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Daphne Bennett
King without a Crown
Albert, Prince Consort of England 1[zasłonięte]819-18
London 1977
Stron XVII+430, format: 16x24 cm
26 czarno-białych ilustracji
Książka jest używana: naderwana obwoluta, stan dobry.
Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha married his cousin Victoria in 1840, three years after she became Queen of England. They were both twenty. For the first few years after their marriage an avuncular prime minister, the Queen's overbearing ex-governess Baroness Lehzen, and Albert's own youth and natural modesty all combined to keep him in the background and prevent him from sharing his wife's responsibilities. But he steeled himself to get rid of Lehzen in 1842, and during the next few years the friendship and wise counsel of Sir Robert Peel, the new prime minister, began his political education and prepared him for the tremendous influence he was soon to wield over the destinies of his adopted country.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 brought him into international prominence for the first time: he had proposed it, and its huge success in demonstrating England's primacy in technology and manufacture was rightly credited to him. Before long his far-sightedness, his flair for politics and his passionate concern for the welfare of his wife's subjects made him the dominant figure in England and the most powerful man in Europe until his sudden death in 1861.
Daphne Bennett's researches into unpublished correspondence at home and abroad have yielded information which enables her to transform the conventional picture of the Prince Consort's character and personality. Ever since Queen Victoria's excessive devotion made her overlay his memory with superhuman attributes, Albert has been presented as impossibly virtuous, rigidly correct and formal - and really rather dull. The truth, as revealed here for the first time, is very different. Albert was lively and sensitive, a man of high intelligence, a romantically devoted husband, an attentive father who understood the remarkably diverse capabilities of his children and adapted their education accordingly, a gifted musician and a discriminating art-collector, a statesman wise beyond his years whose vision and grasp of European and American affairs often outstripped that of Victoria's most famous ministers.
Many of the features of the British monarchy which are most admired today can be traced back directly to Albert's influence. This book shows for the first time how clearly he saw the need to rehabilitate the crown after the scandals of the Regency and to modernise its place in the constitution now that the Reform Bill of 1832 had begun opening the door to popular participation in government.
By the use of new evidence, Daphne Bennett demonstrates convincingly the delicacy, care and skill with which he set about his self-imposed task, and shows both the charm of his personality and the debt the country owes him. King Without a Crown is in some ways a complement to her widely-acclaimed first biography Vicky (published in 1971), which told the story of the eldest child of Albert and Victoria. Like Vicky, it corrects the distortions which have long marred the accepted picture of both father and daughter.
Daphne Bennett is the wife of a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and has two grown-up sons.
The portrait of the Prince Consort by Winterhalter, is reproduced by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen.
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