As Anson realised, he had a very complex young man as his master, and also a very under-utilised one, and in this context there was a significant conversation between him and Melbourne on February 19th, 1841:
. . . Ld M. said the Prince is indolent, & it would be better if he was more so, for in his position we want no activity. I replied the Prince may be indolent, but it results from there being no scope for his energy. If you required a cypher in the difficult position of Consort of the Queen you ought not to have selected the Prince, having got him you must make the most of him, & when he saw the power of being useful to the Queen he will act. He is not ambitious, he wishes for no Power, except such as will enable him to support & assist the Queen . . .
Indolence was not the problem; boredom and frustration were, and Anson was quickly to realise that he severely underrated Prince Albert’s political ambitions, although there are other indications in his papers that he was beginning to appreciate this fact rather more than this conversation might indicate. In short, one suspects a diplomatic rather than a strictly truthful approach to the Prime Minister.
In the meanwhile, Lehzen blocked the way. Albert mused to Anson on February 17th 1841 that he believed ‘that the Queen has more fear than love for the Bss & that she wd really be happier without her, tho’ she cd not acknowledge it’. When, in April, the Queen was incensed by Uxbridge ‘but dreaded his outbursts of temper’ Albert at once undertook the task of rebuking the Lord Chamberlain, although Melbourne feared that, as he told Anson, it ‘would place implacable enmity on Uxbridge’s part against the Prince’. Surrounded as he was by these vipers, it is not to be wondered at that Albert told Anson that ‘I give every person about me credit for the best intentions & honesty of purpose until they prove themselves unworthy of my confidence. I applied this my general rule to the Bs. She has lost it by repeated instances of animosity’. The reality was that he came to hate her as an evil but potent influence on his wife, constantly causing difficulties and scenes between them, impeding his work to reform and reorganise the Court and the appallingly ill-managed Royal finances, and deliberately setting the Court against him. He saw her not only as a political schemer and a Court meddler but as a real threat to his relationship with his wife. Anson, although a Whig himself, and a Whig appointee, took Prince Albert’s side. Melbourne’s faculties may have been failing, but the crafty politician in him saw no value whatever in increasing Prince Albert’s influence at the expense of his and Lehzen’s. So long as Melbourne was Prime Minister, Albert could receive no help from that quarter. Thus, to an extent that it is doubtful he or Anson fully appreciated – although they certainly did later – Prince Albert’s personal and political interests depended upon a change of Government, and a smooth and uncomplicated transition of power in which the Queen would not be politically implicated. The Prince had, accordingly, a real and personal stake in the advent of a Tory Government and the ending of the Whig domination over the Court and his wife.
It is surprising that this crucial point has been so consistently overlooked by so many. Prince Albert remained formally aloof from Party politics as such, but already he was personally involved in them in fact. His early high-minded protestations of complete impartiality had had to be amended very severely in the light of harsh experience at the hands of Melbourne, Lehzen, the insufferable Pagets, the arrogant and avaricious Whigs, and his totally partisan wife. A Tory Government under Peel offered the only way out of this unhappy morass, which threatened his happiness, his usefulness, his unfulfilled energies, and even possibly his marriage. Anson, and others, were to discover for the first time that when Albert’s interests were concerned he could change very rapidly from the humorous, charming, merry and cheerful companion and master to a strong-willed and resolute politician.
Queen Victoria’s many qualities did not include an acute social conscience, and, preoccupied as she always had been with her own world, she was strikingly unaware of, and lacked real interest in, the issues of wealth, poverty, and social reform that were inexorably becoming the principal issues of contemporary Britain. Here, the negative aspect of Melbourne’s influence was most conspicuous, but his indifference to such matters was shared by the Queen, and his cynicism fell on receptive ears. The Factory Act of 1833 to reduce the appalling exploitation of child labour had been only a modest step towards limiting these abuses, while the Poor Law of 1834 had not improved the condition of the very poor, but had actually made them worse. ‘If paupers are made miserable’, as Thomas Carlyle cuttingly wrote, ‘paupers will needs decline in multitude. It is a secret known to all rat-catchers’. A bad harvest and a sudden slump in trade in 1837 made matters even worse, and combined to give The People’s Charter a substantial popular support. When it was disdainfully rejected by Parliament fierce rioting broke out in Birmingham, swiftly followed in other towns and in the hitherto peaceful countryside. Although the temper subsided, the cause of the Chartists did not. The Queen vehemently supported the Government, but Prince Albert was more doubtful.
His first public speech was on June 1st 1840 to the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Traffic and the Civilization of Africa at Exeter Hall, in the Strand. As it was an open public meeting there was an immense demand for tickets, and although Albert was intensely nervous his brief speech had a bite that was somewhat unexpected, and left no one in any doubt as to his strength of feeling on the subject of humanity and justice, which was the theme of his remarks. Although he confined himself strictly to the slave trade – ‘the blackest stain upon civilized Europe . . . a state of things so repugnant to the spirit of Christianity and to the best feelings of our nature’ – the significance in a national context only became publicly evident rather later.
In 1838 he had told Stockmar, to the latter’s dismay, that he had little interest in politics, and at that stage it was true. His general impressions of British politics had not been improved by the disputes over his income and title, and the furore over his religion. He now found himself carefully excluded from his wife’s duties as Queen, with the jealously protective Lehzen denying him even the position of Private Secretary. When he suspected that Lehzen had diverted £15,000 of the Queen’s income into the coffers of the Whig Party he raised the matter, in considerable concern, with Melbourne, who merely remarked that this was nothing compared with the sums that King George III had spent on elections, an observation that did nothing to assuage Albert’s alarm about the political independence of the Monarchy or his dislike for Lehzen. Characteristically and fairly, he did not blame Melbourne; it was the ‘Kensington System’ that still survived, and which he was determined to end.
With Stockmar’s strong support, he plunged himself into study of his new country, its politics, and its problems. By this stage Stockmar’s knowledge of these subjects was detailed, and probably unrivalled, and his lack of personal involvement in active partisan politics made him a uniquely trusted figure. His approach has been best described by himself:
If you are consulted by Princes to whom you are attached give your opinion truthfully, boldly, without reserve or reticence. Should your opinion not be palatable, do not, to please or conciliate him, deviate for a moment from what you think the truth. You may in consequence be some time out of favour, treated with neglect or coldness; and when they come back (for back they will come, if you remain honest and firm), never complain of the treatment you have received, never try to make them own how right you were, and how wrong they have been. It must be enough for you that you should, for their good and the good of the country, act upon the principles, the soundness of which is thus acknowledged.
In Albert he found somewhat stronger material than he had expected, and which had already so surprised, and impressed, Melbourne. Prince Albert had developed a considerable regard for Melbourne, which was reciprocated, although not totally on either side. Their relationship, after their initial correspondence, was courteous but wary. In a sense, each was competing for the ear and at
tention and support of the Queen, although this should not be exaggerated. What was more fundamental was that Melbourne, although devoted to Queen Victoria and her interests, remained a Whig politician precariously hanging on to Office, while Albert was obsessed by his wife’s and Lehzen’s Whig partisanship and its attendant dangers, and the discovery that Lehzen might have been channelling Royal income to the Whigs brought home to him how perilous the situation actually was. Also, Queen Victoria had gradually mellowed her original strict views on personal morality under Melbourne’s subtle influence – ‘times have changed, but I do not know if they have improved’ – and had become markedly more tolerant of personal peccadilloes, a feature of her character that always existed and which was to be both enduring and endearing. Her stern censures on her ‘wicked uncles’ were firmly resisted by Melbourne (‘but they were such jolly fellows, Ma’am’) until they were a topic of amused and engaging interest. This was emphatically not the view of Stockmar and Prince Albert, with such acute experience of the libertine activities of Duke Ernest and his elder son, and the Queen’s comment to Melbourne that ‘the Prince is much severer than me’ has a critical and somewhat wistful note. Albert’s eagerness to extricate the Court from any hint of scandal was very understandable, and also clearly understood by Melbourne, but his cry ‘This damned morality will ruin everything!’ after a session with Albert emphasises the gulf between them. But the fact that they admired and liked each other should be recorded to the credit of each, particularly as although Albert’s political influence over the Queen slowly grew, as David Cecil has rightly written: ‘It was still not to be compared with Melbourne’s’. This was the problem.
At this stage, in effect only given the task of organising the Royal finances and households – into which he threw himself with much energy and with immediate and enduring benefit – Prince Albert had not worked out his own role for himself, but he had already established the principles of political neutrality, to which his wife became reconciled only gradually, and the need to strengthen the real influence of the Crown. Ten years later he set out his purposes in a letter to the Duke of Wellington which can be inserted at this point. These were, he wrote,
to sink his own individual existence in that of his wife – to aim at no power by himself, or for himself – to shun all ostentation – to assume no separate responsibility before the public – to make his position entirely a part of hers – to fill up every gap which, as a woman, she would naturally leave in the exercise of her regal functions – continually and anxiously to watch every part of the public business, in order to be able to advise and assist her at any moment in any of the multifarious and difficult questions brought before her, political, or social, or personal. To place all his time and powers at her command as the natural head of the family, superintendent of her household, manager of her private affairs, her sole confidential adviser in politics, and only assistant in her communications with the officers of the Government, her private secretary, and permanent Minister.
These were indeed awesome objectives, aimed at a degree of personal power unparallelled by any Consort, and drawing into his hands the reality of political knowledge and influence. These purposes took some time to achieve, but it is clear that they were present from the outset. The campaign to remove Lehzen from her position was only the beginning, but a highly significant one.
Equally important was the establishment of his title as Regent in the event of Queen Victoria’s death while her child was still a minor. In view of the extreme difficulties over Parliament’s hostility to him only a few months before, this step – vehemently opposed by the Duke of Sussex – could have run into serious difficulties, but these were swept aside by an episode on June 10th best described by Albert himself:
Dear Grandmama,
I hasten to give you an account of an event which might otherwise be misrepresented to you, which endangered my life and that of Victoria, but from which we escaped under the protection of the watchful hand of Providence.
We drove out yesterday afternoon, about six o’clock, to pay Aunt Kent a visit, and to take a turn round Hyde Park. We drove in a small phaeton. I sat on the right, Victoria on the left. We had hardly proceeded a hundred yards from the Palace, when I noticed, on the footpath on my side, a little mean-looking man holding something towards us; and before I could distinguish what it was, a shot was fired, which almost stunned us both, it was so loud, and fired barely six paces from us. Victoria had just turned to the left to look at a horse, and could not therefore understand why her ears were ringing, as from its being so very near she could hardly distinguish that it proceeded from a shot having been fired. The horses started and the carriage stopped. I seized Victoria’s hands, and asked if the fright had not shaken her, but she laughed at the thing.
I then looked again at the man, who was still standing in the same place, his arms crossed, and a pistol in each hand. His attitude was so affected and theatrical it quite amused me. Suddenly he again pointed his pistol and fired a second time. This time Victoria also saw the shot, and stooped quickly, drawn down by me. The ball must have passed just above her head, to judge from the place where it was found sticking in an opposite wall.26
The many people who stood round us and the man, and were at first petrified with fright on seeing what happened, now rushed upon him. I called to the postillion to go on, and we arrived safely at Aunt Kent’s. From thence we took a short drive through the Park, partly to give Victoria a little air, partly also to show the public that we had not, on account of what had happened, lost all confidence in them.
To-day I am very tired and knocked up by the quantity of visitors, the questions, and descriptions I have had to give . . . My chief anxiety was lest the fright should have been injurious to Victoria in her present state, but she is quite well, as I am myself. I thank Almighty God for His protection.
Your faithful grandson,
Albert.
The name of the culprit is Edward Oxford. He is seventeen years old, a waiter in a low inn – not mad – but quite quiet and composed.
This near-tragedy transformed the situation. The Queen’s waning popularity was entirely restored, and the question of the Regency was handled with great tact and skill by Stockmar. The key was that Albert had already convinced the Tories of his genuine impartiality – ‘The Tories are very friendly to me, as I to them’, he wrote to his father – and although Prince Albert gave the credit to Stockmar, the fact was that the politicians had been impressed by the warm reception given to his slavery speech by the audience and the newspapers, and the public reaction to the assassination attempt demonstrated that it would have been politically highly unwise to have opposed the Bill. Melbourne was right when he told the Queen that ‘three months ago they would not have done it for him’.
This having been achieved, Stockmar considered that his task was over and he returned to Coburg, having briefed Anson carefully before his departure. His reservations about Albert remained, and he was to be an active and wise counsellor from afar to whom Albert often turned. But the relationship had definitely changed. In the course of a long and solemn letter on September 2nd Stockmar suddenly wrote, in complete contrast with the rest of the letter:
. . . One day on my way up the Rhine I was made very sad, but only for a short time, by reading in a newspaper that you had had a bad fall from your horse. At that moment I felt how sincerely I love you.
The first year of any marriage is a difficult one. In the case of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert this crucial period of adjustment was not made any easier by Albert’s frustration at the ambiguity of his formal position, Victoria’s early pregnancy, acute political difficulties with the fading and unpopular Whig Government, the assassination attempt, and a heavy programme of Court and other functions and duties. The Queen was extremely busy, Lehzen hovered and intrigued possessively, Prince Albert was deep in his studies and reorganising the chaotic condition of the Royal adminis
tration, feeling acutely his situation as a foreigner, and with no real friends in a strange country. And yet it was clearly a time of much happiness for both, as Queen Victoria began to discover the extraordinary width and range of her husband’s interests and knowledge, and not least in music and art. He organised and directed his first public concert in April, which was a revelation to the small minority of serious musicians who had long despaired of informed interest in their field from anyone in public life. The scurrilous jokes and sneers in London Society continued, but it was appreciated by a few people that here was a man of remarkable capacities. For his part he had realised the essential truth of Melbourne’s comment on Queen Victoria: ‘She is the honestest person I have ever known. The only difficulty is to make her see that you cannot always go straight forward, that you must go round sometimes’. The same point was made by Greville in 1842: ‘Her chief fault (in little things and in great) seems to be impatience; in a sea phrase, she always wants to go ahead’.
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