage in which they spent much time apart – although they seemed to remain good friends. Campbell was reputed to be gay, and Louise’s occasional flirtations with other men at court sometimes prompted innuendo and gossip from those who suspected she was indulging in clandestine affairs.
Louise, like her sister Helena, remained busy throughout her life with charity work. She died in 1939 at the age of 91.
Arthur William Patrick Albert
Born: 1 May 1850
Died: 16 January 1942 (aged 91)
Arthur, who later became Duke of Connaught and of Strathearn in 1874, was a strong, healthy baby who had an even temper without the irritability or tantrums of some of his siblings, and was courageous without being reckless. Always good-mannered and obedient, Arthur was said to be the queen’s favourite; when he was aged eight, Victoria wrote to her husband that Arthur was “dear, dearer than any of the others put together, thus after you he is the dearest and most precious object to me on Earth”.
As a child, Arthur said that he was going to be a soldier when he grew up – a dream that he fulfilled. He joined the army at the age of 16 and went on to have a distinguished career that included military service in South Africa, Egypt and India. He eventually became inspector-general of the British forces and finally governor general of Canada.
Throughout his life, as during childhood, Arthur rarely caused the queen any trouble or anxiety. He had a rare gift for getting on well with all members of the family, not least his nephew William, the last German Emperor, who often irritated the rest of his relations. Alfred was in Berlin in January 1901 when he learned that his mother was seriously ill, and the emperor insisted on travelling back to England with him, reportedly full of jokes and good humour, telling his suite that “Uncle Arthur is so downhearted we must cheer him up”.
Even in old age Arthur continued to serve in a military capacity, although he had largely withdrawn from public life by the time of his 80th birthday. Outliving his wife (Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia) and two of their three children, he died in 1942 at the age of 91.
Leopold George Duncan Albert
Born: 7 April 1853
Died: 28 March 1884 (aged 30)
Prince Leopold, created Duke of Albany in 1881, was a clever, amusing child who learned to read quickly and adored music and the arts. Sadly, he was also his parents’ “child of anxiety”. At first he suffered from weak digestion and was very thin; bruised easily and suffered greatly whenever he fell over. It was later discovered that he had haemophilia, a condition that prevents blood from clotting properly, which meant that any accident could for Leopold prove fatal.
Because of his poor health, Leopold was prevented from following a service career. He was, however, allowed to study at Oxford University, later becoming a patron of the arts and literature and, for a while, unofficial secretary to his mother. Victoria always remained protective of Leopold, much to his irritation, and sometimes he openly defied her out of sheer devilry. Once, for example, he refused to accompany her on her annual visit to Balmoral, on the grounds that he was always “bored” there. His mother reluctantly allowed him to spend a few days in Paris instead, and on arrival there he announced that he would stay for a full fortnight.
Leopold surprised his mother by not only living to maturity but also marrying, his bride being Princess Helena of Waldeck-Pyrmont. The couple married in 1882 and had two children: Alice, later Countess of Athlone; and Charles, later Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Sadly, Leopold never lived to see the birth of his son, as he died suddenly at the age of 30 after a fall and subsequent brain haemorrhage.
Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore
Born: 14 April 1857
Died: 26 October 1944 (aged 87)
Beatrice, who was called ‘Baby’ by her mother well into adult life, was always treated indulgently. She was inclined to be mildly impertinent – but with a charm that allowed her to get away with it without fear of scolding. When told at the dinner table that she was not allowed certain foods, for example, she helped herself regardless, mimicking her mother’s voice as she insisted, “but she likes it, my dear”.
At the age of five, Beatrice announced that she did not like weddings and would never be married herself but would instead stay with Victoria. For the next 20 years it looked as if she might keep her promise, until in 1884 she fell in love with Prince Henry of Battenberg (whose elder brother Louis had recently married one of her nieces) and insisted she would become his wife. Queen Victoria was astonished, and for a number of weeks relations between mother and daughter were strained.
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However, when the rest of the family supported their sister – and told their mother that Beatrice had every right to lead her own life – Victoria relented. Beatrice was permitted to marry on condition that she and Henry lived with the queen. He agreed with good grace, but after a few years he became restless, bored with his uneventful domestic family life at court, and longed to serve his country in a more active capacity. Having joined a military expedition to Africa in 1895, he caught malaria and was sent back to England – but to the family’s devastation he died on the journey home.
Following the death of Prince Albert in 1861, Beatrice remained for a long time her widowed mother’s constant companion. Beatrice’s final years were clouded by ill-health, but she lived a long life and died in 1944 at the age of 87.
John Van der Kiste is the author of numerous books on Queen Victoria, including Queen Victoria’s Family (1982); Queen Victoria’s Children (1986); and Sons, Servants and Statesmen: The Men in Queen Victoria’s Life (2006).
This article was first published by HistoryExtra in February 2019
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