When Prince Albert visited the Pope, it made a difference that he had a sense of the ridiculous rather than a sense of humour. A.N. Wilson told me about it at the launch of his Prince Albert, which argues that the Prince Consort saved the institution of the monarchy.

A year before his marriage in 1840 to Queen Victoria, Albert toured Italy and secured an audience with Pope Gregory XVI. Seeing the Pope at Mass in St Peter’s, Albert “a Liberal Protestant with a pronounced distaste for Catholicism”, noted that he looked “like a pagoda”. That sounds a striking image, but I think what he meant was that the Pope looked like a pagan idol or despot, an earlier meaning (in German and English) than that of a storeyed temple. In his diary, Byron had referred to “my poor little pagod, Napoleon, pushed off his pedestal”.

Anyway, when they met, Albert did not hesitate to lecture Gregory on the relationship of Greek statuary to the art of Egypt and Etruria. This was something the Pope knew a great deal about, having founded the Egyptian and Etruscan museums in the Vatican. Despite Albert’s relentless instruction, the papal demeanour continued to be “kind and civil”, the visitor thought.