Volume 44, Number 15 · October 9, 1997
Royal Comedy
By Ian Buruma
Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert
by Stanley Weintraub
Free Press, 478 pp., $27.50
Mrs. Brown
a film directed by John Madden. distributed by Miramax Films
The first things that struck Princess Victoria favorably about her German cousin Albert on his visit to England in 1836 were his 'beautiful nose' and his 'very sweet mouth with fine teeth.' Victoria noticed such things. She was very fond of male beauty. Just before Albert's visit, with his brother Ernst ('fine dark eyes and eyebrows, but the nose and mouth are not good'), to celebrate Victoria's seventeenth birthday, she had dismissed two Dutch princes presented to her as potential suitors. 'The [Netherlander] boys,' she wrote to her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, 'are very plain.' She thought their faces showed an unpleasing mixture of Dutch and 'Kalmuck,' or Mongol, and 'moreover they look heavy, dull and frightened and are not at all prepossessing. So much for the Oranges, dear Uncle.'
Review, 4178 words
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