Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  Having agreed that the Heir could only marry a Royal wife, the parents were startled by the discovery of how limited the field was. Vicky, pressed into service on behalf of her parents and brother, was struck (December 21st 1860) by the ‘great dearth of nice princesses at present’, and on April 20th 1861 wrote again to her mother:

  What are we to do? Unfortunately, princesses do not spring up like mushrooms out of the earth or grow on trees . . . I sit continually with the Gotha Almanack in my hands turning the leaves over in hopes to discover someone who has not come to light!

  The facts that the future Queen must be a Protestant, a Princess, and from a country with whom Britain was in political amity gravely reduced the options. There was also the factor of Bertie himself, who, when he was informed of the industry being conducted on his behalf, protested strongly, and declared emphatically that he would marry only for love. While Albert’s concern was for suitability, he appreciated that an arranged marriage with a plain and undesirable princess would hardly resolve Bertie’s problems nor avoid the difficulties to which Bruce had so tactfully alluded. The Queen, while insisting on Royalty, was also very sympathetic on this point.

  Vicky, after suggesting the beautiful and intelligent Princess Elizabeth of Wied (later Queen of Romania), to which proposal her brother did not respond favourably, came up with the sixteen-year-old Danish Princess Alexandra, a girl of great beauty, but whose family was unfortunately involved in the interminable Schleswig-Holstein question. An Anglo-Danish marriage to the daughter of the heir to the throne of Denmark would be regarded with great coldness in Prussia and Germany, with which Prince Albert had strong personal sympathies. To add to the already considerable complications, the Queen and the Prince disapproved of the Hesse-Cassel family of which Princess Alexandra’s mother was a member.

  Nonetheless, there was virtually no available alternative, as the Prince unenthusiastically remarked when he was presented with the photographs of the possible candidates, and his father was now so eager to see his son safely married that the German objections rapidly assumed a lower place in his considerations, and when he heard that the Tsar of Russia was also very interested in Alexandra for his own heir, his remaining reservations vanished. ‘It would be a thousand pities if you were to lose her’, he told his son, and wrote anxiously to Vicky that ‘We dare not let her slip away’.

  ‘What a pity she is who she is!’ the Queen wrote on December 8th 1860, and, on February 25th 1861: ‘The mother’s family are bad – the father’s foolish’. But these grave disadvantages were overwhelmed by Vicky’s enthusiasm for her when she met Alexandra in May: ‘Oh if she only was not a Dane and not related to the Hesses I should say yes – she is the one a thousand times over’.

  Thus the matter was settled so far as the Royal parents were concerned. To Vicky the Queen wrote on June 19th:

  Dear Papa and I are both so grateful to you about all the trouble you have taken about Princess Alix. May he only be worthy of such a jewel! There is the rub! When I look at Louis60 and at the charming, sweet, bright, lively expression of the one – and at the sallow, dull, blasé and heavy look of the other I own I feel very sad . . . The contrast pains me very deeply. Let us hope that certain prospects may make a great change.

  Vicky and Fritz ardently promoted the match, in defiance of German nationalist feelings, and the protests of Stockmar and Duke Ernest were rejected with surprising brusqueness, Ernest being bluntly told by Albert to mind his own business and keep out of the matter. Bertie, who received a somewhat precise, but not unsympathetic, memorandum from his father on the subject of matrimony before his departure, went to Germany on the pretext of attending military manoeuvres, and met Princess Alexandra in the romantic context of a rendezvous in front of the altar in the cathedral at Speyer on September 24th. On the following day they met again, and Fritz reported that ‘the reverse of indifference on both sides’ had been demonstrated. On his return to Balmoral he spoke very approvingly to his mother of Alexandra. ‘Bertie is extremely pleased with her’, she wrote to Vicky, ‘but as for being in love, I don’t think he can be or that he is capable of enthusiasm about anything in the world’. As Bertie had met Alexandra only twice, very briefly, and was being propelled very reluctantly into matrimony at the age of nineteen, this comment may be justifiably regarded as both unfeeling and unfair. ‘As for B’s affair’, his mother reported to Vicky on October 10th, ‘it is not very prosperous. A sudden fear of marrying and above all of having children (which for so young a man is so strange a fear) seems to have got hold of him – but I hope he will see this in its right light ere long’.

  Prince Albert was more understanding, although he wished the match to succeed, and wrote to his son about his desire for delay:

  That is quite reasonable and proper, and it would, unless you had actually fallen in love (which after this apparent hesitation can hardly be supposed to be the case) have been imprudent on your part to go further in the matter without due reflection.

  Thus matters stood at the middle of 1861, with the Royal parents relieved at the prospects of a reasonably suitable marriage for their difficult and errant eldest son. The Princess Royal was happily married, Princess Alice was engaged, and their other children were thriving, with the sad exception of little Leopold when it became apparent that he was a haemophiliac, and thus an additional centre of the parents’ concern.

  With this exception, and after all the difficulties they had jointly experienced in their sincere and dedicated endeavours to achieve the best possible upbringing for their children, the Queen and the Prince could justifiably feel that they could be reasonably confident about the future of their large and growing family.

  * * *

  57 28th July 1858 Kronberg Papers, quoted in Andrew Sinclair: The Other Victoria (1982).

  58 Magnus: King Edward VII, p. 20.

  59 Winston Churchill: My Early Life, p. 46.

  60 Prince Louis, eldest son of Prince Charles of Hesse, and later Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, who married Princess Alice in July 1862.

  chapter nine

  ‘Something Great and Good’

  The deep concerns of Prince Albert and the Queen about their children, and the establishment of a pattern of family life at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral that they had gradually and personally created, must be seen as interwoven with their daily concerns on national and international political issues. Indeed, what is so remarkable about their correspondence with friends and relatives – and especially the latter – is the manner in which personal and public matters were discussed in the same letters, so that they moved easily and naturally from news of the children’s health to the condition of the weather, the fate of a Government, and the state of European affairs. Prince Albert’s pattern of work was to rise early, and work by himself for two hours before the Queen joined him for breakfast, and as his burdens, mainly self-imposed, increased inexorably, so did his hours of work. ‘I get on pretty well’, he wrote in April 1857 to his grandmother, ‘in spite of a weak stomach, with which I came into the world, and which I shall take with me to my grave’.

  The width and depth of his interests, especially in the arts and industry and in military matters, did not diminish. When it was proposed to launch an Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester he at once offered to lend it pictures from the Royal Collection, and then successfully persuaded other private owners to do the same by his example – an unprecedented event, with a successful result. But he was also writing to Palmerston with enthusiasm about ‘so important a new fact as submarine navigation’ and exploring the mysteries of flight, while always involving himself deeply in current national and international politics. ‘I am overwhelmed with papers’, he wrote to his eldest daughter, ‘and can scarcely wrestle through them; therefore, even to you I must say farewell so soon’. ‘Tired to death with work, vexation, and worry’ he confided to Stockmar on January 5th, 1860. The
pace never slowed, and there was no reduction in endeavour or commitment. But, ominously, there were now regular references by himself, the Queen, and others to bouts of poor health, exhaustion, irritation, and despondency. But these seemed of little significance, especially when he was with his family at Osborne or Balmoral.

  His formidable intellectual energy was combined with a continuing zest for improvements at Windsor and Osborne, and his enthusiasm for the Balmoral ‘expeditions’ with his family and the hunting about which Theodore Martin wrote that ‘In these pursuits the latent fire and force of his character could find a vent, which elsewhere were of necessity held under rigid constraint’. But the shadows were gathering.

  In retrospect, it can be clearly seen that Prince Albert’s greatest political error had been to underestimate Palmerston. When the Crimean War broke out, the Prince was dominated by a sense of failure that he had not been able to prevent this unnecessary futility. His unhappiness was substantially increased by the fact that all of his concerns about the lamentable condition of the British Army, and especially its leadership, were grimly and totally fulfilled in the Crimea. ‘The present administration of the army is not to be defended’, he wrote to Leopold. ‘My heart bleeds to think of it!’ ‘I hazard the opinion that our army, as at present organised, can hardly be called an army at all, but a mere aggregate of battalions of infantry, with some regiments of cavalry, and an artillery regiment’, runs another memorandum submitted to Ministers. In the main his proposals were sensible, although one to raise a British Foreign Legion was publicly denounced in the Commons and Press as ‘a foreign idea’, and consequently made no progress. The fall of the Aberdeen Government early in 1855 was inevitable, and the appointment of Palmerston as Prime Minister took place in an atmosphere described by the Prince as ‘quite crazy’. He headed a Royal Commission to establish a relief fund for the families of the dead, which raised over a million and a quarter pounds, but criticisms of his alleged malign involvement still continued, and the Radical M.P. J. A. Roebuck even spoke of impeachment. On this amiable proposal the Prince wrote:

  We cannot make people either virtuous or wise, and must only regret the monstrous degree to which their aberration is extended. I must rest mainly upon a good conscience and the belief that during the fifteen years of my connection with this country, I have not given a human soul the means of imputing to me that want of sincerity or patriotism. I myself have the conviction that the Queen and myself are perhaps the only two persons in the kingdom who have no other interest, thought, or desire than the good, the honour, and the power of the country; and this not unnaturally, as no private interest can be thought of which could interfere with these considerations.

  ‘The will at least to injure me is never wanting in certain circles’, he added, with some bitterness, ‘and the gullibility of the public has no bounds’. Such criticism genuinely baffled and distressed him, although he was now wearily resigned to it. In 1847 he had written that ‘I must console myself with the conclusion that from my heart I mean well towards all men, have never done them aught but good, and take my stand on truth and reason, the worship of which becomes daily more and more a matter of conscience with me’. His activities during the war and after, and which included the establishment of the camp at Aldershot, for which he designed the Royal pavilion and donated his personal substantial military library (still known as The Prince Consort’s Library) and the foundation and design of Wellington College, with the donation of another library, and the creation of the Victoria’s Soldiers Libraries, continued to be publicly denounced as ‘the Prince’s incessant meddlesomeness’.

  The real problem was that he had a regular capacity to be right when the politicians, newspapers, and soldiers were wrong. It was an unhappy period.

  What was surprising was that Palmerston, the Prime Minister, turned out to be very different from Palmerston, the incorrigible and reckless Foreign Secretary. Difficulties remained, but his former hostility to Prince Albert moved into cautious respect, and finally, considerable regard.

  Palmerston’s tenure of the Premiership had a brief interruption early in 1858 after he made a rare and uncharacteristic misjudgement of British opinion by his reaction to an assassination attempt by Felix Orsini on Napoleon in Paris, the bombs and conspiracy having been made in London. It was considered that he had responded too easily to French anger and pressures, and for a time, as Albert noted with amazement, was so unpopular that he was regularly ‘hooted down’ in the Commons. But the second Derby-Disraeli Ministry was no more durable than the first, and fell in June 1859.

  A State Visit by Napoleon III was a substantial success – the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor being tactfully named the Music Room – and after the death of Tsar Nicholas, although the war continued, the search for a settlement began. What worried the Prince was that this process might be hindered by thoughtless speeches and newspaper articles suggesting that the British were prepared to concede everything, and in a speech at a Trinity House dinner he perhaps went too far in making these views known, which gave the impression that he believed that despotisms had advantages denied to a democracy, and drew much criticism. This was not one of his happier speeches, but what had happened was, as he confessed to Stockmar, his notes had contained ‘a qualifying clause, but it did not flow (why I know not) from the lips’. To depict Prince Albert as an admirer of despotism and hostile to liberal democracy was grotesque, but what was true was that he was becoming obsessed by what he regarded as the total irresponsibility of the Press, and particularly W. H. Russell’s unsparing dispatches in The Times. The alleged statement by the new Tsar that the English Press ‘has been most useful to us’ made a particular impression upon him, and Russell became a ‘miserable scribbler’ who was ‘despoiling the country of all the advantages which the heart’s blood of 20,000 of its noblest sons should have earned’. To be fair to him, it was the first time that the dilemma of uncensored Press reporting in time of war had arisen, and as he compared the British situation with that in France and Russia, it was this that so troubled him. It is a dilemma unresolved to this day.

  A highly successful State visit to Paris and the opening of Balmoral lightened the strains of 1855. The Queen became profoundly impressed by Napoleon’s charm and handsome good looks – ‘at once mystic and Lothario, looking like an opium eater, and speaking French like a foreigner’, in the marvellous description of H. A. L. Fisher – but Prince Albert’s feelings went from cautious acceptance to dislike and distrust, and, finally, to outright hatred, and fear of what damage the new Emperor could achieve.

  One of Napoleon’s most severe deficiencies in the eyes of Prince Albert was his hostility to German unification, and when in 1857 the Emperor proposed to him the revision of the 1815 Treaty of Vienna to amend its boundary provisions ‘I begged him to open the book of history which lay before him’, he recorded.

  His verdict was to prove more sound than that of Queen Victoria, and it was an interesting example of how she appreciated male beauty and flattery; it also illustrated one of her most endearing qualities – her ability to forget completely that she was Queen and to respond to attentions given to her as a woman. This was one of the essential keys to the supreme happiness of her own marriage, and also to why, in later years, she turned against Gladstone and found in Disraeli a new Melbourne-figure.

  But the happiest event was the engagement between Vicky and Prince Frederick William, the only son of the Prince of Prussia. Contrary to some allegations then and later, this was not an arranged and calculatedly dynastic engagement, but a love match, which began when the Prince took her to the Great Exhibition in 1851. As the Princess Royal was only fifteen, there was no question of an early marriage, but Prince Albert wrote that ‘the young people are ardently in love with one another’, although his pleasure was shadowed by the prospect of losing his favourite child. The Prince, known in the family as Fritz, then aged twenty-four, was a young man of great kindness and gentl
eness. The political possibilities of the marriage were obviously considerable, and both families were eager for it for many years, but there was more to it than cynical, political considerations. Also, as events were to prove, Fritz was the least calculating of men, and certainly not as strong-willed as his wife.

  These private pleasures were, unhappily, far overshadowed by other events. Anxiety was making Prince Albert sleepless, and he deeply resented the unending stream of private and public criticism. Speaking in Birmingham in June 1857 he set forth again his burning faith in the power of education in one of his best speeches. It was widely praised – except in The Times. ‘Never mind!’ Stockmar wrote; ‘it pleased me very much’.

  Peace came slowly. Prince Albert upbraided the King of Prussia for his neutrality, and Leopold received a firm and fair lesson on British objectives from his nephew. He continued to submit detailed and thoughtful memoranda to Ministers on military matters but was, as Aberdeen shrewdly noted, ‘decidedly pacific’. His relations with Palmerston continued to improve dramatically into a most improbable but genuine friendship and trust, Palmerston admitting frankly to a friend that until he became Prime Minister he had not appreciated the extent of Prince Albert’s extraordinary abilities and wisdom.

  When peace at last came he wrote to Stockmar that he was hard at work on establishing a permanent and effective military organ-isation. Florence Nightingale was invited to meet the Royal couple, and was closely and sympathetically questioned. His other interests and involvements did not abate. He was selective about which matters he felt he could take up, but when he made a decision to interest himself in a subject he did so with immense thoroughness. When the unfortunate ballast heavers of the Port of London approached him with their justifiable complaint that they could only obtain work at the docks through corrupt owners of riverside public houses he persuaded Ministers to insert a clause in the 1853 Merchant Shipping Act to end this abuse, and transformed their conditions of employment. When John Clabon came to him with his imaginative concept of Working Men’s Clubs it was Prince Albert who urged that they be open on Sundays, that families be allowed to join, that dancing should be encouraged, and, when the vexed question of smoking was raised, said that it should certainly be permitted, and not in a separate room. It was with some reluctance that he agreed that the provision of alcohol was hardly consistent with the concept of ‘a reformed public house’, but he told the virtuous Clabon that his substitution of beer for whiskey at the Balmoral Gillie’s Ball had been a great mistake: ‘There was dissatisfaction; they did not seem to enter into the dancing with spirit’. He was, as those close to him knew, very human and very tolerant of the less important human frailties, but this came as a surprise to people like Clabon who had only seen the distant façade. The Queen and Prince Albert still resented that he did not have any title, but once more, the politicians said that it was premature to discuss such matters. At a speech in Salford in May 1857 he was able to correct the unfortunate impression given by the Trinity House Speech, and on July 25th Queen Victoria achieved her purpose when, at her command, the Privy Council ordained, by Letters Patent, the creation of the title of Prince Consort. Ministers had, again, been doubtful of passing an Act of Parliament to achieve this, particularly as they expected – wrongly – strong controversy over the proposed dowry to the Princess Royal on her marriage. Exasperated, but careful to wait until the dowry issue was resolved, the Queen made firm use of her prerogative. He had been generally known as the Prince Consort for so long that it seemed superfluous for some, but it meant a great deal to him and to the Queen. The Times, again, was highly critical.