A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  Anticipating his imminent arrival, the first thing Victoria did at Osborne was to sit down and pour out her heart to Uncle Leopold, on writing paper with inch-thick black borders:

  The poor fatherless baby of nine months is now the utterly broken-hearted and crushed widow of forty-two! My life as a happy one is ended! The world is gone for me! If I must live on…it is henceforth for our poor fatherless children – for my unhappy country, which has lost all in losing him – and in only doing what I know and feel he would wish, for he is near me – his spirit will guide and inspire me.

  At last anger burned through the numbness of grief, arousing Victoria’s indignation. How dare God take her precious Albert from her?

  But oh! To be cut off in the prime of life – to see our pure, happy, quiet, domestic life, which alone enabled me to bear my much disliked position, CUT OFF at forty-two – when I had hoped with such instinctive certainty that God never would part us, and would let us grow old together…is too awful, too cruel.61

  On 22 December, after a week of prayer meetings up and down the country, another cold, grey Sunday dawned and the churches of Britain were packed with worshippers. The solemnity of the occasion was heightened by the surfeit of black everywhere: British churches that day were festooned with a ‘crapery of woe’. Worshippers sat in muted grief listening to long sermons on the death of the Prince Consort by parish priests, many of whom grasped the opportunity for issuing exhortations to their flocks to prepare for their own ends by ensuring that they live untainted, Christian lives as the Prince had done.62

  United in a ‘bond of common sorrow,’ the nation now gathered its strength for the heartbreak of the funeral to come, which promised a ‘grand Gothic fane…completely draped and carpeted with black’, with dirges and anthems and dead marches, and catafalques and a hearse ‘drawn by plumed and mantled steeds and hung with escutcheons of the illustrious deceased’, according to Sala of the Telegraph, once more rising to the occasion with a lugubrious flourish.63Overall the tone of the Prince’s obituaries that week had reflected the public wish, as Lord Clarendon saw it, ‘to make a serious amende for the injustice too often done to him in his lifetime’.64It was, however, the leader-writer of the Observer who best summed up, in a simple sentence quoting the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, what other obituarists had taken columns to express:

  Peace to his ashes! A good husband, a good father, a wise Prince, and a safe counsellor, England will not soon ‘look upon his like again’.65

  In these final dark, sullen days of December yet more bad news arrived: ships from America had brought discouraging dispatches. The American cabinet in Washington, whilst deliberating its course of action, still appeared to be taking a belligerent stance over the Trent affair. At the US legation in London, Benjamin Moran continued to fend off anxious enquiries as to the outcome of the crisis, whilst observing the protocol of ensuring that all notes to the British government were now sent on black-edged paper in black-bordered envelopes sealed with black wax. Privately he expected a speedy reconciliation, but the British public at large, as the time approached for a receipt of America’s answer, seemed convinced that war was inevitable. But, if a trade-off could have been possible, to the mind of Lord Palmerston it was ‘Better for England to have had a ten-years’ war with America than to have lost Prince Albert’.66

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Will They Do Him Justice Now?’

  It had been forty-four years since the British nation had experienced a royal tragedy to match that of the death of Prince Albert. Back in 1817 the popular and vivacious Princess Charlotte of Wales, daughter of the Prince Regent, and – failing the birth of any other legitimate ones – heir to the British throne, had at the age of only twenty-one died of complications following the stillbirth of a son. For many people this sudden loss took on the dimensions of an everyday tragedy, for death in childbirth (of mother and child) was then such a common occurrence. Nevertheless, as a robust and healthy young woman, Charlotte should not have died, had she not been so unmercifully bled and starved by her misguided doctors during her pregnancy. With the Princess already fatally weakened, the failure of the royal doctors to intervene with forceps to progress her agonising two-day labour had resulted in her death from haemorrhage and shock on 6 November.1

  Princess Charlotte’s death, much like that of the Prince Consort later, was viewed as a great national disaster: ‘The Catastrophe at Claremont’. It was commemorated in a torrent of sermons, discourses, dirges, elegies and epitaphs across the land, many of which were collected as ‘A Cypress Wreath for the Tomb of Her Late Royal Highness the Princess of Wales’. Bonfires stacked to celebrate the impending birth were dismantled, shops closed and businesses suspended as many went into mourning. The unexpected deaths of two prospective heirs to the throne provoked much talk in the Continental press of a monarchical crisis and the looming fear – in the continuing absence of a legitimate heir of a foreign monarch yet again taking the British throne.

  With perhaps the exception of the death in 1852 of the Napoleonic War hero the Duke of Wellington, the nation had ‘never been afflicted by a loss at once so sudden and so overwhelming’ and of such a prominent member of the royal family.2A great state occasion was made of the eighty-three-year-old Duke’s death; an elaborate twenty-seven-foot-long funeral car, embellished with black and gold ornamentation and drawn by twelve black-plumed horses, had processed across London in front of around a million people, to St Paul’s Cathedral, where the Duke was buried in the crypt alongside Admiral Lord Nelson. Prince Albert had taken a prominent role in national mourning for the Duke, and the funeral had been very much a mark of respect for a long life, well lived, that had come to its natural end. But the Duke’s was the last of the great heraldic state funerals. By 1861 tastes had changed, particularly with regard to the outmoded convention of royal burial at night. This had been the norm for members of the royal family earlier in the century, including Princess Charlotte, the main reason being that the darkness reduced the need for the precise observation of the elaborate heraldic trappings traditionally required. The natural Gothic drama of such a funeral conducted in darkness was heightened by the flickering torchlight and ghostlike black weeds of the mourners. But when in 1837 the Duke of Sussex had had to endure the irreverent, overblown shambles of the funeral of William IV, he left instructions for a simple daylight funeral for himself without excessive pomp, which was observed when he died in 1843. When William IV’s widow, Queen Adelaide, died in 1849, she left a similar request that her funeral be simple and conducted during the day. By then, even the royal lying-in-state had been abandoned – last seen at the funeral of Princess Sophia of Gloucester in 1844.

  In his will, Prince Albert reflected the general and growing distaste among the aristocracy for pompous and protracted obsequies, stating: ‘Everything I possess belongs to the Queen, my dear wife. I wish to be buried privately.’3The details of the will were never published, nor were any medical reports by Albert’s doctors on the circumstances of his death, beyond the superficial content of the official bulletins. When King George IV had died in 1830 the royal doctors had published the gruesome details of his post-mortem in The Times; there had been post-mortems too for Princess Charlotte and her dead baby before they had both been embalmed, but Victoria flatly refused to allow any posthumous examination of her husband’s sacred corpse, a fact that aroused considerable disapproval in medical circles.4

  It fell to the Lord Chamberlain – Viscount Sydney – as chief officer of the royal household to make the arrangements for the funeral, in consultation with Bertie and the Duke of Cambridge. With the Queen wanting no involvement in its planning, it was assumed that a repetition of the private funeral overseen earlier that year by Prince Albert for the Duchess of Kent would be the best option. The most urgent decision to be made was the actual date, which was decided on for Monday 23 December. The Lord Chamberlain and his staff were placed under considerable pressure to complete the arrangements in ti
me, but it was seen as essential that the funeral be held before Christmas, in order to allow the nation some release from mourning over the coming festive season, even though, inevitably, it would be a very subdued one that year.

  One thing at least could be relied on, and that was the discretion and efficiency of Messrs T. & W. Banting, who had conducted all royal funerals since 1811, as well as those of Nelson and the Duke of Wellington. From their fashionable premises in the West End, Banting’s (like many other similar businesses of the day) combined a prosperous upholstery and cabinet-making enterprise with undertaking, contracting out the embalming and other aspects of the business. After his death Albert’s corpse had been placed in the loving care of his valet Löhlein, who had laid out the Prince with the rings still on his fingers, dressed in the long dark-blue frockcoat of a field marshal, with gold cord aiguillette across one shoulder and a gold and crimson waist sash with tassels.

  In accordance with royal tradition, Albert’s body was placed within two coffins, similar in style and size to those used for the Duchess of Kent: the inner wooden shell lined with white satin had an outer casing of lead with massive silver-gilt ornaments and bore a Latin inscription:

  Depositum

  Illustrissimi et Celsissimi Alberti,

  Principis Consortis,

  Ducis Saxoniae, de Saxe-coburg et Gotha Principis,

  Noblissimi Ordinia Perisceldis Equitis,

  Augustissimae et Potentissimae Victoriae Reginae

  Conjugis percarissimi,

  Obiit die decimo quarto Decembris, MDCCCLXI,

  Anno aetatis suae XLIII.*

  On the evening of the 16th, officers of the Board of Works came and soldered the lead coffin down – Messrs Holland & Sons, undertakers of Mount Street, having placed charcoal around the corpse, again as per royal mortuary practice (in order to absorb any odours as it began to decompose).5Colonel Biddulph had arranged with Banting’s that the entire ante-throne room be ‘put in mourning to receive the body’ with ‘black druggett to cover floor, black cloth draperies over doors and windows’. In addition, a double-width of druggett was to be used to form an elaborate black pathway over the carpets, through two rooms, down the staircase and all the way to the entrance door of the castle, ‘so as to form a mourning route for the remains’, to be trod by those following the coffin.6When the coffin was moved down to the ante-throne room on the 22nd, it was placed inside a third, massive state coffin of mahogany covered with crimson velvet, over which a heavily embroidered black velvet pall lined with white satin was arranged, with Albert’s coronet and his field marshal’s baton, sword and hat placed on top.

  On Saturday 21 December – for one day only – and in order to satiate intense public curiosity, Banting’s had put the third, ceremonial coffin made in their workshops on public display at their premises at 27 St James’s Street.7But this is as much as the public would get to see; the ceremony itself at Windsor would be strictly private and the British people were denied any opportunity of paying their final respects at a formal lying-in-state. Even when Princess Charlotte had died, only a limited number had been allowed into a cramped room at Lower Lodge, Windsor, for a few hours to take a brief glance at the coffin. This was a matter of some concern to the Mayor of Windsor, who was dismayed that no local people would be allowed to see anything of the funeral cortège. He requested a change in the route when the coffin was brought from the private apartments in the Upper Ward, suggesting that it might proceed down Castle Hill and out of the precincts briefly, before turning back to St George’s Chapel. The palace and the Lord Chamberlain resisted this vigorously, insisting on absolute privacy.8As for the members of the press – as well as the necessary artists to illustrate the day’s events – they would be allowed access, but hidden away in the organ loft above the main body of the chapel. The Mayor meanwhile persisted; there would, he argued, be ‘intense disappointment’ if the public were totally excluded. In the end he and a handful of people were allowed into the castle precincts, but the Comptroller would later complain that despite the tight security arrangements, a lapse by the Mayor had allowed some ‘strangers’ to get in; worse, the policeman on duty at the door to the organ loft had allowed the sister of the organist, Dr George Elvey, to sneak in and watch the ceremony, ‘an unpardonable piece of impertinence…as he was perfectly well aware that no lady was to be admitted excepting by the Queen’s direct order’.9

  Preparations for the funeral in St George’s Chapel went on apace. The stone flagging covering the entrance to the royal vault was removed, and a raised dais constructed over it in the centre of the chapel to take the state coffin and its huge velvet catafalque. The whole of the chapel from its west door to the entrance of the choir was carpeted in black and the doors draped with heavy black curtains. The empty oak choir stalls and canopies of the Knights of the Garter were also festooned with black, as were the steps up to the communion table. The only colour breaking the pervading gloom was that of the glittering medieval escutcheons and fringed banners high in the roof of the chapel and its stained-glass window. Otherwise there was an ‘utter absence of prismatic colour’.10

  As the days passed, one thing was all too clear, as the Duke of Argyll observed: ‘The whole nation is mourning as it never mourned before.’ ‘During the past week,’ wrote Lord Hardman, ‘every shop in London has kept up mourning shutters, and nothing is seen in all drapers’, milliners’, tailors’, and haberdashers’ shops but black. Everybody is in mourning.’ For Albert’s death had brought ‘painful reminders of the death of the Princess Charlotte and her baby’ all those years before.11The 200 shop assistants at Jay’s vast London General Mourning Warehouse on Regent Street were under siege, for, from the moment of the Prince’s death, there had been an ‘incalculable demand for mourning’. Sales of engravings and cartes de visite of the Prince Consort and the Queen had also been unprecedented, the most popular being one by John Mayall of the Prince seated, pen in hand, at his desk, which had been taken in May 1860. The carte de visite was a recent innovation from France that had immediately found favour with the public, with cartes of Mayall’s photographs of the royal family selling by the 100,000. Photograph dealers were quick to capitalise on the windfall of the Prince’s death and the astonishing demand for images of him. Inside a week, ‘no less than 70,000 cartes de visite had been ordered from…Marion & Co.’, the largest photographic wholesaler in England, located in Soho Square; in Paris, a print-seller claimed to have sold 30,000 cartes in one day.12On the afternoon of 21 December, Arthur Munby had fought his way through the shoppers on Regent Street and found huge crowds outside the photograph shops, ‘looking at the few portraits of the Prince which are still unsold’. He went into Meclin’s to buy one: ‘every one in the shop was doing the same. They had none left: would put my name down, but could not promise even then. Afterwards I succeeded in getting one – the last the seller had – of the Queen and Prince: giving four shillings for what would have cost but eighteen pence a week ago.’ Munby concluded that the escalation in price was an indicator of the ‘great conviction of his worth and value which the loss of him has suddenly brought to us all’.13

  The morning of Monday 23 December 1861 dawned cold, grey and cheerless. ‘The very air felt heavy with the general gloom,’ recalled Princess Mary Adelaide when she got up at eight. She could already hear the tolling of the bells and later the minute guns in St James’s Park, informing London that the ‘last sad ceremony’ was about to take place in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Nature itself seemed to sympathise with the national feeling of despondency, for the dull, damp, leaden sky showed no sign of clearing as people ventured forth to mark the day – a day when no respectable person was seen out of doors except in the deepest of mourning.14

  The most profound gloom of all reigned in the town of Windsor, as the correspondent of The Times reported: ‘every shop closed, every blind drawn down; streets silent and almost deserted’. The castle’s great bell chimed out its doleful sound at intervals from
an early hour, joined later by the minute bells tolling from nearby St John’s parish church. Early that morning Bertie, Arthur, Duke Ernst, Prince Louis, the Crown Prince of Prussia and other male mourners in the royal entourage for Albert’s funeral had left Osborne and travelled by special train from Southampton to Windsor, the shutters firmly drawn down as it passed through stations en route, observed by mute and grief-stricken crowds. The entourage brought with them wreaths of moss and violets made by Alice, Helena and Louise for their father’s coffin, as well as a simple, touching bouquet of violets with a white camellia in its centre from their mother.15These would be the only flowers in evidence, fresh flowers as such not yet being part of British funeral culture.

  At eleven o’clock the principal mourners gathered in the Oak Room, wearing, as instructed by the Lord Chamberlain, plain black evening coats and white cravats. Mourning scarves and armbands, as per funeral convention, were to be provided by Banting’s at the chapel. Only those with a personal connection to the Queen and Prince Albert, plus the essential Cabinet ministers and the Archbishop of Canterbury, had been invited. Much to their dismay, the Duke of Cambridge and Lord Palmerston were both too unwell to attend; the Prince of Leiningen was also absent, having elected to remain at Osborne with the Queen. No foreign ambassadors were there either, bar the Portuguese envoy Count Lavradio, Count Brandenburg from Prussia and, on behalf of King Leopold who was yet to arrive in England, the Belgian ambassador, Sylvain Van De Weyer. Foreign royals present included the Duc de Nemours (married to Albert’s cousin) and Albert and Victoria’s cousins from Belgium: the Duke of Brabant and the Count of Flanders. ‘Youth seemed out of place here,’ remarked George Augustus Sala; the congregation for the funeral was ‘a congress of old men, of patriarchs’. The only youthful exception, aside from Bertie and Arthur – and the only representative of Britain’s many colonies (where the news of Albert’s death was yet to arrive) – was the twenty-three-year-old former Maharaja of the Sikh Raj, Duleep Singh, now domiciled in England and a favourite of the Queen’s. No women were present in the main body of the chapel, although, at Victoria’s particular request, two of her closest friends – the Duchesses of Sutherland and Wellington (her former and current Mistresses of the Robes) – along with five other ladies, observed the proceedings out of sight in the Queen’s Closet on the north side of the choir, specially fitted up with mourning on the Lord Chamberlain’s orders. At Bertie’s thoughtful request, Prince Arthur’s nurse, Mrs Hull, was also at hand, in the organ loft.