Isaac Cart
Cart was born in Morges, a municipality in the Swiss canton of Vaud, probably in 1811 as he was listed as 30 years old in the 1841 English census. He seems to have brought his fiancée Fanny Louise Franziska Peneveyre with him, whose family came from the same canton. She was listed in the 1841 census for the borough of Saint George Hanover Square in Westminster as a thirty-year-old, together with her and Isaac’s daughter “Miss Cart”, who was three months old at the time. Fanny and Isaac married in England shortly after Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, on 1st April 1840.
A year later their first daughter was born. The loyal servant Cart chose the name Albertine for his firstborn. Their second daughter, whose birth is registered for the quarter July to September 1842, was promptly named Victoria. The third daughter, Charlotte, was born in 1844, and a fourth child must have been born in the spring of 1846, because on 4 May 1846 Prince Albert wrote to his step grandmother Caroline: “…My poor Cart, who was married in the same spring as us, lost his wife in childbirth. The poor man is beside himself and has now 4 very small children (the last a few days old) on his hands. …” The fourth child must also have died, because in the main register of 1858 the three daughters mentioned above were listed as his only children. Most probably, Isaac’s sisters-in-law came over to raise the girls, because the 1850s census also lists Andrienne and Emilie Peneveyre, who lived with the three girls at 8 Chapel Street in the community of Saint George Hanover Square in Westminster at the time.
In 1858 Victoria and Albert went on a journey through Germany with some of their children. Isaac Cart seemed to have been granted holiday, because he travelled with his daughters and sisters-in-law to Switzerland to visit family and friends. But this trip was to be his last. A few days after his arrival in Switzerland he fell ill. On the way to Lausanne, on 10th July, he suffered his first heart attack. With increasing breathing and heart problems, Cart died on 7th August 1858, leaving three daughters behind. Queen Victoria’s diary entry of 12th August remarked:
“…While dressing Albert came in, quite pale, with a telegram in his hand, saying, ‘my poor Cart has died’. We heard a few days ago that he was dangerously ill with congestion of the heart, which alarmed us very much, still, we were full of hope. He died suddenly at Morges of angina pectoris. Good Cart was with dearest Albert from his 7th year, a quite invaluable man, well educated, thoroughly trustworthy, devoted to him, superior, in every sense of the word, — a proud, independent Swiss, who was quite ‘un homme de confiance’. I can’t think of Albert without him, he seemed quite part of himself. It is a grievous loss & my poor Albert feels it dreadfully. …” 1
Cart’s eldest daughter Albertine went back to England. In the 1861 census she was listed as “Governess” to the family Barret in Claremont in the parish of The Holy Trinity in the municipal borough of Hastings. Here she was described as twenty and unmarried, and under the column “Where Born” it was noted: “London, Swiss Subject”. It has not yet been possible to determine what later became of her or her sisters. Andrienne Peneveyre, the aunt of the girls, spent the rest of her life in Morges, where she died in 1869 at the age of 54.
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1 12 August 1858, Queen Victoria’s journals
