by Gillian Gill
His work for the exhibition brought Prince Albert into daily communication with some of the most brilliant and entrepreneurial Englishmen of his day men he could respect, compete with, and learn from—men like himself. He was never happier than in the society of scientists, artists, musicians, and intellectuals. But these were men called plain Mr. X or Professor Y. Most were middle class, some were common, and they did not own homes in May-fair or country estates in Hampshire. They did not appear at levees, and the Queen could never invite their wives to tea. When the prince met such men, they backed out of his presence and stood while he sat. Albert could preside over such men and make speeches to them, he could consult them, he could tour factories and gardens and bridges with them, he could persuade his wife to give them knighthoods or even peerages. But he could not make them his friends, or so he believed, because at heart he was a conventional man who never wholly shook off the provincial attitudes of his father’s small, impoverished German court.
William Hartington Cavendish, the seventh Duke of Devonshire, could have taught the prince some lessons in English upper-class social mores, had the prince cared to know the duke. The bachelor duke was the immensely rich scion of one of England’s greatest families, a man of great culture, few words, and shy charm. Careless of gossip, he could take the gardener’s boy Joseph Paxton as his lifelong friend and companion, help Paxton to fame and fortune, and still be welcome in every home in England, except Osborne. Devonshire was rare but not unique. In English clubs, on English hunting fields, in English committees, it was slowly becoming possible for a nobleman like Lord Palmerston and a middle-class gentleman like William Nightingale to establish companionable relationships. Their wives and sisters and daughters might even be allowed to exchange visits.
But in Germany such relationships continued to be social apostasy, and Albert was a royalist conservative with liberal tendencies, never a radical. Protocol and etiquette were the scaffolding that supported the Prince of Coburg’s ego.
Lord Palmerston Says No
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EVER DID PRINCE ALBERT ENJOY AS MUCH POPULARITY WITH ORDINARY British citizens as on October 15, 1851, when the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations closed. But the mob is ever inconstant, as Albert and his friend Stockmar liked to remind each other at sententious intervals, and the prince’s fall from grace was rapid. By November 1853, he was the most distrusted man in England, and the rumor around London was that he and the Queen would soon be committed to the Tower. England was eager to go to war with Russia, and the Queen’s husband was widely considered to be the tsar’s friend or even his agent. Prince Albert’s German birth and odd accent, his foreign friends, his internationalism, all of which had been handsomely showcased at the Great Exhibition, were now viewed by press and public alike as prima facie evidence of treason.
The nation had suddenly woken up to the power the prince was wielding behind the scenes. Could it be, editors asked rhetorically, that Queen Victoria was a mere puppet, manipulated by her husband to serve the interests of foreign powers? Radicals and reactionaries alike took to pontificating in parliament on the dangers that “King Albert” posed to the nation.
To accuse the Queen’s husband of treason was a vicious libel, yet the critics had seized upon a fact that needed to be brought to public attention. Queen Victoria had withdrawn into domesticity and was becoming more and more depressed and self-absorbed with each successive pregnancy. She was trying hard to conform to the role of “kleines Fräuchen” her husband allotted her, and took a backseat in state affairs. She frankly admitted this to her uncle Leopold in an 1852 letter: “Albert grows daily fonder and fonder of politics and business, and is so wonderfully fit for both—such perspicacity and such courage—and I grow daily to dislike both more and more. We women are not made for governing—and if we are good women, we must dislike these masculine occupations; but there are times which force one to take interest in them mal gré bon gré [whether one likes it or not] and I do of course, intensely.” It is distressing to the modern ear to find the great Queen Victoria dutifully parroting her husband’s patriarchal platitudes, but King Leopold was no doubt delighted.
In the face of the vitriolic press attacks of 1853 and 1854, both Victoria and Albert saw the prince as an innocent victim, and many of his critics were indeed rash, prejudiced, and ill informed. Nonetheless, a strong case can be made that Albert’s hubris had opened him up to justified criticism and that he and the British government had very different notions of patriotism. Since 1846, the prince had made a determined attempt to take over Britain’s European affairs. He was convinced that he had a combination of talent and status that made him uniquely fitted to mastermind English foreign policy and conduct the nation’s diplomacy. Not content with asserting jurisdiction over the foreign office in his wife’s name, the prince secretly conducted diplomatic negotiations with foreign monarchs over the heads of British ministers of state.
This lunge for power eloquently revealed how little the prince subscribed to English political values and how much he underestimated the power of the English political establishment. All the same, Great Britain was nothing if not pragmatic, and if Albert’s foreign policy had been successful, it might well have been applauded. Unfortunately the prince’s confidence in foreign affairs was equaled by his inexperience, his verbosity, his Germanomania, and his bad luck. He was, as he presented himself, a man of vision, principle, and intelligence. He worked very hard and sincerely believed his motives and actions to be beyond reproach. Unfortunately, when put to the test of events, the Albertian vision turned into nightmare, principle shaded dangerously into Coburg self-interest, and intelligence foundered in rhetoric.
Luckily for Britain and especially for Queen Victoria, who ran no small risk of losing her throne, Prince Albert ran up against a formidable political opponent ready to challenge him on key constitutional issues. That opponent was the longtime English foreign secretary Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston. If any one man was responsible for waking the prince from his dream of becoming a great European statesman, it was Lord Palmerston.
BOTH PRINCE ALBERT and Queen Victoria were earnest students of British history and the British constitution, but they read them rather differently from other people. They knew as well as anyone that parliament under Oliver Cromwell had executed King Charles I, and that aristocratic cabals had sent King James II into permanent exile and, subsequently, when the Stuart dynasty died out, invited the Elector of Hanover to rule in England. They agreed that the extensive political power and executive oversight enjoyed by the first three Hanoverian kings during the eighteenth century had been eroded by the decline into madness of George III, the immorality of George IV, and the inadequacy of William IV But rather than seeing this loss of royal power as progress toward a more equitable and productive society, they fiercely condemned it. Their mission in life was to turn the clock back to the glory years of the young George III.
In the hearts of both the Queen and the prince, the seeds of the doctrine of the divine right of kings lay ready to sprout. Far from seeing the Queen as a figurehead, they believed that supreme authority in the nation was vested in her. They envied the personal power wielded by the rulers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia even as they affected to deplore the cruelty and injustice underpinning that power. They envisioned themselves as enlightened autocrats and were convinced that the British nation would be happier and more prosperous if they, not parliament, dictated national policy. They fought any measure likely to convert constitutional monarchy into parliamentary democracy, which they saw as a way station on the road to a republic.
The assertion of royal prerogatives and powers came into play in the close, daily relationship between the Crown and the fifteen or so members of parliament who formed the cabinet or executive arm of the British government. The phrase “Her Majesty’s Government” was, for Queen Victoria, not a form of words but a statement of fact. The constitution made the Queen responsible for in
itiating and leading the negotiations to form a new government, and ministers were said to serve at the Queen’s pleasure. Victoria and Albert deduced from these formalities that she had the right, after due consultation, to dismiss any minister she found inadequate or retain one she found satisfactory even if parliament rejected him. Her assertion of that right had been at the heart of a constitutional confrontation with Sir Robert Peel in 1839 that had caused the Queen’s popularity to plummet. Albert criticized the timing, tactics, and tone his wife had used at that time, but far from questioning her understanding of her rights and prerogatives, he reinforced them. Now that he was at the helm of royal policy, he was sure that things would be handled better.
In domestic affairs, the modus operandi of the Crown, as it is now useful to refer to the Victoria-and-Albert political team, was both rational and moderate. Between 1842 and 1846, the prince had a seamless entente with the Tory prime minister Sir Robert Peel and felt he had mastered the English executive and legislative systems. The famine in Ireland and the repeal of the Corn Laws were the defining problems facing Peel and his cabinet, and the prince was enthusiastically in favor of the moderately reformist solutions they proposed. In gratitude for the support he received from the Crown, Peel seconded the prince in his efforts to purge the court of immoral elements and to reform the management of the royal household. Unfortunately for Peel, his close association with the prince did nothing to ingratiate him with the right wing of his Tory Party, which had nourished a profound dislike of Albert from the moment his engagement was announced.
Peel was duly defeated by his own party in 1846, but discreet cooperation continued between the Crown and successive ministries. The Queen and the prince demanded to be fully informed on cabinet discussions, gave advice to ministers in regular meetings, made written corrections and edits on government documents, contributed memoranda, mostly in the prince’s hand, but refrained from appearing to dictate government policy. A gracious smile from the Queen to a new cabinet member worked wonders in the policy sphere. The vast majority of ministers at this period, Whig and Tory, came from the aristocracy, and all were devoted monarchists. It was their pleasure to obey their sovereign lady as long as she made sense and did not encroach on their own prerogatives. The less the Times newspaper heard about the actual negotiations between a complaisant cabinet and an assertive Crown, the better for both parties.
But if in domestic affairs the Queen and the prince were ready to give way, in foreign affairs they were determined to take the upper hand. By 1847, the attention of British statesmen was being urgently directed to the political unrest throughout Europe. The prince felt it was time he asserted control and exercised day-to-day management of the foreign office. As Victoria and Albert saw it, diplomacy was the prince’s special field of expertise and his special area of accreditation. Europe was ruled by a small group of monarchs. Who better to deal with the tsar of Russia and the emperor of Austria than Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg in the name of his wife and cousin, the Queen of England?
The pretensions of the royal couple to foreign policy expertise were aided by the strange jargon used in nineteenth-century European diplomatic communication. Ambassadors and envoys referred to themselves in the third person and used each person’s full official title. Their accreditation was always to the country’s monarch. In all her correspondence with officials, Queen Victoria always referred to herself in the third person: “the Queen wishes to point out that she …” and so forth. But in the letters to foreign rulers that Queen Victoria wrote, or that were drafted for her, she was addressing her peers. Therefore she saluted the king or emperor as “Dear Brother,” the queen as “Dear Sister,” and used the habitual first person pronouns I or we.
In most of Europe, these diplomatic expressions reflected the political reality. The emperor of Austria had agents whom he had chosen to carry out his policies. However, if he chose to go over the heads of those agents and deal directly with, say, his fellow sovereign the tsar of Russia, he was free to do so. In England the forms had ceased to reflect the political reality, but Queen Victoria preferred to deny this.
Queen Victoria saw foreign affairs as an extension of family affairs. She was related in some degree to virtually every royal house in Europe, and in genealogical lore even her husband could not compete with her. Foreign policy for Victoria consisted in no small measure of her writing careful missives in beautiful French (the international language of diplomacy) to her kinfolk. One day she might advise her first cousin’s wife the queen of Portugal to be more careful in choosing her intimate associates. The next she might beg her distant Austrian relation for his own good to be kinder to the Italians and Poles even if they did show a foolishly rebellious spirit; or her Dutch cousin to stop bothering dearest Uncle Leopold in Belgium; or her French uncle Louis Philippe to drop the idea of marrying one of his sons to the Spanish infanta. When war threatened to break out in any part of Europe, the Queen was stricken with angst. If Uncle France started fighting Uncle Austria over Italy, whose side should she be on?
In her husband the Queen saw the means to translate her inchoate ideas of royal powers and prerogatives into solid policies. A down-to-earth woman of limited education and no intellectual pretensions, Victoria was bowled over by Albert’s display of theoretical brilliance. He was at once a philosopher and a historian of political tactics and prided himself on deriving policy from first principles, unlike the old muddlers down at the foreign office. Albert digested policy papers as other men ate dinners, and he could handwrite a ten-page memorandum in English or German before another man finished shaving.
In 1848, when Germany was shaken by revolution and the Prussian royal family was ousted by a mob, the prince went so far as to write a constitution for a new Germany of which he sent copies to “Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, Munich, etc.” He also sent a copy to his brother in Coburg, imperiously instructing Ernest to do all he could to get the constitution adopted by the newly created assembly of German states. Prince Albert’s constitution went nowhere, to the surprise of no one but his wife and himself.
The Queen and the prince agreed that with due diligence they had the means to achieve dominance in European diplomacy. Custom dictated that every document relating to foreign affairs—the official diplomatic correspondence of the foreign office, the unofficial reports sent back to London from ambassadors, ministers, and envoys abroad; even the minutes of the British cabinet’s discussions of foreign policy—come before the Queen and the prince every day in the dispatch boxes. To this avalanche of documents Prince Albert and Queen Victoria applied themselves with special zeal. Obviously they did not have enough hours in the day to read it all, but they were insistent that it all come through their hands. Both the prime minister and the foreign secretary met with the Queen and the prince regularly to discuss British foreign policy, and of these meetings the prince himself made and circulated lengthy memoranda.
The Crown’s new assertion of control over foreign affairs was from the start a practical nightmare for the men at the foreign office. Foreign affairs had grown immensely more complex since the days of George III— a monarch in any case whose diplomacy led to the loss of the American colonies. With the invention of the telegraph and improvements in the postal system, the quantity of information available about other countries increased massively. On the other hand, even with the telegraph and an expensive system of personal couriers, if a rebellion against Austria broke out in northern Italy or a coup d’état was staged in Paris, quick response from Great Britain became impossible if the Queen and the prince were holed up at their country lodge on Loch Muick.
But far more important than the practical difficulties were the political questions. Who set international policy for Great Britain—the Crown or the cabinet? Who was more capable of representing the nation to the world and protecting its interests, the Queen’s husband or the foreign secretary? And what if those two eminent gentlemen failed to agree on what policies should be pursued? There was one man
in England who was quite sure that he knew the answer to these questions, and in 1847, the year that Prince Albert began to throw his foreign policy weight around, that man was once more England’s foreign secretary. Lord Palmerston believed he was the right man to conduct England’s foreign affairs, and, unlike Prince Albert, he had thirty years of experience in government and international diplomacy to back up his confidence.
HENRY JOHN TEMPLE, third Viscount Palmerston, was one of the most fascinating men of his time. Born in 1784, Palmerston inherited his father’s modest Irish peerage and a heap of debt when he was only seventeen. A brilliant and ambitious youth, he looked to make a career in politics, and the one advantage of being a mere Irish peer was that he could take a seat in the Commons, the more powerful of the two houses of parliament. All the same, Palmerston knew from the outset that, lacking wealth and high rank, he would need to be smarter than the other fellows to get to the top.
Unlike most of his aristocratic friends, Palmerston took advantage of the educational opportunities available at the universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, and then traveled widely, picking up excellent French and Italian and some German. These languages would stand him in good stead in his career. After several attempts, Palmerston managed to get elected as a Tory member for the pocket borough of Newport in the Isle of Wight. His maiden speeches in the Commons so impressed the party elders that they offered him a seat in the cabinet as chancellor of the exchequer when he was only twenty-five.
Palmerston certainly needed the income high government office would bring, but, to everyone’s surprise, he turned down the exchequer. He did not feel that his talents lay in oratory and knew he would be constantly on his feet in the combative House of Commons, defending the government’s economic policy. Instead he accepted the noncabinet post of secretary for war, and for almost twenty years, he labored in obscurity at the War Office. It seemed that the Palmerston rocket had fizzled, but ambition still burned in Palmerston’s heart. In the words of novelist Anthony Trollope, “he took it all as it came, resolving to be useful after his kind, and resolving also to be powerful,” and his social and sexual talents kept him afloat in the highest levels of British society. Tall, handsome, and witty, the young Palmerston was a member of George IV’s debauched set and a good friend to Lord Melbourne before that gentleman became a model of propriety.
