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her destiny.
    He was a happy choice, in almost every respect. He grew up in a bitter, broken home—a place of mutual adultery, separation, and divorce—and he was at a very young age separated from his mother. His father was the ugly, dissipated, indebted Duke of Coburg, and his brother Ernest promised in every way to follow in the footsteps of his father. Albert hardly seemed to be related to them: he was fair (while they were dark), he was sober, studious, with a zealous sense of duty and a deeply held belief that a good life was one of good works. He was, in short, more a Victorian than Victoria was. And he was hers , Victoria felt, with the sense that this was too good to be true. Life at court quickly shifted so that now Albert and Victoria shared the spot at the center: he prominently rode beside her in her cavalcades and at a military review. They lunched several times a week with the Duchess. Albert, of course, was the Duchess’s nephew, and the engagement itself began to lift Victoria’s relation with her mother out of the depths into which it had dropped. Both Victoria and Albert, however, had decided that the Duchess would have to move out of the Palace when they married, and this—very much contrary to the Duchess’s own expectation and desire—would create new tensions between Victoria and her mother. (The Duchess did indeed move out of the Palace two months after the wedding, and moved into a private residence in Belgrave Square.) For the most part, Victoria and Albert spent the first few days of their betrothal surprising one another, becoming familiar with one another’s bodies: holding hands, embracing, kissing. Albert quickly took upon himself what had been Lehzen’s task of warming the Queen’s tiny hands with his own. He also found his place beside her while she worked, but in a way that made it clear to both that the political responsibilities were very much Victoria’s: “I signed some papers and warrants etc.,” she wrote in her Journal, “and he was so kind as to dry them with blotting paper for me.”
    By the time Albert left the Court, on 14 November, in order to spend two months in Germany before the wedding, the two were very much one.
    The ambiguous nature of Albert’s role in national affairs, however, placed public and private strains on the relationship. There was, first of all, the question of the Prince’s allowance. Traditionally, male or female spouses of the reigning monarch were awarded £50,000 a year; Queen Anne’s, George II’s, and George III’s spouses got that amount, as did Uncle Leopold when he married Charlotte, daughter and Heir Apparent of George IV. Leopold, however, hardly helped the Prince’s cause: after Charlotte died in childbirth in 1817, Leopold continued to receive his allowance, until he gave it up in 1831 to become King of the Belgians: a huge public expenditure in return for no public duty. The British public knew very little about Albert at the end of 1839, but it did tend to see him as a penniless German princeling who had surely made an excellent financial move by this betrothal. A broadsheet of the time expressed the following unflattering and cynical sentiments:
    Here comes the bridegroom of Victoria’s choice,
    The nominee of Lehzen’s vulgar voice;
    He comes to take “for better or worse”
    England’s fat Queen and England’s fatter purse.
    Melbourne had promised the Queen an allowance of £50,000 for Albert, but he was of course the head of a weak government, existing during a time of economic and political difficulty; Tories and Radicals turned down that sum, and instead awarded an allowance of £30,000. Victoria raged against the “vile, confounded, infernal Tories,” and particularly against that “nasty wretch” Peel, who had spoken in favor of the bill. Albert was far more complacent with the vote, regretting only that it would