by Julia Baird
The queen openly wished her grief would kill her. She wrote to Albert’s childhood tutor, Herr Florschütz: “My only wish is to follow him soon! To live without him is really no life.” She consoled herself with the thought that he was near her, and she would meet him in their “eternal, real home.” Without that thought, she said, she would “succumb.” She revised her will, appointed guardians for her offspring, and prayed to die.
Victoria managed to hold a council on January 6, just a few days after Albert died. She asked the men of the Cabinet to organize their affairs to account for her anguish, and said she did not have the stamina or fortitude to see them through a time of chaos. She told Lord Clarendon pitifully that “her mind was strained to its utmost limit—that she had never before had to think, because the Prince used to read and arrange everything for her, saving her all trouble, explaining to her things which she had to sign, etc.” She claimed a change of ministry would kill her—“and most thankful she would be for that result”—through sheer madness. Once, she tapped her forehead dramatically and cried, “My reason, my reason!” knowing well the impact this would have.
She also appealed to the leader of the opposition, Lord Derby, for calm. On June 16, 1862, six months after Albert’s death, the queen asked Lord Clarendon to tell Lord Derby “that if the Opposition succeeded in turning ministers out of office, they would do so at the risk of sacrificing her life or reason.” She said this would apply only to the current session of government, which went through to August. Some interpreted this as support for the prime minister, her old foe, Lord Palmerston, rather than what it actually was: a desire for peace and stability. After her message was sent to Lord Derby, no more attacks were made on the government in that session, sparing Victoria a potentially enormous workload.
Victoria was surrounded by those who believed, just as Albert had, that she could not rule alone. The elderly Palmerston, who had fainted several times on hearing of Albert’s death, said, “The Queen would be less a national loss.” Benjamin Disraeli, too, said, “We have buried our sovereign.” She believed it herself. The robust queen who had waved troops off to war and given birth to nine children had been reduced to a lonely, weeping widow. By 1864, more than two years after Albert’s death, people were openly asking whether she might abdicate. But Bertie was not respected or particularly liked, and many people knew he had been blamed for his father’s death. The relations between Bertie and his mother were at a dangerously low ebb. Victoria refused to allow Bertie to take over any of her or Albert’s duties or even be gainfully employed, despite pressure to do so. Victoria was annoyed by the sight of him, and even complained about his “ugly” legs. She prayed that she would outlive him. The prime minister grew increasingly concerned about her “unconquerable aversion” to her son. The Prince of Wales existed in a liminal state of “enforced idleness.” In February 1862, just a few weeks after his father died, he was sent off to the Middle East for a trip Albert had planned. Victoria was relieved.
In death, Albert was not just dominant and clever, but omnipotent and omniscient. Victoria began to construct a myth that would have been implausible when Albert was alive: that of her utter helplessness, uselessness, and worthlessness. She grew furious if anyone suggested she had ever done anything at all when it came to the children or business: “They ought to have known it was all him, that he was the life and soul of the family and indeed of all her counsels.” When explaining why she didn’t want to open Parliament in 1864, she described herself as a small rabbit that had haplessly bounded into the world of politics, “trembling and alone.” Constructing this fiction gave her an excuse to dwell on, and magnify, her loss. Shrinking herself and inflating Albert became a way to explain both her grief and her reluctance to reenter the world: If he had been everything, what could she possibly do without him? If the man she mourned was like a god, then surely all should grieve, or at least respect her grief, as the loss was everyone’s.
Victoria was now saddled with the chores of two people, one of whom had been a prodigious workaholic. Her loss of confidence was extreme. Even just reading out a declaration for Bertie’s marriage to a small group was “very trying”; her pale face distressed her children. In conversation, her conviction faltered and old insecurities returned. When talking to an aristocratic guest about turmoil in Italy and Poland in April 1863, she wished that she had been “surer of my facts to have been able to talk more myself.” She went back through the binders of Albert’s opinions and studied them closely. This was surely the best way to advocate for the policies Albert would have wished her to promote.
When Florence Nightingale had visited the royal couple at Balmoral during the Crimean War, she had been struck by the difference between the bored, frivolous court members and Victoria and Albert, both consumed with thoughts of war, foreign policy, and “all things of importance.” Even before Albert’s death, she thought Victoria conscientious “but so mistrustful of herself, so afraid of not doing her best, that her spirits are lowered by it.” With Albert gone, “now she is even doubting whether she is right or wrong from the habit of consulting him.” Nightingale found this touching, a sign that “she has not been spoilt by power.” She had developed a great fondness for Victoria, shy in “her shabby little black silk gown.” She could see she had depth; that the queen could not “now go through the vain show of a drawing room.”
Victoria never attended or held another public ball. Alice’s wedding, held at Osborne House in July 1862, was more like a funeral. A solemn Victoria sat on a chair, hidden from view by her four protective sons. She fought her tears throughout and could not stop thinking that she had planned this wedding with Albert. She found the “hustle” unbearable and skipped the reception, dining with Alice and Louis on her own in a separate room. Victoria grew fond of her new son-in-law, Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt in Germany, but she admonished Alice for not spending enough time in England. Another child was lost to her. Victoria decided she must have one married daughter living with her, and she determined to find a “young, sensible Prince” for Helena to marry who could live in one of her homes.
Her children were hurdling puberty, growing taller, exploring other lands, falling in love, having babies of their own, and trying to shape their lives around the sinkhole caused by their father’s death and their mother’s grief. In April 1863, Alice gave birth to a girl at Windsor. The eighteen-year-old Alfred got up to mischief with women in Malta. At each event marking their growth—confirmations, weddings, christenings—Victoria felt increasingly desperate. It was not just that she missed Albert’s company; she also resented being on her own. She hid in corners, behind her children, or up in church closets, trying to shrink to nothing.
Victoria seemed to take for granted that her houses swarmed with sympathetic companions. Her depression meant she was more troubled by departures than buoyed by arrivals. Even when she felt desperately alone, her life was always full of people: her numerous, kind children, her ladies-in-waiting, relatives, friends, politicians, priests, poets, servants, and ghillies. She even saw her childhood governess Lehzen on a trip to Germany in 1862, and they were both “much moved.” The queen did not lack for affection; what she lacked was peers. As she stood alone on that “terrible height,” peering longingly into the heavens, behind her stood a crowd of people, watching closely. She didn’t want a crowd; she only wanted Albert.
—
When Bertie married the beautiful Alix of Denmark on March 10, 1863, Victoria sat in a closet high above the altar of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. (She had walked a covered path through the Deanery to avoid being seen.) When Benjamin Disraeli raised his eyeglass to see her better, he received a wintry glare and dared not look again. Guests were allowed to wear colors, but the ladies and royal daughters were in the colors of half mourning, mostly lilac and white. Victoria was wearing a black silk gown with crêpe, and a long veil with her cap, feeling agitated. When she saw her children walk into the chapel, Victoria wanted to sob. Ber
tie bowed to her while waiting for Alix, and he kept looking up at his mother with an anxious expression. When the trumpets sounded, she thought of her own wedding and almost fainted.
Thirty-eight people thronged the dining room for a family luncheon, but Victoria ate quietly next door with Beatrice, who was now almost six. That night, she went to bed miserable. Her children kept leaving her. Vicky, Alice, and now Bertie had their loved ones next to them, but she had only Albert’s gowns to clutch: “Here I sit lonely & desolate, who so need love & tenderness, while our 2 daughters have each their loving husbands & Bertie has taken his lovely pure sweet Bride to Osborne,—such a jewel whom he is indeed lucky to have obtained…Oh! what I suffered in the Chapel!”
She knew she should not be envious of her children, but could hardly bear it. Her consolation was that poor Bertie was at last settled, he seemed content, and Alix was a “jewel.” She woke the next day with a heavy head cold, feeling rotten.
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Lord Palmerston once quipped that there were only three people who understood the Schleswig-Holstein conflict: the Prince Consort, who was now dead; a German professor who had gone mad; and himself, who had now forgotten it. For Victoria, while the politics were complex, her allegiances were fairly simple. Denmark had ruled the two duchies for decades, but the Germans—led by the dominant, belligerent Prussians—continued to eye them hungrily. Victoria supported British neutrality and was keen to avoid a general war after the disaster in the Crimea, but her sympathies were with Prussia. When the king of Denmark died in November 1863 and was succeeded by Alexandra’s father, Christian IX, the Prussians prepared to strike, with Austria’s backing.
The battle split the family. Alix, who naturally supported her homeland, Denmark, went into premature labor in January 1864, and gave birth to a son, Albert Victor. The next month, Prussia and Austria invaded Schleswig. When Bertie, loyal to his wife, argued that the British should intervene to support Denmark, Victoria asked Clarendon to tell him to tone down his views. After all, his brother-in-law Fritz, Vicky’s husband, was fighting in the Prussian army. It became a taboo subject at family dinners.
Victoria’s heated correspondence on the subject contradicts her self-portrait in those years as a “poor hunted hare.” She fired off letters and memoranda full of conviction, urging neutrality. She grew so absorbed that she seemed hardly aware that she was working. Queen Sophie of the Netherlands said to one of the ladies, “She has the habit of power and once taken it is hardly possible to live without it.” Victoria continued to see herself at the center of the government’s foreign policy, directing Palmerston to ensure that when she traveled to Coburg, “no step is taken in foreign affairs without her previous sanction being obtained.” She lobbied the Cabinet in a manner that indicated she did not wish to be contradicted. When writing to Vicky in 1863 about the frictions in Europe, Victoria bemoaned the loss of Albert’s help, but she added that in spite of her broken heart she still had the many “eyes of Argus”: “I have, since he left me, the courage of a lioness if I see danger, and I shall never mind giving my people my decided opinion and more than that! Yes, while life lingers in this shattered frame, my duty shall be done fearlessly!”
Not all appreciated the roars of the lioness. On May 10, 1864, an “impertinent” Palmerston informed her that people had come to believe she had strong “personal opinions” on the Schleswig-Holstein question. Some thought she had influenced the government in not going to the assistance of Denmark, breaching her constitutional duty of impartiality. On May 26, Lord Ellenborough insinuated that Victoria had not been as neutral as previous monarchs such as George III. There was, he said, a “strong impression on the Continent, and especially in Germany” that in matters relating to Germany, Her Majesty’s ministers had difficulty “carrying out a purely English policy,” which had undermined their authority and influence. Victoria launched into a torrent of self-pity in her diary:
What a cruel accusation, against a poor unprotected widow, who is no longer sheltered by the love & wisdom of her beloved Husband, when I only live on to work & toil for the good of my country & am half torn to pieces with anxiety, sorrow & responsibility, seeing this Country lower itself & get more & more into difficulties,—& above all, have always sought to be so impartial! Such monstrous calumnies have made me feel quite ill. Oh! to be alone, & not to have any one to shield me, it is too dreadful!
She told Lord Granville it was her “duty to God & my country” to stop them going to war in Europe, despite much public support for it. Granville diplomatically assured her that she had saved the country from “many a false step.” By June, Denmark was defeated. By October, Holstein and the German-speaking parts of Schleswig were ceded to Prussia and Austria.
This became Victoria’s new template: weep with the women and dictate to the men, all while cushioning herself with a dramatic, large grief. As she withdrew completely from public view into her far-off mansions and castles, though, the tremendous public sympathy for her began to sour. Someone tied a sign to the Buckingham Palace gates: “These commanding premises to be let or sold, in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business.” It was pulled down, and the police presence doubled, but it appeared again just a few days later.
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The snow was falling lightly in the Scottish Highlands on October 7, 1863, and Victoria spent the day riding with Alice and Helena, stopping for tea before turning back home. It was dark, and the guide could not see the road well; Victoria’s servant John Brown kept hopping off the box of the carriage to help him. Twenty minutes later, the carriage began to tip—Alice said slowly, “We are turning over”—and the women were thrown to the ground. This was a pivotal moment for Victoria. She wrote in her diary afterward that she had just a moment to think “whether we should be killed or not” but decided “there were still things I had not settled & wanted to.”
I came very hard with my face on the ground, but with a strength I should not have thought myself capable of, I managed to scramble up at once, saw Alice & Lenchen lying on the ground, near the carriage, both the horses on the ground & Brown calling out in despair, “the lord Almighty have mercy on us! Who did ever see the like of this before, I thought you were all killed!”
Victoria spent the next few days in bed with raw meat on her black eye, nursing a sore neck and a sprained thumb that would remain crooked forever. Her “helplessness” was very trying, Victoria sighed, yet she had shown that her grief-fueled wish to die was overruled by a stronger, subliminal will to live.
Gradually, with regular visits to Albert’s body in the mausoleum at Frogmore, trips to Osborne, long hours of prayer, treks around Balmoral, and the kindness of her children, Victoria grew calmer. On the third anniversary of Albert’s death, while thousands walked through the mausoleum to get a glimpse of Albert’s grave, she seemed more philosophical. She told her friend Countess Blucher, also a widow:
Lonely & weary as my life now was I yet realized & felt more & more, how necessary I was to my Children & Country & to the carrying out of dearest Albert’s wishes & plans. For all this I must try & live on for a while yet! My suffering is as great as ever but there is resignation & submission, which was so hard for me at first.
Victoria, despite herself, gradually became more serene. Alice urged her mother to get back in her carriage, on the horse, into public view. At first, after Albert died, she had struggled even to walk. People commented on how thin she had grown; but she wanted to wrinkle and age to show the wear of grief and outward signs of the cracks in her heart. She checked eagerly to see if gray hairs had sprouted. But soon pink cheeks and occasional bouts of animation betrayed her still-robust constitution. Victoria would live another thirty-seven years.
CHAPTER 22
Resuscitating the Widow of Windsor
All those who are in waiting on me bear the sable garb, which I think suits best our sad sisterhood.
—QUEEN VICTORIA TO
LADY WATERPARK, SEPTEMBER 1864
&n
bsp; An English lady in mourning is a majestic and awful spectacle.
—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
On January 16, 1862, just a month after Albert died, more than two hundred men and boys were trapped in the lowest pit of the New Hartley mine. The cast-iron beam of the pumping engine had snapped and fallen into the single shaft, entombing the miners below. When their bodies were found six days later, they looked as if they had fallen asleep on the floor. The youngest boy was only ten. Victoria was distraught, declaring “her heart bled for them.” Eleven months later, after she had returned from a ceremony consecrating Albert’s remains, she was given a handsome Bible with the signatures of many “loyal English Widows” inside, including eighty women who had lost their husbands in the Hartley disaster. Victoria sat at her desk and wrote to her “kind sister widows,” telling them that what comforted her in the loss of her husband was “the constant sense of his unseen presence” and the idea of being united with him someday.
In her fervent embrace of widowhood, the queen turned what was usually a sign of lost identity into something noble and significant. Bereavement crossed all divisions. “I would as soon clasp the poorest widow in the land to my heart,” she wrote, “if she had truly loved her husband and felt for me, as I would a Queen or any other in high position.” She invited Lady Eliza Jane Waterpark to attend her after her own husband had died, with the words “I think that we understand one another, and feel that Life is ended for us, except in the sense of duty.” It was a gloomy life. The queen promised she would only ask Lady Waterpark to do things in harmony with her feelings, and added, “All those who are in waiting on me bear the sable garb, which I think suits best our sad sisterhood.” This sisterhood provided Victoria with a steady flow of emotional counselors, women she talked and wept with. (Lady Geraldine Somerset, lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Cambridge, sighed, “The dreary painful effect of all this mass of black all round one [was] altogether too inexpressibly sad and dreadful.”) When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, Victoria wrote to his wife, Mary, with her condolences. No one could better appreciate, she wrote, what she was going through than this “utterly broken-hearted” queen. Mary Lincoln responded that she knew Victoria could understand.