Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who married Queen Victoria in 1840, has usually been described as cold, formal and prosaic, given to an excess of virtue after the manner of his age - in short, as a rather dull and uninteresting character. Strangely enough, this misleading and incomplete picture of her husband derives mainly from Queen Victoria, who not only commissioned and directed Sir Theodore Martin's biography, but even wrote a good deal of it herself. In truth, however, Prince Albert's personality was warm and kindly; he possessed a lively and at times over-sensitive imagination, and there was a streak of romanticism in him which he owed to his mother and to the legends of their native Thuringia of which was so fond. But whereas his mother ruined her life by romanticism, the careful reflection and scholarly caution with which Albert approached the problem of politics made him for ten years the dominant figure in England as the most powerful man in Europe. -- Prologue