Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy under Edward III Book

We Two has one of those tantalizing subtitles that nonfiction loves to plaster on covers: "Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals." If Victoria and Albert had consciously considered themselves rivals, this concept for the book would have made for an extremely interesting study of two competing partners ruling the most powerful nation of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately for author Gillian Gill, Albert and Victoria seem to have left nothing in the way of their own writing or in others' anecdotes to indicate that either of them saw their relationship as a competition, and that is a fundamental problem in the book's organization.

Instead, Victoria erected lavish memorials to the Prince Consort, published hagiographic biographies of him, and wrote diary entries and letters that indicate she was bereft without him. Where, you might well ask, can this possibly leave a revisionist author, determined to showcase their marital battles? Logically, it leaves the corpus of letters that can be summarized to their most damning themes, as well as all the destroyed documents that obviously contained all the critical information the author can't provide in the historical record.

The method of arguing from silence works in general because nobody can prove its conclusions wrong through evidence. Thus, Gill is irrefutably able to answer several key questions in Albert-Victoria biography debates. Why was Albert able to satisfy Victoria on their wedding night if he was as pure as he claims? Gill answers ex silentio: because Albert had had a lot of gay sex experiences at university. Next: did Victoria sleep with John Brown, her Highland Servant, after Albert's death? "[T]he lack of hard evidence is in itself a proof of intimacy," writes Gill. (The relevance of Victoria's relationship with someone after Albert's death in a book dedicated to the marriage of the two is, however, never made clear.)

Gill's writing is so graceful at times that it masks her weaknesses as a biographer. The chief weakness is neither the peculiar absence of quotes from most of her chapters, nor her occasionally unclear timeline of narration, but rather her own confusion about her argument. I can't tell if she approached her sources with the view that Victoria and Albert were prototypes of modern power couples, and then failed to find much evidence for that in the documents they left, or if she approached her sources with the idea that Albert was a foolish and oppressive husband, but Gill definitely approached the texts with some sort of hypothesis that fell apart the more she examined it. The result is that she vacillates between Albert-as-superman and Albert-as-weakling characterizations depending on the chapter. Such characterization is unfair to both the Prince Consort and Queen Victoria, who certainly deserves more credit for her own choices than she receives from Gill's attacks on and defenses of the Prince.