“Albert! spare those trees,
Mind where you fix your show;
For mercy’s sake, don’t, please,
Go spoiling Rotten Row.
“That Ride, that famous ride,
We must not have destroyed,
For, ne’er to be supplied,
Its loss will leave a void.
“Oh! certainly there might
Be for your purpose found
A more congenial site
Than Hyde Park’s hallowed ground.
“Where Fashion rides and drives,
House not Industrial Art;
But, ’mid the busy hives
Right in the City’s heart.
“And, is it thy request
The place that I’d point out?
Then I should say the best
Were Smithfield, without doubt.
“There, by all votes approved,
The wide world’s wares display,
The Market first removed
For ever and a day.”
Prince Albert’s academic cap is typical of his being LL.D. and Chancellor of Cambridge; and the singular-looking being addressing him is a staunch and bigoted Tory, whom Punch delighted to caricature, Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp, M.P. for Lincoln, whose opposition to the Exhibition of 1851 amounted almost to mania. Take, for instance, the following quotation from a speech of his in the House of Commons on the subject (26 July, 1850):—
“Hyde Park was emphatically the Park of the People, and it was now proposed to be devoted to purposes which he must hold to be prejudicial to the people in a moral, religious, and social point of view. It was sought to appropriate it to the encouragement of—what? To the encouragement of everything calculated to be prejudicial to the interests of the people. An exhibition of the industry of all nations, forsooth! An exhibition of the trumpery and trash of foreign countries, to the detriment of our own already too much oppressed manufacturers.... They were flying in the face of the rights of the public merely to gratify the foreigner, who had no right to be here at all.”
On another occasion he said, “They might call it success, but he called it failure. He did not wish to see that building destroyed by any acts of violence, but would to God that some hailstorm, or some visitation of lightning, might descend to defeat the ill-advised project.” For this he had to sit for his portrait once again. Punch, 15th February, 1851.