High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  With one death in particular the cult reached its apotheosis. The awe of death, the exhibition of grief and the sanctification of memory experienced by many Victorians were never engaged in with such reverence, hyperbole, excess and histrionics as practised by the Sovereign herself. Her desire to see her late husband commemorated in the most spectacular fashion led to one of the most distinctive projects of the whole Albertopolis scheme. It drew, once more, on the can-do attitude of the Victorians. Despite the sensitivity of the subject, it provided yet another stage for the clash of egos of those who felt they were making Victorian Britain. It sparked a debate about an appropriate artistic and aesthetic approach to the commemoration of death, and the idea of contemporary style. It cemented the cult of Albert at the heart of the cult of the dead, making him the model for the expression of high Victorian grief. It provided a cultural template for the handling of death that lasted well into the twentieth century.

  II

  Establishing the habit of a lifetime, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, still just short of his twentieth birthday, had some illicit sexual encounters with an Irish actress called Nellie Clifden in Dublin in the autumn of 1861, while attached to a regiment at the Curragh. Miss Clifden was an early practitioner of the ‘kiss and tell’ stratagem, and soon the news was all over Dublin society. Word inevitably sped back to Windsor and outraged the Queen and Prince Albert. They feared the Heir to the Throne might, inadvertently, have set about securing his own line. On 25 November 1861 Albert went to Madingley Hall, just west of Cambridge, where his son was staying while engaging in what purported to be study at the university, to admonish him. They walked outside on a cold, damp day and sat up late into the night while Albert lectured his son about the inevitable decay if he kept on this trajectory, and also about how scandal could undermine the monarchy.

  It was not this exacting day on the Fens that killed him: though it weakened his health coincidentally to his contracting either typhoid or Crohn’s disease, an inflammation of the bowel, one of which did. Albert had been exhausted all autumn, however, and during the Royal Family’s holiday at Balmoral in October 1861 had had several soakings while out tramping through the heather.5 Not the least preposterous aspect of his widow’s hysterical – and there is no other adjective for it – grief was her decision to blame her eldest son for the death of his father. In truth, it had far more to do with that curse of the nineteenth century that technology and investment would soon overcome, poor sanitation. Albert died of the drains at Windsor Castle. There was also a misdiagnosis at the earliest stage of his illness, shortly after he returned from Cambridge, by Dr Jenner, the royal surgeon, who thought Albert had a heavy cold and nervous exhaustion. The Queen told her uncle Leopold on 4 December that Albert had the flu. However, over the next few days his fever intensified and his condition deteriorated. It was not until 12 December that his doctors realised this was more than influenza; but even at this stage it was not clear that they realised it was typhoid. He died two days later, and Victoria’s long wallow in widowhood began.

  Scarcely was Albert in his tomb than discussions began about a great memorial to him, and to his greatness. Quick off the mark, predictably, was Henry Cole, who had an open letter published in the press calling for the creation of an Albert University. This stimulated no reaction at all, but Cole had signified that should a movement start up to commemorate the life and works of the late Consort, he would (whether anyone else liked it or not) be a significant part of it. The City of London made a more corporate, and determined, effort to launch a memorial appeal. A public meeting took place on 14 January 1862 chaired by the Lord Mayor, William Cubitt, brother and partner of Thomas, the builder ‘to consider the propriety of inviting Contributions, for the purpose of erecting a lasting Memorial to His late Royal Highness the PRINCE CONSORT, and to adopt such measures for carrying out the object, as may then be decided upon.’6 The Bishop of London moved a motion ‘deeply deploring the irreparable loss the country has sustained’ of the Prince, not least because of his long service ‘unceasingly devoted to improving the condition of the humbler classes, and to the development and extension of Science and Art.’7

  The motion also called for the constitution of a committee of noblemen and gentlemen to see the project of the memorial through. Palmerston, Derby and Disraeli were among the past, present and future prime ministers who sought to serve on the committee. Grey wrote to Clarendon to say the Queen especially wanted him to serve, along with Sir Charles Eastlake, the director of the National Gallery, to give ‘advice in the selection of artists’ for a memorial and ‘the direction of its execution’.8 Derby, who would chair the committee, raised the question in the Lords on 7 February, stating that £27,000 had already been subscribed, and only uncertainty about how the memorial fund would be managed and disbursed had prevented more from pouring in.9 The following week Granville announced that as the desire to have a memorial had arisen spontaneously, the government would not dream of seeking to control what would happen. The final decision would be the Queen’s. Meanwhile a rash of provincial towns, led by Liverpool and Glasgow, proceeded to make plans for their own memorials.

  A Prince Consort Memorial Committee was formally established, comprising Derby, Clarendon, Cubitt and Eastlake, who as the president of the Royal Academy acted as its secretary. It met for the first time at the Royal Academy on 1 March 1862. The Queen had intimated little, in her grief, other than that she expected something of an appropriate scale, and liked the idea of an obelisk.10 Charles Dickens had heard from a lady-in-waiting that ‘she applies herself to all sorts of details appertaining to the Memorial, all the morning, and cries all the rest of the day.’11 Dickens, who reserved his sentimentality for his novels, observed that Albert ‘was neither a phaenomenon, nor the Saviour of England; and England will do exactly without him as it did with him.’

  It was clear from the press that ‘a large proportion of the public appeared to be desirous of connecting the intended monument with some Institution intimately associated with the Prince’s name.’ The Committee, therefore, decided a two-phase memorial would be appropriate, with the institution being devoted to the promotion of the Arts and Sciences, as Albert would have wished. It would also, the Committee felt, reflect his wish – expressed at the opening of the Garden of the Horticultural Society in June 1861 – that those gardens would ‘at no distant day, form the inner court of a vast quadrangle of public buildings’.12 A great hall – something Cole had first envisaged in the late 1850s – would be perfect for that purpose and would ‘harmonise with every kind of institution’. So great would be the hall that the monument would need to stand opposite in Hyde Park, not merely being near the site of the Great Exhibition itself, but sufficiently far away from the hall not to be overwhelmed by it.

  The immediate consensus was to play safe and support the Queen’s idea of an obelisk, preferably of red, but if necessary of grey, granite. Eastlake and other members of the Committee were bombarded with letters from architects, aesthetes, stonemasons and members of the public suggesting how the memorial should be executed. Although obelisks were very much the fashion, and the Queen herself wanted such a memorial, there were doubts whether such an object could be made sufficiently interesting, or sufficiently tall, from a single piece of stone. In April 1862 the Committee wrote to the Queen to make these reservations, and General Grey (upon whom she had immediately come to lean in her bereavement) replied that she had reluctantly acceded to those views.13 She asked that the foremost architects should be consulted.

  Albert’s period of unpopularity was fresh in the memory and there was nervousness that a plan might backfire, causing an already hysterical Queen to pitch into even deeper misery. Yet the enthusiasm for the idea seemed to give the lie to fears that it would come to nothing. Grey wrote to Bowring on 31 March about a subscription raised to fund the monument; and he was sceptical. ‘Certainly a subscription from 4,500 individuals out of a population exceeding 30 millions does not constitute a
National Memorial.’14 The following month Grey suggested, also to Bowring, that an institution might be dedicated to Albert’s memory – ‘call the building to be erected a College, or Gallery, or what you will’ – and that the idea ‘deserves consideration’.15 ‘But what chance of getting the necessary funds? The Queen cannot announce such a wish in the chance of having to give it up for want of means – I fear they are sanguine who think the announcement of such a plan would run the subscriptions up to a quarter of a million.’ He felt an institution was ‘the only satisfactory form that any useful project could, in my opinion, take’. He foresaw that Parliament would be asked to vote £100,000 to ensure that ‘the nation’s tribute to the Prince’s memory’ was executed appropriately’ and was doubtful that would happen. He asked Bowring to think about it and discuss the matter with him when he had.

  A letter of 9 May 1862, written by Sir Charles Phipps to Palmerston five months after Albert’s death, raised the question of a ‘National Memorial’. The Queen was holed up at Balmoral, prostrate with grief. Everyone around her was in a state of tension. Phipps told Palmerston that if the question were discussed in Parliament it was vital ‘to avoid not only all opposition, but all adverse discussion’.16 The possibility of removing, after all, the National Gallery to Kensington was not to be mentioned (though it resurfaced within a year or two), that having been a great wound to both the Queen and the Prince, and one it was dreaded being revisited, since the Queen felt the decision had been made to keep it in Trafalgar Square out of ‘personal opposition to the Prince’. However, there had been a ‘change of public feeling’ about the Prince: and Kensington would be the obvious place for a memorial, if there were to be one.

  Any sort of building, Phipps warned, would require ‘a managing body, must be kept in repair, lighted and attended to, and that these expenses would have to be provided for either by endowment, which would require a considerable sum of money, or by an annual vote of parliament, unless the institution were self-supporting, which could hardly be ensured.’ Also, ‘on account of the distress in Lancashire’, where the cotton industry was in a desperate state because of the American Civil War, a vote for any money for a memorial ought, the Queen and her advisers had thought, to be postponed until the following session of Parliament. Phipps reluctantly requested to see Palmerston to discuss the matter: something had to be done.

  Cole, writing to Sir Charles Eastlake on 29 May 1862, went to a whole new level of ambition, ‘that of connecting all the South Kensington institutions with the Prince’s memory. There would be Horticultural Gardens – buildings for the International Exhibitions, South Kensington Museum, Central Hall for Scientific Societies and examinations, and the Personal Monument on the Highest Ground in Hyde Park.’17 With his record of success, with no one to challenge his vision, and with the Queen’s mood very much set on the creation of the grandest and most extensive memorial possible for her late husband, a crucial phase in Cole’s empire building would soon begin.

  Another man keen to make his voice heard was George Gilbert Scott, one of the architects consulted. He made a point of writing separately to Eastlake to share his own specific views, and to emphasise that ‘I cannot help giving a somewhat large share of my thoughts to it’.18 Scott would have to go through some hoops before securing the commission: Eastlake wrote to many architects including him, Charles Barry the younger, Philip Hardwick, Matthew Digby Wyatt and Sydney Smirke, inviting them to submit designs. Scott replied that to build something in line with ‘public expectations’ would cost up to twice the amount suggested in the prospectus.19 The project at this stage included the central hall as well as the monument, and Scott warned that if an architect who had not foreseen the problem were commissioned – that is, anyone but Scott himself – then the problem would quickly become apparent, and vast modifications would be necessary.

  Scott was one of the period’s greatest architects, and one of its greatest egos. He was the son of a clergyman, from a clerical family, and had an almost Ruskinian conception of a link between the divine and the Gothic. A family peppered with clergy ensured that when, in the early 1840s, he set about restoring churches that were deemed, in the Victorian estimate, to require improvement, or building new churches in the newly favoured Gothic Revival style, there was plenty of scope for patronage. As a boy Scott had acquired a love of sketching medieval buildings, and in 1827, when he was sixteen, his father had him articled to a firm of London architects.

  The boy’s genius was not recognised, and his penchant for the medieval was actively discouraged. Scott plodded along until his father died in 1835, at which point he set up his own practice. He hired William Moffatt, with whom he had worked a few years earlier, and they secured a number of commissions to build workhouses required by the passing of the Poor Law Act in 1834. Scott married his cousin in 1838 and had five children with her. She also, after a few years of nagging her husband to do it, sacked Moffatt, who had become Scott’s partner shortly before their marriage, and in this she was astute. Moffatt lost money in railway speculation in the 1840s, was rude to Scott’s clients and lived beyond his means. When he was eventually imprisoned for debt Scott helped him out.

  In the early 1840s Scott moved on from workhouses to churches, strongly influenced by Pugin, most celebrated at that epoch for joining Sir Charles Barry in the design of the new Houses of Parliament. Scott brought to the task his own devout Anglicanism: his style of Gothic frightened no horses. However, his first meeting with Prince Albert had been in 1843, at the opening of one of his humbler buildings, the Wandsworth Infant Orphan Asylum. In 1844 he set out his artistic influences: ‘From a very careful consideration of the ancient churches of Germany, France and England, the author . . . has been led to the end of the thirteenth century, viz from 1270 to 1300 ad, as the period at which the most perfect ecclesiastical architecture is to be found: very fine specimens are certainly to be met with both earlier and later than these dates, but still within these limits appear to be comprised the period of the fullest development of the style.’20 He argued that the architectures of the three countries he had specified had reached a common style by this point ‘by coincidence’, only to diverge again thereafter. Each ‘departed from the simple principles of taste and introduced into their architecture those fantastic and corrupted details, which at length led to the extinction of the style, and a return to the architecture of ancient Rome.’21

  By the 1850s he had moved on to competing for great public commissions, was writing widely on his art, and was a force to be reckoned with. At the time of the competition for the Albert Memorial he had just started to build the chapel at St John’s College, Cambridge – which is by way of a small cathedral, or large town parish church – and was recovering from the controversy, described later, over the new government buildings in Whitehall. In these years, as well as continuing to restore churches (including Westminster Abbey) and cathedrals (including Chichester, St Albans, Salisbury, Lichfield, Chester, Exeter, Rochester and Ely, some of which stand today only because of Scott’s work in shoring them up) he would also build the Midland Hotel at St Pancras Station, Leeds Infirmary, Preston Town Hall and parts of Glasgow University. He had around thirty people working for him, and some of the other great names of the period, such as Bodley and Street, passed through. He was very much at the top of his profession: and the memorial to the late Prince Consort was a prize indeed for such a man, with the eyes of the nation upon it.

  Eastlake reported to Bowring at the 1851 Commission – upon whose land the memorial would sit – on 10 June 1862 that a group of architects including Scott, Smirke and Tite had investigated the matter, and made the following proposals, which Eastlake now forwarded: ‘A monument in Hyde Park, between Rotten Row and the public road; and a Central Hall, south of the public road, in a direct line between the Monument and the centre of the Conservatory.’22 The idea of a separate monument, free-standing at the south side of Hyde Park, was advanced because of the uncertainty over the future of
the rest of the site. This would ensure that, however long it took to construct the rest of Albertopolis, Albert himself would not have to wait too long for his memorial. South Kensington was the overwhelming, but by no means unanimous, choice of site: a long, anonymous letter to the Morning Advertiser, under the nom de guerre ‘ex-MP’, said it was yet another example of the ‘jobbery’ that had gone on about Kensington ever since the exhibition.23 He wanted the memorial at Burlington House on Piccadilly: his argument died swiftly.

  The architects had considered various sorts of memorial. A monolith was out because no single stone of suitable size could be sourced. So too was an obelisk, as one ‘built up in several stones would only show an inferiority to the ancients’.24 A column topped by a statue was ruled out because the statue would not be visible enough. A ‘Memorial composed of one or several groups of Sculpture, surmounted by a Statue of the Prince’ was a possibility; but bronze, the material of choice, ‘soon acquires a dark tone, injurious to the effect of a work of art’. The architects proposed a mixture of metals that ‘would acquire an agreeable permanent colour’. Also, it had to be ‘upon a very large scale to be effective’. The architects recommended a separate hall because ‘we have nothing in London for such an object [meetings connected with the arts and sciences] like the great halls of Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester.’25