Queen Victoria was much put out by this. Despite her ‘agony of despair’ at how listless and distracted Albert was, she was ‘dreadfully annoyed’ by Palmerston’s interference, and more so by what appeared to be his covert calling into question of the medical skills of Clark and Jenner.6She instructed Sir Charles Phipps, who during Albert’s illness was temporarily performing the role of her Private Secretary, to respond very firmly, thanking Palmerston for his ‘kind interest’. The Prince had a feverish cold of the kind that he often succumbed to in winter and she hoped it would pass off in a few days. She would therefore be ‘unwilling to cause unnecessary alarm where no cause exists for it, by calling in a medical man who does not upon ordinary occasions attend at the Palace’.7The message was clear: Victoria and the royal doctors did not want to provoke an adverse response in the highly sensitive Albert by suggesting that his condition was in any way serious; nor, privately, did the doctors want any overattention to the Prince’s worsening condition to cause the kind of hysterical outbursts that Victoria had shown over her mother.
And so a stubborn policy of cheerful optimism and illusory hope was adopted, in the face of all indications to the contrary. Victoria was already settled on a course of denial, confident there was nothing to worry about; after all, ‘Good kind old Sir James’ had reassured her, and that was enough in her book. ‘There was no cause whatever for alarm,’ Clark had told her and he felt sure that Prince Albert ‘would soon be better’.8To reassure the Prince, Dr Jenner stayed at Windsor that night, but although Albert got some sleep between 8 p.m. and midnight, he was awake and restless for much of the remainder – wandering aimlessly from room to room, with a disconsolate Victoria trailing after him.
Was the royal doctors’ decision not to take the Prince’s illness with deadly seriousness at this early stage a fatal mistake? It certainly ensured that the patient was not firmly told to get into bed and stay there, in order to allow himself to be properly nursed. But the fact was that there was as yet no system of efficient nursing established in Britain to supplant the slatternly, untrained hospital nurses of Mrs Gamp fame, immortalised by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit. After her return from the Crimean War in 1856, Florence Nightingale had been given official approval to establish nurses’ training at St Thomas’s Hospital as a respectable profession for women, but the first Nightingale Training School had only opened in July the previous year. For now, the nursing of the sick poor was still largely carried out by nuns and similar lay orders. For the better-off, the best and often most hygienic care was that provided in their own homes by their nearest and dearest – in many cases the eldest unmarried daughter of the family.
The situation was no different at Windsor. With the Queen too emotionally unstable to cope with the stresses and strains of an increasingly irascible patient, the role of sick-nurse fell to the eighteen-year-old Princess Alice, who was assisted by the Prince’s closest, but medically untrained personal attendants: his fellow Coburger, Rudolf Löhlein; his eighteen-year-old Scottish garderobier, Archie Macdonald; and his Swiss valet, Gustav Mayet.9For all her youth and inexperience, Princess Alice had from a young age shown a compassionate interest in the sick, visiting poor cottagers on the estate at Balmoral and, at the age of only eleven, going with her parents to see the wounded – many of them severely mutilated – of the Crimean War. Alice could see the grim reality where her mother could not, having long had an intuitive understanding of her father’s state of growing weariness. From the start of this latest bout of illness Alice had had grave apprehensions. Writing to Louis in Hesse on 3 December, she openly admitted that ‘poor mama’ had no idea how to nurse someone, ‘although she wants to help as much as she can’. (Augusta Bruce thought likewise: ‘The Queen’s little knowledge of nursing made her rather not the best nurse in the world.’)10Alice was steeling herself to the role expected of her – that of the sentimental archetype, the ‘Angel in the House’ – on whom the family relied. But it was so hard with her father not eating, not sleeping and experiencing bouts of chronic pain, and refusing to allow that he would get better. ‘I have to listen to the mutual complaints of my dear parents if I am to be really helpful to them,’ she wrote, ‘or even carry their burden, if that were possible,’ she told Louis.11From now on she would be an almost constant presence, hovering devotedly over her father and sleeping in the room next to him so as to be always on call.
The first public inkling that something was amiss came in the morning papers of 4 December, which carried a small notice in the daily Court Bulletin that ‘The Prince Consort has been suffering for the last three days from a feverish cold, which has confined His Royal Highness to his room.’12Over at Windsor the Queen had awoken after ‘a very sad night’ during which she had wept a great deal at seeing her husband in so much distress. After tossing and turning till 6 a.m., Albert had got up and sent for Dr Jenner, but refused to take any breakfast. Later he was persuaded to take some orange jelly and ‘a little raspberry vinegar in seltzer water’.13Victoria pulled herself together to write a letter to Leopold in Cannes, telling him that Papa was suffering from ‘a regular influenza’, but when she returned from her walk on the terrace later that day she was dismayed to see Albert’s looks and manner ‘very sad and disheartening’ and, worse, how little he smiled.14‘It was, from the first,’ she later recalled, ‘as if he could not smile his own expression.’15
Sir James Clark arrived, and was ‘grieved to see no more improvement’. But he was still not discouraged, he told the Queen. Albert rested in the bedroom for most of the day and asked to be read to. But his irritable and restless state prevailed and ‘no books suited him, neither Silas Marner nor The Warden’. The Queen tried to raise his spirits with Charles Lever’s The Dodd Family Abroad – a humorous novel about gauche British travellers on the Continent – but Albert did not like that either, so it was decided that the following day they would revert to an old favourite, a book by Sir Walter Scott.16
That night Albert’s restlessness became even more marked; after tossing and turning in bed, he got up and once more walked distractedly from room to room in his quilted dressing gown. Dr Jenner arrived and administered a sedative, but it brought the Prince only a few hours’ respite. After breakfast on the 4th the Queen found him looking ‘dreadfully wretched and woe-begone’, able only to take some tea, but no food.17Princess Alice did her best to soothe her father by reading Scott’s The Talisman – a tale of Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades. After taking a short walk with her daughters that afternoon, the Queen found Albert no better. He was lying on the bed, but ‘seemed in a very uncomfortable panting state, and saying “I am so silly” which frightened us’. Albert’s persistence in taking no food roused even the usually conciliatory Dr Jenner, who told the Queen that the Prince must eat, ‘and that he was going to tell him so’. Yes, it was tedious to have to eat when he felt so unwell, but ‘completely starving himself, as he had done, would not do’.18For once Albert’s self-administered starvation cure for his ‘old enemy’ was not working.
Albert was once more unsmiling and distant when Victoria went in to see him the following morning. It was deeply disturbing, for he seemed ‘so unlike himself and he had sometimes such a strange, wild look’ in his eyes, which she could not comprehend. After being persuaded to take some broth he slept for a while, and in the evening an ever-hopeful Victoria was encouraged that he seemed ‘so dear and affectionate and so quite himself’. Earlier that day she had taken her youngest daughter Beatrice in to see him. ‘He quite laughed at some of her new French verses which I made her repeat.’ Then Albert lay there and ‘held her little hand in his for some time’ while a bewildered Beatrice stood gazing at him. But he refused to undress and get into bed when Dr Jenner again suggested it, eventually settling down to sleep in his dressing room, only to change rooms restlessly two or three times in the night.19
Victoria was awoken at one in the morning on 6 December, ‘hearing coughing and moaning’. But Albert had at least taken some te
a and broth during the night from Jenner, who had sat up with him by candlelight and once more reassured the Queen that ‘there was nothing alarming’.20Thankfully, after Victoria had been out for a drive with one of her Ladies of the Bedchamber – the Duchess of Athole – Albert’s mood lifted. Clark and Jenner were pleased, for the Prince had taken some broth and eaten two rusks, though he had ‘vehemently remonstrated against taking any arrowroot in his broth, saying: “it is so offensive, that thick stuff”’.21
There were as usual urgent letters for the Queen to write, keeping her family up to date on Albert’s condition. Despite her worst anxieties she confidently assured Uncle Leopold in Belgium that ‘this nasty, feverish sort of influenza and deranged stomach is on the mend, but it will be slow and tedious’. But she had to admit how greatly alarmed she had been by ‘such restlessness, such sleeplessness, and such (till to-day) total refusal of all food that it made one very, very anxious’. For four nights in succession she had got ‘only two or three hours’ sleep’.22She told a similar story to Vicky in Berlin, complaining of how irritable Albert was; she and the doctors would not of course be taking this all so seriously, were it not for the fact that ‘the dear invalid’ was ‘the most precious and perfect of human beings’. Thankfully ‘Good Alice’ had been a ‘very great comfort’ to her; day after day, the Princess had sat reading to Albert, without ever betraying her own fears or allowing her voice to falter.23
That day Sir Charles Phipps wrote to the Prime Minister, having taken it upon himself to keep Lord Palmerston abreast of developments. The Prince’s illness ‘required much management’, he warned, in order to fend off both Albert’s natural depression at being ill and the Queen’s extreme nervousness about it. In effect, the royal physicians were having to deal with two patients: the sick prince and his overwrought wife. As it was, a third practitioner was now also paying regular visits – Dr Henry Brown, the Windsor apothecary who, Phipps assured Palmerston, ‘knows the Prince’s constitution better than anybody’. But to call in any more doctors at this stage would do more harm than good, for ‘the mere suggestion the other night upset the Queen and agitated her dreadfully’.24
On the morning of Saturday 7 December Victoria discovered that although Albert had had ‘a good deal of sleep’, he had again changed rooms several times during the night before returning to his original bed. Early that morning, as he had lain awake listening to the dawn chorus, he told her he had fancied himself back again in his beloved woods at the Rosenau; such thoughts were increasingly recurring as he sat in an armchair in his sitting room, ‘looking weak and exhausted, and not better, complaining of there being no improvement, and he did not know what it could come from’. Victoria once more insisted that it was all the fault of overwork. For once Albert agreed with her. ‘It is too much. You must speak to the Ministers,’ he told her.25Later Dr Jenner came to see the Queen and told her that the doctors had ‘all along been watching their patient’s state’ and that, from their physical examination, they now feared the Prince had a ‘gastric or low fever’.26
The suggestion that Albert was suffering from some form of ‘fever’ was an ominous one, for in Victorian times fever and its various synonyms – ‘low fever’, ‘slow fever’, ‘gastric fever’ and ‘bowel fever’ – were catch-alls for a whole range of complaints, of which typhoid fever was the most common and the most dreaded. The word typhoid – if that is what the doctors truly believed it to be at this stage, and it had puzzlingly taken the supposed specialist Jenner a long time to reach this conclusion – was never uttered in front of the Queen. The case was ‘quite clear’, Jenner told her. ‘He knew exactly how to treat him,’ he went on, ‘that it was tedious and that the fever must have its course – viz – a month from the beginning, which he considers to have been from the day Albert went to Sandhurst – 22nd – or possibly sooner’.27This nebulous statement was the closest the Queen ever came to being given a diagnosis; it would also give rise to 150 years of subsequent speculation that Albert had somehow picked up a typhoid germ that day at the military academy, or possibly back home at Windsor. Thus reassured by Jenner, all the Queen had to do was wait patiently for the fever to run its course (just like scarlet fever or measles) and all would be well. It was, however, not advisable for the younger children – Louise, Beatrice and Arthur – to go in to see their father, for fear of infection, though Alice was by now indispensable and showed no fear of any perceived risk. The Prince, of course, was not to know any of this because of his ‘horror of fever’; it would only bring him down in his present state.28
Another memorandum was sent by Phipps to Palmerston, confirming that the Prince’s illness ‘is to-day declared to be a gastric fever’. But he insisted there were no symptoms that gave cause for anxiety. Confidentially, however, although the Queen was presently ‘perfectly composed’, Phipps again reiterated to Palmerston that it required ‘no little management to prevent her from breaking down altogether. The least thing would alarm her to a degree that would unfit her for the discharge of any duties.’ For this reason ‘as cheerful a view as possible should be taken to her of the state of the Prince’.29But it was already proving a struggle for Victoria; she was by now exhausted, not just with her constant attendance in and out of Albert’s room, but with the task of having to deal alone with all the unfinished official business in the dispatch boxes that were piling up.
Prince Albert spent the whole of the 7th in his dressing room lying on the sofa dozing, as his wife sat by him struggling to contain her emotions. ‘What trials have we not had this year?’ she wrote despairingly in her journal that day. ‘What an awful trial this is – to be deprived for so long of my guide and my support and my all!’ She felt as though she was living in a ‘dreadful dream’, and wept at the thought of what lay in store, of ‘the utter shipwreck of our plans and the dreadful loss this long illness would be publicly as well as privately’.30Needing a close friend with whom to commiserate, she sent for Lady Augusta Bruce to come and stay, as Dr Jenner and Rudolf Löhlein settled in for another disrupted night watching over Albert.
The morning of 8 December gave rise to false hopes of the Prince’s recovery. He seemed very weak, but was still walking about, and although extremely irritable and impatient, the doctors thought him ‘going on well’. The Prince ate a little chicken and took some tea and wine during the day. Such minor improvements were sufficient to raise Victoria’s hopes. When she returned from breakfast she found Albert lying on the bed in the King’s Room, a small room used mainly by the royal family at Christmas time. It provided more air and light than the couple’s bedroom and Albert specifically asked to be moved there. He seemed happy – ‘the sun shining brightly and the room fine, large and gay; ‘It is so fine,’ he told her; he liked this room with its eastward view, out over the garden and the orangery, and, above, the blue sky and morning sunshine. For the first time since the onset of his illness Albert asked for some music: ‘I should like to hear a fine chorale played at a distance,’ he said. And so a piano was brought into the next room, where Alice played several of Albert’s favourite pieces: Martin Luther’s hymn ‘Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott’ and the Lutheran chorales ‘Wachtet Auf’ and ‘Nun Danket Alle Gott’. The Luther hymn, a paraphrase of Psalm 46, which reassures the faithful that ‘God is our refuge and strength/A very present help in trouble’, seemed to offer great comfort to the sick man: ‘he listened, looking upward with such a sweet expression,’ the Queen noted, but then, soon wearied, he said in German, ‘That is enough.’31
As it was Sunday, the royal family all headed off to service at St George’s Chapel, leaving the Prince in the care of Princess Alice. The Reverend Charles Kingsley preached a ‘beautiful’ sermon, in the view of Lady Bruce, but the Queen professed she ‘heard nothing’, preoccupied as she was.32Alone with Alice, the Prince asked to have the sofa on which he was lying pulled closer to the oriel window ‘that he might see the sky, and watch the clouds sailing past’. He once more asked her to play to him and la
y there reflectively as Alice ‘went thro’ several of his favourite hymns and chorales’, including another favourite, ‘To Thee, O Lord, I yield my spirit’, and ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me’. When she turned from the piano to look, Albert seemed very still and serene with his eyes closed, his hands ‘folded, as if in prayer’; her once-strong father was now as weak and helpless as a child. She thought he was asleep, but suddenly Albert looked up and smiled at her, and told her he had been having ‘such sweet happy thoughts’.33Perhaps they were of the home in heaven that he had already contemplated at length in his reading of William Branks’s book.
The fact that her father had chosen now to settle in the King’s Room – the room in which both William IV and George IV before him had died – could not have escaped Alice (though the great state bed in which the kings had died had been moved out and replaced with two smaller ones). In such precious moments together during these final days, Albert often confided thoughts and feelings to his daughter that he would never dare share with his wife, for ‘she could not bear to listen, and would not see the danger he felt, and only tried to argue him out of the idea’.34But, as Alice recognised that Sunday, her father was already resigned to dying and was preparing himself for it. It took all her strength of character and fortitude not to betray this knowledge to her mother, whilst drawing on her own emotional reserves for what now seemed inevitable. It was only when ‘she felt she could bear it no longer’ that she would ‘walk quite calmly to the door’, and then rush into her own room to weep. Shortly afterwards she would return, ‘with her deadly white face, as fixed and calm as ever, with no trace whatever of what she had gone through’.35But in a long letter she wrote to Louis that day, Alice admitted how ‘terribly difficult’ the last week had been and how unbearable it was to see ‘a strong, hard man like Papa…lying weak and helpless like a child’ and listen to his pathetic groaning.36
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 9