by Lucy Worsley
Victoria had not yet seen him, but at three that morning, Bertie had arrived at Windsor from Cambridge, summoned by telegram by his sister. She hadn’t contacted Bertie herself, for she blamed him for his father’s illness. Albert’s discovery of ‘that dreadful business in the Curragh’, Victoria believed, had burdened his mind so heavily that his resistance to illness was reduced.6 ‘Albert has such nights since that great worry,’ Victoria complained, ‘it makes him weak and tired.’7 Albert himself admitted in November that he’d ‘scarcely closed’ his eyes ‘for the last fortnight’.8 Victoria was therefore reluctant to let Albert see Bertie, ‘lest it should excite or agitate him’.9
But now, thank God, the prognosis was different. At seven, Victoria went along the corridor, as usual, to where Albert was lying in the ‘Blue Room’. Situated in the Clarence Tower and named for its silk hangings, the Blue Room looked east over the gardens towards the sunrise. It was, however, a place of ill omen, for it was here that both George IV and William IV had died.
Albert had occupied a great many beds around the castle during the course of the last week, before settling here. He had been extremely restless, moving from one room to another in the night. The Blue Room’s great state bed – ‘in which the kings had died’10 – had now been taken out and replaced by two little ones for easier nursing. As Victoria entered, she noticed that ‘the room had the sad look of night-watching, the candles burnt down to their sockets, the Doctors looking anxious’.11
Victoria and Albert’s second daughter, Alice, had been a constant presence during his illness. Albert once mentioned to Alice that he liked to lie near the window that ‘he might see the sky, and watch the clouds sailing past.’12 And now, in Victoria’s words, ‘it was a bright morning … the sun just rising and shining brightly … never can I forget how beautiful my Darling looked lying there with his face lit up by the rising sun’. He was wearing a special white jacket that he always put on when he wasn’t well, and his hands were clasped on his chest just as they were when he fell asleep while sitting in the drawing room after dinner. Albert’s eyes, though, were unusually bright, and he was gazing ‘as it were on unseen objects’, taking no notice of Victoria or anyone else the Blue Room contained.13
While Alice had played her part in watching, waiting and attending on her father, Victoria herself hadn’t been much use. It was generally agreed that she was ‘not the best nurse in the world’.14 ‘Poor mama!’ wrote Alice, ‘she wants to help as much as she can.’15 Victoria was delighted when she was allowed to feed Albert some soup, but she did sometimes manage to annoy him, for which he ‘quite slapped’ her hand.16 Alice wasn’t a trained nurse either, but she had an instinct for it, and tradition and convention insisted in any case that a daughter was better than the most professional nurse available. (Tradition and convention were wrong about this, as Victoria herself later admitted.)17
The one thing Victoria could do for Albert was to read aloud to him, and she reached for Sir Walter Scott, who’d brought them together so long ago. The Royal Library’s copy of Scott’s novel Peveril of the Peak still contains a note in Victoria’s hand, saying ‘This book was read up to the mark in Page 81 – to my beloved Husband during his fatal illness.’18 Literature, like music, had always ‘seemed to take him into a dream-world, in which the anxieties of his life were for the moment forgotten’, where ‘the pressure on a brain often too severely taxed was for the moment removed’.19
But now the dazzling morning, the good news, dispelled something of the gloom of the castle. ‘I cannot ever feel the slightest affection or tendre for this fine, dull place,’ Victoria claimed, ‘I think I dislike it more and more.’20 At Windsor Castle the drains had long posed problems. Even after improvements had been carried out in the 1840s, Victoria’s Lord Chamberlain still complained that noxious smells from ‘the old drains and numerous cesspools’ were ‘so exceedingly offensive as to render many parts of the castle almost uninhabitable’.21 The courtiers sighed at the irony that a palace could be so nasty. ‘There are more stinks,’ wrote one of them, ‘in Royal Residences than anywhere else.’22 People were also surprised to encounter the penny-pinching ways at Windsor, including the ration of one lump of sugar only in one’s morning tea, and the newspaper squares in the lavatories.23
Just three years before Albert’s present illness, the whole town of Windsor had suffered a particularly virulent outbreak of typhoid fever. Three or four hundred people had been affected, ‘even in the comparatively well-appointed houses of the middle and upper classes’.24 This was unusual because a disease like typhoid generally respected class and was hungrier for victims in poorer homes with inferior sanitation. A report published in 1842 revealed that in Manchester life expectancy at birth for a child from a working-class family was seventeen, while a ‘gentleman’ or member of the professional classes, with his better plumbing, could expect to live to thirty-eight.25
Albert’s valet, Rudolf Löhlein, had taken the Windsor typhoid outbreak very seriously. ‘Living here will kill your Royal Highness,’ he’d said. Löhlein was a fellow Coburger, thought by some to be Albert’s illegitimate half-brother by his promiscuous father the Duke.26 Albert, his valet thought, must ‘leave Windsor and go to Germany for a time to rest and recover strength’. But Albert refused to listen, and Löhlein’s warnings ‘passed unheeded’.27
Earlier in 1861, a new doctor had been appointed to the household. Dr William Jenner seemed a good choice for a royal residence situated in an insanitary town, as he’d become celebrated for his work at the London Fever Hospital. There he’d worked out that typhus and typhoid fever are in fact slightly different illnesses. Typhus is carried by lice, while typhoid fever is picked up from food or water.28 But Jenner and Albert’s other doctors could not agree on exactly what was wrong with him now. Dr Jenner, this supposed specialist in fevers, had named Albert’s ailment as ‘gastric’ or ‘low’ fever, and reassured Victoria that it would run its course in a month.29 No one mentioned typhoid.
When Victoria talked over the possible causes of her husband’s illness with Doctors Jenner and Clark, their conclusions were ‘worry, & too hard work’.30 Dr Clark had been saying for a decade that Albert’s declining health was to do with lifestyle and stress. ‘For years,’ Dr Clark considered, he’d ‘worked his brain so much’ that it had damaged his nervous system.31
And those closest to him had known for a long time that Albert was incapable of managing his time and energy effectively. ‘I am more dead than alive from overwork,’ he’d claimed, back when he had staged his Great Exhibition in 1851.32 In 1844, his secretary had warned Albert ‘most seriously’ that he must adopt ‘some plan of fixed hours’ instead of working late into every night.33 In 1861, though, Albert was still at it. ‘His nervous system is easily excited and irritated and he’s so completely overpowered by everything,’ Victoria admitted. She found him ‘often very trying – in his hastiness and over-love of business’.34 Albert developed what was referred to as ‘rheumatism’ in his right shoulder, a pain he described as ‘frightful torture’ that left him unable to hold a pen.35 It sounds like repetitive strain injury from too much writing.
Historian Helen Rappaport points out that the talk of fever from Albert’s doctors is confused and inconsistent. Having made a remarkably thorough study of the evidence for his symptoms, she suggests the intriguing possibility that he really had Crohn’s disease, with its stomach and joint pains. It’s a disease that can be made worse by stress, and it was certainly apparent that Albert’s malaise both pre-dated his fever and had a mental component.36 ‘God have mercy on us!’ Baron Stockmar had said. ‘If anything serious should ever happen to him, he will die.’37 And then, of course, Albert had been terribly put out by Bertie’s sexual awakening. ‘Mental anguish’ about this, wrote Dr Clark, ‘acting on him for weeks’ before the fever set in, had greatly increased its severity.38
And the year of 1861 had been full of trouble for the royal family even before Bertie’s ‘fall’. V
ictoria’s mother died in March after suffering terribly for some years from the skin disorder erysipelas. ‘What agony, what despair was this!’ Victoria wrote.39 Despite having reached a better understanding with Victoire in recent years, she was poleaxed to discover from looking through her mother’s papers ‘how very very much she and my beloved Father loved each other. Such love & affection … Then her love for me – It is too touching; I have found little Books with the accounts of my Baby-hood, & they show such unbounded tenderness! Oh!’40
But Victoria’s grief helped blind her to her husband’s growing weakness, disguised as it was behind his stern, withholding attitude towards her. She wished that Albert would ‘listen to and believe me’, yet simultaneously not ‘believe the stupid things I say like being miserable I ever married and so forth which come when I am unwell’.41 But he continued to accuse her of self-indulgence. In October, when she was still deeply grieving for her mother’s death only seven months before, he told her, in one of his pitiless letters, to be ‘less occupied with yourself and your own feelings’.42 ‘If you will take increased interest in things unconnected with personal feelings,’ he added, ‘you will find the task much lightened of governing those feelings in general which you state to be your great difficulty in life.’43 Cold comfort, for a bereaved and lonely woman.
Their very worst rows stemmed from parenting disagreements, Victoria unable to express her concerns and Albert retreating into silence, supposedly to allow her space to ‘calm’ herself. She expressed distress, or at least tried to; he withdrew. ‘I never intend or wish to offend you,’ he wrote, ‘I try to be patient.’ But deep down he felt that listening to her ‘recriminations’ was ‘the dreadful waste of a most precious time & of energies which ought to be turned to the use of others’.44 There was the whole issue in a nutshell: Victoria, who lacked a father, had long sought mentors or alternative fathers in Uncle Leopold, Melbourne and then in Albert himself. Yet she couldn’t get him to listen to her. It was, in any case, a vain hope. A Victorian man was failing in his masculinity if he failed to control his wife, and Albert could never quite control a wife who was also a queen. So they were doomed to clash.45
Despite her general inattention to her husband’s health, Victoria did notice a link between stress and Albert’s long-standing digestive problems. If he were annoyed by badly done paperwork, for example, it would ‘affect his poor dear stomach’.46 Albert himself believed – in characteristically ascetic manner – that when his stomach gave him trouble he should fast. Putting no food into it would ‘rob’ it ‘of the shadow of a pretext for behaving ill’, he claimed.47 In October 1861, he purchased a new travelling medicine chest, packed with drugs particularly suitable for disorders of the belly, including a powder of rhubarb and cinnamon, to be ‘taken when the bowels are disturbed, & disposed to diarrhoea,’ and another mixture ‘to be taken after every action of the bowels’.48 Victoria’s accounts show that her doctors were gearing up for trouble as well, with the acquisition of ‘a new stomach pump’ and a ‘syringe in case’.49 The royal chemist – Peter Squire of Oxford Street – delivered a standing monthly order for rhubarb pills, calomel, senna and bicarbonate of soda. Helen Rappaport notes that in the autumn of 1861, there were disturbing new additions to this list: belladonna and sulphuric acid. It looks as if Albert’s stomach was getting worse, and the strength of the medicines required was increasing.50
Albert, then, had long been unwell, though Victoria could not bear to see it. She also believed Dr Clark to be infallible. His medical method lay in jollying along and encouraging his patients to think that they were improving, so that matter would follow mind. He put this into practice by, for example, taking the trouble to disguise the nauseating taste of medicine with flavouring, which was a small but significant thing to do.51 ‘Your position is constantly exposing you to the risk of having your health deranged,’ he warned the prince.52
Dr Clark told Albert to slow down, but he was constitutionally incapable of doing so. On 1 December, despite being ill, Albert wrote a paper advising the government how to respond to the growing crisis of the American Civil War. A British ship had been intercepted and the situation was dangerous, but Albert’s intervention in favour of reconciliation reminded everyone how helpful he could be when he trained his mind upon a problem. Yet the effort had cost him dearly. ‘I could hardly hold my pen,’ he told his wife as he gave her the draft to copy.53
And Clark’s optimistic approach failed, utterly, in convincing Victoria that Albert’s condition was serious. On 9 December she was even still complaining that his sickness was a bore: ‘you know he is always so depressed when anything is the matter with him … it is extremely vexatious.’54 As a household insider later revealed, ‘she could not bear to listen, and shut her eyes to the danger.’55
And so, it was only with his gentle, nurturing daughter Alice that Albert shared his belief that death was drawing near. Albert understood that he lacked the inner resources for a severe struggle. ‘I do not cling to life,’ he’d said, previously. ‘If I had a severe illness I should give up at once.’56
‘I have told my sister that you are very ill,’ Alice now said to him, having written to Vicky in Germany.57 ‘You have done wrong,’ was her father’s reply, ‘you should have told her I am dying, yes I am dying.’58
This seemed a remote possibility, though, on the sunny morning of Saturday 14 December. Dr Clark ‘was very hopeful, so was Dr Jenner, & said it was a decided rally.’59 Victoria was shown a draft of the news bulletin that the royal doctors were to issue. Based on his progress over the previous night, they announced at 9 a.m. that Albert’s condition was improving.
Victoria left the Blue Room after her early-morning visit to breakfast with Bertie, who then went in at Albert’s own request to see his father. All was going to be well. Victoria decided she could risk taking ‘a breath of fresh air.’ She went out on the terrace with Alice, for half an hour, and they heard the military band playing in the distance. But she could not fully relax into her feelings of relief; there was too much at stake. ‘I burst out crying,’ she recalled later, ‘and came home again.’
Victoria’s premonition was correct. Returning to Albert’s room that afternoon, she found an unexpected deterioration. ‘The breathing was the alarming thing,’ she wrote, ‘so rapid, I think 60 respirations in a minute … there was what they call a dusky hue about his face and hands, which I knew was not good.’ Victoria was perturbed to find that Dr Jenner had not himself noticed this. She also observed that ‘Albert folded his arms, and began arranging his hair, just as he used to do when well and he was dressing … Strange! As tho’ he were preparing for another and greater journey.’60
At half past four, the doctors issued another bulletin, contradicting their earlier optimistic statements. Now, they were forced to admit, the prince was in a ‘most critical state’.61 At five, his bed was moved from its place near the window and into the middle of the room. Victoria asked Dr Jenner if any hope remained. It did, he said, but only just: it was ‘not impossible’ that Albert should live.62
The room was beginning to grow crowded with a considerable number of people. The Victorians generally died, as they were born, at home, and in the presence of their families. What can appear to us twenty-first-century people to be an unhealthy fascination with death and mourning in Victorian culture may in fact have been a source of powerful mental resilience. They were ‘in touch’ with birth and death. Today grieving and mourning are perceived as weaknesses, almost sicknesses, to be conquered and overcome. It might be better to accept bereavement, as the Victorians did, as an integral part of life, and to say a collective farewell to family members as they died in their own familiar bedrooms.
So now, at their father’s unexpected decline, Bertie, Helena, Louise and Arthur came trooping into the darkening sickroom as the afternoon wore on, each to take in turn his or her father’s hand. Missing were Vicky, who was in Germany with her husband, Affie, at sea with the navy, Leopold, sic
k with an illness of his own in the South of France and Beatrice, who at four was thought too young.
Also in attendance were the doctors, three gentlemen of the household and the Dean of Windsor. His presence was an augury that the time for prayer was coming. ‘Oh how can I govern the Country without him?’ Victoria asked the Dean while they were both taking a brief break in the room next door, ‘her hair in disorder burying her face in her hands’. He told her that she’d done it before Albert and could therefore do it again. ‘Oh how badly I did it, I did nothing right,’ was her response.’63
At about half past five, Victoria continues in her own account, she went back into the Blue Room, ‘and sat down beside his bed’. Albert’s body was by now bathed in perspiration. This encouraged the doctors, because they thought it meant he was going to throw off his fever.
And now he recognised Victoria. ‘Gutes Frauchen,’ he said, German for ‘good little wife’. In Victoria’s words, he ‘kissed me, and then gave a sort of piteous moan or rather sigh, not of pain, but as if he felt that he was leaving me, & laid his head on my shoulder’.64 So they sat, and waited, and prayed. Albert ‘seemed to wander and to doze’ as the winter afternoon grew dark, and sometimes he said things that didn’t make sense.65 He was heard to mutter the name of ‘General Bruce’, Bertie’s governor and commanding officer, which suggested that his mind was still wandering painfully through the hutments of the Curragh camp.66
But even if he wasn’t making much sense, Albert still lived. As the clock in the Curfew Tower chimed out the quarters of the hour, and as the afternoon stretched into evening, ‘things went on, not really worse’. Then, in another heart-stopping reversal of fortune, Albert showed remarkable signs of improvement. ‘It was thought necessary to change his bed,’ Victoria continues, ‘and he was even able to get out of bed and sit up’. Albert’s digestive system was still functioning, and although no one liked to state clearly what had happened, he’d obviously experienced a bowel movement. ‘I observed to Dr Jenner,’ writes Victoria, ‘that this was surely a good sign.’ Dr Jenner said it was no good a patient’s having a functional digestive system if he couldn’t breathe, but so long as air was passing through the lungs, ‘there was still hope’.67