Was Queen Victoria the victim of Coercive Control?
A royal marriage reexamined.....
When her husband died on December 14th 1861 at the age of forty two, Queen Victoria was devastated. Her husband of twenty one years, the father of their nine children, man her private secretary, and closest advisor, was gone. This was not an heir and spare and separate bedrooms sort of royal marriage, Albert was unique among royal bridegrooms for being totally faithful to his wife. We know that Victoria was physically besotted with Albert, (who when she married him was the definition of a handsome prince, golden curls blue eyes , the lot; the portly balding Albert we see in photographs was a good fifteen years older, than the twenty -one year old bridegroom). The day after their wedding night she wrote in her diary that she never knew ‘such joy’, and sixteen years later in 1856 after the birth of her ninth child when she was advised by her doctors that she shouldn’t have any more, she protested to her doctor “What no more fun in bed?
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The symbols of this royal love story are everywhere, the monogram V&A that is sprinkled all over the Victoria and Albert museum, the brooding golden statue of Albert facing the Albert Hall, and the films and tv series ( one written by me) that have dramatized the romance between the two first cousins. But, when I started to write my new play Victoria Unbound about the end of Victoria’s life, I came to see their marriage in a very different light. After Albert’s death Victoria said, “ he did everything for me, he even used to choose my bonnets.” At first glance this seems like a poignant detail, but I began to wonder what sort of husband goes to the trouble of choosing his wife’s hats? Why was Albert acting as Victoria’s personal stylist? There was nothing wrong with her fashion sense, in the three years of her reign before she married Victoria had no difficulty choosing what to wear. Could it be that Albert’s interest in Victoria’s wardrobe was part of a wider pattern of control? Was it possible that Albert was exercising what we would now call ‘coercive control’. Was it possible that Albert was not a ‘dearest angel’ but something closer to the wickedly manipulative husband played by Charles Boyer in the film Gaslight ( where the term gaslighting originates from) who tricks Ingrid Bergman into believing she is losing her mind
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Albert was extremely able – unusually among royal princes of the time, he had had a university education and was fascinated by the brave new world of Victorian technology. He was an early adopter – installing flushing lavatories in Buckingham Palace ( including one in the Servatnt’s quarters) long before indoor sanitation became the norm. He was fascinated by photography and founded the royal Photographic society in 1849. He was president of the royal society of statisticians, chancellor of Cambridge University, and he won a silver medal for his services to pig breeding. It must i have been humiliating for him to be sent to England on approval in 1839 as the nineteenth century equivalent of a blind date to see if his cousin liked the cut of his jib. Fortunately for him , Victoria was smitten instantly writing excitedly in her diary about his ‘ white cashmere breeches, nothing under them, and high boots”). After they were married Albert complained that he was ‘only the husband and not the master in the house.” That was a situation that he set out to rectify
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My sense of Albert was that he may not have been as interested in sex as his wife , but he understood the advantages of keeping Victoria in a state of perpetual pregnancy. In the first eight years of their marriage they had six children, and with every confinement Albert assumed more of Victoria’s duties – going through her ministerial boxes, advising her on appointments, drafting letters and sitting in on audiences with her Ministers. Victoria had been Queen for three years before she married Albert, and at first she resisted his desire for them to become a double act, but as the children kept coming she could no longer resist her husband’s relentless competence. She had a key to her ministerial boxes cut for him, so that he could get to work before she woke up.
Victoria, famously, did not welcome her pregnancies. She refused to breastfeed, and would later tell her daughters not to spend all their time in the nursery. Victoria suffered badly from post natal depression, and at one point she had even had post partum psychosis – hallucinating about being buried alive and being covered in maggots. This must have been particularly alarming to the couple given that Victoria’s grandfather George III had a history of mental illness. And yet Albert, for all his scientific acumen, could not devise a way of spacing his wife’s pregnancies. It begs the question whether he really wanted to. After all if Victoria’s mental illness worsened and she had to be confined, then Albert would be become Regent. Is it possible that the thought may have crossed Albert’s mind? There was so much Albert wanted to DO - his first public speech in 1842 was against slavery which he called ‘ the darkest stain upon civilisation; his passion project the Great Exhibition was visited by a tenth of the population and among other things pioneered the first public lavatory. The museums of South Kensington, the Royal college of Music, Aart and Oorganists as well as Imperial college are all a result of Albert’s vision. I can only admire how much he accomplished in a relatively short time. I once heard the former Prince Andrew compare himself to his great great grandfather when talking about his Pitch@Palace enterprise - but it is hard to think of two more different men. Albert was prudent, diligent, economical and uxorious … Andrew is none of those things.
But all the things that made Albert a model prince, his industry, his logical mind, his passion for detail, did not make him an empathetic husband.
Although the couple were careful to present a united front in public – they had some spectacular rows in private – including one where Victoria threw a glass of wine over Albert. Albert used Victoria’s emotional outbursts as evidence of her unfitness to be queen. After one quarrel he refused to speak to her until she wrote “ I must learn to control my temper’ one hundred times. His constant references to her instability and volatile temper wore down Victoria’s self -confidence. She had never known her father, who died when she was eight months old, so she had no template to follow when it came to married life. Albert never saw his mother after the age of five, when she eloped with her lover, desperate to escape from her serially unfaithful and overbearing husband, so it wouldn’t be surprising if he had some mistrust of women generally. Over the course of their twenty one year marriage Victoria changed from the self willed eighteen year old who declared that she never wanted to get married, to a woman whose personality had all but been subsumed by her husband’s. In the last year of their marriage, the couple were in a bad way. Victoria’s mother had died earlier that year
which affected Victoria deeply. Her relationship with her mother had not been a happy one, but after her death Victoria was subsumed by feelings of guilt and loss. Albert found Victoria’s outbursts of grief infuriating, given how unkind she had been to her mother while she was still alive. He began to voice concerns about her mental state. The climax came whenAlbert discovered that their oldest son Bertie had been relieved of his virginity by an actress called Nellie Clivden. He blamed Victoria’s side of the family with its clutch of promiscuous royal dukes for Bertie’s lapse, although Albert’s own father and brother were just as bad. He remonstrated with his son on a two hour walk;it poured with rain and Albert caught a chill. Two weeks later he was dead. Victoria blamed Bertie for her husband’s death, even though Albert had been suffering from health problems for at least ten years. When Florence nightingale met him in 1856, she thought he was a man who was ready for death.
Although Victoria’s grief over Albert was clearly genuine, I wonder if after the initial shock had faded there might been some sense of relief. Her relationship with her Highland Servant John Brown started a year or so after she was widowed, and I suspect she must have relished the contrast between a man who treated her as a hysterical encumbrance and a man who was always ready to offer her a swig from his hip flask.
Not that you would find any hint of this in Victoria’s diaries where Albert is always spoken of in the most adoring and reverential tones. She is so complimentary about her husband in her diaries that I suspect that he was reading them. Of course any uncomplimentary remarks may have been edited out by her youngest daughter Beatrice after the Queen’s death, but I think it is quite likely that Victoria in her diaries was an unreliable narrator of her own life. She wrote about the marriage she wanted to have, rather than the reality. I have examined this idea in my play Victoria Unbound, which examines the contrast between the picture of Victoria and Albert painted by the diary and the reality of a marriage that where Albert exerted more and more control over Victoria. I don’t want to give any spoilers but I think it is not impossible that if Albert lived there might even have been a separation. However Albert’s premature death meant that Victoria never had to face that. Instead she turned the loss of ‘her beloved angel’ into the great tragedy of her life – wearing mourning for the rest of her life, and frequently referring to herself as a ‘poor widow.’ But in nineteenth century England, widowhood had its advantages. Until the Married Woman’s property Act, married women formed part of their husbands’ good and chattels. They had no legal identity of their own. Widows on the other hand were answerable to no one. Even a Queen might find it easier to be a widow than to be married to a man who was constantly reminding you in thought, work and deed that they were your superior in every way
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One thing Victoria was very good at, was brand management. She understood that a happily married royal family was the way to restore the monarchy’s popularity after years of badly behaved Kings. She was the first monarch to be photographed, a development n which must have been as earth shattering in the nineteenth century as seeing Elizabeth II and Prince Philip barbecueing at Balmoral in the tv documentary Royal Family. The Victorian public saw for the first time, not an engraving of a queen with a crown but a photo of a woman in a bonnet surrounded by her family. It was the beginning of the myth that the royal family are really just like us. Victoria began her reign with a number of scandals that dented her popularity, but when she died in 1901 she was mourned as the mother of the nation. Her widowhood was twice as long as her marriage, and I suspect despite her protestations, that she might have been twice as happy.
If you enjoyed or are at least intrigued by my take on Victoria and Albert - come and see my pla
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Victoria: A Queen Unbound is on at the Watermill Theatre from March 27th -May 9th. I am doing a Q and A on the 21st April, after the show. Would love to see you there.
This was so compelling to read - and viewed through a modern lense makes for a coherent and persuasive argument that the love story so celebrated had such controlling elements .
Very interesting!