Prince Albert - Legacy

Legacy

The Queen's grief was overwhelming, and the tepid feelings the public had felt previously for Albert were replaced by sympathy. Victoria wore black in mourning for the rest of her long life, and Albert's rooms in all his houses were kept as they had been, even with hot water brought in the morning, and linen and towels changed daily. Such practices were not uncommon in the houses of the very rich. Victoria withdrew from public life and her seclusion eroded some of Albert's work in attempting to re-model the monarchy as a national institution setting a moral, if not political, example. Albert is credited with introducing the principle that the British royal family should remain above politics. Before his marriage to Victoria, she supported the Whigs; for example, early in her reign Victoria managed to thwart the formation of a Tory government by Sir Robert Peel by refusing to accept substitutions which Peel wanted to make among her ladies-in-waiting.

Albert's body was temporarily entombed in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, until a year after his death his remains were deposited at Frogmore Mausoleum, which remained incomplete until 1871. The sarcophagus, in which both he and the Queen were eventually laid, was carved from the largest block of granite that had ever been quarried in Britain. Despite Albert's request that no effigies of him should be raised, many public monuments were erected all over the country, and across the British Empire. The most notable are the Royal Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial in London. The plethora of memorials erected to Albert became so great that Charles Dickens told a friend that he sought an "inaccessible cave" to escape from them.

All manner of objects are named after Prince Albert, from Lake Albert in Africa to the city of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, to the Albert Medal presented by the Royal Society of Arts. Four regiments of the British Army were named after him: 11th (Prince Albert's Own) Hussars; Prince Albert's Light Infantry; Prince Albert's Own Leicestershire Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry, and The Prince Consort's Own Rifle Brigade. He and Queen Victoria showed a keen interest in the establishment and development of Aldershot in Hampshire as a garrison town in the 1850s. They had a wooden Royal Pavilion built there in which they would often stay when attending reviews of the army. Albert established and endowed the Prince Consort's Library at Aldershot, which still exists today.

Biographies published after his death were typically heavy on eulogy. Theodore Martin's five-volume magnum opus was authorised and supervised by Queen Victoria, and her influence shows in its pages. Nevertheless, it is an accurate and exhaustive account. Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria (1921) was more critical, but it was discredited in part by mid-twentieth-century biographers such as Hector Bolitho and Roger Fulford, who (unlike Strachey) had access to Victoria's journal and letters. Popular myths about Prince Albert—such as the claim that he introduced Christmas trees to Britain—are dismissed by scholars. Recent biographers, such as Stanley Weintraub, portray Albert as a figure in a tragic romance, who died too soon and was mourned by his lover for a lifetime. In the 2009 movie The Young Victoria, Albert, played by Rupert Friend, is made into a heroic character; in the fictionalised depiction of the 1840 shooting, he is struck by a bullet—something that did not happen in real life.