Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Why Queen Victoria was a CRUMMY MUMMY
After her husband Albert died, the grieving Victoria was left to raise their nine children. And she made a royal mess of it, says a new series
She hated pregnancy, reviled childbirth, was disgusted by breast-feeding and thought a baby was ‘a very nasty object’. Yet, such was Queen Victoria’s passion for her husband that she kept on having children.
When Prince Albert died in 1861, Victoria became a widow aged 42 with nine children to care for. She was also head of the world’s biggest empire. She withdrew from public life to mourn her darling Albert and, in some respects, took out her pain on her children.
Queen Victoria’s Tragic Family, a three-part documentary for Channel 5, tells the remarkable story of her lovehate relationships with her children. It reveals a far less flattering picture of her than popular ITV drama Victoria.
‘She really was an awful mother, an absolute control freak,’ says Richard Sanders, who produced the Channel 5 series. ‘She was occasionally loving but extraordinarily selfish. She was their parent, but also their queen. She was the ultimate controlling mother.’
Until Albert died at 42, Victoria had left the parenting up to him. While he supervised their schooling and social lives, she was happy to see the children twice a day while in her role as queen.
When he died she was bereft but acted as if she was the only one suffering. ‘It didn’t occur to her that her children had lost their father and needed their mother,’ says Richard. ‘She saw them as people who must look after her now. Being queen, she took it for granted that she was the most important person in the world.’
Albert and Victoria had strong ideas about how to raise their children. ‘They were to be as different as possible from the families Victoria and Albert had,’ says Richard. ‘ They didn’t want them debauched or decadent, instead they wanted them to be models of middleclass virtue and intelligence.’
They imposed hours of strict schooling. It worked for their first child, the diligent Victoria, who married the Prince of Prussia and was the apple of Albert’s eye. But it came unstuck with Bertie, the heir to the throne.
‘They treated Bertie harshly,’ says historian Helen Rappaport, contributor to the programme. ‘They had very high intellectual expectations which he couldn’t rise to. He was very good socially but for Victoria and Albert it was all about academia.’
Victoria disparaged his appearance, particularly his ‘total want of a chin’, and his attitude, which grew more dissolute the more she complained. ‘They hoped he’d be a mini Albert. But Bertie was impulsive, like Victoria,’ says Richard. And their relationship would never recover after his indiscretion with a prostitute called Nellie Clifden in 1861. ‘Victoria and Albert were manic about sex outside marriage, it scared the living daylights out of them. Albert went to Cambridge, where Bertie was studying, to tell him off,’ says Richard. ‘They went for a long walk and Albert got a chill. Nineteen days later he was dead. Victoria always believed that her son had murdered her husband.’
Victoria once wrote of Bertie, ‘Oh, that boy. As much as I pity him, I never can or shall look at him without a shudder.’ In another letter she said, ‘I often pray he may never survive me for I know not what would happen.’
Her third child was Princess Alice, who married a German prince. She infuriated her mother by breast-feeding her first baby. Victoria called one of her royal cows Princess Alice out of spite, but was distraught when Alice died at 35 after catching diphtheria from her son.
Prince Alfred came next. After several scandalous liaisons, he was unhappily married to a Russian princess and spent his life at sea. But Victoria’s fifth child, Princess Helena, was more obedient. She married a German prince but was ordered by her mother to live close by as Victoria needed at least one married daughter at her beck and call, so the couple remained in Britain.
Princess Louise, the sixth child, was an artist. She is said to have had many affairs, starting with her sculpting tutor. ‘We explore a hypothesis that a teenage Louise had an illegitimate child,’ says Richard. ‘People who have tried to research this in the royal archive have found that the records for Louise are still closed. And there’s a family, the Lococks, who are convinced they are descended from an illegitimate son; they have a trust fund which was administered by the royal solicitors. Louise is also believed to have entered into a sham marriage with a gay man.’
Victoria’s clear favourite son was Prince Arthur, her seventh child. The others were compared to him, which was difficult for Prince Leopold, the youngest son. He was a haemophiliac, described by his mother as ‘the ugliest and least pleasing of the whole family’.
But, worried about his health, she determined he should stay with her forever as her private secretary. He was bright and went to Oxford University, and got married, but died aged 30.
The youngest child, Princess Beatrice, was called ‘Baby’ by her mother, who determined that she should be her constant companion. She was furious when the princess fell in love with Prince Henry of Battenberg. ‘Victoria was apoplectic when Beatrice said she was getting married,’ says Richard. ‘They lived together but she refused to talk to Beatrice for seven months, only communicating through notes.’
The couple married, but when Henry died a decade later, Beatrice became the companion Victoria had wanted.
‘There’s so much melodrama that these stories feel like a posh East Enders,’ says Richard. ‘Victoria thought she was doing the best for her children. But she was relentlessly selfish.’
Queen Victoria’s Tragic Family will be on Channel 5 later this month.