The Uncrowned King

...The Uncrowned King is a concentrated look at a man of astonishing intellect and ability that gives Albert his long-overdue place on center stage and offers proof on every page that England, at least, got two for the price of one...

...He didn't reckon with the Saxe-Coburg sperm count...

...On top of this, it also fell to Albert to explain the facts of life to another daughter before her betrothal when Victoria sidestepped the duty herself ("Papa told her all," she noted in a letter...

...The American captain had taken the Confederate envoys back to blockaded Norfolk and jailed them...

...Albert ignored it...

...Sabbath observance were outraged that the working classes might be drawn away from prayer, and promoters of penitential Sundays also objected to the bands as a German sacrilege introduced by Prince Albert...

...During this private recital some sheets of music fell to the floor and were picked up by Victoria...

...He does look so beautiful in his shirt only, with his beautiful throat seen...

...They were first cousins...

...This German Prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our Kings have ever shown...

...A little while later came another that said, "The Queen awaits HRH...

...His refusal to be "managed" won the respect of male members of Victoria's court, who knew her imperious ways...

...During their honeymoon at Windsor Castle, the couple were seen taking an early-morning walk, prompting Lord Greville to tell Lady Palmerston, "This is not the way to provide us with a Prince of Wales...

...Dragging himself literally from his deathbed, Albert defied the jingoistic politicians and found the perfect diplomatic loophole to prevent England from entering the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy...

...Victoria, who loved to dance the night away and sleep until noon, "never saw the dawn but through a ballroom window," but Albert the early bird could not stay awake after ten and frequently nodded off at late suppers...

...Still he ignored it...

...Disliking everything about motherhood except conception (the couple filled their boudoir with nude paintings and statuary and had a device that permitted them to lock the doors without getting out of bed), she suffered frightening episodes of post-partum depression which she took out on Albert, who, like all husbands, sought peace and quiet by burying himself in his work—in his case, the settlement of the Sepoy Mutiny...

...All did, but none, Weintraub reminds us, dared rule under it...

...Albert did, but he never lost his heavy German accent, and the news that he and Victoria always spoke German together did not please...

...The English people were sick of foreigners, having endured German sovereigns since 174 when Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, died childless and the Crown went to her distant cousin, the Elector of Hanover, who became George I. The first George never learned English...

...Having by now earned the trust of Victoria's ministers, he read state papers, drafted her replies, and sat in on audiences, taking notes which he labeled and filed in his meticulous fashion...

...Albert himself was an organist whose playing, said Felix Mendelssohn, "would have done credit to any professional...

...Albert was always cold...

...He could be quite witty, especially at the expense of the English who criticized him...

...They did not bargain on Albert's extraordinary conscientiousness...

...Albert's consuming interest in science and industry dragged England into the nineteenth century...

...Albert latched onto these mitigating circumstances and combined them with common sense: Surely, he pointed out, no country that had just split in half would deliberately add to its troubles by provoking a war with England...

...Almost the only 72 August 1997 • The American Spectator time the Prince came alive at dinner," writes Weintraub, "was when he could discuss problems of drainage and heating...

...Made an honorary chancellor of Cambridge, where Latin and Greek were sacrosanct and a professor of Oriental languages lectured in Sanskrit, he moved higher education into the "ungentlemanly" areas of applied science and engineering...

...His virtue," said one wag, "was indeed appalling...

...The letter, dated December 1,1861, was a masterpiece of diplomacy that let the The American Spectator • August 1997 73 Lincoln government off the hook and saved face all around...

...The Association for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the Association for Relief of the Poor, the Committee to Redecorate the Houses of Parliament, Sponsors of the Boys' Mechanical Institute, every Royal Society for thisor-that—wherever improvers gathered Albert was there...

...not a single vice redeemed it...

...As for useful work, his job was to sire the Succession, nothing more...

...In a letter to his brother he wrote: "Sentimentality is a plant which cannot grow in England, and an Englishman, when he finds he is being sentimental, becomes frightened at the idea, as of having a dangerous illness, and he shoots himself...

...Goldwin The AEI Press / 213 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan A ccording to the eminent constitutional scholar, Robert A. Gold-win, James Madison is to the Bill of Rights what St Paul is to Christianity: an early opponent who underwent a massive change of heart and became an impassioned supporter...

...His married life was subject to the extremes of Victoria's nervous system...

...The Prince's vision for the modern monarchy died with him...

...The prudishness for which he has been blamed was actually the work of the Wesleyan Methodist movement, which, Weintraub points out, saw his "foreign" influence in every pleasure...

...But virtue had the last laugh...

...It could not have been sustained without his intellectual qualities and his intensity of purpose, and he left no such potential in his spouse or progeny...

...S tanley Weintraub's earlier biography, Victoria, follows the queen to the end of her long life when she had become a grand old lady who "wrapped the nation in her warm Scotch shawl," so beloved that even London's prostitutes wore black when she died...

...Despite his good looks he displayed a "marked indifference to women" and abstained from the time-honored Teutonic tradition of student princing while at the University of Bonn...

...Nine months later Victoria gave birth to the first of nine children (four boys and five girls), but the real augury of the marital dominance Albert would achieve is that walk: He got her up...

...When he approved free Sunday concerts by military bands, "Leaders of the movement for strict44 The book offers proof on every page that England, at least, got two for the price of one...

...Nor was he popular with the powerful, except for the wrong reasons...

...All this on top of his continuing round of committees, societies, and associations, and cornerstone layings without end (his collection of ceremonial trowels has never been equaled...

...To keep her from dominating the book, Weintraub had to do what Albert himself had to do and put her firmly in her place...

...DNA aside, they had little in common...

...This was Albert the Good of Victoria's italic-strewn diary ("Dear, dear Albert, so faultless, so perfect, such an angel...

...Though only 41, he looked like an old man, and his stomach trouble worsened...

...In his new biography of her husband, he is limited to the younger Victoria, who was often less than lovable and occasionally a hysterical shrew...

...To the amazement of classmates and professors alike, Albert preferred studying to wenching...

...Goldwin's story begins in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787...

...At first she slept clutching his nightshirt...

...He even read and clipped the newspapers for her...

...They recognized the risks...

...This and many other mechanical innovations were displayed in 1851 at the Great Exhibition, a living museum of modern industry conceived and designed by Albert, which became the inspiration for the World's Fair...

...Whenever he encountered an antiquated practice that offended his methodical mind — a frequent occurrence —he urged change...

...Like all members of the royal family, he was given honorary chairmanships and invited to lend his name to committees, but unlike them, he actually went to the meetings...

...The greatest coup in the history of this one-export Ruritania was the marriage in 1840 of Prince Albert, younger son of the reigning duke, and England's Queen Victoria...

...his father and her mother were brother and sister...

...later she mourned him by insisting that all future male successors to the Throne bear "Albert" as one of their From Parchment to Power: How James Madison Used the Bill of Rights to Save the Constitution RobertA...

...Weintraub argues convincingly that Albert died of the kind of stomach cancer that starts with ulcers —he was a classic ulcer type—not from the long-assumed typhoid, and certainly not from a chill caught while lecturing the erring Prince of Wales on prostitutes (Victoria's theory...

...The following year he collapsed as England faced a casus belli: the seizure of HMS Trent by the USS San Jacinto and the forcible removal of two Confederate envoys from the British vessel...

...The marriage of these two chaste 20year-olds (both were born in 1819 but Victoria was three months older) inspired many a ribald joke, mostly at Albert's expense...

...B y 186o, when he addressed the fourth International Statistical Congress, his life resembled an eternal C-Span gig...

...Victoria's ministers, jealous of their influence over her, welcomed the unthreatening youth but refused to do anything to enhance his status, including giving him a title...

...Nonetheless, he found time to tutor his oldest and favorite child, the Princess Royal Victoria ("Vicky"), who alone of all his progeny had inherited his brilliant mind and answered his deep need for intellectual companionship at a time when Victoria, worn out from childbearing, expected him to read Jane Eyre to her...

...In his letter to Secretary of State Seward he said that HM's Government was unwilling to believe that this could be the case, and felt that the American naval commander had acted on his own rather than on official orders, in which case HM's Government would accept "the restoration of the unfortunate passengers and a suitable apology...

...This draft was the last the beloved Prince ever wrote," Victoria noted in the margin...

...On December 14 he died...

...taking notes, asking questions, listening and learning...

...Knowing that Victoria simply wanted him home, Albert ignored this one as well and spent the night— alone — at another royal residence...

...The aristocracy, less impressed, saw in Albert what a later age would call a geek...

...but though serious and responsible, he was never a bluenose...

...Albert got off to a bad start...

...Finally, there came a third message: "The Queen commands HRH...

...Victoria survived him by thirty-nine years...

...FLORENCE KING'S latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...

...It was while he was at one of these meetings that he received a message saying, "The Queen desires HRH to return to Buckingham Palace...

...Albert followed up on what he learned, researching topics with a Germanic thoroughness that flattered and impressed his audiences, leading an awed glass manufacturer to exclaim, "Why, he knows more about glass than I do...

...names...

...The delegates to the Constitutional Convention, after four months of intense deliberation, had just completed one of the most glorious achievements in the history of statecraft JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...

...One of many independent states in the patchwork quilt of the German Confederation, it was the place for royalty with marriageable daughters to shop for willing and able princelings to carry on the line...

...Although this was technically impressment, enemy communications were proper contraband of war, and since the envoys were traveling with oral instructions only, they could be considered "the embodiment of dispatches...

...Martin's...

...He was also a bookworm...

...at their first meeting in 1836 the only discernible chemistry between them was metabolic...

...She had a hearty appetite...

...he picked at his food and had a weak stomach...

...Learning that all of Britain's screws were made by hand in a quaint Yorkshire workshop, he imported an American screw-making machine...

...Never did I think I could be so loved...

...Both of them succeeded...

...Why Madison initially opposed amending the Constitution, and why he subsequently changed his mind and became known to posterity as the Father of the Bill of Rights, is the subject of Goldwin's elegant and enlightening study—the first, amazingly, to provide a narrative history of how and why the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution...

...As Disraeli said in his eulogy: "With Prince Albert we have buried our Sovereign...

...That the young couple's lack of sexual experience did them no harm is evident from the Blue Lagoon sweetness of Victoria's diary entry for their wedding night: "When day dawned (for we did not sleep much) and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express...

...Queen Victoria's German Prince Charming The Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert Stanley Weintraub The Free Press / 478 pages / $27.50 REVIEWED BY Florence King T ifi he stud farm of Europe" was Bismarck's name for the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg...

...She liked brisk English room temperatures and thought it a sign of weakness to light a fire...

...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...

...Moreover, the Americans did not take HMS Trent into port but allowed her to sail on, making the offense against the British flag illegal in form but not in substance...

...The Uncrowned King is one of those rare books that thoroughly justifies its title...