In this the artist who lays out the work, and devises a garment for a piece of ground, has the delight of seeing his work live and grow hour by hour; and, while it is growing, he is able to polish, to cut up and carve, to fill up here and there, to hope, and to love.
That he was a very successful farmer became so well known that when he opened his speech to the Royal Agricultural Society in July 1848 with the words ‘We agriculturalists of England’ he was genuinely surprised by the thunderous applause which interrupted him. An invention of his own to convert raw sewage into agricultural fertiliser was so successful at Osborne that he became excited by its general application, bearing very much in mind the foetid horrors of the industrial towns and cities; unhappily, his invention depended upon a sharp fall of ground to be effective, and the special circumstances of Osborne could not be repeated elsewhere.
It was his purpose ‘to make Osborne a smooth, easily worked, yet beautiful machine in which to live’35, as had been Jefferson’s at Monticello; unlike Jefferson, Prince Albert, Gruner and Cubitt got it right first time.
Psychologically, Osborne was crucial for the Prince. He could apply his energies, his frustrated ambitions, his mind and his imagination to the creation of something that was his. No Parliamentary money was involved, there was no need for the constant, irritating, demeaning and usually fruitless appeals to Ministers and officials to make Buckingham Palace habitable for a young family, and to defray the Royal expenses for their official duties. The fact that Osborne could be bought and built, at an eventual cost of some £200,000, was entirely due to the Prince’s careful management of her estates, and particularly the Duchy of Cornwall. The income had been substantially increased, and the overheads drastically cut, and indeed it was from this source, and money from the inherited money of the infant Prince of Wales as Duke of Cornwall, that part of the original funds for Osborne were found.
He had now fulfilled an ambition that is very common and human, to create a home for his wife and children that was truly theirs. His own Early Renaissance pictures glowed in the principal rooms, and portraits of his family were in the corridors and in his own dressing-room. He designed the gardens, built an ice-house, and had a reservoir built on top of The Mound near the house, to be principally used for fire fighting in the event of a fire (it was, in fact, to be used once for that very purpose). Everywhere at Osborne one sees the evidence of the remarkable abilities of a man who was twenty-six years of age when he designed and built what remains his most revealing personal memorial.
Thus did the young Queen and her husband create for themselves and their children what was, in her words, ‘a perfect little Paradise’. It was always to remain so for her, and it was at Osborne that she was to die, in their bedroom, with her husband’s portrait and watch case, in which he hung his gold watch every night, beside her.
This capacity for achievement was also evident in his campaign to achieve the abolition of duelling in the Army, which was the direct result of Prince Albert’s intervention, making use of considerable newspaper comment on a fatal duel in July 1843. Wellington, whose advice Albert sought, was content to leave the matter to public opinion, now becoming markedly hostile, but Albert proposed, as a first step, Courts of Honour on the French and Bavarian patterns, to resolve disputes between officers. The Duke was unenthusiastic, and the Master of the Ordnance and the Lords of the Admiralty were adamant in their opposition. Prince Albert stuck to the principle that it was an ‘unChristian and barbarous custom [which] has been generally condemned, forbidden by law, and severely punished; but no substitute has been granted, and the officer, whose very existence is based upon his honour, is left to the alternative of either trespassing against the laws of religion and of the State, and becoming a criminal, or of losing caste in the estimation of his profession and of the world, and seeing that honour tarnished’ (to Wellington, January 13th 1844).
His suggestion having met with such opposition, Albert proposed, with Wellington’s approval, that the matter should be laid before the Cabinet. The Courts of Honour proposal did not find favour, but it was agreed to amend the Articles of War, which were issued in April 1844, and which in effect ended the practice completely. Prince Albert’s achievement – a not inconsiderable one – did not raise him in the already low estimation in which he was held in the more reactionary elements in the Army and in the ranks of ex-officers. Another link with cherished English traditions of honour had been sundered by this youthful German, who had never served in the Army, was a foreigner, and had no comprehension of his adopted country’s heritage. Thus, although he was absolutely right, his success brought him few thanks in the socially and politically vocal military establishment.
The Prince’s dislike and distrust of the Duke of Cambridge and his brother, the King of Hanover, which had led him to the immediate conclusion that Oxford’s murder attempt had been instigated by Hanover to destroy the Queen and the succession, were now significantly increased. They snubbed invitations to the Court, Cambridge was pestering for money, his son Prince George was regarded as dissolute and was the father of an illegitimate child, and when the engagement was announced of the daughter, Princess Augusta, in the spring of 1843, Cambridge was swift to demand a large annuity for her from the public funds.
Prince Albert was immediately sympathetic to the determination of Peel to resist what the latter described in a letter to the Queen on April 19th as ‘His Royal Highness’ indefatigable perseverances’. She was also the recipient of these appeals, usually with somewhat menacing undertones, and Albert drafted for her a stiff letter to her uncle, which had little effect. Although, as Peel pointed out in a letter to Cambridge, he had already received £540,000 from the public purse at a time of national economic difficulty and much poverty and distress, Cambridge persuaded the M.P. for Lymington, W. A. Mackinnon, to propose in the House of Commons an annuity of £2,000 for Princess Augusta, to take effect immediately. ‘It was with difficulty that Mr Mackinnon was prevented from publicly stating that he made his proposal with the Concurrence of the Duke of Cambridge’, Peel wrote to Albert on June 13th, the proposal having been successfully resisted by Ministers.
The Royal brothers accordingly arrived at the wedding on June 28th in a foul mood. Their anger, long simmering, was the direct result of Queen Victoria’s determination to increase her husband’s status and position, and it was notable that each of the births of her first three children had been very advantageous to this ambition, as had the assassination attempts. After the birth of Princess Alice on April 25th, following a far easier confinement, Albert held the Levees in her place, she having ruled that ‘Presentations to him were to be considered as equivalent to Presentations to the Queen herself.’ This was not popular in the Court, and outraged Cambridge and Hanover, who refused to attend. They saw only too clearly how considerably, and relentlessly, Prince Albert’s position was increasing in strength and influence, and they hated it, and him.
The King of Hanover had deliberately arrived late for the christening of Princess Alice, although Queen Victoria had asked him to be one of the baby’s sponsors, and had been calculatingly offensive to Albert, and now he was determined to take precedence over him, on the grounds that he was a King, whereas Prince Albert was not. What ensued was described by Anson as ‘rather a Bear Garden scene’. When the service ended Hanover hobbled to the Queen and told her that she must walk out with him; she refused; he insisted; Albert shoved him away; he nearly fell over, but was removed by the Lord Chamberlain ‘by force, fuming with ire’, in Anson’s account. There was then a scene at the signing of the register, when Hanover again demanded precedence. The Queen seized the register, and he was thwarted again, but, persistent to the end, he now insisted on leading with her to the reception. Victoria resolved this problem brilliantly by giving precedence to the Queen of the Belgians and Albert, she and the furious Hanover walking second. To Prince Albert’s immense satisfaction Hanover, after storming out, slipp
ed and fell badly. Albert wrote to Ernest that ‘I was forced to give him a strong punch and drove him down a few steps . . . he left the party in a great wrath. Since then, we let him go, and happily he fell over some stones in Kew and damaged some ribs.’ Hanover, happily for all, left the story of Queen Victoria’s life and Prince Albert’s concerns. Until his death in 1851 he did his best to spread evil and malicious stories about Albert in Hanover and London, and his reputation as the least attractive of all the sons of King George III endured. The Queen’s staunchness in backing her husband touched him very deeply. ‘My wicked Uncles’ had had their day.
The end of 1843 contained two events that were to prove of lasting significance in Prince Albert’s life.
In October he and the Queen went to Cambridge for him to receive an honorary degree, when he first met the then Vice-Chancellor and Master of Trinity, Dr Whewell, and the scholar Professor Adam Sedgwick. The Prince was deeply impressed with Sedgwick’s courteous wisdom, and the Professor was surprised by the maturity and intellectual ability of a man who had only recently celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday. The Royal couple was enchanted by Cambridge, which Albert considered far superior to Oxford, and their reception astonished them.
The Queen’s original impressions of Cambridgeshire had been that it was ‘frightfully ugly. No hedges, but ditches, no trees but willows, with ugly barren fields, and the whole county as flat as a table. The whole was more like Holland than England’. (Journal, September 21st 1835). This time, with her husband at her side, the impression was entirely different. ‘The enthusiasm of the students was tremendous,’ Albert reported to Stockmar, ‘and I cannot remember that we were ever received anywhere so well as on the road to Cambridge and in Cambridge itself. This was to be the beginning of an association of outstanding benefit and importance for the Prince and for Cambridge University.
In December they visited Chatsworth, the imposing and glorious mansion of the Cavendishes, where the Duke of Devonshire presided over an estate and palace superior to any of the Royal residences except Windsor. But what made the deepest impression on them was the huge iron and glass Conservatory designed by the head-gardener, Joseph Paxton. They visited it at night, when it was spectacularly illuminated, and were astonished, the Queen describing it as ‘the finest thing imaginable of its kind,’ and Prince Albert was enthralled by the conception and the genius of its execution; he described it as ‘magnificent and beautiful’, which was high praise, and sincerely meant. He never forgot Paxton and the Conservatory. Seven years later Paxton was to come to his rescue in a dramatic manner, but if Prince Albert had never seen the Chatsworth Conservatory there would never have been the Crystal Palace.
These visits, although somewhat tedious for the Queen and especially for her young husband, were of value in Prince Albert’s growing understanding of the Britain that existed outside London and Windsor. The Mayor of Birmingham, a vehement Chartist, told him that ‘he would vouch for the devoted loyalty [to the Monarchy] of the whole Chartist body,’ which Prince Albert never forgot. His real skill and courage as a rider to hounds startled the county bloods when they stayed at Belvoir Castle, to his wife’s amusement. They had expected a dull and intellectual German, and found that he was a horseman of exceptional ability and spirit; the Queen’s enjoyment of the admiration he aroused for these accomplishments did not extend to approval of what she regarded as a highly dangerous pastime, and at her insistence he abandoned it. Anson considered – and certainly rightly – that it was no sacrifice on his part. Except very occasionally, he abandoned the hunting field for ever, having made his point that not only Englishmen could be distinguished in it. His shooting he never abandoned, but in this skill he also excelled – again to the considerable surprise of those who had accepted the reports from London of this solemn and rather dreary Coburg Princeling.
1844 opened bleakly. Stockmar had warned Albert of the decline in his father’s health, but the death on January 29th 1844 of Duke Ernest in his sixtieth year upset the Prince greatly. ‘My darling stands so alone’, Victoria wrote to Stockmar, ‘and his grief is so great and touching’. ‘Here [Windsor] we sit together, poor Mama, Victoria, and myself, and weep’, Albert wrote ‘with a great cold public around us, insensible as stone’. He described his wife to Stockmar as a ‘consoling angel’, and ‘the treasure on which my whole existence rests. The relation in which we stand to one another leaves nothing to desire. It is a union of heart and soul’. But the sense of being far away was intense, and was at least partly responsible for this outburst in the same letter (February 4th 1844):
The world is assuredly not our true happiness; and, alas! every day’s experience forces me to see how wicked men are. Every imaginable calumny is heaped upon us, especially upon me; and although a pure nature, conscious of its own high purposes, is and ought to be lifted above attacks, still it is painful to be misrepresented by people of whom one believed better things.
Five days later he wrote, rather more calmly, ‘I have regained my composure . . . My youth, with all the recollections linked with it, has been buried with him around whom they centred. From that world I am forcibly torn away, and my whole thoughts diverted to my life here and my own separate family. For these I will live wholly from this time forth’.
The English Court went into deepest mourning, the Royal note-paper was heavily black-bordered, the little Royal children could not understand why their parents and everyone else had to wear black, and Albert’s weeping gave Anson what Lady Lyttelton described as ‘a violent attack of nervous headache’. ‘One loves to cling to one’s grief’. Queen Victoria wrote to King Leopold, a profoundly interesting and prophetic remark. The memorial service at Windsor for the late Duke saw the lovely Chapel almost smothered in black. There was a general recognition at the Court that, although the Prince’s grief was obviously absolutely genuine, this was somewhat excessive, and it was certainly a very considerable exaggeration for Queen Victoria to lament of her dissolute and improvident father-in-law, whom she hardly knew, that ‘We shall never see his like again’.
With good cause, Albert and Stockmar looked with much nervousness at the alarming prospect of Ernest as the new Duke. He could be charming, although this was not a quality all would acknowledge, was engagingly cynical about himself and his unashamed hedonism, and was truly loved by his brother; but he was as improvident as his father and even more licentious, with a reputation that spread far beyond Coburg. This fact caused Albert constant alarm, and was often the subject of his letters to his brother. Albert was remarkably tolerant of Ernest’s excesses, as he had been of his father’s, but he understandably dreaded the real possibility of the Queen of England’s brother-in-law becoming involved in a major public scandal that would certainly reverberate appallingly in England, and be the happy topic of many a scurrilous broadsheet, public innuendoes, and gleeful gossip in London, especially by those who disliked the new high-minded morality of the Court that Prince Albert had introduced and firmly maintained. There was also the question of money, with which Albert was becoming somewhat obsessed – and with good reason – at this time. The prospect of endless importunities from his brother was not one to be relished, and at the end of March he left England to visit Coburg and Ernest.
This was the first separation in their marriage, and one Victoria felt deeply, but Albert was a regular and loving correspondent on what turned out to be a particularly mournful expedition for him. Ernest made many pledges of good behaviour, but Albert was sceptical. The warmth of his reception in Coburg, the pathetic joy of his grandmother at seeing him again, and his visit to The Rosenau, in whose garden he picked flowers for his wife, moved, but also depressed him. Here was his real home, here were his real friends, here were his true roots. The loss of his father was both personal and symbolic of what he had given up, and all he missed in England. Coburg, The Rosenau, and the countryside was indeed, as the Queen knew and understood, ‘the place he loves best’. He wrote to her fro
m Coburg: ‘Oh! how lovely and friendly is this dear old country, how glad I should be to have my little wife beside me, that I might share my pleasure with her!’ On April 11th he wrote in his diary: ‘I arrived at six o’clock in the evening at Windsor. Great Joy’. Victoria wrote of her ‘immense joy’ at ‘being clasped in his arms’.
In the summer there was another break with the past when Albert’s greyhound, Eôs, died, on which event Albert lamented to his grandmother: ‘How many recollections are linked with her! She was my companion from the fourteenth to my twenty-fifth year, a symbol, therefore, of the best and fairest section of my life.’
On August 6th there was much joy when the Queen gave birth to her second son, christened Alfred, but known in the family as ‘Affie’. Shortly after the birth there was the first visit of the Prince of Prussia to Windsor, with whom Albert developed a close and eventually important friendship, and in October Louis Philippe paid the first official visit of a reigning French monarch to England, which was, to the deep pleasure of the Queen and Albert, a remarkable and outstanding success. Their family was growing with a speed that pleased the Prince, but troubled the Queen, who had now produced two daughters and two sons in five and a half years of marriage.
The spring and summer of 1845 were cold and wet, but made delightful for Victoria and Albert by at last taking possession of Osborne. ‘The weather is frightfully cold and disagreeable’, Albert wrote on May 10th, but the pleasures of planning the new house and estate were even less to him than the visit he and the Queen paid to Germany, where they were entertained by the King of Prussia and Victoria saw Coburg and The Rosenau for the first time.
On their return they visited the French Royal Family at Eu. This was a political occasion, with the Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen in attendance, whose purpose was to ensure that neither the young Prince Leopold of Coburg nor any of the sons of Louis Philippe would be contenders for marriage to the daughters of the King of Spain. It appeared that full agreement had been reached on this matter, and that the prospect of a Franco-Spanish Royal marriage, with its uncomfortable political possibilities, had been averted.
Prince Albert Page 21
