Victoria was glad to see Albert relax, at last relinquishing his ‘over-love of business’ and she greedily consumed every precious moment in his company.8Another two-day round trip of 129 miles followed in October, in driving wind and rain for much of the time (Albert not helping his rheumatism by getting soaked through, while Victoria, who relished the invigorating cold of Scotland, had stayed cosy, wrapped in waterproofs and a plaid). With the light fading fast, they finally arrived at an inn in the village of Dalwinnie, where the cold, wet and hungry travellers were disappointed at the sight of ‘two miserable starved Highland chickens, without any potatoes’ for supper, and nothing but strong tea to drink. And, worse, there was ‘No pudding, and no fun’, recorded a disgruntled Victoria.9
Despite the privations, she noted that this had been ‘the pleasantest and most enjoyable expedition I ever made’. She had ‘enjoyed nothing as much, or indeed felt so much cheered by anything, since my great sorrow’.10With her grief temporarily receding and Albert’s spirits revived, the couple made one more expedition on 16 October – a beautiful autumnal day during which they picnicked out in the open on a steep and rocky hillside overlooking the narrow valley of Cairn Lochan, where Albert left behind a note in an empty bottle of seltzer water as a memento of their visit. They returned at seven that evening as the moon was rising, ‘much pleased and interested with this delightful expedition. Alas!, I fear our last great one!’ Victoria wrote, in anticipation of their imminent departure. Six years later she would add a plaintive note in the margin: ‘It was our last one!’11
As always, Victoria and Albert were loath to leave Balmoral. On 22 October the Queen wrote to Vicky ‘My heart sinks within me at the prospect of going back to Windsor’, for she knew her return would rekindle painful memories of her mother, but she did at least depart with one positive thought in mind. During this latest visit she had taken great delight in the unstinting attention shown to her by their ‘invaluable Highland servant’ John Brown, who combined ‘the offices of groom, footman, page, and maid’. Victoria was impressed: Brown was ‘so handy about cloaks and shawls’ and all the paraphernalia required for their expeditions.12She would be certain to remember him as she took one last look at the sunshine on her beloved Highlands, blue with autumn heather, and one final lungful of pure mountain air. Sure enough, the day of their departure, as Albert told Stockmar, ‘the Queen’s wounds were opened afresh’; ‘the void’ of her mother’s absence once more ‘struck home to her heart’.13Albert knew how hard it was for his wife to get a grip on the whirlwind of her feelings; it had been one of the tasks he had set her in her self-improvement plan when they were first married. Now, as Victoria once more bewailed their enforced return to a place that held terrible reminders of the loss of her mother, he felt the time had come for some firm, but straight talking. He sat down and wrote her a letter. The best advice he could offer was that she try ‘to be less occupied with yourself and your own feelings’, for pain was ‘chiefly felt by dwelling on it and can thereby be heightened to an unbearable extent’. ‘This is not hard philosophy,’ he went on, ‘but common sense supported by common and general experience. If you will take increased interest in things unconnected with personal feelings, you will find the task much lightened of governing those feelings in general which you state to be your great difficulty in life.’14
On Sunday 6 October, whilst still at Balmoral, Victoria and Albert had as usual attended service at the modest little Church of Scotland kirk at nearby Crathie. The sermon that day was given by the Reverend Stewart, vicar of St Andrew’s, Edinburgh, his text being ‘Prepare to meet thy God, Oh Israel’ from Amos 4:12. Now that she had had first-hand experience of death and had entered the inner sanctum of the initiated, Victoria felt the words of the sermon and its message so much more acutely. ‘I feel now to be so acquainted with death – and to be so much nearer that unseen world,’ she wrote to Vicky the following day, echoing a phrase of the Catholic cleric Cardinal Manning, whom she admired, that has long since been attributed to her.15The sermon had a profound impact on Albert, clearly feeding into the intimations of his own mortality that had preoccupied him since the Duchess of Kent’s death, and the Queen requested that a manuscript copy of it be sent to him. She would later recall how often Albert had remarked on her own indomitable lust for life: ‘I do not cling to life,’ he had told her not long before his death, ‘You do; but I set no store by it. If I knew that those I love were well cared for, I should be quite ready to die tomorrow.’ More prophetically he had added that he was sure that ‘if I had a severe illness, I should give up at once, I should not struggle for life.’ It was an awful admission to make to a wife whose physical robustness was so visible, but he had, he told her, ‘no tenacity in life.’16And yet he said these words cheerfully. They were, for him, a simple statement of belief – not a death-wish, as they have so often been interpreted. As a devout Christian, Albert was, as he had been throughout his life, ever ready to submit to God’s will. ‘I know of no public man in England,’ remarked Sir Charles Lyell, ‘who was so serious on religious matters, and so unfettered by that formalism and political churchism and conventionalism which rules in our upper classes.’17Such simplicity of faith had created in Albert an acceptance of what he was sure would be his own early death. His narrow escape from the carriage accident in Coburg the previous year, and his obvious distress on that visit at seeing his homeland for what he was convinced would be the last time, all fed into his increasing world weariness and spiritual detachment from the family.
The Queen remembered how strange it was in retrospect that her husband had ‘dwelt so much on death and the future state’ in the six months before his death, as though he had had a presentiment of its imminence. Had she given it closer thought perhaps, it might have occurred to her that her husband’s lack of ‘pluck’, as she would later call it, was in fact a reflection of his profound unhappiness.18Their shared reading at the time – chosen of course by Albert – was dominated by religious texts, including a collection by William Branks of the letters of a religious evangelical, Sarah Craven, entitled Heaven our Home. Indeed, the subject of the afterlife was something the couple often talked of, Albert observing that although he had no idea ‘in what state we shall meet again on the other side’, he was sure that he and Victoria would recognise each other ‘and be together in eternity’.19Of that he was ‘perfectly certain’. And so, most determinedly, was she; for Albert was hers for this life – and the next. Sarah Craven’s letters, with their ecstatic striving for perfection on the path to eternal glory and arrival at ‘those blissful shores’ of heaven, endorsed the Queen and Prince Albert’s own belief that heaven was a familiar and comforting home, ‘with a great and happy and loving family in it’ – a place indeed ‘worth dying for’.20
The tenuousness of health and happy family life were brought home again to Victoria and Albert in early November, when new worries consumed them concerning their youngest son Leopold. Now aged eight, he had always been a thin and sickly child, prone to knocks and bangs that set up severe bouts of bleeding that laid him up for weeks. He had finally been diagnosed with haemophilia a couple of years previously, a fact that the royal family took care not to advertise at a time when the disease was little understood. By 1861 Leopold had become so frail – a ‘child of anxiety’, as the Queen described him – that, after yet another serious bleeding attack, the doctors had advised sending him to the French Riviera for the winter, in the care of his rather aged governor, the seventy-four-year-old General Bowater and a German physician, Dr Günther. But Bowater himself was not in the best of health and Albert worried for his son’s well-being; he also grieved to see another child removed from the family nest: Vicky in Berlin, Affie away at sea, Bertie at Cambridge and now dear little Leopold gone from them on 2 November. Bertie, for all his failings, at least was not far away and came back to Windsor on 9 November for his twentieth birthday. Bells rang out across the town and – breaking her slavish observation of mourning sti
ll for her mother – Victoria allowed a military band to celebrate the occasion. She prayed to God ‘to assist our efforts to make him turn out well’, but found it hard not to be reminded of past, happier days. Bertie’s birthday was the first family celebration spent at Windsor without the Duchess of Kent. ‘I nearly broke down at dinner,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘The contrast of former times – all in deep black…all was so painfully forcibly felt!’ And Albert had not been well either, suffering ‘a very bad headache before dinner’.21
Gloom and yet more gloom piled up that month; the Queen was also fretting about Vicky, newly pregnant and sick with influenza in Berlin. She talked of sending Dr Jenner out to treat her, but then news arrived by telegraph on the 10th that the twenty-four-year-old Pedro, King of Portugal (to whom both Albert and Victoria were related through the Coburg line) was seriously ill with typhoid fever. His younger brother, Ferdinand, had died of the disease four days previously. Two days later Pedro too was dead. Victoria was stunned; in the habit of never taking any illnesses seriously other than her own, she had thought Pedro’s complaint ‘nothing but one of those frequent little feverish attacks which foreigners so continually have from not attending to their stomach and bowels’. She and Albert attended to their own digestive systems most rigorously. The royal pharmacist – Mr Peter Squire of Oxford Street – supplied them with monthly consignments of laxatives and purgatives such as tincture of rhubarb, syrup of ipecac, calomel, Rochelle salt, senna and bicarbonate of soda. But since their holiday at Balmoral, belladonna, sulphuric acid and tincture of paregoric had been added to the list to deal with Albert’s continuing stomach cramps and diarrhoea.22Pedro’s shocking and sudden death was a terrible loss for them both, but especially Albert, who had loved him as a son; more importantly, he had looked on the conscientious and hard-working Pedro as a young man in his own image, a ‘model’ king, whom he hoped to see uphold the integrity of the monarchy and democratise the throne of Portugal. Pedro was everything Albert had hoped to see in Bertie. These two deaths further fed into his morbid and religiose state of mind and his pathological dread of ‘fever’, which, in its various forms, carried so many off. The deaths of Ferdinand and Pedro were ‘another proof’, he told Vicky, that death might at any time come knocking on the door and that ‘we are never safe to refuse Nature her rights’.23
The Portuguese deaths had once more plunged the court into black not long after the period of mourning for the Duchess of Kent had finally ended. Victoria’s spirit was greatly knocked back by these two additional deaths in the wider royal family of Europe: ‘We did not need this fresh loss in this sad year, this sad winter,’ she wrote in her journal, for it had already been a year ‘so different to what we have ever known’.24Pedro’s death prompted her to recall the parting words of John Brown, the day they had left Balmoral, that the family should all remain well through the winter and ‘return all safe’. Above all, he had added, he hoped ‘that you may have no deaths in the family’. The concurrence of the two deaths in Portugal kept returning to her mind, ‘as if they had been a sort of strange presentiment’.25Victoria and Albert remained ‘much crushed’ and kept to their rooms for meals for the next few days. Sensing how ‘dejected’ Albert was, as she told Vicky, the Queen did her best to bear up, but there was no disguising the atmosphere of increasing gloom that the deaths provoked in him.26‘The sad calamity in Portugal’ haunted his already-restless nights. He seemed increasingly silent and listless; in later years Princess Beatrice remarked that after the death of King Pedro she did not see her father smile again. ‘It was almost as if he had had a stroke,’ observed others. Prince Albert seemed to be ‘half in another world’.27
Nothing could cheer the ailing Prince Consort – not even the hopes of a marriage soon for Bertie. For the Prince of Wales had now been dispatched in obligatory pursuit of the most eligible bride that his energetic sister Vicky, enlisted by her parents, had been able to find for him: Princess Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Prince Christian, heir to the King of Denmark. Alexandra was pretty but poor, her father being descended from a marginal branch of the Danish royal family, and she came at the bottom of a list of other, more strategically desirable candidates who had been rejected for various reasons. Bertie travelled to Europe for a secret meeting with Alexandra in the Chapel of St Bernard at Speyer Cathedral near Baden-Baden, orchestrated by his sister. It brought no coup de foudre, though Bertie at least came away pleased with Alexandra’s sweetness, her grace and charm. She would do well enough. Vicky was dismayed at her brother’s indifference to an alluring young woman who, in her estimation, ‘would make most men fire and flames’. The Princess’s charms had, sadly, not produced enough of an impression on him even ‘to last from Baden to England’ and he remained hesitant.28Love was out of the question, agreed Victoria, for in her estimation Bertie was incapable of enthusiasm ‘about anything in the world’.29She did not yet know it, but in fact his initiation into the pleasures of the flesh was well under way – and he was loath to cast them aside so soon for monogamy.
Just before he had left his training camp at the Curragh, after a lacklustre performance, Bertie had attended a rowdy party at the Mansion House in Dublin. After it was over a group of his fellow officers arranged a farewell present for Bertie, smuggling a young ‘woman of the town’, Nellie Clifden, into his quarters. She was a regular favourite among the Guards and knew her way around camp in the dark, so well indeed that when Bertie staggered back to his bed that night, he found the vivacious and willing young Nellie waiting for him. Having enjoyed Nellie’s welcome, he ensured her surreptitious exit via the window of his hut and arranged further assignations with her back in England – right under his parents’ noses at Windsor. The gossips were quick to dub Nellie ‘The Princess of Wales’, for she was unable to resist the temptation to brag about her conquest around the dives and casinos of London.30The scandal soon hit the London clubs and appeared in the papers on the Continent. Bertie’s parents remained blissfully ignorant of the fact until a letter arrived in early November from Baron Stockmar in Germany informing them of the rumours. The couple were deeply shocked, but before taking any action, Albert checked with Lord Torrington, a regular of the clubs. Confirmation that the rumours were true, Victoria later wrote, ‘broke my Angel’s heart’; Bertie’s behaviour was painfully reminiscent of that of Albert’s brother Ernst with a servant-girl in Dresden and of their father’s affair with a courtesan, Pauline Panam – better known as ‘La Belle Grèque’ – who had later caused much royal embarrassment with a kiss-and-tell memoir.31But in Bertie’s case there was an empire, rather than a duchy, at stake. A traditional rite of passage such as sexual initiation was par for the course in army life; but to Bertie’s puritanical father, this transgression – which was almost to be expected in the mind of most Victorian fathers – was nothing short of a catastrophe. Albert’s stress levels went haywire: Bertie’s transgression would, he told his son, suck him irrevocably down into the vortex of sin and self-destruction.
Victoria would ever after lay at her son’s door the devastating effect of Bertie’s indiscretions on Albert’s precarious health. For they had awakened Albert’s innermost fears of the dangers of unbridled sexuality and, with it, a return by his son to the old, profligate habits of the British royalty. In his paranoia, Albert saw the spectre of vice opening the door to blackmail, scandal, pregnancy and even disease; vice had always ‘depressed him, grieved him, horrified him’ – and the worry of the dishonour that Bertie’s encounter with a woman who was little more than a prostitute might bring on him (and the monarchy) drained his last reserves of energy.32A martyr now to his son’s bad behaviour, he paid the price with crippling insomnia and neuralgia.
On 16 November, ‘with a heavy heart’, Albert sat down and wrote a long and melodramatic letter to Bertie. His behaviour had caused him ‘the deepest pain, I have yet felt in this life’. His son had ‘wilfully plunged into the lowest vice’, an
d Albert berated him for his thoughtlessness, weakness and ignorance.33The level of Bertie’s depravity, as Albert perceived it, would be sufficient, should the woman fall pregnant and drag him before the courts, to provide her with an opportunity ‘to give before a greedy multitude disgusting details of your profligacy’. But, far worse, the escapade might wreck the delicate marriage negotiations with Alexandra of Denmark. Four days later Albert wrote again in response to a letter from a contrite Bertie begging his forgiveness. He softened his tone; he was ‘ever still your affectionate father’ and entreated Bertie to make up for his behaviour by his future actions. Having eaten of the forbidden fruit of the tree, he must now hide himself from the sight of God, for nothing could restore him to the state of innocence and purity that he had lost. ‘You must not, you dare not be lost,’ Albert went on. ‘The consequences for this country, and for the world at large, would be too dreadful.’ The past was over and done with. Bertie ‘had to deal now with the future’ and the only thing that could save him was his marriage to Alexandra.34
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 7