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| Albert in 1842 by Winterhalter Royal Collection Public domain |
'Only the husband'
In May 1840 Albert wroteIn my whole life I am very happy and contented; but the difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband and not the master of the house.
But his first breakthrough came in September when his heavily pregnant wife made him a member of the privy council. Soon afterwards she gave him a duplicate set of keys to her official boxes. Her nine pregnancies and her bouts of post-natal depression gave Albert the opportunity to have an ever-greater say in policy. He was soon carving out a role for himself and re-fashioning the hitherto undefined role of the consort of a reigning queen. He was also establishing his position as head of the family.
Albert takes control
Victoria and Albert had very different temperaments and this led to tensions within the marriage. In January 1842, when the Princess Royal became ill, Albert blamed his wife and the royal physician, Sir James Clark for mismanaging the nursery: ‘if she dies you will have it on your conscience’. He also blamed Baroness Louise Lehzen, who had become Victoria’s governess after previously teaching Princess Fedora, calling her ‘a crazy, stupid intriguer, obsessed with the lust of power'.In the same month he wrote to Stockmar,
Victoria is too hasty and passionate… She will not hear me out but flies into a rage and overwhelms me with reproaches of …want of trust, ambition, envy etc, etc.
But he secured his victory when Lehzen was retired with a pension in July 1842.
This victory was to have significant implications for the couple’s marriage. It established Albert's dominance, with Victoria happy to take a subordinate role. Had the wilful young woman become a clinging vine?
In fact many tensions remained. Albert was frustrated in his ambivalent role and he often felt oppressed by the intensity of Victoria’s love. At the same time his love of control was undermining her capacity for independent action. After his death she observed that she had
leant on him for all and everything - without whom I did nothing, moved not a finger, arranged not a print or photograph, didn’t put on a gown or bonnet if he didn’t approve it.
For a very negative take on the marriage, see Jane Ridley's article here.
Intervention in politics
In 1841 Sir Robert Peel replaced Queen Victoria's beloved Lord Melbourne in 1841. He and Albert soon developed a relationship of mutual respect and the prince was able to wean his wife away from her Whig bias and turn her into a strong supporter of the new prime minister.When Peel split the Conservative party over the repeal of the Corn Laws, Albert was open in his support for the beleaguered prime minister. On 27 January 1846, on the first day of the debate on the repeal of the Corn Laws, he went to the Gallery of the House of Commons to lend him moral support. This open political partisanship was very controversial, and he was attacked on the floor of the Commons and in the press. He never repeated this action.
Albert and his children
As head of the family and a man with many intellectual interests, Albert took charge of his children’s education and tried to mould them in his own image. This was especially the case with the two eldest, Vicky, Princess Royal and Bertie, Prince of Wales.When Vicky was sixteen months old and Bertie four months, Albert's mentor, Baron Stockmar, issued a memorandum of forty-six pages detailing the education of the royal children.
The object of Education is to develop and strengthen the good, and subdue or diminish the evil dispositions of our Nature. [Above all education must] regulate the Child’s natural Instincts and keep its Mind pure.
Vicky, a highly intelligent child, responded well to this programme. She grew up knowing she was her father's favourite and unlike her siblings she was never afraid of him. She later (in 1868) wrote to her mother:
That he should love me was my most ardent wish, my greatest ambition. I never cared more for a kind look or word from him than for anything else in the world…But I never thought he could really care for me. I felt much too imperfect for that. I never dared to expect it.
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| John Lucas Prince Albert and Vicky with his greyhound, Eos, 1841 Public domain |
Bertie, far less gifted than his sister, reacted badly to the strict educational regime imposed on him. His tutor wrote that ‘he had more than the usual difficulty in writing, spelling, calculating and composing sentences, or doing grammatical exercises’. The royal physician, Sir James Clark, reported in 1849 that the prince’s ‘perverseness was such that the father decided on whipping him. The result was excellent’. In fact, Albert's treatment of his heir was a disaster.
Homes
Victoria and Albert disliked Windsor and were anxious to have family homes where they could live a private life with their children. In Otober 1845 they bought Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. The house was enlarged and rebuilt to Albert’s design in the style of the Italian Renaissance, a style he had studied when a student at Bonn university. Writing to Vicky in 1858 about the gloominess of Windsor Castle, the queen stated, ‘I long for our cheerful and unpalacelike rooms at Osborne’.They bought Balmoral castle on Deeside in 1852. The original house was pulled down and rebuilt to Albert's specifications in Scots baronial style by 1856. It was the beginning of the royal family’s love affair with the Highlands.
The Great Exhibition
Through his presidency of the Society of Arts, Albert became the major organiser of the Great Exhibition of 1851. He set out the philosophy of the Exhibition in a speech at a Mansion House banquet on March 21 1850. The project received no state funding and the money was raised largely through Albert's influence. In July 1850 the committee he chaired accepted Joseph Paxton’s design of a huge structure or iron and glass.The Great Exhibition was Albert’s supreme moment, showing his efficiency, determination, and creative gifts.
Matchmaker
In 1857 Victoria conferred the title of Prince Consort on him by royal letters patent. Because Parliament would not grant him an official role, she used her prerogative to create a title that had never been previously known in Britain.Albert concerned himself with European as well as British politics. He never forgot that he was a German and he shared with King Leopold and Baron Stockmar a vision of a Germany united under peaceful and liberal principles. He hoped to help achieve this by a dynastic marriage – that of his beloved daughter Vicky into the Prussian royal family. The idea had surfaced when Prince Frederick William of Prussia (‘Fritz’) visited the Great Exhibition. In 1855 he and Vicky became engaged at Balmoral though Victoria and Albert would not allow the marriage to take place until she was seventeen.
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| Marriage of the Princess Royal, by John Phillip Public domain |
When Vicky married and left for Berlin in 1858 Albert was heartbroken. The day after their parting he wrote to her
My heart was very full when yesterday you leaned your forehead on my breast to give free vent to your tears. I am not of a demonstrative nature, and therefore you can hardly know how dear you have always been to me, and what a void you have left behind in my heart.
But he did not doubt that the sacrifice was worthwhile: his daughter would rule Prussia and liberalise Germany. It was a lot to ask of a seventeen-year-old girl, and of course it did not turn out as he had wished.
Trouble with Bertie
By 1860 Albert, though only forty-one was aging fast. He had never been robust but he continued with his punishing workload. Victoria wrote to Vicky that he was working too hard, but, robustly healthy herself, she did not realise how ill he was. |
| Albert in 1860, photographed by J J E Mayall Public domain |
The year 1861 began badly with the death of his mother-in-law (and aunt) the duchess of Kent. Then later in the year his son, Bertie, caused him great grief and anxiety. In the summer year he was allowed to attend a military Grenadier Guards camp at the Curragh outside Dublin. In September, urged on by his fellow-officers, he escaped out of his quarters to meet the actress, Nellie Clifden, who had followed the brigade from London. On 12 November a courtier reported to Albert that she had seduced Bertie.
Albert, always the moralist, was appalled. He penned a long letter to Bertie on ‘the deepest pain I have yet felt in this life’. In another letter, he wrote,
You must not, you dare not be lost; the consequences for this country & for the world at large would be too dreadful!On 25 November he visited an apparently penitent Bertie at Cambridge, but he returned to Windsor a sick man. On 27 November he inspected the Eton volunteers, and stood outside in the cold.
The Trent incident
Albert’s last action before his death was to help to avert a major diplomatic crisis between Britain and the United States, following the onset of the American Civil War.In November 1861 a Federal warship intercepted a British packet, the Trent, and removed two agencies from the Confederacy. Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, and Lord John Russell, the Foreign Secretary, declared this a gross breach of international law. On 1 December Albert rewrote the British ultimatum to make the wording more conciliatory.
Albert's role in this has often been exaggerated - it is most unlikely that Lincoln and his cabinet would have wished to have a war with Britain at this crucial moment - but he certainly helped to diffuse the tension. It was his last service to his adoptive country.
Death
On 7 December the royal doctors diagnosed fever. On 12 December Albert became delirious and vomited foul-smelling bloodied mucus into a bowl. He died at 10.45 pm on 14 December.He had been ill for some years and though his death was ascribed to typhoid fever, modern diagnosis suggests Crohn’s disease, an inflammation of the gut. The final cause was probably pneumonia.
See here for the reaction to Albert's death.
It is well known that after Albert's death Queen Victoria went into prolonged mourning and neglected her public duties, so that her politicians worried that she was putting the very survival of the monarchy in danger. A critical interpretation of her actions might put some of the blame on her for allowing her grief to take over (though if she was suffering from clinical depression, this would probably be unfair). Victoria's refusal might reflect badly on Albert - had his highly interventionist role deprived her of the capacity for independent action. This is certainly the opinion of some biographers.
Albertopolis
Albert's memory lives on in the area of South Kensington developed after his death. He might have found the Albert Memorial too ostentatious for his taste, but he would have welcomed such iconic buildings as the Natural History Museum.Conclusion
- Albert was a highly interventionist consort and was regarded by many as king in all but name. His work record was astonishing.
- He was a highly educated and cultured man a great patron of the arts and sciences. His achievements lived on after his death in the South Kensington museums.
- It is an open question how far his dominance of Victoria was good for her. Did he restrain her more irrational impulses or deprive her of the ability to act for herself? Was his treatment of Bertie a disaster? Did it have shades of cruelty?
- It is also an open question of how far his interventions were good or harmful for the monarchy. Was his death a misfortune for the monarchy or did it save it from being over-politicised?
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