Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and
Gotha (
Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel; later
The Prince Consort; 26 August 1819 –
14 December 1861) was the husband of
Queen Victoria of the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland.
He was born in the
Saxon duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld to a family connected to many of
Europe's ruling monarchs. At the age of 20 he married his first cousin, Queen Victoria, with whom he would ultimately have nine children. At first,
Albert felt constrained by his position as consort, which did not confer any power or duties upon him. Over time he adopted many public causes, such as educational reform and a worldwide abolition of slavery, and took on the responsibilities of running the
Queen's household, estates and office. He was heavily involved with the organisation of the
Great Exhibition of 1851. Albert aided in the development of
Britain's constitutional monarchy by persuading his wife to show less partisanship in her dealings with
Parliament—although he actively disagreed with the interventionist foreign policy pursued during
Lord Palmerston's tenure as
Foreign Secretary.
He died at the early age of 42, plunging the
Queen into a deep mourning that lasted for the rest of her life. Upon Queen Victoria's death in
1901, their eldest son,
Edward VII, succeeded as the first
British monarch of the
House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, named after the ducal house to which Albert belonged.
The Queen's grief was overwhelming, and the tepid feelings the public had felt previously for Albert were replaced by sympathy.[
108]
Victoria wore black in mourning for the rest of her long life, and Albert's rooms in all his houses were kept as they had been, even with hot water brought in the morning, and linen and towels changed daily.[
109] Such practices were not uncommon in the houses of the very rich.[
110] Victoria withdrew from public life and her seclusion eroded some of Albert's work in attempting to re-model the monarchy as a national institution setting a moral, if not political, example.[
111] Albert is credited with introducing the principle that the
British royal family should remain above politics.[
112] Before his marriage to Victoria, she supported the
Whigs; for example, early in her reign Victoria managed to thwart the formation of a
Tory government by
Sir Robert Peel by refusing to accept substitutions which
Peel wanted to make among her ladies-in-waiting.[113]
Albert's body was temporarily entombed in
St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle,[114] until a year after his death his remains were deposited at
Frogmore Mausoleum, which remained incomplete until
1871.[115] The sarcophagus, in which both he and the Queen were eventually laid, was carved from the largest block of granite that had ever been quarried in Britain.[116]
Despite Albert's request that no effigies of him should be raised, many public monuments were erected all over the country, and across the
British Empire.[
117] The most notable are the
Royal Albert Hall and the
Albert Memorial in
London. The plethora of memorials erected to Albert became so great that
Charles Dickens told a friend that he sought an "inaccessible cave" to escape from them.[
118]
All manner of objects are named after
Prince Albert, from
Lake Albert in
Africa to the city of
Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, to the
Albert Medal presented by the
Royal Society of Arts. Four regiments of the
British Army were named after him: 11th (
Prince Albert's Own) Hussars;
Prince Albert's Light Infantry; Prince Albert's Own
Leicestershire Regiment of
Yeomanry Cavalry, and The Prince Consort's Own
Rifle Brigade. He and Queen Victoria showed a keen interest in the establishment and development of
Aldershot in
Hampshire as a garrison town in the
1850s. They had a wooden
Royal Pavilion built there in which they would often stay when attending reviews of the army.[
119] Albert established and endowed the
Prince Consort's Library at Aldershot, which still exists today.[
120]
Biographies published after his death were typically heavy on eulogy.
Theodore Martin's five-volume magnum opus was authorised and supervised by Queen Victoria, and her influence shows in its pages.
Nevertheless, it is an accurate and exhaustive account.[121]
Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria (
1921) was more critical, but it was discredited in part by mid-twentieth-century biographers such as
Hector Bolitho and
Roger Fulford, who (unlike Strachey) had access to Victoria's journal and letters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert,_Prince_Consort
- published: 01 Dec 2014
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