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• Born: 26 August 1819
• Birthplace: Schloss Rosenau, near Coburg, Germany
• Died: 14 December 1861
• Best Known As: Beloved husband of Queen Victoria

Albert was the beloved husband and trusted advisor of Britain's Queen Victoria. First cousins, they were married on 10 February 1840, two years after Victoria became queen at age 18. Despite public suspicion of his German heritage, Albert became a key figure in Victoria's early reign, and some considered him the 'power behind the throne.' Albert was known for his eager interest in science and learning, and from 1847-61 he was chancellor of Cambridge University. He also organized the Great Exhibition of 1851, held in the famed Crystal Palace, which showcased advances in science and industry. His death at age 42 devastated Victoria, who spent several years in mourning.

Albert was the son of Ernst, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in Germany... Victoria and Albert had nine children; their son Albert (b. 1841) became King Edward VII after Victoria's death in 1901... The cause of Prince Albert's death is unclear; physicians at the time diagnosed typhoid, but later scholars suggested the cause was a stomach ailment like cancer... Albert's name is given to the Royal Albert Hall in London, as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum... A 20th-century pipe tobacco was named for Prince Albert; the tobacco was sold in tins, leading later to the humorous question, "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?"... A modern-day royal Albert is Prince Albert of Monaco.

Albert (1819-1861) was the husband of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort of Great Britain. His most important achievements were the strengtheningof the constitutional monarchy and the establishment of the royal family as a moral force in the life of the nation.

Albert was the second son of Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and of Louise, daughter of Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Altenburg. He was born on Aug. 26, 1819, at Rosenau, Germany. Educated by a private tutor, he was advised and encouraged by his uncle Leopold, who became king of Belgium in 1831, and by Baron Stockmar, a friend and confidant of the Coburg family. After a short visit to England in 1836, Albert spent 10 months studying in Brussels. He then attended Bonn University and toured Italy with Stockmar.

Marriage to Victoria

His marriage to Victoria had, in effect, been settled in 1836, but they did not announce their betrothal until November 1839, more than 2 years after Victoria ascended the throne. Although the marriage was arranged for political and dynastic reasons, Victoria had fallen deeply in love with Albert, and he returned her devotion. Their marriage in February 1840 was not, however, enthusiastically supported by the English. Albert was never to win the unanimous support either of the populace or of the aristocracy.

During the first period of their marriage, Victoria was unwilling to offer Albert royal tasks commensurate with his real abilities. "I am only the husband, and not the master in the house," he wrote to a close friend less than 3 months after his wedding. It took time for Albert to influence the Queen in public affairs, and even then he never fulfilled the role assigned to him by Stockmar of acting as her "constitutional genius." However, he was a personality in his own right, keenly interested in music and in the progress of science and technology and deeply concerned about the duties of royalty in a changing social context.

Change of Albert's role came gradually following the birth of the Princess Royal in November 1840 and the replacement of Lord Melbourne as prime minister by Sir Robert Peel in 1841. Above all, the retirement to Germany in September 1842 of Baroness Lehzen, Victoria's devoted Hanoverian attendant, strengthened Albert's position. His increasing involvement in government affairs was also guaranteed by the domestic happiness that he afforded the Queen. A keen gardener and a fine shot, he was always happy in the country with his family. As Albert and Victoria shared the delights and the difficulties of bringing up their nine children, sketched and painted together, and played duets, she came to rely upon him more and more. In 1857 he received the title Prince Consort.

Domestic Policies

Albert respected Peel, with whom he had much in common - a distaste of faction, a strong sense of duty, and a high-minded seriousness; moreover, both recognized that politics had to take into account the economic and social changes that were transforming Britain into an industrially based economy. The events of 1848, a year of European revolutions, confirmed Albert's view that in the course of social change the interests of workingmen had to be safeguarded as well as those of the middle classes. "The unequal division of property … is the principal evil," he wrote in 1849. "Means must necessarily be found, not for diminishing riches (as the communists wish) but to make facilities for the poor. … I believe this question will first be solved here in England."

Albert was one of the main architects of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was held in London's newly built Crystal Palace. This exhibition was designed to display in international as well as national terms how society was being reshaped by science and technology. On the opening day of the exhibition, Victoria wrote in her diary, "All is owing to Albert - All to Him." Although this was an exaggeration, it was certainly true that Albert's zeal and enthusiasm had inspired everyone connected with the originally hazardous and controversial enterprise.

Foreign Affairs

Deeply suspicious of Lord Palmerston, who had become foreign minister in 1846, Albert had his own network of foreign intelligence sources and his own approach to international relations. He and Victoria did not hide their feelings about the Palmerstonian policies that they honestly believed to be perilous. Their first clash with Palmerston came in 1847 on the issue of Portugal, and there soon were differences on France and Spain. When Palmerston resigned in 1851, there was sharp criticism both of Albert and of the Queen. On the eve of the Crimean War (1853-1856), Albert was strongly attacked in the press for what were condemned unjustifiably as pro-Russian sympathies. Between the end of the Crimean War and his death, Albert remained strongly interested in European, and particularly German, politics. He was sympathetic to German unification under Prussian leadership. His advice was frequently taken on difficult issues, but in 1859 there were renewed differences both with Palmerston and with Lord John Russell on the Italian question. In 1861 Albert used his influence to prevent Britain from becoming embroiled in the American Civil War as a result of an incident involving the mail steamer Trent.

Albert died on Dec. 13, 1861, after an attack of typhoid fever. The Queen was desolate and throughout the rest of her long reign tried to model her actions on what she thought her beloved Albert would have done.

Further Reading

The standard biography of Albert is Sir Theodore Martin, The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort (5 vols., 1875-1880). Other biographies are Roger Fulford, The Prince Consort (1949); Frank Eyck, The Prince Consort: A Political Biography (1959); and Hector Bolitho, Albert, Prince Consort (1964). Kurt Jagow's edition of Letters of the Prince Consort, 1831-1861 was translated by E. T. S. Dugdale in 1938.

Additional Sources

Bennett, Daphne, King without a crown: Albert, Prince Consort of England, 1819-1861, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977.

Hobhouse, Hermione, Prince Albert, his life and work, London: H. Hamilton, 1983.

James, Robert Rhodes, Albert, Prince Consort: a biography, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983.

James, Robert Rhodes, Prince Albert: a biography, New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1984, 1983.

Scheele, Godfrey, The Prince Consort: man of many facets: the world and the age of Prince Albert, London: Oresko Books, 1977.

For more information on Albert, prince consort of Great Britain and Ireland, visit Britannica.com.

Albert, prince consort (1819-61). Albert was the second son of Ernest, duke of Saxe-Coburg, and Louise, daughter of Duke Augustus of Saxe-Coburg-Altenburg. His parents were divorced in 1826. He was a shy and delicate child but exceptionally diligent and serious-minded. The possibility of a match with his cousin Queen Victoria was fostered by their uncle Leopold, king of the Belgians, but they did not meet until 1836 when they were both 17 years old. Victoria then found him ‘extremely handsome’. When they met again at Windsor three years later Victoria fell instantly in love and Albert soon responded. Five days after their meeting she proposed to him and they were married on 10 February 1840.

If Albert was unexpectedly swept off his feet by Victoria's ardour, he was less enthusiastic about her country, nor did her subjects take to him. He was not thought important enough to marry the queen of England, and the facts that he was German, Victoria's first cousin, lacked wealth and position, and was hardly known in England all counted against him. He was variously (and wrongly) supposed to be a ‘Coburg adventurer on the make’, a political radical, a papist, and (even worse because accurately) an intellectual. Parliament reduced the allowance that was proposed for him, and refused to grant him precedence next to the queen. Precedence was nevertheless conferred on him by letters patent, but he received no title and was not officially designated prince consort until 1857.

Victoria adored her husband but was reluctant to admit him to share in her political duties. He did however guide his wife towards political neutrality, weaning her from her previous Whig partisanship and reconciling her after 1841 to Peel. After 1842 he acted as Victoria's informal counsellor, private secretary, and sole confidant. In many ways he was a natural bureaucrat—efficient, painstaking, and absorbed by detail. He was happy to become, on Peel's suggestion, chairman of the Fine Arts Royal Commission and he threw himself energetically into his favourite project to make South Kensington a centre for the arts and for education. His attempt to promote the causes of social improvement, science and technology, and the public patronage of the arts and sciences culminated in the organization of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Nor was he inactive in other public fields. He attempted to guide British foreign policy in peaceful directions and tried to insist that Palmerston should submit his policies and dispatches to the queen. Palmerston's refusal led to his dismissal from the Foreign Office in 1851. Nevertheless, Albert was unable to avert the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 and Palmerston's return as prime minister in 1855. Almost his last act on his death-bed in 1861 was to tone down an aggressive dispatch to Washington on the Trent affair which probably averted war with the USA.

Perhaps Albert's most lasting contribution to his adopted country was the example he set, with Victoria, of a respect-able and devout private life. They produced nine children, to whom Albert was a loving and devoted though heavy-handed father. His relations with his eldest son, the future King Edward VII, suffered from ‘Bertie's’ resistance to the ambitious system of education which his father devised and supervised. The pressure placed on the prince of Wales resulted in his alienation from his parents and increased the anxieties from which Albert increasingly suffered. His habits of overwork and his weakened physical constitution resulted in an inability, and perhaps a lack of will, to resist attacks of ill-health and he died of typhoid fever on 14 December 1861 at the age of 42.

(1819–61)

Born at Schloss Rosenau, near Coburg, Prince Albert married the young Queen Victoria in 1840, and was created Prince Consort in 1857. In 1841 he chaired the Royal Commission to oversee the decorations of the new Palace of Westminster that were to act as a catalyst to improve the quality of British art, design, and manufactures. The Prince joined the Society of Arts and became its President in 1843; in this capacity he encouraged the application of science and art to industrial purposes. Around this time two important figures, (Sir) Henry Cole and Professor Ludwig Grüner (1801–82), became closely involved with the Prince. The latter acted as art-adviser, encouraging a taste for Renaissance polychromy, grotesques, and the Rundbogenstil that were to be so influential in the buildings at South Kensington. The former became Chairman of the Society of Arts, and promoted model designs commissioned from artists which coined the term ‘art manufactures’: he was an energetic organizer, becoming Prince Albert's chief lieutenant for the remarkable Great Exhibition of 1851 in Paxton's Crystal Palace, of which the Prince was an enthusiastic promoter.

Albert was also President of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, and helped to encourage the building of exemplary dwellings: the Society erected four ‘Model Houses for Families’ as part of the 1851 Exhibition, designed by Henry Roberts and paid for by the Prince. Later, Albert proposed using the profits of the Great Exhibition to found an establishment where science and art could be applied to industry of all nations. This was the beginning of South Kensington, a complex of museums, scientific institutions, and places of learning, known as Albertopolis, which had at its nucleus the Schools of Design. The Victoria & Albert Museum, a national museum of fine and applied art, is probably the Prince's greatest memorial.

As an influence on architecture the Prince was significant. Not only was polychromy favoured from the late 1840s, but many of Grüner's other Italianizing enthusiasms took root. Albert himself was involved in a number of design projects, including the Italianate Osborne House, IoW (with the London builder Thomas Cubitt from 1845), the Royal Dairy at the Model Farms at Windsor, alterations at Buckingham Palace, and Balmoral Castle (an essay in the Scottish Baronial style executed by William Smith (1817–91) of Aberdeen). However, Prince Albert's importance in the history of design lies in the immense improvements that became apparent from the time of the 1862 London Exhibition, which he encouraged, but did not live to see realized.

Bibliography

• Ames (1967)
• J. Curl (1983)
• Hobhouse (1983)
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
• Rhodes James (1983)
• Scheele (1977)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

1819–61, prince consort of Victoria of Great Britain, whom he married in 1840. He was of Wettin lineage, the son of Ernest I, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and first cousin to Victoria. As an alien prince he was initially unpopular, but in time the English came to admire him for his irreproachable character, his devotion to the queen and their children, and his deep concern with public affairs. His influence was particularly strong in diplomacy; his insistence on moderation in the Trent Affair (1861) may have averted war with the United States. As chancellor of Cambridge Univ., he transformed it into a modern institution.

Bibliography

See biographies by R. Fulford (1949), F. Eyck (1959), R. Pound (1974), and R. R. James (1983); S. Weintraub, Uncrowned King (1997).