Princess Alice spent the evening kneeling at Albert’s bedside ‘with his burning hand in mine’, she later told Louis. ‘I said to myself as I listened to that painful, difficult breathing, “Perhaps God will take him, and then we shall be parted from the dearest thing we have on earth – it cannot be.” I expected that he would leave us, but I could not take it in.’30Lady Augusta Bruce had been deeply moved by Alice’s conduct throughout these difficult days, dealing not just with her sick father and her anxious mother, but also with the stream of relatives who arrived at Windsor asking for news. She was, thought Bruce, quite ‘wonderful’. The desperate situation had compelled the Princess, still so young herself, to ‘suddenly put away childish things and to be a different creature’.31
As another telegram was sent to the city at 9 p.m., announcing that the Prince Consort’s condition was desperate, the British public at large prepared for their beds, reassured by the third edition of the day’s papers and unaware that the Prince lay dying at Windsor. ‘I made up my mind that a favourable turn had been taken,’ wrote Charles Pugh, a clerk in the Court of Chancery, in his diary. Like many others he was convinced ‘that a sound constitution, temperate habits, and strength of manhood of the Prince would bring him through’ and, with the rest of the nation, he went to bed in hopes of better news in the morning.32
In the King’s Room at Windsor the Queen longed desperately for some sign of recognition from her husband. She leant forward and tenderly whispered in Albert’s ear: ‘Es ist kleines Frauchen’ – It is your little wife – and asked for ein Kuss, but he could barely raise his head from the pillow to do so. ‘He seemed half dozing, quite calm and only wishing to be left quiet and undisturbed.’33And so she retired to the anteroom for a while, where she sank to the floor exhausted, her hair awry and her face buried in her hands. The Dean of Windsor, who was standing close by, spoke to her gently: ‘she had a great trial to undergo and [I] prayed her to nerve herself for it’; she had governed the country once without him and she would do so again. But ‘Why?’ she asked him plaintively, ‘Why must I suffer this? My mother? What was that? I thought that was grief. But that was nothing to this.’ She and Albert were one, she sobbed; ‘it is like tearing the flesh from my bones’.34
Within half an hour a rapid change had set in; Prince Albert was now bathed in sweat as the fever of pneumonia took hold. The only sound in the King’s Room was the dying Prince’s increasing struggle for breath. Alice recognised it immediately: ‘That is the death rattle,’ she whispered to Augusta Bruce and went to get her mother. Victoria had herself heard Albert’s heavy breathing from the adjacent room. ‘I’m afraid this takes away all our hope,’ Alice told her.35Upon which, Victoria ‘started up like a Lioness rushed by every one, and bounded on the bed imploring him to speak and to give one kiss to his little wife’.36Prince Albert opened his eyes; he seemed to know her, but was too weak to raise his head from the pillow. Even now the doctors were still, fruitlessly, trying to dose him with stimulants, this time on a sponge: but ‘he had cried out and resisted the brandy so much that they did not give it any more’. Utterly distraught, Victoria kissed Albert passionately and clung to him. His breathing became ‘quite gentle’. ‘Oh, this is death,’ she cried out in a final agony of recognition, taking his left hand, which already felt quite cold. ‘I know it. I have seen this before,’ she sobbed as she knelt by his side.37
Outside in the Grand Corridor Elphinstone and the others, who had all been too fearful to go to bed, were still huddled anxiously when they saw a pale and drawn Dean of Windsor hurrying toward the King’s Room. They knew what this signified: he had been summoned to read the prayers for the dying. Inside, Alice was kneeling on one side of the bed, with General Bruce beside her opposite her mother, and Bertie and Helena kneeling at its foot, and the Prince of Leiningen and Löhlein standing not far behind them. Beyond stood the four royal doctors – Clarke, Jenner, Holland and Watson – Sir Charles Phipps, and the Prince’s closest equerries: General Bentinck, Lord Alfred Paget, Major Du Plat, Colonel Seymour and General Grey.38Lady Augusta Bruce and Miss Hildyard looked on from the doorway of the adjoining anteroom.
A terrible stillness had descended, broken only by the great clock in the Curfew Tower at the western end of Windsor Castle striking the third quarter after ten. It was hardly possible to say exactly when the moment came, but a few minutes later, as the Queen recalled, ‘Two or three long but perfectly gentle breaths were drawn, the hand clasping mine, and…all, all was over – the heavenly Spirit fled to the World it was fit for, and free from the sorrows and trials of this World!’ Victoria threw her arms around Albert’s body, covering it with fervent kisses and calling out ‘in a bitter and agonizing cry “Oh! My dear Darling!”’, and ‘he can’t be gone, he can’t be gone’, before dropping to her knees ‘in mute, distracted despair, unable to utter a word or shed a tear!’39Some would later recall a far more chilling, visceral sound – one, unforgettable ‘piercing shriek’, that had echoed out into the Grand Corridor and beyond.40
For some minutes the Queen would not be torn away from Albert’s corpse, until Dr Jenner said firmly to her: ‘Queen, this is but the casket, you must look beyond’, after which the Prince of Leiningen and Charles Phipps raised her from her knees and led her, sobbing and with such a look of despair on her face, to the anteroom, where she lay down on the sofa, with Alice cradling her head.41One by one the gentlemen of the royal household came in and knelt down and kissed her hand, Lord Alfred Paget weeping out loud. Alice, with her uncanny composure, managed to hold herself together as Bertie came and threw himself in his mother’s arms, vowing, ‘I will be all I can to you.’ ‘I’m sure my dear boy you will,’ Victoria replied with composure, as she held him and kissed him.42But when Howard Elphinstone approached hesitantly to offer his condolences, she reached out and clutched at his hand ‘with a violent effort’, beseeching him with a frantic look: ‘You will not desert me? You will all help me?’43
Upstairs the Duchess of Athole, one of Victoria’s three ladies-in-waiting on duty that day, had been sitting with Horatia Stopford and Victoria Stuart-Wortley. None of them had seen the Queen since the previous morning and they were all deeply anxious. Finally, at around 11 p.m., the Duchess had decided to venture downstairs to enquire how the Prince was, before retiring for bed, when she was met by a footman in red livery sent in search of her. As she arrived at the door of the King’s Room, the Queen came out – white with shock – to meet her: ‘Oh Duchess,’ she cried, ‘he is dead! He is dead!’ She took the Duchess inside, throwing herself with open arms on the corpse in paroxysms of weeping. Then she calmed a little and told the Duchess some of the details of Albert’s final moments. They were joined by Miss Hildyard, who kissed the Prince’s now-cold hands. Then Victoria dismissed her ladies, wishing to remain with Albert’s body. It took some persuasion to get her to leave the room and try to rest; upon which she rushed straight up to the nursery, followed by the children, calling out as she went, ‘Oh! Albert, Albert! Are you gone!’44One of the Queen’s dressers, Annie Macdonald, recalled the awful sight: ‘the Queen ran through the ante-room where I was waiting. She seemed wild. She went straight up to the nursery and took Baby Beatrice out of bed’ and, ‘clasping her tightly without waking her, lay her down in her own bed’. Midnight struck as the Queen, deranged by grief, still sat there ‘gazing wildly and as hard as a stone’ at her chambermaids Sophie Weiss, Emilie Dittweiler and Mary Andrews. Eventually she allowed them to help her undress, ‘and oh, what a sight it was to gaze upon her hopeless, helpless face, and see those most appealing eyes lifted up,’ wrote Augusta Bruce, as the Queen lay down next to the sleeping Beatrice, clasping Albert’s nightclothes, and with his red dressing gown laid out beside her.45Alice settled down in the small bed at the foot of the Queen’s to try and rest too, but her mother could not sleep, nor could she weep, and sent for Dr Jenner, who came and sat with her for a while, and then gave her some opiates. But Victoria slept only for a short while, ‘then
woke and had a dreadful burst of crying, which relieved me’.46For the rest of the night she slept intermittently, talking and weeping with Alice between times. As soon as she awoke, little Beatrice tried to soothe her mother with her caresses. ‘Don’t cry,’ said she, ‘Papa is gone on a visit to Grandmamma.’47
Late that night, before he went to bed, Howard Elphinstone went in to see Prince Albert’s body. His face was calm and peaceful. Elphinstone had known all along that the Prince ‘had a fixed idea, that he would die of the 1st fever he got’, but nevertheless he was distressed that the Prince had not tried to fight his illness. ‘He had gone without a struggle, but likewise without saying a word’, to the end a stranger in a foreign land, and longing still for his beloved Coburg. Returning to his room, Elphinstone found a telegram awaiting him from Cannes: Prince Leopold’s ailing governor, General Edward Bowater, had just died. A long way from home, the queen’s eight-year-old youngest son was having to deal alone with two deaths on the same day.48
At his home at Upton Court that evening George Augustus Sala and his friends had enjoyed a convivial meal, although he would later admit that ‘my mind was from time to time perturbed’, and that it had ‘wandered to Windsor and the illustrious invalid there’. Nevertheless he went to bed. It was left to another newspaperman to scoop the momentous news when it came. Thomas Catling, sub-editor on a popular new penny newspaper, Lloyds’ Weekly, had earlier that evening been instructed to head for Windsor to await developments. He had arrived at 11 p.m. on the last train and made straight for the castle, only to find the bearded soldier on sentry duty there in tears. He allowed Catling to pass on up the hill to the castle itself, where the news of the Prince’s death was confirmed. Catling asked the officials on duty to telegraph the news through to his paper, but was told that the wire at the castle was ‘for Court uses only’. So he headed off in the dark to hunt out the home of the local clerk of the Electric and International Telegraph Company. The clerk was reluctant to get up in the middle of the night – he had ‘taken nitre in gruel and put his feet in hot water to ward off a cold’, he complained – but Catling persuaded him to send a telegraph to his newspaper office, after which a friendly policeman helped him find lodgings for the night.49His paper would be the first with the news.
That evening the Tory politician Henry Greville, a close friend of the Queen, had been dining at the home of the French ambassador, the Comte de Flahaut, with Count Lavradio of the Portuguese legation, during which they had concurred on the extent to which the recent deaths in Portugal had played on Prince Albert’s anxieties and how he had been ‘constantly harping upon it’ during his illness. Greville had moved on to his club when a telegram arrived late, informing him of the Prince’s death. ‘Every one present (and the room was full), both young and old, seemed consterned by this event, so unlooked for, and possibly pregnant with such disastrous consequences.’50‘I tremble for the Queen,’ he wrote, as too now did Sir Charles Phipps over in his room at Windsor. He had important things to do. First, a short message was sent by electric telegraph from Windsor to the Lord Mayor of London at the Mansion House informing him of the Prince’s death, and then some urgent letters: one to the Duke of Cambridge, in which he attempted to find the words to describe how he had witnessed ‘the last moments of the best man that I ever met in my life’. The Queen’s strength was extraordinary, Phipps told the Duke, ‘Overwhelmed, beaten to the ground with grief, her self-control and good sense have been quite wonderful.’ As for himself, ‘my heart is broken’.51He also wrote a message to Lord Palmerston, hoping that he had prepared him sufficiently for the ‘dreadful event’ and assuring him that the Queen was ‘perfectly collected’, and showing a self-control that was ‘quite extraordinary’. When the Duke of Cambridge brought the letter to the ageing Prime Minister at his home in Piccadilly late that night, Palmerston was so knocked back by the shock that he ‘fainted away several times’ in front of the Duke, who feared he would ‘have a fit of apoplexy’.52
Palmerston’s response echoed the great distress of the entire royal household that night; the Queen’s eerie state of composure, they knew, was a sign of her profound state of shock. ‘She has not realised her loss,’ Phipps observed, and he dreaded the moment when the ‘full consciousness’ of it would come upon her. Like Greville, he trembled at the prospect of the ‘depth of her grief’. ‘What will happen,’ he asked, ‘where can she look for that support and assistance upon which she has leaned in the greatest and the least questions of her life?’53It was a question that filled everyone with dread. It would not just be a matter of coping with their own private grief at the loss of the Prince, but of dealing with its catastrophic effect on the Queen – not to mention the everyday duties of the monarchy.
Over at Slough, George Augustus Sala had been unable to sleep and had got up at daybreak. ‘I hastened into the garden and gazed across Datchet Mead towards Windsor,’ he later recalled. He could just dimly see the Round Tower in the distance as the early-morning mist rose from the surrounding fields. And then he saw the irrefutable proof of the disaster that had befallen the nation. The royal standard was at half-mast, floating disconsolately in a chilly dawn, greeted only by the rooks cawing in the bare trees of Windsor Great Park. Grabbing his coat, Sala hurried down to a deserted station, boarded the first train to London and headed straight to his office to write the most important leader article of his career.54
Chapter Six
‘Our Great National Calamity’
That morning, 15 December 1861, there was a terrible tolling of bells across England. It had begun just after midnight when the great bell of St Paul’s Cathedral in the city of London had begun sounding a long, slow lament across the wintry streets, rousing those within earshot from their sleep. Everyone knew what it signified, for the bell was only ever tolled in times of national disaster or on the death of monarchs. It went on echoing across the streets for the next two hours as hundreds of anxious citizens rose from their beds, dressed and began assembling in the churchyard outside St Paul’s, their voices hushed, their faces drawn with shock as the news was passed from one person to the next that the Prince Consort was dead.1
A bulletin issued at 8 a.m. by the Mansion House confirmed the dreadful event, and thence an ‘electric chain’ rapidly united the whole nation in grief as the telegraphic wires hummed across England, and beyond – to Scotland, Wales and Ireland.2All the newspapers had gone to press by the time Prince Albert had died, so there was nothing in the first edition of the Sunday papers, although a few smaller news-sheets had managed to get the story out and were being sold at a premium. ‘In almost every street crowds of persons were seen surrounding the possessors of these sheets,’ one eyewitness recalled, ‘anxiously listening while the statements contained therein were being read aloud.’3Soon the news was being chalked up on walls in the back-street tenements of London. By lunchtime that Sunday special editions of papers such as the London Gazette Extraordinary enclosed in heavy black borders were being sold by newsboys brandishing placards and shouting, ‘Death of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort’.
But the first intimation that most of the general public had – particularly those in rural areas – came with the slow tolling of bells, many of them muffled, at intervals of half a minute, which echoed across the countryside as people made their way to Sunday morning service. Others did not hear the news until they were sitting in their pews and it was whispered as the collecting box was passed round; for some, the shocking realisation came when the prayers for the royal family read out by the priest omitted the Prince’s name.
The diarist Arthur Munby vividly recalled that day:
This morning came the astounding news of Prince Albert’s death: so unexpected and sad and ominous, that people are struck dumb with amaze [sic] and sorrow. The news-offices in the Strand were open and besieged by anxious folk; a strange gloom was upon the town; in church, the preacher spoke of it, and an awful silence there was, with something too very like sobbing, wh
en his name was left out from the prayers.
Attending service in Whitley, Surrey, that morning, the artist James Clarke Hook remembered that the rector had heard rumours that the Prince had died, but had decided nevertheless that it ‘would be all right to pray for him’. Seeking confirmation, Hook later went down to the local railway station to ask if any bad news had been received by telegraph there. ‘No, sir,’ the stationmaster replied, ‘but I’ll ring the bell to Godalming, sir, and inquire.’ Shortly afterwards, letter by letter, a reply came clicking back across the wire: ‘P-r-i-n-c-e-C-o-n-s-o-r-t-d-e-a-d’.4
Everywhere, the response to the news was the same: up at Fylingdales on the remote North Yorkshire moors, the wife of a clergyman was preparing her usual class of farmers’ daughters ‘to read the Bible and settle the week’s charities’. The fatal news came, she recalled, ‘just as we assembled. We could not read; but we all knelt down and prayed for the Queen and wept bitterly.’ News spread rapidly, even there, and ‘In many parts of the wild moorland…the poor people have not gone to their days works without wearing some mark of mourning.’5
Few country vicars had time to record their reaction in their church sermons that day, but at St Paul’s Cathedral a huge congregation heard Canon Champneys allude to the national bereavement and offer prayers for the Queen and the royal family in their great sorrow, before being played out at the end of the service to Handel’s sonorous ‘Dead March in Saul’. In Leeds, the vicar of St John’s startled his congregation by reading the stark words from Samuel 3:38, ‘Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?’, without explaining its context to his bewildered flock until his sermon later on.6Other preachers improvised hastily revised sermons: from Bow Church in Cheapside, and the Poultry Chapel in the City, to the Lambeth Orphan Asylum and the Greek Orthodox church at London Wall, to the Roman Catholic church in Chelsea and the Scotch Church, in which the minister, Dr Cumming, deemed the Prince’s best epitaph to be the text ‘He doth rest from his labours and his works do follow him’. In Oxford, at St Mary’s Parish Church, the Bishop of Oxford spoke ‘in heart-stirring language’ of ‘the cloud which had that day spread over the land’. Throughout the day people everywhere instinctively turned to the Church for comfort; when Exeter Cathedral opened its great doors for afternoon service, it did so to a flood of people who filled it so quickly that many were turned away.7
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 12