Abstract
Prince Albert (1819–1861), second son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, forged with his wife and queen, Victoria, a nineteenth-century global-imperial monarchy that reshaped Britain’s relationships with its empire and the wider world. As the queen’s consort and, over the last two decades of his life, private secretary, Albert’s vision for the monarchy’s role in the world profoundly informed how Victoria approached the duties and rituals of the monarchy (and, in turn, how the empire and the world understood the monarchy). While Albert died at a young age, of typhoid fever aged 42, his vision lived on as Victoria sought to honour the priorities and legacy of his life through the remainder of her long reign. This chapter focuses on Albert’s efforts to redefine the role of the British monarchy on the international stage. His vision for a global-imperial monarchy played an essential role in defining not just the Victorian monarchy but the British monarchy through the twentieth century, the end of empire, and beyond.
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Notes
- 1.
Prince Albert, The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 17 June 1851, RA VIC/MAIN/Z/271/17, https://albert.rct.uk/collections/royal-archives/prince-alberts-official-papers/the-society-for-the.
- 2.
The most recent male consort was Prince George of Denmark and Norway, husband of Queen Anne (r. 1702–1714). Albert is the only consort in the history of the British monarchy to be recognised with the title “Prince Consort.” See: Julie Farguson, “George of Denmark: The Quiet Protestant Hero,” in Tudor and Stuart Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty, ed. Aidan Norrie, Carolyn Harris, J.L. Laynesmith, Danna R. Messer, and Elena Woodacre (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 313–333.
- 3.
Biographers of Albert have given limited attention to the imperial dimension of his life, though I did consult a number of those works in the writing of this chapter, including: Daphne Bennett, King Without a Crown: Albert, Prince Consort of England, 1819–1861 (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1977); Jules Stewart, Albert: A Life (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Stanley Weintraub, Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert (New York: Free Press, 2000); Hermione Hobhouse, Prince Albert: His Life and Work (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983); Helen Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death that Changed the Monarchy (London: Windmill Books, 2011). The most comprehensive and useful account of Albert’s relationship with empire focuses on India: Miles Taylor, Empress: Queen Victoria and India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 49. This chapter leans heavily on Taylor’s work.
- 4.
Other theories explaining Albert’s death have emerged over the years. Helen Rappaport, for example, has persuasively argued that Crohn’s disease might best explain Albert’s symptoms and death. See: Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession, 292–294.
- 5.
Walter L. Arnstein, Queen Victoria (New York: Red Globe Press, 2003), 202.
- 6.
Taylor, Empress, 49. At the same time, as the perceived fount of justice in the empire, Victoria was a near-constant subject of petitions and audience requests, many or most of which were forwarded to or did not proceed beyond the Colonial or India Offices.
- 7.
A word of Persian origin used in the Mughal Empire and India to describe a teacher, secretary, writer, or other confidante. See: Shrabani Basu, Victoria and Abdul: The Extraordinary True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant (Stroud: History Press, 2017); Michael Alexander and Sushila Anand, Queen Victoria’s Maharajah: Duleep Singh, 1838–1893 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980); Charles V. Reed, Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects, and the Making of a British World, 1860–1911 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), “Empire Comes Home.”
- 8.
Taylor, Empress, 82.
- 9.
Taylor, Empress, 51. See also: Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
- 10.
“Prince Albert to Baron Stockmar, 16 October 1839,” in Letters of the Prince Consort, 1831–1861, ed. Kurt Jagow, trans. E.T.S. Dugdale (London: John Murray, 1938), 23.
- 11.
Journals of Queen Victoria, 15 October 1839.
- 12.
David Cannadine, History in Our Time (New York: Penguin, 2000), 42.
- 13.
According to Lord Shaftesbury, Melbourne responded to Victoria’s proposal that Albert be made King Consort by Parliament at the time of their marriage: “For God’s sake … let’s hear no more of it ma’am: for if you once get the English people in the way of making kings, you will get them into the way unmaking them.” Weintraub, Uncrowned King, 88.
- 14.
Weintraub, Uncrowned King, 161.
- 15.
“At a Meeting for the Abolition of Slavery, 1 June 1840,” The Principal Speeches and Addresses of the Prince Consort, ed. Arthur Helps (Leipzig, 1866), 67–68.
- 16.
This moment is dramatised in an episode of the miniseries Victoria (2017), wherein anti-slavery activists invite Victoria to speak. She expresses sympathy but declines the offer, which Albert in turn takes up with interest.
- 17.
“Prince Albert to Duke Ernest I of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, 4 June 1840,” in Letters of the Prince Consort, 69.
- 18.
Miles Taylor argues that Albert was influenced by German India scholars who focused less on the history of the East India Company and Christian conversion than their British counterparts. Taylor, Empress, 50.
- 19.
Quoted in Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 17.
- 20.
Albert to Lord John Russell, quoted in Theodore Martin, The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, 5 vols. (London, 1875–1879), 2:360.
- 21.
Taylor, Empress, 54.
- 22.
Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press 1999), chapter 6.
- 23.
Elphinstone to Henry Labouchere, 1 January 1849, RC/H/1/1/98; Taylor, Empress, 54; Auerbach, Great Exhibition, 112.
- 24.
Partha Mitter and Craig Clunas, “The Empire of Things: The Engagement with the Orient,” in A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum, ed. Malcolm Baker and Brenda Richardson (London: V&A Publications, 1997), 221.
- 25.
Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue: Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851, 4 vols. (London, 1851), 2:857.
- 26.
Siddhartha V. Shah, “Romancing the Stone: Victoria, Albert, and the Koh-i-Noor Diamond,” West 86th 24, no. 1 (2017): 29–46; Danielle C. Kinsey, “Koh-i-Noor: Empire, Diamonds, and the Performance of British Material Culture,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 2 (April 2009): 391–419.
- 27.
Shah, “Romancing the Stone,” 29.
- 28.
See: Anita Anand, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
- 29.
“Town Talk and Table Talk,” Illustrated London News, 7 June 1851.
- 30.
William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 222.
- 31.
Quoted in Shah, “Romancing the Stone,” 42.
- 32.
One example of this is: Essie Fox, “Queen Victoria, the Maharajah, and the Diamond,” London Historians Blog, https://londonhistorians.wordpress.com/2017/12/01/queen-victoria-the-maharajah-and-the-diamond/.
- 33.
“Memorandum of the Prince Consort as to Disposal of the Surplus from the Great Exhibition of 1851,” in Martin, Life of His Royal Highness Prince Albert, 2:570.
- 34.
Ruth Adams, “The V&A: Empire to Multiculturalism?,” Museum and Society 8, no. 2 (July 2010): 63.
- 35.
See: Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2020).
- 36.
On Victoria’s belief that she was empress long before 1876, see: Miles Taylor, “Queen Victoria and India, 1837–1861,” Victorian Studies 46, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 264–265.
- 37.
Taylor, Empress, 51. Taylor also identifies the German philologist and Orientalist Max Müller among this intellectual milieu. Muller was apparently a guest at the royal dinner table and was invited to travel to India with the Prince of Wales in 1875–1876 (he declined). See: John R. Davis and Angus Nicholls, “Friedrich Max Müller: The Career and Intellectual Trajectory of a German Philologist in Victorian Britain,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 85, no. 2/3 (2016): 67–97.
- 38.
Albert to Wilhelm, 27 July 1857, quoted in Martin, Life of His Royal Highness Prince Albert, 4:85–86.
- 39.
Albert to Wilhelm, 27 July 1857, quoted in Martin, Life of His Royal Highness Prince Albert, 4:86.
- 40.
See: Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
- 41.
Taylor, Empress, 71–75.
- 42.
Albert to Wilhelm, 27 July 1857, quoted in Martin, Life of His Royal Highness Prince Albert, 4:87.
- 43.
Jonathan Marsden, ed., Victoria and Albert: Love and Art (London: Royal Collection, 2010), 244.
- 44.
Collar of the Order of the Star of India, RCIN 441295, Royal Collection, London; Prince Albert to Sir Charles Wood, 16 May 1860, 29 May 1860, RA VIC/MAIN/N/23/85, cited in Marsden, Victoria and Albert, 330.
- 45.
Three women were ultimately invested in the order: Sultan Shah Jahan, Begum of Bhopal; her daughter Sultan Jahan, Begum of Bhopal; and Mary of Teck.
- 46.
Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.
- 47.
Some of this analysis on the royal tours is based on Reed, Royal Tourists.
- 48.
Queen Victoria’s father Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, for example, lived in British North America in the 1790s and became Commander in Chief of the British North American forces.
- 49.
Ian Radforth, Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 18–21.
- 50.
Pamela Clark, the Royal Archivist at the time, revealed this disappointing news to me during my first visit to the Royal Archives.
- 51.
Albert to the Duke of Newcastle, 8 July 1860, Ne C 12771/1, Papers of the Duke of Newcastle, University of Nottingham.
- 52.
Martin, Life of His Royal Highness, 4:83.
- 53.
“A Toast Given at the Dinner of the Trinity House, June 23, 1860,” in The Principal Speeches and Addresses of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort (London, 1862), 243–244.
- 54.
The Progress of His Royal Highness, Prince Alfred Ernest Albert, Through the Cape Colony, British Kaffraria, the Orange Free State, and Port Natal, in the Year 1860 (Cape Town, 1861), 118.
- 55.
Queen Victoria to King Leopold I, 13 November 1860, in The Letters Of Queen Victoria, 1837–1861, ed. A.C. Benson and Viscount Esher (London: John Murray, 1911), 413.
- 56.
Reed, Royal Tourists, 11.
- 57.
Quoted in Richard Hough, Victoria and Albert: Their Love and Their Tragedies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 157. A Punch cartoon shows an Americanised Albert Edward telling his consternated father, upon returning from North America: “Now Sir-ree, if you’ll liquor up and settle down, I’ll tell you all about my travels.”
- 58.
Quoted in Hough, Victoria and Albert, 162
- 59.
See: Reed, Royal Tourists, 21–22, for example.
- 60.
Taylor, Empress, 193.
- 61.
Victoria to Sir John Lawrence, 26 July 1864, in The Letters of Queen Victoria, ser. 2, A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence and Journals between the Years 1862 and 1878, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1926), 1:242.
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Reed, C.V. (2023). Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha: Prince Consort of the World. In: Norrie, A., Harris, C., Laynesmith, J., Messer, D.R., Woodacre, E. (eds) Hanoverian to Windsor Consorts. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12829-5_7
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