A TALE OF TWO PRINCES

There are many parallels with Victoria and Albert and our present Queen and Prince Philip, writes Daisy Goodwin. Elizabeth and Philip are both the greatgreat-grandchildren of Victoria and Albert (left), and I would argue there is more of Victoria in Philip and more of Albert in Elizabeth. Philip has inherited Victoria’s passionate directness and impetuous and quicktempered nature, whereas Elizabeth appears to have all of Albert’s dutiful seriousness of purpose, self- control and diligence.

Both Prince Albert and Philip Mountbatten were princes without a portfolio and both were encouraged to marry the heiresses to the British throne by ambitious uncles. Both were noticeably good- looking. Albert was viewed as a parsimonious foreigner – as we have seen in this series, he was horrified by the waste and corruption that bedevilled the royal household in the 1840s but his money- saving changes were not always met with approval by staff. Philip met with the same kind of resistance 100 years later when he, too, tried to modernise the Royal Household. Both men were muttered about as being brusque and having no feeling for

tradition. Each of them was also considered to have undue influence over their wives.

Albert left the template for a prince consort in terms of public works and his legacy can be seen today in ‘Albertopolis’, or what we now call the museum district of South Kensington. Philip has left another kind of mark on the nation in the form of the Duke of

Edinburgh Awards. And both couples have had problems with their children, probably for the same reasons: both Albert and Philip had unrealistic expectations of their offspring.

The two consorts may have been very different in character – Albert wrote music and was the Royal Family’s last great collector of art; Philip’s interests are more sporting – but each in his own way has shown the dignity of being the husband of the Queen.