Prince Albert, Consort

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha shines through a Virgo Sun, the vitality that seeks the limelight not for its own sake but through hard work, service and a fine analytical mind: the soul who shines by being useful and doing the job perfectly, out of principle. It is the ideal signature for a consort. Marrying his first cousin Queen Victoria in 1840, he chafed at first against a role that granted him no power, then quietly made himself indispensable, running the royal household, estates and office, and championing educational reform and the worldwide abolition of slavery. His organisation of the Great Exhibition of 1851 was his masterpiece of Virgoan mastery. That Sun sits in the twelfth house, the unknowable house of self-sacrifice and service behind the throne, where he laboured selflessly in another's light. His Moon in Scorpio is the emotional volcano beneath a composed surface, all-or-nothing in its loyalty and depth; placed in the third house of the mind and communication, an exalted, prized Moon, it fed his tireless counsel and his gift for persuading Victoria toward constitutional restraint. A Virgo Ascendant doubled the perfectionist, dutiful mask. His death in 1861, at only forty-two, cast Victoria into lifelong mourning.