A week or so ago some letters between Victoria and Albert were published and trumpeted as "new" and, as one tabloid put it, "showed Queen Victoria was a nag". Typical click bait heading and I found it very annoying.
I had already read these letters years ago so why the newness claim I do not know. I feel the letters put Albert in a bad light not Victoria.
A couple of years ago there was a two part programme on the BBC which made Victoria out to be a ghastly mother and I strongly disagreed with the stance it took. She was not a huggy feely touchy mother but she was, contrary to opinion, devoted to her children and took a huge interest in their upbringing and welfare. Her diaries and letters show how she took pride in their achievements, how she detailed everything about the clothes they wore, the holidays they took with them and in many ways she sounds just like an ordinary mother.
But of course she wasn’t. If we want to label her we could say she was a Working Mother and therefore could not spend as much time with them as she wished.
Also I want to remind everyone that she had NINE children. Yes nine in seventeen years. And please bear in mind that she was tiny just over 5 foot and yet time and time again she gave birth to strong healthy children (with the exception of one who was haemophiliac).
With each birth she suffered what we now realise was probably post natal depression. She struggled through it because she received very little sympathy and Albert was particularly obtuse and unhelpful.
"I am trying to keep out of your way until your better feelings have returned and you have regained control of yourself. You on the other hand want to talk it all over with me again, you 
make a parade of your suffering before my eyes so as to make me feel your reproaches still more keenly,
I am ready to ignore all that has happened and take a new departure and try in future to avoid anything which might make you unhappy and your state of mind worse. Cure it I cannot. You alone can do that"
AND
"I can give you a good certificate this time and am pleased to witness your own improvement. My advice is to be less occupied with yourself and your own feeling"
A certificate! Wow thanks Albert
Over the years my opinion of Albert has undergone a change. After reading Lady Longford's seminal biography back in the sixties, I felt sorry for him living with this bad tempered wife but as having read an exchange of letters with his adviser and mentor Baron Stockmar it was clear that the plan all along was for him to act as a King and Victoria's state of perpetual pregnancy made her heavily reliant on him. Victoria adored what she called Fun in Bed but was not so enamoured of the consequences. There were plenty of courtiers who were secretly happy that a MAN was in charge believe you me.
Thought she was devestated at Albert's early death the real Victoria slowly began to emerge once more. Having been made to feel ill eduated and ignorant by her husband, her acute political acumen came to the fore, and she is revealed as a woman who has her finger firmly on the button and an instinctive knowledge of how her subjects felt on certain matters. In other words she had the Common Touch which Albert never possessed.
I believe he sucked all the joy out of her and, as the years passed and her love for him never dimmed, it must have been disheartening and upsetting to be consistently criticised and ignored. I loved the later Queen Victoria and in one of her letters to her daughter the Crown Princess of Prussia, she said "I am afraid I am going to do something of which dear Papa would not have approved" and I thought GO GIRL!
Don't ask me what it was she was going to do because I cannot remember, but I do remember my reaction….
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