Albert (Prince Consort)

I

Introduction

Albert (Prince Consort) (1819-1861), second son of Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and husband of Victoria. He was born at Rosenau, near the town of Coburg. When Albert married Victoria, his first cousin, in 1839—they were both 20—he moved from Europe’s princely periphery, a small German duchy, to what was to become during the 19th century the heart of Europe’s royal network, the Court of London. It was not until 1857, however, that the Privy Council gave him the title of Prince Consort.

Albert, who was educated privately and read law for a year at the University of Bonn before visiting Italy, remained intensely interested in German politics, particularly the politics of constitutionalism and of unification. After his marriage, which from the start was a marriage of love, however, his main commitments and obligations were in Britain. His role was an important, sometimes controversial one. One of his critics complained in 1854 that it was “too much that one man, and he not an Englishman by birth, should be at once Foreign Secretary, Commander-in-Chief, and Prime Minister under all administrations”. Of course, Albert held none of these titles, and the complaint was grossly exaggerated. He was a hard worker and was to die young in December 1861, from typhoid. The Queen, in an “agony of grief”, was “inconsolable”: she did not know what she would do without him. His life and work was commemorated in central London in the Albert Memorial and the Royal Albert Hall, both characteristic monuments of their age, an age of which he was not only an accomplished and distinguished representative; but a guide through what he called “a period of the most wonderful transition”.

II

Representative and Guide

Albert referred to his age as “a period of the most wonderful transition” in a speech at London’s Mansion House when he was chairing the Royal Commission on the Great Exhibition. Its opening in the dazzling Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton, on May 1, 1851, was the greatest achievement of Albert’s life. At Albert’s wish the Exhibition displayed the industry of “all nations”. Looking backwards and forwards, Albert wished the collective exhibits to present “a true and living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task” and to serve as “a starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions”.

The stirring success of the Exhibition was attributed to him and to Henry Cole, “a Prince Consort in Miniature”, and a number of other leading figures close to Albert including Lyon Playfair, who had studied chemistry in Germany with the great agricultural and industrial professor of chemistry, Justus von Liebig. Albert’s vision embraced both the arts and the sciences, and it was fitting that after his death the financial surplus accruing from the Great Exhibition should be used to create an arts and science complex in South Kensington, near to the place in Hyde Park where the Exhibition had been held: the name “Albertopolis”, which did not stick, was given to it.

Before the Great Exhibition, Albert had been introduced to British life through the arts and sciences. He was promptly elected to the Royal Society and in 1843 became President of the Royal Society of Arts. In 1847 he was elected Chancellor of Cambridge University. Throughout his life he proved himself capable of creating as well as of appreciating, encouraging, and serving as a patron of both arts and sciences. A great admirer of the German composer Felix Mendelssohn, he wrote music himself, and both he and the Queen sketched and painted. He was an informed collector of ancient and contemporary works of art. Outdoors he was a keen farmer, interested in scientific agriculture as well as a keen shot. He was an accomplished fencer and rode frequently to hounds. He preferred, nonetheless, to be in his own circle rather than absorbed into the aristocracy.

III

Politics and the Constitution

When Albert married Victoria, she was very much under the influence of her aristocratic Whig prime minister, the aged Lord Melbourne. Very quickly Albert weaned her away, putting his own trust in the Conservative leader, Sir Robert Peel, son of a cotton spinner, who became prime minister in 1841. Peel’s death in 1850 was a blow: the mid-Victorian ascendancy of the aged Lord Palmerston, who survived him, was a matter of almost perpetual grievance. Albert and Palmerston looked at European politics and diplomacy in radically different ways. It was the Tory who had most attacked Peel, Benjamin Disraeli, who told the Queen—and he was not just flattering—that Albert had “formed and guided his generation with benignant power”. In the last years of his life Albert showed himself to be an enlightened man of peace, and it was from his final sickbed that he protested against the hostile message Palmerston’s foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, wished to send to the government of Abraham Lincoln concerning the seizure of Confederate envoys on the British steamer Trent. Tension was reduced at once and the matter was resolved by arbitration.

As far as British politics were concerned, the editor of The Economist, Walter Bagehot, judged six years after his death that Albert “had the rare gifts of a constitutional monarch”, a judgement in flat contradiction to one attributed to (but not confirmed) by Disraeli: if he had “outlived some of us ‘old-stagers’, he would have given us while retaining our constitutional guarantees, the blessings of absolute government”. Bagehot was nearer the truth. In the mid-Victorian years politics were changing—with the Press increasingly active—and they were to change more after Albert’s death with the extension of the suffrage and the rise of constituency-based political parties. Albert was outside this story. In his lifetime he was seldom a popular figure, and he had moments of intense unpopularity during the Crimean War. It was not only the aristocracy—and large sections of the Press—that resented and sometimes lampooned him. Despite his concern for working-class housing and conditions of work, he met opposition there too if only because he was German. The diarist Charles Greville believed that he was “unloved because he possessed all the virtues sometimes lacking in the Englishman”.

IV

Husband and Father

As a husband and father Albert was devoted and responsible. With all his seriousness of purpose in studying British and German politics, he spent much of his time with the nine children that he and the Queen tried, but failed, to bring up to meet their expectations. The first of them, Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, “Vicky”, married the heir to the Prussian throne in 1858 and, mother of the future Emperor Wilhelm II, drew the British royal family, which thought of itself as such, into the heart of European dynastic politics. The second child, Albert Edward, later Prince of Wales and Queen Victoria’s own successor as Edward VII, was a great disappointment both to Albert, whose values he did not share, and to the Queen, who strongly disapproved of his conduct.

Yet for all the European connections Albert was happiest in Balmoral, a castle in Scotland, which he transformed, and at Osborne, a house built for him on the Isle of Wight. There he and Victoria were at home. Albert died at Windsor having had “the pleasantest and most enjoyable visit… ever” to Balmoral earlier in the autumn, and it was to Osborne, not quite finished, that the Queen fled in deep mourning after his death.