Ever since the accession of Prince Albert to the Royal Husbandship of these realms, he has devoted the energies of his mind and the ingenuity of his hands to the manufacture of infantry caps, cavalry trousers, and regulation sabretaches. One of his first measures was to transmogrify the pantaloons of the Eleventh Hussars; and as the regiment alluded to is Prince Albert's Own, His Royal Highness may do as he likes with his own, and no one could complain of his bedizening the legs of the unfortunate Eleventh with scarlet cloth and gold door-leather. When, however, the Prince, throwing the whole of his energies into a hat, proposed to encase the heads of the British soldiery in a machine which seemed a decided cross between a muff, a coal scuttle, and a slop pail, then _Punch_ was compelled to interfere, for the honour of the English army. The result has been that the headgear has been summarily withdrawn by an order from the War Office, and the manufacture of more of the Albert hat has been absolutely prohibited. [Illustration: THE TAILOR'S GOOSE--THE TERROR OF THE ARMY] [Sidenote: _Prince Albert as Sportsman_] The campaign reached its height in 1845 when _Punch_ was given an irresistible opportunity on the occasion of the Prince being entertained by the Merchant Tailors. The Prince, _Punch_ averred, was a born tailor, the Prince of Tailors, the true British tailor. He sought to make the British Army invincible by rendering them so comical that, by coming rapidly on the enemy, they might convulse him with laughter and paralyse his defence. He had fraternized with the Goose of Great Britain, and might sit cross-legged in the eyes of posterity. After this outburst of derision _Punch_ gave the Prince a rest as tailor, but took up the running--or baiting--with renewed energy against his sportmanship. _Punch_, it may be noted, was not an unmitigated admirer of field sports; he denounced otter hunting as cruel, and more than once protested against officers and others who rode their horses to death for a wager. It was part of the humanitarianism which impelled him to support the abolition of capital punishment, though here his argument was based on the view that death was a release for the murderer, who was more effectually punished by being kept in life-long penance for his crime. _Punch_ was never an enemy of fox hunting. Doubtless the influence of Leech counted for something. But the organized slaughter of game filled him with disgust, and the exploits of the Prince in the Highlands in the autumn of 1842 prompted the first of many tirades. The pheasant battues at Drayton, when the Queen and Prince Albert were the guests of Sir Robert Peel, are treated in the same spirit, and the Ballad of Windsor Chase, with its grotesque illustration of fat beagles and obese hares, the Prince on horseback, and the Queen in her pony phaeton, carries on the satire in this fashion:--