Albert
Jules stewArt
I
n 1848, angry mobs took to the streets o Paris, Berlin,Prague, Budapest and Vienna, in a widespread uprisingthat became known as Europe’s Year o Revolution. Many thousands were killed in the clashes, and many more sueredtorture in police dungeons. In May o that year, Prince Albert wrote rom the serenity o London’s Buckingham Palace to hismentor in Germany, Christian Friedrich Stockmar, ‘All is well with us, and the throne has never stood higher in England than atthis moment.’
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Queen Victoria’s young German husband, who was threemonths short o his thirtieth birthday, was too modest a man totake credit or having restored the British monarchy’s esteem aterdecades o discreditable Hanoverian rule. By then the Princehad already assumed the role o monarch without a crown. Theburden he was obliged to shoulder as intermediary betweenthe Government and the Crown pushed him to the brink o exhaustion: ully 28,000 dispatches concerning the uprisings weresent out or received at the Foreign Oce in that year, and as thePrime Minister, Lord John Russell stated in a letter to Albert,‘These dispatches…Lord Palmerston must recollect, come to youand the Queen, as well as to himsel.’
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Had Albert not appeared
Introduction
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albert
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on the scene when he did, it is more than likely that the Crown would have ound itsel besieged by the same crowds that hadousted the Orleans monarchy across the Channel.It is said that behind every great man there stands a woman:in the case o Albert and Victoria, the roles were reversed. Trueenough, had the Queen o England not been there to providethe symbol o greatness, Albert’s genius would surely have withered into obscurity, living out his days as a collector o ne art and accomplished organist in his native Coburg, whosedukedom by right o primogeniture went to his elder brotherErnest. But Albert’s uncle, King Leopold I o the Belgians, working in league with the astute Baron Stockmar, had in 1840successully engineered the marriage o their protégé to his rstcousin, Victoria.It was by no means a case o greatness comortably allinginto the lap o a little-known German prince rom a minor ducalseat o the German Conederation. Albert ought an uphill battleevery step o the way to make himsel acceptable to a mistrustul, xenophobic British establishment and, more importantly, to theBritish people.Albert ell in love with Britain, its constitution, to which hedevoted months o diligent study, the wild Scottish Highlands, where he stalked stag and revelled in the invigorating mountainair, the grandeur o an empire which at its height held sway over a quarter o the world’s land mass and ruled more than 450million people, and o course his amily, which grew to numbernine children by the time o the Prince’s death.Albert was awed by the magnicence o imperial Britain, andhe was equally appalled by the squalid horrors o its actories, thedestitution o workers who slaved in those ‘dark satanic mills’,
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Albert: A Life
Read the introduction to Julesa Stewart's new biography of one of Britain's most influenbtial Victorians: Prince Albert.
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