The happiness of their home life was not a matter of publicity in print and paint. They genuinely felt it. There are many passages describing domestic life in the Queen's private journal, for example one in 1852 when she noted "the birthday of my beloved husband ... We celebrated peacefully and happily in the bosom of our family. The children did all they could to make their dear adored father happy: they drew, worked, recited, wrote compositions, played on the piano and Affie the violin". One of the happiest, if in this case formal, family pictures was painted by Winterhalter in 1847. It shows the Queen and Albert with their four children, including the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal. As the number of royal children grew there were greater strains within the family, and even before Albert died the Prince of Wales had not lived up to his high expectations. Albert had tried systematically to plan the children's education, but the results were mixed, as were his own untiring efforts to understand the British constitution.

With some of the children, however, particularly the Princess Royal, the lessons taught by Albert bore fruit. After she married Prince Frederick William of Prussia in 1858 there was now a new German connection. The marriage on Queen Victoria's insistence took place not in Berlin but in London. "The assumption of its being too much for a Prince Royal of Prussia to come over to marry the Princess Royal of Great Britain IN England is too absurd, to say the least ... Whatever may be the usual practice of Prussian Princes, it is not every day that one marries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England. The question therefore must be considered as settled and closed."

Vicky was the name used by the Queen and by the Princess Royal in the many letters, often difficult to decipher, that they subsequently addressed to each other after the marriage, and within two years of arriving in Berlin she was telling the Queen that she was "every bit as proud of being a Prussian" as of being British "and that is saying a great deal as you know what a John Bull I am". Yet in one of her first letters she had made the point about the significance of the sense of the royal family in Britain by drawing comparisons with Prussia. "I cannot be too careful here", she wrote, "where the Royal Family is the perpetual topic of stories and criticisms, alas often true, but still exaggerated sometimes." "There is no sort of respect for the family here -- and there cannot be."