We Two: Victoria and Albert

Or in full:

We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals by Gillian Gill (2009)

Before reading this lively and enjoyable account, I thought of Prince Albert as a bit of joke, as in "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?"—but also as a symbol of all that was stodgy, moralistic, and ridiculously strait-laced in Victorian Britain. I couldn't have named a contribution he made to the era apart from giving the Queen someone to mourn for decades and lending his name to some public monuments. It is, after all, the Victorian age.

The Albert that emerges in this biography is a much more talented, interesting, and active man than history gives him credit for. He could stand tall in an era filled with remarkably accomplished personalities. He was intelligent, well educated, and musical; Gill reports that "Albert could have succeeded as a professor, geologist, botanist, statistician, musician, engineer, or bureaucrat" (130). He headed up, with brilliant success, one of the most characteristic achievements of the Victorian era—the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851—working tirelessly on this and many other projects.

Was he moralistic and prudish? Yes, and that was just what his Saxe-Coburg handlers wanted. Regency aristocrats had badly damaged the English public's perception of royalty with their licentiousness, free spending, and irresponsibility. Not only that, rampant venereal disease was ravaging the noble houses of Europe—along with rampant social unrest. Both in England and Germany, kingmakers realized that the success of the English monarchy depended on adopting more middle-class, Evangelical values of moral purity. Albert was specifically cultivated to be pure and virginal. So, of course, was Victoria, but Albert's upbringing was very unusual at a time when it was simply expected that aristocratic men would sow their wild oats.

And the Saxe-Coburgers schemed wisely. "Albert would be their man, a man in their own image—in all things but one. Albert would be virtuous, he would be clean, and he would be monogamous. As a result, he would have healthy children, and he would found a dynasty that would rule Europe. This grand plan actually came to pass" (109). It's astonishing when you think about it.

As to the marriage itself, Gill is interested in exploring how Victoria and Albert negotiated all the weirdnesses involved in a highly misogynistic society where a Queen happens to rule. Victoria had been told all her life that she needed a man to make decisions for her, and she gave much lip service to this idea, but when push came to shove, she often wanted her own way. She loved and needed Albert, so it's fascinating to see how the political and the personal mix. As Gill says, the "lived reality" of this marriage was "an extraordinary feat achieved against the odds" (14).

Victoria's ability to stand up for herself is all the more remarkable considering how little independence she had growing up: "For the first eighteen years of her life, Queen Victoria was never in a room by herself. Someone was with her not only when she ate and did her lessons and took her exercise but when she slept, washed, and used the chamber pot. . . . [She] once told her daughters that until the day of her accession, she was forbidden to go down a staircase unless someone held her hand" (60).

Yet right from the first, she loved the business of being Queen. She read all the items in her dispatch box, wrote long memoranda, and in essence had a demanding full-time job. Nevertheless, she intended to be a good wife and on her marriage give up the business of governing. And in any case she almost immediately became pregnant; the fertile Queen ended up with nine children. These confinements, often difficult and followed by what we'd now call post-partum depression, also kept her out of public life for long stretches. Again and again, though, she made her mark. As Gill points out, Lytton Strachey did not include Albert among his Eminent Victorians.

This book was a pleasure to read. Gill explains complexities with admirable clarity and liveliness, and she often brings in the telling detail (as above, with poor Victoria unable even to use the chamber pot alone). This dual biography ends with Albert's death, so readers interested in Victoria's life after Albert will need to look elsewhere. One small quibble: considering how careful Gill is to name and thank all her editors, it would have been nice not to see mistakes like "palate" for "palette" and "discrete" for "discreet." But this is a very small quibble indeed for this well-researched, fascinating book.