Albert, prince consort

Albert, prince consort (1819–61). Albert was the second son of Ernest, duke of Saxe‐Coburg, and Louise, daughter of Duke Augustus of Saxe‐Coburg‐Altenburg. His parents were divorced in 1826. He was a shy and delicate child but exceptionally diligent and serious‐minded. The possibility of a match with his cousin Queen Victoria was fostered by their uncle Leopold, king of the Belgians, but they did not meet until 1836 when they were both 17 years old. Victoria then found him ‘extremely handsome’. When they met again at Windsor three years later Victoria fell instantly in love and Albert soon responded. Five days after their meeting she proposed to him and they were married on 10 February 1840.

If Albert was unexpectedly swept off his feet by Victoria's ardour, he was less enthusiastic about her country, nor did her subjects take to him. He was not thought important enough to marry the queen of England, and the facts that he was German, Victoria's first cousin, lacked wealth and position, and was hardly known in England all counted against him. He was variously (and wrongly) supposed to be a ‘Coburg adventurer on the make’, a political radical, a papist, and (even worse because accurately) an intellectual. Parliament reduced the allowance that was proposed for him, and refused to grant him precedence next to the queen. Precedence was nevertheless conferred on him by letters patent, but he received no title and was not officially designated prince consort until 1857.

Victoria adored her husband but was reluctant to admit him to share in her political duties. He did however guide his wife towards political neutrality, weaning her from her previous Whig partisanship and reconciling her after 1841 to Peel. After 1842 he acted as Victoria's informal counsellor, private secretary, and sole confidant. In many ways he was a natural bureaucrat—efficient, painstaking, and absorbed by detail. He was happy to become, on Peel's suggestion, chairman of the Fine Arts Royal Commission and he threw himself energetically into his favourite project to make South Kensington a centre for the arts and for education. His attempt to promote the causes of social improvement, science and technology, and the public patronage of the arts and sciences culminated in the organization of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Nor was he inactive in other public fields. He attempted to guide British foreign policy in peaceful directions and tried to insist that Palmerston should submit his policies and dispatches to the queen. Palmerston's refusal led to his dismissal from the Foreign Office in 1851. Nevertheless, Albert was unable to avert the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 and Palmerston's return as prime minister in 1855. Almost his last act on his death‐bed in 1861 was to tone down an aggressive dispatch to Washington on the Trent affair which probably averted war with the USA.

Perhaps Albert's most lasting contribution to his adopted country was the example he set, with Victoria, of a respect-able and devout private life. They produced nine children, to whom Albert was a loving and devoted though heavy‐handed father. His relations with his eldest son, the future King Edward VII, suffered from ‘Bertie's’ resistance to the ambitious system of education which his father devised and supervised. The pressure placed on the prince of Wales resulted in his alienation from his parents and increased the anxieties from which Albert increasingly suffered. His habits of overwork and his weakened physical constitution resulted in an inability, and perhaps a lack of will, to resist attacks of ill‐health and he died of typhoid fever on 14 December 1861 at the age of 42.