Penetrating Victoria

"Albert entered by Bushey, advanced through Maidenhead, penetrated Virginia Water and left Staines behind..."

So, Queen Victoria, that glum, ultra-moral, model matriarch of empire, was really a self-obsessed, sex-mad harpy who couldn’t wait to bustle her own "repulsive" children out of the royal presence so she could hurry back between the sheets for another round of rampant "how’s-yer-majesty" with her beloved Prince Albert. That, pretty much, was the headline message of the absorbingly revealing Queen Victoria’s Children (BBC Two), writes the Telegraph's Gerard O'Donovan. This opening broadside, of three, saw a phalanx of academics lining up to tell us that, however idyllic the portrait of domestic bliss purveyed to her adoring subjects, life was no picnic in Victoria’s royal household.

Rarely have so many scrubbed-up royal biographers been crammed into an hour of airtime; so many, that sometimes the competing clamour of expert opinion verged on repetition. We also heard, often startlingly directly from the pages of her own diaries, of Victoria’s unquenchable physical desire for Albert. How she saw children – nine of them – as the high price she had to pay for sexual bliss. How babies essentially revolted her, and that she resented every hour spent with them as it meant less alone-time for her with Albert. One contributor even suggested that Victoria refused to breastfeed her children because "she had that feeling that her breasts were for Albert, not for the children". But however much Victoria worshipped her priapic prince, she never lost sight of who wore the royal trousers and Albert struggled with his second-fiddle role. This lead to rows of Titanic proportions which left their home life "a hornet’s nest of hostilities".


All of which was utterly, curtain-twitchingly, fascinating. It is rare to get such a painfully intimate glimpse into any relationship, let alone a royal one. And many of the less headline-grabbing revelations were just as intriguing. Like Albert’s unusually hands-on approach to child rearing. And his grand plan to secure the monarchy’s position by appealing to the prejudices and family values of the burgeoning middle classes. Hence the circulation of so many loving family portraits, images of domestic harmony rather than imperial grandeur.

Aptly enough, Victoria’s children, as individuals, barely got a look-in last night. They remained vague, formless creatures, kept in the background here as in life, mere adjuncts to the grand romance of Victoria and Albert – which came to such a shattering end with his early death, aged 42, in 1861. "Here I sit lonely and desolate, who so need love and tenderness," she recorded in her diary at the time, This was the point at which Victoria’s domineering presence, her "almost insane" need to assert her authority over her children, and mould them – girls and boys –¬ in the image of her lost prince, came to the fore. The home life, far from being a sovereign example of domestic serenity, turns out to have been as lively as a Walford front room, with door-slamming tantrums and serious maternal deficit.