While Bertie threatened to break his heart, the enduring consolation for Albert was his good and clever daughter Vicky in Berlin, to whom he wrote on her birthday a few days later. ‘May your life, which has begun beautifully, expand still further to the good of others and the contentment of your own mind!’ He had little hope of such worthy objectives from Bertie, who seemed utterly insensitive to the quest for ‘true inward happiness’, which in Albert’s book was ‘to be sought only in the internal consciousness of effort systematically directed to good and useful ends’.35The pursuit of such ends had sent him, ill though he was, on frequent journeys back and forth to London since their return from the Highlands. On 22 November Albert had visited Sandhurst in Surrey to inspect new buildings constructed there for the Staff College and Royal Military Academy. It was a gloomy day of incessant rain, but he stayed for three hours splashing about in puddles, looking over plans and performing his official duties in his usual businesslike manner. He returned to Windsor cold and soaked through, unable to eat and telling the Queen he felt tired, and complaining that he was ‘much of the weather’.36Yet the following day, despite the rain, he went out shooting with Victoria’s nephew, Ernst, Prince of Leiningen, who was over on a visit with his wife. Once again he got soaked through and afterwards sat around in his wet clothes. He confided to his diary that he was full of rheumatic pains and had ‘scarcely closed’ his eyes at night for the last fortnight. Victoria too was worried at how ‘weak and tired’ her husband was from sleeplessness, which had come on ‘ever since that great worry and annoyance’. It was all too ‘horrid’; and it was all Bertie’s fault.37
While Victoria might find a pat explanation for it all, Albert’s physical and mental malaise now went far deeper than mere worries about his errant eldest son. The years of self-imposed overwork and exhaustion had brought an overwhelming sense of isolation. Loneliness gnawed away at him and – though he never admitted as much – this loneliness extended even to his marriage. Victoria was always there ready to adore him, to hang on his every word, his every kiss, to praise unstintingly and monopolise his time, but Albert was tiring of her relentless, cloying admiration and her never-ending emotional hunger. Her love was too inverted; she enjoyed the satisfaction it gave her, without thinking of the good it should do him. He meanwhile longed for space, for spiritual companionship and the wisdom and cool detachment of his old friend and guardian angel, Baron Stockmar. He missed their close ‘interchange of thought’, particularly now that his few other male allies were dead. He had wept uncontrollably at the death of Anson in 1849 and at the time had begged Stockmar to come to England to console him. The loss of former Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel in 1850 had been a real blow too, for Peel had been Albert’s true friend and political amanuensis and, in the opinion of Florence Nightingale, had taught him the political skills needed to be an unofficial minister.38Worse still, in 1858, had been the death of Albert’s loyal Swiss valet Isaac Cart, who was his last link with Coburg and had been with him since the age of seven. ‘I am fearfully in want of a true friend and counsellor,’ he confessed in what would be his last letter to Stockmar on 14 November; but the ageing Stockmar, an unfailing stalwart through Albert’s difficult years in England, was far away in Coburg, his own life now drawing to a close.39
At ten-thirty on the morning of 25 November Albert somehow found the strength to take a special train to Cambridge for a man-to-man talk with Bertie, feeling ‘still greatly out of sorts’.40They met at Madingley Hall, where Bertie had been living with his governor, General Bruce, and his wife since going up to Cambridge in January; the location four miles out of town had been chosen by Albert, who had been unwilling to trust his son to the vicissitudes of college life. Bertie was mortified by his father’s distress and was duly and lengthily chastised during a long walk with him down the wet Cambridgeshire lanes. But the strain of this excursion proved too much for Albert – Bertie had seemed oblivious to his father’s ill health, and his poor sense of direction had got them lost, taking them on a longer route than planned. Albert paid the price when he returned to Windsor the following day and was racked with pains in his back and legs.
Victoria found her husband’s continuing irritability most trying after his return from Madingley, remarking in a classic understatement to King Leopold that ‘Albert is a little rheumatic…which is a plague’.41She could not, and would not, think the unthinkable: that her husband was seriously ill. And so she convinced herself that there was nothing ominous in his symptoms. After all, it was ‘very difficult not to have something or other of this kind in this season, with these rapid changes of temperature’; and, touch wood, he actually was ‘much better this winter than he was the preceding year’. Albert, knowing his wife’s propensity for hysteria, had determinedly kept the truth of his declining health over the last three years from her. And he would not disabuse her of the fact now, though he confided otherwise to his diary. ‘Am very wretched,’ he wrote, and for once he did not join the Queen on the terrace for their usual constitutional that day.42In contrast, the Prince’s valet, Rudolf Löhlein, had by now become greatly concerned at his master’s uncharacteristic listlessness and the way his mind had strangely wandered at times over the last couple of days. He was convinced that the badly drained town of Windsor (which had seen a typhoid epidemic in 1858 that had killed thirty-nine people) was a danger to him: ‘Living here will kill your Royal Highness,’ he had frequently repeated to him. ‘You must leave Windsor and go to Germany for a time to rest and recover strength.’43
Talk of the notorious Windsor fever might have alarmed Albert, but he did nothing about it. He was no better on the 27th, when, after yet another sleepless night, he had a ‘great feeling of weariness and weakness’. But still he refused to take to his bed. Victoria now admitted in a letter to Vicky, ‘I never saw him so low’.44Dr Jenner visited and stayed for the night and advised Albert not to leave the castle. Rest indoors was one thing, but all hopes of unbroken sleep for Albert were removed when news broke in the British press on 28 November of a major diplomatic incident with America, now eight months into a bitter civil war. After the eleven southern states had seceded from the Union in March, forming a Confederacy, Britain – with strong economic links to the cotton-producing South, the mainstay of the Lancashire cotton industry – had given the South its tacit support. On 8 November a British West Indies mail packet, the Trent, which had been conveying envoys of the Confederate forces on a diplomatic mission to Europe, was stopped by a warship of the Federal Union (the Northern states) in the Bahama Channel off the northern coast of Cuba. The ship was boarded and four Southern officials were taken off under arrest: James Murray Mason, envoy to the Court of St James in London; John Slidell, envoy to the Court of the Tuileries in Paris; and their respective secretaries. The jingoistic Lord Palmerston’s government saw this as a flagrant violation of international law and of British neutrality in the war. As the diplomatic crisis deepened, the press whipped up war fever, demanding reparations. Only five years after the end of the Crimean War, the British people found themselves contemplating the unthinkable: taking up arms against the American North. The primary concern of Foreign Minister Lord John Russell was to protect British cotton interests in the South, but taking on the North, at a distance of 2,500 miles, was a tall order. Nevertheless, British warships were ordered to deploy off the American coast, munitions factories went into overtime and 8,000 troops were shipped to Canada in case of war.
News of the ‘astounding outrage of the Americans’ greatly alarmed the Queen, as well as Prince Albert – who was still suffering what appeared to be the continuing aches and pains of a severe chill caught at Madingley.45Worry over the gathering political crisis further disrupted his already fractured sleep. Nevertheless, after dragging himself from bed and taking a hot bath on the morning of 29 November, he turned out to watch a review of the 200 boys of the Rifle Corps of the Eton Volunteers who paraded for the royal family beneath the East Terrace in Windsor Home Park. He k
new that his absence would be remarked upon if he did not go; ‘Unhappily I must be present,’ he noted in his diary, before donning his fur-lined overcoat for the twenty-minute parade.46The weather was mild and muggy for November, but Albert was full of aches and feeling the cold. He looked decidedly unwell and could only walk slowly, because of the pains in his legs. He seemed to be shivering all the time and later told Victoria that he had felt ‘as if cold water were being poured down his back’.47It was the last day that he was seen in public.
Later that day Dr Jenner visited and pronounced Albert much better; ‘he would be quite well in two or three days,’ he reassured him, and there was no need for a doctor to stay over in the castle. ‘No, I shall not recover,’ Albert told him, ‘but I am not taken by surprise.’ He was not afraid, he assured Jenner: ‘I trust I am prepared.’48After eating a little supper, he revived that evening, or so the Queen thought. Privately, in a letter to Vicky, Albert confided – as he often did to her about the kind of things he would never tell the Queen – that ‘Much worry and great sorrow (about which I beg you not to ask questions) have robbed me of sleep during the past fortnight.’ The Bertie affair was haunting him and he confessed himself to be in a ‘shattered state’, made worse by heavy catarrh and headache and pains in his limbs for the last four days.49
He awoke on 30 November after another restless night that had left him wakeful from 3 a.m. Feeling weak and chilly, he ate a little breakfast, but he was suffering stomach cramps and was too ill to go out on the terrace to take the air. Besides, he was far too preoccupied with the Trent crisis. The prospect of war with the North was a very stark one, of which Albert was only too well aware. It would be a disaster for British trade, and worse, with the loss of American grain imports, it could bring with it bread shortages. Letters to The Times were already urging moderation – an apology should be demanded for what was now seen as an ‘illegal and irregular proceeding’ rather than an act of aggression. An editorial in The Times led the way, appealing to reason and self-restraint in the hope that ‘our people will not meet this provocation with an outburst of passion’.50Counter to his wife and Palmerston’s considerably more belligerent attitude, Albert sided with The Times and thought the incident was not something worth going to war over. The boarding of the Trent must, he suggested, have taken place without the assent of President Lincoln – an assumption that, whether true or not, might provide a way out of the impasse. He was still very depressed and eating very little, as Victoria told Vicky that day, but she persisted in her own logical explanation: it was a result of all the sleepless nights, which had lowered his spirits. She refused to take any of it seriously. ‘Dear Papa is in reality much better’, if he would only admit it, the fault being that he was ‘as usual desponding as men really only are – when unwell’.51She was already looking forward to their departure from Windsor for Osborne on 13 December, for a cosy family Christmas. She was ‘truly thankful’ that they would soon have other scenery to look at, other than ‘this most tiresome – and this year to me – most distasteful place’.
That evening a draft despatch from Palmerston’s government to the Americans had arrived for the Queen’s approval. Its tone was aggressive and strident; Albert was greatly alarmed: ‘This means war!’ he told Victoria, unless the uncompromising stance of the document could be modified.52That night he slept in a separate room, so as not to disturb her. He rose early the following morning, Sunday 1 December, lit his favourite green desk lamp (the one he had brought with him from Coburg) and sat down, still in his scarlet padded dressing gown, to draft a more conciliatory response. This allowed for the possibility of a misunderstanding and gave the Americans room for a dignified climbdown. Later, when the Queen got up, he wearily handed the draft to her, admitting that he had been feeling so ill when composing it that ‘I could hardly hold my pen.’53
‘He could eat no breakfast and looked very wretched’ that morning, Victoria later recalled, but Albert managed a walk with her for half an hour on the lower terrace, though ‘well wrapped up’. He also accompanied her to Sunday service in St George’s Chapel, where he ‘insisted on going through all the kneeling’.54He tried hard to make the most of a family Sunday, joining everyone for luncheon, ‘but could take nothing’, a fact that dismayed doctors Clark and Jenner when they visited. They were, the Queen wrote, ‘much disappointed at finding Albert so very uncomfortable’. He came down to dinner that evening, but again was unable to eat, but he did his best not to show how ill he felt by chatting and telling stories and then sitting for a while listening to his eighteen-year-old daughter Alice and Marie, Princess of Leiningen, playing the piano. He went to bed at 10.30 ‘in hopes to sleep it off’, but when the Queen joined him at half-past eleven, he was lying there, wide awake, shivering with cold and unable to sleep.55
Aware of the need for a prompt response to the Americans, to be sent that night by steamship, Victoria had reviewed Albert’s draft memorandum on the Trent, made a few emendations – to what would be her husband’s last act of public business – and sent it back to Whitehall in the hope that sufficient redress would be offered, along with a speedy apology.56It would take up to twelve days for the dispatch to reach America by sea. The British nation, with no real appetite for another war, went to church and prayed to God that a conflict could be averted. But Queen Victoria now had other far more immediate preoccupations – with her ‘beloved invalid’.57The following morning, 2 December, after yet another night of shivering and sleeplessness, unable to eat and without even the inclination to get dressed, Prince Albert got up, sank onto a sofa and sent for Dr Jenner.
Chapter Four
‘Our Most Precious Invalid’
With ‘The American Difficulty’ still preoccupying the British public and taking the lion’s share of the newspaper columns, there was no inkling in the press on Monday 2 December 1861 that a very real crisis was brewing closer to home. As usual the Queen’s every move over the weekend was reported in meticulous detail: on Saturday she had ridden out in the morning with Princess Alice and taken the air by carriage that afternoon, before holding a Privy Council meeting at five; the Prince Consort had accompanied her to Divine Service the following morning; the family was preparing to depart for Osborne for Christmas by the middle of December; and at the Birmingham Cattle and Poultry Show the Prince Consort’s cattle had won first and second prizes in the Devon Steers class.
To the outside world all seemed well at Windsor. But for the Prince and his anxious wife it had been another ‘sad night of shivering and sleeplessness’, with Albert ‘being awake at every hour almost’. When Dr Jenner arrived, he found him ‘extremely uncomfortable and so depressed’. But he told the Queen that ‘there was no reason to be alarmed’, although he did fear that the Prince’s condition was ‘turning into a kind of long feverish indisposition’.1Albert lay listlessly on the sofa in his dressing gown and from time to time sat up in an armchair as Victoria or Alice read to him, but he was still very restless and uncomfortable when Jenner visited later that day. ‘He kept saying, it was very well he had no fever, as he should not recover!’, Victoria lamented in her journal, but she and the doctors persisted in making light of the Prince’s neuroses. Such a thing, they all told him, ‘was too foolish and he must never speak of it’. He tried to eat, but even some soup with bread tasted awful, ‘making him feel nauseous and his stomach uncomfortable’.2Albert’s mood was not lifted when his emissaries, Lord Methuen and Colonel Francis Seymour, returned from Portugal – where they had been dispatched with letters of condolence – bringing accounts of the death of King Pedro. The doctors had advised that Albert should not speak to them, for fear of becoming demoralised, but he had insisted on hearing all the details of the King’s illness and death, at the end of which he had asserted to Lord Methuen that his own illness also would be fatal.3
That night, rather than disturb Victoria, Albert got up and went to his own room, but sleep again evaded him as he lay there feeling cold.4The following morning
he could not eat breakfast or even take any broth without being overcome by nausea. Seymour thought the Prince looked ‘as if he was on the brink of a jaundice of no trifling kind’, with ‘severe cold, bile and rheumatic aches in his back, legs, etc.’ ‘There is an end to his shooting for a long time,’ he remarked ruefully, seeing nothing else to be concerned about.5
Although the British public was still oblivious to the Prince Consort’s rapidly declining health, the Prime Minister’s concern was rising. At seventy-seven years of age, Lord Palmerston was far from well himself, suffering from agonising gout that caused such crippling pains in his hands and feet that he could hardly get about or even open a letter. Nevertheless he had come to Windsor for the Privy Council meeting on 30 November and had returned to the castle for a private dinner on the 2 December, when he had been concerned to hear of Albert’s continuing illness. He had had major problems in the past dealing with the Queen’s bouts of hysteria when under pressure, and dreaded any sidelining of the Prince’s role in affairs of state. Having long been sanguine about the efficiency of the royal doctors, Palmerston was extremely uneasy and requested that another medical man be called in to examine the Prince, suggesting Dr Robert Ferguson, who had attended the Queen at the births of all her children.
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 8