Moral leadership
Albert, who had been appointed to the Privy Council four days before his marriage to Victoria, pursued his political role with both tact and vigour. He developed a good working relationship with Sir Robert Peel, with whom he had much in common. This included a sharp intelligence, a capacity for hard work and attention to detail – and a stern bourgeois morality.
Cool, rational, restrained
Albert's father had led something of a dissolute lifestyle and his mother had died young after a tempestuous marriage. Reacting against his parental example, Albert was cool, rational and restrained – the very epitome, indeed, of what became known as 'Victorian' morality, and far more so than Victoria, who learned to tame her own emotional and uninhibited nature to suit her husband. Gradually, she submitted to his will, both in private and in matters of state.
'That damned morality'
It was not an attitude that suited Victoria's former mentor. 'That damned morality would undo us all,' declared Lord Melbourne. But, in fact, Albert identified it rightly as the basis on which the monarchy could build a new relationship with the rising middle class of Britain – a relationship based on moral leadership, rather than on direct political power.
Together with establishing the principle that the monarchy should be above politics – at least in the sense of favouring one major party over another – Albert was simultaneously forging a different role for royalty in the new Britain of the Industrial Revolution.
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 Franz Xavier Winterhalter's 1859 portrait of Prince Albert
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