We Two by Gillian Gill

We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals

Gillian Gill

Ballantine, 2009

When handsome 20-year-old Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha married Queen Victoria in 1839, his new countrymen (Albert had wept during the ceremony in which he renounced his German nationality and officially became a British citizen) were baffled as to what to make of him. On one level, literally: the Prince Consort needed an English rank of his own, but what should it be?

As Gillian Gill writes in her clear-eyed and wonderfully antic new history of the celebrated pair, We Two, the debate over the Prince’s rank was awkwardly complicated by the Prince himself:

For his part, Albert [in 1839] declared that he would never stoop to an English dukedom, since a don of the royal house of Coburg outranked any English peer. In England, where many lords had genealogies as long and estates much larger and richer than Coburg-Gotha, this came off as a piece of pathetic rodomontade from a youth of twenty.

Gill’s account takes readers at a brisk pace through the twenty-year marriage at the heart of her book, tracing the slow, grudging steps by which the ruling elite of Victoria’s realm came to re-evaluate and then appreciate Albert’s many fine qualities. He was a hard worker, a temperate, responsible figure in an extended family of extremely dissolute morons (his family was Victoria’s family – they were first cousins, her mother being sister to his father), and in addition to what Gill calls his “theoretical brilliance,” he held a number of forward-thinking social attitudes, unlike his wife. Gill clearly likes Victoria, so perhaps she’s unaware of what a dithering, clueless portrait she inadvertently paints of the monarch who gave her name to an era:

Queen Victoria saw foreign affairs as an extension of family affairs. She was related in some degree to virtually every royal house in Europe, and in genealogical lore even her husband could not compete with her. Foreign policy for Victoria consisted in no small measure of her writing careful missives in beautiful French (the international language of diplomacy) to her kinfolk. One day she might advise her first cousin’s wife the queen of Portugal to be more careful in choosing her intimate associates. The next she might beg her distant Austrian relation for his own good to be kinder to the Italians and the Poles even if they did show a foolishly rebellious spirit: or her Dutch cousin to stop bothering dearest Uncle Leopold in Belgium; or her French uncle Louis Philippe to drop the idea of marrying one of his sons to the Spanish infanta. When war threatened to break out in any part of Europe, the Queen was stricken with angst. If Uncle France started fighting Uncle Austria over Italy, whose side should she be on?

By the time Albert died (young, overworked at age 42), he had succeeded by sheer strength of personality at carving for himself a position of real power out of what had begun as the greatest of all purely ceremonial appointments. The Queen, at first reflexively possessive of her prerogatives, gradually realized that Albert was never indiscreet, never unprepared on any issue, and perhaps most importantly, virtually never wrong. Not since Lord Burleigh had an English Queen been so well advised, and although Gill is not the first biographer to adjust upwards the dismissive estimates some historians have made of Albert, she just may be the most delicate in her discretion – a quality perfectly capable of handling even the most awkward question about Albert:

Nonetheless, even if it is easy to document that, after the age of five, Albert’s intimate relationships were all with men (except for his love of his wife, the Queen), even if it is possible to argue that the young Albert could have experienced homosexual love, there is not one scrap of hard evidence that he did. This is not surprising. He was a man of great renown, major achievement, and small popularity who died tragically young and had a loyal band of friends and relatives. In the years following his death, the person who assiduously collected and lovingly savored the records of Prince Albert’s boyhood was his wife. Queen Victoria was the last person likely to uncover evidence that her husband had not slept with women because he preferred to sleep with men.

It’s so smoothly done you almost don’t think to re-read it for the whisper-soft suggestion that evidence was destroyed, and that’s as it should be. Despite its famous subjects, We Two is a heart a very Edwardian production: it’s smart but chatty, responsible but slightly purple, and best of all, it expects you to do your own thinking. It would be claiming too much to say Gill has written a book Victoria would have liked – the Queen wasn’t much of a reader. But Albert would have filled this book with his spidery, passionate marginalia, and there’s high praise in that.