Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  This was a strange interlude. Stockmar faithfully reported to the Queen on their travels. It was a somewhat lengthy journey, and in Florence, at Leopold’s request, Albert was joined by Francis Seymour, later General, whose brother was to be in Prince Albert’s personal entourage for twenty-one years. Seymour was an agreeable companion who was to become a close friend. The real purpose of his presence was to keep an eye open for any signs of dissipation and indiscretion on the part of Albert, a fact which caused Victoria much indignation when she learned of the fact many years later. ‘God knows, vice itself would have recoiled from the look alone of one “who bore the lily of a blameless life” ’. Seymour was impressed by Albert, and noted his impatience with meals, considering that ‘eating was a waste of time’, a refrain that was to become very familiar to his future wife. Albert wrote to Löwenstein with mingled enthusiasm and sarcasm: ‘Oh! Florence, where I have been for two months, has gathered to herself noble treasures of art. I am often quite intoxicated with delight when I come out of one of the galleries. The country round Florence, too, possesses extra-ordinary attractions. I have lately thrown myself entirely into the whirl of society. I have danced, dined, supped, paid compliments, have been introduced to people, and had people introduced to me; have spoken French and English – exhausted all remarks about the weather – have played the amiable – and, in short, have made “bonne mine à mauvais jeu”. You know my passion for such things, and must therefore admire my strength of character that I have never excused myself – never returned home till five in the morning – that I have emptied the carnival cup to the dregs’.

  The remainder of this odyssey was hardly less successful. He disliked Rome (‘but for some beautiful palaces, it might just as well be any town in Germany’) and had a curious audience with Pope Gregory XVI:

  ‘The old gentleman was very kind and civil. I remained with him nearly half an hour, shut up in a small room. We conversed in Italian on the influence the Egyptians had had on Greek art, and that again on Roman art. The Pope asserted that the Greeks had taken their models from the Etruscans. In spite of his infallibility I ventured to assert that they had derived their lessons in art from the Egyptians’.

  In fact, the audience was even more comical. To Albert, the Pope looked ‘like a Pagoda’, and one devout Catholic who accompanied them tried to kiss the Papal toe. He lay down flat on the floor and grabbed the Pope’s ankle; the startled Pontiff was thrown off balance, and kicked the ardent supplicant hard in the mouth, to the barely-concealed delight of the Protestant Prince, Albert recording the scene for Florschütz.16

  He attended the Pope’s blessing of the people from the Vatican balcony, ‘amidst the ringing of bells, firing of cannon, and military music’. He found the occasion impressive, although the ceremonies which followed the blessing were tedious ‘and savoured strongly of idolatry’.

  Naples was little better; ‘the sky and the sea are so dull and grey that one might fancy oneself transported to the North Sea’. There then followed the lengthy journey north, eventually returning to Coburg in the early summer. ‘Italy is truly a most interesting country’, he wrote, ‘and an inexhaustible source of knowledge. One contrives, however, to taste extraordinarily little of the enjoyment which one there promises oneself. In many, many respects the country is far behind what one had expected. In the climate, in the scenery, in the study of the arts, one feels most disagreeably disappointed’.

  ‘Albert is much improved’, Leopold wrote to Stockmar on September 12th. ‘He looks so much more manly, and from his “tournure” one might easily take him to be twenty-two or twenty-three’. But he remained deeply concerned about Victoria’s insistence upon postponing any decision. ‘If he waits until he is in his twenty-first, twenty-second, or twenty-third year, it will be impossible for him to begin any new career, and his whole life would be marred if the Queen should change her mind’. For his part, Prince Albert noted that ‘my sphere of observation has been doubled’, a singularly cool comment on his exposure to the wonders of Italian civilisation.

  What was to prove of real importance was that Prince Albert’s other companion was Ludwig Gruner, only slightly older than himself, but already regarded by his tutors as an outstandingly sensitive young appreciator of art and design. The two young men became close friends, and it was Gruner who opened Albert’s eyes to the glories of the Early Renaissance, then much ignored, and indeed despised in fashionable artistic circles. Thus began a friendship and a collaboration of incalculable value to English art and architecture.

  The return to Coburg was marked by the joint coming-of-age of himself and Ernest – by special legislation – and the consequent public celebrations. ‘I am now my own master, as I hope always to be, and under all circumstances’, Albert wrote. To Stockmar, however, he wrote somewhat flippantly that he would follow his advice to ‘accustom himself more to society’ and ‘pay more attention to the ladies’. He was then obliged to accompany his father to Carlsbad before returning to The Rosenau ‘in order to enjoy some days of quiet and regular occupation’.

  This letter was written to Stockmar on September 6th 1839. His respite was short-lived. Shortly afterwards his father told him that the Coburg trio was to travel to England at the invitation of the Queen. She had conveyed to Leopold by special courier a cold reminder in July that there was no understanding of an engagement, that there was ‘no anxiety’ in the country for her marriage – which was a highly questionable statement, considering that her heir was her Uncle Cumberland, King of Hanover – and that there was no question at all of any marriage for two or three years. To Florschütz Albert gloomily wrote that ‘Victoria is said to be incredibly stubborn . . . she delights in court ceremonies, etiquette, and trivial formalities. These are gloomy prospects’. Without any discernible enthusiasm whatever, Prince Albert prepared himself for his second meeting with his mercurial young cousin, absolutely resolved that a definite decision, one way or the other, must be reached.

  Arthur Mensdorff later wrote to Queen Victoria:

  Albert confided to me under the seal of the strictest secrecy that he was going to England in order to make your acquaintance, and that, if you liked each other, you were to be engaged. He spoke very seriously about the difficulties of the position he would have to occupy in England, but hoped that dear Uncle Leopold would assist him with his advice.

  To his brother, Albert wrote on August 26th:

  I am now twenty years old and it is the first time that I do not spend my birthday in your company. In the morning, when the well-known, touching hymn awoke me in The Rosenau, I thought you must come to my bed. I can well feel what you write and I thank Heaven that we were allowed to go side by side through the greater part of our lives. Our childhood is over, at least not to return here on earth; yet I can say that I retain my childlike soul, and this is the treasure that everyone should take with him into his future life. Let us try all the more to attain something perfect – general education, elasticity of the brain. That is what gives great men such power to rule over others.

  You were born for a position that required such qualities. Fate seems to have chosen me for a similar or rather more difficult position. Whatever may be in store for us, let us remain one in our feelings. We have, as you correctly say, found what others seek in vain, during all their lives: the soul of another that is able to understand one, that will suffer with one, be glad with one: one that finds the same pleasure in the same aspirations.

  From this commitment Albert never wavered. He loved his wayward and often dissolute brother as fervently as he did his parents, and his forgiveness had no element of sanctimoniousness. He accepted them as they were, and although angered by their financial importunities and dismayed by their blatant promiscuity was never censorious. When Ernest contracted an ‘illness’ almost inseparable from his dissolute habits in 1841 his brother wrote:

  The cause of it made me very sad. So also did the death-blow which your
reputation received, at least in this country. Yet, it would never occur to me to curse you or take away from you the love I owe you as my brother.

  That love was reciprocated, and no documents in Albert’s papers are more genuine and moving than Ernest’s letters to Victoria about him during his lifetime and after his death. In them, if only for an instant, one feels the authentic note of love between these very different brothers and their veneration for their ill-starred parents.

  It was thus with reluctance that Prince Albert agreed to return to England and to meet his cousin again.

  * * *

  7 Strachey: Queen Victoria, pp. 97–98.

  8 Albert The Good, pp. 17–18.

  9 They were in fact blue.

  10 Fulford, The Prince Consort, p. 21.

  11 Fulford, op. cit., p. 28.

  12 C. Woodham-Smith: Queen Victoria, p. 37.

  13 P. Ziegler: King William IV, p. 277.

  14 Greville: Dairies, iii, p. 309.

  15 Ziegler, op. cit., p. 294.

  16 Fulford, op. cit., p. 32.

  chapter three

  Betrothal

  The conditions of British politics had changed very significantly since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, although to contemporaries the full importance of what had happened between 1815 and the accession of Queen Victoria was not generally recognised. The resignation of the Tory Administration of the Duke of Wellington in November 1830, which led to that of Lord Grey and the passing of the first Reform Bill two years later, was remarkable in that although Wellington and his Ministers had the full confidence and support of the King the Government fell in the House of Commons. The influence of the Sovereign remained, as William IV demonstrated, but the failure of the first Government of Sir Robert Peel in 1834 also emphasised that it was upon Parliamentary majorities rather than on the support of the Monarch that Ministries henceforth depended for their power. This can now be seen as the most significant shift in power between the Crown and Parliament since the seventeenth century.

  Lord Grey’s Administration described itself, and was regarded as, a Whig Government, but the British political process had not reached anything approximating to the modern understanding of separate political parties vying for majorities at elections, the winner taking Office. What political organisation existed was local, and elections, even after the reforms of 1832, continued to be dominated by influence, wealth, venality, corruption, and sharp practice of various kinds, and, to some extent, individual personality. The Grey reforming Ministry was a confederation of individuals and groupings drawn together by hostility to the Wellington Government and support for electoral reform. After 1832 these unifying elements began to fade, and after Melbourne became Prime Minister in 1834 the Whig Government became markedly hostile to popular agitation for social and political reform, becoming in many respects notably more reactionary than its opponents, who gathered themselves, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and expectation, behind the sombre combination of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel.

  It was out of the crisis over the Reform Bill that there was gradually created the nucleus of a modern political party. The work of F. R. Bonham as a national agent concentrating not on Parliament but the constituencies, and the founding of the Carlton Club in 1832, were indications that the Tory confederation recognised the new realities with greater clarity than their opponents. Bonham was helped in the constituencies by dislike of Whig alliances with Daniel O’Connell’s Irish M.P.s, and anger at alleged, although much exaggerated, Whig indifference to the problems of agriculture. In addition, there had been those who had regarded themselves as Whig supporters who disliked the radicalism of the Reform Act and were fearful of possible new measures on similar lines. These were not mollified by the statement of Lord John Russell in the autumn of 1838 that the 1832 Act represented the furthest increase in the franchise that he could accept, thereby earning himself the sobriquet of ‘Finality Jack’. Russell’s domestic liberalism was now outmatched by Palmerston’s unexpected demagogic espousal of liberal causes abroad. Thus, the Tories began to acquire new support from those who were alarmed by Whig radicalism and others who were hostile to its negative attitudes to social problems. We can see, if only faintly, the beginnings of that extraordinary admixture of dedication to the status quo and appetite for radical reform that was to be the decisive collective appeal and strength of the modern Conservative Party.

  In retrospect it can be seen clearly that Peel, a professional politician of a type more easily recognisable today than it was then, was the natural and obvious leader of this new grouping, but it was neither obvious at the time to himself or others. In spite of his regular protestations in public and private of his keen desire to quit politics he was too deeply enmeshed in them, and too fascinated by them, to take such an irrevocable step. Yet these statements were not entirely false. In Ireland, and in the harsh struggles to achieve Catholic Emancipation in 1828, in addition to the fierce controversies over the Reform Bill, he had made many enemies in the Tory confederation. The county M.P.s, and the magnates who put them into Parliament, viewed him with suspicion, and in many cases a keen dislike that was sincerely reciprocated by this tense and sensitive man. In background and class he was conspicuously different from the bulk of the Tories, and his somewhat cold and precise manner did not create a wide circle of intimate friends and admirers. But his unrivalled experience, his outstanding Parliamentary skills, his national prominence and even fame as the creator of the modern metropolitan police force, and his unquestioned ability compelled him to be the real leader of the Tories. By 1835 all the important strands of the national party organisation were firmly in his hands.

  It would be unwise to make the claim that the Tories were, by the accession of Queen Victoria, a political party on a national scale, with agreed policies and leaders. What they did have – as not all realised – was a national political party in embryo, composed of diverse factions and interests, and individuals eager for Office, patronage, and preferment. Of all those interests the agricultural one remained the most powerful, wealthy, and selfish, but Peel himself, and the young William Ewart Gladstone, first elected in December 1832, represented significant new strands in Toryism, while the enfranchisement of the industrial boroughs in 1832 opened the way for others whose background was that of industry and commerce, the first substantial beneficiaries of the new wealth that was beginning to burgeon in the northern cities.

  There is no evidence that Stockmar clearly perceived the full extent of this change. His veneration for the British Constitution was intense, but so was his determination to maintain, in new circumstances, the power and position of the Monarchy. What deeply worried him was that the impressionable and headstrong young Queen was obviously capable of harming that development by her reckless partisanship and political innocence. His forebodings were justified more swiftly than he had appreciated.

  The glorious and hopeful beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria, when so many were enchanted by her youth, attractiveness, vivacity, and dedicated application, and she herself was an enthralled and exhilarated recipient of lavish affection and adulation which she had never experienced, was unhappily not of long duration. By the spring of 1839 she had become deeply embroiled in a major and sustained political crisis which seriously affected not only her public popularity but the respect of many who had welcomed her accession so warmly.

  It is easy to see why there was such high public enthusiasm for the young Queen, and what heady wine it was for her to be suddenly so independent, so important, so admired, and so apparently powerful. ‘She conducts herself with surprising dignity: the dignity which proceeds from self-possession and deliberation’, as Greville wrote on November 14th 1837, but all the early golden opinions could not obscure the fact that she was an inexperienced, emotional, volatile, and in many respects immature young woman with
very limited understanding both of politics and the nation whose Sovereign she now was. This was not to be wondered at, and she was to develop rapidly, but by the beginning of 1839 the initial lustre had faded almost completely, and she was learning for herself the bitter truth of the Byronic warning:

  . . . All the world looked kind,

  (As it will look sometimes with the first stare,

  Which youth will not act ill to bear in mind).

  Queen Victoria’s new-found and delightful independence of her mother and her coterie had been far from complete. The Duchess, Conroy, and their adherents moved physically from Kensington to Buckingham Palace, and continued their intrigues. ‘It is a hard and unfair trial of the Queen, whose mind and health should not be exposed to such absurd vexation and torment’, Lord Liverpool reported to Stockmar. For her part, the Queen was implacable in her hostility to Conroy, with consequent distressing appeals, scenes, and correspondence with her mother. This was not only wearying, and made her ‘sick and miserable’, but the continued presence of the Tory Conroy and his malignant machinations had significant political consequences, and not least in the abrupt decline in the Queen’s estimation of Leopold, which had a considerable importance for the immediate fortunes of Prince Albert and the Coburg family.

  There were difficulties and public embarrassments over the settlement of the Duchess’ considerable debts, which had to be partially resolved not only by a special vote in Parliament but also by the Queen’s careful management of her own income. But the Duchess’ spendthrift, feckless ways continued, and ‘plagued’ Victoria at a time when she was conscientiously attempting to learn the intricacies of domestic and international politics and was preparing for her own Coronation. This took place on June 28th 1838 amidst a certain amount of cheerful chaos, during which the Archbishop of Canterbury forced the ring on to the wrong finger, the Bishop of Bath and Wells ended the ceremony prematurely and it had to be re-started, the altar in St. Edward’s Chapel, as Melbourne noted, was ‘covered with sandwiches, bottles of wine, etc.’, and the lack of rehearsal was very evident. The young Benjamin Disraeli maliciously recorded that ‘Melbourne looked very awkward and uncouth, with his coronet cocked on his nose, his robes under his feet, and holding the great sword of state like a butcher’. As has already been related, Duke Ernest of Coburg was invited, but his sons were not.