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'Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha' (''Francis Augustus Charles Albert Emanuel'', later 'HRH The Prince Consort') (26 August 1819 – 14 December 1861) was the husband and consort of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He was the only husband of a British Queen to have formally held the title of Prince Consort. Upon Queen Victoria's death in 1901, the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha succeeded the House of Hanover on the British throne.^[1]

Contents

Early life

Marriage

The Great Exhibition of 1851

Other public activities

Later life

Titles, styles, honours and arms

Titles

Children

Ancestry

Legacy

Image on postage stamps

Military

Medals

Apocryphal stories

See also

Sources

References

Early life

Albert was born at Schloss Rosenau near Coburg (formerly in the Duchy of Saxony, now in the state of Bavaria, Germany), as the second son of Ernst I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and his first wife, Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. Albert's aunt, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, had married Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of King George III of the United Kingdom. She was the mother of the future Queen Victoria. Thus Albert and his future wife were first cousins. They were also born in the same year.
Albert and his elder brother Ernst spent their youth in a close companionship scarred by their parents' turbulent marriage and eventual separation. They adored their mother, who was exiled from court, barred from seeing her children again and died at the age of 30 of cancer. The brothers received a good education, attending the University of Bonn like many other princes. There Albert studied natural science, political economy, and philosophy. His teachers included Fichte and Schlegel. He also studied music and painting and excelled in gymnastics, especially in fencing.

Marriage

The idea of a marriage between Albert and his cousin Victoria had always been cherished by their uncle, King Leopold I of Belgium, as well as by Victoria's mother (Leopold's sister), the Duchess of Kent, and in May 1836 the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and his two sons paid a visit to Kensington Palace, where Princess Victoria of Kent (as she was then titled) lived, for the purpose of meeting her.
The visit did not by any means suit Victoria's uncle, King William IV, who disapproved of the match with his heir, and favored Prince Alexander, second son of William II of the Netherlands. But Princess Victoria knew of Leopold's plan, and William's objections went for naught.
Princess Victoria, writing to her uncle Leopold, said that Albert was "extremely handsome" and thanked him for the "prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me in the person of dear Albert. He possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy." The parties undertook no formal engagement, but privately understood the situation as one which would naturally develop in time.
After Victoria came to the throne on 20 June 1837, her letters show her interest in Albert's being educated for the part he would have to play. In the winter of 1838–1839 the prince traveled in Italy, accompanied by the Queen's confidential adviser, Baron Stockmar.
In October 1839 he and Ernst went again to England to visit the Queen, with the object of finally settling the marriage. Mutual inclination and affection at once brought about the desired result. They became engaged on 15 October 1839 and the Queen made a formal declaration of her intention to marry to the Privy Council on 23 November. The couple married on 10 February 1840 at the Chapel Royal, St. James's Palace. Four days before the wedding, his future wife granted Prince Albert the style of ''Royal Highness'' and made him a member of the Privy Council. However the British Prime Minister at the time, Lord Melbourne, advised the Queen against granting her husband the title of "King Consort".
Apparently Prince Albert did not wish to become a British peer, unlike Prince George of Denmark, the husband of the future Queen Anne, who was made Duke of Cumberland by King William III in April 1689. He wrote, "It would almost be step downwards, for as a Duke of Saxony, I feel myself much higher than as a Duke of York or Kent."^[2] Although he was formally titled "HRH Prince Albert", he was popularly known as "HRH the Prince Consort" for the next seventeen years. On 25 June 1857, Queen Victoria formally granted him the title Prince Consort.
The position in which the prince was placed by his marriage, while one of distinguished honour, also offered considerable difficulties; and during his lifetime the tactful way in which he filled it was inadequately appreciated. The public life of the Prince Consort cannot be separated from that of the Queen, so most of what he accomplished was tied to her accomplishments.
Nonetheless, he was thought to have undue influence in politics, and the prejudice against him never fully dissipated until after his death.

The Great Exhibition of 1851

Prince Albert, a man of cultured and liberal ideas, proved well qualified to take the lead in many reforms which the United Kingdom of that day sorely needed. He had a special interest in applying science and art to the manufacturing industry. The Great Exhibition of 1851 originated in a suggestion he made at a meeting of the Society of Arts and owed the greater part of its success to his intelligent and unwearied efforts.
He had to fight for every stage of the project. In the House of Lords, Lord Brougham denied the right of the crown to hold the exhibition in Hyde Park; in the House of Commons, members prophesied that foreign rogues and revolutionists would overrun England, subvert the morals of the people, filch their trade secrets from them, and destroy their faith and loyalty towards their religion and their sovereign.
Prince Albert served as president of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, and every post brought him abusive letters, accusing him, as a foreigner, of being intent upon the corruption of England. He was not the man to be balked by talk of this kind and quietly persevered, trusting always that bringing the best manufactured products of foreign countries under the eyes of the mechanics and artisans would improve British manufacturing.
The Queen opened the exhibition on 1 May 1851, and it proved a colossal success. The surplus of 186,000 pounds sterling it raised went to purchase land in South Kensington and establish a number of educational and cultural institutions, including what would later be named the Victoria and Albert Museum. This area of London is sometimes referred to as "Albertopolis".

Other public activities

Prince Albert involved himself in promoting many similar, smaller public, educational institutions. Chiefly at meetings in connection with these he found occasion to make the speeches collected and published in 1857. One of his memorable speeches was the inaugural address he delivered as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science when it met at Aberdeen in 1859.
The education of his family and the management of his domestic affairs furnished the prince with another very important sphere of action, in which he employed himself with conscientious devotion.
The estates of the Duchy of Cornwall, the hereditary property of his son, the Prince of Wales, improved so greatly under his father's management that the rent receipts rose from £11,000 to £50,000 per year. Prince Albert, indeed, had a peculiar talent for the management of landed estates. His model farm at Windsor was in every way worthy of the name; and he designed the layout of the grounds at Balmoral and Osborne House.
As the prince became better known, public mistrust began to give way. In 1847, but only after a significantly keen contest with Earl Powis, he was elected chancellor of the University of Cambridge; and he was afterwards appointed master of Trinity House. In June 1857 the formal title of Prince Consort was conferred upon him by letters patent, in order to settle certain difficulties as to precedence that had arisen at foreign courts.
In 1861 when the Trent Affair threatened war between the United States and Britain, Albert intervened quietly to soften the British diplomatic response.^[3]

Later life

During the autumn of 1861 he was busy with the arrangements for the projected international exhibition, and it was just after returning from one of the meetings in connection with it that he was seized with his last illness. Beginning at the end of November with what appeared to be influenza, it proved to be an attack of typhoid fever, and, congestion of the lungs supervening, he died on 14 December.
The Queen's grief was overwhelming, and the sympathy of the whole nation erased the tepid feelings the public had for him during his lifetime. Queen Victoria wore black, mourning for him for the rest of her long life, the sole exception being a white gown worn for the Jubilee celebrating electrical lighting.

Titles, styles, honours and arms

Titles

★ '26 August 1819-12 November 1826': ''His Ducal Serene Highness'' Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield, Duke in Saxony

★ '12 November 1826-6 February 1840': ''His Ducal Serene Highness'' Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Duke in Saxony

★ '6 February 1840-25 June 1857': ''His Royal Highness'' Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Duke in Saxony

★
★ ''commonly abbreviated: His Royal Highness'' Prince Albert

★ '25 June 1857-14 December 1861': ''His Royal Highness'' The Prince Consort

★
★ ''in use since 10 February 1840''

Children

Name	Birth	Death	Notes
The Princess Victoria, Princess Royal	21 November 1840	5 August 1901	married 1858, Frederick III, German Emperor and King of Prussia; had issue
Edward VII	9 November 1841	6 May 1910	married 1863, Princess Alexandra of Denmark; had issue
The Princess Alice	25 April 1843	14 December 1878	married 1862, Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine; had issue
The Prince Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Duke of Edinburgh	6 August 1844	31 July 1900	married 1874, Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna of Russia; had issue
The Princess Helena	25 May 1846	9 June 1923	married 1866, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg; had issue
The Princess Louise	18 March 1848	3 December 1939	married 1871, John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, 9th Duke of Argyll; no issue
The Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught	1 May 1850	16 January 1942	married 1879, Princess Louise Margarete of Prussia; had issue
The Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany	7 April 1853	28 March 1884	married 1882, Princess Helena of Waldeck and Pyrmont; had issue
The Princess Beatrice	14 April 1857	26 October 1944	married 1885, Prince Henry of Battenberg; had issue

Ancestry

Legacy

The magnificent mausoleum at Frogmore, in which his remains were finally deposited, was paid for by the queen and the royal family; and many public monuments were erected all over the country, the most notable being the Royal Albert Hall (1867) and the Albert Memorial (1876) in London. His name also lives on in the Queen's institution of the Albert Medal (1866), in reward for gallantry in saving life, and in the Order of Victoria and Albert (1862). Numerous landmarks were also named after Prince Albert such as Albert Park, in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia (later renamed Roma Street Parklands).
Many credit Prince Albert with introducing the principle that the British Royal Family should remain above politics. Before his marriage to Victoria the Royal Family supported the Whigs; 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.
Prince Albert is also rightfully credited with advancing the fortunes of his family, the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. Through his marriage with his first cousin Victoria, Albert fathered nine children. He had 40 grandchildren, only two of whom were born during his lifetime. Amongst his grandchildren were several reigning monarchs: King George V of the United Kingdom, William II, German Emperor, Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, and Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha itself, as well as Alexandra ill-fated wife of the last Tsar of Russia. Amongst his great-grandchildren were King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, King George VI of the United Kingdom, King Olav V of Norway, and King Carol II of Romania, 3 kings of Greece (George II, Alexander I, and King Paul), and Grand Duke Vladimir Cyrillovich claimant to the throne of Russia. Great-great grandchildren include Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, King Peter II of Yugoslavia and King Juan Carlos I of Spain. Thus, many believed and some still do consider Prince Albert to be the "Grandfather of Europe".

Image on postage stamps

Military

Four regiments of the British Army were named for Albert; the first, the 11th (Prince Albert's Own) Hussars, was named for him in March 1840, shortly before he became its colonel. The 13th Foot – later the Somerset Light Infantry – took the honorific of Prince Albert's Light Infantry in 1842, and Prince Albert's Own Leicestershire Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry was renamed in 1844. The fourth was The Prince Consort's Own Rifle Brigade, a line regiment of the Army of which he had been Colonel-in-Chief, which was renamed in memory of him in 1862, shortly after his death.
He and Queen Victoria showed a keen interest in the establishment and development of Aldershot in Hampshire as a garrison town in the 1850s, having a wooden ''Royal Pavilion'' built there which they would often stay in when attending reviews of the army. Albert established and endowed ''The Prince Consort's Library'' there, which still exists today.

Medals

There are two Albert Medals struck in his honour; one presented by the RSA – see Albert Medal (RSA) – and one for lifesaving – see Albert Medal (lifesaving).

Apocryphal stories

The Prince Albert genital piercing is named after Prince Albert, the claim being that men of the time, in order to wear the tight trousers that were fashionable would use the piercing to secure their male appendages in a compact and discreet manner. No contemporary evidence supports this rumour and it is believed to have been an invention by Doug Malloy who popularised more extreme forms of body piercing and wished to give this form a spurious heritage.

See also

★ Albert Memorial

★ John Brown

★ List of coupled cousins

★ Royal Albert Hall

Sources

★ Theodore Martin ''The Life of H. R. H. the Prince Consort'' 5 vol (1874–80), authorized by Queen Victoria

★ Stanley Weintraub ''Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert'' (2000)

★ Elizabeth Darby and Nicola Smith - ''The Cult of the Prince Consort'' (Yale, 1983) ISBN 0-300-03015-0

References

1. Queen Victoria remained a member of the House of Hanover, even though, upon marriage her personal surname, if any, is sometimes said to have changed from Hanover (or Guelph) to Wettin. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was not Prince Albert's surname, but rather the dynastic name of the branch of the Saxon ducal family to which he belonged. Victoria and Albert's eldest son, King Edward VII, was the only British monarch of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
2. Quoted in Kurt Jagow, ed., ''The Letters of the Prince Consort, 1831–61'' (London, 1938).
3. Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, V, pp. 418–26.

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