Albert was a man of diverse interests and talents. Whether he threw himself wholeheartedly into them because of dissatisfaction with his home life and a lack of friends at Court, even the difficulty faced by a naturally shy man of making friends in another country, can only be guessed at. Yet he worked hard at starting to bring the royal residences into the nineteenth century. He had the drains, sewerage and plumbing at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle modernised, and ensured that their new homes at Osborne and later Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands also benefited from such changes. He scrutinised the household accounts and was astonished to learn that hundreds of candles at the palace were snuffed out when only burned halfway down and then discarded, or else removed by the servants for their own use. This was one practice which he accordingly reformed, with the result that a substantial saving was made. He found a large collection of valuable paintings stacked and neglected in the cellars, and oversaw the restoration, cataloguing and in many instances rehanging of such works to full advantage.
Of Prince Albert’s many achievements during his lifetime, perhaps none could ever compare with that of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the culmination of his interest in science and manufacture. He believed passionately in industrial Britain and thought that man might use his techniques to create a better world. While some saw it as just an enormous British shop-window, full of the products of the new industry, it was an attempt to fuse together utility and beauty, a celebration of the British Empire and advances in technology. In this he was inspired partly by the success of a recent French Industrial Exposition and partly by the enthusiasm of Henry Cole, an active member of the Royal Society of Arts, of which Albert was already President. He was also appointed President of a Royal Commission, and a total fund of £230,000 was raised. The Commissioners set up a competition for designing the building for the exhibition: 233 architects sent in designs, 38 from abroad, 51 from around England and 128 from London. The winning entry, from Joseph Paxton, proposed a glass house on a huge scale, the like of which had never been seen before.
The exhibition was held in the Crystal Palace, erected in Hyde Park, London. It opened on 1 May 1851, remaining open six days a week, and closed on 15 October. The original admission fee of 5s was reduced to 1s on four days each week, and on Fridays – and Saturdays from August onwards – it was 2s6d. The first major event of its kind in England, it had an enormous influence on the development of many aspects of society, including art and design, education, international trade and even the tourist industry, and also set a precedent for many more international exhibitions over the following hundred years.
Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their family attended the opening of the exhibition. The day had been declared a public holiday, thousands lined the route the Queen would take, and inside the Palace were 25,000 invited guests and season ticket holders. Afterwards she wrote to King Leopold that it was ‘the happiest, proudest day in my life, and I can think of nothing else. Albert’s name is for ever immortalised with this great conception, his own, and my own dear country showed she was worthy of it.’8 She came to visit almost daily from its opening until she left Buckingham Palace for Osborne at the end of July.
By the time it closed, over 6 million visitors had passed through its doors, though the precise total figure of 6,063,986 includes those who visited more than once. The profits exceeded £180,000, and on Albert’s suggestion an acreage of land in Kensington Gore was purchased as a site for royal colleges and museums, notably the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Albert Hall. The Crystal Palace itself was moved to Sydenham, where it was eventually destroyed by fire in 1936.
As a demonstration of industrial progress and a bringing together of all classes, the exhibition was an undoubted success. Writing to Prince Albert in rather patronising terms which would seem politically incorrect in the extreme to later generations, the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, was particularly struck by the fact that it brought to London thousands of people who had never seen a train before, ‘people speaking the strange tongues of Lancashire and Durham, and the official reports of their behaviour as they flocked through museums and gardens are full of unconcealed pride. Not a flower was picked, not a picture smashed.’9
Although the Great Exhibition made Prince Albert very popular in the country, he and the Queen were soon to find that this mood of euphoria did not last. When the Crimean crisis broke late in 1853 and Turkey declared war on Russia, Lord Palmerston, the Home Secretary, urged immediate support for the beleaguered Turks and joint action with France against the Russian Empire. When the Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, shrank from declaring war, Palmerston resigned. Public opinion, which was overwhelmingly on Palmerston’s side, accused the Prince of having plotted to bring about his departure from the government and of carrying on pro-Russian intrigues through his relatives in Germany. It was rumoured that Palmerston had steamed open the Prince’s letters and found evidence of treacherous correspondence with the Russians. Expecting him and the Queen to be sent to the Tower for treason, crowds gathered at Traitors’ Gate in the hope of seeing their sovereign and ‘the German lad’ being taken through as prisoners.
War fever, the royal family and politicians were sure, had sent the whole country ‘a little mad’. The press accused Albert of interference in the affairs of the War Office, where a senior officer had resigned his post after differences with the Commander-in-Chief, the Queen’s notoriously reactionary cousin George, Duke of Cambridge.
So virulent were the attacks that Lord John Russell, as Leader of the House of Commons, strongly deprecated these calumnies, saying that the people of the country ‘always just in the end, will, as a result of this experience, give a firmer and stronger foundation to the throne’.10 The attacks on Albert were formally rejected in parliament by members of all parties, and the storm soon abated. Nevertheless, the Queen was bitter that politicians should have allowed passions in the country to have become so inflamed and that they had not come to the defence of her much-maligned husband sooner.
‘I cannot ever think or admit that anyone can be as blessed as I am with such a husband and such a perfection as a husband; for Papa has been and is everything to me,’ the Queen admitted candidly in 1858 to her eldest daughter, Victoria, Princess Royal, then newly married to Prince Frederick William of Prussia. ‘I had led a very unhappy life as a child – had no scope for my very violent feelings of affection – had no brothers and sisters to live with – never had had a father. . . . Consequently I owe everything to dearest Papa. He was my father, my protector, my guide and adviser in all and everything, my mother (I might almost say) as well as my husband.’11
‘Dearest Papa’ was not quite perfection, however. ‘That despising our poor degraded sex – (for what else is it as we poor creatures are born for man’s pleasure and amusement, and destined to go through endless sufferings and trials?) is a little in all clever men’s natures,’ she told her daughter just over a year later. Albert himself was not free from such faults, though he would not have admitted it. He might laugh and sneer constantly at what his wife might have to live with, and at their ‘unavoidable inconveniences’, though he hated the want of affection, of due attention to and protection of them, and said that men who left all home affairs and the education of their children to their wives ‘forget their first duties’.12
Such arguments would be returned to yet another year later, while the Princess was eight months pregnant with her second child. If only those selfish men, she lamented, who were the cause of such misery, ‘knew what their poor slaves go through!’13
Much as Victoria loathed the Schattenseite, or shadow side, of child-bearing, the Hanoverian in her was certainly anything but frigid when it came to what might delicately be called her other role as a wife. When Dr James Clark told her, after the birth of her ninth baby, Beatrice, that she should not have any more children in case it seriously threatened her health, she is reputed to have asked with disappointment, ‘Oh, James, can I have no more
fun in bed?’14 (Perhaps her instruction on the subject of birth control had been somewhat lacking.) Four years later, on one of the couple’s last joint Highland excursions, she complained of the lack of facilities and substandard accommodation at an inn at Dalwhinnie: ‘No pudding, and no fun.’15 One cannot but smile gently at her allowing an admittedly cryptic reference in her diaries to ‘fun’, and even more, at the fact that she allowed this reference to be published in her Leaves from Our Life in the Highlands in 1868.
Fulfilling the roles of monarch, mother to a family of adolescents, wife and also expectant mother made demands on her patience which would have taxed any woman. Shortly before she became (in her preferred term) enceinte for the last time, she confided her fears to Sir James Clark, who told Albert that ‘she felt sure if she had another child she would sink under it’, and that Clark himself feared more for her mind than her health.16 In March 1857, a month before the birth of Beatrice, she begged her husband to uphold her authority with the children, now aged between three and sixteen, and not scold her in front of them, as her physical condition caused her a deep sense of degradation. Her temper was further strained by feelings of jealousy where their eldest daughter was concerned. When the Princess Royal was betrothed to Prince Frederick William of Prussia, Albert began spending more and more time with her, coaching her in political and governmental matters and preparing her (a little too thoroughly, it must be said) for her future life in Germany. Victoria was angry with Albert for devoting too much attention to their unusually clever child and was also apparently angry with Prince Frederick William for preparing to devote his life to their child whom, Albert wrote to her bluntly, ‘you are thankful to be rid of’.17
Albert was said to have been less physically passionate than his wife, a characteristic ascribed to prudery arising from psychological damage after his mother’s expulsion from the family nest while he was still a boy. His lack of interest in other women amused, if not surprised, some of the more rakish gentlemen at Court. It was whispered that sometimes she had to coax him to bed, and it was even rumoured that, ‘with her erotic Hanoverian inheritance’, she debilitated him so much with her sexual demands that she hastened his early demise.18
For the sheltered young Queen of twenty, sharing a physical relationship was undoubtedly a revelation, something that the bowdlerised version of her journals that survives for posterity can only hint at but not completely disguise. Some commentators have called their love-life undoubtedly passionate, citing as evidence such details (recorded in Victoria’s journal) as her unashamed pleasure in such actions as watching Albert shave in the mornings or his helping her to put on her stockings. Others think that he was sexually indifferent to her and regarded the whole business as procreational rather than recreational.19
Another measure of their interest in such matters can be discerned in a different way. For a couple who were generally considered by succeeding generations to be the last word in prudery, they had relatively uninhibited tastes in art. The Queen had their bedroom hung with paintings of male nudes. According to psychologist and author Dennis Friedman, this sprang from the hope that Albert would find them visually erotic.20 For the sake of their marriage, one would like to think that he found his wife’s present to him on his thirty-first birthday more to his liking. This was a vast painting by their favourite portraitist, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Florinda, full of voluptuous women who had gone to a stream in order to bathe as nature intended. Elizabeth Longford suggests that they both developed sexually with each other, and that she loved him so much that the sudden lack of their love, including the sex, was what drove her into seclusion for so long after his death.21
Yet the Queen must have been aware that her Hanoverian vivacity far exceeded his Coburg fatalism. His indigestion and similar chronic symptoms, especially ‘fainting fits’, became more frequent over the years. All would be well in the end, Sir James Clark blandly assured her, but she was not convinced.
Neither was Baron Stockmar, who saw Albert in Coburg in September 1860 shortly after the latter had been involved in a horse-drawn carriage accident. The horses had bolted, Albert tried to rein in the beasts but failed, and his vehicle collided with a stationary wagon at a level crossing. He jumped clear, sustaining only cuts and bruises, and rushed to the aid of the wagon driver who was similarly shaken but not seriously hurt. After shock set in, Albert burst into tears, saying that he knew he would never see his beloved Coburg again. Stockmar came to see him while he was resting and said to himself afterwards that Albert was incapable of fighting a severe illness. If anything serious happened to him, he would surely die.
The Prince Consort later confirmed this gloomy outlook. ‘I do not cling to life,’ he told the Queen in conversation shortly before his last illness. If he had a severe illness, he said, he would give up at once and would not struggle for life.22 Partly because of this it has been asserted, somewhat unconvincingly, that his marriage could not have been very happy, and that the withdrawn and introverted adolescent was drawn to Victoria, as she was to him, out of a shared need for emotional fulfilment, yet he was crushed by the affections of a woman on whom he depended but whom he could not have loved, ‘because dependence and hostility go hand in hand’, and from whom only death could release him.23
For present-day commentators to put such a construction on a relationship between two people, one of whom has been dead for over a century, is easy enough, yet perhaps a shade superficial. The marriage had its ups and downs, and Albert was one of those introspective souls who gave the impression of rarely, if ever, being totally happy and at ease with the world. Yet one should be careful of putting too negative an interpretation on the story of Victoria and Albert. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that she was besotted with him, simply because she was less inhibited and more passionate about expressing her feelings, particularly in her journal (even the expurgated one which has survived her daughter Beatrice’s censorious transcription), and also because she had a fiery temper. Though less demonstrative, Albert was surely in love with her, ‘whatever love means’, to use the words memorably spoken by one of their descendants at the time of his first betrothal over a century later.
What is beyond doubt is the fact that by 1861 he had aged well beyond his forty-two years. The year had begun sadly with the death, on 2 January, of the childless King Frederick William IV of Prussia, the Princess Royal’s uncle by marriage, and the accession of his brother William, who had earlier given the misleading impression that he agreed – or at least did not take serious issue – with Albert’s plans for bringing liberalism and democracy to the German kingdom, but now showed his true colours by angrily throwing Albert’s letters into the fire. On 16 March the Queen’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, became ill with the skin disease erysipelas and died. Thanks to Albert’s peace-making skills, mother and daughter had been reconciled very soon after the wedding, and the Queen was so stricken with grief that rumours of her impending madness circulated throughout Europe. Later in the year, two of Albert’s Coburg relations in Portugal, King Pedro V and his brother Prince Fernando, succumbed to typhoid fever.
This coincided with the news that the Prince of Wales, the incorrigible Bertie (the future Edward VII), had just had an affair with a lady of the night, Nellie Clifden, while at Army camp in Ireland. To add insult to injury, it seemed as if almost every court in Europe knew before the scandal reached his horrified parents at Windsor Castle. They both reacted with intense fury, Albert writing him an anguished letter on the subject and then travelling to Cambridge to see him in person. Though he forgave his son, the Queen took a long time to do so. The Prince Consort arrived back at Windsor dispirited and exhausted. Within a few days he had taken to his bed, suffering from the typhoid fever which would claim his life on 14 December.
‘How am I alive after witnessing what I have done?’ she wrote to Vicky in her grief, four days later. ‘Oh! I who prayed daily that we might die together & I never survive him! I who felt in those blessed
Arms clasped & held tight in the sacred Hours at night – when the world seemed only to be ourselves that nothing could part us!’24
To the few close friends who also knew the Prince Consort well, she would regularly lament her sad lot in life, particularly when precious anniversaries came around. Shortly after her forty-sixth birthday, in May 1865, she wrote to Queen Augusta of Prussia how she would ‘rather sit and weep and live only with Him in spirit and take no interest in the things of this earth, for I believe that I am going further away from him and do not always see things so clearly as I used to! But I suppose that is God’s will and one must acquiesce in that also. He commands that I shall live, and so He allows me for the present the power to continue, until I am with my Angel once more.’25
The feelings of insecurity which the Queen had known since childhood reappeared in widowhood. Now she had no husband to smooth her path or lighten her load, she held fast to old familiar ways. Sometimes family and friends thought she was living in the past. When Victoria was in her mid-seventies, a young lady-inwaiting, Marie Mallet, was struck by the ‘curious charm to our beloved Sovereign in doing the same thing on the same day year after year’.26 The ghost of the Prince Consort still held sway over a court which seemed to have been permanently set in stone since December 1861, over thirty years earlier. His widow resisted any efforts or suggestions to alter her time-honoured rituals or routines, and she remained fiercely resistant to change. There was no little comfort to be found in holding on to the past. Sometimes she would admit to feeling like a lost child.
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