Prince Albert

by Robert Rhodes James

  These forecasts of doom, added to the warnings of the arrival of what Brougham called ‘Socialists and men of the Red Colour’, so alarmed the King of Prussia that he was anxious that his son and heir and his wife should not attend. To these fears, Albert replied robustly:

  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 prophesied 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.

  In spite – or, more probably, because – of this engagingly sardonic account of the perils, the King gave his permission.

  Then, there was the fear that Roman Catholics would exploit the occasion, neatly countered by Prince Albert who pointed out that the Belgians had been prevented from sending a wax Pope and twelve Cardinals (including Wiseman) for their stand. The Archbishop of Dublin sent plans for a Universal Coinage, and the Liverpool Peace Society wished to be involved; both were courteously rejected.

  The great building rose, with remarkably few difficulties, and was completed by the end of March 1851, by which time it was the topic of widespread praise and admiration, Colonel Sibthorp and the angry professionals had lost their audience. But it had been an alarmingly adventitious salvation. The exhibits – apart from the Koh-i-Noor diamond – have virtually all been forgotten today; the Crystal Palace has not.

  The Queen wrote in her Journal on February 18th 1851:

  After breakfast we drove with the 5 children to look at the Crystal Palace, which was not finished when we last went, and really now is one of the wonders of the world, which we English may indeed be proud of . . . The galleries are finished, and from the top of them the effect is quite wonderful. The sun shining in through the transept gave a fairy-like appearance. The building is so light and graceful, in spite of its immense size. Many of the exhibits have arrived. We were again cheered loudly by the 2,000 workmen as we came away. It made me feel proud and happy.

  Paxton had provided exactly what Prince Albert wanted – a superlative mixture of colour, modern technology, glamour, grace, and drama. The exhibits provided their own problems. They were divided into six main parts – raw materials, machinery, textiles, metallic vitreous and ceramic manufactures, miscellaneous, and Fine Arts – with thirty classes within these main categories, each encompassing a dizzying range of products. The tests for the juries awarding prizes had to be carefully specified, with the overriding consideration ‘to reward excellence in whatever form it is presented’. The selection, transportation and arrangement of over 100,000 exhibits constituted a major logistical problem. Indeed, the establishment of the Great Exhibition from Cole’s discussion with Albert in June 1849 to its realisation on May 1st 1851 was the story of the surmounting of problems that most sensible people considered insurmountable. There were problems with the British and Foreign Bible Society, which applied late; there was The Great Wig Dispute, which particularly amused the Queen, when a wigmaker who had wanted to be in Fine Arts found himself, to his fury, in Animal Products; there were complaints about the expensive refreshments, and what one visitor described as ‘the worst and smallest sandwiches I ever tasted’; another wrote to the Morning Chronicle about the absence of ale, and another about the fact that ‘the young females at the refreshment tables . . . would be greatly improved by a moderate use of soap’; there was much controversy over a statue of Bacchante in the French Section, ‘rolling in a state of drunken excitement on a bed of vine leaves and grapes’, which the jury considered evidence that the sculptor (Clesinger) had ‘allowed his imagination to be perverted and degraded to the service of a low sensuality’, but accepted and, on artistic grounds alone, praised. The annals of the Great Exhibition are not devoid of interest.

  The result was magnificent, and enthralling. It was a wonderful achievement, but when Cobden said that no one ‘has done one half the labours’ as Prince Albert, it was only too true. For his part, the Prince praised others, especially Cole: ‘You have been one of the few who originated the design, became its exponent to the public, and fought its battles in adversity, and belong now to those who share in its triumphs’, he wrote to his friend and collaborator. Cole was later to write of Prince Albert as ‘of pre-eminent wisdom, of philosophic mind, sagacity, with power of generalship’.

  It would be possible, reading Albert’s papers on the Exhibition, to take the view that he was over-obsessed with details, but the fact was that the details, however tedious, were crucial if the great concept itself was to succeed. That it did succeed owed everything to his leadership and application. At the age of thirty-two he had created the greatest popular spectacle and occasion in the history of the modern Royal Family. But the cost, in terms of personal anguish, concentration, hours of work, strain, and patience in a normally impatient personality was very considerable. Also, this immense burden had to be borne in a series of major political crises. ‘All day some question or other or some difficulty’, Queen Victoria wrote in her Journal, ‘all of which my beloved takes with the greatest quiet and good temper’. She wrote to Stockmar on January 25th 1851 that ‘The Prince’s sleep is again as bad as ever, and he looks very ill of an evening’. But his calmness was only superficial. To ‘Grandmother Coburg’ he wrote on April 15th – two weeks before the opening:

  Just at present I am more dead than alive from overwork. The opponents of the Exhibition work with might and main to throw all the old women into panic and drive myself crazy. The strangers, they give out, are certain to commence a thorough revolution here, to murder Victoria and myself, and to proclaim the Red Republic in England; the plague is certain to ensue from the confluence of such vast multitudes, and to swallow up those whom the increased price of everything has not already swept away. For all this I am to be responsible, and against all this I have to make efficient provision’.

  This was not a patient, or even whimsical, letter, but a bitter one. There were to be more problems. On April 29th, two days before the official opening, he recorded: ‘Terrible difficulties with the arrangements for the opening’.

  These ‘terrible difficulties’ had significant political consequences. The Commissioners, led by Prince Albert, had decided that the Doyen of the Diplomatic Corps should present a joint congratulatory statement on behalf of them all, which the Doyen had been pleased to arrange. All seemed settled, but then the Russian Ambassador, Baron Brunnow, claimed that this was highly improper, and that no individual had the right to speak for the representatives of other nations, and canvassed successfully for support among his colleagues. Prince Albert was intensely angry at this apparent snub to him, as President of the Commission, and to the Queen of England. Russell agreed with him that ‘they are making great fools of themselves’ (Albert to Russell, April 24th) and the Prime Minister blamed Lord Granville for mishandling the matter.

  The real and serious problem was that it was Palmerston, not Granville, who was responsible, as he supported Brunnow. ‘It appeared to me to be inconvenient and objectionable to invest the Foreign Ministers with a Corporate Character’, Palmerston breezily wrote to Russell on the 24th; he recommended that the suggestion ‘should be dropped’, and that the Diplomatic Corps should be invited to attend the opening ‘as Spectators and not as Actors’. To make matters even worse, so far as his relations with Prince Albert were concerned, both he and Granville then left London, ‘& one so pressed for time’, as Albert wrote on the 26th. He wrote with some anger to Russell: />
  . . . Ld Palmerston is quite right in calling the proceeding unusual & unprecedented in this Country, but so is the occasion for it. It is not a purely English ceremony for an English object, but an international one, in which all Nations have taken an active Part: half the Building is in charge of foreign Authorities, half the Collection the property of foreign Countries, half the Juries are appointed by foreign Govts who have also defrayed the expenses of the foreign Part of the Exhibition. It would have been wrong, in my opinion, not to have given the Representatives of these foreign Nations the opportunity of taking an active part also in the opening Ceremony.

  Parts of this letter have been quoted in previous accounts50; what has not been made clear is that it was written within five days of the opening.

  Palmerston, although warned by Russell of the Prince’s strong feelings, wrote to him somewhat casually on April 26th to say that he entirely agreed with Brunnow, and enclosed his letter, to which the Prince replied with tartness that ‘Baron Brunnow’s letter is entirely arguing upon the principles of the Etiquette of the English Court, which is not in the Russian Minister’s keeping & therefore cannot properly form a ground of objection on his part’. But he unhappily accepted that the proposal must be definitely dropped, and the Diplomatic Corps be given a decorative and mute role in the proceedings. The episode did nothing to improve his already low opinion of Palmerston, who may have been technically in the right but who had dealt with the matter not only incompetently and rudely but with no apparent recognition that it mattered so much to the Queen and her husband. But this was not the first example of Palmerston’s lack of interest in the project. On July 2nd 1850 Albert had written to Russell that ‘I hope you will ask Ld Palmerston to say a few words in debate on the communications with Foreign Governments, & the disappointment they would justly feel at the overthrow of the Exhibition at the 11th hour’, but Palmerston had not done so. The fiasco of the Corps Diplomatique marked another important point in the deterioration of Prince Albert’s opinion of the Foreign Secretary, especially as it did not involve sincere differences of opinion on politics or the conduct of foreign policy, but on a matter of deep personal importance to himself and the Queen. Subsequent letters from Palmerston of congratulation when the Exhibition was an obvious success did nothing to improve matters.

  Of equal – if not greater – importance was that Queen Victoria was deeply mortified, as her personal appeal to the Corps – with the barbed comment that ‘Her Majesty is not able to compel the Diplomatic Corps to accept a courtesy’ – was rejected by Brunnow and not supported by Palmerston. The biographer and historian, confronted with new and largely unpublished material, must always be cautious about its significance, simply because it is new. But there is no question in my judgement that this was an important episode in the relations between Prince Albert and Palmerston.

  Meanwhile, other problems haunted the final preparations. The Austrians, Prussians, French and Russians became frantic about possible assassinations, and there were many meetings about security; then, only a week before the opening Russell wrote to Albert expressing alarm that the firing of celebratory guns in Hyde Park might shatter some of the windows and create panic, and they had to be hurriedly moved to St. James’s Park; the unexpected problem of the sparrows in the great elms was, allegedly, magnificently resolved by Wellington’s simple remedy, ‘Sparrowhawks, Ma’am’, but then tremendous uproar greeted the announcement that the Queen would open the Exhibition in private, with only officials and specially invited guests present.

  The tumult in the newspapers – by now almost wholly ardent supporters of the Palace and the Exhibition – was one thing. What impressed the Prince was the formidable number of letters he received from people he respected – Cole, Lyon Playfair, and Granville among them – urging a change of policy. The Prime Minister’s concern, understandably, was the security of the Queen and of the increasingly agitated foreign dignitaries, who were very much in favour of as much privacy as possible, but on April 19th he recommended to Prince Albert that only the possessors of season tickets to the Exhibition, which had been on sale for some time at three guineas for men and two guineas for women, and which had had a limited popularity, would be admitted; the result was a spectacular demand for the tickets, whose sale soared in ten days to over 25,000. The nervous foreigners could only reflect – as they glumly did – on the fact that their security fears had not been allayed at all, but the decision had been made.

  Up to the opening day there were many and complex problems to be resolved, bruised feelings to be coped with, personality clashes to be dealt with; by the end of April Prince Albert was intellectually and physically totally exhausted, ‘fagged out’ in Queen Victoria’s words. The actual opening itself on May 1st, which was of unrestrained joy to almost everyone else, was to him the culmination of months of worry, immense hard work, nervous strain, and apprehension. While everyone was ecstatic, his tired comment to Cole was simply, ‘Quite satisfactory’. It was only later that he could relax, as he realised that it had been, after all, a triumph.

  But although the public was enthralled, and was to flock to the Palace in numbers – over six million – that far exceeded expectations and left the Commissioners with a healthy profit of £186,000 even after reducing the entrance prices, Lady Lyttelton was writing that ‘I believe it is quite universally sneered at and abominated by the beau monde, and will only increase the contempt for the Prince among all fine folk. But so would anything he does’. Wellington was sceptical of its value, although not its popular success, and Brougham was writing with some savagery that ‘Prince Albert will be hated as much as ever prince was for this Exposition and the consequent invasion of the Park. A man in his very peculiar position should have the sense to know that repose and inaction is his only security against ridicule. But he must needs be disliked as well as laughed at’.

  But, once again, the beau monde was proved wrong.

  The opening, on May 1st, was described by Queen Victoria as ‘one of the greatest and most glorious days of our lives, with which to my pride and joy the name of my dearly beloved Albert is for ever associated!’ She described it to Lady Lyttelton as ‘that great & glorious 1st of May – the proudest & happiest day of, as you truly call it, my “happy life” ’. It was a day of triumph and sunshine, enormous and enthusiastic crowds, the first appearance of Royalty on Albert’s balcony at Buckingham Palace, the evident discomfiture of the Diplomatic Corps, described with satisfaction by the Doyen as ‘mute as fish [and] . . . thoroughly ashamed of what they had done’, and the odd appearance at the opening ceremony of a dignified Chinese, who made a very public and much-noticed obeisance to the Queen, but turned out to have no official status at all. According to Cole, ‘he was a sea captain who brought his junk into the Thames for exhibition, and got a great deal of money’.

  Two days later, with the Exhibition drawing over 60,000 visitors a day, Albert was the guest of honour at the Royal Academy dinner, where he received an ovation that greatly moved him, and gave him the opportunity of praising its new President, Eastlake, and denouncing excessive criticism of artists. On June 17th he undertook a more difficult assignment when he spoke at the 150th anniversary of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and was able to move carefully across the current commotions concerning Tractarianism and anti-Papism. At the beginning of July he attended the meeting of the British Association at Ipswich, where he was much acclaimed, and then back to the work of the Exhibition Commissioners, which could now look with satisfaction, and some surprise, at the great commercial success they had already achieved. The City of London then gave the Queen and Prince a triumphal dinner at the Guildhall, and Queen Victoria recorded to Russell ‘how enthusiastically we were received by an almost fearful mass of people in the streets; the greatest order prevailed, and the greatest and most gratifying enthusiasm’, and Albert spoke at the Royal Agricultural Society at Windsor when he applauded increased mec
hanisation – which had been one of the principal features of the Exhibition, which he and Victoria had visited repeatedly. ‘We go out of town tomorrow’, she wrote to Stockmar on July 19th, ‘and, though it is a great relief to us, still it pains me that this brilliant, and for ever memorable season should be past’.

  The Prince was invited by the French Government to a special celebration in Paris, but refused. He reacted strongly against a proposal to raise a statue to him to commemorate the Exhibition, and froze at its outset a well-intentioned attempt for a national subscription, limited to one guinea each donor, in his honour. The problem of what to do with the Crystal Palace and some of its exhibits had to be dealt with, and how the unexpected surplus should be used. At the Prince’s insistence, the latter was used to begin his ambition of a huge scientific and technological complex in South Kensington by the Commissioners acquiring the site. His desire was that ‘the Great Exhibition of 1851 should not become a transitory event but that its objects would be perpetuated.’