Noble Blood - Queen Victoria, in White, in Black, in White

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

Queen Victoria wore white to her wedding, to emphasize that she was not just a monarch but also a loyal, obedient wife. The rituals of her life became heavily imitated, and we still feel the cultural consequences of her choices today. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and pre-order its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. Hey, this is Dana Schwartz. One quick note before we begin. If you want to support the show, we have a Patreon. It's patreon.com slash nobleblood Tales. I upload the episode scripts and a monthly bonus episode where I talk about a movie period piece and how historically accurate or inaccurate it is. And we also have a seasonal sticker club. So every season you get a brand new and exclusive sticker to the Patreon. We also have Noble Blood merch. It's at dFtba.com, but it's linked in the episode description. But as always,

the best possible support is just you listening to the show, so thank you so much. This was the happiest day of my life. That's a line in the diary of Queen Victoria, dated February 10, 1840. That night, she recorded in detail the events of that most happy day, the day of her wedding to Prince Albert. It wouldn't be an overstatement to call it the wedding of the century. It's remembered as one of the most defining events of the Victorian era. Given that Queen Victoria and Albert would also go on to have nine children, we can assume correctly that Victoria was also thrilled not just about the wedding itself, but the events of the wedding night.

But the wedding itself was a colossal event, and it was defining in its own time too, not just in retrospect. At the time, Charles Dickens wrote to a friend, quote, society is unhinged here by her majesty's marriage, and I am sorry to add that I have fallen hopelessly in love with the queen. Historians often point to Queen Victoria's wedding ceremony as having popularized many of the wedding traditions we're familiar with today. Victoria's innovation of combining the luxury that a royal wedding demanded with a number of traditional customs from both common and noble people created a new ideal for what a wedding,

quote-unquote, should be. Every subsequent royal wedding and every subsequent royal bride has followed in Victoria's footsteps to some degree, but her influence went far beyond royalty. On a larger cultural scale, much of our modern conception of the white wedding in Western culture was shaped by Victoria. It's ironic then a little bit that Victoria is perhaps most often associated with wearing black. For 40 years after the death of Prince Albert, Victoria wore her mourning dress. The queen, who was once seen as the picture of the angelic blushing bride, would see her later life consumed by mourning, shrouded in its requisite color.

It was only for her own funeral, 61 years after her wedding, that she would allow herself to wear white again. And as she did for her wedding, for her funeral, Victoria created a list of practices that would break royal protocol and align herself with the common people in a way that would persist in royal funerals to this day.

Her subjects did, in great numbers, fall hopelessly in love with Victoria, as Dickens had, in large part due to that very ability she had to frame herself as an ordinary wife, mother, and widow, while also being a queen, For better or for worse, Queen Victoria, quite literally defined in era. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Despite the Victorian era being a time that we associate with a fixation around modesty and chastity,

many of us also associate the Victorian era with its literary romance heroines and their dark, moody heroes. Kathy and Heathcliff, Jane and Mr. Rochester, North and South's Margaret and Thornton. There is no doubt, though, that during the actual Victorian period, the country's favorite love story was between Victoria and Albert. While the marriage between the first cousins had been arranged, Victoria was famously infatuated with her husband. She didn't see the need for a husband during the first few years of her life as queen, but she soon found herself feeling somewhat adrift, and she decided that marriage would set her life on a new track, especially because she realized that marriage would also mean

that she would no longer need to live in her mother's household. Victoria's father died when she was a baby, and her relationship with her mother was, let's say, contentious. The future queen was raised under something called the Kensington system, which refers to the incredibly strict set of rules that the young Victoria was forced to abide by. Victoria was isolated from all other children and never permitted to be alone without her mother or governess or tutor. Her diet was strictly controlled and all of her behavior was recorded and her lessons would occupy most of her time. one of Victoria's first requests when she became queen at 18 years old

was that she would be allowed to have one hour of time to herself a day. Her next request was that her bed would be removed from her mother's room. Even once their bedrooms were separated, mother and daughter would share a household until Victoria was married. Yes, even after Victoria became queen. And so, that separation between daughter, and mother was one more reason for Victoria to want to get married sooner rather than later. None of that sounds particularly romantic, but once Victoria and Albert began their courtship,

there was no going back. On the night of her proposal to him, because of course as queen, she had to propose, Victoria wrote, quote, Oh, to feel I was and am, loved by such an angel as Albert. was too great delight to describe. He is perfection, perfection in every way, in beauty, in everything. I told him I was quite unworthy of him and kissed his dear hand.

This quote paints a fair portrait of who Victoria was in marriage. She willingly gave up her independence in favor of devotion, and she made it very clear to all of England that she was just as much of a wife as she was a queen. Albert, for his part, would rise to the expected role of husband as both caretaker and controller,

albeit in the slightly unusual situation of his wife also being the sovereign. If the aforementioned literary couples were all non-traditional in a sense, Victoria and Albert represented everything the era idealized, despite their unusual power dynamic. A good metaphor for their relationship, I think, is the charming, if a little, stifling. Fact that on their retreat at the Isle of White, they had side-by-side writing desks,

so they would work right next to each other. Their wedding was a chance to show the country everything they embodied, everything Victoria wanted to represent. To portray the fairy tale love story, she would have to deviate from the decidedly unromantic royal weddings of the past and implement some new customs. To start with, she traded her crown for a wreath of imitation orange blossoms. One of the more popular cultural fads of the time was the quote-unquote language of flowers,

the idea that flowers were associated with a specific meaning. Orange blossoms symbolized fertility and purity, and the message Victoria told with them would have been clear to all the ladies who read about her wedding attire in the popular women's magazines of the day. In most descriptions, her dress was also adorned with orange blossoms on the bodice, and the incorporation of orange blossoms into the dress itself would become a royal tradition.

Victoria's daughters had designs of orange blossoms sewn into the hems of their gowns. The current Queen Elizabeth II would do this later for her own wedding to Prince Philip. More recently, Kate Middleton reportedly were Joe Malone's orange blossom perfume for her wedding to Prince William. Orange blossoms didn't just become a symbol in royal weddings. The famous first wedding dress of Socialite and Noble Blood alumna Margaret Wiggum,

the future Mrs. Sweeney and Duchess of Argyle, was embroidered with orange blossoms. That dress was designed by Norman Hartnell, who would later go on to design Queen Elizabeth the Second wedding dress years later. Arguably, Queen Victoria's greatest impact on weddings wasn't what was embroidered onto her dress, but the color of the dress itself. Her gown was not a true white, but a cream. Its wide neckline and puffed sleeves trimmed with cream lace from Haunton, a manufacturer based in Devon. Victoria's dress was entirely composed of British textiles in an effort to give a much-needed boost to her country's industry,

a tradition we still see today with Kate Middleton and Megan Markle, strategically highlighting British designers at key public events. Satin was used for Victoria's bodice, which was fitted around the waist in a deep V shape before it opened into a full skirt. Lace would also be used for her veil, which represented modesty. Victoria, perhaps an early pioneer in the slow fashion movement,

rewore her wedding veil on several important occasions throughout her life. If you've ever seen pictures of an older Queen Victoria, with a crown that seems a little too small for her head, she might actually be wearing a lace veil under the crown. Can you sort of picture that, the veil and then the little crown on top? That's her wedding veil, upcycled. At her wedding ceremony, she wore a dress with a six-yard-long sat-sat, train, which took 12 attendants to carry down the aisle. Victoria was the vision of femininity and romance, but that wasn't what a royal wedding had previously represented. Traditionally, royal brides wore colorful velvet capes and brocaded gowns.

Victoria would not be the first bride to wear all white or cream and embody all that that color symbolized, but she would be the first royal bride to do so and first to do so on such a massively public scale. Her wedding would be broadcast around the world with paintings of it printed in newspapers and on souvenirs for sale. There aren't any photographs of the wedding. We would be about a decade out from that technology being available, but there are actually photographs of Victoria and Albert in their wedding clothes. Albert would have them reenact their wedding for photographs 14 years later after the fact. Maybe inadvertently starting a trend of vowel renewals for the sake of Instagram likes.

But about the color choice Victoria had made, what was the purpose of the choice to wear white? According to biographer Julia Baird, quote, Victoria had chosen to wear white, mostly because it was the perfect color to highlight her gown's delicate lace. But even if the decision was stylistic or practical, at least in my mind, it's impossible to separate the ideas of Victorian purity and religious morality from one of the period's most defining social events, the wedding. Victorian's obsession with white and whiteness was not born from Victoria or her wedding, but her choice furthered the connection between these ideals and the domestic sphere.

In her contemporary biography, published in 1840, the historian Agnes Strickland described Victoria the bride as dressed, quote, not as a queen in her glittering trappings, but in spotless white like a pure virgin to meet her bridegroom. Ever since the Hanover's had come to the British throne, the image of the monarchy in the eyes of the British people was a little fragile, So many were ready to accept a version of a queen who appeared to be more like them than what a monarch had previously represented. Thousands showed up to watch the wedding procession, hoping to get a glimpse of the adoring couple.

There were, of course, those who were wary of the change. Victoria's bridesmaids in white dresses designed by Victoria herself were adorned with white roses, and the dresses apparently courted the opinion from onlookers that they, quote, looked like village girls. To most, though, that wasn't such a bad thing. It certainly wasn't to the women's magazines at the time targeting a middle-class audience who provided their readers with detailed reports on the queen's bridal fashion. Victoria was seen as a symbol of the modest, the tasteful,

and readers were advised to follow in her footsteps, and avoid the vulgar. Around this time, romance novels were becoming increasingly popular with this middle-class audience. There was a clear market for what Victoria was selling, in other words, and the people were ready to buy. As noted in the book Cinderella Dreams, Victoria did not invent the romantic consumer culture, but rather provided several of its customs with a new level of desirability. As we would come to see time and time again from a wide range of public figures, Victoria was simply selling them something they already had. Of course, for the majority of brides, white dresses were impractical. They got dirty easily and they were difficult to re-wear. If you

were wearing a white dress for your wedding day at the time, you were showing off the fact that you were rich enough to have it cleaned. Up until that point, most women would just have worn the nicest dress they already owned in a bright, often vibrant color. But that was the power of Victoria's symbolism. She was somehow both down to earth and aspirational. She was the sovereign leader of the country and an obedient wife. Beyond the white wedding dress, there's another domestic tradition that Victoria and Albert popularized together. The Christmas. tree. The Christmas tree was originally a Germanic tradition, and German Albert gifted decorated

trees to schools and barracks around Windsor Castle during the holidays. But in 1848, the idea of an evergreen tree in one's home for the holidays became an indelible part of English culture when there was an engraving published of Victoria, Albert, and their children surrounding a Christmas tree, a light with candles, toys glittering below. It was this engraving that tattooed itself on the popular Western imagination, Christmas trees, a symbol of the domestic order, as ushered in by a white wedding. In her diary, Victoria later recounted of her wedding, quote, this ceremony was very imposing, and fine and simple, and I think ought to make an everlasting impression. On that, she was correct. In all of those romance novels alluded to before, there is perhaps an equal fascination with death

as there is with love and life. The Victorian era is arguably as equally remembered now for its morbidity as for its ideas of romance. Think of portraits that were taken of corpses upright after their deaths, as if they were still alive so that their loved ones would be able to remember them. Hair was given as a token of love. It's those sort of macabre Victorian gestures that now, as modern audiences, we come to associate with the Victorian period. Weddings and funerals are perhaps the two biggest bullet points in any monarch's life. But for Queen Victoria, her spiritual death was perhaps more prominent in pages of history than her physical one. death had essentially become her for the last 40 years of her life after losing her husband, Albert, in 1861.

My husband won't die, she had said to Albert's doctor when he had taken ale, for that would kill me. Those who were present at the time of his passing recall Victoria throwing herself onto his lifeless body, sobbing and calling him every endearing name shared between them. quote, this is death, they heard her say. I know it, I have seen this before. Victoria had lost her mother in March of that very same year. Of course, she and her mother had had a strained relationship. But the sense of a loneliness, the death of a mother and then a spouse, must have been profound.

Victoria knew just as well as those around her how heavily she relied on Albert, from her personal life to her duties as queen. how she had kept her vow to obey him, and how, without him, she was left flailing. For the next decade, Victoria withdrew from public life. She had earned the nickname, the widow of Windsor, isolated in her castle. Until that point, she had always managed to be everything at once, a wife, a mother, and a queen. Now she was simply a widow. Doctors worried about the weight she had left.

lost, and what they described as a, quote, madness that had overtaken her. A widow of the time was expected to wear black for one to two years after the death of her husband, but Victoria chose to wear it for the rest of her life. Morning was, quote, the dress which I have adopted forever, for mine, as she told her daughter. To another daughter, she admitted she was, quote, afraid of getting too well. Because death was so common in the era, the culture and conversation surrounding it became open and deeply ritualistic. The anecdote of Victoria collapsing onto Albert's deathbed is known because of the Victorian custom to surround the deathbed with loved ones, hoping to hear the last words of the dying. It was also popular to keep a lock of the dead's hair in jewelry,

along with producing portraits and death masks, anything to memorialize the deceased. There were also, of course, the intricacies of mourning dress. Typically, widows were expected to mourn their husbands for around two years, which meant donning black dresses made of crape and isolating themselves from society, for the most part. While it represented the emotional state of the family, mourning dress was also meant to signify to others that one needed special consideration because they were grieving. In choosing to mourn for the rest of her life, Victoria was communicating to her subjects a certain level of helplessness. This was a double-sided coin. On one side, this opened doors for anti-monarchs

to rally around the uselessness of the queen, but on the other side, she was able to evoke a Christian sympathy from the nation that her advisors encouraged. In calculating her wedding image, Victoria was an active player. In mourning, she allowed those around her to craft a narrative. Where the design of her wedding dress with its romantic sleeves and billowing skirt represented romance and youthfulness, the design of Victoria's morning clothes represented a sensibility and practicality. She asked for the bodice to include only light boning and for pockets to be added to the skirts. The black morning dress, in a style of her own, had become her defining image in the public, even when she was still alive.

Thanks to the commercialization of photography later in her life, Victoria was beginning to have more portraits taken. Of course, this being towards the end of her life, in her morning dress. In one of her most famous photos, her diamond jubilee portrait, she wears a black gown and her wedding veil, bridging the past and the present. By this point she had re-emerged in society, albeit not to the extent that she had been with Albert by her side. One of the occasions Victoria would regularly show up for was a funeral, which, though surrounding her noted, was a source of great interest. for her. One of her ladies, Mary Mallet, once noted, quote, it is very curious to see how the queen takes the keenest interest in death and all its horrors,

and specifically commented that, quote, it is certainly strange that she should take such deep interest in the merest details of these functions, end quote. It is no surprise, then, that Victoria made elaborate plans for her own funeral. She listed each item that she wanted buried with her, jewelry, photographs, Albert's dressing gown, and her wedding veil. She also insisted on a military procession to honor her status as a soldier's daughter and head of the army. Her coffin was to be carried by a gun carriage, the first time this was ever to be done. The innovation of a military funeral for a monarch led to, perhaps, the most impactful shift in future state funerals.

Once again, firmly identifying the crown with a larger, more middle-class-oriented organization. She also insisted that there should be no public lying in state, meaning her coffin would be transported straight to Windsor, where she would be buried after the procession through London. Most of note, she wanted everything to be white, from her gown to the pall to the horses. Victoria's return to white brought with it a new symbolic meaning. Years earlier, she had visited a mausoleum with the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson,

whom the queen greatly admired. There she had commented on the bright light that cast through the windows and covered the room. Tennyson told her he liked that point and wished funerals could be in white. 20 years later, when he died, he was buried in a coffin covered in a white pall. Upon Victoria's death, another eight or so years after Alfred Lord Tennyson's, she would choose to do the same. Perhaps after long years of morning, Victoria had seen death as a rebirth, letting the light back in. Or perhaps, she wanted to wear white as she had for her wedding, because she knew she would be seeing her Albert one more time.

That's the story of the wedding and funeral of Queen Victoria, but stick around to hear about another procession in her casket. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and The Big Money Players Network, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.

I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.

It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam.

My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and The Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come, look for up and coming talent.

He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. Mm. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.

Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Queen Victoria was. buried with her beloved Albert's dressing gown, but he wasn't the only man she would take a memento of to the grave. In her instructions, she asked for two things to be placed in her left hand,

a photograph of a man called John Brown and a lock of his hair. A bunch of flowers was then placed over her hand to conceal what she held. John Brown was a Scottish man, a personal attendant to Victoria and a former Gilly or hunting attendant for Albert. While the suspected nature of his relationship with Victoria cannot be confirmed, we know that there was a

great friendship and intimacy between the two. When Brown passed, a letter Victoria sent read, quote, perhaps never in history, was there so strong and true an attachment, so warm and loving a friendship between the

sovereign and servant. Strength of Character, as well as power of frame, the most fearless, uprightness, kindness, sense of justice, honesty, independence, and unselfishness, combined with a tender, warm heart, made him one of the most remarkable men. The queen feels that life for the second time is becoming most trying and sad to bear deprived of all she needs. The blow has fallen too heavily, not to be very heavily felt. This was the second blow, she said. The first, of course, was the death of her husband, Prince Albert. Noble Blood is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grimmin-Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz.

Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is produced by Rima Il-Kaali, with supervising producer Josh Thane, and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans.

I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.