SYMHC Classics: Victoria and Albert

We're looking back at an episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina. She's one of Britain's best-loved queens, but Victoria's parentage made her an unlikely heir. When she became queen at 18, she rebelled from her upbringing. But an early marriage to her cousin Albert changed the way she lived and ruled.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday everyone. Since Valentine's Day is coming up soon,
we thought we would take a moment to look back
at a historical love story, and that is Victoria and Albert.
Courtesy of previous hosts Sarah and Bablina. Victoria is definitely
one of our problematic favorites. I'm very open that she's
a problematic ruler and a fascinating woman, and I love

(00:23):
her despite her many flaws. But this episode is really
focused on the two of them and their relationship and
how they got together, rather than her time is Monarch
or the greater story of what was happening in the world.
There are some scandals mentioned, though, including the Lady Flora
Hasting scandal that we have done a whole episode on,
but otherwise, enjoy a royal love story. Welcome to Stuff

(00:45):
you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm
Deblina Chalk Rebording. And to me, it really seems like
Queen Victoria is our classic background podcast character. We've joked
before that she just pops up when you least expect her.

(01:07):
She really does. I think somebody even suggested once that
we have some stock music noise or whenever Queen Victoria appears,
but until recently, she hadn't gotten a podcast to herself.
Earlier this spring, we finally did an episode on Victoria
focusing on her last great friendship, which was a relationship
with her Indian teacher of Dual Kareem, and that was

(01:29):
sort of a strange, lesser known side of Victoria's life,
and it was also late in her life. By the
time Kareem knew Victoria, she was an elderly woman. In
the period we focused on was she was in her
seventies and her eighties. It was it was late in
Victoria's reign. Yeah, but listeners are usually more interested in
the queen's early years, probably largely because of the recent

(01:49):
film Young Victoria, which I'm sure a lot of listeners
have seen. It's all about romance, ribbons and no nine
kids in the picture yet for Victoria and Albert. So
we're going to talk about that side of Victoria's life,
her romance with her husband specifically, but we'll also revisit
one of our common themes, which is that of the
sad Royal childhood and to understand that we have to

(02:11):
first look at why Victoria became a queen in the
first place. Yeah, so it's pretty remarkable that the throne
went to Victoria because her father was the fourth adult
son of George the Third. Usually, if you have that
many kids, the throne isn't going to go to the
daughter of the fourth son. However, George the third sons
weren't that inclined to marry and produce legitimate offspring at least,

(02:33):
so consequently those crisis developed in eighteen seventeen. So George
the Third and his wife Charlotte had fifteen children, and
for many years their eldest son had acted as regent
for his insane father. He was known as the Prince
Regent and later George the Fourth. So the Prince Regent
had a legit air of his own, a daughter named Charlotte,

(02:54):
and for a long time she was really the darling
of the country, and it really seemed like the succession
was guaranteed when she married the future King of the Belgians, Leopold.
But in eighteen seventeen and age twenty one, she died
in childbirth and her son was stillborn, So two generations
right there wiped out at one time and the country
went into a deep morning. Okay, so there's still airs,

(03:16):
though it wasn't like they're just are no children around.
But the Airs are mostly middle aged princes and they
don't have kids, so the race is off. The first
prince of the blood, the first son of George, the
third um to make an air, gets his debts canceled
by the Prince Regent. So a pretty good deal because

(03:36):
a lot of these guys are into gambling and fast
living anyways. Yeah, but it's not as easy as it seems, right, No,
it's not at all. So the Prince Regent will obviously
start with him. He's the eldest son. He was separated
from his wife, so there's no chance there of another air.
The same went for the next in line, the Duke
of York, and after him there's the Duke of Clarence,

(03:56):
the third son, so he took took the challenge up,
if you could call it that, and he married a
German princess, but unfortunately none of their children survived infancy.
So the next son in line, it all came down
to the Duke of Kent, and he dumped his longtime
mistress and married a woman who had already had children,

(04:19):
so he knew she was fertile. Victoria Mary Louisa, who
was the daughter of the Duke of Saxe Coburg Salfeld,
and she was also the widow of German Prince so Bingo,
we have our winners in this couple. Finally. Yeah, it
sounds so unromantic when you say fertile when you put
it that way, but that is what it was all about.

(04:40):
Going and once the Duchess became pregnant, the Duke of
Kent started making plans for the child to be born
on English soil. They'd been living in Bavaria at the time,
and he wrote that they need to get back in
order to quote render the child my wife bears virtually
as well as legally English. But the Regent hadn't exactly
followed through on that whole cancel your debt steal and

(05:02):
the Duke couldn't find the funds to move his entourage
until March of eighteen nineteen, and so by the time
the duchess actually got back on English soil, she was
already eight months along. Yeah, they had trouble getting lodgings too,
because these brothers, the Prince Regent and the Duke of
Kent really didn't get along very well, but the Prince
Regent does grant them apartments in Kensington Palace, and on

(05:23):
May eighteen nineteen, Alexandrina Victoria was born, and she was
this big, healthy baby and things looked promising. She got
her name though, the Alexandrina, apart from her godfather, who
was the Russians, are Alexander the first and the story
behind that is is kind of strange and also further
speaks to this feud between the brothers. The Regent had

(05:44):
forbidden Victoria's parents to use any of the standard names
that royal baby girls were being called, Charlotte Elizabeth Georgina
can kind of see his rationale behind Charlotte not having
the new air named the same thing as his these daughter,
but still a weird stipulation, and as a result, the
people of England still weren't entirely sure what her name

(06:07):
was even up to the morning of her accession at
age eighteen. Yeah, Alexandrina or Victoria, even though she had
actually always gone by Victoria as a girl in her home.
But the little princess was really born just in the
nick of time though for this family, because only eight
months after her birth, her father, the Duke of Kent, died,

(06:27):
and so six days after that, George the Third died,
and that made the Prince Regent finally George the fourth,
and that made Victoria third in line to the throne,
after her two uncles. But she gets even closer as
the years go by and these uncles start to to
die off. When the eldest of the two uncles died
in she was obviously one step closer, and eventually, when

(06:50):
George the Fourth died and her uncle, the Duke of Clarence,
became William the Fourth, Victoria was next in line from
the throne. So from birth she was is to be
a likely queen, although not a guaranteed queen. It you
still didn't know if somebody might have a kid between
her birth and when she came to the throne. Yeah,

(07:11):
but it's interesting even though she was raised as a
queen the whole time, nobody really told her of her
position until she was about ten years old. Though. There's
that classic story where she had a family tree inserted
into a history book and studied it and suddenly pronounced,
I will be good, And so that's probably likely untrue. Yeah,
there are two competing versions if that story. It's a

(07:32):
pretty good story, but it's a little hard to back up.
And Victoria herself remember the realization as being a lot
more dramatic. And that makes sense to me for this
girl who was not raised to to know she was
going to be queen. She said, I cried much on
learning it and even deplored this contingency. Yeah, but it
seems like a really natural reaction, as you pointed out,
because her life turned out to be pretty rigid because

(07:54):
of this future of hers um. She had lots of lessons,
languages like Italian and writing, history, music, drawing, arithmetic, geography, religion,
she learned all kinds of things. Yeah, so maybe that
wasn't so bad, but it did make her life pretty busy.
But she also didn't get a lot to eat. She
had bread and milk served to her in a silver bowl,

(08:15):
and she had a really early bedtime, lots of exercise,
and most notably strict isolation. Yeah, so we could we
could add the lessons and the not much food in
the early bedtime and the exercise into the that's kind
of standard for the lives of many British aristocratic children
of this time. But this strict isolation was something unique,

(08:37):
and it was the design of her mother's companion and adviser,
a guy named Sir John Conroy, and the Duchess herself,
and they called it the Kensington system, and it was
the way Victoria was brought up. It was a course
of rigorous private studies and isolation from her peers. And consequently,
Victoria's main companion during her early years was her elder

(09:00):
half sister, Fyodora, her her mother's daughter by her first marriage.
And after Fyodora left to Mary, since she was quite
a few years older than Victoria, Victoria was pretty distraught
and turned to her governess, a woman named Louise Lateson,
and she really became her main companion and just sort
of heard her defense against her, this conniving Conroy character,

(09:24):
who was such a strong influence in her household. Yeah,
and she really needed it, because Conroy even kept her
away from her own family. He encouraged the Duchess to
keep Victoria away from her quote wicked uncles, and by
isolating Victoria from her paternal family, the royal family, right,
Conroy hoped to create a better position for himself should

(09:45):
William the Fourth die before Victoria's majority, and that was
really the plan because hopefully, if hopefully her Conroy, if
William the fourth died, then the Duchess of Kent would
become regent, and because Conroy controlled the Duchess of Kent,
he would essentially rule in Glenn. So it was all
a play for power, definitely, And at one point, when
Victoria was sick with a serious illness, Conroy and the

(10:06):
Duchess even tried to pressure the sixteen year old princess
into extending her minority from aged eighteen to age twenty one.
She refused, though, yeah, with the help of her governess.
Actually that was something that really endeared the woman to her.

(10:28):
But the Kensington system obviously couldn't maintain this strict privacy constantly.
I mean, she was a queen to be and so
in eighteen thirty, the Duchess of Kent decided that she
wanted to sort of validate her own education system but
also show off her daughter to Victoria's future people. So
she set up this series of examinations by three clerics,

(10:49):
and Victoria performed really well. The Duchess was valid validated
because I think the cleric said, yeah, we couldn't you
couldn't do anything better. She's being educated just as she
should be. Um. But the Duchess also arranged for Victoria
to travel some and see her country, and that was
pretty pretty major event in young Victoria's life. Yeah. And
in eighteen thirty two, before Victoria toward the Midlands and

(11:13):
North Wales, she was given a journal by her mother
and she kept a journal for the rest of her life.
I think we talked about that a lot in the
Victoria abdual Caream episode, so we know that she eventually
even starts die like journaling in Hindustani, which is pretty impressive. Yeah.
But what's interesting is when you look at these early journals,
sometimes the politely restrained entries in Victoria's journals of that

(11:35):
time period contrast with the quote behavior books that she
kept from eighteen thirty and on for her governess. And
these books, basically, I mean you told me a little
bit about them, Sarah. It's basically like her governess wanted
her to judge herself, so write down her her opinion
on her conduct, on her how she performed in her

(11:57):
studies for the day, and do that every single day,
so a real self judgment. So just to illustrate some
of the differences you'd see between the two sometimes um
In one Behavior Book entry from September thirty two, she
wrote that she had been very very, very very horribly
naughty with many exclamation points, all caps, all caps. But
on the same day as the horribly naughty entry, all

(12:19):
she wrote in her own journal is that the heat
was intolerable. Yeah, So, I mean, I think this gives
you sort of a sense of Victoria as a young girl.
She's she's sort of dramatic. She has this dramatic flare
to her, maybe melodramatics. And would say, but she's also
good at at either concealing things or or just sort
of sort of playing it cool, you know, not divulging

(12:41):
everything in her journals, maybe because I don't know, afraid
a parent might read it, or just practicing for the
restraint she would need as queen. So she had a
lonely childhood, but not a completely miserable one. She had
a ton of pets. She liked plain dress up, she
liked writing. She compositions inspired by popular novels, and she

(13:02):
also watercolored and would paint costumes and poses after attending
the theater or concerts. And she was also strongly attached
to her uncle Leopold, her mother's brother and the one
time husband of the Charlotte who had died in childbirth,
the one we mentioned earlier in this episode. He lived
in Surrey until becoming King of the Belgians in eighteen
thirty one, and it's through Leopold's work that she meets

(13:24):
her future match. Yeah, so, only three months after Victoria's birth,
her mother and Leopold's other brother, the Duke of Saxe
Coburg Saalfeld, also had a child named Albert, and it's
it's really kind of cute. Victoria is born at the
beginning of the summer and Albert's born at the end
of the summer. But Albert was the second son with
no fortune coming his way, so all along from his birth,

(13:47):
his family kind of hoped for this match with cousin
Victoria since she clearly had some good things coming to her.
So for Victoria's seventeenth birthday, the plans there. The family
starts to try to put this and into action, and
Albert and his brother Ernest and his father all visited England.
But Albert was kind of an awkward teen at this point.

(14:08):
He sounds really awkward. Actually, he had fainting spells. Um,
he didn't really like dancing. And Victoria was was sort
of a vivacious young girl, even though she was raised
in such strict isolation, and she really had more of
a crush on these three visiting Persian princes anyway, so
we're gonna put Albert on the back burner. He didn't

(14:29):
make a great first impression, but apparently she put him
on the back burner as well. She did too, But um,
we need to move on anyways, because Victoria had some
pretty big changes coming her way. Yes Early on June
twentie thirty seven, King William the Fourth died. He had
managed to stay alive just long enough for his niece
to reach majority. She was barely eighteen when he passed away,

(14:52):
and after being told of her new position, Victoria met
with the Privy Council and they were really impressed with her.
She carried herself well, she spoke well. Plus it was
sort of romantic to have this teenage queen well. And
she's really an unknown quantity at this point because of
the Kensington system and the way she's been raised. But
for Victoria it was just a total relief. She was

(15:13):
free at last, and she moved to Buckingham Palace and
for the first time she had a room to herself.
And she's sort of on bad terms with her mother
because of the way she had brought John Conroy into
her life and all of that, and pushed her mother
away into far away apartments in Buckingham Palace and sent
Conroy off entirely and really enjoyed her independence and sort

(15:35):
of lived it up as you might expect a teenager too,
but later said it was the least sensible and satisfactory
time in her whole life. So she she clearly realized
that she overindulged a little bit in her newfound freedom,
didn't maybe take her role as seriously as as she
wish she had later, and there were some errors that

(15:56):
she made in that early period. She started a close
relationship up, for example, with Lord Melbourne, then Prime Minister.
He boosted herself confidence but also shaped her politics. She
became a Whig at this time and taught her to
partly ignore social problems or write them off as the
issues of agitators. Yeah, and that partisanship, which, of course
the Queen was not supposed to be avertly partisan like

(16:19):
that really led to trouble, and two crises broke out
in eighteen thirty nine, and the first was the Hastings affair.
And this is just sort of a scandalous would be
pregnancy story, but basically Victoria forced Lady Flora Hastings, who
was a maid of honor with Tory connection, so divergent
from Victoria's own politics, to undergo a pregnancy examination and

(16:44):
it turned out that Hastings was not pregnant. That was
sort of scandal number one. Then within a year, Hastings
died of a tumor that hadn't been diagnosed by Victoria's physician,
scandal number two. While that's going on, though, there's another
another issue brewing. Yeah, the bed Chamber crisis, which occurred
when Melbourne resigned in eighteen thirty nine and was replaced

(17:05):
by Conservative Sir Robert Peel. But Victoria wanted to keep
her old wig ladies of the bed chamber, so Peel
wouldn't take office, and this caused a huge scandal. Yeah,
so Victoria's desire to be independent, that's probably kind of
at root of the two scandals we just mentioned, but
independent as in single too, and that desire did not

(17:26):
go over well with Parliament with her people, she needed
an air so Victoria reluctantly started to interview eligible Protestant
princes and it was kind of slim pickings. So in
eighteen thirty nine she invited cousin Albert back to England
from his studies at the University of Bonn. And he's
not an awkward teenagerney more. Victoria's smitten. She wrote in

(17:49):
her journal, Albert really is quite charming and so extremely handsome,
a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waste.
My heart is quite going. Yeah, he was the one
and she liked what she saw, and since he was
not allowed to Victoria proposed marriage just a few days later,
and the couple were married that February February eighteen forty

(18:11):
and it wasn't the most popular marriage match that could
have been, at least at first. Parliament wasn't pleased that
the crown was about to get even more German. That's
how they saw. The couple even spoke German at home,
so that was a big deal. And also the British
aristocracy found Albert to be overly moral, to academic and
to artistic. But the marriage also ironed out some of

(18:32):
Victoria's controversy before. We're happy at least that she was
married and there would be an heir in the future. Yeah,
and it's certainly changed the way Victoria planned to rule,
which we're going to look at as well. Yeah, and
this is about where the movie Young Victoria leaves off.
I think they have the conjoined desks, and it's super cute,
but that's not exactly how things were going. So the

(18:56):
desks did exist, though, I was pleased to warn that.
So for the first few Victoria was really determined to
stay independent. She she liked ruling on her own, and
so they did work at those conjoined tandem desks, but
Albert only got to block her signature, which for a
very ambitious and talented and educated man, this was pretty frustrating.

(19:27):
Of course, we all know Victoria starts to have lots
of kids, and biology really changed the course of things
for her. She got pregnant within weeks of the wedding,
and bit by bit, Albert started to take on more
important tasks. He would send dispatches, he'd attend meetings with ministers.
He even got the key to the secret boxes, and

(19:48):
over time he also started to change the way Victoria
thought about things and affect her politics. Even her governess
was dismissed, who had been the former main influence in
her life. And in eighteen forty two there was an
attempt on her life, and and the kids just kept
on coming to right, well, there were so many of them,

(20:09):
were just going to list off their names really quickly.
Princess Royal Victoria also known as Vicky, Prince of Wales,
um the later Edward the seventh, Princess Alice, Prince Alfred,
Princess Helena, Princess Louise, Prince Arthur, Prince Leopold, and Princess Beatrice,
and the grandchildren started arriving only two years after her
last child was born, so she did not have a

(20:32):
gap in mothering so to speak. No, she really didn't.
And because she was out of commission so much of
every year, every single year, Albert really took on an
almost regent like role, and he did in fact get
a regency bill that allowed him to act in the
event of Victoria's death or in capacity. But by ET five,
an observer named Charles Greville wrote, quote, it is obvious

(20:55):
that while she has the title, he is really discharging
the functions of the sovereign. He is the king to
all intents and purposes, and Albert saw his role though
as adviser to the Queen. As he later told the
Duke of Wellington, his goal was to quote to be
the natural head of the family, superintendent of her household,
manager of her private affairs, her sole confidential advisor in politics,

(21:19):
and only assist in her communications with the officers of
the government, her private secretary and permanent minister. But he
do all that at the expense of his own identity
and pretty much working himself to death in the process.
So he wasn't going after titles or were public recognition.
He just wanted to play this role and do it

(21:40):
for Victoria and to to hopefully do good at least
that's has that That's how he saw it. So their marriage, though,
was generally considered to be a happy one and something
that really set a model for people in the Victorian era.
They focused heavily on educating their children. They had these
sort of middle class tastes, especially Victor Coria, because Albert did,

(22:01):
after all, really like science and technology and art and
that sort of thing. But Victoria liked reading Dickens novels
and going to circuses and seeing wax works that sort
of thing. And the couple also liked their privacy, and
they're really famous for that. Albert built residences at Osborne
and Balmoral Castle for them to escape too, and and

(22:21):
as we I think we mentioned in the Cream Abduel episode,
those retreats really become even more important maybe to Victoria
in her in her later life right. But Victoria also
shouldn't be thought of as a model Victorian wife and
mother figure. She had serious postpartum depression at times, and
she did not like being pregnant, and she really didn't

(22:42):
like babies that much in general, she didn't even really
like kids. She called pregnancy the quote shadow side of
marriage and compared herself to a cow or dog while
she was pregnant. So that's kind of shocking, i'd say,
coming from someone who her identity is all to hide.
With these family portraits of her and Albert and all

(23:03):
of their little tiny kids sitting around the Christmas tree
or sitting around at home relaxing, it does seem different.
But I mean it's just to show that this couple
had an effect on on their country, for sure, But
they also led a private personal life too. Yeah, but
part of her dislike of childbirth was that she wished
she had gotten more time with Albert alone. In late

(23:25):
eighteen sixty one, Albert, who was forty two years old
at the time but much older looking, raced off to
Cambridge to chastise his eldest son over an affair he'd
had with a prostitute. And after that, Albert pneumonia and
took to bed. Doctors diagnosed what he had as typhoid fever.
But that was probably a mistake, um modern analysis shows,

(23:45):
and there hadn't been typhoid fever in the area at all, right,
and so but at the time that's what they thought
it was. And they dosed him with brandy until he died.
And though Victoria always blamed the death on their son,
Albert had known for some time that he wasn't feeling
very well. So it was probably stomach cancer, I think,
is what we now think he had. He had definitely
been sick with something. But Victoria, as as we talked

(24:08):
about in the last episode, and as most people know,
went into deep mourning after Albert's death, and she she
said of him. Without Albert, everything loses its interest. But
we need to talk about their legacy too, because the
idea of the the happy couple of Victoria and Albert
almost emerges more after the fact, because while alive, Albert

(24:31):
had been often unpopular and sometimes even used as a
scapegoat because he was foreign. Victoria's decision to name him
as Prince Consort, for instance, in eighteen fifty seven, had
been terribly mocked. She tried to justify it by saying, well,
our adult children are going to start to outrank him
because he's a foreign prince. But people just thought it

(24:51):
was a ridiculous decision. But over time it became clear
that he had greatly assisted Victoria and helped shape her monarchy,
and that they're happy and wrong marriage had influenced the
country's tastes and morals, so people started to think on
the couple fondly, especially by the queen's old age and
by the height of her popularity. So the perception of
them together definitely changed over the years, and and looking

(25:13):
back to they left quite a legacy. Albert's grand achievement was,
of course, the eighteen fifty one Great Exhibition at the
Crystal Palace, and even over the years that people looking
back on that, realized what a high point it had
been for England. And another great legacy of theirs is
the Victoria and Albert Museum, which sort of originally came

(25:34):
out of the Great Exhibition, but was was named the
Victoria and Albert Museum really really late in Victoria's life,
clearly a sort of touching tribute for her. I'm sure
thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday.
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(25:56):
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(26:16):
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