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Fortunately, Pugin’s legacy ripples across the years and the continents. The great Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott was, as we have noted, deeply influenced by Pugin’s ideology. His Gothic buildings include such fine and dispersed examples as the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras in London, the eponymous Anglican cathedral at Christchurch in New Zealand, which is due to be recreated after its destruction by earthquake, and Holy Trinity at Shanghai in China. All of these can trace in their lines and ornamentation a direct link back to Pugin. In Pugin’s own Ramsgate, Gilbert Scott designed Christ Church. It is profoundly Puginesque, though erected by public subscription as a furious Anglican riposte to Pugin’s feared Romanising tendencies. Scott later insisted that the dead architect must be commemorated on the relief at the base of the Albert Memorial in London. Pugin’s son Edward, meanwhile, created the soaring Gothic cathedral overlooking the harbour at Cobh (then Queenstown) in Ireland and scores of other buildings which owe their provenance to his father.
In The Stones of Venice, published in 1851, a year before Pugin’s death, John Ruskin damned him as ‘not a great architect but one of the smallest possible or conceivable architects’. Although his words were condemned, they cast a shadow over Pugin’s legacy that could not readily be dispelled. A century and more later, the august historian and broadcaster Kenneth Clark mourned Ruskin’s malign influence on the future, noting acidly, ‘If Ruskin had never lived, Pugin would never have been forgotten.’ Indeed, it is only in these latter years that Pugin’s lasting influence had been acknowledged and honoured. The shape he gave to his buildings transferred to the shape that Britain herself assumed in the national psyche, lending his work a potency that none of his contemporaries can possibly match.
As for Pugin himself, perhaps he outstrips Ruskin in negativity, for he was his own worst critic. He felt his work to be uneven and erratic and he came to despise many of his early and best commissions. In 1850 he lamented, ‘I can truly say that I have been compelled to commit absolute suicide with every building in which I have been engaged, and I have good proof that they are little better than ghosts of what they were designed [sic].’ Time shows what his inordinately busy and productive life rendered obscure to his own eyes. He created a body of work never seen in the Middle Ages themselves but which was as honest and coherent as anything done in that deep past. Pugin took the language of the past and placed it in the service of the present and in doing so he created marvels which affect our lives profoundly if Churchill’s famous quip ‘we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’ is to be believed.
The purpose of his writing, his drawing, his rhetoric was clear, honest, open, evident. It was to serve a higher purpose and never simply the purposes of a profane human life. A sight of his life and work shows a man who could only ever have been what he was because he had a cause greater than himself. His achievement is all around, rising effortlessly above the sniping of the critics then and since. His punishing life reveals much about the self-sacrifice being a Victorian so often involved and the price he paid was made manifest in the words spoken at the funeral celebrated in the Ramsgate church he himself had built:
zelus domus tuae comedit me.
Zeal for thy house has consumed me.
Albert: Behind the Throne
Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Consort of the United Kingdom (26 August 1819–14 December 1861) is a central figure in the story of Victorian Britain. He stands at the side of Queen Victoria in any number of paintings from the age the loyal and devoted husband, the father of the Royal couple’s nine children, the grandfather of kings and queens and dukes and empresses the length and breadth of Europe. The patron of a host of worthy causes, the power and energy behind the Great Exhibition of 1851, the campaigner against slavery, the diplomat, the crusader, the architect, the tentative liberal. The lonely and distressed child of a shattered marriage in a minor German duchy, who became almost the de facto king of another realm. The man who held no official power at any point in his life, who upon marriage was denied even the governance of his own household, who was scorned as a foreign carpetbagger but who went on to wield extraordinary influence as the partner and equal in what had to be a profoundly unequal union. All this, plus any number of assassination attempts with which to contend. Albert emerges from history as a Renaissance man and as a thoroughly dutiful individual.
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Sometimes and in some circumstances it is best to be an outsider. To be the stranger, new to a nation, a family, or a firm. The newcomer must work hard to learn and adapt. He or she might be put in a gruelling situation or expected to take on unfamiliar tasks immediately. In every case, the process of adapting to a new set of circumstances, to a new culture, will take time. The trick is, sometimes, not to let the strain show, to present a certain comfortable face to the world and not to show weakness.
It is necessary to make the best of the situation, to take the freshness of the circumstances, to turn it to the best possible end. As well as to remember this lesson, that it can be easier for outsiders than for those born into a given context to take stock of a situation and to recognise that the status quo can and sometimes must change profoundly and swiftly.
This inevitably leads to a famous consort of the Victorian era, a representative of minor German royalty who married a youthful Queen Victoria and installed himself, or found himself installed, at the centre of the British Royal Family. The presence of such a man had the effect of introducing new energy to the House of Hanover at a moment when such an infusion was most necessary. From the Royal Family, Albert’s influence spilled out into wider British society, leaving a mark on everything from culture to science to the public realm. All this was in the course of a life in Britain that lasted a scant two decades. Who was this minor princeling and what influences and philosophies drove him on?
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Prince Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel, of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was born on 26 August 1819 in Schloss Rosenau, near the town of Coburg in the historic Franconia district of what is now northern Bavaria. The Schloss and its estate had been in the possession of the Coburgs since the middle of the eighteenth century. Debts occasioned its sale but in 1805 the family repurchased it and commissioned a well-known Prussian architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, to mastermind its splendid redesign.
There was nothing remarkable in this. The Coburgs were a venerable family and one of the dynasties that held sway over the myriad minor German dukedoms before the consolidation of these patchwork territories into a German Empire later in the nineteenth century. There was little by way of actual grandeur or majesty in the family’s circumstances. Albert’s father, Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, ruled no empire, but rather a duchy less than half the size of Somerset, but the Duke had some right to a degree of pride. He had fought Napoleon, he was of an ancient lineage and was well connected and wealthy. He invested his riches in part in the enhancement of Coburg and of the duchy and in the interior of the Schloss itself, where his son grew up surrounded by an atmosphere of cultured beauty. As for the grounds at Rosenau, these were beautiful too, for they had been landscaped in the English picturesque style so popular in the Germany of the time.
Cultured beauty but not stability. The Duke’s marriage to his kinswoman Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg was not a happy one. They had two children but the Duke’s infidelity put a strain on the relationship and Albert’s mother followed her husband’s example. The couple officially divorced in 1826. Louise had been banished from the household two years previously and after her departure, she never saw her children again. She died at Paris in August 1831.
Albert was close to his brother Ernest but his difficult, fractured childhood showed in aggression towards other children. He was not fortunate enough to enjoy a mother’s love even though his father would marry again in 1832. For his formative years, Albert had no maternal presence in his life. Instead, he relied on the friendship and support of his
tutor, Johann Christoph Florschütz, an intelligent, enlightened graduate of the University of Jena, whose influence was vital and long-lasting. From Florschütz, the young Albert learned the virtues of independent thinking and of hard work. He drove himself to succeed, writing in his journal at the age of eleven that he ‘intended to train myself to be a good and useful man’. By the age of fourteen, he had adopted the habit of dividing his days into eight one-hour-long slots, the first beginning at 6 a.m. and the last ending at 8 p.m. He permitted himself a break between 1 and 5 p.m. which was scarcely a break at all as he used this period to study history, classical literature, French, English, mathematics and Latin composition, with vigorous games pursued outside during whatever time was left to spare. Albert was no idler but rather an exemplification of the daunting phrase mens sana in corpore sano, ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. His studies were often interrupted by his father the Duke, to whom Albert was devoted, but his nature was nevertheless hard-working. The young Albert’s habits of industry were to last to the end of his life.
Albert’s education took him from Germany to the new kingdom of Belgium, ruled over by his uncle, and eventually back to Germany. Then, as was the custom for many German princes, he studied at the University of Bonn. This young man’s ultimate destiny, if not quite established, was at least approximately delineated. As a member of a European Royal house, Albert was expected to marry a fellow Royal. The continental nobility was astonishingly self-regarding. This was his duty and there is no indication that he ever questioned the general form his future life would take.
As for the marriage that was ultimately arranged for him, the key figure in bringing Albert and Victoria together was Leopold, King of the Belgians since 1831. As early as 1821, when both Albert and Victoria were a mere two years old, the idea of a useful dynastic union was being bandied about by relations on both sides. The two young people were already related by blood. They were first cousins, as Victoria’s mother, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, was Duke Ernest’s sister and thus Albert’s aunt. The case was, nominally at least, already set fair.
Leopold, however, can be credited for driving the idea forward. As brother of Princess Victoria and Duke Ernest, he was uncle to both Victoria and Albert, in the way of Europe’s intricately related Royal houses, and he had accepted the newly created throne of Belgium, having previously rejected the throne of Greece. He had further connections. His first wife was Charlotte, daughter of George IV, who before her untimely death had been heir presumptive to the British throne. It can thus be safely inferred that Leopold knew more about dynastic marriage policy than anyone else in Europe.
Moreover, he was on excellent terms with all the principles in the case. Victoria told her journal delightedly that Leopold ‘is so clever … is indeed like my real father, as I have none, and he is so kind and so good to me’. He was assiduous in keeping in touch with her, no doubt partly out of genuine avuncular affection but also because he knew that she would, in due course, become the Queen of the United Kingdom. It should be added that Leopold was a great one for interfering. Victoria would, in the future, sharply rein in this tendency, although she would continue both to admire him and to remain fond of him. She once said that hearing ‘dear uncle speak on any subject is like reading a highly instructive book; his conversation is so enlightened and clear’.
Leopold was thus in a good lobbying position when the question of Victoria’s marriage arose. A sort of beauty parade of eligible suitors was arranged for the gratified Victoria, with the choice coming down to, on the one hand, Prince Albert, and on the other the equally eligible Prince Alexander of the Netherlands, who was the preferred choice of her uncle, King William IV. This was in 1836, when Victoria was barely seventeen years old and Albert sixteen.
Leopold now worked assiduously to bring about the marriage, conspiring with Victoria’s governess, Baroness Louise Lehzen, to pave the way for an alliance. Victoria immediately seemed to warm to Albert, describing him as ‘extremely handsome; his hair is about the same colour as mine; his eyes are large and blue, and he has a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth’. She was less enamoured of Alexander, noting that the ‘[Netherlander] boys are very plain … moreover they look heavy, dull, and frightened, and are not at all prepossessing’. Albert was less enraptured by the beauty pageant in which he was forced to participate. He objected in particular to having to stay up late for an assortment of entertainments. Moreover, he disliked, as some visitors do, the generally delightful nature of the British climate. These onerous duties eventually ended and Victoria and Albert did not meet again for three years.
Leopold in the meantime continued his matchmaking. On their second meeting, Victoria was as delighted as ever with her German prince. It was with some emotion, she told her journal, ‘that I beheld Albert – who is beautiful’. Victoria’s status had changed fundamentally in the course of the intervening years. Her uncle the King was now dead and she was the Queen of the United Kingdom, probably the most important person in the world. Victoria had a close relationship with her first Prime Minister, the Whig Lord Melbourne. He spent a great deal of time counselling the Queen in the ways of rule and government. This was constitutionally proper as well as personally agreeable and now she sought Melbourne’s guidance on her marriage.
His advice to her was fair and frank. He warned the Queen that the Coburg family was unpopular in Europe, adding bluntly that her own difficult mother, with whom the young Queen had a complicated relationship, was a fair specimen of them. The Russians hated the family and, to cap it all, Melbourne added that the British public was nervous of foreigners. He also reminded her that Albert was, after all, her own first cousin. Against this list of disadvantages there were no other suitable Protestant Royal suitors and Victoria herself was reluctant to marry a subject, noting, as she put it squeamishly to Melbourne, ‘marrying a subject was making yourself so much their equal, and brought you so in contact with the whole family.’ When all was said and done, it was clear that Albert was the obvious choice.
Hence, Victoria proposed to Albert while they were out riding at Windsor. Albert accepted but elements within the nation were less enthusiastic, their disdain for what was taken to be Albert’s ungentlemanly motives summed up in this mean little stanza: ‘Here comes the bridegroom of Victoria’s choice, the nominee of Lehzen’s voice; he comes to take “for better or for worse” England’s fat Queen and England’s fatter purse.’ Albert was viewed correctly as the most minor of royalty and less fairly as an impoverished grasper intent on rising in the world and with Catholic relations to boot. It was not a good beginning.
Nor, in the short term, did matters improve for the Prince. Parliament would not vote through the usual grant of £50,000 per annum out of the Civil List. Albert’s allowance was cut to £30,000, though this was more to do with Parliament’s hostility to Melbourne, who ran a minority Whig administration, than to any dislike of Albert. In addition, Victoria could not persuade Melbourne, or anyone else for that matter, that Albert ought to have the title of King Consort. Such a move would have required an Act of Parliament. In the sixteenth century, Philip II of Spain had required such an Act to assume the role of formal King Consort to Mary I and in the seventeenth, William of Orange had required a similar measure to assume the role of formal King Consort to Mary II. In both cases, Parliament had obliged but in this case Victoria was forced to accept that neither Parliament nor people would clasp Albert to their bosoms any time soon. ‘The English,’ she wrote gloomily, ‘are very jealous at the idea of Albert having any political power or meddling with affairs.’
Thus foiled, Victoria tried a new strategy. Albert might not be King Consort but at least his rank and precedence would for ever be preserved and now Victoria put pressure on Parliament to pass the necessary legislation so ‘that the Prince, for his life, was to take precedence in rank after Her Majesty, in Parliament and elsewhere, as Her Majesty may think fit and proper, any law to the contrary notwith
standing’. Alas for Victoria, Parliament declined this measure too and in the end the Queen determined his precedence by means of letters patent, which could not affect the statutory rules of the House of Lords or the Privy Council.fn1
This was a difficult beginning and such a parade of quarrels, petty, party political but unrelenting, cannot have made Albert’s early introduction into British life very amusing. He was also not granted a peerage and here we catch a rare glimpse of Albert’s vexation. His tart response was that a British peerage would be a humiliation and ‘almost a step downwards, for as a Duke of Saxony, I feel myself much higher than a Duke of York or Kent’. At length, however, the squabbling ended. Victoria and Albert were married in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace on 10 February 1840 and Albert became a naturalised subject of his wife.
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Initially, Victoria was not keen to allow Albert a role in her official life. Even before they were married, the Queen had made clear to Albert that her duty must come first. He proposed a long honeymoon, maintaining that the usual custom in England was ‘for newly married people to stay up to four or six weeks away from town and society’. The Queen would have none of it. ‘I am the Sovereign,’ she told him, ‘and that business can stop and wait for nothing. Parliament is sitting and something occurs almost every day, for which I may be required, and it is quite impossible for me to be absent from London; therefore 2–3 days is already a long time to be absent.’ Upon their return to London, moreover, the Queen made it clear that she preferred to continue her conversations on matters of state with Melbourne and not to involve Albert.
The Victorians Page 17