Albert, Prince Consort

Albert was resented as a penniless German princeling for most of his life in England, reorganised the monarchy while holding no constitutional office at all, and died at forty-two leaving Victoria in mourning for the remaining thirty-nine years of her reign. He was the younger son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, educated at Brussels and Bonn, and married his first cousin Victoria in 1840, five months after she proposed to him as protocol required. Parliament voted him a smaller allowance than precedent suggested and refused him a peerage; he was not given the title Prince Consort until 1857. He took over the management of the royal household and estates, put Osborne and Balmoral on a sound footing, and made himself in practice the queen's private secretary, reading and drafting on every dispatch. His central conviction was that the crown should be visibly useful and scrupulously above party, and the modern shape of British constitutional monarchy owes more to him than to anyone. He conceived and drove the Great Exhibition of 1851, which drew six million visitors and turned a profit large enough to buy the South Kensington land on which the Victoria and Albert, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Royal Albert Hall now stand. He campaigned against the slave trade, chancellored Cambridge and reformed its curriculum, and in December 1861, already ill, redrafted a belligerent dispatch to Washington over the Trent affair in terms that let the Americans retreat without humiliation. He died of an abdominal illness days later, long recorded as typhoid and now disputed. Victoria wore black until she died. He designed a set of royal buildings himself, including much of Osborne House. Nine of his children and grandchildren married into European royal houses, which is why he is sometimes called the grandfather of Europe alongside Victoria.

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