The great break in her own life had come long before -- on the
death of her beloved husband, Albert, on 14 December 1861 at Windsor
Castle at the early age of forty-five. Victoria described herself
on New Year's Day 1862 as "living in a dreadful dream",
and it was not until February 1872 that she found the strength
to describe her husband's death in her precious journal, which
she had started at the age of thirteen. She was missing him as
much as ever in 1901. There has been much historical speculation
as to what British history would have been like had Albert lived.
Questions abound. Might he have "conferred upon Britain
the blessings of absolute government"? That by report was
Benjamin Disraeli's expression. How would he have responded to
both social and cultural change? Lord Esher believed that "had
Albert lived his tenacity might have hardened into obstinacy,
and the relations between him and a government founded -- like
ours -- on democratic institutions, would have become very strained".
All this, however, is pure conjecture. The reality was that
since his marriage to the Queen, straight from Coburg, on 10 February
1840 Albert, "while developing his own personality and extending
his intellectual and cultural interests", had worked very
closely with the Queen in establishing what they both regarded
as a & constitutional", not a democratic, monarchy.
When he died the Queen felt an irrevocable sense of political
as well as of personal loss. She had come to depend upon him.
Albert knew this well. In 1850, seven years before he was given
the title of prince consort -- not by Act of parliament but by
letters patent from the Queen -- he had described himself to the
Duke of Wellington as "the husband of the Queen, the tutor
of the royal children, the private secretary of the Sovereign,
and her permanent minister". If the last of these self-descriptions
needs to be qualified, Albert was correctly described by Disraeli
as "the prime councillor of a realm the political constitution
of which did not even recognise his personal existence".
Unwritten as it was, the constitution left a substantial place
for the royal prerogative, a bigger place than Walter Bagehot
allowed for in his brilliant essay on The English Constitution
which first appeared in 1867; and it was the constitution, still
evolving in ways that Victoria did not completely understand,
that she had faithfully promised "to respect and to love"
in a much appreciated speech that she delivered to the Privy council
on the day of her proclamation in 1837.
