He lived with Leopold almost continuously in England till 1831, when his master was chosen King of the Belgians; the limited monarchy of the Belgian Constitution was as much the work of Stockmar as that of the King. Stockmar returned to England as soon as the birth of the Belgian monarchy was safely accomplished, to wind up the affairs consequent on Leopold’s relinquishment of his English annuity; and when this was completed he retired to Coburg, in 1834. Stockmar had strongly advised Leopold on ascending the Belgian throne to give up the £50,000 a year which the House of Commons voted him on his marriage with Princess Charlotte. Leopold consented to do so, charging it, however, with his debts, amounting to £83,000, and with the keeping up of Claremont, the residue to be repaid to the Treasury. Greville’s comment on this arrangement is that the odds were none of it would ever reach the Treasury, and that Leopold would be back before the debts were paid. However, events proved that he had underestimated Leopold’s capacity, and the durability of the Belgian monarchy. In the storms of 1848, the constitutional thrones of England and Belgium, both of them owing much to Stockmar’s political genius, stood firm and strong when nearly every other in Europe was shaken.
In 1834 it was Stockmar’s purpose to retire into private life at Coburg; however, we soon find him engaged in arranging a marriage between Prince Ferdinand of Coburg, a cousin of Prince Albert’s, and the Queen of Portugal; and in May, 1837, he returned to England to furnish help and advice to Princess Victoria immediately upon her attaining her majority. This event took place on May 24th, 1837, and Stockmar arrived at Kensington on the 25th. The King was even then very ill, and it was certain that the Princess would soon become Queen. Stockmar had known her intimately from her birth, and his presence in England was of the greatest use and assistance to her. George IV. and William IV. had both employed private secretaries. Stockmar arranged that no similar appointment should be made by the young Queen, having in mind that when the time came the proper private secretary would be found in the person of the future husband. The duties of private secretary were therefore divided, as had been seen, between himself, Lord Melbourne, and Baroness Lehzen, formerly the Queen’s governess.
Stockmar’s chief work at this time was that of political tutor to the Queen. He drilled her in the principles of constitutional monarchy. In this he was not helped, but was thwarted, by Melbourne, who, as a strong party man, desired to enlist the Sovereign as a partisan of the Whigs. Stockmar’s doctrine ever was that the Sovereign was chief, not of a faction, but of the whole nation; that her moderating influence should be brought to bear on successive party leaders, who from time to time might be tempted to sacrifice national interests to party triumphs; that for “the perfect working of the English constitution, the Sovereign should not only set the example of a pure and dignified life, but should be potential in Cabinet and Council, through a breadth of view, unwarped by the bias, and undistracted by the passions, of party, and also, in the case of a long reign, through the weight of an accumulated knowledge and experience, to which not even the most practised statesmen could lay claim.”
It is needless to say that the eighteen-year-old Queen did not at once appreciate this lofty view of her position and functions. This was reserved for a later period, after she had learned from some of her own mistakes, and when she had associated with her as “permanent Minister,” Stockmar’s other pupil, the Prince to whom, in 1840, she gave her hand in marriage.
We know that Leopold had long ago settled who The Queen’s husband should be; but it is characteristic of Stockmar’s independence that he was at first by no means sure that his master had made the best choice. He had been so much away from Coburg that he did not know Prince Albert intimately. Leopold sent him as travelling companion to the young Prince on his journey to Italy in 1838, but Stockmar still had his doubts of Prince Albert’s strength and energy. He found in him a certain lethargy of mind, and disposition to spare himself both physically and mentally; a tendency to impulsiveness, without the continuous motive-force to carry through what he had conceived. He was startled to find in the future husband of the Queen of England an almost entire want of interest in politics; the Prince, in 1838, wished there was only one newspaper, The Augsburg Times; and he did not even read that! Stockmar also found the Prince lacking in ease and grace of manner. He admitted the Prince’s many good qualities and great intelligence, but wrote, “All this, however, does not yet suffice. He must not only have great capacity, but true ambition and great strength of will.... I will watch him closely, and endeavor to become better acquainted with him. If I find that at all points there is sufficient stability in him, it becomes a matter of duty that the first step taken should be to explain to him all the difficulties of the undertaking.”
It is characteristic of Stockmar that even after he was convinced that he had at first underestimated the Prince, and that it would be impossible to make a better choice of a husband for the Queen, he did not allow politics did not exclude morals; the next step after a suitable education for the Prince was that he should win the affection of the Princess, so that the marriage should be founded on a stable basis of mutual love.
Nothing could be more erroneous than to suppose that Stockmar gained his great influence with the Queen and Prince by judicious flattery. Affection and admiration he had in abundance for both of them; the Prince especially he came to love as a son; but his rule of conduct with them and with all other Royal personages was to speak out fully and frankly what was in his mind, not at all to echo what he thought was in theirs. He did not in this nor in other things act so much by instinct as by settled rule. “If you are consulted by princes to whom you are attached,” he wrote to the Belgian Minister, M. Van de Weyer, “give your opinion truthfully, boldly, and without reserve. Should your opinion not be palatable, do not, to please or conciliate him, deviate for a moment from what you think the truth.” It was this absolute sincerity which gave his advice its weight and value. His early letters to the Prince are characterized by sharp criticism, such as few young men in any position would take in good part; and it is very much to the credit of the Prince that he was able to do so; for instance, on leaving England in 1841, Stockmar wrote a long letter to the Prince, in the course of which he dwells on the tendency he had observed in him to be carried away “by impulses and predilections for men and things which spring from mistaken or perverted feeling. This tendency, which on a close self-scrutiny you will find to be the result either of weakness or vanity, should because of its very origin be most strenuously subdued. The same defect too often leads your Royal Highness, even in matters of moment, to rest satisfied with mere talk, where action is alone appropriate. It is, therefore, not merely unworthy of you, but extremely mischievous.”
Later, in 1847, although his affection for the Prince had grown greatly, and his confidence in his character still more, he calls him sharply to task for regarding the movement in German politics from a too exclusively dynastic standpoint, and also, with imperfect information, for expressing an opinion at all; he tells the Prince that he fails, from lack of knowledge and dynastic prejudice, rightly to grasp and appreciate the actual present condition and wants of the German people; that the current of opinion among thinking people in all classes in Germany was running strongly towards the conviction that the chief impediments to German national life were the dynastic sentiments, the pride and self-seeking of the numerous German princes; he declares that no men are so ignorant as the German princes of what was going on around them, and that their ignorance, arising from class prejudice, blinds them to their own true interests, which really lay in the direction of the development of political liberty among their people. He implores the Prince not to come out with a ready-made plan for the regeneration of the Fatherland, which would only betray his ignorance of the vital facts of the situation, and show him to be out of harmony with the spirit and tendency of the age. Nothing could be more outspoken than the whole of the letter, which covers more than seven pages of the biography of the Prince Consort. It shows Stockmar at his best as political preceptor to the Prince, and the Prince at his best as pupil, accepting the lecture with frankness and humility, and without a trace of resentment.
It appeared from time to time that the Queen was extremely sensitive as to the precedence of the Prince, especially in relation to foreign Sovereigns, and that she desired to confer on her husband the title of King Consort. Stockmar was strongly opposed to this. On a report reaching him in Coburg in 1845, that the matter was about to be broached, he wrote to the Prince: “What can it be which has led to the reopening of that report?... Meanwhile on this head I write a word of warning and entreaty. Never abandon your firm, lofty, powerful, impregnable position in order to run after trifles. You have the substance; stick by it, for the good of your wife and children, and do not suffer yourself to be seduced even by the wishes of affection into bartering substance for show.” It was not till 1857 that effect was given to the wishes of the Queen, and the title of Prince Consort was conferred on her husband by Letters Patent. In the letter from the Prince conveying this news to Stockmar he remarks that for nearly nineteen years he has valued above all others his old friend’s judgment on matters concerning himself, and he had the satisfaction of learning that Stockmar’s objection to a change in his title had been abandoned. Stockmar’s independence of Court forms and ceremonies was illustrated by his habit of slipping away after his numerous and prolonged visits to the Queen and her husband, without telling any one he was going or bidding farewell to his Royal hosts. They would come to his rooms to find him gone. The same disposition was also shown towards the close of his life by his entirely ceasing to reply to the Prince Consort’s constant letters. Stockmar, though not by any means very old, had many of the infirmities of age, and was disinclined to write; therefore he did not write, though the Prince frequently begs quite pathetically for “one little line.”
In the earlier years of the Queen’s married life Stockmar watched her development and that of her husband with eyes partly parental and partly pedagogic. He wrote to Bunsen in 1847:—