Look at these two. Get a room, already!
I’m no tenured professor of Victorian history, but I’m pretty sure of one thing: Nobody has ever loved to fuck as much as Victoria and Albert. And I’m not just talking about the nine children in 17 years, either. (Though that isn’t exactly evidence to the contrary.)
Just look at this image of the pair waltzing. I can barely stand to look at it. Being in the same room with these two must’ve been absolutely impossible.
You’ve never seen two people wearing this much clothing give off such an intense impression of intimacy. It’s like every picture is either immediately proceeded or succeeded by an intense round of fingerbanging.
Basically any artwork of these two in any museum in London will make you feel slightly uncomfortable in the way that overhearing the rhythmic headboard-banging of neighbors you don’t really know will make you feel slightly uncomfortable. Well, except for the sculpture of that depicts them clinging to one another in “Anglo-Saxon” medieval costume, which delighted me so much I almost screamed when I stumbled upon it unawares. It makes them look like a couple of Society for Creative Anachronism reenactors for whom it is definitely a sex thing.
Here is a letter that Albert wrote Victoria on the eve of their marriage, via the Telegraph:
Beginning “Theuerste innigst geliebte Victoria”, or “Dearest deeply loved Victoria”, he wrote: “I need not tell you that since we left, all my thoughts have been with you at Windsor, and that your image fills my whole soul.:
According to the BBC:
They loved to surprise each other with a ‘secret’ present, such as the surprisingly sexy painting of the young Victoria, with tendrils of hair tumbling over bare shoulders, by German artist, Franz Winterhalter (1805-73). The painting was commissioned by the queen as a present for her husband’s 24th birthday, in 1843. Over a decade after his death, the queen wrote fondly about the painting in her journal as “my darling Albert’s favourite picture”….
The artist William Edward Frost was renowned for painting nudes, and the queen and Prince Albert bought several of his works. At Osborne House, the family’s home on the Isle of Wight, the queen commissioned Scottish artist William Dyce to paint the fresco Neptune Resigning to Britannia the Empire of the Sea, a scene which contains a mass of nude bodies – male and female – about which Dyce recorded that the prince consort was shocked. On his birthday in 1857, Albert was presented with a statue of Lady Godiva, modelled in sensuous silver, gold and enamel.
Have you ever seen their tomb? It looks like they’re about to roll over in the middle of the night and have a go at it.
But maybe it was Victoria who was the real horndog. The moment Albert died, she immediately entered conspicuous mourning and wore black for the rest of her life. Her favorite hobby thereafter appeared to be commemorating Albert. The monument she built him is essentially, as one Jezebel staffer put it, “a gilded dick piercing the sky.”
I guess if you’re going to going to be queen of England, you ought to at least get some good lovin’ out of it. Nevertheless, good God. Please, think of the rest of us.
