The marriage of Victoria and Albert

10^th February 1840 was the wedding day of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a small principality in Germany. It was a rare thing in royal politics, namely a true love match in which dynastic considerations played an insignificant part – a union between Great Britain and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha made no difference to the balance of power in Europe, although the marriages of the couple’s children would prove to have extremely important outcomes.

Victoria had already been Queen for more than two years when she first met Albert in October 1839. She was instantly smitten by him and proposed marriage after only four days – royal protocol demanded that a queen had to propose to a mere prince and not the other way round.

A fruitful marriage

Albert may have had other motives than pure love – he was, after all, only second-in-line to a very small duchy – but, once married, he became as besotted with Victoria as she was with him. The couple were to have nine children in all, the first (Princess Victoria) being born barely nine months after the wedding and the last (Princess Beatrice) coming along in April 1857. Up to this point there were not many months in which Victoria was not pregnant.

Husband of a queen

Albert had assumed that he would play a larger role in government than Victoria was prepared to give him, and this led to tension between them in the early years of their marriage. He had to develop a different sort of role for himself in which he became a patron of the arts and industry, as typified by his sterling work in promoting the Great Exhibition of 1851. It is also thanks to Albert that a number of customs associated with the celebration of Christmas became established in Britain, such as the Christmas tree.

There is a story that demonstrates how Albert came to see himself as husband and consort to the Queen of England. Having been excluded from a state meeting he stormed off to his room and locked the door. Victoria went after him and knocked on the door. “Who’s there?” he asked.

“The Queen of England”, said the Queen of England. He refused to answer and the same happened again when Victoria knocked for a second time. However, at the third knock and “Who’s there” she replied “It is Victoria, your wife”. That is when he opened the door.

The death of Albert

The marriage ended in 1861 with Albert’s death from typhoid fever following several months of illness from a stomach disorder. He was only 42 years old. Victoria’s grief was profound and, most would say, excessive, in that she withdrew completely from public life for several years, being mocked in some quarters as “the widow at Windsor”. She lived for another 39 years but never again wore anything other than black in mourning for Albert.

© John Welford

Sir Robert Peel

Sir Robert Peel’s early years

Sir Robert Peel, the founder of the modern Conservative Party, was born on 5^th February 1788 at Bury in Lancashire but grew up at Drayton Manor near Tamworth in Staffordshire. This is known today as the site of a popular theme park, although the original house no longer exists. The estate was bought by Robert Peel’s father who had made a fortune in the textiles industry and used his money to buy his way into the social and political establishment.

Robert Peel benefitted from his father’s endeavours in several ways, not only inheriting his baronetcy in 1830 (hence the title Sir Robert Peel) but gaining an expensive education and his first seat in Parliament via a “pocket” Irish borough.

However, although his career was launched by family money and influence, Peel was undoubtedly a brilliant man (he gained a “double first” at Oxford) and a natural Parliamentarian.

He became Home Secretary in 1822 at the age of 34 and made a number of important and lasting reforms. These included reducing the number of offences that carried the death penalty and instituting a properly regulated police force for London. This latter initiative, which became the pattern for policing in many parts of the world as well as the whole of Great Britain, led to policemen becoming known as “bobbies” or “peelers” in his honour.

The Tamworth Manifesto

It was in 1834, in his “Tamworth Manifesto” that Peel laid down the general principles that underlie modern Conservatism. In effect, these liberalised the hard-line approach of the old Tory party that was based on aristocratic rule funded by “old money”. Peel represented a new class, namely that of people who had achieved success by their own efforts – albeit one generation removed in Peel’s own case. The basic tenet of the new Conservatism would be that change would be embraced when it was the best thing to do, but would not be undertaken merely for the sake of so doing.

Prime Minister

Peel became Prime Minister of a minority administration in 1835, but it did last long due to the opposition parties ganging up to defeat most of his proposed measures.

Peel’s main stint as Prime Minister began in 1841 and lasted until 1846. The outstanding success of this government was the Factory Act of 1844 which, among other things, restricted the hours that children could be made to work in factories. The idea that children as young as nine could still be forced to do dangerous work in cotton mills for nine hours a day might strike us today as barbaric, but it was a distinct improvement on what had gone before.

However, it was the repeal of the Corn Laws that showed Peel at his most courageous, because he knew that repeal was essential but would put his own political future in jeopardy. The Corn Laws were import tariffs that kept the price of imported corn artificially high and caused real distress to ordinary people who could not afford to buy enough bread to prevent hunger. This was especially true of Britain’s Irish subjects who had suffered the devastation of potato blight in the 1840s.

Peel eventually got the repeal through Parliament, but at the expense of splitting his party, which divided between “old Tory” and “new Conservative”, the latter being generally known at the time as “Peelites”.  Peel was forced to resign as Prime Minister in June 1846.

Sir Robert Peel died in June 1850 at the age of 62, following a fall from his horse in central London. He is remembered as one of the great peacetime Prime Ministers and also as one of the most influential.

© John Welford