All in the Family

...He was made Prince Consort in 1857...

...The Prince of Wales was hardly the intellectual Albert wanted him to be, and he did not enjoy pursuing a course of study similar to his father' s boyhood regimen...

...It was a profoundly difficult marriage as well...

...Indeed, she was so adamant about her preferences that Melbourne managed to stay on—"the last occasion on which a British sovereign was able to prevent the formation of a ministry which was politically uncongenial...

...By limiting his perspective to Albert's immediate circle, the author fails to create an overall picture of the early Victorian political and intellectual milieu...

...In addition, he was a statesman of strong liberal principles, and his personal behavior was respectable— qualities conspicuously lacking in many royal families, including his own and that of England...

...These are gloomy prospects...

...But unlike Lytton Strachey's irresponsible and amusing Queen Victoria, or John Clive's magnificently informative Macaulay, it is not worth reading for its own sake...

...Not until their second meeting, in 1839, did Victoria fall in love...

...Albert wrote him, "The nation must be with you, at all events I can assure you that the Queen is...

...Such beautiful blue eyes," she wrote of Albert in her journal, "an exquisite nose, and such a pretty mouth with delicate mustachios...

...These well-paid positions were a form of totally partisan patronage...

...however, the Prince was simultaneously a creature of the old order, and he fought Palmerston tenaciously...

...Motivated chiefly by a shortage of cash, the Duke of Kent agreed to take a wife in return for a higher grant of income...

...After several years of great achievement, his administration had to deal with the Irish Famine...

...By then Leopold, already King of the Belgians, was clearly bent on promoting the match...

...they saw Leopold as a schemer, and in a sense they were right...

...And the going is tougher still because Knopf has not seen fit to give us an edition that conforms to American standards of spelling and punctuation...

...She gave birth to Princess Victoria in May 1819...

...Turned out by his own party, Peel delivered a resignation speech that "glowingly praised" Richard Cobden, the radical chief of the free traders...

...I also think that Albert's life should have been set in a much broader context than James provides...

...He simply wanted the whole business disposed of quickly, since a long delay leading to a refusal would make him used goods, as it were...

...But it is remarkable that a mother could have remained so indifferent to the obvious distress of a child...

...Despite Albert's annoyance at these remarks, many of his own opinions resembled Cobden's—his internationalism, for instance, and something pretty close to pacifism...

...The Prince supported him no less vigorously than the Queen had supported Melbourne, so it is curious to see James asserting that Albert contributed to the Monarchy chiefly by placing it beyond partisanship...

...Actually, she was self-centered and ignorant...

...He displayed his conservative side in the annus mirabilis of revolution, 1848...

...Albert, in other words, wanted to be the "King behind the Stairs," guiding the Queen in her relations with the Cabinet and politicians generally...

...James finds that her infidelities were limited to a certain Alexander von Hanstein...

...It was Albert's ultraliberal side that inspired his best-known accomplishment: "The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851," meant to promote understanding among peoples...

...That omission is perhaps a matter of judgment...

...Albert—the second son of Leopold's oldest brother, Ernest, who had succeeded his father as Duke of Coburg—arrived in November...

...He was firmly committed to German unity, and whatever the rights and wrongs of that cause, England had not the least reason to encourage it...

...England, and Prince Albert himself, preferred the Conservatives and their leader, Sir Robert Peel, the son of a self-made cotton manufacturer...

...The revolutionary regimes he welcomed were realities, and Albert's hopes that the monarchies of France, Austria and Prussia would reform voluntarily were mere pipe dreams...

...Albert really was a good German and a good man, though he was certainly not a good Englishman...

...Victoria's faint interest in matrimony evaporated altogether when she became Queen in 1837, at age 18, following a childhood full of meddling adults—similar to the one she would inflict on her own offspring...

...Albert had strong feelings on "the Social Question," too...

...The Queen was ill-advised to assert her powers...

...Not so the inadequacy (at least for American readers) of the author's efforts to identify people and places...

...I myself wonder if James is not confusing the chronically depressed Albert's surprising sense of humor with happiness...

...In 1841 the Conservatives won again, and she did not attempt to block Peel...

...Nonetheless, Albert belonged to the traditional ruling class of Europe and did not wish to see it overthrown violently...

...Moreover, Albert remained "a true German, and a true Coburg and Gotha man," to use his words...

...At Bonn University, Albert dabbled in philosophy, political economy and science...

...my heart is quite going...

...It happens that the Foreign Secretary was arguably in the right...

...James tries to disprove the received assumption that Leopold plotted to hitch the two cousins in the cradle, but the sole argument he can muster against it is their not having met before they were 17...

...Reviewed by Roger Draper Prince Albert , Queen Victoria's beloved husband, was the first royal personage in 19th-century England who embraced the spirit of his age...

...It is not certain at what point the idea of his marrying Princess Victoria entered anyone's mind...

...He was regarded as "an insufferable German Puritan," notes Robert Rhodes James, the author of this new biography...

...Four earlier Queens Regnant—Bloody Mary and Elizabeth in the 16th century, Mary II in the 17 th and Anne in the 18 th—had not left behind precedents that could be used to shape his role...

...Yet his uncle became King of the Belgians...

...James admits that "In this sad story, Prince Albert must bear the principal responsibility...

...This is not the only instance where the author's admiring attitude has led him down the garden path...

...Besides, marriage was not a priority to her...

...Albert in particular had to bear the malice of High Society...

...Albert, too, had doubts: "Victoria is said to be incredibly stubborn...

...Eagerly supported by the Queen and her husband, Peel in 1846 decided to throw out agricultural protection and announced his conversion to free trade in grain...

...Leopold took charge of the boy's education, stressing modern languages, history and the natural sciences—the subjects emphasized in middle-class schools...

...The worst concerned his eldest son, Bertie, the future Edward VII...

...And she was a passionate Whig, doting on the clever and reactionary Melbourne, a man whose personality is summed up in a comment he made after a meeting with Albert: "This damned morality will ruin everything...

...A moderate on constitutional matters like electoral qualifications, Peel sought the laurels of a domestic reformer...

...The King and many of his subjects disliked the notion of a consort from so inconsequential a place...

...Centuries of upward and downward mobility had left his immediate ancestors with nothing more important than the Dukedom of Saxe-Coburg, in Germany...

...and other relations mounted the thrones of Bulgaria and Portugal...

...More in tune with the national mood than most professional politicians, he reshaped the monarchy with such success that what it lost in direct power, it partly regained through its influence over the public mind...

...Albert somewhat fatalistically accepted his uncle's plans...

...Albert, though, had definite thoughts on what it should be...

...Given the times, the great problem was Victoria's independence...

...If you already know the politics and the thought of the age and want to look into the Prince's life, you will find this book useful...

...To all of this the deeply affectionate father reacted with impatience and disappointment...

...Albert responded to her infatuation, and they began what James rightly calls "one of the most moving, as well as the most important, marriages in modern history...

...Furthermore, Albert devised the system and the blame for it is in all justice his...

...Albert's attitudes on domestic matters left Palmerston's far behind...

...Leopold made his great leap forward in 1816, when he married Princess Charlotte, the only child and heir of George IV...

...very slight whiskers: a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders & a fine waist...

...Leopold had a sister available, Princess Victoire, and soon arranged a marriage...

...George IV had no surviving children, and his six brothers, the so-called Wicked Dukes, had no legitimate ones...

...At a time of triumphant liberalism he was a strong, and often triumphant, liberal...

...Unhappily, its most seminal legacy turned out to be Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, the admittedly beautiful building where it was held —and the mother of all those glass and steel monsters that have disfigured our cities...

...is in my house and I not in his," she wrote sympathetically...

...His enduring achievement is the Metropolitan Police, whose constables are called "Bobbies" in his honor...

...Nor did Bertie have the dedication to work which killed Albert at the age of 42, or his father's high moral character...

...The succession was imperiled...

...Nonetheless, the author insists that Albert's childhood was "the happiest period of his existence...

...The Whigs were in office, and their Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, insisted on a policy of liberal activism on the Continent...

...In the beginning, he was merely the fourth son of an unimportant Duke...

...That goodness hovers around this biography and makes the author reluctant to pass harsh judgments on Albert's failings...

...Both the Whigs and the Tories considered this policy "the most insane proposition that ever entered the human head," as Melbourne put it...

...Because Albert's mother was unfaithful to her husband, himself a notorious philanderer, rumor had it that the true father was a Baron von Meyern, the Jewish Court Chamberlain...

...Had men of Albert's stamp created the German Reich, of course, it would not have been a world-historical catastrophe...

...Albert's Uncle Leopold was the colossus who led his family out of Coburg...

...She was a Queen Regnant, Albert a mere husband, without title or office in his adopted country...

...In the first place, since James himself has shown that Queen Victoria had little love for her children, there is nothing "remarkable" about her detachment...

...These defects notwithstanding, James has produced the best biography of Albert in a weak field...

...In any case, Queen Victoria, and then the Kingdom, gradually fell under his influence, a process the author describes convincingly...

...Albert himself made the greatest match of his day...

...He told Lord Melbourne, his wife's first Prime Minister, "I must alone be her adviser"—her one confidential adviser, that is...

...By training and temperament an intellectual who liked to meet artists and scholars, he hated the company of politicians and the "Upper Ten Thousand," and never lost the habit of falling asleep at dinner parties...

...Victoria was not yet willing to concede that authority to him...

...A conservative MP since 1976, James has also written books on Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill, the Gallipoli campaign, and several other topics...

...As Monarch, she was still the head of government, even if only in the increasingly tenuous sense that the Cabinet had to be politically acceptable to her...

...In its absence, general readers—the book's intended market, to judge from the elaborate production—are likely to feel that the Prince is floating in air, not firmly linked to the events surrounding him...

...His niece was the obstacle, not his nephew...

...At a time when virtue had become almost fashionable he was extremely virtuous...

...There were nine children...

...Like so many characteristic figures of the period, Albert was born into a family on the make, albeit a royal one...

...Charlotte died in childbirth in 1817, but the "Coburg connection" lived on...

...Lehzen was Victoria's governess...

...Occasionally, editorial standards of any kind are wanting, thus: "But perhaps the most important of his [Albert's] achievements in this early period was to reconcile his [Albert's] wife with her [Victoria's] mother, a difficult task— made even more difficult by Melbourne's views, soured by his [Melbourne's] experience of the Conroy faction, and which prompted him [Melbourne] to describe the Duchess to her [the Duchess'] daughter as 'a liar and a hypocrite' —which he [Albert] achieved with great delicacy and skill, and the eventual removal of Lehzen...

...The author gently observes that "No fair estimation of the young Princess Victoria can exclude certain realities about her personality...

...then she fell hard...

...These feats of social climbing were resented...

...In 1843 a crusading MP issued a report condemning child labor...

...In the quiet of his study he could even describe "the unequal division of property, and the dangers of poverty and envy arising therefrom," as society's "principal evil...

...she delights in court ceremonies, etiquette and trivial formalities...

...It is therefore odd to read a few pages later that "one can understand" why Albert and Baron Stock-mar, the family counselor, sought to turn Bertie into a scholar-prince, much " as it is easy, with all the benefits of hindsight, to realize why they failed...

...In truth she was not, but Albert himself was so committed that he misled his correspondent...

...When the Conservatives defeated their rivals in the 1839 general election, Victoria would not take Tory ladies-in-waiting...

...The Duke and his wife were eventually divorced, she followed her lover, and five-year-old Albert, her favorite, never saw her again...