WHAT ENGLAND OWES TO PRINCE ALBERT.

It will not be undesirable at this stage of our narrative to interpose a summary compendium of some indications of the manner in which Prince Albert, or the “Prince Consort,” as he was designated by Royal Letters Patent, after 1857, discharged the high, onerous, and important duties to which his position called him. If the conduct and career of a husband be an integral and large part of a woman’s life, it is tenfold more so in the case of a woman who is also a queen, and especially a queen-regnant in and by her own right. The large and enlarging breadth of mind which the Prince soon began to display; the abundant tenderness of heart, which found at once indication and exercise in the admirable and diverse modes in which he advanced all agencies of public utility and associated benevolence; the excellent mode in which, equally as a father and a husband, he evinced the warm glow of domestic virtue which animated his bosom, and the absolute and much-wanted scientific and artistic lessons which he taught more than any other man, during his life in England, to the somewhat uncouth people of whom he became a part—all these, and other elements of character and conduct, indirectly increased the growing esteem in which the Queen was held, on her own merits, by her people; for we might have had to look forward to a different national future, so far as a national future can be moulded in the sense of either making or marring, had the “father of our future kings” been other and lesser than what he was. Such a man as the Prince Consort must necessarily have wielded a very large and weighty influence upon the character of the royal lady whom he married. The history of her life, therefore, even if it were traced within narrower limits than those within whose compression our task must be discharged, would be insufficiently delineated without the introduction of such episodical but most relevant matter as that to which this chapter is briefly dedicated.

Almost the first task which the Prince Consort undertook when he came amongst us was to set himself to an assiduous study of our laws and institutions. He secured the services of a most competent instructor in themes so important to one who stood so near the throne, in the person of the late Mr. William Selwyn, Q.C. Mr. Selwyn was a sound jurist, and under his guidance the Prince read such works as Blackstone, De Lolme, Hallam, Bentham, and Mill. He proved himself an apt student, for he had the capacity for study eminently developed; and, besides, his position was one of singular difficulty and delicacy. He stood so near to the throne, amongst a people, too, traditionally jealous of aliens, and especially of aliens in high places, that any utterance he might be called upon to make would be considered as almost, if not quite, emanating from the throne itself. Although a certain cabinet intrigue, and one rare expression of his own—not so much unguarded in itself, as wanting in explicitness, and capable of a certain misconstruction—did, on two several occasions, provoke in certain quarters something approaching to national disfavour, he soon outlived the misconception; and the universal sentiment of the people came round to the conviction that the Prince was faithful and loyal to the constitution to which he had sworn fidelity; nay more, that he had fairly caught, apprehended, and absorbed into his being the very genius and spirit of the English race.

The first speech the Prince made in England was at an anti-slavery meeting; the last at the opening of an international statistical congress. The former was delivered during the first summer of his married life. It is so brief, and it gives, as it were, so thoroughly the key-note of his character, that our readers will thank us for giving it entire:—

We have already remarked the wide range of Prince Albert’s endeavours, study, devotion, and consequent usefulness. He presided at dinners of the Literary Fund, and of the Royal Academy; at the Trinity House most frequently, and at many agricultural meetings. Two of the best and most pregnant with good of his addresses, were delivered at the meetings of associations designed respectively for the better housing of labourers, and in behalf of the large and sorely tempted class of domestic servants. Now he presided at the Bicentenary of the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy; again at the two hundredth anniversary of one of our most illustrious regiments of Foot Guards. On art, as all were prepared to expect, he delivered ripe words of wisdom at the Royal Academy in Trafalgar Square, and in laying the foundation in the capital of his wife’s Stuart ancestors of a new National Gallery for her Scottish subjects. Against the expectation, and to the loudly expressed surprise of all, save those who knew him thoroughly, he made a most admirable survey of the sciences and their uses, at one of the last meetings held ere his death, of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Of art he was a judicious critic, as well as a munificent patron. It was at his special wish and option that the savant Lyon Playfair was made one of his Equerries; and that a residence in Hampton Court Palace was put at the disposal of Michael Faraday.

How much of mingled love for art and artists, and at the same time of criticism most kindly and sagacious, is to be found in these brief sentences, extracted from his great speech at the Royal Academy dinner:—

And again, as a companion and worthy picture—which is none the less, but all the more, worthy of hanging along with that we have just presented, that the great truth it teaches is presented with such lucid simplicity—take these sentences explanatory of the scope and end of such institutions as the British Association for the Advancement of Science, delivered by him as its President, at the 1859 Congress at Aberdeen:—

The Queen, who was staying at Balmoral, was very anxious about the manner in which her husband should pass the very severe ordeal of delivering an address to the assembled men of science. She recorded her high gratification at learning by telegram that “Albert’s reception was admirable, and that all was going off as well as possible. Thank God!” She invited the savans, to a fÊte at her Highland home; they accepted the invitation in great numbers; and “the philosophers,” of whom Her Majesty was not a little, and rather comically, afraid, were not only entertained with creature comforts, but the somewhat novel combination was presented of Owen, Brewster, Sabine, and Murchison, with their brethren of lesser renown, standing as spectators of contests of strength between athletes of the Grant, Farquharson, Duff, and other clans. Some of the more distinguished guests remained over night, and at dinner they rejoiced the Queen’s heart by “speaking in very high terms of my beloved Albert’s speech, the good it had done, and the general satisfaction it had caused.”

Probably the capacity of all others in which the Prince became most generally familiar to the nation, was that of a practical, improving, scientific agriculturist; and we use this word in its twofold sense, as embracing the growing of crops and the rearing of live stock. Almost from the outset of his career amongst us he commenced a series of scientific agricultural experiments on the farms in Windsor Park. He renovated the agriculture of the Park, as much as he confessedly did its landscape gardening. He became a constant and most successful exhibitor of live domestic edible animals at the great agricultural shows; his example in this field having been followed since his death, to the great gratification of the agricultural interest, both by his widow and his eldest son; and, especially in the case of Her Majesty, with marked success. As a high and eminent authority on the subject has admirably put it—

We must deny ourselves the pleasure of aught but passing reference to the admirable manner in which he discharged his academic duties as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, which post he held from 1845 till his death, and about which we say enough when we remind or inform the reader that it was such men as Professor Sedgwick, the Vice-chancellor, who spoke of the exercise of his duties in this capacity in terms of the highest honour and estimation. Similar were his services to such noble institutions as Eton and Wellington Colleges, in both of which he offered prizes expressly calculated to encourage the pursuit of those studies which had been, or were most likely to be, ignored in their several cases. Horticulture, art exhibitions, the National Portrait Gallery, the Society of Arts, societies for improving the general condition and the housing of the labouring classes, mechanics’ institutions—each of these constitutes a theme most pregnant and suggestive in connection with the Prince’s name and memory. But we can do no more than recite and dismiss the bald catalogue of topics. Reserving for the appropriate chronological occasion some brief remarks upon the character of the Prince as a private man, as contrasted with his aspects of character as a citizen and public benefactor, to which we have at present confined ourselves, we feel that we cannot better conclude than by condensing his opinions delivered in an address to the annual meeting of the Servants’ Provident Benevolent Society, in 1849, in which the whole plan and doctrine by which he believed all really useful associated benevolence ought to be regulated was summed up. His view was that no such organisation was founded upon a right principle which did not require every man, by personal exertion, and by his own choice, to work out his own happiness. Benevolence he held to be not really such unless it stimulated providence, self-denial, and perseverance. He used special words of warning against those so frequent lotteries of uncertain and precarious advantages—“really a species of gambling”—expensive convivial meetings, balloting for prizes, and electioneering contests on a small scale. “Let them always bear in mind,” he proceeded to say, “that their savings are capital, that capital will only return a certain interest, and that any advantage offered beyond that interest has to be purchased at a commensurate risk of the capital itself.”

Such is a view, but all too summary and inadequate, of some of the obligations which the English, as his fellow-citizens, owed to that Prince whose life was so intertwined with and influential on that of their Sovereign.