We Two: Victoria and Albert (87 page)

Chapter 20:
THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

245
The idea of the Great Exhibition
Other accounts credit John Scott Russell with having the big idea and selling it to the prince.

246
In the end, parliament voted
This is the account given by Martin in
Life of the Prince Consort
, vol. ii.

247
Never one to let the grass
The precious piece of blotting paper is now preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

247
Amazingly, its fan of intersecting ribs
An etching of Paxton’s daughter standing on the lily pad appeared in the
Illustrated London News
.

248
The memory of the great revolutions
In 1858 England and France came close to war when a group of Italian revolutionaries tried to blow up the Emperor Napoleon III, and the grenades were found to have been built in Great Britain. Karl Marx, of course, found refuge in England in 1849 and wrote much of
Das Kapital
in the British Museum.

248
As the prince wrote to his
Prince Albert to Marie, dowager Duchess of Coburg, April 1851, Martin,
Life of the Prince Consort
, vol. ii, pp. 293–294.

248
Three years after the end
See Kingsley Martin,
The Triumph of Lord Palmerston: A Study of Public Opinion in England Before the Crimean War
, London: Hutchison, 1963.

249
“Mathematicians have calculated
Jagow,
Letters of the Prince Consort
, pp. 176–177.

250
“The tremendous cheers
Martin,
Life of the Prince Consort
, vol. ii, p. 299.

250
As Victoria herself noted
Martin, vol. ii, p. 314.

253
And the building was pulled down
The enlarged and re-created Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire in 1934.

254
The frantic months of activity
All of these expressions come from the Queen’s journal.

254
When the prince met such men
Lyon Playfair, who collaborated closely with Prince Albert on many public and private projects and admired him very much, once commented that never in all their dealings did the prince ever ask him to sit down.

254
Albert could preside
Several of the men associated with the Great Exhibition were subsequently knighted by Queen Victoria—Henry Cole, Joseph Paxton, Charles Fox. Lyon Playfair ended his life as Lord Playfair.

Chapter 21:
LORD PALMERSTON SAYS NO

255
By November 1853, he was
This is what Prince Albert told Stockmar in a long letter of January 24, 1854; Jagow, ed., p. 207.

255
She frankly admitted this
Queen Victoria’s Early Letters
, ed. Raymond, p. 188.

256
In the face of the vitriolic
Albert to Stockmar: “As for the calumnies themselves, I look upon them as a fiery ordeal that will serve to purge away impurities … Everyone who has been able to express or surmise any ill of me has conscientiously contributed his faggot to burn the heretic, and I may say with pride, that not the veriest tittle of a reproach can be brought against me
in truth”
(Jagow, p. 206). Yet in 1860 Prince Albert was still sending to his “Dear Cousin” William, the prince regent (soon to be king) of Prussia, an exact account of the recent and secret negotiations of the Emperor Napoleon III with Russia and Austria, which he had heard of from the foreign office papers or discussions. Albert begins this brief note: “It may not be uninteresting to you to hear something that I will beg you to regard as strictly confidential” (Jagow, p. 349). The letter of February 8, 1859, to Prince William’s wife, Augusta, makes clear that Prince Albert also communicated on foreign policy issues with the Prussian court by trusted private emissaries such as Count Perponcher, who would convey information and opinions without committing any of it to paper.

256
If any one man was responsible
In my account of Prince Albert’s foreign policy, my key source is the five-volume biography of the prince that Queen Victoria commissioned from Theodore Martin. Frank Eyck’s
The Prince Consort: A Political Biography
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959) was also very important in forming my opinions of Prince Albert’s geopolitical ideas and diplomatic initiatives. Eyck was a naturalized Englishman born in Germany and a scholar of acumen and probity. He was given unusually complete access to the archives at Windsor and Coburg, and, almost alone among biographers of Prince Albert publishing in English, he was able to read the unpublished papers written in German. Eyck seeks to present Prince Albert in as positive a light as possible, but, unlike Hector Bolitho, he was more interested in the historical record than in hobnobbing with Prince Albert’s descendents. His work is all the more damning for being sober, scrupulously documented, and based on wide knowledge of nineteenth-century German history. For my account of Lord Palmerston, I rely mainly on Jasper Ridley’s
Lord Palmerston
(London: Macmillan, 1971) and Kingsley Martin’s
The Triumph of Lord Palmerston: A Study of Public Opinion Before the Crimean War
(London: Hutchison, 1963). After completing this chapter, I came upon a copy of Anthony Trollope’s 1882 contribution to the “English Political Leaders Series”
(Lord Palmerston
, London: Isbister) and was delighted to find the great novelist endorsing my account of the struggle between prince and foreign secretary. Trollope writes stalwartly in his introduction: “With the verdict of the Prince … in regard to Lord Palmerston [as revealed in the recently published biography of the prince consort by Theodore Martin] I am compelled to differ … I think that I shall be able to show that England has disagreed with his Royal Highness, and that England is right” (p. 2).

257
They fought any measure likely
In her official capacity as commander in chief, Queen Victoria put her signature on every army commission. This inevitably resulted in a backlog of commissions and was hardly conducive to army efficiency. However, when the practical suggestion was made that commissions should be certified in some other way, Victoria refused.

258
The famine in Ireland
For a brief summary of the issues involved in the repeal of the Corn Laws, see chapter 14.

261
In the words of novelist
Trollope,
Lord Palmerston
, London: Isbister, 1882, p. 26.

262
Mrs. Brand resisted
There are at least three versions of this affair: Greville (vol. vi, p. 441) and two memoranda in the Royal Archives by Prince Albert and by his secretary George Anson. Greville says that Queen Victoria knew about the event at the time. Albert and Anson believe that she did not and that she was horribly shocked when her husband told her about in 1850. My guess is that Victoria, in fact, did know in 1840, since the Brand affair would certainly have come to the ears of Baroness Lehzen, reputed to be a great gossip and a favorite with Melbourne and Palmerston. Court gossip between Lehzen and Victoria was one of the things that Prince Albert held against the baroness.

262
Back in 1810, when Emily
Gossips claimed that both Emily Cowper and her mother, the first Lady Melbourne, had an amorous liaison with the prince regent (later George IV). One of Emily’s younger brothers was reputedly the prince regent’s child.

262
As the husband of a beautiful
Lady Palmerston had three brothers, but none of them had any children when he died, so she inherited all the Melbourne estates.

265
But on certain key issues
See Prince Albert’s letter to Stockmar of August 20, 1850, soon after the Peace of Olmutz kept Prussia from going to war with Austria over Schleswig-Holstein: “The fixed idea here [essentially in Lord Palmerston’s foreign office] is, that Germany’s only object in separating Holstein with Schleswig from Denmark is to incorporate them with herself and then to draw them from the English into the Prussian commercial system. Denmark will then become a State too small to maintain a separate independence, and so the division of European territory and the balance of power will be disturbed. I grant that this is a tenable view, and that Germany (especially Prussia) has given cause for it; but assuredly this affords no ground for doing violence to law, to honour, to equity, to morality, in order to defeat an eventuality which has not been brought about by ambition or caprice, but by the nature of things” (Martin,
The Life of the Prince Consort
, vol. ii, p. 259). In 1864, three years after the prince’s death, Prussia under Bismarck crushed Austria and Denmark and absorbed not only Schleswig and Holstein but also Hanover, Hesse, Nassau, and Frankfurt am Main. In 1870 Prussia went to war with France and inflicted a stunning defeat. The Emperor Napoleon III was deposed and fled to England. Prussia, which by this point already had two-thirds of the population of Germany, acquired the French border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Suffice it to say that ambition and caprice, to say nothing of an obsession with military might, accounted far better for Prussia’s foreign affairs strategy than Prince Albert’s law, honor, equity, and morality.

265
Reports that the tsar of Russia
One ambassador claimed to have read the whole of
Clarissa—
then the longest novel in the English language—while waiting for Lord Palmerston.

266
While giving lip service
In 1848 a popular insurrection forced the Austrian emperor to agree formally to certain democratic reforms, including some form of elected assembly to which the executive arm of government would be responsible. The emperor, who believed that he was appointed by God to rule, never had any intention of respecting these agreements. By 1851, he felt strong enough to renounce them publicly, declaring, “Henceforth [Austrian] Ministers should be responsible solely to the Crown, as the center of all authority” (Martin,
Life of the Prince Consort
, vol. ii, p. 321).

267
“Osborne, 20
^th
August
Queen Victoria’s Early Letters
, ed. Raymond, pp. 147–148.

268
It begins: “I said to Lord
For the full text, ibid., pp. 148–150.

268
According to the memorandum
Frank Eyck,
The Prince Consort: A Political Biography
, p. 139. Eyck notes that Prince Albert also dug out the file of old grievances in 1848, when his wife’s half brother, Charles Leiningen, disagreed with him over German politics. He accused Leiningen of having “intrigued with Sir John Conroy against Queen Victoria before her accession” (Eyck, p. 92). This was both unfair and irrelevant.

269
In August 1850, the Queen specified
Queen Victoria’s Early Letters
, ed. Raymond, pp. 172–173.

270
Victoria wrote to her uncle Leopold
Queen Victoria’s Early Letters
, ed. Raymond, p. 188. Prince Albert in a January 1852 letter to Prince William, the de facto ruler of Prussia, was smugly pleased that Palmerston’s affronts to Austria and support of Hungary were at an end: “Since then he has himself made it easy for his colleagues by suddenly becoming Louis Napoleon’s accomplice. That was too much of a good thing, and the pitcher broke at last after too many journeys to the well. There is no doubt that now he is thinking solely of revenge, but I think him less dangerous in opposition than he would be in power, for there are not at his disposal those vast possibilities of doing harm, which the Foreign Office gave him”
(Letters of the Prince Consort
, ed. Jagow, p. 181).

270
But once a respected statesman
Lord Palmerston wrote: “The real ground for my dismissal [in 1851] was a weak truckling to the hostile intrigues of the Orléans family, Austria, Russia, Saxony, and Bavaria and in some degree the present Prussian government. All these parties found their respective views and systems of policy thwarted by the course pursued by the British Government, and they thought that if they could move the Minister they would change the policy. They had for a long time past effectually poisoned the mind of the Queen and Prince against me, and John Russell giving way, rather encouraged than discountenanced the desire of the Queen to remove me from the Foreign Office.” Quoted in vol. ii of Martin’s
Life of the Prince Consort
, where Queen Victoria does her best to defend her dead husband against the charge that he unfairly conspired against Lord Palmerston as foreign secretary.

272
But he was not an aggressive
Trollope writes of Palmerston: “He could fight and would fight as long as he could stand; but as a conqueror he could be thoroughly generous” (p. 9).