Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

• 1. Introduction

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  Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha never wore a crown, yet the clerk of the Privy Council, Charles Greville, once wrote of him: "He is King to all intents and purposes." Albert was the husband of Queen Victoria, and Greville's line captures a strange fact about his life. A prince from a small German duchy came to shape British government, finance, science and education, even though his role as consort gave him no formal power. How did a foreigner whom many Britons distrusted earn that reputation? What did he do with the influence he gathered? And what happened to the Queen, and to the monarchy she led, when he was gone?

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• 2. Coburg and Courtship

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  Schloss Rosenau, near Coburg, was the birthplace of Albert on the 26th of August 1819. He was the second son of Ernest III, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. His future wife, Victoria, had been born earlier that year with help from the same midwife, Charlotte von Siebold. Home life was unhappy. In 1824 the boys' mother was exiled from court, and she later married her lover, Alexander von Hanstein. She presumably never saw her sons again, and she died of cancer at the age of 30 in 1831.

  Albert and his elder brother, Ernest, stayed close through it all. A tutor named Christoph Florschütz taught them at home, and in Brussels Adolphe Quetelet was among their teachers. Albert then went to the University of Bonn, where he studied law, political economy, philosophy and the history of art. He also excelled at fencing and riding.

  An 1821 letter from his paternal grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, first recorded the idea of a match with Victoria. She called Albert "the pendant to the pretty cousin". By 1836 their ambitious uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians since 1831, was pushing the plan too. In May of that year he arranged for the Coburg duke and his two sons to visit Victoria's mother. King William IV disapproved of any Coburg match and favoured Prince Alexander, second son of the Prince of Orange. Victoria judged Albert "extremely handsome" and called Alexander "very plain".

  Victoria came to the throne on the 20th of June 1837, aged 18, and she resisted attempts to hurry her into marriage. Albert returned to Britain with Ernest in October 1839, and it was the Queen who proposed, on the 15th of October. She told the Privy Council of her intention on the 23rd of November. The couple married on the 10th of February 1840 at the Chapel Royal, St James's Palace. Just before the wedding, an Act of Parliament naturalised Albert, and an Order in Council granted him the style of Royal Highness.

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• 3. Husband, Not Master

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  Parliament valued Albert at £30,000 a year, well below the £50,000 granted to earlier consorts. Lord Melbourne, who led a minority government, advised Victoria against the title King Consort. Lawmakers also refused Albert a British peerage, partly from anti-German feeling and a wish to keep him out of politics. His Lutheran faith worried some, and so did his Roman Catholic relatives. Albert shrugged off the peerage, writing: "It would almost be a step downwards, for as a Duke of Saxony, I feel myself much higher than a Duke of York or Kent." For seventeen years he was styled simply HRH Prince Albert. On the 25th of June 1857 Victoria granted him the title Prince Consort, so that foreign courts would not treat him as a junior member of the house of Saxe-Coburg.

  Inside the palace, the obstacle was a woman. Baroness Lehzen, Victoria's former governess, ran the royal household, and Albert wrote: "I am very happy and contented; but the difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband, not the master in the house." He called her the "House Dragon". Within two months of the wedding Victoria was pregnant, and their first child, also named Victoria, was born in November 1840. Eight more children followed over seventeen years, and all nine lived to adulthood, which was remarkable for the era. The biographer Hermione Hobhouse credited Albert's "enlightened influence" over the nursery. In early 1841 he took the nursery out of Lehzen's control, and in September 1842 she left Britain for good.

  Danger arrived in June 1840, when Edward Oxford fired at the royal carriage while Victoria was pregnant. Oxford was later judged insane, and neither of them was hurt. Newspapers praised Albert for his courage and coolness. In August, Parliament passed the Regency Act 1840, naming him regent should Victoria die before their child came of age. Shots were fired at the couple again on both the 29th and the 30th of May 1842. The culprit, John Francis, was condemned to death and later reprieved.

  Sir Robert Peel became prime minister after the 1841 general election, and Albert's authority behind the throne became plain. He could read all the Queen's papers, he drafted her letters, and he sat in when she met her ministers. He would even see ministers alone when she was absent. In 1846 Lord George Bentinck rebuked him for attending the Corn Laws debate in the House of Commons, where his presence signalled quiet support for Peel.

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• 4. Homes, Art, and Music

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  By 1844 Albert had trimmed the royal finances enough to buy Osborne House on the Isle of Wight as a private home for the growing family. He and the builder Thomas Cubitt designed an Italianate villa, and Albert laid out the grounds himself. At Windsor he ran a model farm, Shaw Farm, which his biographers admired. Under his stewardship the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, the hereditary property of the Prince of Wales, rose steadily.

  A rainy holiday at Loch Laggan in 1847 led to Balmoral. The royal doctor, Sir James Clark, reported that his own son had enjoyed dry, sunny days farther east at Balmoral Castle. Its tenant, Sir Robert Gordon, died suddenly in early October, and Albert began talks with the owner, the Earl Fife. He leased the castle in May 1848 without having seen it. The family first stayed there in September 1848 and came to relish the privacy. In 1852 an eccentric miser, John Camden Neild, left Victoria an unexpected legacy, and Albert used it to buy the freehold.

  After the 1841 election, Peel made Albert chairman of the royal commission overseeing the redecoration of the rebuilt Palace of Westminster, which had burned down seven years before. The work moved slowly. The architect, Charles Barry, took many decisions out of the commissioners' hands by treating ornate furnishings as part of the architecture. Albert had more success as a private collector. He bought early German and Italian paintings, among them Lucas Cranach the Elder's Apollo and Diana and Fra Angelico's St Peter Martyr, along with works by Franz Xaver Winterhalter and Edwin Landseer. Ludwig Gruner of Dresden helped him find pictures of the highest quality.

  The children's governess, Lady Lyttelton, thought Albert unusually kind and patient, and she described him joining family games with enthusiasm. His plans for the Prince of Wales were harder. At the age of seven the boy faced six hours of lessons a day, including an hour each of German and French. When he failed, Albert caned him, a punishment not thought unduly harsh at the time. The biographer Philip Magnus wrote that Albert tried to treat his children as equals and that they sensed he loved them and needed their company.

  Music was Albert's private pleasure. For his wedding he composed a duet, Die Liebe hat uns nun vereint, meaning "Love has now united us". Felix Mendelssohn heard him play the Buckingham Palace organ and said it would have done credit to any professional. After lessons with George Elvey, the organist at St George's Chapel, Windsor, Albert wrote settings of the Te Deum and Jubilate and an anthem, Out of the Deep. He also composed a cantata, L'Invocazione all'armonia, and a Melody for the Violin, which Yehudi Menuhin later called "pleasant music without presumption".

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• 5. Reform and Exhibition

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  Soon after the wedding, Albert became President of the Society for the Extinction of Slavery, at a time when slavery was still lawful in most parts of the world beyond the British Empire. Education drew even more of his energy. In 1847 he won the chancellorship of the University of Cambridge after a close contest with the Earl of Powis. He used the post to push through a broader curriculum, adding modern history and the natural sciences to the traditional mathematics and classics.

  In an 1848 speech to the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Labouring Classes, which he headed, Albert voiced "sympathy and interest for that class of our community who have most of the toil and fewest of the enjoyments of this world". He backed moves to raise working ages, which set him apart from landowners who approved of child labour. He also sympathised with Jewish emancipation, and his influence was sought to secure the right of Jews to sit in parliament. In 1860 he wrote to the Prince Regent of Prussia that it was "high time" Emperor Franz Joseph I did justice to Protestants, Hungarians and Jews.

  Science brought him into conflict with the clergy. Albert delivered a memorable address as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Aberdeen in 1859. After Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Albert and Palmerston recommended a knighthood for him. The Bishop of Oxford opposed the idea, and it failed.

  Albert's greatest public triumph grew from the Society of Arts, which he had led as president since 1843. As president of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, he fought for every stage of the project. In the House of Lords, Lord Brougham thundered against holding it in Hyde Park. Opponents predicted that foreign rogues and revolutionists would overrun England and destroy the people's faith. Albert thought such talk absurd and quietly carried on. Victoria opened the exhibition on the 1st of May 1851 in a specially built glass hall called the Crystal Palace.

  It was a colossal success, with a surplus of £180,000. That money bought land in South Kensington for educational and cultural institutions, among them the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, Imperial College London, the Royal Albert Hall and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Sceptics nicknamed the whole district "Albertopolis".

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• 6. Palmerston and War

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  Revolutions spread across Europe in 1848, and Victoria and Albert blamed part of the unrest on the independent foreign policy of Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston. Albert feared for relatives, several of whom were deposed by revolutionaries. The couple withdrew to the relative safety of Osborne, where they spent time while Victoria was expecting their daughter Louise. No effective revolutionary action followed in England.

  The death of the Duke of Wellington in 1852 left offices vacant, and Albert took several, including the mastership of Trinity House and the colonelcy of the Grenadier Guards. He used the opening to campaign for long-overdue army reform. When Russia and the Ottoman empire drifted toward conflict, Albert felt the army was unready and urged a diplomatic solution. Palmerston wanted to block further Russian expansion. He was manoeuvred out of the cabinet in December 1853, but around the same time a Russian fleet attacked the Ottoman fleet at anchor at Sinop.

  London newspapers called Sinop a criminal massacre. Palmerston's popularity surged as Albert's fell, and within two weeks Palmerston was back in office. As public outrage grew, false rumours spread that Albert had been arrested for treason and locked in the Tower of London.

  By March 1854 Britain and Russia were at war in the Crimea. Albert devised a plan to besiege Sevastopol while starving Russia economically, and it became the Allied strategy once the Tsar chose a purely defensive war. British optimism faded as the press reported ill-equipped troops led by aged generals using out-of-date tactics. Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen resigned, and Palmerston replaced him. The March 1856 Treaty of Paris ended the war.

  During the fighting, Albert arranged the marriage of his fourteen-year-old daughter Victoria to Prince Frederick William of Prussia. He delayed the wedding until she was seventeen, hoping the couple would liberalise a very conservative Prussian state. She married at the beginning of 1858, and Albert felt her departure keenly.

  A last crisis came in November 1861, when Union forces removed Confederate envoys from the British ship RMS Trent during the American Civil War. The British government prepared an ultimatum and readied troops. Albert, though gravely ill, revised the demands in a few hours so that the Lincoln administration could release the envoys and apologise without losing face. The key idea came from a suggestion in The Times: let Washington deny it had authorised the seizure and apologise for the captain's mistake.

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• 7. Illness and Mourning

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  In August 1859 Albert fell seriously ill with stomach cramps. The biographer Robert Rhodes James describes him as having lost "the will to live". In October 1860, driving alone near Coburg in a carriage drawn by four horses, he found the team bolting toward a wagon waiting at a railway crossing. Albert jumped clear. One horse was killed, and he suffered only cuts and bruises, but he told his brother and eldest daughter that he sensed his time had come.

  The Duchess of Kent, Victoria's mother, died in March 1861, and Albert took on most of the Queen's duties despite his stomach trouble. The last public event he led was the opening of the Royal Horticultural Gardens on the 5th of June 1861. In August the couple visited the Curragh Camp in Ireland, where fellow officers introduced the Prince of Wales to an Irish actress, Nellie Clifden. In early November, Albert's young cousins King Pedro V of Portugal and his brother Ferdinand died of typhoid fever within five days of each other. Then came gossip about the Prince of Wales in gentlemen's clubs and the foreign press. The royal parents feared blackmail, scandal or pregnancy, and on the 25th of November Albert travelled to Cambridge to confront his son.

  On the 9th of December the physician William Jenner diagnosed typhoid fever. Albert died at 10:50 pm on the 14th of December 1861 in the Blue Room at Windsor Castle, with the Queen and five of their nine children present. He was 42. Modern writers note that two years of persistent stomach pain may point instead to a chronic condition such as Crohn's disease, kidney failure or abdominal cancer.

  His funeral took place on the 23rd of December at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, and his body was first placed in the Royal Vault. A year later it moved to the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore, which stayed unfinished until 1871. The sarcophagus, meant for both Albert and Victoria, was carved from the largest block of granite ever quarried in Britain.

  The public's tepid feelings for Albert gave way to sympathy for the widow. Victoria never recovered, and she wore black for the rest of her life. In all of Albert's houses his rooms were kept as he left them, with hot water brought each morning and fresh linen and towels laid out daily.

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• 8. Legacy

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  Before her marriage, Victoria had been a partisan of the Whigs. Early in her reign she thwarted Sir Robert Peel's attempt to form a Tory government by refusing to change her ladies-in-waiting. Albert is credited with persuading her toward the principle that the royal family should stay above politics. After his death, her long seclusion eroded his effort to remake the monarchy as a national institution that set a moral example.

  Albert had asked that no effigies of him be raised, but monuments appeared across Britain and the Empire. The most notable are the Royal Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial in London. There were so many that Charles Dickens told a friend he was looking for an "inaccessible cave" to escape them. In Hampshire, Albert had helped establish Aldershot as a garrison town and training base. A wooden Royal Pavilion was built there for his visits, and the Prince Consort's Library, which he endowed, still exists.

  Theodore Martin's five-volume biography was supervised by Victoria herself, so it leans toward praise, though it remains accurate and exhaustive. Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria, published in 1921, was more critical. Later biographers Hector Bolitho and Roger Fulford, who could read Victoria's journal and letters, discredited parts of it. Scholars dismiss the popular claim that Albert introduced Christmas trees to Britain. The 2009 film The Young Victoria, with Rupert Friend as Albert, invents a moment in which he is struck by a bullet in the 1840 shooting. That never happened.

  Albert's 42 grandchildren included four reigning monarchs: George V of the United Kingdom, Wilhelm II of Germany, Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, and Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Five more married monarchs, among them Empress Alexandra of Russia and Queen Marie of Romania. On the day Victoria died in 1901, their eldest son became Edward VII, the first British monarch of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a name taken from Albert's own ducal house.

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