Beautiful Warts Prince Albert

By Melvin Maddocks

In recent years, many biographers learned their art in the School of Debunking. But accounts of past lives have yielded to a more generous and appreciative discipline, which has led to opposite excesses. For declaring Prince Albert "comparable to Thomas Jefferson" and for insisting that Queen Victoria's Prince Consort "merits a volume as architect, designer, farmer, and naturalist," Robert Rhodes James earns highest marks in the Warts Can Be Beautiful School of Biography.

Even so, it is useful to have this work as a long-overdue antidote to Lytton Strachey's sneering, unfair attack in Queen Victoria (1921). Prince Francis Charles Augustus Albert Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was, for one thing, strikingly handsome--possessed of a "beautiful nose" and "fine teeth," as Victoria noted in 1836 when the two cousins, both 16, first met. He was a dutiful, romping father. He taught the art of the somersault. He played with kites. He enjoyed having nine children in 17 years almost as much as Victoria did not.

Certainly they were a love match, as royal marriages go. Nonetheless, Rhodes James is forced to report, they did have their scenes. She could fly into rages and overwhelm Albert with accusations of "want of trust, ambition, envy, etc. etc." About ambition, the Queen may have been right. The Prince's first tutor observed of Albert, "To do something was with him a necessity." He formed an alliance with the Tories, thereby becoming the last occupant of Buckingham Palace to meddle in partisan politics. But despite reading and annotating Foreign Office papers until he dropped, the Prince had a modest reputation that rested on other accomplishments. Rhodes James calls him "the greatest Chancellor Cambridge University has ever had."

Fair enough; he did bring Cambridge's medieval curriculum into the 19th century to suit his taste for math and the sciences. Nor was that all. Albert initiated the Crystal Palace exhibition of modern industry, as of 1851. He fought to abolish dueling. He promoted the Christmas tree. He composed music for the Duke of Wellington's funeral. He managed a lot of little things well. Yet even this doting biographer concedes that he was "excessively conscientious on quite minor matters." Albert died at 42, almost as much from overwork as from influenza.

The eyes staring out of his portraits are those of a private and somewhat lonely man whose fate was to suffer double exile: as a public figure in a foreign land. It was as if he had been sentenced for life to be a Prince and Buckingham Palace was his prison. In a touching letter to his brother, he spoke his heart: "In a small house there is more cheerfulness to be found than there is in the big cold world, in which most people have hearts of stone."

Biographer Rhodes James' nomination of the Prince Consort as "perhaps the most astute and ambitious politician of his age" seems one compliment too far; Metternich was still active in the decade when Albert married Victoria, and Bismarck became Premier of Prussia in 1862, the year after Albert died. This Albert memorial serves mainly to persuade readers that, compared with most European royalty, the Prince was a giant. Alas, a giant among royalty is only man-size anywhere else.