Back in 1844 when news had come from Coburg of the death of his father, Ernst I, Albert and Victoria had both descended into paroxysms of grief, the distraught Queen begging her Uncle Leopold to now ‘be the father to us poor bereaved, heart-broken children’. The couple’s self-indulgent display at the time had alarmed their three-year-old daughter Vicky. She could not understand why ‘poor dear Papa and dear Mama cry so’, nor why all the blinds were pulled down on the windows and the rooms so gloomy.29Overnight, death had erased the pain from Albert’s memory of his father’s dissolute life, his cruelty to Albert’s mother and his endless sponging for money. Albert and Victoria had now viewed the deceased old reprobate as a paragon of virtue, as one, so Victoria insisted, ‘who was so deservedly loved’ – this of a man she hardly knew. Indeed, Albert was disappointed in the British public’s lack of grief. ‘Here we sit together, poor mama [the Duchess], Victoria and myself, and weep, with a great cold public around us, insensible as stone.’ But what significance did this obscure German royal have for the British public? Only Albert’s devoted Victoria had been able to gauge the depths of his grief and offer solace; she was, he assured Stockmar, ‘the treasure on which my whole existence rests’.30
Ever in tune with her emotions, Victoria had taken to the performance of bereavement with aplomb. This first experience in 1844 of ‘real grief’, as she put it, made a ‘lasting impression’ on her, she told Uncle Leopold, so much so that she admitted, ‘one loves to cling to one’s grief’.31Years later, in a conversation with Vicky about ensuring that even young children wore mourning, she had insisted: ‘you must promise me that if I should die your child or children and those around you should mourn; this really must be, for I have such strong feelings on this subject’.32By 1861, therefore, Victoria was already a master of the long and flamboyant mourning protocols that were in vogue, enthroning her own particular maudlin celebration of grief as a virtue to be emulated by all. She had by now been in and out of black for the best part of the last ten years, marked in particular by the grand, theatrical state ceremonials for the Duke of Wellington when he died in 1852 (the massive and ornate funeral car designed in consultation with the ever-resourceful Albert).33The Queen’s intermittent wearing of black had continued through the deaths of various members of her extended family: her Aunt Louise, Queen of the Belgians, in 1850; her uncle, the King of Hanover, in 1851; her half-brother, Prince Charles of Leiningen, in 1856 – for whom she had indulged in an excessively elaborate six-month period of mourning. Charles’s death was closely followed by that of Victoria’s cousin, the Duchess of Nemours, in 1857, to which she responded by holding a gloomy and ‘interminable’ black Drawing Room (as royal receptions were called), with only the soon-to-be-married Vicky allowed to wear white.35Then Victoria’s brother-in-law, the Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, had died in April 1860, inaugurating yet another slavish retreat into crape for three months – during which she had told Vicky how ‘lovely’ her darling Beatrice (just three years old) had looked ‘in her black silk and crepe dress’ – further fuelled by the death of Prince Albert’s stepmother, Marie of Saxe-Coburg.34Victoria had gushed sympathy for both at a distance. Even when Tsar Nicholas I died on 2 March 1855 during the Crimean War she had insisted that the correct protocols of mourning be observed at the British court – no matter that this was for the monarch of a hostile nation. Royal blood was always thicker than water. Most recently, the death of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the mad old King of Prussia, in January 1861 had propelled the disgruntled ladies at the British court back into crape yet again.
Friedrich Wilhelm’s death had provided twenty-year-old Vicky, as wife of the Prussian Crown Prince, with her own first-hand initiation into the solemn rituals of the royal way of death – something her mother had yet to experience. Informed in the middle of the night that the end was nigh, she and Fritz had hastily dressed, to hurry on foot across the frozen streets and stand vigil at the dying king’s bedside at the Sanssouci palace at Potsdam. Soon the Queen was thrilling to Vicky’s ‘painfully interesting details’ of the scene, with nothing but the great clock ticking the hours of the night away to the accompaniment of the ‘crackling of the fire and the death rattle’ and then the sight of the stiffened corpse the following morning. Etiquette had required Vicky to pay her respects to the laid-out body of the King on several subsequent days and she did not spare her mother the minutiae of the fearful alteration that she observed in it before the coffin was sealed, or the ‘great shudder’ she had experienced when forced to kiss its face on the pillow. This time, the corpse had ‘looked like death and no longer like sleep’.36
Mourning protocols then current in Britain demanded twelve months of black for a parent or child (with only a retreat to half-mourning in the final three months); six months for a sibling, three months for an aunt or uncle; and six weeks for a first cousin. The strictest observance of such protocols was de rigueur at the British court, though it did reduce down to a few days for very distant royal connections. But 1861 began – and ended – in black; altogether that year the Queen would issue seven declarations of official court mourning. Nothing but black silk, bombazine and crape; black gloves, black collars, black flowers, feathers, lappets and fans and festoons of jet mourning jewellery were the order of the day – except for the younger, unmarried ladies-in-waiting, who were allowed to freeze in lily-white muslin well into the winter. The Queen herself remained in mourning for much longer than the statutory time. Her withdrawal into mourning for her mother was total, obliging members of the royal household to creep around on tiptoe, conducting conversations in whispers in quiet huddles in corners, in order not to break the spell of silence that descended on Windsor. The social life of the British court was at an end. For months to come all royal family celebrations were cancelled: there were no birthday parties or outings to the theatre, and not even any music. By June everyone was complaining at the unremitting atmosphere of gloom in London. ‘The Queen carries her sorrow at her mother’s death to an absurd extent,’ complained assistant secretary Benjamin Moran of the United States legation. ‘There are no balls this season and in lieu thereof but one concert, and to this the Ministers, and their Ladies and Chief Secretaries only are to be invited.’37
The Duchess’s funeral had been held in the strictest privacy at St George’s Chapel, Windsor on 25 March. Unusually the pall-bearers had been six of her ladies, including her favourite, Lady Augusta Bruce. But neither the Queen nor her daughters had attended the ceremony, remaining, in Victoria’s words, ‘to pray at home together, and to dwell on the happiness and peace of her who was gone’. In Victoria’s absence Albert had acted as chief mourner, assisted by Bertie and ten-year-old Arthur, in a chapel festooned in black and with the great bell tolling. After the service the Duchess’s crimson coffin was lowered into the gloom of the vault beneath, to be temporarily housed there until the mausoleum being constructed for it was ready. Prince Albert was visibly moved during the ceremony, his eyes filling with tears when Mr Tolley, the soloist in the chapel choir, came to the words in Martin Luther’s hymn ‘The trumpet sounds, the graves restore/The dead that they contained before’.38That evening, he took a strange pleasure in sharing in his wife’s grief, reading aloud to her the letters the Duchess had written to a German friend forty-one years previously, describing the illness and death of her husband and Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent.39For the first three weeks after her mother’s death, until 9 April, Victoria wallowed in her grief, seeing only her closest attendants and taking no comfort in her children. She did not even come down to family meals. The relentlessly sombre mood in the household at Windsor was broken only by the pert little Princess Beatrice, entertaining everyone round the dinner table with her renditions of ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ and ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and other nursery rhymes.40Victoria’s continuing orgy of grief disturbed many at court, particularly in the levels of bathos with which she now eulogised her once-hated mother. It undoubtedly was a form of atonement for her own past sins, b
ut the Queen’s instability alarmed people such as her friend the Earl of Clarendon, who worried about her state of ‘great dejection’ and her endless weeping. Her stubborn refusal to be consoled heralded what he felt was a return of the ‘morbid melancholy to which her mind has often tended’. Clarendon knew it was a constant cause of anxiety to Prince Albert, who firmly begged his wife not to give way so completely and to be reconciled, remembering that ‘the Blow was dealt by the Hand of the All Wise’.41
Not to receive this, the ‘first real blow of misfortune’ – a death in her immediate family – until the age of forty-one, and in an age when most couples lost more than one child in infancy, had meant that the Queen had taken her mother’s death particularly hard. When Vicky arrived from Berlin, no doubt glad to see her family again, she was chastised for being in high spirits. As for Bertie, he had failed his mother’s litmus test of grief too, giving ‘great offence’ by not bursting into tears the moment he arrived at Windsor from Cambridge University for the funeral.42He was also reprimanded for not using writing paper with a broad enough black border. For the royal household the Queen’s hysterical grieving was an annoyance; for the egocentric Victoria, it was cathartic: ‘the general sympathy for me, and approval of the manner in which I have shown my grief…is quite wonderful and most touching,’ she told Uncle Leopold. Weeping – ‘which day after day is my welcome friend’ – was her ‘greatest relief’.43The more extravagant her mourning, the more she felt it demonstrated her devotion; and, as Queen, there were no limits placed on her right to indulge it. Her eldest daughter, however, was profoundly disturbed by what she saw during her visit: it was as though her mother enjoyed her sorrow, whilst turning a blind eye to how sick and exhausted her husband was. On her return to Berlin, Vicky discovered rumours had been circulating in the German court that her mother had lost her mind and that the mad doctors had been brought in to see her.
Absorbed in her own grief, Victoria entirely overlooked the fact that her mother’s deathbed had also been Albert’s first experience at close hand. Cast adrift in his own very private grief for a mother-in-law he had come to love dearly, he had little time to dwell on his own feelings; the comptroller of the Duchess’s household, Sir George Couper, had also recently died suddenly, and Albert was charged – as her now sole executor – with taking on the onerous task of sorting out the Duchess’s estate. He did so uncomplainingly, responding to the many letters of condolence from around the world and, more importantly, easing the mounting burden of his distraught wife’s neglected dispatch boxes. Meanwhile Victoria took her mother’s devoted lady-in-waiting and confidante, Lady Augusta Bruce, who had served the Duchess since 1846, to her bosom as her newly created, resident Lady of the Bedchamber. As a mournful cabal of two, they could wallow undisturbed in their shared remembrance of ‘The Beloved’. Albert found himself of little use, but marshalled what remained of his emotional resources to sit with his wife reading consolatory prayers. Lady Bruce was much impressed by his tenderness and tact: ‘Oh! He is one in millions,’ she observed, ‘well might she love him as she did!’44
Morning and evening Victoria persisted in feeding her grief by sitting in the Duchess’s rooms at Frogmore, ensuring that all was kept exactly as it had been, even down to the little canary singing in its cage. Mama ‘lives much in the past and future, perhaps more than in the present,’ Albert explained to Vicky, which was why it was for her ‘a spiritual necessity to cling to moments that are flown and to recollections, and to form plans for the future’. He continued to listen patiently and console when the couple went to Osborne the following month, but was increasingly worried by the state of his wife’s mental health. Victoria’s half-sister Feodora (from the Duchess of Kent’s first marriage to the Prince of Leiningen) also sent endless exhortations from her home in Baden, urging Victoria to ‘look round you and feel how rich you are; how much God has given you to be thankful for’. ‘I do not wish to feel better,’ the Queen insisted. She was determined to hold on to her grief: ‘the more distant the dreadful event becomes, and the more others recover their spirits – the more trying it becomes to me’.45As for the children, they were ‘a disturbance’ to her and she could hardly bear to be around them, or show any real concern for the increasingly fragile health of her haemophiliac youngest son Leopold.
Thus, inevitably, the burden of official duty fell entirely on Albert. He was, he admitted to Stockmar, ‘well nigh overwhelmed by business’, but as always he soldiered on, with Victoria steadfastly refusing to leave off her mourning.46Her birthday on 24 May came and went in disconsolate, sombre retreat without even any music (‘That would kill me,’ she told Vicky).47It was not until 19 June that she made her first public appearance at a Drawing Room at St James’s, in deep crape mourning – ‘the deepest of deeps’ – and with a headdress of black feathers.48It was crowded, hot and muggy and, after going through the barest of formalities, Victoria quickly retired. When King Leopold visited from Belgium at the end of the month he urged an end to full court mourning: he could see that Victoria’s morbid state of mind was undermining Albert’s health. Albert, however, would have none of it; the gloom at court was in tune with his own melancholic mood; besides, he knew that his wife would be unwilling to contemplate a transition – even to half-mourning – until six months of full mourning had passed, with her late mother’s birthday on 17 August.49
Chapter Three
‘Fearfully in Want of a True Friend’
Queen Victoria’s fitful waves of weeping for her mother continued throughout the summer of 1861, her grief reignited on 1 August with the removal of the Duchess’s coffin to a polished blue granite sarcophagus at the mausoleum at Frogmore specially constructed for it. She herself did not attend the ceremony, but visited on her mother’s birthday to lay a wreath of dried flowers, consoling herself that the Duchess’s ‘pure, tender, loving spirit’ was hovering there above them.1For his own part, Albert was by now more preoccupied with the very real aches and pains that plagued him, particularly continuing bouts of high temperature and agonising toothache.
His tolerance of Victoria’s retreat from view was heroic; he did his duty, continuing to defer to her grief – priding himself that court mourning had not ‘deviated’ from her wishes in this respect by ‘one hair’s breadth’ – and standing in for her at various levees and Drawing Rooms that year, which she would not contemplate attending.2Much to her annoyance, however, he insisted on returning early from their holiday at Osborne to fulfil a commitment to open the Royal Horticultural Show (the forerunner of the Chelsea Flower Show) at the beginning of June. He went there without Victoria, taking Bertie, Alice, Helena, Louise and Arthur. But the brightness of the floral displays could not dispel the dark and showery weather as the royal party trudged up the wet and muddy gravel walks to the glasshouse, where ‘an endlessly long address was read and responded to’ and – in the mind of Victoria’s cousin, Princess Mary Adelaide – ‘an ill-timed prayer offered up’. Albert gritted his teeth, planted a Wellingtonia redwood tree and allowed the children to enjoy an ice cream. But the Queen’s absence was noted, and many thought how pale and worn the Prince looked.3
Unseasonably hot weather later in the month and a stream of royal visitors further sapped Albert’s energies: the bouts of feverishness and pain in his limbs persisted. It left him feeling ‘very miserable’, but he had to pull himself together to deal with their guests: King Leopold and his son from Brussels, Vicky and Fritz and their two small children from Berlin, Archduke Maximilian and his wife from Austria and other relatives from Hesse, Baden and Sweden, who all arrived in quick succession.4A trip to Ireland followed in August, primarily to see how Bertie was shaping up on his ten-week training course with the Grenadier Guards at the Curragh outside Dublin. Here he was enduring a strictly regulated regime laid down by his father, which, though it allowed for occasional dinner parties and meals in the regimental mess, endeavoured to keep him away from the corrupting influence of his more worldly fellow officers. Sad
ly, Bertie, while looking quite good in a uniform according to the Queen, proved to have absolutely no natural leadership skills; his disappointed parents were informed that he would not make the rapid rise through the ranks they expected of him. Indeed, his commanding officer had advised that the Prince of Wales would not even be capable of commanding a battalion by the end of his training, as he was ‘too imperfect’ in his drill.5
Whilst they were in Ireland the couple celebrated the Prince Consort’s forty-second birthday on 26 August. But it was a subdued affair; Albert was in low spirits, sinking ever more into a mood of fatalism. Victoria refused to be downcast. ‘God bless and ever preserve my precious Albert, my adored Husband!’ she wrote in her journal. But, alas! ‘So much is so different this year, nothing festive, we on a journey and separated from many of our children and my spirits bad’ (only Alice, Helena and Alfred were with them). She wished her husband joy, but somewhere deep inside a germ of worry was growing: ‘May God mercifully grant that we may long, very long, be spared to live together and that I may never survive him!’6
After a short stop in Killarney, where the Prince soaked up the scenery, finding the lakes ‘sublime’, the royal yacht took the family across the Irish Sea to Wales for the onward journey to their annual holiday at Balmoral, where they would be joined by Alice’s fiancé Louis and Victoria’s half-sister Feodora. When they docked at Holyhead, Albert sought some private pleasure in a day’s railway excursion to nearby Snowdonia, as a prelude to the restorative peace and beauty of six weeks at Balmoral, which the family reached by special train to Aboyne station in Deeside, and thence by carriage to the castle.
Victoria and Albert’s love affair with Scotland was a passionate, visceral one. When they were first married they had enjoyed Sir Walter Scott’s romantic reinvention of a heroic, feudal Scotland in his popular novels such as Ivanhoe, and they made their first visit together in 1842. The dry air of Balmoral, redolent with the balsamic smell of heather and pine and birch, reminded Albert of the mountains and forests of Thuringia near the Rosenau. At Balmoral he felt he had come home and it always worked its therapeutic magic on him. Even now, with his energy levels at an all-time low, it did so once again. The brief respite from his workload gave precious time in which to shake off the black dog of melancholy, as he enjoyed some excellent deer-stalking – bringing down six stags in the space of three days – and grouse-shooting and excursions taking in the grandeur of the glens and lochs of the area. He shook off the worst of his fatigue (though the staff noticed how pale and tired he seemed) and planned another ‘Great Expedition’ by carriage and pony like the one they had enjoyed the previous year. On 20 September he, Victoria, Alice and Louis, plus a small retinue, travelled incognito forty miles south-east of Balmoral, up through the hazy hills of Loch-na-Gar, down the wild glens of Tanar and Mark, wading on horseback across racing burns of crystal-clear, icy-cold water, to Invermark and its romantic old ruined castle half-covered in ivy. That evening, when they arrived at Fettercairn, they stayed at a local hostelry, the Ramsay Arms, under the guise of a ‘wedding party from Aberdeen’, taking great delight in not being recognised and enjoying a moonlit walk through the silent village before bedtime.7
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 6