Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 21, 2025
We can imagine Baron Stockmar watching keenly in the background to catch every furtive glance and remark, permitting himself to rub his hands and exclaim, with sober exultation, "He is liked!" Prince Albert's father and brother, his dearest friends hitherto, walked beside him.
The philosophic creed of Stockmar was that "the most valuable side of life consists in its negative conditions," in other words in freedom from annoyance, and in the absence of "crowns of thorns."
He possessed, through the alliance of Leopold and Stockmar and the devotion of Victoria, kingly power without the name and the responsibility, and with that he became content. He used it cautiously and well when he employed it at all. His position was a trying one, but he steered well through its difficulties, and died as generally trusted as he was at first universally watched.
Albert was easily dispirited: what was the use of struggling to perform in a role which bored him and which, it was quite clear, nobody but the dear good Baron had any desire that he should take up? It was simpler, and it saved a great deal of trouble, to let things slide. But Stockmar would not have it. Incessantly, he harped upon two strings Albert's sense of duty and his personal pride.
In spite of the good counsel of the family Mentor, Baron Stockmar, and of her sagacious uncle, Leopold, she must have committed some errors of judgment fallen into some follies; she was so young and impulsive so very human. Her first independent political act seems to have been a mistake, founded on a misunderstanding. It was at all events an act more Georgian than Victorian.
Birch, tutor to the Prince of Vales. With the assistance of Baron Stockmar, fitting successors for those gentlemen were found in Sir Thomas Biddulph and Mr. Frederick Gibbes. The ball at Guildhall had been fixed for the 2nd of July, but the day was changed when it was remembered that the 2nd was the anniversary of the death of Sir Robert Peel. The entertainment was a very splendid affair.
The influence also of Stockmar, who was the closest adviser of her early married life, was not wholly for good, and the theory which the Prince held that the direction of foreign affairs is in a peculiar degree under the care of the Sovereign, and that the Prince, her husband, should be regarded as 'her permanent Minister, created during many years much friction.
These various obligations, together with his rapidly increasing interest in public affairs, and the number of persons who claimed his attention, especially when he was in London, become a serious tax on his strength, a tax which the Queen even at this early date feared and sought to guard against. Baron Stockmar was greatly pleased with the aspect of the family.
Among the other guests at Babelsberg were the Duke of Saxe- Coburg and Baron Stockmar. The Prince Consort's thirty-ninth birthday was celebrated in his daughter's house. The peculiar pang of separation to the Queen, she expressed in words which every mother will understand.
Baron Stockmar came to England in January, to see to this important element in the Prince's independence and comfort, as well as to the signing of the marriage contract.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking