Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  At present the democratic and social evils are forcing themselves on the people. The unequal division of property, and the dangers of poverty and envy arising therefrom, is the principal evil. Means must necessarily be found, not for diminishing riches (as the communists want), but to make facilities for the poor. But there is the rub. I believe this question will be first solved here, in England.

  Prince Albert’s role as an enthusiastic patron of the arts and music, and the friend of artists and muscians as individuals, provided him with an essential outlet for that part of his complex personality that was so full of happiness, warmth, and enjoyment of life. In political matters and on formal occasions he was immensely serious, although not as solemn or cold as was often alleged, and his early and enduring dismay at the general gloominess of English life was very significant. As his family knew, he loved colour, laughter, and happiness, and Thomas Carlyle was not the only person to be surprised to meet, instead of an earnest and dull young German, someone ‘very jolly and handsome’. His own music was notably cheerful, and although he was a far better judge of art than a practitioner – in which the Queen was much superior – his jewellery designs and his architecture have a lightness and delicacy that are revealing, as was his passion for the then much despised Early Renaissance artists. Far ahead of his time, he realised that the era of the private patron was over, and must eventually be replaced by the State.

  In reality, a modest start had been made, following a Report by a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1836 lamenting that ‘the arts have received very little encouragement in this country. The want of instruction in design among our industrious population; the absence of public and freely-opened galleries containing approved specimens of art; the fact that only recently a National Gallery has even been commenced among us, have all combined strongly to impress this conviction on the minds of the members of the Committee.’ From this there grew the School of Design in London – the direct progenitor of the Royal College of Art – and the establishment of seventeen local Schools of Design in the principal manufacturing towns. But it was a very modest beginning.

  Prince Albert had become quickly and actively involved in encouraging such enterprises, but his predicament was that his net income of £29,000 was largely absorbed in family and estate expenses, and he was as a result unable to contribute personally as much as he wished to personal financial support for the arts. As he pointed out in a lengthy and detailed memorandum to Russell on December 30th 1849 his personal establishment cost £14,000 to maintain, the Queen was worse off than George IV and William IV, and he could not be the ‘protector & Patron of Literature, Science & Art’. Russell was adamant that any proposals for increased grants would be ‘very unadvisable’, and the matter had to be dropped. It was a poor response to a man who had consistently lived within his income, had managed the Queen’s affairs with frugality and skill and refused to depend on her ‘in money matters’. Russell saw the possibility of Revolution if the Royal grants were increased, and dwelt heavily on the awful precedents of the events of 1848. Prince Albert accepted the Prime Minister’s view, while making the point that he considered himself to have been ‘crippled in my means of usefulness to the Country & the Throne’, and that if the nation wanted a Royal Family it ‘will have to provide for them’.

  He believed passionately that the glories of art and music should be opened to the public, and took his own lead in making the royal collections available to serious students, and in 1848 the pictures he had taken as security for a loan from Prince Oettingen-Wallerstein were made the principal part of an exhibition at Kensington Palace which was open to the public. He had attempted to interest the National Gallery in this collection, but without success; after his death, at his bequest, twenty-two were given to the Gallery. His endeavours to revive English frescoes may have been unsuccessful, but over a half a million people had visited the Westminster Hall exhibition in two months, and he was personally responsible for ensuring that ‘The famous Obelisk called “Cleopatra’s Needle” ’ was brought from Egypt to London and erected on the Embankment. He was a highly active, and enlightened, President of the Royal Society of Arts, and bought wisely for the Royal collections.

  It should be remembered that all this took place simultaneously with his political responsibilities, which he regarded as the first call on his time and energies, the management of the Royal estates and the designing of Osborne, and then Balmoral, and the responsibilities as a husband and father, which he took with immense seriousness, although with great happiness.

  He urged upon Ministers that Gaelic should be taught in the Highland schools and the Welsh language in Wales, in which not successful endeavours he had the strong support of the Queen. He was insisting that Cambridge undergraduates should be compelled to attend – and answer in examination for this attendance – lectures on subjects outside their specialities. He continued to give every assistance he could to the revival of music, and to increasing its popularity. But he also found time to write a loving, funny letter to his wife from Lincoln which ended: ‘Last but not least (as they say in the after-dinner-speeches phrase) that he loves his wife, and remains Your Faithful Husband’.

  When Anson died suddenly in September 1849 Lady Lyttelton recorded that ‘The Prince and Queen in floods of tears, and quite shut up . . . The Prince’s face is still so sad and pale and grave, I can’t forget it’. Prince Albert was an intense, passionate, and highly sensitive man, with great capacity for love, gratitude, and loyalty, and also for those descents into grief and melancholy that also emphasised the acuteness of his feelings. He was realistic, calculating, and shrewd, and this was the aspect that was most often seen. The real man was gentle and vulnerable, affectionate and kind. He hated crisis, strains, and unhappiness, although these were too often his fate to endure. He seemed to triumph easily over them, but the attrition on a tense and febrile personality was severe.

  At this point, almost – although not entirely – by chance he embarked upon a venture of exceptional difficulty.

  The idea of establishing something on the lines of the Frankfurt Fairs, which he had so enjoyed as a child, had been with him for some time when Henry Cole, the assistant Keeper of the Public Records, returned in June 1849 enthused by the Paris Exposition he had just attended.

  Cole was one of Albert’s most notable discoveries in England, a man who fully shared his enthusiams for the arts, architecture, industrial design, and music, wrote excellent and popular children’s books, published the first Christmas card, was dynamic and efficient, and had the precious quality of imagination. Officially the Assistant Keeper of the Public Records, he had helped to launch the Penny Post, campaigned – again successfully – for the standard gauge railway track, was to be in charge of the South Kensington Museum for twenty years, and was eventually to be responsible for the Royal College of Music and the Albert Hall. He and Prince Albert constituted a most formidable combination of youth, ability, and capacity for work. Cole joined the Society of Arts in 1846, and the two worked together to create a series of exhibitions of manufactures, with particular emphasis on design. The first was held in 1847 – when the Society received its Royal Charter – and it and its successors were immediately successful, the number of visitors rising from 20,000 in 1847 to over 100,000 in 1849. The idea grew – and it is not clear whether it was the Prince’s or Cole’s – to hold a great National Quinquennial Exhibition in 1851, modelled on the successful French Exposition in Paris.

  But when Cole returned, fired with enthusiasm for a similar enterprise in London, the key decision was taken at once by Prince Albert that it should be international, thus making it a substantially more ambitious and quite different venture to the French Exposition, and at the outset he decided that half the available space should be allocated to foreign exhibitors.

  After the Exhibition had proved a brilliant success, claims were made – and are still repeated – that the real originator wa
s Cole. His own account, and the letters in the Royal Archives, make it clear that Cole envisaged an English version of the French Exposition, although he was definitely interested in the possibility of making it international in scope. It was Prince Albert who, in Cole’s words, ‘reflected for a minute, and then said, “It must embrace foreign productions”, to use his words, and added emphatically, “International, certainly” ’. It was then Albert who devised its title – ‘The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations in 1851’. Cole’s contribution was to be invaluable, but the idea of the first international exhibition was that of Prince Albert, and it was not Cole, but the Prince’s detractors, who have tried to prove otherwise.

  The next stage was to discover what, if any, interest there was in British industry for such a project, and Cole and Scott Russell – the Society’s secretary – were sent on tour, armed with a personal letter of authorisation from Albert, charging them ‘to travel through the manufacturing districts of the Country, in order to collect the opinions of the leading manufacturers’ concerning ‘a great Exhibition of Industry of all Nations to be held in London in the year 1851’. Cole had wanted to move even faster than this, and on July 16th urged upon the Prince the immediate appointment of a special Commission to act as guarantor of sums raised by the Society, and for a deputation to see the Prime Minister for this purpose. Albert was already becoming concerned that the Society did not have the capacity to handle a project of such a scale as he envisaged. ‘The undertaking appears to HRH to be one of immense magnitude and of very great national importance’, Phipps wrote to Cole on the 17th: ‘– it is a question so large that the Govt. would not in HRH’s opinion be justified in committing themselves upon it without mature consideration in the Cabinet’. He added that Prince Albert considered that any dealings with Ministers must be done by him, as President of the Society.

  There were also disagreements about Cole’s wish to hold large public meetings to build up popular interest, but other counsels from Windsor prevailed, it being pointed out to Cole that London was full of ‘Orators who object to everything, and would sacrifice any Undertaking to the pleasure of making a smart speech’.

  Cole returned from his tour with ardour undimmed, and with reports of considerable enthusiasm, interest, and solid pledges of support. ‘5,000 influential persons’ agreed to act as promoters.

  The sheer magnitude of the undertaking was sufficient to persuade the Royal Society that it could not possibly cope with it, and Prince Albert formally invited the Government to appoint a Royal Commission; this was agreed to, as were all his proposals for its membership, including the fact that he was to be its President. He brought together a most remarkable group, including Ministers and the Prime Minister himself, other Members of Parliament, most notably Gladstone and Cobden, nine Fellows of the Royal Society, the Presidents of the Institute of Civil Engineering and of the Geological Society, and Charles Barry, the architect of the Palace of Westminster. The Commission was established on January 3rd 1850. Cole was an immensely active, prominent, and crucial member of the Executive Committee.

  Hard though the Commission and its committees worked, the main burdens fell upon Prince Albert. He accepted them willingly, to the point that, for the first time in their marriage, Queen Victoria became worried about his health. This was not to be wondered at. His work on the Exhibition, which was arduous enough, had to be conducted simultaneously with his official and political concerns, which were especially intense and complex. Thus, on top of these, and family matters which included the building of Balmoral and the continuous task of administering the Royal estates, he was undertaking the first international Exhibition. He had barely more than a year to stage what Cole was later to describe as without precedent ‘in its promotion of human industry’, but which was also to be ‘a festival’ of internationalism and peace, and on which everything depended, in Albert’s words, upon ‘peace, love, and ready assistance, not only between individuals, but between the nations of the earth’.

  Between the vision and the reality, and all to be done so quickly, lay practical problems that were awesome and intimidating. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these had been very seriously underestimated by everyone, including Prince Albert. The question of the site was quickly resolved; the Prince proposed Leicester Square, but Cole pointed out that this would be too small, and suggested Hyde Park, which Albert accepted at once. The Queen and the Commissioners agreed, but hostility grew rapidly in Parliament, fuelled by Albert’s old foe Colonel Sibthorp, and by The Times. Brougham was another violent critic in public, although in private he wrote to Charles Grey to say that although he was ‘a Hyde Park Heretick’ he was not opposed to the Exhibition ‘whereof I am a sincere well wisher – but only to the place – & perhaps in that I have a selfish feeling, for I doubt if London will be habitable’. The opponents loudly claimed that trees were to be cut down,49 the Park defiled, vagrants, thieves, pickpockets, and prostitutes would abound; the noise would be unbearable, foreigners of very dubious character would create their own forms of unpleasantness – and for what purpose?

  While the Commissioners and their committees were coping with problems such as the prizes – no money, but special medallions was the decision – and the juries to award them, the bodies that would make the selections of the exhibits, the hours of opening and entrance prices, whether refreshments should be available (no alcohol), and how the foreign entries should be judged, the Building Committee came close to wrecking the entire venture when it produced its design for the Exhibition Building, a turgid, huge, and obviously immensely solid and permanent edifice of brick and mortar, involving the use of nineteen million bricks. It was reproduced in the Illustrated London News on June 22nd 1850, and the storm broke.

  The Times excoriated not only the design but the entire concept. Hyde Park was to ‘be turned into something between Wolverhampton and Greenwich Fair’, the whole thing was ‘insanity’. Sibthorp was in top form, denouncing the Exhibition as ‘the greatest trash, the greatest fraud, and the greatest imposition ever attempted to be palmed upon the people of this country. The object of its promoters is to introduce amongst us foreign stuff of every description – live and dead stock – without regard to quantity or quality. It is meant to bring down prices in this Country, and to pave the way for the establishment of the cheap and nasty trash and trumpery system’. There is a strong temptation to quote more of Colonel Sibthorp’s magnificent and absurd demagogery, richly enjoyed by the House of Commons and The Times, but not at all by Prince Albert, who resented it intensely.

  So serious was the uproar that Albert seriously believed that the entire project would have to be abandoned, but a well-whipped Commons gave it their support, although opposition to the Committee’s monstrosity did not diminish. When it is examined, this is not surprising.

  At this point, Providence intervened in the form of Joseph Paxton, whose glittering Chatsworth Conservatory the Queen and the Prince had so much admired in 1843, and who had just completed the special Lily House at Chatsworth, also created out of iron and glass. Paxton was fortuitously in London for a trial session of the new House of Commons and its acoustics – which were terrible, and required major alterations which Barry would not accept – and, as he said later, was ‘afraid they would also commit a blunder in the building for the Industrial Building . . . I had a notion in my head’. He found that the Executive Committee were prepared to accept another design; what started as ‘a notion’ became a rough sketch on his blotting paper while he was doodling during a railway board meeting at Derby, and after nine days and nights of intense activity with his very small staff he returned to London with his amazing plan, which was in essence a vastly enlarged version of the Lily House. It also had the outstanding merit of being easily put up and subsequently dismantled, thereby obviating the principal objection to the virtually permanent proposal of the Committee. But it was the concept itself that was so marvellous, the
perfect combination of lightness, strength, and visual excitement that made it an immediate, and enduring, classic of modern architecture.

  Paxton’s design was so revolutionary and extraordinary that the luckless Committee, battered by the intense hostility and abuse aroused by their design, was in a turmoil of indecision. But Paxton proceeded to publish his plans in the Illustrated London News on July 6th, and there was immense and immediate enthusiasm for a magical concept that Punch described as ‘The Crystal Palace’. Ruskin mocked it as a ‘cucumber frame between two chimneys’, but his was a very exceptional voice. Prince Albert at once recognised it as the masterpiece that it was, and his opinion was shared by most contemporaries and is endorsed to this day. ‘Paxton’s design’, an eminent modern architect of conspicuous skill and sensitivity has said, ‘has stalked the imagination of all architects, engineers and designers of any real ability from that day to this. It was the most advanced and wonderful building of the nineteenth century’. On July 15th Paxton’s superb design was accepted, with the proviso – with Colonel Sibthorp very much in mind – that three giant elms should be roofed in; to meet this, Paxton produced the great vaulted transept which was the only significant change to his original design, the tender of the builders was accepted by the end of July, and the first foundations were laid in August. It subsequently rose with astonishing speed.

  Paxton’s glorious design was exactly what Prince Albert had wanted – ‘truly a piece of marvellous art’, he described it to Ernest. It was in itself a marvel of construction, using pre-fabricated mass-produced parts, covering sixteen acres with iron and glass, its length over three times that of St. Paul’s Cathedral, with 293,655 panes of glass, over 4,500 tons of iron, and twenty-four miles of guttering. Paxton was not an easy man to deal with, and there was at least one sharp dispute between him and the Commissioners that so infuriated Albert that Paxton had to make a quick and handsome apology, but his achievement was phenomenal, and certainly merited his subsequent knighthood. The fact that he, a gardener’s son, was neither a qualified engineer nor architect aroused vehement comment in the members of those professions, who publicly anticipated disaster for the bucolic amateur’s creation, even the Astronomer Royal giving his view that it would assuredly fall down. Colonel Sibthorp publicly desired that it might be ‘dashed to pieces’, and railed against it as ‘a piece of low, dirty, cunning . . . a humbug from beginning to end’. He called upon the Almighty to destroy it. He had spirit. Even when the Exhibition was a manifest success, Colonel Sibthorp did not relent in his abuse, saying on July 29th 1851 that its results were ‘the desecration of the Sabbath, the demoralisation of the people, a disunion of parties, and increasing poverty to a most serious extent’.