Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: what was their relationship like?

• Who were Queen Victoria’s children?

A brief encounter at celebrations for Victoria’s 17th birthday in 1836 had planted the seeds of an attraction between the pair. She writes passionately in her diary of Albert’s “beautiful nose and… sweet mouth with fine teeth” as well as the “charm of his countenance”, which she describes as being “full of goodness and sweetness, and very clever and intelligent”. But Albert, unused to the late nights and whirl of fashionable gaieties of the English court was forced to leave several balls early, feeling sleepy and faint, leaving his lively young cousin to dance on into the night.

They were united in their desire to create a model, happy family, setting an example to the world

Albert was one of several suitors introduced to Victoria in the months before she turned 18 and inherited the throne from her uncle William IV, bringing to an end more than 120 years of male Hanoverian rule. Another first cousin, Prince Augustus of Saxe-Coburg, made a favourable impression on the young princess, more so than Princes William and Alexander of Orange whom Victoria described as being “very plain”.

Cupid's arrow strikes

By 1839, Victoria was relishing the relative freedom of being an unmarried young queen and once again declared herself reluctant to marry. But in October 1839, Albert visited England again. This time, Victoria was smitten.

“It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert – who is beautiful”, she scribbled in her diary that night. Just five days later, on 15 October, in accordance with royal protocol, Victoria proposed, exclaiming: “Oh! to feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel as Albert, was too great delight to describe! he is perfection; perfection in every way”.

• Love before Albert: Queen Victoria’s suitors

The marriage ceremony, which took place on 10 February 1840 in the Chapel Royal at St James’s, was everything a royal wedding should be. Dressed in a white satin gown with lace veil, a wreath of orange blossom, and attended by 12 bridesmaids, Victoria married her Albert.

Victoria fell pregnant almost immediately, giving birth to their first child, Princess Victoria, nine months after the wedding. The future Edward VII (Bertie) was born the following year. The physical attraction between the pair never faded and, between 1840 and 1857, Victoria gave birth to nine children.

Unhappy childhoods

However, Victoria was not a natural mother. Princess Victoria's childhood had been an unhappy one, kept in seclusion at Kensington Palace by her own domineering mother with little in the way of companionship or affection. The death of Victoria’s father when she was just eight months old had a profound impact and the only male influence she had had as a child was that of her mother’s despised advisor Sir John Conroy. “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,” admitted Victoria in later life

Albert, too, had suffered an unhappy childhood. His father had been a serial philanderer who paid little attention to either of his sons. Albert’s mother, Princess Louise, had been forced into exile following an affair and the breakdown of her marriage, and Albert had grown up determined to be the type of father he had never had.

Victoria and Albert were united in their desire to create a model, loving family that would set an example to the world. But neither were quite sure how to do it. Victoria hated being pregnant and found babies equally repugnant. “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 froglike action”. Breastfeeding, too, was deemed a repulsive act and a wet nurse was employed for all of her nine children, allowing Victoria more time to devote herself to matters of state, and to her beloved Albert.

• Friends, family and rivals: Queen Victoria and the European empires

Their children were spoilt and lavished with every describable luxury from birth, yet expected to adhere to their parents’ ideals of a model family. Countless works of art depicting royal domestic bliss are testament to the public relations campaign Albert sold to the world.

Behind closed doors, however, royal relationships were often strained – none more so than that of Victoria and Albert.

Role reversal

Albert was not a popular choice of husband for Victoria with the British public. He had come to the marriage an impoverished and relatively low-standing prince, despite his royal connections. And he was German to boot. “He comes to take for ‘better or for worse’ / England’s fat queen and England’s fatter purse” were two lines from a popular, if insulting, song of the day.

The traditional sum of £50,000 as an allowance for the consort of a monarch was reduced to £30,000 for Albert by Robert Peel’s Conservative party – the smallest sum ever to be offered. He was refused both a peerage and a seat in the House of Lords – a mixture of anti-German sentiment and an attempt to limit Albert’s political power. In fact, it was not until 1857 that Albert was finally granted the title of Prince Consort.

As a champion of the rights of workers, improvements in social welfare, education, the abolition of slavery, as well as a patron of the arts and technology, Albert must have been bitterly disappointed not to have had a bigger say in government affairs.

With his wife distracted by regal duties and himself lacking a formal role, it was Albert, then, who initially took on much of the responsibility for the upbringing of their children. But from the start he wanted more.

• Was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's union a marriage of misery?

“The difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband, not the master in the house”, Albert is said to have uttered to his university friend William von Lowenstein. And he was right. Albert entered a royal household that was governed by his wife and run by her former governess, Baroness Lehzen.

“I am very happy and contented; but the difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband, not the master in the house”

But within a couple of months of the wedding, Victoria reluctantly began to hand some of her official duties over to Albert as she was forced by continued pregnancies to take more of a backseat. Privately, he became her most trusted advisor and the pair worked side by side attending to royal business.

Albert was Victoria’s rock and she looked up to him as her intellectual superior, encouraging his ideas. But although she was happy to share power with her husband – within reason – Victoria had a strong sense of her own hereditary right and resented having to hand over her powers while restricted by childbirth.

Behind the public image

The issue of sharing power was a constant thorn in the marriage. Albert was an accomplished polymath with deep interests in the arts, science and new technologies of the day. He used his influence as Victoria’s husband to further some of his passions, adding President of the Society for the Extinction of Slavery and Chancellor of Cambridge University to his titles. He was the driving force behind the Great Exhibition of 1851, which shone a light on British engineering and technology, and was a staunch promoter of British manufacturing.

But behind closed doors, the carefully crafted public image of the perfect family was showing signs of strain. Locked in an endless power struggle, terrible rows broke out between the lovers. For his part, Albert was terrified of Victoria’s violent outbursts, fearing that she had inherited the madness of her grandfather George III, whose near 60-year reign was peppered with periods of mental ill health. Advised by the royal doctor not to argue with his wife in case his fears proved true, Albert was forced to communicate during her periods of rage by means of handwritten notes meekly posted under her door.

The couple’s eldest son Bertie, the future Edward VII, also caused tension within the family and was something of a disappointment to his parents. Neither gifted intellectually nor especially handsome – his own mother described him as having a “painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin” – Bertie rebelled against his parents’ grand expectations for him. The young prince devoted himself to a life of pleasure and, when word of their son’s tryst with ‘a lady of easy virtue’ reached his parent’s ears, Albert took it upon himself to meet with his wayward son to deal with his reckless behaviour before it became public knowledge. It would be the last time father and son would ever meet – feverish, racked with pain in his legs and wet through from their long walk in the rain, he returned to Windsor where, just weeks later, Prince Albert died. He was aged just 42.

Victoria never fully recovered from Albert’s death. For the rest of her life, she dressed in black and appeared infrequently in public. She surrounded herself with memorabilia to remind her of her beloved husband, taking his dressing gown to bed with her each night and continuing to have hot water for shaving brought up on a daily basis, as it had been when he was alive.

Albert had been everything to Victoria – confidant, husband, lover, closest advisor – and his death dealt a devastating blow to the Queen and the British monarchy. After his death, Victoria papered over the cracks in their marriage, memorialising her husband as an almost saintly figure. In a letter written 15 months after Albert’s death, Victoria wrote: “The poor Queen… can only hope never to live to old age but be allowed to rejoin her beloved great and loyal husband before many years elapse”. It was a wish that would be denied her.

Charlotte Hodgman is the editor of BBC History Revealed magazine

This article was first published in the June 2017 edition of BBC History Revealed