Prince Albert
By AN Wilson
Atlantic, 430pp, £30/$35
Publishers love subtitles as a means of catching prospective buyers. So AN Wilson’s delightful biography of the Prince Consort has to have one: The Man Who Saved The Monarchy. It’s valid, because Wilson himself makes the claim, but it’s tiresome too, inviting the question “Really?”
The monarchy might have survived without him. Queen Victoria might have had a husband who was more popular than Albert, if admirable in different ways. Moreover, since Wilson rightly insists on the frustration Albert felt at being excluded from politics and being unable to play the part of an enlightened not-quite-despot – for which his mentor Baron Stockmar had prepared him – one might argue that it was the politicians, notably Palmerston, who denied him that role, thus ensuring the constitutional monarchy would survive in Britain because of its gradual exclusion from day-to-day politics.
