High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Cardwell’s leg-man was none other than Cole. He wanted the government to have as little to do with the plans at Kensington as possible for, as he told Phipps on 6 September 1853, ‘the more I try to realise the proceedings under Government, the greater the difficulties appear and I feel increased confidence that if the Public are invited to do the work themselves, instead of entertaining jealousies, they would welcome any suggestions from the Prince and be ready to acknowledge him as the leader in the plans and carry out his views.’97 Phipps replied that Albert had read Cole’s memorandum ‘very carefully’ and ‘agreed in the main with the principle which you have therein laid down that works of great magnitude are more likely to be carried out with grandeur and complete efficiency by the agency of private enterprise than under the control of Govt and by means of grants to be made by Parliament.’98 Albert was heavily influenced by Cole’s arguments, and wished the conduct of the enterprise to proceed as he suggested. Cole then proceeded to draw up a paper outlining, as far as it could be told, the plan.

  VII

  There was constant nervousness about the state of public opinion towards Albertopolis, or what was still then called ‘the Surplus scheme’. ‘It has been indispensably necessary to bring as large an amount of influence as possible to bear upon it by means of discussion in the press, and thus set the ball rolling,’ Bowring wrote to Grey on 4 January 1853.99 Suggestions poured in for what museums might be founded on the site: including a patent museum and an animal products museum.100 The Royal Academy of Music applied direct to Albert for a building, in April 1853, causing Grey to comment that ‘the result is that another wheel is added to the machinery which is slowly propelling us towards Kensington.’101

  One difficulty in achieving Albert’s vision was that his standing with the public rose and fell. In January 1854 Gladstone wrote in a private memorandum: ‘Twelve months ago, nothing could be more brilliant than the popularity of the Prince Consort. At the present moment it seems, so far as the public journals afford a criticism, to be overcast. Was the view right then, and is it wrong now? Or right both then and now?’102 The new unpopularity was based on misconceptions, passed on by rumour: that Albert ‘is commonly present when the ministers have audience of Her Majesty’ and that ‘the Prince occupies a seat at the Council table’. This was compounded by the fact that ‘he is by birth a foreigner and that he has relations abroad with whom he corresponds’. Albert did attend council meetings when the Queen was present – ‘but not . . . cabinet ministers and the Prince alone’. Gladstone defended this: senior members of the Royal Household were Privy Councillors and so attended such meetings, and ‘it does not seem wholly irrational that if the relation of a chamberlain or vice-chamberlain to the Queen’s person is such as to bring these functionaries into the Council Chamber, the Queen’s husband should likewise be found there.’ However, Gladstone attested that Albert took no part in the deliberations, but merely observed.

  The public view was different. Arthur Hugh Clough, then a junior employee in the Privy Council Office, wrote to his American friend Charles Eliot Norton at the end of January 1854 to say that the Queen was, after all, going to open the new session of Parliament in person, even though ‘it was said [she] was afraid her loyal subjects might pelt her husband’. He added that ‘many people do you know really believed Prince Albert was actually sent to the Tower, and some repair being in operation on one of the turrets, a large number of people collected to look on, in the belief that apartments were to be fitted up for HRH.’103 Describing the actual ceremony, Clough later told Norton that he had seen the procession to Westminster from his window in Whitehall ‘and heard the occasional hisses of some members of the assembled town-democracy against Prince Albert’.104 It was also believed, as Britain went to war with Russia in the Crimea in October 1854, that Albert had pro-Russian sentiments, which did not help.

  By April 1853 a steering committee was meeting to discuss the establishment of a ‘Museum of Inventions’, and was told that ‘there appears to be no difficulty about obtaining a good collection of models’.105 However, such things grew like topsy: the committee also told Albert that ‘a Collection of Models would be without vitality if disconnected from a library and the printed specifications.’ The committee agreed that to create even a temporary structure for such a collection would cost £10,000. Disraeli warned them that the idea of funding this from patent fees was ‘not practicable’, and his colleagues on the committee feared that trying to raise a subscription for such an enterprise at that time would not be useful.

  Not all the members of the 1851 Commission backed this great concentration of learned societies and museums. Barry, who deeply opposed the idea of the National Gallery moving there, felt Kensington ‘is far too much to the west for the general convenience of the Metropolis, particularly for the industrial community and the working classes at the eastern and central portion of the town’.106 He proposed that the area around the British Museum in Bloomsbury be used instead for this centre of Arts and Sciences: but it was to no avail. The Prince sent his prolix missive on to Granville, who noted that ‘it is certainly to be regretted that we shall have Sir Charles Barry against us; but besides the self-contradictions in his memorandum and the distrust of him by the public, he is altogether too late in the field.’107 He was indeed. Albert had sent a comprehensive memorandum to his fellow commissioners from Osborne on 20 August 1853 suggesting a general plan for the whole site.108 The new National Gallery would be on a site now occupied by the Royal College of Music, open to the park in front. Behind it, roughly on the site of the Imperial College, the Science and Natural History Museums, would have been two long oblong buildings, either side of a square of gardens and monuments, housing the museums of industrial art and patented inventions and of trade, and with the site entered at the south (at the present entrance to the Natural History Museum) through a triumphal arch. Either side of where the Albert Hall now stands would be buildings housing colleges of arts and sciences; and around the periphery there was scope for smaller elegant buildings housing learned societies and other such institutions. An Academy of Music, or concert hall, was planned, but nowhere near where they ended up; rather on the south side of the main road opposite what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum. Albert’s ambition was limitless: if more frontage to Hyde Park could be purchased then the proposed schools could be extended, forming beautiful courts in front of the proposed National Gallery.

  VIII

  Albert was distressed by a rumour in early January 1855 that Cole had resigned from the Commission. ‘If it is the case,’ asked Grey, ‘what is the real motive for such a step? I can hardly think he wd have taken it without some communication to HRH.’109 It was not true. Albert was constantly on edge about plots to derail his scheme. When in July 1855 a vote approached in the House of Commons for money to buy more land, Albert wrote to Palmerston, by then Prime Minister, urging him to ensure it passed. It was not just that ‘Mr Disraeli, Mr Gladstone and Mr Cobden are personally pledged to support the vote’ but that ‘departmental jealousy in subordinate ranks in the Treasury is trying to defeat this plan.’110 Palmerston replied at once that he would table a vote and put the government’s weight behind it.111 On 2 August Albert got his money, £15,000, thanks to support from a combination of Gladstone and Disraeli.

  Meanwhile, by late 1854 work was well advanced on the roads on the site and through its centre, with sewers being laid underneath them. Albert decided on the names of the roads in April 1855: one was to be Exhibition Road, another Prince Albert’s Road, and the one to the south Cromwell Road.112 It had been decided to move the Museum of Manufactures, as it had become known, from Marlborough House, to Albertopolis in 1857, when the Queen formally opened what had been renamed the South Kensington Museum. It was now situated in an iron building designed by a Royal Engineer, Captain Francis Fowke, one of Cole’s team whose role in Albertopolis would become wider yet. She would reopen it in 1899 in a grand new building as the Victoria and Al
bert Museum. It soon commanded 40,000 visitors a month, displaying the public’s growing hunger for culture. It was central to Albert’s conception of this hub of civilisation to have both the National Gallery and learned societies in Albertopolis. There was even a suggestion in 1858 that the Education Department of the Privy Council Office should move to Kensington, and this centre of enlightenment; though this intrusion of government was met with coolness at the Palace.113 Parliament was, though, reluctant to find money to move the National Gallery, Gladstone’s concern for the public purse trumping all other considerations.

  Unfortunately for Albert, he had made the relocation of the National Gallery the linchpin of the whole project: and as obstacles arose, his confidence in what could be achieved, and in the vision itself, was undermined. The Times suggested that if a new National Gallery were needed there were three Royal Palaces not doing very much, one of which could be used for that purpose: Kensington Palace, St James’s Palace or Marlborough House. This outraged the Queen, who wrote to Palmerston that she was ‘indignant with the unfair and mischievous article in the Times of today and trusts that the Govt will not allow itself to be beaten upon the National Gallery question by a knot of persons who seem to delight in nothing but making mischief and showing their own importance. Really nothing worthy of the Country can be ever produced if the repeated decisions of Royal Commissioners, committees of the House of Commons, Govts etc etc are thus to be everlastingly set aside and all progress and preparation made to be lost labour.’114 The suggestion that one of her palaces should be used was ‘really too bad’. Understanding the exigencies of the situation, Palmerston replied at once that the notion was ‘objectionable and absurd’.115 The problem did not arise, because Parliament flatly refused to vote the money.

  The Times’s influence was largely blamed for this setback. Granville wrote to Albert on 5 July 1856 comparing the newspaper to ‘the King of Naples who is hated, but is feared and obeyed in his own country. I do not know whether anything could be done without affecting Your Royal Highness’s dignity to put a stop to these attacks.’116 He told the Prince of the ‘two most important persons’ on the paper, John Walter, the proprietor, and John Delane, his editor. ‘The first I am told is all powerful when he interferes. I do not know him at all, but I am informed that he is narrowminded and violent, rather a morbid but not a bad man.’ As for the editor, ‘Delane is vulgar, without much appearance of ability, but must understand his own Trade. He seems very open to personal civility.’

  A leading historian of the project, Hermione Hobhouse, has described the ‘schizophrenia’ present in the development of Albertopolis because of ‘the uneasy coexistence of the grandeur of the Prince’s original concept with the Commissioners’ ability to put it into practice.’117 She adds, plausibly, that such a project required a ‘roi soleil’ who, as well as having a vision, had the absolutist powers to enforce it. The traditional suspicion of the English towards authority, a culture shock to Albert when he left Coburg, would not brook any such attitude. Private property was sacrosanct and interference in it by the State an abomination. For all his influence Albert, in the end, lacked power. Rather than being able to command a grand project, he would have to have Albertopolis built piecemeal; and he would not live long enough to see it built in that fashion largely by Henry Cole.

  Vanity Fair would later speak of Cole, his fingers in so many pies, as having had a ‘peculiar mission of reviving the artistic sense among his countrymen . . . His great aim and object has been to provide artistic instruction, and to that end he has founded art schools . . . He it is who has been the soul and intellect of all those undertakings which have made South Kensington famous.’118 Cole achieved all these things – including, later, his being a motive force behind the museums and the Albert Hall – despite being increasingly unpopular because of his sometimes scheming, sometimes dictatorial methods, and because of his rampant personal ambition.

  In May 1858 Bowring suggested to Albert that the commissioners buy out the government’s interest in the site, except for £60,000 representing the site of the Science and Art department. Albert thought the suggestion ‘very good’.119 In 1859 Parliament passed the Kensington Estate Bill, guaranteeing the future of the site for the purposes Albert intended. Thwarted on his gallery, Albert conceived instead grand horticultural gardens for the site. He started to draw up plans even before the Horticultural Society had responded to an invitation to become partners, on land roughly where the Royal College of Music and Imperial College now stand. He recruited Fowke to help plan the gardens: Fowke would benefit from his patronage in various schemes in South Kensington – not least the Albert Hall. The Horticultural Society was offered 20 acres and undertook the work with the help of a £50,000 grant from the Commission, which paid for ‘a highly decorated Italian Arcade and certain costly earthworks required as the foundation of a garden.’120 Albert opened the gardens, which were highly acclaimed, in June 1861, and they eventually included a monument to him as a memorial to the Great Exhibition of 1851.

  It was also at this time that another inadvertent effect of the Great Exhibition came into being: a business calling itself ‘The Great Northern Palace Company’ issued a prospectus for its ‘Palace of the People, Muswell Hill’ to complement the Crystal Palace, now at Sydenham and enjoying huge popularity – 1,384,163 persons visited it during 1859. There was clearly scope for something accessible to those living north of the metropolis. That the prospectus appears in Albert’s papers shows how interested he was in this unintended consequence of his big idea.121 Its proposed devotion to ‘general instruction and amusement’ would be complemented by 30 of its 450 acres ‘of the finest land in the county of Middlesex’ being set aside for ‘Benevolent Institutions connected with Art, Science, Literature, Music, Horticulture and Railway Interest’. It would have an ‘educational department’, but this was not merely a philanthropic but also a speculative venture, some of the land being set aside for ‘the erection of Suburban Villas’. The main actors were also directors of the Great Northern and other railway companies, whose fortunes would be made by ferrying people to and from this palace of varieties. A number of members of both Houses of Parliament, led by Lord Brougham and Lord Albemarle, were listed as patrons.

  In May 1860 plans for the schools of General Education and of Art were sufficiently advanced for Cole to ask Grey whether Albert and the Prince of Wales would be available to lay their foundation stones the following month. It was proposed to hold another exhibition in 1862 under the auspices of the Society of Arts and to use temporary buildings in Kensington to house it. Cole would have his fingers in this pie too. It was also around this time that a possibility arose for a new cultural establishment in Albertopolis: the first suggestion of an ‘International Concert Room’ was made in June 1861. Albert approved the notion in August.122

  IX

  Almost a decade after the Great Exhibition Albert, egged on by Cole, was still conceiving ambitious projects, and Cole in particular – for all his weaknesses – was still showing he could see them through, before coming back to suggest more. On 23 January 1860 a letter from Gladstone brought the prospect of yet another project, for what would become the Natural History Museum: ‘On Saturday the Trustees of the British Museum accepted by a majority of nine to eight a motion of Lord Palmerston’s to the effect that it is desirable under existing circumstances that the Collections of Natural History should be removed to another site.’123 The Trustees had originally wanted the new accommodation to be contiguous with the existing museum in Bloomsbury. The first request to separate the natural history collection from everything else had in fact come five years earlier, from Professor Richard Owen, superintendent of that department. Owen had much in common with Cole: a man of great ability, but also with a gift for unpopularity. T. H. Huxley had written of him in 1851: ‘It is astonishing with what an intense feeling of hatred Owen is regarded by the majority of his contemporaries. The truth is, he is the superior of most, and does no
t conceal that he knows it, and it must be confessed that he does some very ill-natured tricks now and then.’124

  A Treasury Minute of 23 October 1861 that Gladstone wrote precipitated the foundation of the Natural History Museum. On 21 October Owen had shown Gladstone round the cramped collections in Bloomsbury, and had not needed to impress upon him how overflowing, and inadequate, the space there was. Gladstone could see this for himself. He sent his minute to the Prince Consort on 14 November 1861, a month before his death. Gladstone’s main concern was financial, and in advocating the course to be adopted he identified a saving of between £350,000 and £415,000 if buying land in Kensington rather than Bloomsbury.125 Fowke laid before the Commons Committee on the South Kensington Museum a plan for laying out the Science and Art Department at a cost of £214,000. The elevations on the south and west sides would be ‘suitable for a public building worthy of the nation.’ The Committee said it would be ‘unwise to commit the country to a heavy expense in anticipation of its wants’, but agreed to some limited development. In fact, by 1865 a total of £519,070 had been spent on the site, well over twice Fowke’s estimate.