Circle of Franz Xaver Winterhalter , 1805 – 1873 Portrait of Prince Albert of Saxe-coburg and Gotha (1819–1861), Prince Consort

Circle of Franz Xaver Winterhalter , 1805 – 1873

Portrait of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819–1861), prince consort

oil on panel

25 x 17 cm (10 x 7 in.)

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819–1861), prince consort, consort of Queen Victoria, was born on 26 August 1819 at the ducal summer residence of the duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, the Rosenau, on the southern edge of the forest of Thuringen, about 4 miles from Coburg. On 19 September 1819 in the marble hall at the Rosenau he was baptized Franz Karl August Albrecht Immanuel with water from the River Itze, which flowed through the duchy. His name was immediately Anglicized by his family to Albert, the only one of his given names that was ever used. The reigning duke was his father, Ernest (1784–1844), who had named his first son and heir, born a year earlier, after himself. The mother of the boys, who would be their only children, was the former Princess Louise (1800–1831) of neighbouring, but larger and richer, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. Seventeen years younger than her husband, she had married him at sixteen on 31 July 1817.

The duke's rakish ways were unreformed by his marriage. After the birth of his sons he resumed his earlier sports of hunting and wenching. Louise consoled herself with flirtations, the last with a young lieutenant, Baron Alexander von Hanstein. On 4 September 1824 the unhappy duchess was banished from Coburg and left her small sons forever. The legal separation which Ernest had demanded was followed by formal divorce in 1826, after which Louise married Hanstein. She died of uterine cancer in August 1831.

By 1826 the duchy and the princelings had new names, as the death of the last eligible male descendant in Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg meant a rearrangement of mini-states. Ernest added Gotha in exchange for Saalfeld (which went to the duke of Meiningen), creating the hyphenated designation by which the young Albert was later identified. Although abandoned at five, Albert understood—much later—the circumstances of his mother's departure and never doubted her affection; her loss could hardly have been repaired by the attentions of Christoph Florschütz, who in his mid-twenties had been engaged as tutor to the brothers. Albert became quiet and subdued, subject to fits of weeping which he confessed candidly in a journal begun, precociously, when he was less than six. Early on, Florschütz was not quite the benign influence he was later to become. On 26 March 1825 Albert wrote that he had ‘made so many mistakes’ in a letter that ‘the Rath’—his tutor—‘tore it up and threw it into the fire. I cried about it’ (Grey, 34).

Albert's awkwardness with, and dislike of, his father, whom he had good reason to blame for a lonely and insecure childhood, was blunted by time, as were his impressions of Florschütz, who became, as Albert grew up, an affectionate companion and devoted teacher. Tutorial impatience, however, emerges in Albert's notation when not yet six, ‘I cried at my lesson today, because I could not find a verb: and the Rath pinched me, to show me what a verb was. And I cried about it’ (Grey, 34).

At first Albert fled from strangers, retreating into the arms of his brother, the two sharing an affection not reciprocated by their aloof father. Florschütz was to supervise the studies of both boys for fifteen years in ducal residences from which their father was often absent. Until Albert was eleven (and Ernest twelve), Florschütz stolidly tutored the boys each day, taking his midday meal with them. Only their grandmother and stepgrandmother furnished a softer presence. When the boys visited Louise's stepmother, they encountered music and theatre and even novels. Grandmother Augusta, a political liberal, flexible even in her Lutheranism, educated Albert in her own way. Two men were even more influential. Prince Leopold (1790–1865), wi