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  Despite the saying that opposites attract, their union was based on commonalities: Victoria and Albert were born in the same year with the assistance of the same midwife; their families had royalty in their blood, and, as Victoria’s mother was from Germany, they spoke the same language. Moreover, they were both victims of unhappy childhoods: When Albert was five his parents divorced and his exiled mother never saw him again; Victoria’s father passed away when she was an infant, and her mother was comparable to any Brothers Grimm fairy-tale villainess. The couple found the affection, companionship, and trust that neither had experienced while growing up. Victoria’s first act as queen, when she moved into Buckingham Palace, was to symbolically give her mother a bedroom far from her own. In response, her mother gave her as a nineteenth-birthday present a copy of King Lear.

  The popular view of Queen Victoria is the embodiment of sexual repression; urban legend has it that she ordered all the piano legs in her palaces to be covered with skirts because of their suggestiveness to female anatomy. Similarly, her advice to her daughters on their wedding nights was, “Lie back and think of England.” The quotation most associated with her is, “We are not amused.” However, she bore nine children in seventeen years, and their conception was as much a result of her love for her husband as it was duty to her country.

  Prince Albert’s position when he came to live in his adopted homeland was difficult. He was a foreigner in the British castle and thus vulnerable to suspicion. Moreover, in the male-dominated epoch he was in a subservient role, as it was his wife who was one of the most powerful leaders in the world. She was the marquee attraction; he was merely her understudy. His lesser status was reflected in his title of prince consort, rather than king. Three months after his marriage he wrote to a friend, “I am only the husband, and not the master of the house.”

  Given his situation, Albert could have taken the path of indolence and idleness, but in her choice of husband, as in most else, Victoria proved astute. Instead of partaking in ale and fox hunting, Albert became a hands-on father to his nine children. Although he possessed the silver spoon since birth, he had empathy and campaigned for those who did not share his good fortune. Because he earned the respect of his adopted countrymen, he was able to introduce the German tradition of the Christmas tree, its decorations, and the placing of wrapped presents under it. In a sense, he eventually became the power behind his wife’s throne as well as her steadfast companion. In the eyes of their court he walked a step behind her, but as husband and wife they were equals. They referred to themselves as “we two,” in the sense of two souls as one.

  Those with blue blood are not inured to horror, and this held true with the queen and her consort. During Victoria’s first pregnancy, seventeen-year-old Edward Oxford attempted to assassinate the queen as she was riding in London in her carriage. Before he had time to fire a second shot, Prince Albert pushed her down so that the bullet again missed its mark. Undaunted, days later the queen attended an opera; the audience’s cheering for their monarch delayed the performance for several minutes. The newspapers praised the prince for his courage and coolness during the attack; he did not lose his head even when faced with losing his heart. There were eventually seven unsuccessful attempts on Victoria’s life.

  On December 12, 1861, Albert fell ill with typhoid fever. When he came out of his delirium, his last words to his Victoria were “Gutes Frauchen” (“Good woman”). In turn she replied, “Es ist das kleine Frauchen” (“It is the little woman”). Her trademark expression was never truer; she was not to be truly amused again. Albert died in the private apartments at Kensington, where Victoria had first gazed upon the man whose countenance she cherished above all else. He left this world in the presence of the queen of his heart and five of his children.

  The room was kept as a shrine to her beloved; in addition, hot water was brought there each morning and its linen and towels were changed daily, as if Albert were due back momentarily. For three years after Albert’s death, Victoria refused to go out in public, and for the next forty years she never wore any color but black. When she traveled she did so with a huge portrait of Albert, which she had positioned on an easel at the foot of her bed, with a smaller one by her pillow. In this way, when she awoke, it was to him. She said of the hole he left, “Can I—can I be alive when half my body and soul are gone?” She became convinced that she would shortly follow where her prince had gone, but fate had other plans.

  Throughout the years without her essential half, Victoria spent Christmas at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, where she died in 1901, at age eighty-two, after being on the throne for sixty-three years, a longer reign than any other British monarch. In contrast to her lengthy title of Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India, her final farewell was brief. Her last word was to her first love: “Bertie.” For the world it was the passing of an epoch; for the queen it was reunion with her beloved.

  Postscript

  Albert’s body was entombed in the magnificent mausoleum at Frogmore. Over the entrance Victoria had inscribed, “Farewell best beloved, here at last I shall rest with thee, with thee in Christ I shall rise again.”

  When Queen Victoria passed away she was clothed in a white dress and her wedding veil; by her side was one of Albert’s dressing gowns. Also enclosed was a cast of Albert’s hand by her side. After lying in state, she was interred beside Prince Albert. In the crypt are marble effigies of Victoria and Albert; the queen’s likeness is slightly turned to gaze upon the prince consort. Because of her distaste of black-themed funerals, London was festooned in purple and white.

  7

  Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Moulton

  1845

  One never knows where Venus’s capricious son is going to leave his calling card. Elizabeth Barrett Moulton was a reclusive, middle-aged morphine addict under the dominion of a tyrannical father when she met a fellow poet. Their romance gave rise to some of literature’s most immortal poetry.

  Elizabeth was born on a five-hundred-acre estate in Hertfordshire. The source of her family’s fortune was a Jamaican sugar plantation that relied on slave labor. As a child Elizabeth enjoyed riding her pony on the extensive grounds, tending her garden of white roses, and arranging theatrical productions with her eleven younger siblings. Her father, recognizing her brilliance, allowed her an education and encouraged her writing; when she was fourteen, he published fifty copies of her narrative poem.

  Elizabeth’s happiness was sharply curtailed in the mid-1820s, when she contracted a mysterious illness. She described her symptoms as if a cord were tied around her stomach “which seems to break.” Her doctors were unable to diagnose the cause of her distress, which eventually rendered her bedridden; however, they prescribed morphine for the pain, which ultimately exacerbated her problems when she became addicted. Because of her physical frail-ness and overprotective father, she became agoraphobic.

  When she was twenty-two, she was devastated by the death of her mother; her passing for a time left Elizabeth without the power to concentrate. A few years later, because of ill health, Elizabeth traveled to Torquay, in the hope that the seaside would restore her health. She was accompanied by her favorite brother, who drowned in a boating accident. She stayed there for another year and recalled that the sound of the sea always was like the “moan of a dying man.” Added to her emotional bereavement was financial hardship; the abolition of slavery marked the end of her family’s lucrative Jamaican plantation, and they were forced to relocate to London, where they bought a house at 50 Wimpole Street.

  During several reclusive years, Elizabeth’s diversions were family and a golden-haired cocker spaniel named Flush. Her other emotional life jacket was what had sustained her since childhood: poetry. As an adult she had achieved acclaim when she published her works in both a book and in magazines. Her only contact with the outside world was when John Kenyon, a distant cousin, introduced her to the luminaries of the literary wor
ld such as William Wordsworth; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Walter Savage Landor; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and Thomas Carlyle. Though she’d never experienced romantic love, she wrote of it often, such as in “A Woman’s Shortcomings”: “Unless you can die when the dream is past—/ Oh, never call it loving!”

  Elizabeth’s destiny, Robert Browning, was born in London into a liberal environment; his father was an abolitionist and intellectual whose vast library contained six thousand volumes. He was an ardent admirer of the Romantic writers, especially his idol Percy Bysshe Shelley. When he read the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett, he was extremely impressed and wrote to her, “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett ... I do, as I say, love these verses with all my heart.” He asked John Kenyon to secure an invitation to 50 Wimpole Street.

  The first time Elizabeth met Robert was in May 1845. He immediately became as enamored of the woman as he was of her poetry. For her part, Elizabeth found it difficult to believe that a worldly man six years her junior would have an interest in a thirty-nine-year-old reclusive, bedridden, morphine-addicted spinster; however, he was able to convince her that his interest was genuine. Thus, passion entered Elizabeth’s life.

  Over a twenty-month courtship, Elizabeth found a way to make “death less deader” whereby the couple exchanged 574 letters in which they poured out their emotions to each other. Unfortunately, their meetings were clandestine because Elizabeth’s father would not permit any of his twelve children to marry. (One theory behind this odd edict is that he believed that his forebears, who had lived in Jamaica, had cohabited with slaves, which he feared might come out in the birth of a dark child.)

  At first, Elizabeth, feeling guilty that Robert should have an ailing partner, decided against a relationship “with all her will, but much against her heart.” However, love, as is sometimes the case, conquers all, and on September 12, 1846, the couple had a private marriage at St. Marylebone Parish Church. After the ceremony, the bride was forced to return to Wimpole Street. Her romantic bliss is summed up in her poem “First Time He Kissed Me”: “A ring of amethyst I could not wear here, plainer to my sight / Than that first kiss ...”

  A week later, Elizabeth left Wimpole Street for the last time. Like his hero Shelley, Browning whisked his bride off to Italy; he hoped the sunny region would do more for his wife’s health than England’s wet climate. Whether it was indeed the weather, his love, or the fact that her life had a new purpose, the new Mrs. Browning, though still frail, was no longer confined to bed. The couple spent time in various locales, which was especially welcome for Elizabeth, who had spent so many years confined to one room.

  In Pisa, Elizabeth first showed her husband Sonnets from the Portuguese, her collection of poems inspired by their courtship and marriage. The title came from Robert’s nickname for her; he called her “Portuguese” as a term of endearment because of her dark hair. She explained that because of their personal nature, she did not intend to publish them. He, on the other hand, thought otherwise. As he said, “I dared not reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare’s.” The first two lines of the soon-published Sonnet 43 became her most famous: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” The sonnets are the autobiographical revelation of one of the greatest poets, who once believed love had overlooked her.

  The couple eventually settled in Florence in a home, Casa Guidi, where they lived for twenty years. Robert was enthralled with his adopted country and once remarked, “Italy was my university.” Their home became the spiritual and physical mecca for the expatriate English and American communities. Their drawing room was fitted with large bookcases, constructed of Florentine carving and selected by Robert. Tapestries, pictures of the saints, and portraits of Dante, Keats, and Robert Browning hung on the walls. Eventually there was another portrait of a beloved family member. At age forty-three, despite ill health, two miscarriages, and a morphine addiction, Elizabeth gave birth to a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, nicknamed Penini or Pen. His middle name came from Robert’s mother’s maiden name.

  During these happy years in Florence, the only blight was that Elizabeth’s father refused to acknowledge her; his silence made it clear that she had forever forfeited her old family.

  Later in life, Elizabeth, always socially conscious, wrote about other issues than affairs of the heart. She turned her pen to women’s tribulations and championed Italy’s unstable political troubles.

  However, the Brownings’ pens truly flowed when they turned to romance. Kenyon wrote, “With the single exception of Rossetti, no modern English poet has written of love with such genius, such beauty, and such sincerity as the two who gave the most beautiful example of it in their own lives.” And Robert summed up their happiness in his poem “Pippa Passes”:The lark’s on the wing,

  The snail’s on the thorn;

  God’s in his heaven—

  All’s right with the world!

  In 1861, Elizabeth again suffered from ill health, eating little and turning more and more to morphine for relief. As she lay dying, she uttered her last word to her first love: “Beautiful.”

  Postscript

  Browning buried his wife in Florence in an elaborate Carrara marble tomb in the English cemetery in Piazzale Donatello.

  In 1889, Robert Browning passed away in Venice. He was buried in the poet’s corner in Westminster Abbey, adjacent to Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

  8

  Sir Richard Burton and Isabel Arundell

  1850

  The Victorian era gave birth to some of the most colorful personalities in world history, and yet Sir Richard Burton’s larger-than-life personality managed to eclipse most of his colorful contemporaries. It took an extraordinary woman to win the heart of the restless wanderer, and he found it in the woman who followed him throughout the world.

  Richard Francis Burton was born in Devon, England; however, he spent most of his childhood traveling with his family throughout Europe. He attended Oxford University, where he pursued his genius for language, and took up the pursuits of falconry and fencing. He was expelled for attending a steeplechase, as well as for antagonizing both faculty and students. Before departing, as his final calling card, he trampled the college’s flower beds with his horse and carriage. After his expulsion, he enlisted in the army of the East India Company, because, as he explained, he was “fit for nothing but to be shot at for six pence a day.”

  Burton had many habits that set him apart from other soldiers. One was his flawless command of twenty-nine languages. Another oddity was that he kept a large menagerie of tame monkeys in the hopes of understanding their communication. He was also well known for his proficiency in sexual practices, especially ones from foreign countries. However, Burton did not care what others thought of him, as he said, “Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause.”

  Richard’s destiny, Isabel Arundell, came from an old and distinguished Catholic family and was educated at a convent near her home. Although raised in a traditional fashion, from a young age she did not want to play the role of a typical upper-class woman. As a debutante, she was far different from the shallow, husband-seeking females of her class. When introduced to eligible young men at dances, she referred to them as “mannikins” or “animated tailors’ dummies.” She wrote, “’Tis man’s place to do great deeds!” She determined she would rather spend her life in a convent than as a country squire’s wife. In her diary she confided, “As God took a rib out of Adam and made a woman of it, so do I, out of a wild chaos of thought, form a man unto myself. He is a gentleman in every sense of the word; and of course he is an Englishman. He is a man who owns something more than a body; he has a head and a heart, a mind and a soul.” A few months after her entry, in Essex, she met a Romanian gypsy, Hagar Burton, who foretold that her life would be bohemian: “Your life is all wandering, change and adventure. One soul in two bodies, in life or death, never long apart. Show this to the man y
ou take for a husband.”

  The first time Richard met Isabel was in Boulogne, France. Isabel had traveled there (the first time she had left England) for a family vacation; Richard was on leave to visit its fencing school. Their first glimpse of one another was when Isabel and her sister were on a stroll and she saw the man whom she was forever to refer to as “my destiny.” Of their meeting she wrote, “He looked at me as though he read me through and through in a moment, and started a little. I was completely magnetized, and when we got a little distance away I turned to my sister, and whispered to her, ‘That man will marry me.’” The next day when he saw her he chalked on a wall, May I speak to you? and then left the chalk beside his message. Isabel wrote as her response, No, Mother will be angry. However, she never lost an opportunity of making her path cross his. Later they met at a British colony party; afterward, because he had put his arm around her waist when they waltzed, she treasured the sash he had touched.

  When it was time for the Arundells to return to London, Isabel did so with a sinking feeling in her heart; she was hopelessly in love with Richard. However, he made no professions of his affection. He was already looking forward to the horizon of future adventures. Hence, when they parted they did so as friends, though Isabel yearned for far more. While she was out of sight and out of mind, he embarked on the journey that was to make him one of the most celebrated of Victorians.

  Richard’s seven years in India had made him familiar with the customs of Islam, a necessary step for him to attempt a hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca. For verisimilitude, he dressed, spoke, and acted like a Muslim; in addition, he stained his skin with henna. Even more extreme, he underwent a circumcision to lessen his chance of discovery. This was essential, as the penalty for detection was death. He became the first non-Muslim European to enter the Islamic forbidden city, which he accomplished under the guise of Abdullah of Afghanistan.