Did Queen Victoria promise to obey Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha during their wedding? I know that she had to propose to him because of her status as a sovereign.
She wouldn’t have had the option of *not *promising to “obey” in 1840. The CoE marriage service didn’t allow that option until the 20th Century.
And I think the British Museum still has a boxed piece of their wedding cake. A bit dried out by now, but it’s there.
She was the head of the CoE though.
New (but relatled) question; was Victoria subject to the doctrine of coveture?
No. But then, in English law, neither were queens consort.
See Blackstone’s Commentaries, book 1, chapter 4.
First I’ve heard of that. Got a cite for it?
I think you mean coverture:
I’ve heard that as well. Though I suppose I don’t count as a cite.
Didn’t seem to be true for Queen Elizabeth I
:smack: Oh wait, Erik was a King of Sweden, not a subject of the Queen.
This claim is also made in the Wikipedia article:
That would make sense. Only a fellow sovereign would equal her in status.
Was not allowed? Oh, please. For that to be true, there would be a law prohibiting that particular speech. What is the law? If there’s no law, then it’s just a folk story.
The way I understand it, it was more of a social custom. I don’t think there was any law of Parliament forbidding anyone of lower rank from proposing to her, but I don’t have much trouble believing that it just wasn’t done. And someone of lower rank who would have proposed to her would probably have elicited much disapproval.
Just because there wasn’t a law doesn’t make it a folk story. It was more about conventional custom - something that guides a great deal of Monarchical and Government business round these parts, having no written consitution to follow.
Queen Victoria indeed made the proposal. This is from a letter that Albert sent to his grandmother: “The queen sent for me alone to her room a few days ago, and declared to me in a genuine outburst of love and affection that I had gained her whole heart, and would make her intensely happy if I would make her the sacrifice of sharing her life with her …”
It would have been the height of presumption for him to propose to Victoria. Albert, the younger son of a reigning ducal family, was a mere serene higness, which is inferior to royal highness. He was was just barely ebenbürtig, that is to say, of sufficient rank to marry a queen regnant. Victoria later granted him the style royal higness.
A generation earlier, when Victoria and Albert’s uncle Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (who was of the same rank as Albert) married the Princess Charlotte, a number of British aristocrats protested that Leopold was not of sufficiently exalted station to marry the only child of the Prince of Wales (later George IV.)
In contrast, Prince Philip is generally thought to have popped the question to Princess Elizabeth. But Philip was a royal highness by birth and so there was more parity of rank between them. (Both Philip and Elizabeth are great-great grandchildren of Victoria and Albert.) Philip, though living on his pay as a naval officer, was more of an eligible parti than Albert and Leopold had been, and his proposal was not thought presumptuous. However, if he’d postponed the proposal until after 1952, when Elizabeth succeeded, he probably would have had to wait for her to ask him.