Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  They reached Osborne well contented ‘after one of the most beautiful journeys we have ever made, or shall probably ever make’, Albert wrote, in spite of the ‘unceasing rain’ which features prominently in the Queen’s Journals.

  In fact, it had not all been sweetness and light. There had been difficulties with the King and Queen of Prussia and criticism of Queen Victoria’s manner, which dismayed and upset her, while the eminent naturalist Alexander von Humboldt took a strong dislike to Prince Albert. But there had been one outstanding result. A young German scientist, A. W. Hofmann, a research chemist at the University of Bonn, expressed interest to Sir James Clark in taking a temporary appointment at the new College of Chemistry in London. As the Prince was President of this new venture, Clark introduced Hofmann to him, and Albert personally arranged with the King of Prussia that Hofmann would not lose his place at Bonn. Hofmann came for two years, but stayed for twelve, Prince Albert again making the necessary arrangements. His laboratory and his students constituted the first school of research in England, with dramatic and long-lasting consequences for British science. In some respects this was the single most important intellectual contribution Albert made to his adopted country, perhaps even more significant than the revolution he was to effect at Cambridge.

  Superficially it might appear strange that Prince Albert, so fearful of Queen Victoria’s political partisanship, should now lay himself open to the same charge in his relations with Peel. Here, the attraction was personal in the first instance, but given Peel’s uneasy position within the Conservative Party, of which Albert was fully aware, his genuine admiration for him and desire to assist him contained perils. The key point, often overlooked, is that Peel’s character not only mirrored that of Prince Albert – there was much wisdom in Wellington’s comment that ‘it was the Prince who insisted on spotless character, the Queen not caring a straw about it’ – but so did his politics. Commenting on Peel’s unpopularity among the Conservatives to Anson in April 1843 Albert remarked that it was exactly this that made him admire Peel so greatly, as ‘he was determined either to stand or fall by his own opinion, and the Prince felt that in such a man’s hands the interests of the Crown were most secure’.36 After Peel’s death, in a tribute in a public speech in York in October 1850, Albert said of him with admiration that ‘he was a Liberal from feeling, but Conservative upon principle’, a man whose ‘impulses drove him to foster progress’ within established institutions, the maintenance of society, ‘like organic growth in nature’. These are revealing words, as they absolutely represented Prince Albert’s political views. In May 1846 the Gladstones dined with the Queen and Prince, after which Gladstone recorded that ‘the Prince is very strongly Conservative in his politics and his influence with the Q. is over-ruling; through him she has become so attached to Conservative ideas that she could hardly endure the idea of the opposite Party as her Ministers.’

  Thus, between the Prince and Peel there developed a relationship never equalled in his life between himself and an individual politician. They corresponded frequently on a very wide variety of subjects, met often, and even after Peel had ceased to be Prime Minister he remained the Prince’s closest adviser on most matters, from political affairs to the reorganisation of Cambridge University and to the development of Osborne. Although Albert sought Stockmar’s advice on domestic and foreign affairs throughout his life, Peel took his place as his real adviser and confidant in England. It was Peel who, in Albert’s view, had given him his first real opportunity for public service as Chairman of the Fine Arts Royal Commission, for which he was deeply, and touchingly, grateful, as it gave him the chance to have the ready access to intellectuals, artists, musicians and scientists for which he craved, and whose absence – apart from his own private attempts – had been a significant cause of his depression and frustrations. For his part, Peel was an unstinting admirer of one whom he described to Charles Eastlake, the secretary of the Commission, as ‘the most extraordinary young man you will have ever met.’ It was this manifest and genuine respect for her beloved husband that gradually thawed the Queen’s ingrained coldness towards Peel, although some reservations could not be completely effaced.

  Some of Prince Albert’s artistic ventures – notably the attempt to revive frescoes in England by a public competition for the new Palace of Westminster, now rising amidst incessant difficulties and acrimony – the full genius of Barry and Pugin’s masterpiece as yet widely unrecognised – were not notably successful in themselves, but attracted a surprising and heartening degree of public interest, the fresco exhibition itself drawing very large crowds to Westminster Hall.

  Then, there was a very real and important intellectual sympathy between the Prince and Peel. Albert once remarked to Queen Victoria that ‘to me, a long, closely-connected train of reasoning is like a beautiful strain of music. You can hardly imagine my delight in it’. To him, as to Peel, the latter’s abrupt change of policies that characterised his career and was the chief cause of the intense mistrust felt for him in his own Party were logical, necessary, and intellectually coherent. In the harsher world of politics they were regarded as evidence of opportunism, lack of principle, and arrogance. Peel was certainly poor at cultivating people for whom he did not have much regard, another characteristic he had in common with Prince Albert, whose ‘playfulness and good humour’ that so attracted those who really knew him was strictly reserved for private occasions.

  The danger in this very close relationship between Prince and Premier was that Prince Albert’s popularity, although definitely improved, was not very great, while suspicions of his political influence were steadily growing. These attacks were particularly frequent in the summer and autumn of 1845, to Queen Victoria’s anger and distress, not much lessened by Leopold’s comment (October 10th) that ‘to hope to escape censure and calumny is next to impossible, but whatever is considered by the enemy as a fit subject for attack is better modified or avoided’. The wisdom of this advice was quickly to be demonstrated. Greville, whose position as Clerk to the Privy Council gave him an admirable vantage point, saw the signs. ‘Anything that can be done to enhance the dignity of the Prince is done’, he noted, also – as did many others – that the Queen had had ‘a chair of State set up for him in the House of Lords the same as her own, another throne, in fact. He is as much King as she can make him; all this, however, does not make him any more popular’. Neither Greville nor any one else apart from Victoria, Stockmar and Melbourne knew of her desire to appoint him King Consort, but the indications were clear.

  In these circumstances the Prince’s manifest admiration for Peel demonstrated his own political immaturity. His successes, one suspects, may have seriously misled him to over-confidence on his political judgement, and if Anson’s memoranda are accurate – and there is no reason to believe that they are not – he wholly underestimated the dank mists of jealousy, suspicion, and dislike that menaced him. When the Prince stayed with Peel at Drayton Manor in the autumn of 1843 he wrote that ‘the visit made the Premier very happy, and is calculated to strengthen his position’. Admittedly, Albert was flushed with excitement and pleasure after a visit to Birmingham that had caused Ministers considerable apprehension, and yet which had passed off very successfully. Nonetheless, this is a revealing, and dangerous, comment. Royal patronage of a Prime Minister was not what it used to be.

  Both, moreover, were becoming obsessed – and rightly so – by ‘the condition of England question’, which included that of Ireland, sinking rapidly towards unimagineable horrors. The Prince had read, and had been appalled by, the famous report on the employment of children in factories and mines, and had sought out its initiator, Lord Ashley, soon to become the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. ‘I have been horror stricken by the statements which you have brought before the country’, Prince Albert wrote; ‘. . . The nation must be with you, at all events I can assure you that the Queen is’. This was not true. The Queen was strongly opposed to Ashley�
�s Ten Hour Bill limiting the hours of workers in mills and factories, many of whom were children, which she considered harmful to British commercial interests. She remained a Melbourne Whig, her husband was the pragmatic liberal Conservative reformer. He urged further action on the slave trade to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen; he persuaded Ministers to pass special legislation to naturalise a German artist whom he wished to include in the patronage list of the Fine Arts Commission; his interest and involvement in European politics increased steadily, and Peel used him to convey British views on the Turkish status quo to the Tsar of Russia when he paid an official visit in the early summer of 1844. Having read Peel’s letters to the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin he wrote:

  . . . Your correspondence with Lord Heytesbury has very much interested me & much pleased me as proving the entire agree-ment & harmony of feeling existing between you & the steady purpose to adhere to a moderate liberal, equitable but firm course of policy. This is so rarely found that it is still more rarely recognised & therefore it will wait till it will, by its own weight, have penetrated through misconception & misrepresentation, but in the end you must be triumphant if you are left time to reap the fruits of your own work, which I hope will be the case for the Queen & Country’s sake.

  These enterprises, far from being evidence of what one of his biographers has called his ‘ripening sagacity in public affairs’ in fact demonstrated his increasing personal and political commitment to the Peel Administration.

  The State visit of Louis Philippe in October 1844 was successful, the King of France was lavish in his praises, but the event was not generally popular. Prince Albert’s two great European ambitions were the unification of the German States into one nation with a liberal constitution and institutions, and substantially improved relations between Britain and France. The phrase entente cordiale belongs to this, and not to a later, era, and figures often and prominently in the letters and memoranda of himself and the Queen. They had taken great trouble to ensure that the first State Visit of a French King to England would be as well-managed, warm, and successful as possible, but others did not share their ambitions. Suspicion and dislike of France and French designs were very deep in England, and Palmerston’s view of France as his country’s most dangerous and potentially hostile adversary was far closer to the popular judgement than that of Prince Albert.

  ‘Now that France becomes every day more over-reaching, more overbearing, more insulting, more hostile’, Palmerston was writing just before this visit, ‘even the quietest and most peaceful among us are beginning to look forward to a war with France as an event which no prudence on our part can long prevent, and for which we ought to lose no time in making ourselves fully prepared’.

  By this time, at the beginning of 1845, Victoria’s admiration for her husband was total. ‘Everywhere my dearest Angel receives the respect and honours I receive’, she wrote in January 1845, but when a critical Member of Parliament again raised – in a hostile manner – the question of whether he was to become King Consort she wrote to Peel that ‘The title of King is open assuredly to many difficulties, and would perhaps be of no real advantage to the Prince, but the Queen is positive that something must be done at once to place the Prince’s position on a constitutionally recognised footing, and to give him a title adequate to that position. How and when are difficult questions’.

  Stockmar warned him not to abandon ‘your firm, lofty, powerful, impregnable position to run after trifles. You have the substance; stick by it for the good of your wife and children, and do not suffer yourself to be seduced even by the wishes of affection into bartering substance for show’. Prince Albert entirely agreed that, as he wrote in reply, ‘it is power and not titles which are esteemed here’, and Peel concurred with him that ‘my [public] position is extremely good’.

  But, was it? He was, after all, only twenty-six. He intensely resented public criticism or mockery; his detailed and extensive Press cuttings, organised by Anson at his command, were perhaps too efficient and comprehensive for his peace of mind; and on one occasion after he had perused Punch and two broadsheets, The Satirist and The Age, he protested strongly to Aberdeen. A meticulous reader of newspapers, journals, and cheap broadsheets, which flourished mightily, he demonstrated his professionalism in one respect, but also his inexperience. To consider, as he genuinely did, that hostile comments in Germany on the English Royal Family were the result of lampoons in Punch, or that Peel’s difficulties were solely the result of vicious journalists and political place-seekers – described with some fervour and injustice by the Queen as ‘gentlemen who did nothing but hunt all day, drank Claret or Port Wine in the evening, & never studied or read about any of these questions’ – reveals not only an excessive sensitivity to criticism but a marked, and growing, partisanship.

  Few areas of public life escaped his eager attention or concern. He had, and expressed, strong views on the role of Bishops; they should ‘abstain completely’ from contemporary politics, but should give general support to ‘the Queen’s Government’. The Anglican Church should certainly support his own liberal attitudes to ‘questions like Negro Emancipation, education of the people, improvement of the health of towns, measures for the recreation of the poor, against cruelty to animals, for regulating factory labour, &c., &c.’, but, ‘while they should come forward whenever the interests of Humanity are at stake’ there must be recognised limits to such activities. A Bishop, he warned, should ‘never forget that he is a representative of the Church of the Land, the maintenance of which is as important to the country as that of its Constitution or its Throne’. Albert regarded himself, with some justification, as a liberal, but, like Peel, within severe limits. To Samuel Wilberforce, the new Bishop of Oxford, his message was plain:

  Always be conscious that the Church has duties to fulfil, that it does not exist for itself, but for the people, for the country. Let there be no calling for new rights, privileges, grants, &c . . .

  Then, in the context of 1845, a most revealing passage:

  . . . a Bishop ought to be a guardian of public morality, not, like the press, by tediously interfering with every man’s private affairs, speaking for applause, or trampling on those that are fallen, but by watching over the morality of the State in acts which expediency or hope for profit may tempt it to commit, as well in home and colonial as in foreign affairs.

  This was heavy stuff for a man of twenty-six. He now devoured work, in his increasingly important position. The Queen’s Ministers had no doubt of the importance and influence of the Prince, nor of his assiduity. In one year he read, annotated, and advised upon several thousand documents from the Foreign Office alone. He personally designed and developed a highly efficient filing system, with swift cross-references. All his correspondence of any importance was in his own hand, and he wrote copies of any of his own letters he regarded as significant. From Buckingham Palace, Windsor, and now Osborne, there came to Ministers a ceaseless flow of memoranda, comments, and advice usually in the name of the Queen, but whose true author was only too well known to the recipients. Most seriously of all, he had become, and was to remain, and was known to be, a ‘Peelite’.

  There are two ways of regarding all this earnest activity in the affairs of State. One is admiring, the other is more dubious. Certainly, the Queen needed assistance and advice, and the very heavy burdens of her official engagements were now augmented by the fact that she was the mother of four small children, while the sheer volume of the papers she had to read and the letters she had to write was very formidable. In these circumstances Prince Albert was the perfect Private Secretary and adviser, and the efficiency of their transaction of business was, in itself, quite remarkable, and commands the admiration of a twentieth century civil servant operating in the age of the typewriter, the telephone, and modern communications.

  All this is to be applauded. What was more dangerous was that he was still very young, a foreigner with only five years’ experi
ence of the politics of his adopted country, in effect responsible for the Queen’s political views and advice to her Ministers – advice that was always taken very seriously and was usually decisive. This was not accidental, nor was it the result of circumstances. Now that Prince Albert had achieved his position as the Queen’s principal political adviser he intended to use it – with caution, it is true, but very definitely to use it. He had become, by deliberate intent, deeply and personally involved in contemporary politics. Ministers and ex-Ministers knew it; Members of the House of Commons knew it; the newspapers knew it. It was this knowledge that resulted in the criticisms of him which he and Queen Victoria so strongly resented, and it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that he was intent upon the maximum of political influence with the minimum of criticism – to be in the fray, yet seemingly above it. These are dangerous objectives to attempt to combine simultaneously.

  By the autumn of 1845 Albert’s hero, friend, and virtual colleague, was entering a crisis of desperate proportions from which he was destined never to emerge.

  The cold and wet summer of 1845 ensured that the harvest, and particularly the grain harvest, would be poor. This was serious enough, but it was not to be compared with the potato disease which had originated in America in 1844, had carried to Europe, and in 1845 now spread catastrophically to England and to Ireland, where at least half the population of well over eight million37 depended upon the potato crop for its survival. The potato was crucial, as it enabled large amounts of food to be produced from the small plots of land which had become characteristic of Ireland; the 1841 census revealed that 45% of holdings were less than five acres, and the great majority was very considerably smaller. There was remarkably little hardship or starvation in a country where an acre and a half would provide a family of six with food for a year, where heat from peat was plentiful and cost nothing. But this very precarious balance between existence and starvation depended absolutely upon the potato, and all warnings of disaster were ignored, in spite of the grim lessons of previous, and recent years, when local failures had been calamitous. But nothing had happened, even in the very dark years of 1839, 1841, and 1844, to compare with the total disaster of 1845 when the ‘blight’ which was ravaging England first arrived in the fields around Dublin. The human nightmare of what became tragically immortalised as ‘The Great Hunger’ was to result in over a million deaths in Ireland, the massive depopulation of the country through emigration, and a scar that remains livid and unhealed to this day. In England, the political consequences were traumatic, and dominated the rest of Prince Albert’s life.