SUPPLY—PRINCE ALBERT. (Hansard, 24 January 1840)

§ Lord John Russell

then rose and said, 555 that the House, in its Address in answer to the Speech from the Throne, had littered its heartfelt congratulations to her Majesty on an occasion so deeply interesting to all her faithful subjects as her approaching marriage; and it then went on to assure her Majesty, "We shall cheerfully concur in such measures as may demonstrate our duty and attachment to her Majesty's person and family, and as may be necessary to provide for such an establishment as may appear suitable to the rank of the Prince and the dignity of the Crown." With respect to the subject of her Majesty's marriage, except in so far as it was connected with the pecuniary provision which it might be proper to make for Prince Albert, it would not be necessary for him to make any observations, after the debate which took place on the address, carried as that address was by the unanimous vote of the House. He might, however, observe, in respect to political considerations, that he thought it would have been a subject of considerable embarrassment to this country at a future time, if her Majesty's marriage connected her with any considerable power of Europe, thus entangling the empire with the alliances and the enmities of foreign kingdoms. This was a difficulty felt, though in a minor degree, in the course of the last century, in consequence of the connection of this country with Hanover, though in the Act of Settlement it was expressly provided that this country should not be involved in war without the consent of Parliament, for the defence of the King's electoral dominions. But it was obvious, if the Sovereign of this country found his inheritance invaded, it would be impossible for this country, in the honourable support of its Sovereign, not to become embarrassed in the defence of those territories. He mentioned this, because he thought it had some bearing upon the provision now about to be made, and, indeed, upon the subject generally, Prince Albert being born in a foreign dominion, but, at the same time, coming to this country at an early period of his life, he thought it should be our object to attach him as much as possible to English habits and connections, and induce him to think, that he would always find from this country that affectionate support which he was sure, would always he given to the Throne of these realms. Anything, therefore, that would tend to show—contrary to all former precedents, and contrary, he 556 thought, to the wisdom which had hitherto guided these arrangements—that it was the desire of Parliament that the Prince at any future time should dissolve his connection with this country, would be at once unjust and impolitic. He would now state all the circumstances which appeared to him to bear upon the question of the amount of provision that ought to be made for Prince Albert. The Prince who might be allied to the Queen of this country had not properly any prerogatives, or powers, or legal attributes, such as belonged to the Queen Consort of these realms. At the same time, the position of the Queen Consort was in many respects, the nearest in analogy to the position of the Prince who became the husband of the Queen. With regard to the arrangements that had been made in former times, it was, of course, quite useless to mention the precedent of the marriage of a King of Spain with the Queen of these dominions. Another of the Queens of this country was married a considerable time before her accession to the Throne—he alluded to the Princess Anne of Denmark. Her marriage was contracted a number of years before the Revolution, and many years before her accession to the Throne. On ascending the Throne a provision was made for her after the same plan of arrangement as the household of King William 3rd had been provided for. But any arrangement of what could be called the civil list of that time was so totally different from any that had been made of late years, that it could not fairly be considered as affording a precedent applicable in any way to the present altered state of things. For instance, an attempt was made after the Revolution to separate the general expenses of the country from those which were supposed to belong more peculiarly to the Sovereign; and for that purpose it was proposed that a specific sum should be granted to King William for certain specific purposes, and that another should be granted to defray those general expenses which appeared to belong more properly to the country than to the Sovereign. Under this arrangement the sum allotted to King William 3rd, for the household, the payment of the judges, and other charges attaching to the civil list formed about one third of the expense of the peace establishment of the country. When Queen Anne came to the Throne, the general expense of the peace establishment being then about 2,000,000l., a sum 557 of 700,000l. was appropriated to the Queen, out of which 100,000l. a-year was devoted by her to the expenses of Prince George. There was at that time no special provision made for Prince George; hut, in 1702, the Queen's warrant was passed granting 50,000l. a-year to the Prince, one moiety of which was to be paid out of the Excise, the other moiety out of the receipts of the Post-office. This was all that could be quoted, in the way of precedent, with regard to princes who had been the husbands of the reigning Queens in this country. An arrangement was proposed to Parliament in 1816 with regard to Prince Leopold. It was to be remembered, that Prince Leopold married the heiress presumptive to the Throne. There was of course no certainty that the Princess would ever succeed to be the Queen of this country, even if she lived to survive her father. A sum of 60,000l. a-year was granted for the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold; and 50,000l. a-year of that sum was afterwards settled upon Prince Leopold during his life. The other cases which bore, he thought, a very considerable analogy to the present, were the cases of the Queen Consort of this kingdom. Upon this part of the subject, he begged to read that to which he had referred the other night, namely, the report of the select committee of 1831 upon the civil list. [The noble Lord read the report, in which the committee, after pointing out the absence of any data by which they could be governed beyond the mere reference to precedents, concluded by recommending that 110,000l. should be "allotted to the privy purse of their Majesties King William and Queen Adelaide, of which 60,000l. should be for the privy purse of the King, and 50,000l. for the privy purse of the Queen.] That recommendation of the Committee was adopted by Parliament without alteration or amendment. When the present Queen came to the Throne, the privy purse was reduced by 50,000l., leaving only to her Majesty a sum of 60,000l. a-year. But, in order to institute a fair comparison, it would be necessary to refer for a moment to two changes which had been made in another respect. On the accession of her present Majesty, the arrangement which formerly gave 75,000l. a-year for pensions was altered, and a sum of 1,200l. to be granted yearly only allowed for that purpose; and, according to the statement of the late Chan- 558 cellor of the Exchequer, the whole expense of pensions was taken at 35,000l. a-year. In the next place, 10,000l. a-year for secret service, which previously had been charged in the civil list, was, under the new arrangement made upon her Majesty's accession, transferred to the Consolidated Fund. It was not necessary for him then to enter into a comparison of the relative merits and advantages of these two modes of arrangement; it would be enough to say, that whereas by the former arrangement there had been some excess, under the present management there had been a considerable saving. It appeared, that the civil list of William and Adelaide amounted to 435,000l., and that the civil list of her present Majesty was limited to 385,000l., being the difference of the 50,000l. previously allotted to the privy purse of Queen Adelaide. As far, then, as they could judge by precedent of these matters (and he should endeavour presently to show, that there was no other mode of judging of them), it would appear, that 50,000l. a-year was the sum that had been allotted to Princes in the situation of Prince Albert and to the Queens Consort of this country. With respect to the sums which had been granted either to the husband of the Queen, or to Queens Consort in all cases of their surviving the Sovereign, the sum allowed was always greater than that which he now proposed. In the cases of Prince George of Denmark and Queen Caroline, the Consort of George 2nd, 100,000l. a-year was settled by Parliament upon each, in the event of their surviving the Sovereign. The Princess Dowager of Wales, the mother of George 3rd, had an annuity for life of 50,000l. Queen Charlotte, the consort of George 3rd, had a dower of 100,000l. a-year settled upon her in case she should survive his Majesty; and in the late reign, a similar dower was voted to Queen Adelaide, in the event of her surviving King William 4th. In the case of Prince Leopold, who, as he (Lord John Russell) had already stated, was not the husband of the Queen, and who might never arrive at the duties, the rank and the station which attached to the husband of the Queen, 50,000l. a-year was granted incase he should survive the Princess. With these several precedents before them, the; proposition that he wished to make was, j that the House should empower her Majesty to grant an annual sum of 50,000l. a-year out of the Consolidated Fund to 559 Prince Albert upon his marriage; to commence from the day of his marriage, and to continue for the whole of his life. By this arrangement it was proposed to embrace the two periods which heretofore had been regarded separately, namely, the period that the Prince might remain the husband of the Queen, and the period that he might survive her. Now with regard to any particular reasons or grounds which led the Government to make this proposition, he did not know that he had any to state, he did not find any direct authority for what they were doing; neither did lie feel himself competent to put the House in possession of any detailed information on the subject. He found that the select committee of 1831 stated, in several parts of their report, that with regard to the expenses necessary for the dignity and support of the Sovereign in the present times, it was impossible for them to form an opinion. They stated further, that they had taken the opinion of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, the right hon. Gentleman, the Member for the University of Cambridge, and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Althorp, upon the subject. He (Lord John Russell) had looked through the statements contained in the very eloquent and celebrated speech of Mr. Burke with respect to the civil list; but he did not find anything in it that could affect the present question. He could only say generally, that an establishment of some sort must be maintained by Prince Albert, and that it will be impossible for him, with the rank and dignity which he will hold as the Queen's husband, not to have about him persons above the ordinary rank, who would be ready to be in attendance at the royal palace in the usual manner in which Lords in waiting were in attendance upon the Sovereign. Without saying that anything definitive had been fixed, he might observe, that it was proposed to form the establishment of Prince Albert upon the model of the establishment of the Prince of Wales, during the time that the Prince of Wales had a separate allowance. He would have a groom of the stole, with 1,200l. a-year; grooms in waiting, an equerry, and other officers of the same class, whose salaries would amount to about 7,000l. or 8,000l. a-year. This was necessary, in order that the husband of the Queen might have in attendance upon him persons of superior rank and station. With regard to other expenses he did not know, that he could do more than refer 560 to the precedents he had quoted. At a time when everything was much less costly, when an income of 10,000l. a-year would go as far perhaps as 20,000l. now, at that time it was thought, that the husband of the Queen—the husband of Queen Anne —should have 50,000l. a year; and at all subsequent times the Queen Consort of the Sovereign had never received less than the like sum of 50,000l. a year. The proposition, therefore, that Prince Albert should receive 50,000l. a year appeared to him to be a reasonable one. The only ground, indeed, upon which he was told that the civil list upon this score ought to be reduced, was a ground which he really did not think applied to the present case. The proposition of the Government was this—that whereas the civil list of her present Majesty had been reduced by 50,000l., as compared with the civil list of his late Majesty, it should now again be increased to the same amount as was voted for William 4th, namely, 435,000l. In other words, that the 50,000l. formerly voted for the privy purse of Queen Adelaide should now be voted for the privy purse of Prince Albert. The only objection that he had heard to that proposition—and which he could not think applied in any way to the case—was founded, not upon what was proper or necessary to maintain the dignity of the Crown, not upon what was necessary to maintain the rank of the monarch and the household of the Prince, but upon the present unfortunate state of distress in some of the districts of the country. Nobody could lament more than he did, or more than the Government did, that such a state of distress should exist; but he owned he did not think it a ground upon which the House of Commons ought to found a vote for the permanent establishment of Prince Albert. If such a ground were once admitted, he did not know how the House could refuse to entertain the argument per contra. If the House were to make a limited grant of 21,000l. as was proposed by the hon. Member for Kilkenny (Mr. Hume), on account of the distress which prevailed in the country this year, he did not know how, in a future year of great and general prosperity, it would be possible for the House to refuse an application for a larger grant, which should be as lavish as the hon. Member for Kilkenny would now have it mean. He did not think that was the proper manner in which they ought to make a provision for one who was about to 561 be so nearly allied to the Sovereign of this country. If, indeed, the nation was permanently declining, and they in future should be unable to provide for an establishment suitable to the dignity of the Crown and becoming the greatness of the nation, that might be a reason for decreasing the amount of the vote then before them. But he could not take that view of the state of the nation, but believed, on the contrary, that the country in all its great resources was unimpaired; and the distress that prevailed, though heavy, was not to be looked upon as a sign of permanent declension and decay. They ought not, therefore, to take that as a permanent ground for determining what they conceived to be a proper establishment for the consort of the reigning Sovereign. The only question, therefore, which they had now to consider was, whether 50,000l. was a proper sum, or whether it was excessive: and, also, whether there should be any condition annexed to its enjoyment, in the event of Prince Albert surviving her Majesty, or whether it should remain the same during the life of that Prince. He had already stated his reasons why he did not think it advisable to make any such condition. There was but one case in which it had been proposed to annex a condition to a grant to a person allied to the Royal family, and that proposal was at once rejected by the House of Commons. He thought it far better not to refuse their confidence in one who was about to become a Member of the Royal Family, and who was much more likely to become attached to this country, as his place of abode, if confidence were evinced towards him. By such conduct, too, the House would at the same time be endeavouring more satisfactorily to congratulate her Majesty on her approaching union by showing respect to the object on whom she had fixed her affections. He had only now to move "That her Majesty be enabled to grant an annual sum not exceeding 50,000l. out of the consolidated fund of Great Britain and Ireland, for a provision to his highness Prince Albert of Saxe Coburg and Gotha, to commence on the day of his marriage with her Majesty, and to continue during the life of his Serene Highness.