AN Wilson article
IIn two days’ time we shall be celebrating the 200th birthday of Prince Albert, the man who invented the modern constitutional monarchy. Most of the cheers raised will be for his cultural legacy, his championing of the Great Exhibition of 1851, his support for museums and the arts. Likewise, many will praise the delicacy of his political legacy, the subtle way in which he, Queen Victoria and Robert Peel reshaped modern constitutional monarchy to make it compatible with the growth of parliamentary, representative government.
In the royal family itself, however, there is one legacy from the upright, saintly prince which they will view as more of a burden than a privilege. That is, his insistence that the royals should be models of domestic virtue and sexual continence.
Albert, the child of parents whose divorce had amused and entertained the press for months during his boyhood, married Victoria in 1840. She was the daughter, and niece, of paunchy old roués, all of whom had mistresses. Together, V & A decided to be monogamous, and never to stray from the marriage bed.
When their son Bertie, the Prince of Wales, was found to have slept with an actress called Nelly Clifden, Albert — by then himself, aged 42, a dying man — reacted as if the skies had fallen.
“If you try to deny it, she can drag you into a court of law to force you to avow it.” He reminded the prince of “the grief which you have caused us by the crime [sic] committed towards us and the country of which you have been invested with rank and wealth and which sees its own honour defiled in that of its royal family”.
Did any such words fall from our sovereign’s lips at the breakfast table at Balmoral when the sabbath-day press informed Her Majesty of Prince Andrew’s close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Virginia Roberts? How often, as they cringed at press exposure of the Prince of Wales’s taped phone calls with Mrs Parker Bowles (as she then was), of the Duchess of York’s toe-sucking saga, or Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, having a mysterious feud with her Norfolk neighbour the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, must modern royals have wished that Prince Albert had not been such a prig, and forced upon them the difficult legacy of being maritally well-behaved.
What he would have made of the Duke of Cambridge’s assertion that he would be “absolutely fine” if one of his sons was gay, or the Duchess of Sussex’s reported plans to raise her child Archie as gender-fluid, we can only speculate. Likewise, we can merely imagine how high Albert’s eyebrows would have shot up his balding skull at the surname now bestowed on his family: “Mountbatten-Windsor”. What kind of a name is that?
When I had finished my book on Prince Albert, I gave it the subtitle The Man Who Saved the Monarchy, but I am now beginning to wonder whether that phrase is right. Did he set the bar so high that, in our generation, we’ll watch them fall like ninepins?
Supposing he was right, and a monarchy can only really survive if the royal family have a higher standard of personal morality than the rest of us? In the century after his death, the press connived in this idea by drawing a veil over the shenanigans of royalty.
Gossips all knew about the antics of “Edward the Caresser”, but the newspapers did not print stories about the King. Only very late in the Abdication crisis did the papers even mention King Edward VIII’s wish to marry an American divorcee. As for Prince Philip and the present Queen, the press convention is that they have never put a foot wrong.
For the generations that come afterwards, however, that convention no longer applies, and even if newspapers keep quiet about Prince Andrew and the other royals, social media will join the dots.
Since George V allowed his shy son Bertie, the future George VI, to “marry out” — choosing the popular Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon to be Duchess of York, and later the Queen — they have broken the Albertian convention that future monarchs should only come from a limited pool of European royalty.
The “Queen Mum” might have been popular in some quarters, but by affecting to pretend she was royal, the gate was opened for the likes of Duchess Fergiana, Meghan Markle and Duchess Kate. Since giving themselves the absurd invented name of “Mountbatten-Windsor”, they have proclaimed that they have surnames, like commoners.
They are not really royal, not in an Albertian sense. Not in the sense of a special caste, set aside for a peculiar role, where more is expected of them than, perhaps, any family can quite provide.
Queen Victoria used to refer to Prince Albert, even before he died, as her “angel”, and an angel, in many ways, he was. In his huge range of talents and abilities, in his devotion to duty, both in private and public, he seemed to be something rather above ordinary human nature.
Yes, one reason for this was that he was as close to being a genius as the British royal family has ever had. But he was helped by the fact that everyone in those days knew what being royal was. It was coming from that inter-related European gene pool, from which he and Victoria descended and into which they married their children.
If his shade returned to the Windsor Castle where he breathed his last in 1861, I wonder if he would regard the present inhabitants as being royal, in his sense, at all.