Though she was a busy monarch, Queen Victoria still found time to raise a large family, which wasn’t without its pressures
As a monarch, Queen Victoria’s reputation as a joyless prude precedes her, but it isn’t a reputation that she entirely deserves. Immortalised in the public consciousness as a heartbroken widow, she was also a loving and devoted wife, not to mention the mother of nine children. Like any family, such a large brood didn’t come without its challenges and rewards. Despite or perhaps because of being born into immense privilege and influence, some of her children were challenging, to put it mildly.
It’s no secret that Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, enjoyed a passionate and heated relationship. Though their marriage was encouraged by their parents for the sake of building an empire, it was also very definitely a love match. The couple’s first child was born in 1840 and their last in 1857 and in their eventual tally of nine, the royal couple were determined to forge useful members of society. Not only that, but they were also determined to be the sort of caring parents that Victoria and Albert had sorely lacked. Victoria had been raised in seclusion, subject to rigid discipline and strict rules, while the marriage of Albert’s parents had been tumultuous, eventually ending in divorce. Albert was just five when he last saw his mother and she died seven years later. This wasn’t the future he and Victoria envisaged for their own offspring.
Instead they foresaw a happy, stable home that would foster a similarly stable and welladjusted family who were the living embodiment of their parents’ good moral fibre. Beyond that, they believed that their large family would form the foundations of a dynasty that would reach from Great Britain right across Europe, uniting warring powers and solidifying tottering alliances. Unfortunately, their children didn’t necessarily share their parents’ ambitions.
This idea of a united and happy family is hardly surprising considering not only Albert and Victoria’s own childhoods, but also Queen Victoria’s predecessors on the British throne. The Georgian kings had run the gamut from dour to extravagant and thanks to the escapades of George IV during his days as Prince Regent, there had once been a genuine fear that the United Kingdom might follow France into revolution. William IV’s short reign, which had punctuated that of George IV and Victoria, did much to stabilise the country and the monarchy and Queen Victoria had every intention of continuing what he had started. Just like William, Victoria and Albert knew that George IV’s scandalous love life and big-spending, debt-ridden ways had led the country to the brink of disaster. Victoria and Albert were determined to show that they weren’t rarefied royals, living high on the public purse, but nothing more remarkable than a perfectly respectable middle-class family.
Yet the royal family were far from an unremarkable middle-class household and in reaching for something resembling unremarkable normality, tensions eventually began to develop. The very thing that had inspired Victoria and Albert to strive for a happy family meant that they struggled to achieve it. Neither of them knew what a happy domestic scene looked like, because neither of them had ever experienced one. Instead, they had to try and find out together by a process of unforgiving trial and error. None of this was helped by Victoria’s resentment at the fact that childbearing would inevitably take her away from her royal duties and throughout all her pregnancies, she continued to work as much as she possibly could.
The couple’s first child, Vicky, was born within the first year of their passionate marriage and came at a time when Victoria’s attention was on something other than motherhood. She was fully occupied with her royal duties and saw Vicky only twice a day, preferring to leave her care to trusted royal nurses. Though happy to have safely delivered her first child, Victoria was disappointed to be presented with a daughter. She had hoped for a male heir, keen to get on with building her dynasty. Still, she certainly did love her daughter and delighted in bathing her and putting her to bed, routines that she was less able to continue as the years passed and the number of her children grew.
Victoria outlived three of her nine children: Alice died in 1878, Leopold in 1884 and Alfred in 1900
The much desired heir came along the following year. The birth of Albert Edward, known by the family as Bertie, was a huge relief to the queen. Robust and healthy, Bertie’s birth more or less guaranteed her line of succession and meant that her majesty could reasonably take a break from the dangerous business of giving birth, should she so wish. Instead she and Albert welcomed three more children over the next five years, naming them Alice, Alfred – the all-important spare to go with the heir – and Helena.
Yet Victoria was far from the most adoring mother to her newborns and eventually, she had so many children and so much work to do as queen that she saw her children only every few weeks. Not only was she too busy to be a full-time mum, but she hated the physical changes that came with pregnancy and thought babies – even her own – were revoltingly ugly. Even worse for the busy queen, after the birth of each child she suffered alarming symptoms such as low moods and constant weeping, suggesting that she was prone to bouts of post-natal depression.
To Victoria, children were a necessary part of building a dynasty, but not one that she was particularly sentimental about. As was common among royal households, she delegated the matter of breastfeeding to a wet nurse, repelled by the idea of doing such a thing herself. When she learned later that her daughters had breastfed their own children, Victoria was utterly horrified that they would make such a choice. As her children were passed into the care of their nurses, Victoria focussed all her attentions on her beloved Albert. And what attentions they were, resulting in the birth of Louise, Arthur, Leopold and Beatrice over the next few years. To give birth to so many healthy babies was quite a feat when one considers the dangers of pregnancy in the Victorian era.
Albert and Victoria did all they could to publicise their happy family and Albert orchestrated a PR push intended to promote this relatable, middle-class royal family. The couple posed with their children in widely-circulated photographs, supplying the template for the model royal household in which unity and morality were the watchwords. In fact, it was Albert who took responsibility for the children as Victoria concentrated on her public duties. Having barely known his mother and been ignored by his philandering father, Albert couldn’t have been more different to his own parents. He was an involved and engaged father who delighted in the gentle company of his children and they loved him in turn. He knew full well that he had much to learn about fatherhood and he knew that his children could teach him some of what he needed to know, so was enchanted and delighted by watching their growth from newborns into children.
Yet Albert did bring some of his own childhood experience to bear, namely the education system that he had been subjected to. His strict and disciplined education had made him into a wellrounded and intelligent man and he believed that he could do the same for his own children, whether they enjoyed it or not. With no room for intellectual weakness, Albert established an education system alongside Baron Stockmar in which achievement was all and his sons were educated seven days a week for seven hours a day. Underpinning the system was the constant threat of corporal punishment, with Albert and Victoria sharing a belief that discipline and unquestioning obedience was a vital and fundamental element in the education of a child.
The children were subject to levels of discipline that would raise eyebrows by modern standards, including beatings and thrashed fingers should they miss a note when playing the piano. Unfortunately, Albert’s intellectual ambition for his children far outstripped what they were capable of and some of the young princes and princesses struggled with their hours of lessons, from multiple languages to sciences, classics and more. Matters weren’t helped by the fact that Vicky, the couple’s eldest child, was exceptionally intelligent, and her younger siblings were expected to be able to keep up with her. Given that she was speaking French by the time she was two years old, it was an impossibility for Bertie, the heir to the throne.
Busy being the queen, Victoria was more than happy to leave matters of education to Albert and she supported his initiatives without question. She particularly hoped that Bertie, freespirited, flighty and garrulous, could be morphed into the image of his father. In fact, he couldn’t have been more different. He kicked against Albert and Baron Stockmar’s systems and discipline with tantrums and noisy resistance, the unswerving lessons serving only to distress the young prince. There was no room for the children to learn at their own pace, nor any opportunity for them to learn by any other method than rote and corporal punishment, and Bertie suited neither. Victoria and Albert were dismayed by his behaviour and believed that the Prince of Wales was verging on educationally subnormal. Even when the other children struggled, Victoria and Albert refused to bend their system and Albert concluded that they must have inherited their obstinacy and lack of intellectual ability from their mother’s side. God forbid it had come from him.
Despite – or perhaps because of – their ceaseless devotion to one another, Albert and Victoria’s relationship was not without its stresses. With Albert’s attention increasingly taken by his duties to his children, Victoria grew envious and jealous and the couple began to argue. He believed she didn’t appreciate his efforts and began to suffer with nervous illnesses, which were only exacerbated by the arguments at home. Despite these jealousies, Victoria remained close friends with Vicky, her oldest daughter, over the years and the pair exchanged letters constantly following Vicky’s marriage. As the children grew, their parents put the next phase of their plan into action and began to marry them off. Though Victoria and Albert had a love match, they knew that this wouldn’t necessarily be the case for their children. The couple were bitterly sad to see 17-year-old Vicky begin a new life as the wife of Frederick of Prussia but in there was no room for sentiment – they had planned a dynasty, and a dynasty they must have. Yet the royal children wouldn’t play the game and as Bertie began to raise hell, the couple saw their efforts failing in a horribly public fashion. When Albert died after heading out in the rain to rebuke the Prince of Wales, Victoria blamed her son for his death. Victoria had no time or stomach to continue the domestic programme over which he had presided, too wrapped up in her own grief. Though she loved her children, relations with them were not always rosy. Yet Bertie, perhaps surprisingly, made good eventually. As Edward VII he became one of the most well-loved kings the country had ever known.
“With Albert’s attention increasingly taken by his duties to his children, Victoria grew envious and jealous and the couple began to argue”