The Age of Albert, the uncrowned king of Victorian Britain
On 10 October 1839, the young Queen Victoria was at Windsor, watching from the top of the stairs, as her cousin and future husband, Prince Francis August Charles Albert Emanuel of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, commonly known as Prince Albert, arrived to meet her.
Love at second sight
Victoria's uncles, King Leopold of Belgium and Duke Ernst of Saxe-Coburg (Albert's father), together with her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, had long planned that she should marry Albert – as had her mother, the duchess of Kent, who was Leopold and Ernst's sister. But little had come of their first meeting, when Albert had visited England with his brother in 1836.
This time it was different. For Victoria at least, it appears to have been love at second sight. 'It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert, who is beautiful,' she wrote in her diary, underlining and then repeating the word as if entranced by it as she clearly was by him. 'Such beautiful blue eyes, an exquisite nose and such a pretty mouth with delicate moustacchios and slight, but very slight whiskers; a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and fine waist; my heart is quite going.'
Made for each other
The protocol befitting Victoria's superior status required that she should propose to him, which she duly did – and soon. They were married four months to the day after that Windsor meeting, on 10 February 1840, returning to Windsor after their wedding at the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace for a two-day honeymoon.
'We did not sleep much,' Victoria noted, and nine months later, in November, she gave birth to a daughter, Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, the first of their nine children. The happy couple, who worked at adjacent desks and spent far more time in each other's company than was common for husbands and wives in that period, seemed to have been made for each other.
