I
The death of the Prince Consort was the central turning-point in the
history of Queen Victoria. She herself felt that her true life had
ceased with her husband's, and that the remainder of her days upon earth
was of a twilight nature--an epilogue to a drama that was done. Nor is
it possible that her biographer should escape a similar impression. For
him, too, there is a darkness over the latter half of that long career.
The first forty--two years of the Queen's life are illuminated by a
great and varied quantity of authentic information. With Albert's
death a veil descends. Only occasionally, at fitful and disconnected
intervals, does it lift for a moment or two; a few main outlines, a
few remarkable details may be discerned; the rest is all conjecture and
ambiguity. Thus, though the Queen survived her great bereavement for
almost as many years as she had lived before it, the chronicle of those
years can bear no proportion to the tale of her earlier life. We must be
content in our ignorance with a brief and summary relation.
The sudden removal of the Prince was not merely a matter of overwhelming
personal concern to Victoria; it was an event of national, of European
importance. He was only forty-two, and in the ordinary course of nature
he might have been expected to live at least thirty years longer. Had
he done so it can hardly be doubted that the whole development of the
English polity would have been changed. Already at the time of his death
he filled a unique place in English public life; already among the inner
circle of politicians he was accepted as a necessary and useful part of
the mechanism of the State. Lord Clarendon, for instance, spoke of his
death as "a national calamity of far greater importance than the public
dream of," and lamented the loss of his "sagacity and foresight," which,
he declared, would have been "more than ever valuable" in the event of
an American war. And, as time went on, the Prince's influence must have
enormously increased. For, in addition to his intellectual and moral
qualities, he enjoyed, by virtue of his position, one supreme advantage
which every other holder of high office in the country was without: he
was permanent. Politicians came and went, but the Prince was perpetually
installed at the centre of affairs. Who can doubt that, towards the end
of the century, such a man, grown grey in the service of the nation,
virtuous, intelligent, and with the unexampled experience of a whole
life-time of government, would have acquired an extraordinary prestige?
If, in his youth, he had been able to pit the Crown against the mighty
Palmerston and to come off with equal honours from the contest, of what
might he not have been capable in his old age? What Minister,
however able, however popular, could have withstood the wisdom, the
irreproachability, the vast prescriptive authority, of the venerable
Prince? It is easy to imagine how, under such a ruler, an attempt might
have been made to convert England into a State as exactly organised,
as elaborately trained, as efficiently equipped, and as autocratically
controlled, as Prussia herself. Then perhaps, eventually, under some
powerful leader--a Gladstone or a Bright--the democratic forces in the
country might have rallied together, and a struggle might have followed
in which the Monarchy would have been shaken to its foundations. Or, on
the other hand, Disraeli's hypothetical prophecy might have come true.
"With Prince Albert," he said, "we have buried our... sovereign. This
German Prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom
and energy such as none of our kings have ever shown. If he had outlived
some of our 'old stagers' he would have given us the blessings of
absolute government."
The English Constitution--that indescribable entity--is a living thing,
growing with the growth of men, and assuming ever-varying forms in
accordance with the subtle and complex laws of human character. It is
the child of wisdom and chance. The wise men of 1688 moulded it into the
shape we know, but the chance that George I could not speak English
gave it one of its essential peculiarities--the system of a Cabinet
independent of the Crown and subordinate to the Prime Minister. The
wisdom of Lord Grey saved it from petrifaction and destruction, and
set it upon the path of Democracy. Then chance intervened once more; a
female sovereign happened to marry an able and pertinacious man; and
it seemed likely that an element which had been quiescent within it for
years--the element of irresponsible administrative power--was about
to become its predominant characteristic and to change completely the
direction of its growth. But what chance gave chance took away. The
Consort perished in his prime; and the English Constitution, dropping
the dead limb with hardly a tremor, continued its mysterious life as if
he had never been.
One human being, and one alone, felt the full force of what had
happened. The Baron, by his fireside at Coburg, suddenly saw the
tremendous fabric of his creation crash down into sheer and irremediable
ruin. Albert was gone, and he had lived in vain. Even his blackest
hypochondria had never envisioned quite so miserable a catastrophe.
Victoria wrote to him, visited him, tried to console him by declaring
with passionate conviction that she would carry on her husband's work.
He smiled a sad smile and looked into the fire. Then he murmured that
he was going where Albert was--that he would not be long. He shrank into
himself. His children clustered round him and did their best to comfort
him, but it was useless: the Baron's heart was broken. He lingered for
eighteen months, and then, with his pupil, explored the shadow and the
dust.
II
With appalling suddenness Victoria had exchanged the serene radiance of
happiness for the utter darkness of woe. In the first dreadful moments
those about her had feared that she might lose her reason, but the iron
strain within her held firm, and in the intervals between the intense
paroxysms of grief it was observed that the Queen was calm. She
remembered, too, that Albert had always disapproved of exaggerated
manifestations of feeling, and her one remaining desire was to do
nothing but what he would have wished. Yet there were moments when
her royal anguish would brook no restraints. One day she sent for the
Duchess of Sutherland, and, leading her to the Prince's room, fell
prostrate before his clothes in a flood of weeping, while she adjured
the Duchess to tell her whether the beauty of Albert's character had
ever been surpassed. At other times a feeling akin to indignation swept
over her. "The poor fatherless baby of eight months," she wrote to the
King of the Belgians, "is now the utterly heartbroken and crushed widow
of forty-two! My LIFE as a HAPPY one is ENDED! The world is gone for
ME!... Oh! to be cut off in the prime of life--to see our pure, happy,
quiet, domestic life, which ALONE enabled me to bear my MUCH disliked
position, CUT OFF at forty-two--when I HAD hoped with such instinctive
certainty that God never WOULD part us, and would let us grow old
together (though HE always talked of the shortness of life)--is TOO
AWFUL, too cruel!" The tone of outraged Majesty seems to be discernible.
Did she wonder in her heart of hearts how the Deity could have dared?
But all other emotions gave way before her overmastering determination
to continue, absolutely unchanged, and for the rest of her life on
earth, her reverence, her obedience, her idolatry. "I am anxious to
repeat ONE thing," she told her uncle, "and THAT ONE is my firm resolve,
my IRREVOCABLE DECISION, viz., that HIS wishes--HIS plans--about
everything, HIS views about EVERY thing are to be MY LAW! And NO HUMAN
POWER will make me swerve from WHAT HE decided and wished." She grew
fierce, she grew furious, at the thought of any possible intrusion
between her and her desire. Her uncle was coming to visit her, and it
flashed upon her that HE might try to interfere with her and seek
to "rule the roost" as of old. She would give him a hint. "I am ALSO
DETERMINED," she wrote, "that NO ONE person--may HE be ever so good,
ever so devoted among my servants--is to lead or guide or dictate TO ME.
I know HOW he would disapprove it... Though miserably weak and utterly
shattered, my spirit rises when I think ANY wish or plan of his is to
be touched or changed, or I am to be MADE TO DO anything." She ended her
letter in grief and affection. She was, she said, his "ever wretched but
devoted child, Victoria R." And then she looked at the date: it was the
24th of December. An agonising pang assailed her, and she dashed down a
postcript--"What a Xmas! I won't think of it."
At first, in the tumult of her distresses, she declared that she could
not see her Ministers, and the Princess Alice, assisted by Sir Charles
Phipps, the keeper of the Privy Purse, performed, to the best of her
ability, the functions of an intermediary. After a few weeks, however,
the Cabinet, through Lord John Russell, ventured to warn the Queen that
this could not continue. She realised that they were right: Albert would
have agreed with them; and so she sent for the Prime Minister. But when
Lord Palmerston arrived at Osborne, in the pink of health, brisk, with
his whiskers freshly dyed, and dressed in a brown overcoat, light grey
trousers, green gloves, and blue studs, he did not create a very good
impression.
Nevertheless, she had grown attached to her old enemy, and the thought
of a political change filled her with agitated apprehensions. The
Government, she knew, might fall at any moment; she felt she could not
face such an eventuality; and therefore, six months after the death of
the Prince, she took the unprecedented step of sending a private message
to Lord Derby, the leader of the Opposition, to tell him that she was
not in a fit state of mind or body to undergo the anxiety of a change of
Government, and that if he turned the present Ministers out of office it
would be at the risk of sacrificing her life--or her reason. When this
message reached Lord Derby he was considerably surprised. "Dear me!" was
his cynical comment. "I didn't think she was so fond of them as THAT."
Though the violence of her perturbations gradually subsided, her
cheerfulness did not return. For months, for years, she continued in
settled gloom. Her life became one of almost complete seclusion. Arrayed
in thickest crepe, she passed dolefully from Windsor to Osborne, from
Osborne to Balmoral. Rarely visiting the capital, refusing to take any
part in the ceremonies of state, shutting herself off from the slightest
intercourse with society, she became almost as unknown to her subjects
as some potentate of the East. They might murmur, but they did not
understand. What had she to do with empty shows and vain enjoyments? No!
She was absorbed by very different preoccupations. She was the devoted
guardian of a sacred trust. Her place was in the inmost shrine of the
house of mourning--where she alone had the right to enter, where she
could feel the effluence of a mysterious presence, and interpret,
however faintly and feebly, the promptings of a still living soul. That,
and that only was her glorious, her terrible duty. For terrible indeed
it was. As the years passed her depression seemed to deepen and her
loneliness to grow more intense. "I am on a dreary sad pinnacle of
solitary grandeur," she said. Again and again she felt that she could
bear her situation no longer--that she would sink under the strain. And
then, instantly, that Voice spoke: and she braced herself once more to
perform, with minute conscientiousness, her grim and holy task.
Above all else, what she had to do was to make her own the
master-impulse of Albert's life--she must work, as he had worked, in the
service of the country. That vast burden of toil which he had taken upon
his shoulders it was now for her to bear. She assumed the gigantic
load; and naturally she staggered under it. While he had lived, she had
worked, indeed, with regularity and conscientiousness; but it was work
made easy, made delicious, by his care, his forethought, his advice,
and his infallibility. The mere sound of his voice, asking her to sign
a paper, had thrilled her; in such a presence she could have laboured
gladly for ever. But now there was a hideous change. Now there were no
neat piles and docketings under the green lamp; now there were no simple
explanations of difficult matters; now there was nobody to tell her what
was right and what was wrong. She had her secretaries, no doubt: there
were Sir Charles Phipps, and General Grey, and Sir Thomas Biddulph; and
they did their best. But they were mere subordinates: the whole weight
of initiative and responsibility rested upon her alone. For so it had to
be. "I am DETERMINED"--had she not declared it?--"that NO ONE person is
to lead or guide or dictate to ME;" anything else would be a betrayal of
her trust. She would follow the Prince in all things. He had refused to
delegate authority; he had examined into every detail with his own eyes;
he had made it a rule never to sign a paper without having first, not
merely read it, but made notes on it too. She would do the same. She
sat from morning till night surrounded by huge heaps of despatch--boxes,
reading and writing at her desk--at her desk, alas! which stood alone
now in the room.
Within two years of Albert's death a violent disturbance in foreign
politics put Victoria's faithfulness to a crucial test. The fearful
Schleswig-Holstein dispute, which had been smouldering for more than a
decade, showed signs of bursting out into conflagration. The complexity
of the questions at issue was indescribable. "Only three people,"
said Palmerston, "have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein
business--the Prince Consort, who is dead--a German professor, who
has gone mad--and I, who have forgotten all about it." But, though the
Prince might be dead, had he not left a vicegerent behind him?
Victoria threw herself into the seething embroilment with the vigour of
inspiration. She devoted hours daily to the study of the affair in all
its windings; but she had a clue through the labyrinth: whenever the
question had been discussed, Albert, she recollected it perfectly, had
always taken the side of Prussia. Her course was clear. She became an
ardent champion of the Prussian point of view. It was a legacy from the
Prince, she said. She did not realise that the Prussia of the Prince's
day was dead, and that a new Prussia, the Prussia of Bismarck, was born.
Perhaps Palmerston, with his queer prescience, instinctively apprehended
the new danger; at any rate, he and Lord John were agreed upon the
necessity of supporting Denmark against Prussia's claims. But opinion
was sharply divided, not only in the country but in the Cabinet. For
eighteen months the controversy raged; while the Queen, with persistent
vehemence, opposed the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. When at
last the final crisis arose--when it seemed possible that England would
join forces with Denmark in a war against Prussia--Victoria's agitation
grew febrile in its intensity. Towards her German relatives she
preserved a discreet appearance of impartiality; but she poured out
upon her Ministers a flood of appeals, protests, and expostulations. She
invoked the sacred cause of Peace. "The only chance of preserving peace
for Europe," she wrote, "is by not assisting Denmark, who has brought
this entirely upon herself. The Queen suffers much, and her nerves
are more and more totally shattered... But though all this anxiety is
wearing her out, it will not shake her firm purpose of resisting any
attempt to involve this country in a mad and useless combat." She was,
she declared, "prepared to make a stand," even if the resignation of the
Foreign Secretary should follow. "The Queen," she told Lord Granville,
"is completely exhausted by the anxiety and suspense, and misses her
beloved husband's help, advice, support, and love in an overwhelming
manner." She was so worn out by her efforts for peace that she could
"hardly hold up her head or hold her pen." England did not go to war,
and Denmark was left to her fate; but how far the attitude of the Queen
contributed to this result it is impossible, with our present knowledge,
to say. On the whole, however, it seems probable that the determining
factor in the situation was the powerful peace party in the Cabinet
rather than the imperious and pathetic pressure of Victoria.
It is, at any rate, certain that the Queen's enthusiasm for the sacred
cause of peace was short-lived. Within a few months her mind had
completely altered. Her eyes were opened to the true nature of Prussia,
whose designs upon Austria were about to culminate in the Seven Weeks'
War. Veering precipitately from one extreme to the other, she now urged
her Ministers to interfere by force of arms in support of Austria. But
she urged in vain.
Her political activity, no more than her social seclusion, was approved
by the public. As the years passed, and the royal mourning remained
as unrelieved as ever, the animadversions grew more general and more
severe. It was observed that the Queen's protracted privacy not only
cast a gloom over high society, not only deprived the populace of its
pageantry, but also exercised a highly deleterious effect upon the
dressmaking, millinery, and hosiery trades. This latter consideration
carried great weight. At last, early in 1864, the rumour spread that Her
Majesty was about to go out of mourning, and there was much rejoicing
in the newspapers; but unfortunately it turned out that the rumour was
quite without foundation. Victoria, with her own hand, wrote a letter
to The Times to say so. "This idea," she declared, "cannot be too
explicitly contradicted. The Queen," the letter continued, "heartily
appreciates the desire of her subjects to see her, and whatever she CAN
do to gratify them in this loyal and affectionate wish, she WILL do...
But there are other and higher duties than those of mere representation
which are now thrown upon the Queen, alone and unassisted--duties which
she cannot neglect without injury to the public service, which weigh
unceasingly upon her, overwhelming her with work and anxiety." The
justification might have been considered more cogent had it not been
known that those "other and higher duties" emphasised by the Queen
consisted for the most part of an attempt to counteract the
foreign policy of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell. A large
section--perhaps a majority--of the nation were violent partisans of
Denmark in the Schleswig-Holstein quarrel; and Victoria's support of
Prussia was widely denounced. A wave of unpopularity, which reminded
old observers of the period preceding the Queen's marriage more than
twenty-five years before, was beginning to rise. The press was rude;
Lord Ellenborough attacked the Queen in the House of Lords; there
were curious whispers in high quarters that she had had thoughts of
abdicating--whispers followed by regrets that she had not done so.
Victoria, outraged and injured, felt that she was misunderstood. She
was profoundly unhappy. After Lord Ellenborough's speech, General Grey
declared that he "had never seen the Queen so completely upset."
"Oh, how fearful it is," she herself wrote to Lord Granville, "to be
suspected--uncheered--unguided and unadvised--and how alone the poor
Queen feels!" Nevertheless, suffer as she might, she was as resolute
as ever; she would not move by a hair's breadth from the course that a
supreme obligation marked out for her; she would be faithful to the end.
And so, when Schleswig-Holstein was forgotten, and even the image of the
Prince had begun to grow dim in the fickle memories of men, the solitary
watcher remained immutably concentrated at her peculiar task. The
world's hostility, steadily increasing, was confronted and outfaced by
the impenetrable weeds of Victoria. Would the world never understand?
It was not mere sorrow that kept her so strangely sequestered; it was
devotion, it was self-immolation; it was the laborious legacy of love.
Unceasingly the pen moved over the black-edged paper. The flesh might be
weak, but that vast burden must be borne. And fortunately, if the world
would not understand, there were faithful friends who did. There was
Lord Granville, and there was kind Mr. Theodore Martin. Perhaps Mr.
Martin, who was so clever, would find means to make people realise the
facts. She would send him a letter, pointing out her arduous labours and
the difficulties under which she struggled, and then he might write an
article for one of the magazines. "It is not," she told him in 1863,
"the Queen's SORROW that keeps her secluded. It is her OVERWHELMING WORK
and her health, which is greatly shaken by her sorrow, and the totally
overwhelming amount of work and responsibility--work which she feels
really wears her out. Alice Helps was wonderfully struck at the Queen's
room; and if Mrs. Martin will look at it, she can tell Mr. Martin what
surrounds her. From the hour she gets out of bed till she gets into it
again there is work, work, work,--letter-boxes, questions, etc., which
are dreadfully exhausting--and if she had not comparative rest and
quiet in the evening she would most likely not be ALIVE. Her brain is
constantly overtaxed." It was too true.
III
To carry on Albert's work--that was her first duty; but there was
another, second only to that, and yet nearer, if possible, to her
heart--to impress the true nature of his genius and character upon the
minds of her subjects. She realised that during his life he had not been
properly appreciated; the full extent of his powers, the supreme quality
of his goodness, had been necessarily concealed; but death had removed
the need of barriers, and now her husband, in his magnificent entirety,
should stand revealed to all. She set to work methodically. She directed
Sir Arthur Helps to bring out a collection of the Prince's speeches and
addresses, and the weighty tome appeared in 1862. Then she commanded
General Grey to write an account of the Prince's early years--from his
birth to his marriage; she herself laid down the design of the book,
contributed a number of confidential documents, and added numerous
notes; General Grey obeyed, and the work was completed in 1866. But
the principal part of the story was still untold, and Mr. Martin
was forthwith instructed to write a complete biography of the Prince
Consort. Mr. Martin laboured for fourteen years. The mass of material
with which he had to deal was almost incredible, but he was extremely
industrious, and he enjoyed throughout the gracious assistance of Her
Majesty. The first bulky volume was published in 1874; four others
slowly followed; so that it was not until 1880 that the monumental work
was finished.
Mr. Martin was rewarded by a knighthood; and yet it was sadly evident
that neither Sir Theodore nor his predecessors had achieved the
purpose which the Queen had in view. Perhaps she was unfortunate in her
coadjutors, but, in reality, the responsibility for the failure must lie
with Victoria herself. Sir Theodore and the others faithfully carried
out the task which she had set them--faithfully put before the public
the very image of Albert that filled her own mind. The fatal drawback
was that the public did not find that image attractive. Victoria's
emotional nature, far more remarkable for vigour than for subtlety,
rejecting utterly the qualifications which perspicuity, or humour,
might suggest, could be satisfied with nothing but the absolute and the
categorical. When she disliked she did so with an unequivocal emphasis
which swept the object of her repugnance at once and finally outside
the pale of consideration; and her feelings of affection were equally
unmitigated. In the case of Albert her passion for superlatives
reached its height. To have conceived of him as anything short of
perfect--perfect in virtue, in wisdom, in beauty, in all the glories and
graces of man--would have been an unthinkable blasphemy: perfect he
was, and perfect he must be shown to have been. And so, Sir Arthur, Sir
Theodore, and the General painted him. In the circumstances, and under
such supervision, to have done anything else would have required talents
considerably more distinguished than any that those gentlemen possessed.
But that was not all. By a curious mischance Victoria was also able to
press into her service another writer, the distinction of whose talents
was this time beyond a doubt. The Poet Laureate, adopting, either from
complaisance or conviction, the tone of his sovereign, joined in the
chorus, and endowed the royal formula with the magical resonance of
verse. This settled the matter. Henceforward it was impossible to forget
that Albert had worn the white flower of a blameless life.
The result was doubly unfortunate. Victoria, disappointed and chagrined,
bore a grudge against her people for their refusal, in spite of all her
efforts, to rate her husband at his true worth. She did not understand
that the picture of an embodied perfection is distasteful to the
majority of mankind. The cause of this is not so much an envy of the
perfect being as a suspicion that he must be inhuman; and thus it
happened that the public, when it saw displayed for its admiration a
figure resembling the sugary hero of a moral story-book rather than a
fellow man of flesh and blood, turned away with a shrug, a smile, and
a flippant ejaculation. But in this the public was the loser as well as
Victoria. For in truth Albert was a far more interesting personage than
the public dreamed. By a curious irony an impeccable waxwork had been
fixed by the Queen's love in the popular imagination, while the creature
whom it represented--the real creature, so full of energy and stress
and torment, so mysterious and so unhappy, and so fallible and so very
human--had altogether disappeared.
IV
Words and books may be ambiguous memorials; but who can misinterpret the
visible solidity of bronze and stone? At Frogmore, near Windsor, where
her mother was buried, Victoria constructed, at the cost of L200,000, a
vast and elaborate mausoleum for herself and her husband. But that was
a private and domestic monument, and the Queen desired that wherever
her subjects might be gathered together they should be reminded of the
Prince. Her desire was gratified; all over the country--at Aberdeen, at
Perth, and at Wolverhampton--statues of the Prince were erected; and
the Queen, making an exception to her rule of retirement, unveiled them
herself. Nor did the capital lag behind. A month after the Prince's
death a meeting was called together at the Mansion House to discuss
schemes for honouring his memory. Opinions, however, were divided upon
the subject. Was a statue or an institution to be preferred? Meanwhile a
subscription was opened; an influential committee was appointed, and the
Queen was consulted as to her wishes in the matter. Her Majesty replied
that she would prefer a granite obelisk, with sculptures at the base, to
an institution. But the committee hesitated: an obelisk, to be worthy
of the name, must clearly be a monolith; and where was the quarry in
England capable of furnishing a granite block of the required size? It
was true that there was granite in Russian Finland; but the committee
were advised that it was not adapted to resist exposure to the open air.
On the whole, therefore, they suggested that a Memorial Hall should be
erected, together with a statue of the Prince. Her Majesty assented; but
then another difficulty arose. It was found that not more than L60,000
had been subscribed--a sum insufficient to defray the double expense.
The Hall, therefore, was abandoned; a statue alone was to be erected;
and certain eminent architects were asked to prepare designs. Eventually
the committee had at their disposal a total sum of L120,000, since
the public subscribed another L10,000, while L50,000 was voted by
Parliament. Some years later a joint stock company was formed and built,
as a private speculation, the Albert Hall.
The architect whose design was selected, both by the committee and by
the Queen, was Mr. Gilbert Scott, whose industry, conscientiousness,
and genuine piety had brought him to the head of his profession.
His lifelong zeal for the Gothic style having given him a special
prominence, his handiwork was strikingly visible, not only in a
multitude of original buildings, but in most of the cathedrals of
England. Protests, indeed, were occasionally raised against his
renovations; but Mr. Scott replied with such vigour and unction in
articles and pamphlets that not a Dean was unconvinced, and he was
permitted to continue his labours without interruption. On one occasion,
however, his devotion to Gothic had placed him in an unpleasant
situation. The Government offices in Whitehall were to be rebuilt; Mr.
Scott competed, and his designs were successful. Naturally, they were in
the Gothic style, combining "a certain squareness and horizontality of
outline" with pillar-mullions, gables, high-pitched roofs, and dormers;
and the drawings, as Mr. Scott himself observed, "were, perhaps, the
best ever sent in to a competition, or nearly so." After the usual
difficulties and delays the work was at last to be put in hand, when
there was a change of Government and Lord Palmerston became Prime
Minister. Lord Palmerston at once sent for Mr. Scott. "Well, Mr. Scott,"
he said, in his jaunty way, "I can't have anything to do with this
Gothic style. I must insist on your making a design in the Italian
manner, which I am sure you can do very cleverly." Mr. Scott was
appalled; the style of the Italian renaissance was not only unsightly,
it was positively immoral, and he sternly refused to have anything to do
with it. Thereupon Lord Palmerston assumed a fatherly tone. "Quite true;
a Gothic architect can't be expected to put up a Classical building;
I must find someone else." This was intolerable, and Mr. Scott, on his
return home, addressed to the Prime Minister a strongly-worded letter,
in which he dwelt upon his position as an architect, upon his having won
two European competitions, his being an A.R.A., a gold medallist of the
Institute, and a lecturer on architecture at the Royal Academy; but it
was useless--Lord Palmerston did not even reply. It then occurred to
Mr. Scott that, by a judicious mixture, he might, while preserving the
essential character of the Gothic, produce a design which would give a
superficial impression of the Classical style. He did so, but no effect
was produced upon Lord Palmerston. The new design, he said, was "neither
one thing nor 'tother--a regular mongrel affair--and he would have
nothing to do with it either." After that Mr. Scott found it necessary
to recruit for two months at Scarborough, "with a course of quinine." He
recovered his tone at last, but only at the cost of his convictions. For
the sake of his family he felt that it was his unfortunate duty to obey
the Prime Minister; and, shuddering with horror, he constructed the
Government offices in a strictly Renaissance style.
Shortly afterwards Mr. Scott found some consolation in building the St.
Pancras Hotel in a style of his own.
And now another and yet more satisfactory task was his. "My idea in
designing the Memorial," he wrote, "was to erect a kind of ciborium to
protect a statue of the Prince; and its special characteristic was
that the ciborium was designed in some degree on the principles of the
ancient shrines. These shrines were models of imaginary buildings, such
as had never in reality been erected; and my idea was to realise one of
these imaginary structures with its precious materials, its inlaying,
its enamels, etc. etc." His idea was particularly appropriate since
it chanced that a similar conception, though in the reverse order of
magnitude, had occurred to the Prince himself, who had designed and
executed several silver cruet-stands upon the same model. At the Queen's
request a site was chosen in Kensington Gardens as near as possible
to that of the Great Exhibition; and in May, 1864, the first sod was
turned. The work was long, complicated, and difficult; a great number
of workmen were employed, besides several subsidiary sculptors and
metal--workers under Mr. Scott's direction, while at every stage
sketches and models were submitted to Her Majesty, who criticised all
the details with minute care, and constantly suggested improvements. The
frieze, which encircled the base of the monument, was in itself a very
serious piece of work. "This," said Mr. Scott, "taken as a whole, is
perhaps one of the most laborious works of sculpture ever undertaken,
consisting, as it does, of a continuous range of figure-sculpture of the
most elaborate description, in the highest alto-relievo of life-size, of
more than 200 feet in length, containing about 170 figures, and executed
in the hardest marble which could be procured." After three years of
toil the memorial was still far from completion, and Mr. Scott thought
it advisable to give a dinner to the workmen, "as a substantial
recognition of his appreciation of their skill and energy." "Two long
tables," we are told, "constructed of scaffold planks, were arranged in
the workshops, and covered with newspapers, for want of table-cloths.
Upwards of eighty men sat down. Beef and mutton, plum pudding and cheese
were supplied in abundance, and each man who desired it had three pints
of beer, gingerbeer and lemonade being provided for the teetotalers, who
formed a very considerable proportion... Several toasts were given and
many of the workmen spoke, almost all of them commencing by 'Thanking
God that they enjoyed good health;' some alluded to the temperance that
prevailed amongst them, others observed how little swearing was ever
heard, whilst all said how pleased and proud they were to be engaged on
so great a work."
Gradually the edifice approached completion. The one hundred and
seventieth life-size figure in the frieze was chiselled, the granite
pillars arose, the mosaics were inserted in the allegorical pediments,
the four colossal statues representing the greater Christian virtues,
the four other colossal statues representing the greater moral virtues,
were hoisted into their positions, the eight bronzes representing the
greater sciences--Astronomy, Chemistry, Geology, Geometry, Rhetoric,
Medicine, Philosophy, and Physiology--were fixed on their glittering
pinnacles, high in air. The statue of Physiology was particularly
admired. "On her left arm," the official description informs us, "she
bears a new-born infant, as a representation of the development of the
highest and most perfect of physiological forms; her hand points
towards a microscope, the instrument which lends its assistance for the
investigation of the minuter forms of animal and vegetable organisms."
At last the gilded cross crowned the dwindling galaxies of superimposed
angels, the four continents in white marble stood at the four corners
of the base, and, seven years after its inception, in July, 1872, the
monument was thrown open to the public.
But four more years were to elapse before the central figure was ready
to be placed under its starry canopy. It was designed by Mr. Foley,
though in one particular the sculptor's freedom was restricted by Mr.
Scott. "I have chosen the sitting posture," Mr. Scott said, "as best
conveying the idea of dignity befitting a royal personage." Mr. Foley
ably carried out the conception of his principal. "In the attitude
and expression," he said, "the aim has been, with the individuality of
portraiture, to embody rank, character, and enlightenment, and to convey
a sense of that responsive intelligence indicating an active, rather
than a passive, interest in those pursuits of civilisation illustrated
in the surrounding figures, groups, and relievos... To identify the
figure with one of the most memorable undertakings of the public life
of the Prince--the International Exhibition of 1851--a catalogue of the
works collected in that first gathering of the industry of all nations,
is placed in the right hand." The statue was of bronze gilt and weighed
nearly ten tons. It was rightly supposed that the simple word "Albert,"
cast on the base, would be a sufficient means of identification.