by Julia Baird
Albert took three long, gentle breaths, and then it was over. Victoria stood, kissed his forehead, and pressed his hand to her face. She cried out in a howl of anguish that chilled her children’s hearts and echoed in the castle’s thick stone corridors: “Oh! my dear Darling!” She dropped to her knees, numb and distraught, as the clock chimed 10:45 P.M.; the castle was surrounded by black night. Her family stood, stricken, looking at the woman who ruled millions but had loved only one. What would become of her now?
—
Before retiring to bed, Victoria went up to the nursery. She lifted a warm, sleepy Beatrice out of her cot and held her tight, rocking silently in the darkness. She walked back to her room and placed four-year-old Beatrice in her empty bed, curling up next to her. Veering from wild grief to numbness, and sedated with opium, she cried all night. Albert’s nightclothes were laid out next to her. Alice lay in a small bed at the foot of hers, and she woke to cry with her mother. The tenderness of the children was remarkable. Little Beatrice stroked Victoria’s face when she finally woke, saying tenderly, “Don’t cry. Papa is gone on a visit to Grandmama.”
For a long time, Victorian doctors disagreed on what killed Prince Albert. Victoria had not allowed an autopsy. Most assumed he died of the deadly typhoid that the poor drains of Windsor could easily have exposed him to, or perhaps a perforation of the bowel. Others have since guessed it was bowel cancer, a peptic ulcer, or a gastrinoma. The most recent and plausible theory, put forth by Helen Rappaport, is that it was Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel condition exacerbated by stress, whose symptoms matched Albert’s. (This syndrome was not identified by the medical community until 1913.) Albert’s feverish signs, Rappaport argues, may have been the deterioration of a chronic gastrointestinal inflammation, which would explain his stomach problems and his toothaches.
—
The next morning, bells tolled across England. Preachers hastily rewrote sermons on death. Sheets of black material descended on coats, dresses, arms, swords, buckles, fans, flags, and houses across London. The country had not mourned in such a way since the death of Princess Charlotte almost half a century earlier. Doubts about the foreign prince evaporated as the British began to realize what they had lost. The papers trumpeted the virtues of the German now called “the most important man in the country.” Politicians grew nervous about what his death might mean. Lord Clarendon, who had long admired Albert’s “motives, sagacity and tact,” said it was a “national calamity, of far greater importance than the public dream of.” He worried, too, as everyone did, for Victoria:
No other woman has the same public responsibility or the same motive for being absolutely guided by the superior mind of her husband. This habit, or rather necessity, together with her intense love for him, which has increased rather than become weaker with years, has so engrafted her on him that to lose him will be like parting with her heart and soul.
It was true. The proud queen became a wretched woman who would forever be defined by her loss. After she was carried out of the King’s Room, she said quietly, “There is no one to call me Victoria now.” She asked her household not to desert her. She knew how much sympathy her subjects had for her, as reports across the country trickled back: “Even the poor people in small villages, who don’t know me,” she wrote, “are shedding tears for me, as if it were their own private sorrow.” Her subjects ached for her. “The peasants in their cottages,” wrote Richard Monckton Milnes, “talk as if the Queen was one of themselves.”
The children were heartbroken to lose their father. Vicky, pregnant and marooned in Europe, was desperate with the pain of separation. A horror-struck Bertie threw himself into Victoria’s arms and vowed to devote his life to comforting her. Alice was devastated but stoic, and she cared for her mother selflessly and gently, as she had done for her father in his final days. Alfred heard the news when he was still at sea near Mexico and couldn’t return home until February. The eight-year-old Prince Leopold, far away in France, could only cry: “Oh! I want my mother!” The young Beatrice continued to somehow miraculously cheer her mother up. The nine fatherless children were now under the pall of the depressed court: clad in crackling, heavy dark crêpe, they were forbidden to laugh or show any kind of enthusiasm for life. It was a heavy burden for children who needed comforting themselves.
Victoria did not attend her husband’s funeral. Arthur and Bertie were sad little figures who tried to conceal their sobs in front of the rows of solemn old men. Victoria had made one change to the funeral service, though. After reading the draft of proclamation asking that God “bless and preserve” the queen “with long life, health and happiness,” she struck out “happiness” with her black pen. She wrote the word “honor” instead: she could not conceive of a life that might contain happiness now.
—
Christmas 1861 was a grim affair. Lady Augusta Bruce described it as agony, as though an “impenetrable cloud” had settled over all of them: “The whole house seems like Pompeii.” The royal household all received mementos of Albert as gifts. Victoria sat silently in her drawing room while people talked quietly around her. She would slide her hand into her pocket and finger Albert’s red handkerchief and gold watch, thinking forlornly that it hardly seemed fair that his watch was still ticking while he had gone. She had once bemoaned the passing of time; now every hour seemed interminable. She made sure all of her husband’s timepieces were wound daily, and that visitors continued to sign his guest book, next to hers. People had to understand: Albert might have died, but he hadn’t gone.
While nursing her grief, Victoria grew to hate being in the watchful eyes of the public: the peering opera glasses, rows of politicians or commoners craning their necks on footpaths or leaning into her carriage. Eyes followed her everywhere. She couldn’t bear it. Victoria longed for yawning vistas empty of people, for the sight of the sea, for solitude. And what comforted her most of all was her own grief: an excessive, indulgent, loud, unembarrassed, demanding, and scandalous grief. For a woman who was unable and unwilling to suture her raw, bloody heart, the solace of poetry had, for now, entirely overshadowed politics. Would anyone understand when she cried that losing her husband was like “tearing flesh from my bones”? She did not describe herself as the queen anymore, but signed herself as the “brokenhearted Widow.”
* * *
* Arthur, eleven, and Louise, fifteen, had said goodbye to him earlier that evening and been sent to bed. Four children were absent: Vicky was pregnant and stuck in Berlin, Affie was in Mexico with the navy, and four-year-old Beatrice was not allowed to enter the sickroom. The fragile Leopold, now aged eight, had just been diagnosed with hemophilia and was on a recuperative trip—after a bad bout of bleeding—in southern France. Also crowded in the room that day were General Robert Bruce (Bertie’s governor); the Dean of Windsor, Gerald Wellesley; Sir Charles Phipps (Albert’s private secretary); and General Charles Grey.
CHAPTER 21
“The Whole House Seems Like Pompeii”
I have, since he left me, the courage of a lioness.
—QUEEN VICTORIA
When Alfred Tennyson heard that the queen of England wanted a private audience, he was glum. “I am a shy beast and I like to keep in my burrow,” he complained to his friend the Duke of Argyll. The poet asked two questions: how to greet her when he entered, and whether he needed to back out of the room. The duke, a Scottish peer whose son would marry Princess Louise, advised Tennyson on how to behave: to bow low respectfully or kneel, and offer her his hand if it felt natural to do so, and that the queen would walk out when finished. It was April 1862, only four months after Albert had died. The Duke told Tennyson: “Talk to Her as you would to a poor Woman in affliction—that is what she likes best.” Tennyson was warned not to refer to the Prince Consort as “late,” but to remember the “strong reality” of the queen’s “belief in the Life presence of the Dead.”
The fifty-three-year-old poet dressed in a suit and black stockings for his trip t
o Osborne House on a bitterly cold day. He lived nearby, only miles from the queen’s residence on the Isle of Wight. He was shown into Victoria’s drawing room and stood with his back to the fire as he waited for the queen. When Victoria entered, she was pale but self-possessed. She stared quietly at him: the poet who had captured her grief so perfectly. Tennyson had written In Memoriam after the death of a close male friend, and Victoria had returned to it hundreds of times, adding her own notes and underlining the words in her thick black ink:
But I remain’d, whose hopes were dim,
Whose life, whose thoughts were little worth,
To wander on a darken’d earth
Where all things round me breathed of him.
He looked a bit peculiar, Victoria thought, but she found there was “no affectation about him.” Tennyson knelt to kiss her hand. Victoria sat down and told him how much his poem had comforted her, as well as his recent dedication of Idylls of the King to Albert. Tennyson told her that Albert’s death was a great loss to the country, his eyes welling. He thought Victoria very pretty, like a sweet, sad statue. When Victoria asked if he wanted her to do anything, he responded only that she might shake the hands of his two boys. She invited his sons, Hallam and Lionel Tennyson, to Osborne in May the next year, along with their parents.
The Tennyson family—Alfred, his wife, and their children—were smitten with the queen, whom they found to be “beautiful, not the least like her portraits,” and utterly without pretense. Even ten-year-old Hallam wrote: “The Queen is not stout. Her Majesty has a large mind and a small body to contain it therein.” Tennyson’s wife, Emily, remarked on her easy familiarity, and how there was no shyness between them. “One feels,” Emily wrote, “that the Queen is a woman to live and die for.”
Tennyson provided great solace to the queen, with his fierce belief in the immortal soul and his ability to make her feel understood. She wrote in her diary:
Had some interesting conversation with [Tennyson] and was struck with the greatness and largeness of his mind, under a certainly rough exterior. Speaking of the immortality of the soul and of all the scientific discoveries in no way interfering with that, he said: “If there is no immortality of the soul, one does not see why there should be any God,” and that “You cannot love a Father who strangled you,” etc.
Twelve years earlier, in 1850, Albert had insisted that Tennyson be appointed poet laureate. In 1862, Alice sent a message to the poet asking if he could write something to mark her father’s death. Tennyson wrote a dedication for the Idylls, in which he declared him “Albert the Good.” In it, he urged Victoria, in words she recited to herself in her blackest hours, to endure:
Break not, O woman’s-heart, but still endure;
Break not, for thou art Royal, but endure;
Remembering all the beauty of that star
Which shone so close beside Thee that ye made
One light together, but has past and leaves
The Crown a lonely splendor.
—
The first few months without Albert were horrendous. Victoria struggled to sleep, woke feeling wretched, and had violent pains in her face, with frequent headaches. It all felt like a “hideous dream.” She missed Albert’s help constantly: when arranging papers, selecting art, placing paintings on walls, talking about politics or the army, meeting with people, placing sketches in travel albums, supervising the clipping of bushes, consulting with her children’s doctors, arranging rooms for visitors, and hiding Easter eggs, which she had never done before.
Everything triggered the memory of Albert. The sight of trees and plants upset her, because he had known all their names. So did the sounds of singing birds, especially nightingales. She sought out his possessions and went through his papers, his favorite art—especially the Raphaels—and his guns and rifles. What upset her most of all were the calendar reminders of his absence: Christmas, Easter, anniversaries, and birthdays. Victoria spent the day before her forty-fourth birthday, in 1863, on the couch, crippled by a headache. The next day, the pretty presents from her children failed to cheer her: “What I felt so dreadfully was that there was nothing from my beloved one.” The next year, the day for her was “empty” and she felt ill. She dined alone in her room.
—
Some began closely scrutinizing Victoria for signs of madness. The household was aware of Victoria’s acute sensitivity and tendency toward depression. There was also the widespread Victorian belief that women lacked resilience, were frequently manic or hysterical, and were unable to cope with the vicissitudes of life. Lord Clarendon said they had all seen Victoria’s mind “tremble in the balance” when she lost her mother. With Albert’s death, the risk seemed even higher. The “loss of her reason,” he said, could cause a “national calamity.”
Others noted Victoria’s calm and stoicism in the initial stages of her grief. Four days after Albert died, Florence Nightingale said she was astonished to see “this nervous, anxious, fidgety woman behaving with a firmness which would dignify a hero.” Lord Clarendon assumed she was dutifully following Albert’s instructions not to submit to her pain. In truth, she was in a state of shock that later gave way to grief. When she did openly mourn, she was judged quickly and unfairly. Eyebrows arched when she said to Queen Augusta of Prussia, “I could go mad from the desire and the longing.” And when Clarendon was summoned to Osborne a few weeks after Albert had died, he complained: “The Q. showed embarrassing emotion.”
—
Victoria decreed that the entire court would mourn for an unprecedented official period of two years. (When this ended, her ladies and daughters could discard the black and wear half mourning, which was gray, white, or light purple shades.) Many of her subjects decided to join them in mourning. Her ladies were draped in jet jewelry and crêpe, a thick black rustling material made of silk, crimped to make it look dull. Victoria had worn black for much of the decade before her “angel” had died, honoring the deaths of various relatives and dignitaries. The serious, exacting ritual of mourning had always appealed to her. Now, Victoria would wear her black dresses (or “widow’s weeds”) for the rest of her life. Who cared about how she looked? She abandoned corsets, stepped into white underwear trimmed with black ribbon, and settled into unapologetic middle age. There would be no need for corsets in heaven.
Albert’s belongings and rooms were preserved exactly as they were when he was alive. Victoria hung his photo above his side of the bed. Each day, servants carefully laid out his ironed shirts and pants in the Blue Room and provided clean towels and hot water for shaving, which grew cold as his clock ticked and blotting paper sat unmarked. His remains were interred in a burial site on the Windsor grounds, and Victoria arranged for a sculptor, Baron Carlo Marochetti, to model effigies of Albert and herself, at the same age, to be placed on their tombs. It was as though she, too, had died at age forty-two. At Windsor, she went to the mausoleum every day to pray and gaze at his statue, and she visited the Blue Room every night.
Servants grew accustomed to tiptoeing around the queen and speaking in whispers in corridors. Grim company though she might have been, Victoria still insisted on gathering her children around her and keeping them close. She wanted to compensate somehow for the loss of their father, telling Arthur and Leopold’s tutor, Howard Elphinstone, that “she is anxious NOT to separate herself more from them than is absolutely necessary, as now that God has taken their adored Father away who united everything requisite to attach them to Home…the Queen wishes her boys, especially the young ones, to become very intimate with her and to imbibe the views and habits entertained by both of us.” She wanted them to breathe the air Albert would have breathed, though the atmosphere became suffocating.
The entire household revolved around Victoria’s sensitive mental state. Those returning after an absence, like eight-year-old Leopold, were cautioned she could not bear “noise, excitement, etc.” Bertie was warned not to be frivolous, gossipy, and shallow. Victoria refused to allow her childre
n any alternative or a respite from grieving. Instead of protecting them from the pain, she insisted they flounder in it. She grew irritated with the children when they laughed or talked loudly, viewing it as a sign that they were unmoved by their father’s death. She corralled her children into small, black-clad groups for various bleak photographs in which they posed gazing upward at cold white busts of Albert’s head, and she distributed the images to the public. She wrote at the bottom of one such image: “Day is turned into night.”
The queen wanted the public to see how extraordinary Albert was. She canonized him better than any pope could a saint, commissioning books of his speeches and a biography as well as a host of portraits and public memorials. Paintings showed him clad in golden armor, standing in the clouds. Albert the Good, the Handsome, the Knightly, the Celestial Being was clad in a “crown of righteousness.” Victoria wanted to cement his reputation as a man who inspired people’s better angels, a man from whom Louis-Napoleon had walked away feeling “more disposed to do good.”
Victoria also pined for her husband physically. She had chosen a sultry portrait of herself as a young woman of twenty-four to place in his hands in his coffin. In it, her head leaned back against a red couch and her large blue eyes were cast over her left shoulder. Her pale décolletage was exposed, and her hair tumbled down one side of her bare neck. This was a woman only one man had known. Even in death, Victoria continued to desire him. She had a marble cast taken of his face and hands, and she stored the hands near her bed. Sometimes she pulled them close and pretended the cold stone was warm skin. It was dreadful, she said, going to bed by herself: “What a contrast to that tender lover’s love! All alone!” She closed her eyes when she slid between the sheets, wrapped an arm around his dressing gown, and pulled his coat over her.