Punch magazine, then in its heyday, saw scope for much satire. It called for the turf in Hyde Park to be sold off to help pay for the cost of the building. It was, after all, about to be pulverised by hordes of visitors and turned to mud. Unkind cartoons rained down on the Royal couple, who were correctly identified as the driving force behind the Exhibition. This did not much please Albert, who was sensitive to ridicule. The Times thundered energetically against the project, predicting that Hyde Park would become the ‘bivouac of all the vagabonds of London’. The newspaper was so extremely and notoriously hostile to the scheme that 150 years later the Daily Telegraph was able to identify a thread in history and tease The Times about its opposition to the creation of the Millennium Dome.
In the end and in spite of this fundraising industry, the costs associated with establishing the Exhibition did overrun. The overall cost amounted to £169,998, a tremendous sum at this time and at least a third higher than expected. On the other hand a number of other mistakes were sidestepped smoothly. The Building Committee of the Royal Commission initially came up with a proposal to create a neoclassical building to be composed of nineteen million bricks and topped by a dome designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It was not ugly but restrained to the point of dullness and so unpopular that even Albert feared an exhibition housed in such a building could not succeed. It was the great crisis of this entire project.
Fortunately, the inspirational landscape gardener Joseph Paxton came to the rescue. Paxton was responsible, as the Duke of Devonshire’s head gardener, for major works in the park at Chatsworth. Paxton had become interested in greenhouse design. He had taken on the conservation of the estate’s dilapidated glasshouses and the design and creation of innovative new models.
Now, with the Great Exhibition looming, Paxton initially sketched out an idea on a piece of blotting paper at a meeting in the boardroom of the Midland Railway which he then published in the Illustrated London News. It was a plan of a revolutionary light-filled structure of glass, wood and steel. It was to be a building of beauty and one of the most innovative designs of the nineteenth century. The Exhibition, at a stroke, had a home, an enormous home with 293,655 panes of glass. It was 1,848 feet long, not quite managing the 1,851 feet Paxton had hoped to achieve for symbolic reasons, but nonetheless three times the length of St Paul’s Cathedral. Four and a half thousand tonnes of iron and thirty-nine miles of piping were used. Six horses raised the seventy-two-feet-long girders which had been tested to hold fifteen tonnes each into place and 2,000 men worked on the site, incidentally drinking 250 gallons of beer, or a pint each, when Albert visited. The Great Exhibition was inaugurated by Victoria and Albert on 1 May 1851 and now The Times rapidly changed its tune, exulting, in words that Albert himself might have selected, that this London morning was the first ‘since the creation of the world that all people have assembled from all parts of the world and done a common act’. The Royal couple stood centre stage, the Archbishop of Canterbury led a prayer of thanksgiving. The building itself was filled to overflowing with the evidence of British technological prowess: cotton-spinning machines and printing machines, locomotives and telegraphs, steam turbines and steam hammers, carpets from Axminster and ribbons from Coventry. Parts of the displays were lit brilliantly by the British stained glass that lined the upper galleries. And as if to welcome all comers with emblems of the energy driving the British industrial miracle, a twenty-four-ton lump of coal and a one-ton ingot of Sheffield steel had pride of place inside the Crystal Palace.
As Albert had wished, there was a strongly international flavour to the exhibits. The great Koh-i-Noor diamond, lately presented to the Queen by the East India Company, made its first appearance on British soil as did Ireland’s eighth-century Tara Brooch, which had been rediscovered only in the previous year. There were rugs from Tunisia, statues from Belgium, carvings from Austria, a fire engine from Canada and a display of Colt firearms from the United States. France focused on luxury, despatching Sèvres porcelain, Limoges enamel and silks from Lyons. Chile sent gold and Russia malachite and porcelain vases.
The scene was memorialised by contemporary painters. David Roberts’ The Inauguration of the Great Exhibition, 1st May 1851 provides a tremendous image of the sheer scale of the Crystal Palace, with its curving roof, mature trees, wide galleries and balconies, crowds and swarming scenes of industry and pleasure. Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s painting The First of May 1851 portrays this moment as pivotal for the nation and the Royal Family. The aged Duke of Wellington offers a casket to Victoria, a birthday gift to the infant Prince Arthur, she holds in her arms, but Albert stands behind the Queen, gazing into the distance to where the Crystal Palace gleams under a sunburst. Most impressive of all, Henry Courtney Selous’ The Opening of the Great Exhibition by Queen Victoria on 1 May 1851 places the Queen, the Prince and their growing brood at the centre of an extraordinary tableau, as the galleries of the Crystal Palace rise tier upon glorious tier behind them.
The Exhibition was a triumph, which is not to say that tensions were absent. Issues in the world outside spilled into the Crystal Palace. For example, Albert’s relationship with Palmerston, which was not strong in any case, became worse as a result of what was perceived to be the Prince’s championing of Prussian ties with Britain. Albert was not explicitly able to support Prussia but he could use other channels. Later, he and Victoria would marry their eldest child Vicky off to Prince Frederick William, future heir to the Prussian throne, in an attempt to cement the relationship between Prussia and Britain. Meanwhile, he merely used the Great Exhibition to push forward Prussian exhibits, Prussian diplomats and thus Prussian interests, much to Palmerston’s vexation. Nevertheless, Victoria could say that the Exhibition’s opening day was ‘one of the greatest and most glorious days of our lives’. Enormous crowds turned out on that first day. The only error on the first day was that a Chinese man in traditional robes was thought to be part of the ceremony but even that was a happy mistake in retrospect. Vast crowds continued to come, with over six million visitors making their way to Hyde Park before the Exhibition closed in October. Given that the total population of the United Kingdom was twenty-seven million at that time, of whom 6.5 million were in Ireland, these figures show that the event was a triumph. Thomas Cook’s eponymous business, which started with trips for teetotallers,fn2 brought 150,000 visitors to the Crystal Palace. In fact, cheap rail travel was as essential to the event’s success as it had been to the construction phase. Fortunately, there was almost no crime and new-fangled public lavatories were laid on at a penny a time.
Albert could be forgiven for gloating in a letter to Frederick William of Prussia. He was able to reply smoothly to the King, who had been fretting about his security were he to attend the Exhibition. Albert replied that the monarch was quite at liberty to worry if he chose to do so, before mocking the expert opinions being circulated in Berlin. Such opinions were, as is so frequently the case, misconceived, suggested the Prince:
Mathematicians have calculated that the Crystal Palace will blow down in the first strong gale; engineers that the galleries would crash in and destroy the visitors; political economists have prophesised a scarcity of food in London owing to the vast concourse of people; doctors that owing to so many races coming into contact with each other the Black Death of the Middle Ages would make its appearance as it did after the Crusades; moralists that England would be infected by all the scourges of the civilised and uncivilised world; theologians that this second Tower of Babel would draw upon it the vengeance of an offended God. I can give no guarantee against these perils, nor am I in a position to assume responsibility for the possibly menaced lives of your royal relatives.
Best of all, the Great Exhibition made a profit, a princely £160,000, which was invested in what would become known as Albertopolis, an area of South Kensington that housed world-class museums, including his namesake the V&A. It was also used to fund awards for industry, science and engineering which likewise continue to thi
s day. There was a profit of a more immediate kind, for the first legacy of the Great Exhibition was to make the Royal Family immensely popular. People knew how hard Albert had worked on the project, even at the cost of his own health. The other commissioners and committees had done their bit but many questions were referred to Albert for final appeal. He had to exercise every skill he possessed as a diplomat too, such as halting mad schemes like the idea floated that the Hyde Park site ought to be surrounded by eight-feet-high railings for extra security. All this was on top of the Prince’s already heavy daily workload.
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As popular as Albert now became, it was by no means all plain sailing for him. Neither Victoria nor Albert was especially enamoured of the colourful Palmerston, the second of the two key statesmen to figure in the early part of Victoria’s reign, and this dislike also came with difficulty attached. Palmerston’s attempt on the virtue of Miss Brand had sealed this dislike at the beginning of the enforced relationship between Palmerston and the Royal couple. Later, the tension was emphasised by what was perceived to be Palmerston’s high-handed treatment of Victoria, especially his disinclination to await authorisation from the Queen for despatches sent in her name. Victoria and Albert were also appalled by the way in which Palmerston’s support for radical causes in Europe during the 1848 Year of Revolutions was laid at their door. Palmerston was after all the Queen’s minister and was acting notionally in her name. However, he was a popular politician and Albert was aware of the difficulties that would accompany a public falling-out.
The Prince was, however, not one to avoid a confrontation, especially when the dignity of the Queen appeared to be at stake. On the face of it Albert won the first round in 1850, during the Whig premiership of Lord John Russell. Albert agreed to a request for a meeting with Palmerston and read the politician the riot act, informing him that, although disagreements over policy were not insignificant, what mattered most of all was the failure to follow proper process and what was perceived to be Palmerston’s arrogant treatment of the Queen. Palmerston agreed to a memorandum written by Prince Albert with the advice of Baron Stockmar, a German physician who had advised King Leopold of the Belgians and who was a regular confidant of Albert.
The document was intended to regularise the professional relationship between the Sovereign and her senior ministers. It declared that ‘The least the Queen has a right to require of her minister is: 1) That he will distinctly state what he proposes in a given case, in order that the Queen may know as distinctly to what she has to give her royal sanction. 2) Having given once her sanction to a measure, the minister who, in the execution of such measure alters or modifies it arbitrarily, commits an act of dishonesty towards the Crown, which the Queen has an undoubted constitutional right to visit with the dismissal of that minister.’ Unfortunately, in fairly short order, Palmerston ignored this agreement and behaved as he had always done. This behaviour led, eventually, to his resignation in 1851. This was an apparent success for the Prince. In fact, this event damaged all the parties concerned and worse was to come.
Palmerston’s hostility along with the general suspicion of foreigners led to the lowest point in Albert’s public life. He had counselled against any form of intervention in a developing stand-off in eastern Europe between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, much to Palmerston’s irritation, for the politician judged that an assertive role would prove to be in Britain’s interests. In 1854, perhaps not coincidentally, gossip spread that the Prince was under formal investigation as a foreign agent. This was possibly started by an article in the Westminster Review, a liberal-minded quarterly with close connections to Palmerston, which pointed to the ‘high interests’ of the Coburg family. In other words, implying that the Crown was being unduly influenced by Albert’s German heritage.
The gossip was spreading at a difficult moment. The Crimean War had broken out in the previous autumn, with Russia and Britain on opposing sides, and national unity was expected and demanded. It was perhaps inevitable that the non-British elements within the Royal Family would be scrutinised at such a time, particularly the relationship, actual and suspected, between the Coburgs and Russia. The Daily News wrote that ‘above all, the nation distrusts the politics, however they may admire the taste’, of the Prince, and by 1855 it was rumoured that both Victoria and Albert had been arrested and put in the Tower of London for treason. ‘You jolly Turk,’ ran the unpleasant Crimean-inflected ditty, ‘now go to work, And show the Bear [Russia] your power. It’s rumoured over Britain’s isle, That A… is in the Tower.’
These rumours and the deep unpopularity which resulted were a heavy burden for both Victoria and Albert yet it is interesting that relations with Palmerston now began to improve. By the late 1850s, Palmerston was speaking in glowing terms of Albert. This in turn helped to make him more popular in the country at large and it is clear that Palmerston began to accept that the Prince could make a contribution to political life. Albert’s last major act before his death in 1861 was to intervene in a dangerous diplomatic incident between the United States, then in the throes of its civil war, and Britain. The so-called Trent affair began with the boarding of the eponymous British ship by American forces and threatened to spark a conflict between the two powers. Palmerston initially intended to send a robust message but Albert, whose health was now failing with alarming speed, moved to soften a despatch that would have raised tensions further. ‘… Her Majesty’s Government,’ he wrote at the end of November 1861, ‘are unwilling to believe that the United States Government intended wantonly to put an insult upon this country and to add to their many distressing complications by forcing a question of dispute upon us …’ Albert’s words did much to defuse the anger that had been growing rapidly and alarmingly between the two sides.
Albert was dead within weeks.
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Prince Albert’s discreet influence left a clear mark on the monarchy itself. It is a commonplace that the character of our contemporary monarchy came into existence during the reign of Victoria, thanks in no small part to the family-centred life of the Royal couple during the years of their strong and happy marriage. It does not follow, however, that Albert set out to mould the constitutional monarchy into the form that now exists. It was rather less conscious an endeavour than this. If anything, what emerges from the story of these years is the profoundly unorthodox family situation in which Albert found himself. He had to fight and manoeuvre to play the masculine part that any other Victorian paterfamilias would have taken for granted and it was only with the passage of time and several energy-sapping pregnancies that Victoria permitted him sight of state papers or to make a contribution to policy discussions. He then was obliged to manoeuvre against and confront politicians who tended to be older and vastly more experienced than he. He was only twenty years old when he married Victoria.
Ultimately, he became the Queen’s closest adviser but only after 1848, a period of unrest and international tension of the sort that Victoria had had hitherto no experience and a moment when the realisation came, at last, that she needed an adviser she could trust completely. It is here that the benign influence which Albert brought to bear becomes most visible. He was concerned to protect the dignity and pride of the Queen herself but he also understood that the road to the Crown’s greatest influence lay through diplomacy. As the great constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor wisely notes, ‘The consort’s influence was generally employed in the direction of conciliation’ and this habit more than anything else (and to some degree against Albert’s own political inclinations) led to the emergence of a more apolitical monarchy.
Albert wanted to ensure, above all else, that the Queen’s government could be carried on regardless of political interests so in the period between 1846 and his death this meant that the Crown had to accept the Prime Minister who could carry the Commons. Whether the Sovereign liked or disliked this politician on a personal basis was, and it must be, immaterial. This climate fostered the stable, deeply rooted monarchy, one
that was above political currents, reproach and danger. It formed in turn the basis for Bagehot’s dictum that the Sovereign had ‘the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn’.
Bagehot also wrote within four years of Albert’s death, ‘it is only during the period of the present reign that in England the duties of a constitutional sovereign have ever been well performed.’ This was essentially the great achievement of Albert’s public life. He set the tone for a constitutional monarchy. As Professor Bogdanor writes, ‘Since Victoria the changes in the role of the monarchy have been changes in degree and not in kind. There have been no fundamental alterations to the monarchical model as it had evolved by the end of Victoria’s reign.’ When so many of the world’s monarchies have disappeared since the era of Victoria and Albert, the longevity and sturdiness of the British institution is remarkable and this is because Albert managed to establish a monarchy that was acceptable to the political class and popular with the people.
It is worth concluding with what could be called a ‘domestic monarchy’, the image of Victoria and Albert as not only a Royal couple but a normal one too. After all, politicians come and go. Monarchs and their families, by the Grace of God, endure and have more opportunity to create and cultivate relationships with the societies within which they live, with their subjects. Naturally, Britons were interested in and concerned about their relationship to the Crown and here Albert was successful too. Victoria and Albert produced the image of a normal family in an exalted position. Sir Edwin Landseer’s famous painting Windsor Castle in Modern Times exemplifies the success of this image: the Green Drawing Room at Windsor is just grand enough to please, without being too grand, and it is nicely informal, containing as it does frisky canines and a small Princess Victoria playing with a dead bird, the spoils of the day’s shoot. A garden beckons from the open window and, most strikingly, Victoria manages to look simultaneously queenly and subservient. She gazes adoringly at her energetic husband, who is fresh from the field.
The Victorians Page 19