Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (98 page)

A more extensive description can be found in the volume compiled long afterwards by Albrecht’s widow:

Distant about four miles from Coburg, it is charmingly placed on a knoll that rises abruptly… from a range of wooded hills which divide the lovely valley of the Itz from the broad and undulating plain… The knoll on which the house stands… falls precipitously on the east side to the Itz, and by a very steep descent on the other three sides to the plain…

The top forms a small plateau, on the southern edge of which stands the house, a solid oblong building… with high gable-ends. The entrance is in a round tower on the west side of the house, to which the approach ascends through a thick grove of young spruce firs… A broad winding staircase in the tower leads upwards to the principal rooms on the first floor, and downwards to the Marble Hall, or dining-room…

A small terrace-garden at the north end… commands a lovely view of the Itz, beyond which… the country is broken up into a succession of wooded hills and picturesque valleys, with… smiling, tidy villages standing in the middle of rich meadows and orchards, the hills gradually rising up to the highest points of the Thüringerwald…

The Marble Hall… opens on a small gravelled space, bounded by a neatly trimmed hedge of roses, and communicating… by a long and irregular flight of stone steps, with the walk along the banks of the [river] below. Standing on this space in the early morning… or in the afternoon… it is difficult to imagine anything more bright or enjoyable.

Prominent amongst the trees which grow and thrive at the Rosenau is the Abele poplar, of which there are many very good specimens here… This accounts at once for this tree having always been a favourite one with the Prince, for surely no man was ever endowed with a stronger feeling of love for all the recollections and associations of his youth, and of his native place.
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Albrecht would tell his wife that his childhood at Rosenau had been ‘paradise’. He and his older brother had been handed over at an early age to the care of a tutor called Christopher Florschütz, who attended the boys night and day, being responsible for all aspects of their upbringing:

The children soon discovered that Florschütz’s stern exterior hid a heart of gold. Although only twenty-five, he had already been… tutor to the two youngest sons of duke [Ernst]’s eldest sister, Alexander and Arthur Mensdorff. Many of duke [Ernst]’s old-fashioned friends deplored the choice of a man of known liberal principles… (later on, some of them even blamed Florschütz for letting them attend lectures in philosophy at Bonn, on the ground that such studies might lead to anarchy!) Mathematics and Latin formed the basis of Florschütz’s teaching… together with wide reading of modern literature in German, French and English. Florschütz spoke English well, so that [his younger pupil] was familiar with it from the age of four…

Florschütz… was a born teacher who [imparted] a love of learning for its own sake, and there is no doubt that [Albrecht]’s passionate interest in science was a direct result of having physics and chemistry presented to him in an interesting way as a boy… Above all, Florschütz taught them to go to the root of everything, to accept nothing at second hand, to use their eyes and to look about them for beauty in nature, art, literature and humanity.
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By speaking English with Florschütz, Albrecht would have learned for the first time to think of himself sometimes as Albert, and of his brother as Ernest; it was an important transition. He would have known from an early age that his paternal aunt, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, his father’s widowed sister, was now duchess of Kent and living in London with her three children. Having cousins in London, he would have seen the point of giving English an equal place in his studies with the more usual French. His diligence, aged fourteen, may be gauged from a timetable that he prepared for himself in 1833 (see p.
548
).

The paradise, however, had its dark side. Albert’s immediate family could not give him the warmth and encouragement on which children thrive. His father, the duke, was a shameless syphilitic rake, said to organize orgies in one of his other residences at Callenberg. He had brought a mistress from France, Mme Panam, whose insufferable son used the self-styled name of ‘prince de Coburg’, and whose memoirs, published in 1823, brought shame on all concerned.
¹⁴
Albert’s mother, the Duchess Louise, disgusted by her husband’s debauchery, chose a formal separation, even though this most cruelly forced her to abandon her children. When she was leaving, a large crowd of well-wishers gathered at Rosenau to see her off. Her sons, confined in the nursery with whooping cough, could not join them. In due course, she divorced and remarried, but died young, of cancer. She was replaced at Rosenau by the duke’s cousin and second wife, Antoinette-Marie of Württemberg, who failed to establish a warm relationship with her stepsons. Worse still, though they rarely quarrelled openly, Albert did not really find a soulmate in the elder brother, who shared his fate for more than twenty years:

These brothers, born in 1818 and 1819, were so dissimilar in character and appearance that there were mischievous rumours that the younger one was illegitimate… Almost from the day of his birth Albert’s beauty was remarked upon. ‘Lovely as a little angel,’ his mother recorded in his infancy. His eyes, like his mother’s, were deep blue and his curly hair was at first fair.

Albert’s brother Ernest ‘was as unattractive as Prince Albert was attractive. His complexion,’ ran [one] harsh description, ‘was sallow with liver spots, his eyes were bloodshot, and his lower teeth, like those of a bulldog, protruded far above his upper ones.’ He was ‘a mighty hunter of wine, women and song’. Even from their infancy, it was plainly evident that the elder son took after his father… while Albert strongly resembled his mother…

[Another relative] found it puzzling that [Prince Albert] turned out to have so fine a character ‘with such a father and such a brother, both equally unprincipled’. When Albert was still only four, his mother suddenly disappeared from his life for ever… it was typical of the boy, and later of the man, that he never uttered a bitter comment on this occurrence, and always thought of his mother with great tenderness.
¹⁵

Table 3. Albert’s timetable
¹⁶

The ‘mischievous rumours’ were generated by speculation that his mother may have indulged in a secret liaison before his birth, possibly with an army lieutenant or with a Jewish chamberlain at Coburg.
¹⁷
Closer examination of the circumstances leads to the unproven hypothesis that the child’s biological father could have been Prince Leopold, the future king of the Belgians and the most likely source of allegations designed to cover his own tracks.
¹⁸

Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Victoria of Kent were introduced to each other in May 1836 by their hopeful relatives. He was still sixteen; she had just passed her seventeenth birthday. ‘Uncle Leopold’, who by now was King Leopold, was brother both to Albert’s father and to Victoria’s mother; and it was he who arranged for his two Saxon nephews to travel to London to meet their cousin, already the heiress to the British throne. The scheme worked to perfection. Victoria wrote to her uncle thanking him for ‘the prospect of great happiness… in the person of dear Albert’. There was no question at this stage of an engagement. The old king, William IV, disapproved. But the emotional bond, at least on the girl’s side, was sealed.

Victoria’s family, the Hanoverians, were no less German than Albert’s, having consistently imported brides from Germany for all their heirs apparent, and they were even more painfully dysfunctional. Victoria, who had been conceived in Saxony and born in England,
*
was surrounded by German women in her infancy and only began English lessons from the age of five. She never knew her father, the duke of Kent, who died young; indeed, cruel gossip hinted that she, too, was not her father’s biological child.
¹⁹
Three of her four surviving paternal uncles, including the king, were estranged from their wives; bastard cousins proliferated;
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sexual and hereditary diseases, especially porphyria, were rampant; premature deaths were commonplace.
²¹
Victoria had only become heir apparent in 1830 because all three of her father’s older brothers died without legitimate issue. Her mother, the duchess of Kent, never gained a proper grasp of English; she had two older, German-speaking children from a previous marriage, and lived in London with a lover thinly disguised as her household comptroller;
*
†
she was jealous and overprotective of her latest offspring, preventing Victoria making friends and subjecting her to a repressive daily regime. Fearful of the illicit liaisons with which the royal court was riddled, she even forced her adolescent daughter to sleep with her in the same room. The lonely teenager, locked up in Kensington Palace for longer than she could remember, sought solace with her spaniel, Dash, and with her beloved governess, Louise Lehzen, a Coburger.

Victoria, in short, had much in common with her handsome Saxon cousin; and she determined to resist all alternative suitors. William IV died a year after his visit and she was crowned queen in 1838. Albert was invited back the following year. He meanwhile had been patiently studying at the University of Bonn, staying with Uncle Leopold in Brussels and undertaking a ‘Grand Tour’ of Italy. He arrived in Windsor on 15 October 1839, and the queen proposed marriage on the morning of the fourth day of his return. Her journal overflowed with superlatives:

Oh! to
feel
I was, and am loved by such an
Angel
as Albert was
too great a delight to describe!
He is
perfection
; perfection in every way – in beauty – in everything! I told him I was quite unworthy of him and kissed his dear hand – he said he would be very happy ‘
das Leben mit dir zu zubringen
’ and was so kind… it was the happiest, brightest moment of my life, which made up for all I had suffered and endured. Oh!
how
I adore and love him, I cannot say!!
²²

Albert’s account of the betrothal is contained in a letter which he wrote shortly afterwards to his grandmother, the dowager duchess of Gotha; it was to be translated into English for the authorized description of his early years compiled under Victoria’s supervision:

Liebe Grossmama…

The Queen sent for me alone to her room… and declared to me in a genuine outburst of love and affection (
in einem wahren Ergusse von Herzlichkeit und Liebe
) that I had gained her whole heart (
ich habe ihr ganzes Herz gewonnen
) and would make her intensely happy (
überglücklich
) if I would make her the sacrifice of sharing my life with her (
wenn ich das Opfer bringen wolle, mit ihr mein Leben zu theilen
)… ; the only thing that troubled her was that she did not think herself worthy of me (
das sie meiner nicht werth ware
)…
²³