-The Victorian age shaped modern Britain, and all over the country, one man left his mark.
♪♪ -He was the architect of the Victorian era.
He was the man who really created the Victorian world as we understand it.
-He was a visionary, and he would imagine things and then make them happen.
-From architecture to education to living conditions, Prince Albert was an innovator and an idealist.
-He had this great reforming impulse.
I think he had this great civic impulse.
-He was, on a human level, sticking up for the poor, in a way that very few public figures were.
-Yet during his lifetime, Albert's ambitions were often thwarted.
-He was loathed by the royal household.
He was hated by the court.
-They make sausage jokes.
They make bratwurst jokes.
They make pretzel jokes.
-They didn't want a troublemaker.
They'd wanted Albert simply to be a court flunky.
♪♪ -I'm Saul David, a writer and historian.
I've been given remarkable access to the Royal Archives...
So that was the template?
-Absolutely, yes.
-I mean, it's astonishing.
...where Albert's personal letters...
There's a sort of cry for help, really, isn't it?
-Yes, absolutely.
-...and intimate photographs... Wow.
...help us understand his struggles and his achievements in more detail than ever before.
-Victoria, in a way, is the least Victorian of people.
It is Albert who's the true Victorian.
-They reveal the genius of the man I believe was king in all but name.
♪♪ -Windsor Castle has been a royal residence for nearly 1,000 years.
At its heart stands the great Round Tower, home to the Royal Archives and photographs collection.
-Hello, and welcome to the print room.
-Wow.
-Yes, isn't it?
-This space holds the most complete collection of documents and pictures relating to Albert's life.
Now, as part of a massive digitization project, over 20,000 personal letters, diaries, and photographs will soon become available online to scholars and the general public.
-This remarkable photograph looks as if it was taken yesterday.
-Curator Catlin Langford begins by showing me a rare object that sums up Prince Albert's unique vision and what he stood for.
The detail is absolutely extraordinary.
-This was taken in 1848, so at the time Prince Albert was about 28, 29, in his prime, effectively.
-This is at a time when photography had only just been invented, black-and-white obviously.
There's already color, so how did they manage to do that?
-It's created by sort of adding very fine color pigments to the surface of the work.
It sort of combined all of his loves -- his love of art, his love of science, love of technology, and it creates this amazing, unique visual product.
-And interestingly, of course, at a time when some people would have been suspicious of this medium, he embraces it immediately, doesn't he?
He's like, "This is new."
-Yes, he completely embraces it.
I think the photograph shows Albert how he wished to be viewed, as sort of he's looking ahead.
He's looking toward the future.
-While Albert would carve out a role as a leader in British society, he first arrived in England as a teenager from a minor German principality.
-Albert had been promised to Queen Victoria as a husband when he was a baby.
It was all arranged.
-Albert's grandmother, the Duchess Auguste, is absolutely thrilled because she's -- immediately has this plan that Albert should marry his little first cousin, the Queen of England, and this will be his destiny.
-It's the biggest career opportunity he will ever have, is to marry Victoria.
-Luckily Victoria was delighted by the prospect of marrying Albert.
-He's described somewhere as the most handsome prince in Europe, and you can tell from Victoria's diaries that she takes one look at him, and she's absolutely bowled over by him.
-Albert turns up in the hall at Windsor Castle, and Queen Victoria comes to the head of the staircase, and she's absolutely smitten.
She says, she sees Albert and he is "beautiful," underlined.
-There's this wonderful diary entry where she says, you know, "I went for a ride with my dearest Albert.
He was wearing white cashmere pantaloons, nothing underneath!"
♪♪ -The wedding took place in St. James's Palace in February 1840.
Their love for each other was clear.
What's less well-known is the homesickness that Albert felt when he came to England.
The manager of the Royal Archives, Bill Stockting, is showing me one of Albert's earliest letters, recording the young prince's sadness at leaving Germany.
-Here we have a copy letter to his aunt, of course Queen Victoria's mother, the Duchess of Kent, in December 1839.
So still very early days, so he's beginning to think about what this now actually means for him.
-So let's see what he actually writes.
"What a mass of emotions of the most diverse kind seize and overwhelm me.
Hope, love for dear Victoria, the pain of leaving home, departing from your dearest kindred."
♪♪ -Albert comes from Coburg, which is a tiny principality in southern Germany.
It's about the size of Fulham.
-Coburg was known as the stud farm of Europe because so many of the Saxe-Coburg family were married to influential princes and members of the sort of European elite.
-Albert never had any friends in his whole life.
He didn't have a friend.
He only had family, and it was a small family.
He was brought up with his brother, and it broke his heart, really, when he was separated from his brother.
-Victoria sensed Albert's unhappiness.
She understood how much he missed his homeland, so she organized a very personal gift for him.
-She secretly commissions the photographer Francis Bedford in June, July of 1857, to go to Coburg to photograph the sites and sort of scenes and the people associated with Prince Albert's childhood, including his brothers.
There was no expense spared on birthday presents, and I think Queen Victoria felt this was a really significant sort of present to give out, but to sort of relieve some of the homesickness he would have been feeling.
-Wow, it's incredible.
I mean, that could have been taken, I don't know, a couple of years ago, couldn't it?
-This particular photograph that we're looking at now is where he was born and grew up.
-It's quite interesting seeing his childhood home.
It's relatively modest, isn't it?
-Mm, it wasn't massive, but it was what he really adored, and Queen Victoria does write that if she hadn't been queen she would have loved to have lived here.
And it would have brought him a lot of joy, I think, in his time in England to look at this album and revisit, through the photographs, the sites and people associated with his childhood home.
♪♪ -Albert was leaving his beloved homeland behind -- although his family life in Coburg was not always happy.
-His parents' marriage ends spectacularly badly.
Albert loses his mother when he's five.
I mean, she doesn't die when he's five, but his mother runs away with another man.
-Albert was determined to reverse that and demonstrate to the world that he and Queen Victoria were going to have the ideal family with nine beautifully behaved, well-read, multilingual children.
-Albert threw himself into his new role as husband and father, pouring his time and energy into raising his children.
-This is part of a series called "The World's Children" album, of which five were compiled together by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria.
They're remarkable documents.
-A private photograph album records some of the most intimate family moments.
This is the first time it has been filmed.
-This is a photograph of Prince Arthur, taken in 1857 by the photographer Caldesi, who was very popular with the royal family.
It's meant to replicate the cherubs at the bottom of the "Sistine Madonna" by Raphael, and we know that Prince Albert was a great fan of Raphael.
-Now this, I'm guessing, is an image that the royal family would have intended to have been kept private.
-Yes, since they're photographs that were only to be enjoyed by them privately, not for public consumption.
Here is another photograph of Prince Arthur, presenting himself as a military drummer.
-And he goes on, of course, to become a field marshal, so it's clear that his fate is sealed as far as his occupation is concerned.
-Yes, it's sort of foregrounding that later life, yeah.
Here we have a portrait of the Prince of Wales as a young teenager.
-Future Edward VII.
We all remember him much later in life as, like, more rotund with the beard, and look at him here.
-And here he is as a young boy.
And then as we turn the page again, there's a photograph here of a young Princess Alice as a young woman.
-One photograph in this album represents an extraordinary royal first and reveals Albert's instinctive grasp of public relations.
-There is a photograph here that was sort of intentionally private, but then did go on to have a public life.
Initially it was a private commission, and they must have been suitably happy with it that they allowed for it to then be published as an engraving in newspapers.
-Wow, incredible, and with that being the first photograph that the public in the UK would have seen of the royal family.
-Yes, it was definitely the first photograph that was ever publicly exhibited of the royal family, and I think it's particularly telling that they agreed to that because it sort of shows the royal family as they wished to be seen.
You can sort of see there is sort of a united family front, Queen Victoria looking very motherly, tenderly at her newborn baby.
-It's interesting, isn't it?
So they're using photography for their own pleasure, of course, and to record their children as they're growing up, like we all do, but actually there was almost a political or a public image message in all of this.
-I think that's true.
I think they were very aware of what photography could do in terms of their public image, so they're presented as sort of a unified, loving family, but also a very stable family.
I think that's particularly key when you're considering sort of the monarchy, and how they wanted to present themselves as a stable monarchy.
-There's quite a lot of evidence that Albert's promotion of the royal family as a perfect family on the throne works.
The royal family does come to be seen in that way, and that it does therefore gain a great deal of acceptance and legitimacy.
-Despite creating the perfect family, Albert was frustrated in his domestic role.
Being a father and husband wasn't enough for him.
-When Albert first arrived in England, the sense of letdown must have been terrible.
He had no status at all.
His only status was that he was the husband of the Queen of England.
-Albert's allowance from the civil list is way less than he expected, and this is a deliberate snub.
-Albert asks for, I think it's £50,000 a year as an allowance, and Parliament just says no.
You know, "We're not giving this."
You know, "He's a carpetbagger.
He's on the make."
It's a very tricky position to be in, and there's a very sad letter he writes to one of his friends, when he says, you know, "I'm the husband, but not the master in the house."
-The Royal Archives contain a remarkably candid letter from Albert, revealing the depth of his dissatisfaction.
-In a letter we have here to his mentor and adviser Baron Stockmar, we see that very clearly if we start down here at the bottom of the page.
-"My attention has until now been directed to a host of trifles.
I mean, by these domestic and court arrangements, and to these I have chiefly applied myself, feeling that we shall never be in a position to occupy ourself with higher and graver things, dealing, as we have to do, with these mere nothings."
So this is sort of a cry for help, really, isn't it?
-Yes, absolutely.
-Albert was fulfilling his primary duty as royal consort, yet was increasingly determined to carve out a public role for himself, a role that would match his ability and his ambition.
-Albert does want power, certainly, but he doesn't want power for power's sake.
He wants power to do good.
-The Royal Archives at Windsor Castle hold a remarkable collection of documents that are helping us build a new portrait of Prince Albert.
♪♪ -Albert is basically given the education and the training of somebody who's going to become effectively a king.
-As a young man, Albert went to university and did the grand tour of Italy.
He studied history, politics and architecture, and excelled in the arts and sciences.
In England, however, he was sneered at for being a German and an intellectual.
If he spoke out on matters of state, he was ridiculed.
-If you look at all the cartoons of him at the time, I mean, they make sausage jokes.
They make bratwurst jokes.
They make pretzel jokes.
There's a general suspicion that the British have towards foreigners of any kind, wearing funny clothes and speaking with funny accents.
-So here he arrives in England, extremely able young man bursting with political ideas, and, of course, given no executive or political role at all.
-He writes to the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who's of course very close to Queen Victoria, and he says to Melbourne, "What is the precedent for me as the husband of the queen?
What role can I expect to play?"
-So what's the response to his query to Melbourne?
-Well, here from a letter a little over a week later, we have a copy of the letter from Melbourne back to the prince.
-"Your Serene Highness is entering, no doubt, upon a state and situation of some difficulty, in as much as it is one of a peculiar and extraordinary character, and of which there have been little experience."
So he's clearly warning him the possibility that, "We've never had this situation before."
And he's not really holding out much hope or expectation.
-I don't think that was what he was wanting to hear.
If you look here, again, "Your Serene Highness says..." -"It will be certainly prudent that Your Serene Highness should not take an active part in those political questions which divide parties in this country."
I mean, that's quite clear, isn't it?
"Stay out of politics," and it must have come as quite a blow to Albert.
-Absolutely, yes, Albert is getting very frustrated.
-Disappointed by his rebuff from the prime minister, Albert turned his attention to the royal household, where he could find an outlet for his leadership ambitions.
-One thing he can do is to look at the royal finances, and [laughs] he is -- you know, he's an outsider, and he starts looking at some of the practices going on, and he's absolutely gobsmacked.
-His first project is basically to try and reform the palaces, to reform Buckingham Palace and Windsor.
-One of the shocking things, to this day, about Britain, for foreigners when they come here, is realizing how badly everything is run, but it was particularly badly run in the royal household.
In Buckingham Palace, there was one person in charge of cleaning the inside of the windows, and another person in charge of cleaning the outside of the windows, and so because they didn't coordinate, you could never see through the smutty, smog-ridden windows.
-All these palace officers, like the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Steward, they don't work with each other, and they're all, you know, the famous story about how it's the duty of the Lord Chamberlain to lay the fire, but he can't light it.
It's the Lord Steward who has to put a match to it.
-At Windsor Castle, every single day, they prepared huge sides of beef and whole cows and pigs and lambs, being conveyed down corridors with nobody to eat them, of course, because, I mean, the queen and Prince Albert hardly ever went to Windsor in those days.
The levels of petty corruption and inefficiency were almost inexhaustible.
-By tackling the household accounts, Albert was beginning to assert himself.
He could prove his worth by saving money.
-You can see here that we have a list entitled "Savings" on the civil list for 1848, and here, set out probably by a household clerk, is set out the salaries of the major officials of the household, so the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward, the Master of the Horse, and so on, but also what their allowances were.
-And I suppose the question is, does he succeed?
-These papers show very clearly that year-on-year savings were being made, and by 1848 here, we're looking at a figure of over £34,000 was being made, so it's been estimated, from about 1842 to 1853, that over £55,000 was in fact saved, so in today's money that's probably about £4.5 million.
-He was loathed by the royal household.
He was hated by the court.
He was hated by all the flunkies because, of course, he was exposing how absolutely useless they were at their jobs.
-Albert did more than balance the books.
He wanted to modernize and innovate, and the crown properties became his proving ground.
In a corner of the Windsor estate stands an impressive building.
♪♪ A model dairy that showcases Albert's passion for form and function.
-The whole idea behind the dairy was to keep it cool.
The milk had to be kept at a low temperature, so every part of the building was designed for ventilation and to keep the milk cold.
-Prince Albert wanted a functioning building that was ornamental and beautiful, but was practical.
-Curator Carly Collier is showing me an original plan for the interior of the dairy.
-So this is a design by John Thomas for the creamery in the Royal Dairy, one of the walls.
As we can see, incredibly detailed.
-That was the template for the actually dairy itself.
-Absolutely, yes, and we know that Prince Albert was very much engaged.
He looked at designs as they were progressing, so this really is his vision.
-I can see the ground plan here of the whole creamery.
How does this section actually fit into the plan?
-So we're looking at this short edge of the building here, and you can see the fountain there, and that was producing water to help cool the atmosphere, and the water was running down, and there was a system by which it ran underneath the marble tables, on which the bowls which contained cream were kept, to, again, contribute to cooling.
-I mean, it's one thing actually drawing this out.
It's quite another thing building it.
I can imagine the person responsible, the architect, for putting this together must have thought, "Really?
That amount of detail?"
♪♪ -Albert had a very strong view that good design should be matched with industrial manufacturing, and that the two should be welded together.
He always stressed the idea that functionality should come first, and that this place worked as a working dairy.
-Growing in confidence and with substantial savings from the household accounts, Albert now set his sights on an even more ambitious architectural project.
♪♪ So is this Osborne, Carly?
-Absolutely, and this was the private residence for the queen and for the family, and at a stage during building operations, and the main wing over to the left-hand side there, at an advanced stage of construction, but I'm not quite sure if what we can see is the remnants of some scaffolding there.
-Yeah, it's definitely poking up above the structure.
-There's definitely something poking up.
This was painted by the queen's own watercolor tutor, a Scottish artist called William Leighton Leitch, so he would have been at Osborne to teach the queen, and he was clearly interested in this incredibly important building project that was going on around him.
-It strikes me, looking at this very beautiful small but detailed painting, but that you can see in it the growing influence of Albert in the royal family in relation to buildings.
-Certainly his building projects were ambitious and incredibly impressive, and we have this wonderful record of it.
-Osborne become a place where Albert could test his ideas about architecture, design, and engineering.
-He's able to indulge all his great passions.
There's a special tower built from which he stands, looking down.
Where the trees are planted, there's a man in the field with a flag, but where the tree is to be planted or not, and he's a great tree planter, Albert.
-It's very, very Albertian in the sense that when you go inside, there are his corridors and rooms laid out as if it was some kind of seaside place on the Mediterranean, but at the same time, it's all very practical.
For example, all the sewage in the house comes down and irrigates the garden, and there are all sorts of details like that, which make one realize this is Albert's house.
-It's a sort of fantasy of what an Italian villa might look like, and it's been incredibly influential 'cause there are lots of copies of the Osborne-type building all over the world.
-The house that Albert built was a beautiful home for his wife and family.
He also wanted to share the treasures of the royal collection with the wider public.
His most ambitious artistic project used the new medium of photography to create a definitive survey of the works of the great Renaissance artist Raphael.
-So here we have a very large photograph of the Sistine Chapel tapestry cartoons.
-Wow, of course this is early days of photography.
We're talking about the 1850s, I think is the earliest example.
-Absolutely, this is very much a early and innovative use of photography to reproduce artworks.
-I mean, I am flabbergasted that in the 1850s, you're able to produce something of that quality in photography.
-It is really rather magnificent.
They were really, really very well received.
-So far Albert's influence was confined to life inside the palaces.
He had the capability to do so much more.
His chance to make a difference to Britain would come as royal dynasties across Europe were coming under violent attack.
♪♪ By the late 1840s, Prince Albert was reforming the royal household and building a lavish new home at Osborne.
And then in April 1848, he was brought alarming news of social unrest.
-1848 is a year of complete turmoil all over Europe.
I mean, you know, you've got the French king Louis Philippe has been deposed.
There's revolution in Austria.
-Albert understood the potential consequences.
The British monarchy might be the next target.
-Albert was very afraid in 1847, coming into 1848, that there would be a revolution in Britain.
-Historian Onyeka Nubia has come to Kennington Common, site of one of the largest citizen protests of the 19th century.
-Over 100 years ago in 1848, here in Kennington Common, thousands of working men gathered.
They gathered because they wanted the right to vote.
Very frightening, very dangerous to the establishment.
-They were part of the Chartist Movement, a working-class campaign for political reform that swept the country in the late 1830s and '40s.
-Now, we often think of the right to vote as a principal cornerstone of Western democracy.
We think of it as something that is a fundamental human right that everybody should have, but in 1848 that wasn't the case, but the people that gathered here wanted it to be -- artisans, skilled laborers, unskilled laborers, the unemployed.
They all gathered here because they wanted one thing, which was a say in the future and the destiny of their country.
-There's a real moment when it seems as if this is going to erupt into a revolution, as on the continent, and Albert and the queen are sent off to be safe at Osborne.
-The Chartists' mass meeting at Kennington was reported across Britain and made a major impression on Prince Albert.
The photographs collection holds a unique artifact that's evidence of Albert's growing social awareness.
-So this is the Chartists' meeting on Kennington Common, taken on 10th April, 1848.
You really get a sense of the atmosphere.
There's sort of an energy to the photograph.
You do get a sense of sort of the movement of people, the crowds, specifically sort of the details of the flags and also the details of the buildings in the background.
-It's absolutely fascinating, isn't it?
And how long after the photograph was actually taken did Prince Albert acquire it?
-So we believe that he acquired this in May of that year, so only a few weeks after the actual event.
Prince Albert was particularly understanding of the fact that the social and working conditions of the poor weren't great at that time, and I think by purchasing this work, it shows his sympathies towards that.
And he often said, like, those with station, wealth, and, sort of, education, should use that to be able to assist people and make sure that their conditions were better.
-Albert was torn in his mind.
On the one hand, he had a horror of revolutionaries, a horror of socialism.
On the other hand, he could see that there was justice in the Chartists' cause.
-He buys the photograph, I think, because he is fascinated in popular movements, and he feels very deeply about the plight of these people.
He understands that the world is changing, and I think there is a huge kind of moment for him, and he sees that, you know, it's not enough for the ruling class to rule because that's their job.
-He wanted the political class to realize that the grievances of the Chartists, of the laboring classes, were legitimate grievances.
Their living conditions were appalling, their health nonexistent, their education nonexistent.
-Only weeks after the Chartists' protest, Albert gave voice to his concerns.
He spoke out at a public meeting.
-He makes this incredible speech where he says, "We, the ruling class, cannot exercise power without responsibility.
We must put something back."
-We have here in the archives the actual draft of that speech that he made, and I'll just read out a few extracts to give you a sense of what he was trying to get across.
He writes of, "My feelings of sympathy and interest for that class of our community, which has most of the toil and least of the enjoyments of this world, and to show the way how man can help man is more particularly the duty of those who, by the favor of providence, enjoy station, wealth and education."
-He wasn't a socialist in any sense of the word, but he was, on a human level, sticking up for the poor, in a way that very few public figures were.
-The following day, every newspaper published the prince's speech.
Albert's campaign for change was up and running.
-Prince Albert believed education, formal education through schools and colleges and universities, was an absolute necessity for the life of a nation.
Very, very few people in Britain had ever believed that, certainly never expressed the belief.
-Once again, Albert would test out his ideas close to home.
When he realized the children of the Osborne estate workers didn't have a school of their own, he had a new one built specially for them.
This document is evidence of Albert's systematic approach to a lot of things in life, but in this case education.
It's headed "Children, List of on Estate," and then there are a series of headings -- the name, the age, whether they're at school or not, their state of education, whether they can read or write, read only, neither, imperfectly or otherwise.
We've got Charles Bull, who's 17, and you might have hoped he could read or write.
He can do neither.
And what you see here, and what is particularly significant, is that the younger children in the list generally have a higher educational attainment.
A James Hunt, he's 9.
He is at school, and, yes, he can read and write.
He believed passionately that, for people of the laboring classes to get on in life, and therefore, for Britain to prosper as a country, it was necessary for them to have education.
This is evidence that, even in a small way on the Isle of Wight, it could work, and if you translate this right across the United Kingdom, you really would have a revolution in the education of the working classes.
Albert's ideas were starting to be taken seriously.
His next project was the inner cities, encouraging wealthy benefactors to fund housing for the urban poor.
-If you were a working-class family in one of these newly built hellhole cities in the black country, in the north, or in London itself, life wasn't much fun, and your children were going to die of rickets and cholera and typhus and all these horrible diseases.
You were piled on top of one another, so crowded that you had to -- I mean, half the family had to take it in turns to go to sleep, and the other half had to be wandering the streets.
♪♪ -Albert threw himself into the problem, commissioning a team of experts to come up with new solutions to the housing crisis.
-This is a publication of the designs for model houses that were built under the aegis of Prince Albert.
He financed these houses, and then this publication was produced in order to literally provide a blueprint for these residences for future builders -- how to build them, the sorts of costs that would have been involved, and that is married with a series of plans.
-I mean, it strikes me looking at all the detail in this -- extraordinary detail in this, Carly, this is quintessential Albert.
It's got the design.
It's got the costing.
I mean, nothing really is left out, is it?
This is the blueprint for an early form of social housing, and I suppose the question is, was it actually used?
Did this change housing in Britain?
-It was certainly very influential, and this publication was instrumental in changing attitudes towards the housing of the working poor.
♪♪ -The Model Cottage designed by Albert's team still stands at the very place where the Chartists once gathered, demanding change -- Kennington, in South London.
-And although it's one building, it actually comprises four apartments for four families, and it's got some really innovative features for the time.
-Katy Layton-Jones is a social historian specializing in housing.
-It's got a very large parents' bedroom, which was spacious and gave them some privacy, which was unusual for the working classes.
It's got two children's rooms, which were separate from the living room, which gave them really a sense of that middle-class parlor that the other classes enjoyed.
Albert really believed that if you could tackle the living standards of the working classes, really improve their quality of life, that you could also tackle social problems and social conflict in society.
♪♪ -Another of Albert's ambitious housing projects was an innovative five-story apartment building, replacing a block of decaying working-class slums in central London.
Every flat in Parnell House had running water, a lavatory, and a minimum of three bedrooms.
-I think the main impact of buildings like Parnell House was that they really raised expectations for how the laboring classes could live, and they themselves then had improved aspirations, what they wanted from their lives and what they expected from society.
♪♪ This image was produced when the building was brand-new and had its first residents, and you can see it's astonishing how little has changed.
The residents of that time still had pot plants.
You've got the same wrought-iron railings, and even the same light fittings, and right in the center, in this open space that was so important in the model dwellings, you got people enjoying the outdoors, with a little child and a family, because, after all, this building was built for families.
-Parnell House was used as a model for generations of social housing, and Albert was earning respect across Britain as a leader striving to build a fairer society.
-By his own industry, he really invents the idea of the hardworking royal, the royal who justifies their existence by doing good, and, you know, Victoria, you know, never worked as hard as he did.
-Albert was no longer confining his energies to charity and social reform.
An extraordinary collection of documents in the Royal Archives reveals his ambition for a more powerful role in British public life.
You can see in the level of detail in this book, you know, written in his own hands, but it's also a very telling indication of the role he was beginning to play.
It's a record of his political dealings.
He is absolutely immersing himself in the business of government.
He's recording all these conversations, this correspondence that's coming in from ministers, and also with significant figures in the empire, but on this page a report of a conversation with Sir Robert Peel.
Now Peel, of course, is prime minister at this time, so this is a hugely important political conversation, and it absolutely underpins that he is determined that he will play his part in the political life of this country, whatever the establishment wishes or wants.
♪♪ -Albert has become totally indispensable to Victoria.
He basically runs the show, and she is well aware of it.
It is Albert who has taken all the decisions, Albert who has had the new projects, Albert who has controlled her relationships with the politicians, and her role is basically reduced to copying out letters that Albert has already drafted before she gets up in the morning, and saying what Albert tells her to say.
-Albert was winning over the politicians and the people.
His next big idea would cement his place in history, a world-class event that few believed was possible.
It would test Albert's resilience to the limit.
♪♪ In 1851, Albert would embark on his greatest gamble, a daring project to unite his many passions and bring together people from the four corners of the globe.
-Albert believed that trade and invention and technology would unite the human race and there would be universal peace, and that was really the extraordinarily idealistic thought behind The Great Exhibition.
-A vast palace, the largest man-made glass structure on Earth, would house the world's first trade fair, with over 100,000 exhibits.
-We look back on it at the pinnacle of the 19th century, but at the time everyone thought it was gonna be a disaster.
-In Parliament, they said the exhibition would fail.
London would be overwhelmed with crowds, spreading disease, and hiking up prices.
Once again, Albert faced prejudice and mistrust.
-They thought Albert was a spy, foreign spy, and they thought wanting all the people of the world to come and exhibit -- Indians, Persians, Chinese people were invited to exhibit their wares.
I mean, there must be something wrong with that.
They're trying to infiltrate.
-And they thought that a hailstorm would make the glass roof break.
The American president wouldn't come 'cause he was worried about being decapitated by the glass, you know.
There was all these kind of ludicrous sort of rumors and so forth that were going about.
-As the days ticked down to the grand opening, Albert was under enormous personal pressure.
The stress and public criticism were relentless.
This is a wonderful letter, written by Prince Albert just weeks before The Great Exhibition actually takes place, and he writes, "Dear Mama, I am at present more dead than alive from overwork.
The opponents of the exhibition work with might and mean to throw all the women into panic and to drive myself crazy.
The strangers, they give out, are certain to commence a thorough revolution here, to murder Victoria and myself, and to proclaim a red republic in England.
The plague is certain to ensue from the confluence of such vast multitudes, and to swallow up those whom the increased price of everything has not already swept away.
For all this, I am to be responsible."
There's irony in this, there's humor, but there's also a sense of the toll the whole business of putting on the exhibition is taking on Albert.
-Albert was a brilliant natural bureaucrat, I mean, civil servant, creator.
He could see projects through in a way that is, I think, very rare.
-He was a visionary, and he would imagine things and then make them happen.
I -- That's an extraordinary thing.
And it's very -- In a way, that's quite un-English.
-Finally, on the 1st of May, 1851, Queen Victoria, with Albert by her side, declared The Great Exhibition, her husband's brainchild, open.
♪♪ -Queen Victoria realized this was Albert's great day.
It was Britain's great day, and they went in, and as she describes it in the journal, of course, it was an absolute triumph.
It was amazing.
And the "Hallelujah Chorus" was never more appropriately sung.
♪♪ -In the five months The Great Exhibition was open to the public, an astonishing 6 million visitors passed through its doors.
Albert's visionary idea become one of the greatest achievements of the Victorian age.
-In 1857, Victoria creates Albert Prince Consort, and of course, that's the name that we've come to know Albert by, as the Prince Consort, and the fact that Victoria is able to do this for her husband, and feels this need to do this, is just an indication of how far he's come.
-A remarkable letter in the Royal Archives reveals Albert's feelings at finally receiving the acceptance and recognition he has fought so hard for.
This is a very moving letter about a great moment in Albert's life, because 17 years after he first arrived in this country, he is able to tell his stepmother about a change of title, and he writes, "Dear Mama, I have not said a word to you about my change of title, and I now present myself before you as an entire stranger, as Prince Consort.
I was certain to appear to them," and by "them" he means the British people, "in the long run like a stranger in the land, as my sons alone were English princes, and I merely a Coburg prince, but now I have a legal status in the English hierarchy."
Albert was finally being accepted by the British establishment, yet the energy he invested in making Britain a better place was taking its toll.
-If you look at photographs of Albert after the age of 30, he does look prematurely old.
He's not fit.
His shoulders are sloping.
He's not a well man.
-For whatever reason, he was a dying man.
I think from his mid-30s you can see he was a dying man.
-He basically killed himself, I think, through overwork.
Nobody quite knows what he dies of.
You know, people think it may have been typhus or stomach cancer or Crohn's disease, God knows.
-In the winter of 1861, while staying at Windsor Castle, Albert fell desperately ill. As he lay on his sickbed, Queen Victoria read to him.
-Well, this really is, I think, a very sad object.
It's an edition of Walter Scott's "Peveril of the Peak," a very popular author at the time, and you can see here that this marker has been tipped into the volume, and a clue as to what that signifies is in this inscription at the front, which is in Queen Victoria's own hand.
-"This book was read up to the mark in page 81 to my beloved husband during his fatal illness, and within three days of his terrible termination."
♪♪ On the 14th of December, 1861, Albert died with Victoria at his side.
He was 42 years old.
It's extraordinary, isn't it?
This clearly was the last thing she was reading to him, and she wants to mark that.
You know, obviously it's very precious to her.
She's put a mark in it, and here it is, kept forevermore as a sort of memorial to their last few days together.
-Absolutely, and Queen Victoria kept many memorials, and this is yet another one.
-It's unbelievably sad that somebody with all that talent and so much to offer, both on a private and public level, should have died so young.
-The Observer newspaper captured the nation's grief, "England will not soon look upon his like again."
-From the point of view of the monarchy, Victoria has lost the man who's effectively ruled Britain for the past 20 years.
-People say that Queen Victoria went over the top.
She didn't.
The mourning was absolutely justified.
She was right to regard this as one of the great, appalling tragedies of the 19th century.
♪♪ -Britain had lost a dynamic young leader with so much to contribute, yet Albert would leave a remarkable legacy.
This is a wonderful document, and really part of our cultural history because it shows the plot of land that Albert bought with the £200,000 profit from The Great Exhibition.
You can see here in this section here, this blue section, and the intention is to create a cultural quarter, a lasting legacy from the exhibition.
♪♪ And that plot of land was London's South Kensington.
-Profits from that exhibition in 1851 ultimately financed what we call the Albertopolis, the V&A, Imperial College, what eventually become the Royal Albert Hall, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Royal College of Organists, the Royal College of Music, all these things.
-This was an element of our culture, our cultural heritage, that was created by Albert, Albert's idea for The Great Exhibition, and then ultimately to have a lasting legacy for that exhibition.
At the heart of South Kensington stands the museum that bears Albert's name, the V&A.
-Famously, Victoria thought it should just be called the Albert Museum, and she had to be convinced that it should be called the Victoria and Albert Museum.
When we think about the V&A today, and we think about Albert's role in its creation, we think of two words, which are ingenuity and imagination.
The purpose of this place, as Albert envisioned it, was to showcase the greatest works of human ingenuity.
It was there to inspire artists and architects and engineers and designers, to spark the imagination of the next generation.
♪♪ -I don't think people do him justice because they don't really understand what he did for us.
He was one of the great kings we never had.
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