How much influence did Prince Albert have on British culture?

Oh how tastes change! Once upon a time Prince Albert (1819 – 1861) was a royal consort with a high level of learning in the realms of design and architecture. He single handedly raised the level of culture and “governed England for 21 years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings has ever shown" (Disraeli, 1861).

Victorian Britain had been a land of nasty capitalism and self-reliance. Government regulation was minimal, and welfare was left to the Church and voluntary cooperatives. With little tax burden and low labour costs, industrialisation and entrepreneurship gave Britain a thriving middle class but an exploited working class. And the state helped promote and safeguard trade through rather brutal foreign policies.

Then Lytton Strachey wrote Eminent Victorians (1918), changing heroes and saints into flawed and hypocritical citizens. The Labour Party started to represent working families everywhere, women wanted the vote and former British colonies became independent nations with their own parliaments. Queen Victoria and her German consort Albert were no longer revered as the sole source of wisdom and morality in Britain and her Empire.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert
1854

So I was very interested to read contemporary responses to the Albert, His Life and Work Exhibition, held at the Royal College of Art in London in 1983-4.

John McEwen said the Royal College of Art stood next to the Albert Hall and opposite the Albert Memorial, so the venue was appropriate enough. But considering the whole enterprise was meant to enhance Prince Albert's already considerable reputation, it had to be deemed a bit of a flop. Vict­oria came out of it more beguilingly than ever, but Albert appeared a loser all the way. Of course the Prince was a first rate chairman, moderate, unprejudiced, quick to see the better point and even to elaborate on it.

Prince Albert championed the Great Exhibition but it was actually the secretary of the Society of Arts, Francis Wishaw, who took credit for the idea; and despite Prince Albert's equal regard for the arts and sciences, the arts were not represented in the Crystal Palace. As for personal patronage of contemporary art, his taste was orthodox: in 1841 Turner made a point of exhibiting a number of views of Coburg at the Summer Exhibition; Prince Albert did not even respond.

We know it was not easy - Albert was the first of his kind to make a job of the consort role. But in the end how effective was the prince? As a social outsider and an amateur he worked far harder than any insider or old pro would have found necessary. His addiction to work and his inability to delegate reduced his physical and mental resistance to risky levels, even months before the appearance of the typhoid fever which officially killed him. But what really weakened Albert’s will to live was his adult son, Edward Prince of Wales, who spent 3 nights with an actress!! Albert despaired of Edward and the future the son represented for the crown.

Nicholas Jenkins' good design for the installation at the Royal College included a replica of Albert's humble study at Windsor Castle, lit to simulate the golden hour before breakfast when he did most of his written work. And a silver and gold model of the Albert Memorial was successful. But other features designed to accentuate an aspect of his career failed. More pictures, more documentary photo­graphs and less stagy designing would have more properly dignified the subject, for dignified Albert certainly was.

A more positive response came from Erica Brown. A 1980s' exhibition at the Royal College of Art in Kensington on the life and work of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's German-born Prince Consort, suggested that he was perhaps the closest thing that C19th Britain had to a Renaissance man.

When the 20-year-old Albert, who came from the duchy of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, married his cousin in 1840, he found himself in a Britain embarking on the Industrial Revolution and full of new ideas. Albert, who played an active role in government as the Queen's principal adviser, embraced the new ideas and the societies set up to promote them, but he was not merely an idle patron. There was little that did not engage his interest, and once his interest was caught, he brought an enlightened intellect to bear.

By 25 it was said of him: “To an architect he could talk as an architect; to an engineer, as an engineer; to a painter, as a painter; to a sculptor, as a sculptor; and so through all the branches of engineering, archit­ecture, art and science.” Prince Albert introd­uced the latest scientific and mechanical methods to the royal estates. He took a close interest in encouraging the design of modern housing and he advocated educational reforms. He was a knowledgeable collector of early Italian and German paintings.

He was perhaps most at home with architecture and design. He improved the sanitary arrangements at Windsor Castle, and he extended and redecorated parts of Buckingham Palace. His major architectural projects were Osborne (designed as an Italianate villa) and Balmoral (designed as a Scottish schloss), the houses he and the Queen built as private residences.

 Balmoral

Osborne

The small octagonal study in Windsor Castle clearly showed that it was not Albert who imposed heavy stuffiness and pompous piety on Victorianism. Here, in his role as the Queen's private secretary, he interviewed ministers, drafted memorandums and dealt with vast quantities of paperwork. It was here too that much of the planning for his greatest project, The Great Exhibition of 1851, was done. Note that all profits from this project went to provide a complex of museums, scientific institutions, colleges of music and art.

Alas the Prince Consort died in 1861 at 42. Today South Kensington is the home of Albert Hall, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal College of Music and the Royal College of Art - all living legacies of a man much misunderstood during his lifetime and thereafter.

The book Prince Albert: His Life and Work, published to coincide with an 1983/84 Exhibition, was written by Hermione Hobhouse and published by Hamish Hamilton. And read John McEwen's article "Albert, His Life and Work" at the Royal College of Art, in The Spectator, 12th Nov 1983. I have already referenced Erica Brown's article, "Victoria's Consort: Multifaceted Prince", in New York Times, 27th Oct 1983.