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Cole was dispatched to find out how the wider community might react to the concept and, despite the fact that few of the details had been worked out at this stage, he reported “considerable enthusiasm, interest and pledges of support.”23 This was unsurprising given the fact that the country bristled with self-confidence to the extent that some believed that England “had both the capability and the right, indeed the positive obligation to remake mankind in its own image.”24
The Society of Arts was asked to organize the exhibition, but it soon became apparent that the scale of work required would overwhelm it. Albert urged the Liberal government of Lord John Russell to establish an appropriate official body to take on the organizational role vacated by the Society. A Royal Commission resulted from his petition. The commissioners were appointed by Royal warrant on January 3, 1850, and a subsequent Royal charter was issued on August 15, 1850. Members of the government, including the prime minister, were co-opted onto its executive committee.
The initial goodwill Cole had encountered when the notion was first raised in the wider community appeared to evaporate quickly. The concept of an exhibition that was dedicated to the “Works of All Industrial Nations” and sponsored by a foreign Prince Consort had radical overtones that some Englishmen found unpalatable. Opponents of the event were able to marshal considerable support among politicians, in the pages of some newspapers (The Times in particular), and from a group of residents who lived on or around the proposed exhibition site in Hyde Park. Charles Babbage, a noted commentator on the events of 1851, disparagingly referred to these protesters as the Belgravians and their medicine men.25 They raised many objections to the project, even questioning the need to cut down trees to make way for Joseph Paxton’s glass mansion in which the exhibition was to be held.26 The Belgravians also suggested that pestilence and disease would accompany so many foreign visitors to London. Perhaps more darkly, they perpetuated rumors of anarchy and assassination.27 Colonel Charles Sibthorp, the M.P. for Lincoln and Albert’s main parliamentary foe, went so far as to denounce the exhibition as the greatest trash, the greatest fraud, and the greatest imposition ever pressed on the people of England.28