High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Derby, who now led the Commission, agreed to reserve land for the hall; and on 12 June Grey wrote to Bowring to confirm the proposal that would be made to the Queen: ‘That the personal monument to the Prince shall be connected with a Hall, to form the centre of buildings to be hereafter erected between the Horticultural Garden and Hyde Park for educational purposes as regards Science and Art in their application to productive industry . . . the shape that such an Educational Institute shall take must necessarily be left open for the present.’26 Fortunately the panel of architects, the commissioners and, most important of all, the Queen all agreed. Grey reported to Eastlake in June 1862 that ‘I cannot tell you too strongly how much the Queen is pleased with the shape the proposal for the national monument is now taking.’27

  In what appears to be the first use of the term, Grey added that ‘the “Albert Hall” must be so designed as to form a fitting centre for whatever buildings may, in fullness of time, grow up to the right and left of it.’ A marble statue of the Prince was, Grey stipulated, to be ‘a principal feature in the interior of the Hall’. By this stage Grey was more positive about the plan to commemorate Albert: he felt that if the plans for the Hall were ‘well drawn up, I have little doubt that the whole movement will become so popular as not only to give a fresh impetus to the subscriptions during the present year, both to enable the Government in another session to propose a handsome vote to Parlt for the purpose of giving effect to the scheme, which will receive the ready sanction of the H of Commons.’ Consideration of an architect would need to be given carefully – ‘rightly or wrongly there is much jealousy of Fowke by the architects generally – and the public would not be disposed in his favour – not understanding that the extension of the Exhibition Building is yet unfinished.’

  The Committee invited architects to submit proposals for the monument and the hall in July 1862. It was emphasised that the Queen ‘will at all times be consulted’ and that the scale would be considerable.28 The Queen’s views, as set out by Grey, were shared with the prospective architects. She had taken quite well the rejection of her idea of an obelisk, not least because of the institution that would now complement the monument. ‘Few things could now make the Queen more happy,’ Grey told Eastlake on 18 July, ‘than to be allowed to witness the realization of some of her beloved husband’s noble plans for the benefit of mankind’.29 She wanted this to be done by the people, by a manifestation of public support, rather than by Parliament. Grey also observed that ‘for such an institution, some appropriate title, connected with the Prince’s name, will doubtless hereafter be found.’ Scott, Sydney Smirke and William Tite were all asked to submit proposals; as were James Pennethorne, Philip Hardwick, Thomas Donaldson, Matthew Digby Wyatt, Charles and Edward Barry. Designs were required by 4 December 1862, but a short extension was later given, at Charles Barry’s request. Tite and Smirke both declined the invitation on grounds of age. The committee also received numerous unsolicited submissions of varying degrees of competence, which it did the artists concerned the courtesy of considering.

  However, this optimism was dispelled by an attack on the proposals in The Times on 2 August 1862, which Grey found ‘most unaccountable – and most unfair.’30 The Times could countenance a personal monument, but not a hall as that monument. Grey noted that the money already subscribed was enough for the personal monument, and suggested that work should proceed on that for the time being ‘disregarding all the malignant attacks and absurd suggestions of The Times’s correspondents’. He was prophetic to conclude that ‘I feel sure that by patience and perseverance the idea of one great institution and entrance to the whole of the estate, bearing the Prince’s renowned name, will be, in time, successfully developed.’ The Morning Post also weighed in with criticisms, which stung because of the paper’s alleged proximity to Palmerston. The Committee were not, however, deterred about the idea of a hall. Derby wrote to Clarendon on 14 August to say that the plan had the support of the Prince of Wales, who had promised £2,000.

  Scott, ever on the lookout for intrigue, then wrote to Eastlake in December complaining that Tite was making malicious remarks about him. He tarred Smirke with this brush too.31 He warned Eastlake that because he was the only Gothicist competing others would seek to denigrate him: and added that ‘it would be the most miserable weakness on my part not to express my objection’. He and the other architects sent in their plans at the end of January 1863.

  The drawings were taken to Windsor in February for the Queen to inspect them. She came to a decision quickly, and on 27 February Grey wrote to Eastlake that, even before the Committee made its formal recommendation to her, ‘HM has come to the conclusion that it will be better on the whole to adopt Mr Scott’s design for a Gothic Cross – and to abandon the idea of erecting, at the present moment, a Hall in connection with it. Substituting the Gothic cross for an Obelisk, this will in fact be but a recurrence to HM’s original suggestion.’32 The ‘Gothic Cross’ was by way of an open shrine enclosing a statue of the Prince: influenced perhaps by the memorial to Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh, but more recently by Thomas Worthington’s design for the Albert memorial in Manchester. Scott himself claimed to have been affected by the design of the original Eleanor Crosses, all of which he had sketched by the time he was out of his teens. The Manchester memorial was in a fourteenth-century style that the aesthete Stephen Bayley described as being perhaps ‘ahead of popular taste’ at the time.33

  Scott, in his submission, said he wanted his structure to have ‘the character of a vast shrine, enriching it with all the arts by which the character of preciousness can be imparted to an architectural design, and by which it can be made to express the value attached to the object which it protects.’34 Scott would come to regard the shrine as his ‘most prominent work’, and the result of his ‘highest and most enthusiastic efforts.’35 As with another of his great projects, the building of government offices in Whitehall outlined in Chapter 18, it would not be accomplished without much tribulation.

  The Queen told Grey that she wanted the memorial to be ‘the finest thing of the sort that has yet been seen’, and specified the kinds of statuary she wished to see about the base. There seemed only to be one other concern – ‘whether Mr Scott’s design can be executed for the money is another question’.36 He had said £90,000, but others had thought it would run to £150,000. Scott himself raised his estimate to £110,000 in a letter to Eastlake of 28 February.37 The search now began for sculptors of the statuary, and of the effigy of Albert himself. And, although Scott had been told the commission was his, nobody thought to tell the other competitors that they had lost, which prompted a squeal of indignation from Charles Barry (who had submitted a truly monumental design in the Italianate style, a great domed marble edifice sheltering a statue on a high plinth), who wrote to Eastlake when he heard about it by reading in The Times a reference Scott himself had made to it.38

  III

  In March 1863 Palmerston, as Prime Minister, agreed to ask Parliament for its support – moral as well as financial – for the memorial. Grey was, nonetheless, nervous about the outcome, fearing that the memory of the ‘immense services’ of the Prince was fading: he asked Bowring ‘pray, influence everyone you can’.39 Palmerston, who had his own views about Scott, had also found nothing to impress him in the designs – he recorded afterwards that he ‘certainly cannot say that any of them appeared to him to be suitable.’40 He disliked the ‘multitude of complicated details’ in the plan, because they seemed to obscure the life being commemorated and also to be expensive. He suggested instead ‘an open Grecian Temple placed between Rotten Row and the Carriage Drive’.

  More thoughtful and detailed in his own criticisms was Cole, who wrote at length to Grey about them on 10 March. Cole claimed that the execution of the idea that he had in mind was, he felt ‘certain’, ‘one which the Prince himself would have approved.’41 Given Cole’s closeness to the late and sainted Prince, this represented the playing of a trump card ea
rly on in the game. He recommended that the Queen should retain control, and not Scott, whose reputation had preceded him with Cole. ‘The Queen will be able at all times to obtain the best advice possible.’ Cole did, however, praise Scott’s design. He said it was ‘distinguished above all the other designs by its being strictly that of a Memorial character. This character is also pre-eminently English in sentiment; is sanctioned by National associations extending through many centuries when the Fine Arts in England were equal to those in any part of Europe.’42

  Palmerston, on 23 April in his appeal to the Commons for money, used the Disraelian method of laying on with the trowel his expressions of the size of the loss sustained by the death of the Prince Consort. ‘The event struck a gloom into every household – it inspired with deep grief the heart of every subject of Her Majesty,’ he said.43 When Disraeli himself later replied for the Opposition, he seemed to enter into some sort of competition of ingratiation: Albert’s death had been a ‘great calamity’, and he had been ‘the peerless husband, the perfect father, the master whose yoke was gentleness’.44

  The Prime Minister reported on the progress of the submissions by architects, and announced where the memorial would be sited. It would, he said, ‘stand as an example to future generations, to stimulate them to emulate those virtues and high qualities which were possessed by the person in whose honour the memorials are erected.’45 He told the House the memorial would be a worthy object for it to endorse: and that it would be quite in order to vote to make good the difference between the estimated cost of the memorial – put at £110,000 – and the £60,000 or so already subscribed by the public. The Commons gave its support, and a grant of £50,000. The motion to grant the funds was passed nem. con. It was stated that the Queen, not Parliament, would make the final decision about the form of the memorial. Cole and Scott were in the gallery of the Commons to witness Palmerston’s achievement. What the Commons could not know was that the Queen was already annoyed that Parliament had not done this sooner: she had told her daughter, the Princess Royal, now the Crown Princess of Prussia, in May 1862 that ‘the Government have bungled and been shabby’ in respect of a memorial ‘and the House of Commons are most difficult people to have anything to do with.’46

  Cole reported back to Grey the next day that, although cheered by the outcome, Scott had been annoyed by a reference by William Coningham, the MP for Brighton, to a ‘monstrous Eleanor Cross’ 300 feet high that he was supposed to be building.47 He told Cole that the monument would be ‘a shrine’, even if, unlike most shrines, the effigy itself would be open to the elements.48 In any case, Coningham had been put right on the spot – the memorial would be no more than 150 feet high, and the decision about its exact form had yet to be taken by the Queen.

  Derby felt that he and his Committee had done what they best could by advising on the choice of architect: but Grey told him that the Queen wanted to hold them to their original brief of superintending the execution, which Derby knew could take years and would be a thankless task. The Committee managed to persuade the Queen to retain John Kelk to act as its agent as well as the contractor, and keep an eye on progress. Scott, ever on the alert for slights, resented this appointment as an intrusion upon his role as architect, and protested. Derby knew Scott well enough to expect problems. The decision to appoint Kelk was ‘given without any reference to his opinion’. Derby remained anxious about the role of the Committee. ‘I anticipate no end of embarrassments if we are compelled to act, nominally, as advisers. Every point will practically be decided by others, and we, without the power of imposing any effectual check, shall be held responsible for every blunder, and, above all, for the expenditure of the money.’49

  He also had Cole to reckon with, as he was making all sorts of enquiries of experts into the durability of some of the materials being proposed for the memorial and the sculpture, and was seeking to know aspects of Scott’s business better than Scott did. Cole had also decided he greatly objected to the idea of an open shrine, and sent Grey a long paper explaining why on 4 May 1863, arguing once more for an ‘Eleanor Cross’. ‘It may be doubted’, he wrote, ‘if a single instance can be adduced of a Decorative Shrine ever erected in the open air in this country. Is an experiment now for the first time to be made with such a memorial as that of the Prince Consort?’50 Cole kept hammering away at the idea that the statue of the Prince Consort should be exposed to the London weather, even passing on to Grey the suggestion that it should be ‘built under one of the Glass Domes of the Exhibition building.’51 He suggested that a committee be formed to consider the matter, something the Household wisely decided not to gum up the proceedings by acting upon. He also sent Grey a lengthy selection of evidence about Eleanor crosses, distinguished by the exceptional pedantry that had helped make Cole so toxic a personality among those who knew him.

  Scott, profoundly irritated, replied in a predictably combative way, dismissing Cole’s suggestions. ‘The Statue of the Prince Consort himself . . . should be the object which should, at the first glance, strike the eye and explain the whole idea of the monument,’ he wrote in a printed memorandum circulated to Grey and others in May 1863.52 ‘To have this concealed in an apartment invisible to the spectator from without, is to destroy the whole ideal of the monument which would become unintelligible except by the verbal explanation that the lower storey contains a room or cell in which the statue is enclosed to protect it from being soiled or injured. This seems to me highly objectionable; indeed, almost destructive to the effect which such a monument should produce.’ Scott said he was open to persuasion about materials; but the design was not negotiable. Cole quickly saw he had lost, and surrendered. The decisive moment came at Osborne on 11 May 1863, when Sir Charles Phipps effectively told him to mind his own business, and enlisted the Queen’s name to say that such decisions as had been made on grounds of taste were hers, and the matter was closed. It was settled that the monument would be built as Scott wanted: and it was. Meanwhile, Cole considered other means by which he could influence the commemoration of his late patron.

  At the end of May Grey wrote to Disraeli, a commissioner as well as Leader of the Opposition in the Commons – to ensure he was on message, and was assured he was. Grey admitted he had felt reluctant to approach other Conservatives, with the exception of Lord Elcho, in case it did more harm than good, but asked Bowring if he could do it, as well as talking to some ‘Radicals’.53 Grey professed himself ‘very anxious’ about what Bowring found; fear of further emotional damage to the Queen was clearly at the forefront of his considerations. Later in the summer, when the costs became widely known, there were protests about the extravagance, with one correspondent to The Times suggesting that the money be, instead, sent to the north of England for the relief of the poor there.54

  IV

  The Queen gave her permission by the Sign Manual on 6 April 1864 for land in Hyde Park to be used for the memorial. However, the proposal to purchase land on the other side of Kensington Gore for a memorial building was defeated in the Commons the following month. Grey was incandescent, and told Bowring on 19 May that ‘I always believed that the main object of those who defeated the proposal to purchase the building was to throw obstacles in the way of the general Kensington scheme with respect to Scientific Institutions etc.’ He remained convinced that if such a building were put up some great institution would wish to make it its temporary, and then permanent, home. The problem at this stage seems to have been the Court’s determination that the National Gallery, or National Portrait Gallery, should inhabit such a building, which neither wished to do. The idea eventually evolved into a concert and exhibition hall, under Cole’s aegis, being the second part of the explicit commemoration of Albert’s name, and a consolation to Cole for the removal of the Crystal Palace to Sydenham. It also associated Albert explicitly with the advance of civilisation. However, the idea that memorialising Albert was a universally popular occupation was gainsaid by a remark Dickens made to a friend in Whitby in
September 1864: ‘If you should meet with an inaccessible Cave anywhere in that neighbourhood, to which a hermit could retire from the memory of Prince Albert and testimonials to the same, pray let me know of it. We have nothing solitary and deep enough in this part of England.’55

  Eastlake, in his initial discussions with Bowring in 1862, had suggested that there should be a seated statue of Albert in the hall, to distinguish it from the standing one that would be on the monument.56 However, this was not to be: Albert was to be seated on his memorial. This would cause the most profound problems.

  The Queen expressed a preference for Baron Carlo Marochetti as the sculptor of the colossal statue. Marochetti had made some busts of the royal couple in the 1850s that had given much pleasure to them, and had as a result been asked to cast the recumbent figures of Albert and Victoria on Albert’s tomb in the mausoleum at Frogmore, in Windsor Great Park. The Queen seems to have decided that Marochetti was the only artist who could capture her late husband as she would wish. Marochetti was a Sardinian noble, but born in Turin in 1805 and brought up in Paris, where his father had been a lawyer, and where he later studied as a sculptor at the École des Beaux-Arts. He was of the Romantic school, and touted himself around Europe from the 1830s onwards seeking, and quite often finding, commissions, specialising in equestrian statues of supposedly great European leaders and soldiers. He impressed the Queen on their first meeting in 1849 with his courtly manners, and soon won the commission for the equestrian statue of Richard the Lionheart that originally stood outside the western entrance to the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition. Thanks to an intervention by Albert this statue, popular with the public, was moved permanently to outside Westminster Hall. By the early 1860s, Marochetti was one of the most sought-after sculptors in Britain.