It is unfortunate, though indicative of the English sense of humor, that today in the country of which he was Prince Consort the name of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, husband to Queen Victoria and ancestor of a large slice of European royalties, should be most associated with a cosmetic piercing of the penis. It was a part of the princely anatomy of considerable importance—Albert fathered nine children, hence his formidable dynastic effect—but it is not dwelled upon in A. N. Wilson’s thorough, well-written, and insightful biography, Prince Albert. This is the more reliable story of Albert: participant in an arranged marriage that turned into a passionate love-match, embodiment of the Victorian determination for self-improvement, a man thwarted by the limitations of the role of husband to the Queen Regnant and whose death at the age of forty-two was not merely a histrionics-inducing tragedy for his widow, but a severe loss for his adopted country.

Wilson’s book is subtitled “The Man Who Saved the Monarchy,” and perhaps he can be forgiven the exaggeration. The house of Hanover (into which Queen Victoria was born, and which changed its name to Saxe-Coburg and Gotha on her marriage to Albert in 1840) certainly had a rocky passage in the first decades of the nineteenth century. George III was mad, though not perhaps to the extent that dramatic portrayals of him have liked to suggest. His son the Prince Regent, from 1820 King George IV, was an idle, ignorant,