by A. N. Wilson
It would have taken very little to persuade Palmerston to declare war, and feelings of British outrage against Captain Wilkes’s piratical actions were strong. ‘Have you seen the news from America?’ the fictional Prime Minister asks the young MP Phineas Finn in Trollope’s eponymous novel (1867–9). ‘I have seen it but I do not believe it,’ was the reply.
Albert was too weak to go up to London from Windsor to discuss the matter with Palmerston and Lord John Russell. The Queen went in his stead, returning with draft communiqués. Albert settled down to read the Cabinet papers, but, as he admitted after a few hours, ‘Ich bin so schwach, ich habe kaum die Feder halten können.’ (‘I am so weak I could hardly hold a pen.’) After his death, it was piously believed that it was Albert’s moderating influence which persuaded Palmerston to tone down the fire of his dispatches to the Federal Government, and to avert a violent crisis between the two Governments. Whatever the truth of this, Albert’s weakly scribbled response to the Cabinet ultimatum on the morning of 1 December 1861 was the last thing he ever wrote.
The Queen’s journal gives out, for the year 1861, on 13 December. The first fortnight of the month records the most painful catalogue of her husband’s decreasing strength and his doctors’ false hopes. Presumably, the hope was so strong that they did not dare to allow themselves to see the obvious. On Monday, 2 December, the Queen recorded, ‘My poor Albert had a sad night of shivering, sleeplessness & great distress. Sent for Dr Jenner, who found him extremely uncomfortable, sad & distressed. Dr Jenner assured me there was no reason to be alarmed.’ Later that day, the prince sat listlessly on the sofa while the Queen read aloud from Scott’s Peveril of the Peak.
That night, she dined with Lord Palmerston, who urged her to consult new medical opinion, and the Duke of Newcastle. On 4 December, Albert could take no nourishment, though he could ‘sip a little raspberry vinegar in Seltzer water’. On Thursday 5th, they heard the news that the Vicereine of India, Lady Canning, had died in Calcutta. Such was the atmosphere at Windsor, that the news of any death was especially distressing. But on Friday 6th, Sir James Clark came and announced that the prince’s ‘condition improved’. Jenner agreed.
The next day, the doctors told the Queen that the prince had a fever. They had previously told her that if his fever rose, he would not survive it; but now they said that he would have to let the fever run its course, and that it would last a month. On Sunday, the Queen went to St George’s Chapel and heard Charles Kingsley preach. The prince was weaker.
On Monday 9th, Dr Jenner pronounced ‘favourably, thank God!’ By Tuesday 10th, the prince was wandering in his mind ‘but this Sir James said was to be expected . . . The Doctors were much pleased with his state’. On the 11th, he took a little broth. By now a whole team of medics were assembled, including a cheerful one called Dr Watson, and Mr Brown, who had looked after the Duchess of Kent in her last days. By the 12th, Albert’s hands were shaking. Dr Jenner and Sir James Clark ‘thought all was going well’. They gave him ammonia to check his rapid respiration. On the following day, Dr Jenner was expressing the fear that this very quick breathing could lead to congestion of the lungs. Brandy was now being administered every half hour. Dr Watson cheerily told the Queen that he had ‘seen many infinitely worse cases’ and that ‘I never despair with fever.’
That is the last entry for 1861 in Queen Victoria’s journal.50 The next day, 14 December, would be a date of dread, of solemn horror and misery for the rest of her life.
They had moved Albert into the Blue Room, the room where William IV and George IV had both died. At 6 am, Dr Brown called her, and said he had no hesitation that ‘I think there is ground to hope the crisis is over’.51 When she went in to see him early that morning, the Queen saw a radiant Albert. The weight having dropped off his face, he looked as he had done in youth, when she had first fallen in love with him. She walked out on to the terrace in the cold air with Princess Alice. In the distance, a military band was playing, and Victoria wept copiously.
In the afternoon, they moved the bed away from the wall. The Queen noted that his face now had ‘a dusky hue’. He was now speaking in French, worrying over the Orléanist princes who had enlisted in the Federalist forces in America and might find themselves fighting against England.
The doctors asked the Queen if the children could come to see their father. At first, she was worried that the sight of Bertie would agitate him, but one by one they were led through the room to kiss their father’s hand. Everyone noticed the Queen’s extraordinary calmness. By early evening, he was able to get out of the bed, while they changed the sheets. He could not get back into the bed without assistance. The Queen went to lie next door, but then she heard a change in his breathing, and rushed back in.
‘Es ist das kleine Frauchen,’ she whispered desperately to him. She asked for ‘ein Kuss’ and he notionally moved his trembling lips. She ran from the room and threw herself on the ground in anguish.
Princess Alice followed her and begged her to return, for, young as she was, she could see that the end was now very near.
‘Oh, this is death,’ cried the Queen, taking his left hand and kneeling beside the bed. ‘I know it. I have seen this before.’
Princess Alice knelt on the other side of the bed, the Prince of Wales and Princess Helena knelt at the foot of the bed. Prince Ernst of Leiningen, the doctors, Prince Albert’s valet Rudolph Loehlein, Colonel Phipps and General Bruce were there, as was the Dean of Windsor, Gerald Wellesley. Lining the corridor were the Gentlemen of the Household in their splendid Windsor uniforms – put on in honour of the dinner they had just eaten, rather than especially to attend a deathbed.
‘Two or three long, but perfectly gentle breaths were drawn, the hand clasping mine, & (oh! It turns me sick to write it) all, all was over . . . I stood up, kissing his dear heavenly forehead & called out in a bitter agonising cry: “Oh, my dear Darling!” & then dropped on my knees in mute, distracted despair, unable to utter a word or shed a tear.’52
It was quarter to eleven. Those left in the room heard the Queen’s loud sobs as she was carried out by Colonel Phipps. He laid her on a sofa in the Red Room. Her children came to join her. The Prince of Wales ran into her arms. ‘Indeed, Mama, I will be all I can to you.’ She kissed him again and again. ‘I am sure, my dear boy, you will.’
The Household now came in to swear their devotion, to express their sympathy, to promise their loyalty. As she came out of the Red Room, she met the Duchess of Atholl – ‘Oh duchess, he is dead! He is dead!’
She took the duchess and the children’s governess Miss Hildyard to kiss the prince’s hand, which was already cold.
Afterwards, she went to her room, staring wildly at her maids. They got her to bed, and Princess Alice had her own bed moved into the room. It was a repetition of childhood in Kensington Palace, a widowed Queen and a daughter sharing a bedroom. Alice sent for Jenner who gave Queen Victoria a mild opiate, but it was not the knock-out draught she required, and for much of the night she woke and she wept.53
When Vicky heard the news in Germany, she wrote, ‘Why has the earth not swallowed me up? To be separated from you at this moment is a torture which I can not describe.’ On the same day, the Queen had begun a letter to her, with the words, ‘My darling Angel’s child – Our firstborn. God’s will be done.’54
PART FOUR
FOURTEEN
‘THE QUEEN’S GRIEF STILL SOBS’
A YEAR ON, in 1862, the Queen prepared herself for her first Christmas as a widow. Special festivals are times which almost all bereaved people find particularly painful. ‘Precious one, he loved this festival so much – in all his letters he speaks of “das liebe Weihnachtsfest” & he liked it so much as it was “eine allgemeine Bescherung”, mutual giving and receiving! And those 2 dear ones, who introduced this blessed custom & were so busy & so happy in preparing for others – dear Mama (how kind and busy she was) and my An
gel are both no more here!’1
Albert’s ‘liebes Kind’ was a woman of forty-two; but her marriage had – as marriage often can to either sex – infantilized her. She had become so used to his being the one who made the chief political decisions, and drafted the diplomatic and political letters. Intensely shy as she always was, she had gone through the motions of receiving foreign dignitaries, presiding at Drawing Rooms, Investitures, Privy Councils and the like, but always with the prince at her side. Even so simple a thing as knowing when to rise from a State Banquet was dictated by a friendly wink2 from the Prince Consort. Now she was completely adrift. Nothing could console, but the trappings of grief, the swathing of herself, her children, her household in deepest black, the ordering of thicker and thicker black borders for the writing paper, the keeping as a shrine, a Todeszimmer, of the Blue Room at Windsor, and the planning of mausolea and memorials provided an occupation through her sleepwalk of psychological torture.
The grief-stricken Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, upon the death of Princess Charlotte, had built a small Gothic mausoleum in the grounds of Claremont. His gave his nephews, Albert and Ernst, the idea of building a mausoleum at Coburg for their father in 1844. Leopold’s sister, Duchess Victoire, had wanted to be buried in this family vault, but in 1859 she decided she wished to be buried at Frogmore. Prince Albert commissioned Ludwig Grüner to design a mausoleum for the Duchess of Kent near her residence in Home Park, Windsor. The building was executed by A. J. Humbert.
When the prince himself died, the Queen lost no time in commissioning another mausoleum, a last resting place for Albert and herself. Grüner was once again approached as the principal architect, and Humbert was employed to execute the great German’s designs. Grüner chose to encase Victoria and Albert in a monument of high Italian Renaissance style, embellished with glorious marble and stencilled paintwork of rich reds, dark blues and bright yellow. The walls were decorated with frescoes by contemporary German and Italian artists in the manner of Raphael. And the centrepiece of the whole edifice was to be the marital pair themselves. Albert’s love of Scotland and his taste for Italian art were skilfully combined in the huge sarcophagus, which is hewn from dark Aberdeen granite. On top of the massive tomb, however – worthy in size and scope of the great princes of Europe, as magnificent as Charlemagne’s tomb at Aachen, or Napoleon’s at Les Invalides – lie the pair themselves. Baron Carlo Marochetti carved two exquisite figures in white marble, Albert in the robes of the Garter, and his Queen everlastingly young in a dress which is part ballgown and part shroud. This youthful statue of the Queen was kept in store until her death. Forty years would elapse before the Widow of Windsor was laid to rest beside her lover and prince, but that she already did so in spirit was the unmistakeable message of the architects and the sculptor. Grüner had risen to the emotional-cum-aesthetic challenge with true magnificence. The potent mingling of Love and Death had been the leitmotiv of the Romantic movement – in the poetry of Keats and Novalis, and rising later in the century to its operatic, almost orgasmic musical form in Richard Wagner’s Liebestod in Tristan und Isolde. There was nothing artificial about the Queen’s laceration of spirit, but her expression of grief bore all the hallmarks of her era. ‘The Queen’s grief still sobs through its interior as though she had left her sorrow on earth to haunt this rich, forbidding temple to her loneliness.’3
The site of the Frogmore Mausoleum was chosen by the Queen within four days of the prince’s death. The fane was erected with great speed, and a little over a year after Albert’s death, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, consecrated the mausoleum. The next day, the body was moved from St George’s Chapel to its sarcophagus. Thereafter, scarcely a day passed, when the Queen was resident at Windsor Castle, without her visiting Albert’s shrine. Nor, of course, would the Frogmore Mausoleum be the only memorial to the Prince Consort. Sir George Gilbert Scott designed the most famous of them – finally unveiled in 1876 – the Albert Memorial, hard by the original site of the Crystal Palace – which was erected in part by public subscription, in part by a parliamentary grant of £50,000.
In our own day, the Albert Memorial, which had begun to show signs of age, has been gloriously restored, so that we can see it in its pristine splendour: the bronze statue of the Prince Consort by J. H. Foley sits enthroned in a Gothic baldachin. The base of this canopy is adorned with a marble frieze with the figures of painters, poets, composers, architects and sculptors. The corners jut out with statues representing the prince’s practical concerns: Agriculture, Commerce, Manufacture and Engineering. At the corners of the whole memorial are statues representing the four continents. For once, a piece of extravagant funerary statuary does not exaggerate the significance of its subject. Albert, who had been so little understood in his lifetime by the British Establishment, had possessed a prodigious range of talents, interests and accomplishments. Britain had failed to see his excellence, but he had seen Britain’s. The Memorial is therefore both a salute to the only member of the Royal Family in recent history, or perhaps ever, who deserves the name of genius, and to the wonderful age in which he lived. From his Highland home in Balmoral to his birthplace in Coburg, and in many of the new industrial cities of the Midlands and the North, statues of Albert sprang up, and Albert Streets, Albert Squares, Albert Terraces and Albert Crescents rampaged through the road maps of British towns. In Balmoral, in August 1862, ‘We went through a sad ceremony. I and my six orphans went up (I – wonderful to say – in my little carriage) to the top of Craig Lowrigan – just opposite Craig Gowan and placed the first stones (at least some stones), in the front of which all our initials will be carved in large letters; and we have placed at the end the initials of you three absent ones, thinking you would like it,’ the Queen wrote to the Crown Princess of Prussia. ‘It will be 40 feet at the base – and 35 feet high and the following inscription is to be placed on it – in very large letters, “To the beloved memory of Albert the great and good, Prince Consort. Raised by his broken-hearted Widow.”’4 It was inscribed with a quotation from the Book of Wisdom – which, not being part of the canonical Scripture recognized by the Reformation, was criticized by the Free Kirk – ‘shamefully’5 in the Queen’s eyes.
It is the conventional belief that, after she was widowed, Queen Victoria sank into a depressive seclusion which led to a withdrawal from political affairs and public life; that after nearly a decade of this seclusion, the monarchy itself was imperilled; and that, had it not been for the near-death of the Prince of Wales, of typhoid fever in 1870, prompting a surge of patriotic love for the institution, the monarchy and the Queen’s reputation might never have recovered. Mythologies do not arise out of nothing, and there is plainly some truth in this analysis of the ten years or so which followed the death of the Prince Consort.
It is true, certainly, that Victoria was desolated by Albert’s death; that the woman, who loved the theatre and the opera and the ballet, who enjoyed great dinners, was changed into a sable-clad widow who shunned society. It is by no means true, however, that she lost interest in political affairs. At times, the weight of grief and depression were so great that she found it difficult to function as a human being. But there were actually very few months, even at the worst moments of blinding, and almost maddening, desolation, when she was not also politically engaged. This was often how matters appeared to her exasperated ministers, who found her cancelling Privy Council meetings at a moment’s notice, and shrinking from public duties such as the State Opening of Parliament.
Another way of viewing the story, however, would be to say that Victoria was, in her extraordinary way, a woman battling with demons, and overcoming them – largely alone. For many years after she was left alone, she was wandering through the valley of the shadow; but she would emerge. That is the triumphant ending which any reader (or author) of a biography of the Queen can expect. It is a story of victory against painful odds. She was not exaggerating when she wrote, ‘ich habe Alles verloren!’6 (
‘I have lost everything!’) Yet even in the immediate years after she was widowed, although she withdrew from much of public life, she continued to play a daily and active role in the political affairs of Europe. She had no choice. Moreover, as her mental health broke down under the burden of bereavement, she found herself having to struggle with an intractable international situation, one whose outcome would affect the entire future of Europe, one in which her family was intimately involved, and a situation, moreover, where she feared the intemperate attitudes of her Liberal ministers would lead Britain into a futile war. ‘Had a bad night. So worried about this terrible Holstein question,’ she told her journal, and, to the Duke of Newcastle, ‘I urged most strongly the necessity for great caution and no irritating language against Germany being used, for it would produce an everlasting irritation’.7 Events proved her right about this. The rise of Bismarck, and with it the success of Prussia in its territorial and political ambitions, was relentless. There would have been nothing that Palmerston or Gladstone or Russell or Newcastle, or any of these Englishmen, could have done about it. Anything they might have tried to do would have been to make matters worse, and expose Britain to a humiliating war against Prussia, which they would undoubtedly have lost. Not for the last time, Victoria, even in her extremity of nervous collapse, saved her male ministers from their own folly.
1861 had taken from her both her mother and her husband. Between them, Duchess Victoire and Prince Albert had sustained for Victoria, from her very earliest years, a world of home which provided her with stability; it was an alternative world to the alarming and quarrelsome British world outside the walls of, at first, Kensington Palace, and subsequently, outside Osborne and Balmoral. As a child, she had been frightened by the dysfunctional, fissiparous feuds among her British uncles and cousins. As a young monarch, she was alarmed by the British courtiers and by the politicians who seemed to be her enemies. Victoire, and then Albert, came from another world, from Coburg. Never having been exposed, as mother and husband had been, to the darker sides of Coburg life – to the dissolute Duke Ernst I’s marriages, to the quarrels within the German Court – Victoria was enabled to idealize Coburg, and to find in the world of Germany, its language, music and culture, a comfort blanket which smelt of home. This also happened to be the decade in which modern Germany itself, from dozens of German-speaking duchies, former electorates, free cities, princedoms and kingdoms, was struggling to be born. Seen from the perspective of her British subjects, and biographers, the 1860s could be viewed primarily as the time of seclusion. Seen from the perspective of Victoria’s children – three of whom were to be married to Germans by 1870 – and seen from the perspective of the Queen herself, this was the decade in which the Kensington child of a German exile rediscovered her German roots. When Princess Charles of Hesse-Darmstadt came to the Isle of Wight in 1862 to attend the wedding of her son Prince Louis to Princess Alice, she remarked, ‘from the moment . . . I was presented to the Queen, and her kind, almost motherly words in pure German sounded in my ear, a feeling of home came over me.’8