‘Poor Bertie’, as his mother so frequently referred to him. He was a ‘stupid boy’ whose attention could not be fixed on anything useful, ‘even at a novel’. He had grown up in the full glare of his mother’s unending disappointment at his idleness and unprepossessing appearance, as well as his exacting father’s constant pressure that he fulfil the impossibly high expectations they both placed on him.2As a child Bertie had craved parental affection and reassurance, but his naturally cheerful and ebullient nature had been cowed by the austere regime imposed by his father. Such repression had led to childish outbursts of understandable temper and frustration, a fact that caused the Queen to worry that Bertie’s bad behaviour made him her ‘caricature’.3She and Albert both dreaded that, in his laziness and egocentricity, their son and heir might grow up tainted by the blood of his disreputable Hanoverian ancestors. ‘Remember, there is only my life between his and the lives of my Wicked Uncles,’ Victoria retorted when later taken to task on this point.4
Albert’s response to his son’s weakness of character had been to impose a rigorous education that isolated him from his friends and would knock him into shape. A strict regime had worked for him, Albert, as a child and ought to do likewise for his dullard of a son. Bertie struggled to cope with his exacting timetable, but was endlessly chastised by his father for his poor academic performance. Albert’s response to Bertie’s tantrums at his workload was merely to make things even harder for him. Failure was not in Albert’s lexicon. On the advice of Baron Stockmar, he demanded that Bertie study seven hours a day seven days a week, in a relentless quest for self-improvement. He personally checked his son’s course-work and essays; any slight improvement in his performance was commended, but minor improvements never lasted for long. When Bertie reached seventeen he was therefore entrusted to the care of three equerries who took turns in ensuring that he behaved, as his father stipulated, like a gentleman. They were instructed to make sure he did not loll around in armchairs, or stand with his hands in his pockets. He was also to be kept from idle gossip and frivolous pursuits such as cards and billiards – and, the ultimate anathema, smoking cigars. He should be encouraged instead to be like his father and ‘to devote some of his leisure time to music, to the fine arts…hearing poetry, amusing books or good plays read aloud, in short, to anything that whilst it amuses may gently exercise the mind’.5But it did no good; the more Bertie was controlled and chastised, the more he indulged, in secret, in all the things forbidden to him.
The Queen and Prince Albert dreaded Bertie’s coming-of-age in 1859, a day on which he was greeted not with warm congratulations, but by a long, pedantic letter from his parents full of exhortations about his moral duties and that ‘in due, punctual and cheerful performance of them the true Christian and the true Gentleman is recognised’. It was all too much for Bertie and he burst into floods of tears.6By the end of that year Prince Albert had reached a state of despairing resignation over Bertie’s obtuseness, informing Vicky in Berlin that although he was ‘lively, quick and sharp when his mind is set on anything, which is seldom’, her brother’s intellect was ‘of no more use than a pistol packed at the bottom of a trunk if one were attacked in the robber-infested Apennines’.7By April of the following year the Queen had begun seriously to wonder to Vicky what on earth would happen should she die and Bertie become King. In their shared dissatisfaction with him, she and Albert concurred that the only thing that might save him from himself would be an early marriage. But how were they to keep Bertie on the straight and narrow until a suitable bride could be found? ‘We can’t hold him except by moral power,’ the Queen concluded.8For now, a stretch at a Grenadier Guards camp at the Curragh in Ireland during the university vacation might help to make him knuckle under. It was only his father who had managed to keep Bertie out of trouble thus far. ‘His only safety and the country’s,’ the Queen told Vicky, ‘is in his implicit reliance in every thing on dearest Papa, that perfection of human beings!’ But alarm bells were already sounding in Victoria’s head: ‘My greatest of all anxieties is that dearest Papa works too hard, wears himself quite out by all he does.’ All this worry about Bertie, she was sure, was too much for her husband.9
With alarming predictability, in August 1859 Albert was laid low by yet another of his ‘stomach attacks’ and was unable to eat or drink anything but a little milk and water for days. Although he did his best to conceal from her how unwell he felt, even Victoria thought her husband looked ‘fearfully ill’.10Whenever sickness overwhelmed him, Albert felt the additional stress of being kept from his duties. There was always so much to do. In late October he was ill again, suffering one of the severest and most obstinate attacks the Queen had ever seen, ‘the more annoying as it was accompanied by violent spasms of pain’, which kept him in bed for two days. ‘It has been such an unusual thing to see him in bed (never except for the measles),’ she observed ruefully. Whenever Albert was ill, it ‘cast such a gloom over us all’, the Queen remarked, for when he was not able to be out and about as usual, it turned home life ‘upside down’.11
Albert put his latest bout of sickness down to the ‘sudden incredible change of temperature of the last fortnight’, and resumed his duties without taking any real time off to convalesce.12The royal Physician-in-Ordinary, Sir James Clark, who had been with the Queen since her accession, but who was now in his seventies and approaching retirement, offered his own rather nebulous prognosis. It was, quite simply, all in the mind. Among the many causes of Albert’s present condition, Clark reckoned that ‘the worries both of body and mind to which you are daily exposed, the unusual heat of the year, and also the great strain on your strength [that] your position is constantly exposing you to’ all increased the risk of him having his health ‘deranged’. Clark, a physician of limited scientific understanding who had trained in an earlier, less sophisticated medical age, serving as a naval surgeon in the Napoleonic Wars, was noted for his faulty diagnoses and his timid ‘watch-and-wait’ policy. His presence at court, however, suited the Queen, who hated change and liked the reassurance of his familiar face. Clark, fearful always of demoralising her, kowtowed to Victoria and told her what she wanted to hear. To give him credit, Clark had at least emphasised the need for proper nursing and convalescent care, which Albert should have had whenever he was ill, but which he and his busy schedule never allowed.13But, for his own part, Albert placed little faith in the ageing Clark’s diagnostic skills; the Prince had in the past been critical of his ineffectual management of the ailments of the royal children – most notably Clark’s treatment of Vicky with asses’ milk during a bout of illness in 1841.
Prince Albert was, however, only too well aware of the toll his never-ending catalogue of duties was taking on him physically and mentally. In his weekly letter to Vicky in Berlin, written on 23 May 1860, his sense of exhaustion was palpable. Spring in England was beautiful, he wrote: ‘the most glorious air, the most fragrant odours, the merriest choirs of birds and the most luxuriant verdure’, but he did not have time to enjoy any of it – not even the fresh primroses brought to his desk by his children, who knew how much Papa loved them. For Albert was totally and irrevocably chained to the ‘treadmill of never-ending business’; so much so that he was ‘tortured’ at the prospect of his future commitments. Ahead lay two interminable public dinners at which he would be in the chair: ‘the one gives me seven, the other ten toasts and speeches, appropriate to the occasion, and distracting to myself’. Later on he was to open the ‘Statistical Congress of all nations’ – yet more toasts and speeches – and in the interim he was faced with the prospect of:
laying the foundation stone of the Dramatic College, etc. etc.; and this, with the sittings of my different Commissions, and Ascot races…and the Balls and Concerts of the season all crowded into the month of June, over and above the customary business, which a distracted state of affairs in Europe, and a stormy Parliament…make still more burdensome and disagreeable than usual.14
Later that year, du
ring a visit to Coburg, Albert narrowly escaped serious injury in a carriage accident when the horses he had been driving took fright and bolted straight towards a railway crossing. Unable to prevent a collision with a stationary wagon, he had leapt from the carriage, anticipating oblivion. He escaped with cuts and bruises and made light of it, but the accident was yet another reminder, at a time when his spirits were already low, of his own mortality. Both Baron Stockmar and Albert’s brother Ernst, who saw him before he returned to England, were dismayed by the change in him. It was not just the despondency in his eyes, it was a sense they both felt that he had no fight left in him. Something was very wrong. ‘God have mercy on us!’ Stockmar confided to his diary. ‘If anything should ever happen to him, he will die.’15
Not long after his return to England, Albert once again succumbed to stomach problems, suffering ‘violent sickness and shiverings’ in the night, and was confined to his room. The attack was severe, but as usual he concealed from his family how ill he felt. He remained weak for several days, referring to his illness as ‘the real English cholera’ – he also called it ‘cholerina’ – a term then in use for mild, choleraic-type attacks of diarrhoea. But as usual he returned to his work before recovering sufficiently, as he hated falling behind with his correspondence. Sensing his malaise, Victoria was loath to bother him on official business, as she ‘knew it would distress or irritate him, and affect his delicate stomach’.16But Albert’s depressed state of mind received a further blow in January 1861, when his much-valued and talented new physician, Dr William Baly, was killed in a railway accident. The forty-seven-year-old Baly, a doctor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and a specialist in enteric disease, had been appointed Extraordinary Physician to the Queen in 1859 on the recommendation of Dr Clark, in anticipation of Clark’s imminent retirement. Prince Albert had taken to him from the first; Baly’s death was ‘a great, great loss’ for them, he told Stockmar, ‘as he had gained our entire confidence, and was an excellent man’.17Had Baly not died, it is possible that with his greater air of authority and experience in up-to-date medical practice than the ageing Clark – who on Baly’s death was called back into royal service from retirement – he would have immediately insisted on complete bed-rest for the Prince.18
The year 1861 started badly for Prince Albert; even the popular Zalkiel’s Almanac for 1861 warned that ‘The stationary position of Saturn in the third degree of Virgo in May, following upon this lunation, will be very evil for all persons born on or near the 26th August.’ Among the sufferers, it regretted to see ‘the worthy Prince Consort of these realms’. ‘Let such persons pay scrupulous attention to health,’ it had prophetically intoned.19A replacement was soon found for Baly, Dr Clark this time suggesting another rising practitioner and colleague of Baly’s, Dr William Jenner, who had gained considerable attention for his work at the London Fever Hospital in identifying the differences between typhoid fever and typhus.20The Queen was delighted with Clark’s choice, pronouncing Jenner ‘extremely clever’ and with a pleasing manner.21But the presence of another new doctor – albeit one who was the closest the royal family would have to a medical specialist – did nothing to change old habits: within days of his latest attack Albert was back at his desk struggling to keep up with his workload. In the light of his continuing poor health, on 10 February he and Victoria celebrated a rather low-key twenty-first wedding anniversary marked only by the playing of some sacred music by the Queen’s Band that evening. Victoria was, as ever, grateful for her beloved husband’s ‘tender love’; Albert was less preoccupied by the particularities of shared affection, dwelling instead on the bigger picture of a working partnership – of things achieved and yet to be done. ‘How many a storm has swept over it,’ he told Baron Stockmar of his marriage, ‘and still it continues green and fresh, and throws out vigorous roots, from which I can, with gratitude to God, acknowledge that much good will yet be engendered for the world!’22But within days his grand designs were once more sublimated to physical pain, this time terrible toothache and a gumboil, which over the following two days led to inflammation of the nerves of his upper cheek.
‘My sufferings are frightful and the swelling will not come to a proper head,’ he wrote in his diary on 17 February. Enforced rest and restorative tonics brought some relief, but nine days of pain and two incisions of the gum by the royal dentist, Mr Saunders, in an attempt to provide some relief, ‘pulled me down very much’.23Victoria remained entrenched in a stubborn denial of the seriousness of his condition. She grumbled to Vicky in Prussia about Albert’s lack of physical stamina and hypochondria: ‘dear Papa never allows he is any better or will try to get over it, but makes such a miserable face that people always think he’s very ill’. In her view, it was the fault of his nervous system, which was ‘easily excited and irritated’; Albert was ‘so completely overpowered by everything’.24Nevertheless, in mid-February he resumed some of his duties, including, on the same day, a committee of the Fine Arts Commission and a visit to Trinity House (headquarters of the Lighthouse Service, of which he had been elected Master). But it was all too much and he returned exhausted. Within days his face and glands were swollen and painful.
On 21 February, once again confiding to Vicky her impatience at seeing Albert so weak and miserable, the Queen found it all ‘most trying’ and wearing; to her mind, it was part and parcel of the male inability to endure pain. Women, of course, were made differently. The trials of childbirth ensured that they learned to bear suffering with greater fortitude – ‘our nerves don’t seem so racked, tortured as men’s are!’25A day later she complained that Albert had gone against doctors’ orders to keep quiet and not go out, instead ‘staying up talking too long and to too many people’.26He was his own worst enemy. The only recourse was to drag him away from business: to Osborne on the Isle of Wight, where he went at the end of February to recuperate.
But far worse trials and tribulations awaited Prince Albert on his return to Windsor in March. The Queen’s seventy-five-year-old mother, the Duchess of Kent, who had been ailing for some time, was now seriously ill. She had been suffering from a severe case of the skin infection erysipelas for the last couple of years and, more recently, a swollen right arm, which caused her such pain that it had become useless. When it was operated on, the cause, as Dr Clark had privately predicted to Prince Albert some time previously, had proved to be a malignant tumour.
On the night of 15–16 March Victoria kept vigil at her dying mother’s bedside at Frogmore. There, in the clutter of the Duchess’s lilac-painted bedroom with its many visible mementos of her childhood, Victoria sat listening to the hours strike as the Duchess’s face in its mob cap grew ever paler, the features ‘longer and sharper’. From 8 a.m., as life ebbed away, Victoria knelt by her mother’s bedside, holding her hand. ‘It was a solemn, sacred, never-to-be-forgotten scene,’ she later recalled, as her mother’s breathing flickered and finally stopped at nine-thirty in the morning. It was also – in both her own and Albert’s lives – their first experience, close to, of the grim ritual of the deathbed. Albert, much moved and in tears, gathered his distraught wife up in his arms and carried her into the next room – a paragon of tenderness and solicitude as Victoria dissolved into agonies of tears. The truth of her mother’s condition had been kept from her and the shock was therefore intensified. How was she to endure the coming days and the thought of the ‘daily, hourly blank’ of life without her mother, she asked? It was all too dreadful.27
She felt abandoned, a helpless orphan; the whole of her miserable, repressed childhood flooded back to her, the days when she had fought her mother’s control and then, on her accession, had ruthlessly replaced her, first with her governess, Baroness Lehzen, and then with Albert. It was thanks to him – for the Duchess was, after all, his aunt – that the two women had later been reconciled and had grown to love and appreciate each other. Victoria spent much time at Frogmore over the next few days sitting in her mother’s room: feeling the ‘awful stil
lness’ of the house, struggling to recapture the shade of the mother she had in the past so shamefully maligned and had now lost. When she and Albert went through the painful process of sorting out the Duchess’s effects – the accumulation of letters, the diaries, Victoria’s own childish scribblings, and scrapbooks containing locks of her baby hair – she was shocked to find so much evidence of her mother’s love and devotion. It opened the floodgates to a torrent of unresolved guilt, remorse and grief, which brought with it total nervous collapse, so much so that some feared the Queen might go mad. Only her eighteen-year-old daughter Alice (the natural care-giver of the family) seemed equipped to offer consolation. ‘Go and comfort Mama,’ Albert exhorted her.28Alice did so willingly, just as she had spent much time nursing the Duchess and playing the piano to her during her final illness. Meanwhile, withdrawing into total seclusion, as the protocols of mourning demanded – and which she followed to the letter – Queen Victoria donned her crape. Her ladies did likewise. She specified no time for the termination of mourning for her mother, setting the burghers of the Chamber of Commerce aghast at how yet another period of protracted court mourning would affect trade in the British garment industry. For mourning had become a regular feature at Court.
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 5