PRINCE CONSORT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 December 1938, Page 9

PRINCE CONSORT

REVEALING LETTERS. INFLUENCE ON POLITICS. If the Prince Consort has had to wait a long time —he died in December, 1861 —for justice to be done to his eminent abilities and political foresight, at any rate the recognition is now generous and complete, writes J. B. Firth in the “Daily Telegraph and Morning Post.” His political influence grew steadily from the time of his marriage to Queen Victoria until the day of his death. And justly, for he gauged the changed conditions of the time better than most of the leading men in English politics. The leading English statesmen disliked the presence and influence of Count Stockmar at Windsor, and were suspicious of the correspondence which the Prince carried on with his German relatives. They had no means, of course, of discovering its nature, but they made shrewd guesses which were not far out. We are now able to form a more exact estmate, for the Ducal archives at Coburg and the Brandenburg-Prus-sian archives at Charlottenburg have recently been investigated by Dr Kurt Jagow with valuable results which have taken shape in a volume, “Letters of the Prince Consort.” Most of the 350 letters and memoranda see the light for the first time. Among them are several letters from the Windsor archives, which the King has given permission to publish. They were written by the Prince to the Queen during their engagement, when he was enjoying a sunshine which was only clouded by the forboding that he would have to assert his independence very vigorously if he was to be master of the house as well as husband of the Queen. Dr Jagow’s editing is very well done. But he writes from a foreign angle of vision, and few English readers will be willing to allow his bold claim that “it is in essence due to the merits of the German Prince who for less than two decades sat upon, or rather stood by, the throne of England as the faithful guardian of the Crown, that today the British Monarchy is able to command the power, prestige, and internal strength required by the British Empire to hold together its self-governing nations and to take rank as a world Power.” That is Teutonic exaggeration; Dr Jagow’s suggestion that the British Constitutional Monarchy is really the handiwork of the Prince Consort is fantastic. The Prince himself, in a letter to Stockmar, written in 1854, deals very frankly with ihe unpleasant experiences through which he had passed:— ■ “The British nation slow of thought and uneducated, never gave itself the trouble to consider what really i$ the position of the husband of a Queen Regnant. When I first came over here I was met by this want of knowledge and unwillingness to give a thought to the position of this luckless personage.

“AN INTERLOPER.” “Peel cut down my income, Wellington refused me my rank. The Royal Family cried out against the foreign interloper the Whigs in office were only inclined to concede to me just as much space as I could stand upon. “The Constitution is silent as to the Consort of the Queen; yet there he was, and not to be done without. As I kept quiet and caused no scandal, and all went well, no one has troubled about me and my doings. “Now that it has been brought to light that I have for years taken an active interest in all political matters, '.he public fancied itself betrayed because it felt it had been self-deceived. It also rushed all at once into a belief in secret correspondence with foreign Courts, intrigues, etc,” Nor, as this volume shews, was such a belief ill-founded, and in the • contents of some of these letters., notably ihose addressed to King Frederick William IV of Prussia, had been made known to Lord Palmerston they would assuredly have aroused his fierce indignation. The second letter of rhe series begins by assuring the King that “in all our views and opinions on English policy, as well as on European and world policy, Victoria and f are one, as beseems two faithful married people.” “A GERMAN PRINCE.” It continues:

“If, however, in my communications to your Majesty there appears a certain excess, as in my last letter, of purely British feeling, you will (knowing, as I do, your truly German sentiments) see in it in future nothing unseemly, but will freely admit though I am incidentally the Queen of England’s husband, I am also one German Prince speaking to another. “It goes without saying that all such outpourings, whether they come from your Majesty or are addressed to you, are to be treated by us both with the strictest of secrecy, and to be withhold from everyone, including our Governments.” In this same letter some exceedingly derogatory references are made to Sir Edmund Lyons, the British Minister at Athens. “We know very well,” writes the Prince, “that his despatches are written in a spirit of obstinate partisanship, and your Majesty may rely on me watching Sir E. Lyons with anxious attention and seizing upon any action of his not in conformity with his duties to demand his immediate recall.” Manifestly, therefore, Downing Street’s dislike of the Prince’s foreign correspondence was not wholly without foundation. ENGLAND’S INTERESTS.

Such passages, however, are rare. Most of these letters show the Prince’s sterling political judgment, and he did

not often make such a gaffe as he made in 1845, when he wrote to Wilberforce on his appointment to the Bishopric of Oxford, giving him detailed instructions as to how a Bishop of the State Church should comport himself in the House of Lords, on what subjects he should vote and on which refrain.

After the anxieties of the Revolutionary ybar (1848), when his friend, Prince William of Prussia, grandfather of the Kaiser, was for a time an exile in London, the Prince Consort advocated a cautious policy of nonintervention in Continental affairs. “However differently,” he wrote in 1850, “parties here may judge the facts of Continental happenings, all agree absolutely in desiring that England’s interests and welfare shall not be dragged into the whirlpool. This desire only strengthens the general determination against any Continental war and against taking any part in one.

“In face of this national feeling no Minister could dare pledge England’s name to a measure involving a likelihood of participation in a fresh Continental war —without consent of Parliament. Such consent would never be granted, even if it were made clear to Parliament that great interests were at stake.” Yet the events even then were already in train which produced the Crimean War, when the Prince Consort was highly incensed by what he and the Queen considered the “moral cowardice” of Prussia in refusing to join England and France in their war against Russia for the protection of Turkey. POLITICS AND PERSONALITY. The Prince Consort worked too hard and overtaxed his physical powers. He aged very prematurely. In one of his last letters to “Vicky” at Berlin he wrote:

“One’s feelings remain under the influence of the treadmill of neverending business. The donkey in Carisbrooke, which, you will remember, is my live counterpart. He, too, would much rather munch thistles in the castle moat than turn round in the wheel at the castle wall, and small are the thanks that he gets for his labour.” That sounds a pathetic note of selfpity. But in truth he was worn out, and said to the Queen some time before his last illness: “I am sure that if I had a severe illness I should give up at once and not fight for my life.”