Prince Consort consort of Victoria Queen of Great Britain - Prince Albert: the man who saved the monarchy

Prince Albert

Also by A. N. Wilson

FICTION

The Sweets of Pimlico

Unguarded Hours

Kindly Light

The Healing Art

Who Was Oswald Fish?

Wise Virgin

Scandal: Or Priscillas Kindness

Gentlemen in England

Love Unknown

Stray

The Vicar of Sorrows

Dream Children

My Name Is Legion

A Jealous Ghost

Winnie and Wolf

The Potters Hand

Resolution

Aftershocks

THE LAMPITT CHRONICLES

Incline Our Hearts

A Bottle in the Smoke

Daughters of Albion

Hearing Voices

A Watch in the Night

NON-FICTION

The Laird of Abbotsford

A Life of John Milton

Hilaire Belloc

How Can We Know?

Tolstoy

Penfriends from Porlock

Eminent Victorians

C. S. Lewis

Against Religion

Jesus

The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor

Paul

Gods Funeral

The Victorians

Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her

London: A Short History

After the Victorians

Betjeman: A Life

Our Times

Dante in Love

The Elizabethans

Hitler

Victoria

The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible

The Queen

Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright A. N. Wilson, 2019

The moral right of A. N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Frontispiece: Queen Victorias etching of Prince Albert, after Sir George
Hayters The Marriage of Queen Victoria, 1840. Courtesy of Royal
Collection Trust/ Her Majesty the Queen Eliabeth 2019.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders.
The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78239 831 8

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 832 5

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

2627 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For
Matthew
and
Rebecca

Here am I, said Pancks, pursuing his argument with the weekly tenant. What else do you think I am made for? Nothing. Rattle me out of bed early, set me going, give me as short a time as you like to bolt my meals in, and keep me at it. Keep me always at it, and Ill keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country.

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

[Do you deny it is an honourable thing to be a king?]

Homer, Odyssey, Book 1, lines 3912

Translation by Emily Wilson

Victorias etching of Albert, after Hayters The Marriage of Queen Victoria, 1840.

G RATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT IS owing to Her Majesty the Queen, for graciously giving her consent for this biography to be written, and for allowing me full access to all the relevant material in the Royal Archives at Windsor. She let it be known that she thought a biography of Prince Albert long overdue.

When I was halfway through my task, good fortune allowed me to encounter HRH the Duke of Edinburgh. He asked what I was writing. When he heard, he expressed the view, with characteristic forcefulness, that the world did not need yet another book about Prince Albert. I had the temerity to reply that there had not, as it happened, been many, or indeed any, full biographies, since that of Sir Theodore Martin in the nineteenth century. He wandered off to speak to someone else, but then he returned. There is one good aspect, he said. Prince Albert had a very short life, so you can write a very short book.

I hope that His Royal Highness will not consider the finished result unduly prolix. In the course of its composition, Oliver Urquhart Irvine, the Royal Librarian and Archivist, could not have been more helpful, and the entire team in the Round Tower made each visit a pleasure, not least the austere, but jolly, lunch breaks. Julie Crocker has saved me from many howlers. Oliver Walton, a brilliant Germanist and expert on all Coburgian matters, was at hand to advise and help, especially when a letter in the old script seemed illegible. Bill Stockting had much good advice, and the entire team, of regulars and interns, with their unshowy willingness to share knowledge, made visits to the Royal Archives the high point of any month. In the Prints and Drawings Collection, I am especially grateful to Kate Heard and to Carly Collier for discussing Prince Alberts aesthetic, for making material available and for giving useful advice about the illustrations for this book. Helen Trompeteler of the Historic Photographs, Royal Collection Trust, and Leah Johnston, Archive Cataloguer at The Royal Household, were also very helpful.

I owe a great debt to Philip Mould for allowing me to use the superb watercolour by Alfred Chalon as the jacket of this book. This picture has subsequently been acquired by Historic Royal Palaces.

Richard Edgcumbe, Senior Curator in the Metalwork Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, made time to show me the sapphire and diamond coronet designed by Prince Albert and lately acquired by the museum.

Much of the primary material is in what Queen Victoria called the dear German language, and so I am especially grateful to my late mother, Jean, a good Germanist, who urged me in her latter years to start learning it, and to Ute Ormerod who has patiently taught me each week for many years.

I have written this biography at the prompting of my publisher Will Atkinson, who has been the books friend and editor. Thanks, too, for James Nightingales editorial help, and to Tamsin Shelton who has been, as with previous books, a punctilious copy editor. Clare Alexander was a kindly and judicious agent.

I could not have written this book without the friendship and help of Angelika Tasler, who escorted me from archive to archive in Germany, and who took the time to dictate many of the more illegible manuscripts. Our happy time together in Coburg and Gotha taught me more about Prince Albert and his brother than many solitary hours had done previously. Thanks too, in Germany, to Frau Rosemarie Barthel and Frau Cornelia Hopf in Gotha, and to Herr Dr Klaus Weschenfelder, Herr Rudolf Fuhrmann and Herr Dr Alexander Wolz in Coburg. I am especially grateful to the staff at the Kupferstichkammer who so kindly opened up the museum and Kupferstichkammer specially for me when I chose a day to visit on which the public are not normally admitted.