Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life

by Lucy Worsley

  And Sandringham itself was not a happy or healthy house. Within the encircling ginger-coloured sandstone wall of the estate, a great many tense people had gathered. Alix’s lady-in-waiting Lady Macclesfield found that Princess Alice was among the more trying guests. Chief nurse at her father’s death, Alice had now been supplanted by two professionals. There was much to do for Bertie: making his bed, helping him relieve himself, feeding him orange jelly, barley water, beef tea and ‘gravy from chicken’.34 Lady Macclesfield thought that Alice, excluded from this important bustle, showed her resentment by being ‘meddling, jealous and mischief-making’.35

  At least Alice had been allowed to come to her brother’s bedside; others had not. There was no room for Vicky, or Lenchen, despite their wishes, and Louise and Beatrice were sharing a bed through lack of space. The unmarried men were packed off to Bachelor’s Cottage, through the gardens, past the lake and across the stream. It was ‘quite impossible to keep a house quiet as long as it is swarming’ with so many visitors, complained one onlooker, who was shocked by the way the queen’s children ‘squabble and wrangle and abuse each other’.36 There was nothing for the anxious house guests to do, apart from take wet walks, or else pace up and down the saloon.

  Victoria might have been expected to take pleasure in the presence of her children, but as ever she did not. Her Private Secretary Henry Ponsonby had a most un-courtier-like eye for the amusing. He described how, finding himself in Sandringham’s garden one day, he was ‘suddenly nearly carried away by a stampede of royalties, headed by the Duke of Cambridge and brought up by Leopold, going as fast as they could’. ‘We thought it was a mad bull’ that had caused the exodus, Ponsonby wrote, ‘But they cried out: “The Queen, the Queen”, and we all dashed into the house again and waited behind the door till the road was clear’.37

  The house itself was spanking new, completed just a year previously. At the time of his death, Albert had been thinking about purchasing a country estate for Bertie as a twenty-first-birthday present. The search continued without him, and Sandringham was settled upon in 1862. Bertie brought his young Danish bride home to it three weeks after the wedding. They soon decided that the existing twenty-nine-bedroom house was too small and rebuilding ensued.

  The result, completed in 1870, was not entirely a work of beauty. The new house had a peculiarly long and narrow plan, and rather dark reception rooms shaded by the thorn, elm and larch trees preserved from the garden of its predecessor. Alix tried to lighten the murky interiors by installing a multitude of mirrors.38 Bertie’s architect, Albert Jenkins Humbert, was an expert in ecclesiastical work, and his qualifications for the job lay chiefly in his well-received designs for the royal mausoleums at Windsor. At Sandringham, Humbert borrowed gables and pinnacles from the nearby Jacobean Blickling Hall, but the red-brick block he finally produced rather calls to mind a seaside hotel. Insofar as a house that eventually grew to 360 rooms can be so described, Sandringham was unpretentious. Guests thought it odd that one entered straight into the ‘saloon’, a Victorian version of a Great Hall, with no cloakroom or waiting room, but this was supposed to create cosy informality. During happier times, Bertie’s parrot would welcome his guests with squawks, while Bertie himself would record their weight upon a set of jockey scales kept near the door.39

  The chief attraction of Sandringham was the shooting, enabled by fifty or sixty beaters, and the whole estate regularly rang with the sound of gunfire. The beaters, dressed alike in ‘blue blouses’ and ‘black chimney hats’, looked like a small army that ‘divides, and sweeps … scouring the country’.40 Bertie’s purpose-built game carriage had space for 250 dead birds, and was so heavy it required two enormous Suffolk Punch horses to pull it. When the guests returned to the house for tea, Alix herself served them in the saloon beneath the stuffed noses of antlered deer and moose. The floor was made treacherous with slippery ‘Persian carpets & skins of wild animals … their enormous stuffed heads stuck up’. ‘Take care you don’t fall over them,’ Prince Affie warned newcomers.41

  Dinner took place in the small dining room, which could seat only twenty-two. Bertie expected his male guests to wear informal smoking jackets, precursors of the modern dinner jacket, instead of the conventional tailed coat.42 Alix, thin and fashionable, would hobble in, showing off her waspish waist. The house was supposedly fireproof with its iron girder construction (it wasn’t, and would twice be severely damaged by flames) and sported a final eccentric addition that was Bertie’s pride and joy: his private bowling alley.43

  But once Victoria was in residence, she issued a whole string of orders for changes. There was to be no smoking; windows were to be opened; the clocks were to be put back to normal time. Bertie kept his timepieces half an hour fast in order to gain maximum daylight for winter shooting expeditions. Whenever she wasn’t in her son’s sickroom, Victoria tried to entertain herself by inspecting his stables, kennels and cottages.44

  A further source of worry came with the news that a Sandringham servant, a groom named Charles Blegg, had also succumbed to the same sickness as his master. Was it possible that Sandringham, not Scarborough, was the origin of Bertie’s disease? And might his own home also be tainted with typhoid? There had been long-standing concerns that the house was somehow unhealthy, and now ‘quite a panic among the servants’ began. They began to whisper to each other that ‘the place is never free from fever’.45

  It was true that in 1867 Alix had suffered a severe attack of fever that left her with a lifelong limp. There was one theory that her illness was caused by foul air from the Sandringham lake. This water feature had since been moved further away from the house as a precaution, but even so, Victoria believed her son’s home ‘very unhealthy – drainage and ventilation – bad; bad smells in some rooms – of gas and drains’.46 Her cousin the Duke of Cambridge, another house guest during Bertie’s illness, upset everyone by conversing ‘on nothing but drains’. He spent the short dark days prowling round the house detecting odours and proclaiming Princess Louise’s room uninhabitable. ‘This afternoon the Duke thought there was a bad smell in the library,’ records one courtier. Paranoia was setting in. He ‘jumped up and said “By George, I won’t sit here.”’47

  Twenty-seven-year-old Alix loved riding, and in normal times she would happily introduce guests to her favourite mare, Vera.48 She was far too anxious to be able to do so now. Victoria found her daughter-in-law’s state utterly pitiable. ‘Poor dear Alix,’ she wrote, ‘was in the greatest alarm & despair & I supported her as best I could.’ Another symptom that ‘frightened’ both mother and daughter-in-law ‘dreadfully’ was Bertie’s ‘clutching at his bed clothes & seeming to feel for things which were not there’.49

  Alix, Princess of Wales, has not emerged well from the accounts of historians, some of whom have almost excused her husband’s playboy activities on the grounds of her coldness, her icy beauty, her deafness. ‘Are you aware,’ Victoria once wrote, in acid ink, ‘that Alix has the smallest brain ever seen?’50 But Alix’s personal friends and servants were vocally devoted to her. Lady Macclesfield thought that ‘she never thinks of herself – but is always with him … as gentle & considerate to everybody as ever. Poor little darling.’ Alix had grown even thinner, and even whiter, during Bertie’s illness: ‘it goes to one’s heart to see her going about like a ghost.’51

  Alix had come to Sandringham as a beautiful eighteen-year-old upon her marriage in 1863. She quite liked the flat countryside of Norfolk because it reminded her of her native Denmark. She’d been taught to think that her beauty was her greatest achievement, and at heart she was a simple, straightforward person. ‘I always think I was intended for a nursery maid,’ she said.52 Earlier in 1871, she’d lost a premature baby son, John, who’d lived for only twenty-four hours.

  The doctors tried to exclude Alix from the sickroom partly because of the bizarre things that her husband now did and said in his delirium. Upon Victoria’s arrival at the house, she’d found Bertie ‘wandering dread
fully’ in his mind, and ‘talking incessantly’.53 On the darkest day of 13 December, it remained ‘very distressing to hear him calling out & talking incessantly quite incoherently’, at the same time ‘picking at things in the air and playing with his fingers.’54 Bertie’s brothers Affie and Arthur found this funny; their mother did not. ‘Too much giggling,’ she said, ‘and the way in which you both listened to poor Bertie’s wanderings grieved me.’55

  And it really was no laughing matter. As her husband raved, the doctors attempted to keep Alix away lest she learn ‘all sorts of revelations’ and hear ‘names of people mentioned’.56 Bertie, his inhibitions quite gone, was revealing his sexual secrets. At other times, he pelted Alix with pillows. His speech was ‘thick … much of the character of a drunk man’.57 No wonder, for even when he couldn’t swallow food Bertie could still drink. On 13 December, for example, he was given wine in his water at 10.30 a.m., more wine at 1.40 p.m., champagne at two and champagne seltzer at three.58 He yelled at another of his doctors, Dr Gull, to give him more: ‘that’s right old Gull … that’s good, two or three more spoonsful, old Gull.’59 ‘I can’t breathe,’ he was heard to pant in his more lucid moments, ‘I shall die.’60

  Bertie also – apparently – denied his marriage bond. ‘That was once,’ Bertie said to Alix when she came in to see him, ‘but is no more. You have broken your vows.’61 The words imply that at some point Alix had broken off sexual relations in the light of his own repeated infidelities. All this was very scandalous to the household. Yet perhaps the worst among Bertie’s delirious ravings was a ‘great secret’ that Henry Ponsonby nevertheless passed on to his wife: that Bertie ‘thinks he has succeeded & is King’.62

  Victoria had briefly been out during the morning for a stroll in Sandringham’s dripping pleasure gardens. They featured fake rock formations made from Pulhamite, a new type of concrete named for its inventor James Pulham, but they were so new that the plants had barely got going. She came back in, though, to discover that the midday medical bulletin revealed no improvement in Bertie’s symptoms.63 Victoria and Alice began to prepare themselves for the end. ‘There can be no hope,’ they said to each other through their tears.

  In the afternoon, Victoria remained indoors, and was ‘so terribly anxious’ that she hardly left Bertie’s room.64 Yet he did not know that she was there. His doctors continued to argue that Bertie should be shielded from the knowledge of the presence of his family. Alix crawled on hands and knees ‘to be near him & he not see her’, while Victoria lurked behind her screen.65 Eventually, though, Victoria overcame her scruples and the medical advice about not bothering him. ‘I went up to the bed,’ she writes, ‘& took hold of his poor hand, kissing it & stroking his arm.’

  But Bertie failed to recognise his mother. He ‘turned round’, Victoria writes, ‘& looked wildly at me saying “Who are you”.’66

  Even though he had disappointed her so badly, even if she believed that he’d killed Albert and even if she had essentially given up on him and cast him off, it must still have stabbed her to the heart.

  Throughout 13 December, the nation hourly expected Bertie’s death. ‘Many millions,’ claimed The Times, are ‘watching at a distance by this bedside.’67 The bell-ringers of St Paul’s were called into work to be ready to sound the death knell for his passing.68 The newspapers prepared special announcements. Reporters in hired gigs waited at the Sandringham estate’s Norwich Gates, its point of exit nearest to the telegraph office at Dersingham.69 No one could fail to notice the eerie coincidence of dates: ‘it is now ten years tomorrow since the Prince Consort died of a familiar affliction … there is real anxiety.’70 ‘We were getting nearer & nearer to the 14th,’ Victoria noticed. Sickeningly, events ‘seemed more & more like ten years ago’.

  Throughout the course of that dark and dreadful afternoon, though, the grasp of the bitter cold upon the Norfolk countryside had gradually been relaxing. It was ‘raw’ outside, but also ‘damp’, and it had been ‘thawing all day’. When Victoria had taken her son’s hand, he’d been too confused to recognise her. Yet, as evening came, everyone began to hope that ‘dear Bertie was really a little better’.71 ‘The Prince is sleeping,’ reads a boldly scrawled, excited note in pencil among his medical team’s papers, dated 8.45 p.m. This was the first time he had dozed in many days.72

  And later in the evening, Bertie at last seemed to come to himself. ‘That lady,’ he whispered, ‘is very like the Queen.’

  ‘It is the Queen,’ said Dr Gull.73

  ‘It’s Mama,’ she said, ‘Dear child.’74

  ‘Don’t sit here for me,’ Bertie wheezed, and ‘the gasping between each word was most distressing’ to Victoria. But he’d known her, he’d understood that his mother was present and he’d spoken sanely. Everyone was ‘so thankful’.75

  After Victoria eventually felt able to leave to go to her own room, one of the doctors made an urgent call for ‘two bottles of old brandy’. Bertie’s body was rubbed with the spirit, which seemed to restore some further measure of life.76 Midnight passed, and still Bertie lived, with just Alix, now, sitting by his bed. Finally, at four o’clock in the morning of 14 December – that date of all dates, the very anniversary of Albert’s death – Bertie finally managed to fall into a deep slumber and, at last, to grow quiet.

  By eight the following morning, another doctors’ bulletin was issued to the press, and, remarkably, this time ‘there was no decrease of strength to be chronicled’. Thirty-six painful hours ‘of the wildest, loudest, incessant talking, in all languages – whistling, singing, began to subside’.77 Dr Jenner and Dr Gull now told the world that Bertie had ‘slept quietly at intervals during the night’, with ‘some abatement of the gravity of the symptoms’.78

  At 8.45 a.m., Bertie managed to swallow some milk.79 His brother Affie, himself a serious drinker, suggested a glass of pale ale. The patient drank it off quickly, ‘which seemed to revive him’.80 And then he thrilled everyone by asking for another. ‘It seemed hardly possible to realize,’ his mother wrote, ‘& to feel that on this very day our dear Bertie is getting better instead of worse! How deeply grateful we are for God’s mercy!’81 At 5 p.m., Bertie even ‘wanted to leave his bed to go out!’82

  But no one felt able to celebrate too much. While Bertie was getting better, a Sandringham kitchen maid was simultaneously falling ill with the same fever. And in his distant little bedroom above the stable, Charles Blegg the groom lost his own fight for life. A chastened Alix attended Blegg’s funeral at Sandringham Church, and commissioned him a memorial that said: ‘One is taken, and the other left.’83

  Victoria had realised that perhaps after all she did love her wayward child. And her subjects likewise surprised themselves by how much they minded so nearly losing their Prince of Wales. ‘There have been daily beautiful articles in the papers,’ Victoria wrote.84 People seemed to realise that despite their complaints about Bertie they would not quite like to do without him. The politician responsible for noticing this, and capitalising upon it, was a man whom Victoria hated: William Gladstone. Despite her animosity, though, Gladstone was deeply devoted to the monarchy, and had been sincerely concerned for Bertie’s health.

  Victoria was much more personally inclined towards the policies of Gladstone’s Tory enemies than his own Liberal Party, and she didn’t like his manner either. She found the man who possessed the greatest political brain of her reign to be cold, verging on disrespectful. She considered that he had ‘a strange lack of knowledge of men and human nature … which does not give me the idea of his having any great grasp of mind’.85 To Victoria’s evident distaste, Gladstone made no concessions to her femininity. He treated her just like a man, or else ‘as a competent and intelligent head of state’, as historian Paula Bartley puts it, speaking to her plainly and without flattery.86

  If Gladstone earned Victoria’s dislike by neglecting to treat her as a Victorian upper-class woman, he also displeased her by telling her straight out when he thought she was wrong.
He considered that her withdrawal from public life during her decade of bereavement had been deeply damaging to the monarchy. It would perhaps have been forgiveable in an ordinary woman, but not acceptable in a queen. He felt that her persistent failure to turn up to ceremonies such as the opening of Parliament, for example, in the years since Albert had died, was harmful, indeed distressing: a ‘smaller and meaner cause for the decay of Thrones cannot be conceived’.87

  He now argued that Victoria should capitalise on Bertie’s recovery. There must, he decreed, be some public act of thanksgiving. The Prince of Wales’s seemingly miraculous salvation had been enormously good for the monarchy as an institution. Indeed, Gladstone wrote, it had ‘worked in an extraordinary degree to the effect of putting down that disagreeable movement with which the name of Sir C. Dilke had been connected.’88 It’s one of Gladstone’s typically prolix and trying sentences, but you can certainly see his point.

  Eventually, with poor grace, Victoria agreed to Gladstone’s proposal that she should attend a service at St Paul’s Cathedral to give thanks for the saving of her son. On 25 January 1872, his mother was pleased to hear that Bertie had been ‘placed on the sofa’ rather than his bed. By February he was well enough – though ‘very lame’ – to travel with her to St Paul’s for the service.89 Thirteen thousand people were accommodated in the building in specially constructed galleries, with queen and prince taking pride of place under the dome.90 The scandals of his past, the disappointment of her seclusion, was forgotten. The nation was simply glad to have them both back. ‘The deafening cheers never ceased the whole way,’ Victoria recorded. ‘I saw the tears in Bertie’s eyes and took and pressed his hand! It was a most affecting day.’91

  It sounds like a happy ending. But historians in recent years have downplayed the significance of Gladstone’s intervention. Victoria did not take the criticisms of Dilke and others as seriously as Gladstone himself had done. In truth, the complaints of the republicans, while disturbing, weren’t really that effective. The criticism came not because people wanted to abolish the monarchy, but because they wanted more of it.92 ‘They want to see a Crown and a Sceptre and all that sort of thing,’ wrote Lord Halifax. ‘They want the gilding for their money.’93