Prince Albert
A biography
Robert Rhodes James
Having read it
★★★★☆
A lot to take in (and a bit of a slog in places), but a surprisingly reasonable read. Prince Albert seemed to be ahead of his time in his approach and attitude that his contemporaries and the old institutions he was having to work with and alongside, didn’t seem to fully understand and even want to take on most times. Still, as recorded in this biography, he achieved quite a bit with his forward-thinking manner, for the benefit of people and English society, but it isn’t always appreciated.
A good passage
To attempt some appreciation of the passions aroused in the late autumn of 1845 and throughout 1846 it could be said that it were as though a Conservative leader in Britain or the United States in the 1980s suddenly pronounced himself in favour of massive nationalisation and penal taxation, or a Socialist leader in Office was dramatically converted to the total virtues of private enterprise and the iniquities of State management, coupled with the supreme virtues of the Christian reliance upon the all-dominant role of the individual in society.
A second good passage
The Cambridge university Act of 1856 was bitterly contested in the University, and it was not until 1871 the the pernicious religious tests – which had effectively debarred Roman Catholics, dissenters, and free-thinkers – were removed, and opened Cambridge to a new reservoir of talent for college Fellowships and University Professorships. It was Prince Albert’s successor as Chancellor, the Duke of Devonshire, who built and equipped the Cavendish Laboratory at his own expense. But Albert has led the way, and charted the new course that others followed. The impact that he made upon Cambridge, and indeed upon the concept of British universities, is literally incalculable.
A third good passage
No assessment of this remarkable individual, perhaps the most astute and ambitious politician of his age, can ignore the simple but vital facts that he was a highly intelligent and acutely sensitive man whose fate was that he had to deal with men of power whose knowledge, experience, and intelligence were often inferior to his, and who were, moreover, aliens. Perhaps he did not greatly like, or certainly did not always understand, the English. This amiable, brave, emotional, selfish, easy-going, and lackadaisical people, with their contempt and distrust for brains and their insularity, grated deeply upon a man of such width of comprehension and knowledge, vision, sensitivity, internationalism, and self-destructive capacity for work. It was this slow-dawning realisation of the gulf of attitudes which existed between himself and his wife’s country that inexorably created the melancholy and despair which made the end of his life so sadly shadowed.