Prince of progress

The tragedy of Prince Albert was not that he died at the age of forty-two 150 years ago this month, but that his quick-tempered and lusty Hanoverian wife loved him too well. Queen Victoria’s orgiastic response to widowhood — her determination through four decades of sorrowful singledom never again to be amused — kicked over the traces of the real Albert and replaced him with that earnest-looking paragon who stares cheerlessly at pigeons and commuters alike from some 20 or so heavyweight sculptures and monuments scattered across the British Isles.

Victoria’s grief was elemental: ‘My life as a happy one is ended! The world is gone for me!’ So absolute was her absorption in her suffering that it became her raison d’être. It was a form of hysteria, a glorious mummery rooted partly in sadness, partly in selfishness. It sought to create a saint from a man whose lodestar was rationality. In the long term it succeeded in robbing the posthumous Albert of the very qualities that once had set the Queen’s heart aflutter, replacing the armour-clad Byronic Lohengrin painted in 1844 by Robert Thorburn with an image as heavy, dark and immovable as the Widow of Windsor herself.

Perhaps it was only appropriate. Albert’s life was a considered flit from flightiness. As an 11-year-old boy, he confided to his diary, ‘I intend to train myself to be a good and useful man’, a motto better suited to a missionary than one whose chief purpose would be the siring of royal heirs. He attained his lofty end by marrying the most eligible woman on earth, who also happened to be his cousin. Marriage removed him from the corrupting influence of his loose-living father, Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, described by the Literary Gazette in 1823 as ‘a not overwise sort of personage’ on account of his weakness for kiss-and-tell courtesans, and his beloved brother, another Ernest, whose rakishness would soon match that of the boys’ father.

In Britain, Albert was cold-shouldered by an aristocracy hellbent on fornication and foxhunting, and his bride’s family, precious about precedent, were unwilling to yield place to this impecunious Teutonic killjoy.