The Best Laid Plans... Queen Victoria's Children

Victoria. A Queen in a passionate marriage with Prince Albert.

Yet behind closed doors, their domestic life was a battlefield.

Victoria and Albert had terrible rows.

Think of the worst row you've ever had with a partner,

and then magnify it.

But it wasn't the only stormy relationship in Victoria's life.

She had nine children who didn't always do what she wanted.

He had tantrums, he threw his book on the floor,

he pulled his brother's hair, he screamed, and he threw his pencil,

he was rude - I mean, he was really a sort of nightmare of a schoolboy.

In this series,

we will explore the turmoil and drama for Queen Victoria's children,

as they grew up struggling with domineering parents.

She expected them to be beaten

and to be made to understand how they should behave.

Victoria and Albert's dream of blissful domesticity

was vital to the values of the age,

and to rescuing the monarchy from the threat of revolution.

But it came at a huge personal cost.

She wanted to control the children's lives.

Somebody said, "The Queen is absolutely insane

"when it comes to asserting her own maternal authority."

Victoria and Albert wanted their children to strengthen

and redefine royalty for generations to come.

But their plan for the family led to a 60-year war...

between the children and their mother.

Christmas, Windsor, 1860.

Queen Victoria, her beloved husband Albert

and their nine children gathered round.

They exchanged presents.

Family games and billiards were played.

One visitor remembered...

"It was royalty putting aside its state and becoming in words,

"acts and deeds one of ourselves.

"I have never seen more real happiness than

"the scene of the mother and all her children."

It was a happy family image

that Victoria and Albert were determined to make popular.

They knew they had to find a fresh way of relating to their subjects.

The danger of revolution loomed large.

Many other European monarchies were threatened.

The Royal couple needed to save the British monarchy by connecting

with a middle class expanding with wealth and empire.

Their children were key to this plan.

Albert came up with this idea that

the Royal Family should be presented as respectable

and as a close-knit, loving family,

so from very, very early on,

you have a very strong image of a close-knit,

almost middle-class family.

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 behind the facade of this model family

was a hornet's nest of hostilities.

The Royal household was not this chocolate box image of gorgeousness

where everybody loved each other.

It was a place of simmering tension, huge resentments,

extraordinary conniving.

A family life riddled with conflict

was perhaps inevitable, given the couple's own experiences.

Prince Albert was born near Coburg, Germany, the son of a duke.

It was very hard in those days to find suitably upmarket candidates

to marry someone like Victoria. You know, they had to be without

stain on their character, they had to have an absolutely exemplary

background, which Albert fitted because he was very moral and very

upright and very dutiful, and there was not a stain on his character.

Victoria was probably the best catch in Europe at the time, I mean,

Queen of a huge and growing empire. She was an extraordinary catch for

a modest little Prince like Albert from this rather obscure duchy.

In 1839, the handsome German prince arrived at Windsor Castle

for an arranged meeting with his first cousin, the Queen.

From the start, their mutual passion was obsessive.

VICTORIA: "Oh! How I love him, how intensely, how tenderly,

"how ardently!"

-ALBERT:

-"Your image fills my whole soul.

"Even in my dreams, I never imagined that I should find

"so much love on Earth."

It wasn't love at first sight,

the relationship between Queen Victoria and Albert,

but it was pretty near to it.

The second time that they met, Queen Victoria rushed back

and said that she had seen Albert again and he is beautiful.

I mean, she was full of admiration for him,

and it was really a love match, I think, or the useful coincidence

of something that was politically useful.

But Albert was daunted by his role as a subject to his feisty Queen.

"My future lot is high and brilliant,

"but also plentifully strewn with thorns."

The young couple married the following year.

They faced a public with both a distrust of the monarchy

and an intense dislike for Albert,

who was seen as a humourless German intellectual.

One of the strange things was that in Victorian England

there were all sorts of rather obscene lampoons, one of which about

the wedding night went something like this,

that Albert entered by Bushey,

he...advanced through Maidenhead, penetrated Virginia Water,

and left Staines behind, er, not the sort of thing that

you'd expect in Victorian England, but it was a reflection,

I think, of the antipathy that Albert had created.

Here he was, this priggish, pompous foreigner

who'd arrived in order to exploit

the wealth and the dignity of Britain by marrying the Queen.

Victoria and Albert felt the pressures of being anything

but an ordinary couple.

They disagreed over the length of their honeymoon -

Victoria not wanting to be away from Buckingham Palace

and her Royal duties.

"Our position is very different from any other married couple.

"You forget, my dearest love, that I am the sovereign,

"and that business can stop and wait for nothing."

Although besotted with Albert,

Victoria did not concede any political power to him.

He complained...

"I am only the husband and not the master in my house."

And the power play was only just beginning.

I think she was very stroppy and argumentative,

and there is a funny comment Albert made not long after

he was married to her in 1840. He wrote home to his brother and

he said, "Well, Victoria's shaping up very well,

"she's only had two tantrums recently,"

and his attitude with her was sort of knocking her into line,

making her calm down, and be the dutiful meek little wife.

Within weeks of their marriage,

Victoria would give them both a project to work on.

She was pregnant.

The Royal couple's own experiences of family life had not been happy.

Albert's early years in Germany were over shadowed by the dramatic

collapse of his parents' marriage.

Well, he comes from a totally dysfunctional family,

and he had these traumas from childhood onwards

because his father more or less broke up the family.

He was cheating on his wife,

and discarded her when she got too old.

I mean, his father was having affairs with underage girls

and when his own wife was over 21, he just, you know, got rid of her.

And of course to have such a father is pretty awful,

and Albert wanted to love and respect him,

but at the same time resented him for all this that had happened.

So of course Albert wanted to be completely different,

he rebelled against the bad behaviour,

he wanted to be the model son, and later, father.

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.

"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!"

She goes through a period of referring to her mother as

"the Duchess", which would be rather like us calling our mothers

"Mrs Smith", I mean, so, so estranged.

She tells Melbourne in 1838

that she doesn't think Mama has ever loved her.

So she's beginning to become a mother herself just at a time

when her feelings about her mother are still very, very, very frosty.

With their own sad childhoods still fresh in their minds,

the couple resolved to create a happy family of their own -

a model for the dynasty and the nation.

They're determined, like all conscientious parents, that

they're going to make it better this time, they're in a sense going

to cure or heal their own childhoods by doing it right with their own

children and, you know, everybody, lots of us have been there,

it's a very, very common impulse to think that you can put right in

the next generation what went wrong in your own family life.

The first child, called Victoria but known as Vicky, was born in 1840.

The young Queen, busy with royal duties,

only saw her new daughter twice a day.

She did, however, make time to spend with Albert.

Queen Victoria was infatuated with Albert,

on a physical plane - she was excited by his good looks,

she adored watching him shave and put on his stockings,

and talked about the excitement of seeing nothing -

that there was nothing underneath them.

"He was so cold, dear angel, being in grande tenue with tight

"white casimere pantaloons, nothing under them, and high boots."

The unfortunate byproduct of this infatuation was, of course,

children! She didn't, they didn't, know anything about contraception,

and the children arrived with monotonous regularity.

Within a year of Vicky's birth, Albert Edward,

known as Bertie, was born.

"Our little boy is a wonderfully strong and large child.

"I hope and pray he may be like his dearest Papa.

"Vicky is not at all pleased with her brother."

Over the next five years, another three children appeared -

Alice, Alfred and Helena.

She didn't like babies, she always said they were horrible,

ugly little things and they were not even acceptable to look at

or hold till they were about six months old.

Queen Victoria later grumbled...

"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 frog-like action."

Victoria not only found her own babies repulsive,

she also refused to breastfeed them, having a...

"Totally insurmountable disgust for the process."

She installed a wet nurse in Buckingham Palace.

I think the idea of giving over her body for another six months,

for another 12 months, to these frog-like people is

absolutely disgusting to her.

I think the central relationship for her is always the one with

Albert - we know that they enjoyed a very vigorous sex life,

and I think she had that feeling that her breasts were,

as it were, were for Albert, they weren't for the children,

her breasts were sexual rather than maternal.

The couple's vigorous sex life brought more children - Louise,

Arthur, Leopold, and Beatrice, making nine born over 17 years.

Having a large family wasn't just about purging the couple's

unhappy past.

For the survival of the monarchy, Victoria and Albert knew it

was vital to distance themselves from the louche Hanoverians,

as epitomised by Victoria's notorious uncle, George IV.

George IV, the Prince Regent,

has been famous for being fat, unfaithful,

and spending a very great deal of money, and his other brothers were

no better, and in fact one of them, Cumberland, was famously involved in

all sorts of accusations that he'd murdered his valet, so, er, really,

the Royal Family before Victoria had been extremely publicly unpopular.

So Albert came up with this idea that the Royal Family should be

presented as respectable, and as a close-knit, loving family.

Victoria and Albert needed to create a fresh image that would be approved

of by their most important audience -

the expanding middle class.

Family values were key to this new bourgeois ideal,

as the artist Landseer understood.

Landseer painted a portrait of Victoria and Albert

and the Princess Royal in 1841,

and it's called Windsor Castle In Modern Times.

And that title is really important,

because it's...it's signalling very clearly that there's been

a change, that this is about, um, a modern version of the monarchy.

I think what's the most interesting aspect of that painting is

the way that the couple, Victoria and Albert themselves, are shown.

She holds a posy of flowers in her hand, so it clearly

demarcates that she represents femininity, gentleness, um, purity.

I think Landseer's painting shows us the way in which

the Royal Family were using images of the family, intimacy,

femininity, in order to support and promote a new image of the monarchy.

VICTORIA: "They say no sovereign was ever more loved than I am,

"I am bold enough to say, and this is because of our domestic home

"and the good example it presents."

One place more than any other gave them

a stage on which to play out their domestic ideal.

Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Queen Victoria enthused...

"We are more and more delighted with this lovely spot.

"The combination of sea, trees,

"the purest air, make it a perfect paradise."

During these holidays, the children absorbed some of the most cherished

values of the middle classes - on their vast Royal estate.

Enjoying modest pleasures, they hunted butterflies

and played on Osborne's beach.

They learnt to be self-sufficient in a specially built Swiss cottage,

where they were taught to cook, and where Albert helped them

grow fruit and vegetables.

He and Queen Victoria were very keen that they should learn real skills -

all the princesses could cook and bake beautifully,

which astounded people, in later life.

They just assumed they would have always had cooks, they would

never have had to do this kind of, you know, servants' work themselves.

They all learned to tend gardens, to grow vegetables and flowers.

They learned about the natural world,

they learned all sorts of really important life lessons as well.

This was, I think, a way of trying to genuinely engage with

the business of everyday life and acquire skills,

domestic skills. I mean, even if they weren't really going to use

them very much in later life, Albert certainly thought it was important

that those children knew what to do in a kitchen, you know, knew

how to grow a carrot, these sort of things, they were important to him.

Celebrations of the family ideal were created throughout

the house and gardens at Osborne.

Victoria and Albert's initials are intertwined.

The children, cherub-like, adorn furniture,

as characters in a new kind of Royal drama.

Albert, the patriarch, was crucial to the design of this utopia.

It was meant to be a stark contrast to society life in London.

Albert hated the loose morals of lavish dinners, cards and parties.

He was described at a London ball as looking, "Like a cowed

"and kept pet, frightened to sit, frightened to stand."

Despite cultivating an ordinary domestic image, the Royal Family

was in a class of its own, living in splendid isolation.

Really, when one contemplates the life of the Royal Family

in the Victorian era, it's more and more bizarre.

Bertie, for example, could only have an even number of asparagus

stalks on his plate, because an odd number would bring him bad luck.

Princess Louise thought that, er,

the only way that you could achieve good health

was to boil your knees in whisky every evening.

I mean, it was quite extraordinary. They lived in this strange,

regal bubble, in which the only conversation

was something that they themselves created so, so they couldn't

really relate to other people, other people had to relate to them.

Morally upright in the extreme,

Albert was everything his amoral father hadn't been.

He became emblematic of a new kind of fatherhood - totally loyal

to his wife, with a hands-on approach to his children.

Albert adored the eldest, Vicky.

Lady Lyttelton remembered him playing with his daughter. Albert...

"Tossed and romped with her, making her laugh and crow

"and kick heartily."

-The Queen, however, didn't join in, saying...

-"He is so kind to them

"and romps with them so delightfully,

"and manages them so beautifully and firmly."

Albert is not an absent aristocratic dad wandering over the grouse moor

and seeing his children,

you know, once a year

and not even remembering their names.

Prince Albert is this new kind of man, this new

kind of bourgeois father who gets most of his pleasure and definition

from what goes on at home, who's intimately involved in the nursery,

who comes home after a hard day at the office

or, in the case of Prince Albert,

hard day signing papers, and plays and romps with the children.

Albert, considering himself an expert on human behaviour,

was fascinated by the progress of his brood.

"There is certainly a great charm, as well as interest in watching

"the development of feelings and faculties in a little child."

Albert wasn't just curious about the children.

He organised a fastidious plan for moulding his offspring

into role models for the nation, and for Europe.

Prince Albert observed...

"Upon the good education of princes,

"and especially those who are destined to govern,

"the welfare of the world in these days greatly depends."

Prince Albert himself was the product of an efficient

German education. He developed

a kind of educational programme

which his advisor, Baron Stockmar,

said, anybody who carried

this out would develop brain fever immediately,

that it was too much for them to have to undergo.

Albert's plan for the children began when they were infants.

"The chief objects here are their physical development,

"the actual rearing up, the training to obedience."

The young Alice received a real punishment by whipping

for telling a lie.

She wasn't the only one subject to Albert's harsh discipline.

When Vicky misbehaved, he was perfectly prepared to have

her hands tied behind her back, and she was whipped and, er, Bertie was

whipped and when Louise played the piano, for example, and

she hit a wrong note, Albert would, would hit her fingers, and she

hit quite a lot of wrong notes.

So, Albert was not, by any means, an enlightened, modern father,

but he wasn't an ogre either.

As part of his plan,

Albert trained the children relentlessly in social graces.

They practised at what he called "circling" - to enter a room

and make one's way around it,

speaking to each of the assembled company in turn.

Victoria and Albert's children were educated at their station in life,

I mean, obviously only one of them was going to accede to the throne.

But they had to all take part,

as it were, in Royal life, so they had to

learn how to make conversation, how to circulate at levees and parties.

All the sort of politesses that were necessary

for a Royal education.

And also things like languages - I mean, after all,

they knew they were going to meet other royal households,

so the education in language was very important too.

It was a strict regime.

Fortunately, the eldest child, Vicky, was extremely bright.

Under Albert's regime, she was first taught French

when she was just 18 months old.

Albert, right from the time when she's a tiny baby, dotes on Vicky.

And, you know, the arrival of more children doesn't

shake his absolute devotion to Vicky.

Vicky is an almost an infant prodigy - she's speaking Latin,

she's speaking French,

she's reading Shakespeare, all at a very early age.

Lady Lyttelton, a governess, noted that the Princess,

before her seventh birthday...

"Might pass for a lady of 17 in whichever of her three languages

"she chooses to entertain the company."

Vicky, like all her siblings, could speak German.

In private, Victoria and Albert didn't hide their German roots,

but to the public,

the Queen was anxious to appear completely British.

"The Prince and Queen speak English quite as much as German."

One of the things that's most surprising about Queen Victoria

is how much she preferred Germany to England,

although she was Queen of England.

She obviously was half German herself, and she married

a German, and in private, the family conversation was in German.

All of the Royal children were commented on as having quite

prominent German accents.

Even in old age, their friends would comment on them

as speaking with a German accent.

And there's a lovely letter that

remains from one of Princess Louise's ladies-in-waiting, who

said that when Prince Arthur came to visit Princess Louise, when they

were quite elderly, and they were reminiscing about their childhood

in the nursery, their accents became incredibly Germanic, and she said

it was as if they'd started speaking in a completely different language.

They were still speaking English,

but their accents sounded as though they were Germans,

newly arrived in England, because they went back to their childhood.

Victoria and Albert had a clear mission for their children.

But the couple's obsessive relationship would threaten

to derail it.

Victoria was distracted from her role as mother

by her intense passion for Albert.

Even after the exhaustion of having many children,

the Queen was still longing for sensual pleasure.

It was clearly a very passionate relationship, physically, too.

Queen Victoria hated being pregnant,

but she loved the process by which she got pregnant.

I think that she may have been a little bit more passionate

than him, partly because she was a slightly more physical person.

You can imagine him in bed still thinking about guttering

and city planning, and a statistical conference he might have been

wanting to organise some time in the near future.

Besotted with Albert, Victoria idolised him

in front of the children.

"None of you can ever be proud enough of being

"the child of SUCH a father who has not his equal in the world,

"so great, so good, so faultless."

Victoria worshipped Albert

so ardently, she wanted her children to be made in his image.

When pregnant with Bertie, the heir to the throne, she remarked...

"I wonder very much who our little boy will be like.

"You will understand how fervent my prayers,

"and I am sure everybody's must be, to see him resemble his angelic

"dearest father in every, every respect, both in body and in mind."

I think Victoria was more interested in recreating Albert in her

children than she was in actually seeing what

kind of personalities they had themselves.

She is really heir to a much older tradition of thinking

of children as blank slates, in a sense,

whatever you put into them they will become, so

if she puts into them the qualities of Albert, the best qualities - his

rationality, his good sense, his, you know, prudence - you will get,

you will get it back, you will, you will produce lots of little Alberts,

some of them will wear breeches, some of them skirts.

But, basically, they're all little Alberts.

She treats them like a particularly tricky engineering

project, and if you get the mechanics right, you will get a nice

sturdy result that will go forth in the image of their father.

Victoria, like Albert,

believed that she could shape her children's character and destiny.

But this master plan for saving the monarchy was creating a battlefield.

The problem is that Victoria is Queen as well as wife, and so

when she says cross words to Albert, you know, what is he to do?

Is he to sort of say, "Shut up!" or is he to treat them

as though they're Royal commands?

And Albert dislikes confrontation, I think,

a very reasonable, very rational man.

Victoria is not really into rational debate.

And so, yes, you get this extraordinary picture of Albert

chasing Victoria round from room to room, or sometimes Albert shutting

himself in his room, and writing her rather pathetic notes, scolding her.

It is a very tempestuous marriage and there are all

sorts of conflicts in that marriage that are not fully resolved.

Victoria and Albert had terrible rows.

I mean, think of the worst row you've ever had with a partner

and then magnify it. It involves lots of slamming doors, people

sort of locking themselves into rooms, lots of shouting.

ARGUING ECHOES

Victoria saying, you know, "I never realised I'd be

"so miserable being married,"

I mean, absolutely appalling.

The first huge row came two years into their marriage.

An argument developed

over who else should have a say in the children's upbringing.

Victoria's closest and most powerful confidante, Baroness Lehzen,

looked after the nursery. But Albert hated the German governess.

It's a position of great power. Now, when Victoria marries Albert,

Albert clearly realises that Lehzen is the one he's going to

have to watch, but he's prepared to play a softly, softly game at first.

And so when the first baby comes along, Vicky,

the Princess Royal, Victoria puts Lehzen in charge of the nursery

and Albert is prepared to go along with it for a while.

But he clearly, clearly has problems with Lehzen

and what he does is, I mean everybody in this psychic

drama does very complicated manoeuvrings, they shuffle off the

bits they don't like about somebody and put them on to somebody else.

So, what Albert does is he blames Lehzen for everything

he doesn't like about Victoria.

A heated quarrel broke out over Lehzen's treatment of baby Vicky,

who was losing weight.

Albert wrote to advisor Baron Stockmar.

"Victoria is too hasty and passionate for me

"to be able often to speak of my difficulties.

"She will not hear me out but flies into a rage and overwhelms me

"with reproaches of suspiciousness, want of trust, ambition, envy."

Queen Victoria herself wrote to Stockmar.

"There is often an irritability in me which makes me say cross

"and odious things."

Of the family row, Stockmar despaired.

"The nursery gives me more trouble than the government of a kingdom."

Albert, vying for control, described Lehzen as...

"The hag,

"obsessed with the lust of power,

"a crazy, stupid intriguer who regards herself as a demi-god."

So, in a sense, they are on a collision course,

one of them has got to go, they are two very, very tough Germans,

and you know, there isn't really room for two tough Germans in the

Royal nursery, one of them has got to go and in the end it's Lehzen.

Albert was also deeply troubled by Victoria's fierce temper.

It was a reminder of a particular Royal Family legacy - insanity.

Albert scolded Victoria, particularly when she lost her temper

and there was a whole sort of atmosphere around Victoria

losing her temper, I mean, not,

it wasn't just that she had a filthy temper, which she did, but there

was also this sort of fear that, you know, if the Queen loses her temper

this is the sign of the beginning of the madness of George III.

They were all very conscious of the idea that Victoria might have

inherited this awful Hanoverian malady - of course, she hadn't,

she was incredibly sane - but it means that Albert tiptoes

around Victoria and the doctor says you mustn't confront her when she

has a temper because it will make it much worse, you must just walk away.

Sir James Clerk, the Royal doctor, advised...

"Regarding the Queen's mind - unless she is kept quiet,

"the time will come when she will be in danger.

"Much depends upon the Prince's management."

Increasingly, the Prince Consort treated Victoria like his children -

he sought control over his Queen,

and began to re-mould her character.

He made her his own creature, and I think in a way it's rather sad

because the one thing I like about Victoria was her wonderful

spontaneity, her honesty,

and in a way her impetuosity was very charming.

Before she married Albert she loved to stay out late and dance till

two in the morning and gossip with her ladies, and he knocked all that

out of her, you know, they went to bed at ten, he didn't like staying

up late because he'd fall asleep, he didn't like dancing late and he kind

of knocked that wonderful, rounded,

vibrant personality down into

the kind of mould of this rather dutiful and dowdy little hausfrau.

Victoria, still obsessional and insecure,

would seek Albert's approval after an outburst.

"How sadly deficient I am and how over-sensitive and irritable,

"and how uncontrollable my temper is when annoyed and hurt.

"Have I improved as I ought?"

I think she was difficult to live with and I think Albert

actually in his way was a little bit difficult, he was rather

school-masterly, he treated Victoria rather like an errant child,

which of course in a sense she was, you know, he was all for improving

her and he would congratulate her if he felt she had improved.

Albert praised her for what he called...

"Unbroken success in the hard struggle for self-control."

Unlike their father, the children had no escape

from their mother's unpredictable and stormy temper.

Victoria would consent to her children being beaten.

She expected them to be beaten

and to be made to understand how they should behave.

There's famously a comment in one of the ladies-in-waiting's diaries

about when Prince Leopold was being naughty as a little boy

and Queen Victoria wanted to beat him.

And we must remember that Leopold was haemophiliac.

And Queen Victoria's mother, you know, said,

"Oh, no, please don't beat him, he's just being a little boy.

"How can you bear to hear him crying?"

And she says, "Once you've had nine, Mother, you don't notice it."

Unsurprisingly, the children would always be scared of Victoria.

The Queen's private secretary once recalled

seeing the children flee their mother.

"We were suddenly nearly carried away by a stampede of royalties,

"headed by the Duke of Cambridge and brought up by Leopold,

"going as fast as they could. We thought it was a mad bull.

"But they cried out, 'The Queen! The Queen!'"

I imagine the children were fairly, um, certainly in awe of Victoria.

You know, as more...I mean, Vicky certainly wasn't.

Vicky would give as good as she got.

Edward, I think, largely, Bertie largely ignored her.

But I'm sure the younger children would have been, you know,

been pretty much in awe of her.

Of course, scared of her tempers.

Victoria's harsh parenting frustrated Albert.

"It is indeed a pity that you find no consolation

"in the company of your children.

"The root of the trouble lies in the mistaken notion

"that the function of a mother is to be always correcting,

"scolding, ordering them about."

She wanted to control the children's lives,

absolutely, right down to the last T.

And she went on doing that into their adulthood.

It was most extraordinary.

Somebody said, "The Queen is, is absolutely insane

"when it comes to asserting her own maternal authority."

The rows and Victoria's temper

were not the only cause of problems for the family.

Albert's heavy workload also created tensions.

Being trapped in the perpetual cycle of pregnancy and childbirth

forced Victoria to allow Albert

to take on some of her political duties,

on top of his own ambitious projects.

Albert, attempting to be the role model father,

struggled to balance work and family.

He loved his children when he had time for them.

But Albert was on this self-created treadmill

of work, work, duty, endlessly wearing himself out

on 101 committees doing this, that and the other.

The more Albert worked, the more he was away

not just from the children, but his needy wife.

"You cannot think how much it costs me

"or how completely upset I am and feel when Albert is away.

"All the numerous children are as nothing to me when he is away."

BABY WAILS

In the absence of her husband,

Victoria came to resent the children.

"No-one recognises more than I do the blessings of having children,

"but the anxieties and trouble, not to say sorrows,

"are quite as great as the blessings."

Despite the tensions between parents and children behind closed doors,

the public face of the plan was a great success.

Victoria and Albert were setting the moral tone for a new age.

Helped by a fledgling technology in the 1850s - photography.

This is the first publicly-shown photograph of the Royal Family,

taken at Osborne in 1857,

of Victoria, Albert and all nine children.

They have their official portraits, they have their family album,

but they also become a kind of surrogate family

or an extra family for the rest of the country.

Because you can collect pictures of the Royal household.

It was a hugely successful rebranding exercise.

Because for the first time, the monarchy,

instead of being seen as a kind of abstract form of power

that people couldn't relate to,

instead they started to see as a distorted reflection

of their own families, of their own lives.

The Queen became a person.

The children became real people.

You could understand them, you could sympathise with them,

you could gossip about them.

The Royal couple learned to turn lack of privacy into an advantage.

The public lapped up these nuggets of Royal intimacy.

But behind the media image, the plan for the family

was not going as smoothly as it could have been.

It soon became apparent that personalities might get in the way

of Victoria and Albert's desire for princes and princesses

to be made in the image of their father.

It was Bertie, the heir to the throne,

who presented the biggest problem.

From an early age, he refused to conform to Albert's plan

for the children's education.

Unlike his sister Vicky,

he found learning difficult and couldn't concentrate.

Bertie was...

I think...abnormally backward.

He just couldn't focus his mind.

Perhaps he really didn't have much of a mind to focus.

His tutor Frederick Gibbs remarked...

"I had to do some arithmetic with the Prince of Wales.

"Immediately, 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."

With him, it was a complete and utter failure.

Right from a very early age.

He acted out.

He had tantrums.

He threw his book on the floor, he pulled his brother's hair,

he screamed, he threw his pencil, he was rude.

I mean, he was really a sort of nightmare of a schoolboy.

Bertie was forever chastised by Victoria for his...

"Systematic idleness,

"laziness, disregard of everything."

His ever-anxious parents even consulted a so-called expert,

a phrenologist, on the nature of Bertie's brain.

The verdict did little to allay their fears.

"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."

And Albert, rather sort of typically, says, um,

"I wonder where that Anglo-Saxon brain of his has come from?

"It certainly wasn't in the German family.

"It must have come from the Stewarts."

SHE LAUGHS

Other Royal offspring also rebelled against their domineering parents.

Leopold was known for telling lies.

"I heard your musical box playing most clearly this afternoon..."

Victoria complained to her son.

"Impossible! My musical box never plays!"

Later in life, Victoria would recognise

a fundamental shortcoming in the grand plan.

"You will find as your children grow up

"that as a rule, children are a bitter disappointment.

"Their greatest object being to do

"precisely what their parents do not wish

"and have anxiously tried to prevent,

"and often when children have been less watched and less taken care of,

"the better they turn out.

"This is inexplicable and very annoying."

We all, as parents, would like our children

to turn out exactly as we want.

And one of the things you have to accept is that children,

you know, are not little mini-me's

and they are not going to do exactly what you want.

And you have to accept that and build that into your plan.

And if you don't, you're going to be disappointed.

Victoria and Albert weren't just hoping

to gain public approval through their children.

They had aspirations for the dynasty.

The Royal couple had a vision of a harmonious Europe

with an Anglo-German dynasty at its heart.

They believed a marriage between daughter Vicky and Fritz,

heir to the Prussian throne,

could create a pro-English Germany.

A meeting was arranged at Balmoral.

The meeting at Balmoral,

a very erotically-charged meeting between Fritz and Vicky

in Scotland,

was supposed to be entirely secret.

Immense efforts were made to keep it secret.

Of course, these efforts were completely in vain.

And no sooner had the meeting occurred than the news leaked out.

The leading papers had people at court

who were listening, picking up titbits for them.

When the arrangement was announced in the press,

far from celebrating, the British public were horrified.

Prussia had refused to unite with Britain in the Crimean War

just a few years earlier, intensifying anti-German feelings.

One newspaper commented...

"The supposed political character of the match

"and the distrust of a policy for Germanising England

"have been the real causes of the general disfavour

"with which the proposed marriage has been regarded."

Prince Albert knew he had to spin the marriage as a love match,

despite his political ambition for a re-drawn Europe.

"The more it is made clear that our children's marriage

"is the outcome of mutual attraction,

"rather than of political motives,

"the more certain it is that any storm which might arise

"between now and the date of the wedding will pass by."

Albert was very aware of how the Royal Family were written up,

how they were perceived.

He was quite interested in managing that process.

And the marriage of his eldest daughter was something that, er...

He wasn't going to be asleep about the implications of this.

It was, in effect, a kind of political match.

Unity between England and Germany was something that everybody wanted.

Despite being part of the plan,

both Victoria and Albert were devastated

at losing their totally inexperienced 17-year-old daughter

in this child marriage.

Days before the wedding, Victoria wrote...

"After all, it is like taking a lamb to be sacrificed."

"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."

Yet the Queen characteristically

seemed even more concerned with her own feelings.

One of the stories that I found very poignant and sad -

this is during Albert's lifetime -

when her daughter Vicky gets married and she moves to Prussia,

she's been married for a few weeks, maybe five or six weeks,

and she writes to her mother saying

how difficult she's finding life in Prussia.

There's always other people around,

she's constantly having to go to official functions

and she longs for the times

when it's just her and Fritz, her husband,

who she loves very much and she wants to be on her own with.

And her mother responds, to a woman who's just married, and says,

"Oh, darling, at last you understand

"why I always resented you children being around.

"I only ever wanted it to be me and Papa."

Their first child was out of the nest as part of the plan.

But there were further strains on the family.

Albert found his enormous workload exhausting.

By May 1860, he compared himself to a donkey on a treadmill.

"He, too, would rather munch thistles in the castle moat.

"Small are the thanks he gets for his labour."

He had a tremendously, um...

..toilsome approach to life.

And, ultimately,

I think you might well say

that this, this exhausted him and perhaps killed him.

Albert's health was declining.

By this point, he was pained with neuralgia and toothache,

insomnia and fits of shivering.

But Victoria had little room for sympathy.

Having given birth to nine children,

she thought Albert was weak in his inability to endure pain

and found it most trying.

The attitude to Albert's illness that you see in Victoria often is,

"Oh, it's man flu, you know,

"he's putting on a big act about how ill he is

"and we women are sterner stuff. We women have to endure childbirth."

So she always felt Albert was rather putting on the agony

and didn't take it very seriously.

Victoria was a very selfish, egocentric person.

She had a place for Albert, she needed Albert,

she needed Albert to be a rock.

She needed him to be somebody SHE could rely on.

Of course, if he was weak and ailing, she couldn't rely on him.

She had to care for him.

And I think, obviously, she then got scared.

I mean, the possibility of losing Albert seemed to her quite dreadful.

How on earth would she carry on her life without him?

To add to the strains on the family,

in early 1861, Victoria's mother died.

Although they had never been close, the Queen was devastated.

Prince Albert wrote...

"She is greatly upset

"and feels her whole childhood rush back once more upon her memory

"with the most vivid force. And with those recollections

"come back the thought of many a sad hour."

"I do not want to feel better.

"I love to dwell on her and not to be roused out of my grief."

In an orgy of despair,

Victoria was reluctant to acknowledge Albert's ill health.

Writing to daughter Vicky, Victoria spelt out her frustration.

"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's very ill."

Despite his wife's criticisms and feeling desperately sick,

Albert was determined to realise his vision for the children,

and arranged another dynastic marriage

between Bertie, the first in line to the throne,

and Princess Alexandra of Denmark.

Once again, a wholesome public image mattered.

It was crucial the marriage was passed off as a love match,

not a political alliance.

The heir to the throne had to appear to have a chaste life.

But in the summer of 1861,

Bertie started training with the Grenadier Guards in Dublin.

His fellow officers, with whom he became very chummy,

managed or arranged one night

for a sort of camp follower of the regiment,

a lady called Nellie Clifton, to join Bertie in his bed.

And so on three occasions, Bertie slept with,

lost his virginity, with Nellie Clifton.

And then of course, eventually, the story started to trickle out.

And Albert heard about it.

And he wrote Bertie the most terrible letter -

sort of hysterical, completely overwrought -

in which he says that he foresees for his son

this future of kind of paternity suits

and, you know, the terrible slide into total evil

and, you know, low moral character.

"To 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,

"which ought to remain shrouded in holy awe

"until touched by pure and undefiled hands."

He was terrified that she might go to the papers, to the courts,

that she might end up pregnant

and make all kinds of financial and other demands.

But I think this was an extreme reaction

to what he'd seen with his own father and brother's behaviour.

So it was tough on Bertie

because what should have been pretty much brushed under the carpet

turned into this enormous issue.

And Albert, the minute he heard,

was pacing up and down night after night,

not sleeping, worrying.

And he literally wore himself into a frazzle

about this one transgression of Bertie's.

To Albert, Bertie's fall

was not only a threat to his dynastic marriage,

but to the monarchy itself.

"You must not, you dare not be lost.

"The consequences for this country

"and for the world at large would be too dreadful."

What I think we can say for certain is that...

..Bertie's misdemeanour

upset Albert in an utterly visceral way.

It really got in among him.

And he was deeply, deeply upset.

And you can tell this

by the anguished letter that he wrote to Bertie

more or less saying, you know,

this isn't, this isn't just a, a little...sin,

it's something which could shake the throne.

The plan for perfect children had failed.

And the dynastic dream was at stake.

Victoria went on the defensive.

"Wicked wretches had led our poor, innocent boy into a scrape."

The sickly Albert travelled to Cambridge to meet his son

and make him understand the disgrace

he had brought on himself and his family

and also the urgent need to get married.

Albert went to Cambridge to have it out with Bertie about his fall.

And they went for a long private walk in the rain

and they had this long conversation, we don't know what they said,

but we do know that Albert came back absolutely wet through

and that Bertie thought that he'd been forgiven.

So in a way, it sort of...you know, it's a resolution of the conflict.

But it was a cold and wet winter day.

After the long walk with his son,

Albert was wracked with pain in his legs.

Over the next few weeks, his symptoms worsened.

Albert wrote to his daughter Vicky...

"I am at a very low ebb.

"Much worry and great sorrow,

"about which I beg you not to ask questions,

"have robbed me of sleep during the past fortnight."

Now, I personally believe, having done the research,

that Albert did have a longstanding gastric problem

that was wrongly diagnosed as typhoid fever.

I don't believe he died of typhoid fever.

I believe he died of a flare-up of probably Crohn's disease,

which goes into periods of remission

and then flares up during times of extreme stress.

And in 1861, he'd had to deal with

a whole chain of stressful things happening,

which precipitated a final decline,

aggravated then by contracting a chill and a fever.

And his body just packed up on him.

He wore himself out.

In mid-December, when Albert grew worse,

Bertie was ordered home to see his ailing father.

Albert died the following day, aged only 42.

For Victoria, the loss of the man on whom she had come to utterly depend,

could not have been more devastating.

"He was my father, my protector,

"my guide and adviser in all and everything.

"My mother, I might say, as well as my husband.

"I suppose no-one ever was so completely altered

"and changed in every way

"as I was by dearest Papa's blessed influence."

Queen Victoria's overbearing grief

would dominate the Royal household and the nation for decades.

In life, Prince Albert was the central figure within the family.

He had engineered the upbringing of his children,

and it hadn't gone to plan.

But he had also been the visionary

behind a very modern image of the Royal Family.

The monarchy was not a greatly popular institution

at the beginning of the 19th century.

And actually, I think we can, we can thank Albert

for stabilising it as a concept.

The fact that we still have the monarchy today,

I think is quite a lot to do with the way that Albert and Victoria

quite consciously presented themselves to the public

as some version of an ordinary, middle-class family.

Following Albert's death,

the plan to mould perfect princes and princesses had to go on.

But in the process, the children

would become locked in decades of warfare with their mother.

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