A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy
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As the journalists and congregation gathered in the chapel to a low sound of whispering and rustling, the faint sound of machinery could be heard as the mechanism for lowering the bier down into the vault was tested one final time. Elsewhere, workmen hurried to finish sweeping away the remaining mess from where the temporary black carpeting had been laid. Sala – whose account was published the following day across six columns of the Daily Telegraph surrounded in a heavy black border – had an excellent vantage point in the organ loft, from where he could see both east and west ends of the chapel. He was fascinated to note that one of the minor chapels had been converted into a temporary workshop by Banting’s, where ‘the busy bees of Death, the undertaker’s myrmidons – plump men in raven black, rosy girls in brand new sables – [sat] stitching and tacking and folding scarves, and tying bands and sewing on rosettes, until the very last moment’, these to be handed to the mourners as they arrived.
At midday the procession of fifteen mourning coaches slowly wended its way behind the hearse, under the Norman Tower and down the hill from the royal apartments in the Upper Ward. Its progress was witnessed by only a small group of spectators who were allowed to stand in front of the almshouses of the Poor Knights, immediately opposite the entrance to the south side of the chapel. As the procession drew to a halt, the minute guns were fired by members of the Horse Artillery beyond the castle walls in Long Walk, a couple of miles away. Outside the chapel Grenadier Guards, of whom the Prince had been Colonel-in-Chief, stood to attention and presented arms as the heavy black drapes at the chapel doors were pulled back to admit the coffin. From there, slowly, inexorably, it was edged forward into the chapel on a bier underneath its velvet pall (the assistants moving it, being unable to see, were guided by a narrow strip of white along the floor at their feet). Following the coffin came Lord Henry Lennox, bearing the Prince’s baton, sword and hat on a black velvet cushion with gold tassels, followed by Earl Spencer with the Prince’s coronet, which were all then placed on the coffin.
The mourners were led by Bertie and a grief-stricken Prince Arthur, his eyes red and swollen from weeping, who made the most poignant of figures in his black Highland dress. All around ‘there was a dumb, cadaverous air about the chapel, swathed in its ghastly trappings’. Dukes, marquesses, earls, politicians and members of the royal household – from Albert’s valets, to his farm bailiffs, his solicitor, librarian, apothecaries, doctors, and equerries – sat as one in their uniformly black and white garb, the scene relieved only by the occasional glitter of a bejewelled badge or order. As the muffled bell continued its melancholy chime a deep silence fell across those gathered. Gerald Wellesley, the Dean of Windsor, took his place to conduct the burial service, with music composed by the eighteenth-century organist and composer William Croft, which had been used at previous state funerals. A shudder of emotion went round the congregation as the choir burst into the chant ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’, followed by ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ – the latter ‘so touching, so inexpressibly mournful in its long, soft cadences,’ as the organist Dr Elvey recalled.16
Of Albert’s nine children, only two were present at the service: Bertie, who as eldest bore up as best he could, and little Prince Arthur, the Prince’s eleven year-old younger son, who was consumed by grief throughout. When it came to the words ‘So fall asleep in slumber deep,/Slumber that knows no waking’ – part of a favourite chant of their father’s – the two brothers hid their faces and wept. Even Dean Wellesley’s voice faltered many times and was sometimes inaudible, so overcome was he. For once some of the traditional conventions of royal funerals were broken, certainly with regard to the choice of music, which was strongly oriented to Albert’s own musical tastes. The service included two of his favourite German chorales: the sixteenth-century ‘I shall not in the grave remain/Since Thou death’s bonds hast sever’d’, by the Bavarian cantor and preacher Nicolaus Decius, which was ‘chanted by the choir in whispered tones that seemed to moan through the building with a plaintive solemnity’; the other a favourite hymn by Martin Luther, ‘Great God, what do I see and hear?’, sung by the tenor soloist Mr Tolley. These had been requested by Victoria, having been privately printed in a pamphlet – In Memoriam – on the death of her mother, ‘which the late Prince was constantly in the habit of using’.17Then the Garter King of Arms stepped forward to read the proclamation in which reference was made to Queen Victoria, ‘Whom God bless and preserve with long life, health, and happiness’. There was, however, one significant change; having carefully studied the details of the funeral service before leaving for Osborne, Victoria had specifically ordered that the word ‘happiness’ be struck out and replaced with ‘honour’. For her, all worldly happiness was now, and for ever, at an end.18
As the ceremony drew to a close, many in the all-male congregation openly wept as the pall was removed and the gold and crimson-covered coffin suddenly flashed into view, all too briefly, in all its magnificence. In the pause that followed as the congregation gazed in awe at Albert’s coffin, the wind outside gathered and ‘mourned hoarsely against the casements’, accompanied by the quick, sharp rattle of the troops outside as they reversed arms, to the sound of the melancholy knell from the castle spire. Then the coffin was gradually lowered quietly down through the aperture in the stone floor to the royal vault below. As it finally disappeared from view a handful of earth was thrown down ‘with a sharp rattle that was heard throughout the building’. The mourners then slowly advanced to take one last look down at the coffin before departing – to the sound of Dr Elvey playing the ‘Dead March from Saul’. During the hour-long service everyone had perished with the bitter cold inside the chapel and now headed into the castle to be fortified with a champagne funeral luncheon, which Lord Torrington noticed that an exhausted Sir Charles Phipps devoured with relish, no doubt relieved it was all over.19
In his account the following day George Augustus Sala commented on the ‘splendid but ghastly toilet of the grave’ that Albert’s magnificent funeral ceremony had embodied, contrasting it with the last rites for ordinary people, quietly laid to rest in ‘green country churchyards, where the moon shines with a soft and tender kindness on the stones above them’. In contrast, Albert’s great coffin had passed ‘but a few paces from the Chamber of Death to the House of Silence’ and now, as the mourners dispersed, the funeral attendants prepared it for its final resting place. At the end of a stone passage, six feet wide and nine feet high – past rows of tall, black, two-armed wooden candelabra in which torches were placed to light their way – the coffin arrived at two plain, rusty, barred iron gates, which marked the entrance to the royal vault. Inside this cold and silent stone vault with its groined roof stood four tiers of marble shelves on either side, with marble slabs in the centre (the preserve of monarchs only), on which were visible the deep-purple velvet-covered coffins of George III, George IV, William IV and their wives, and to the side the crimson coffin of Princess Charlotte. Queen Victoria had had a horror of Albert’s coffin being placed there, alongside ‘that huge, dingy coffin’ of the venal old George IV.20And so here, at the gates to the vault, it would rest until his mausoleum was completed a year later.
Describing that day to his friend Delane at The Times, Lord Torrington said he was ‘inclined to think that more real sorrow was evinced at this funeral than at any that has taken place there for a vast number of years’. ‘Brave men sobbed like children,’ agreed gentleman usher Lyon Playfair, and ‘even the choristers broke down when they had to sing the requiem’. All around one saw ‘old, dry, political eyes, which seemed as if they had long forgotten how to weep, gradually melting and running down in large drops of sympathy,’ recalled Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford. Arthur Stanley, one of the chaplains to Prince Albert, would himself later recall that, ‘considering the magnitude of the event and of the persons present, all agitated by the same emotion, I do not think that I have ever seen, or shall see, anything so affecting’.21
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p; London itself that day had been ‘like a city struck by the Plague’. An unusual stillness had prevailed everywhere; it was as though normal daily life was in a state of suspended animation. Private houses were dark and ‘as much closed as though each household had lost a close relative’. Shops were shuttered up, labour was suspended, money exchanges were closed, as the country ‘voluntarily imposed upon itself a fine which probably cannot be estimated at less than a million sterling, in order to mark its regret for the dead and its sympathy for its survivors’.22At Lockinge House in Berkshire, Lord Overstone, responding to the prevailing mood, had, first thing that morning, ‘invited the whole household (out of door as well as indoor servants)’ to attend prayers inside the main house. ‘They all attended readily I believe without a single exception,’ he wrote. ‘I read to them the Burial Service, with a few remarks of my own on the character of the Prince and the solemnity of the event whilst the Church Bell was tolling, almost as if it were in the very room.’ All present, he recalled, were ‘deeply affected; sincerely so I fully believe’.23No doubt many families began the day in similar manner, before heading for one of the many commemorative services held in Britain’s churches, where the congregations were huge – with 3,000 crowding into St Paul’s Cathedral alone. Many major towns staged large, solemn processionals ahead of the service: in Leeds not only was the parish church full to capacity, but mourners of all denominations and social classes lined the processional route all the way from the town hall. At Exeter there was again not enough room in the cathedral to take all those wishing to attend, prompting disgruntled local dignitaries to complain that hoi polloi had been allowed precedence.24
At a more modest level, among the working classes in the overcrowded East End, people were no less grief-stricken. At Bethnal Green there was ‘hardly any noise in those usually noisy thoroughfares’; people gathered on street corners in subdued groups around street ballad-singers, ‘whose utterances visibly moved their audiences’ as they lamented the death of the Prince in song:
Britannia, alas! is lamenting,
And grief now is everywhere seen
Oh think, you kind daughters of Britain,
The Feelings of England’s Queen
What trouble and care does oppress her,
Her loss causes her to deplore,
The spirit of him is departed,
And Prince Albert, alas! is no more.25
Philanthropists of the London City Mission noted considerable grief among the ‘very poorest’ of those families whom they visited at the time; one hospital visitor talked of how, when he did his round at St George’s Hospital, ‘not one patient spoke to him of his own wounds or ailments, while every one to whom he went up, was full of expressions of sorrow for the loss which the Country had sustained, and of tender enquiries about the Queen, in her cruel bereavement’. In rural areas Richard Monckton Milnes observed that ‘The peasants in their cottages talk as if the Queen was one of themselves. It is the realest public sorrow I have ever seen – quite different from anything else.’26
But it was not just the Christian community that paid homage in their churches that day. Among the Jewish community, especially of London, Prince Albert was mourned in an atmosphere of profound melancholy. The Jews, who had much to thank the Prince for his impartiality on religious matters, marked the occasion with special services in synagogues, several of them draped in black. Sermons on the dead Prince were delivered at London’s historic Sephardi synagogue (the Bevis Marks in the City) and the two Ashkenazi congregations (the Great and the Hambro synagogues). At the West London synagogue every seat was filled long before the service and the roads leading up to it were jammed with vehicles. Here the congregation heard a sermon by Dr Marks taking as its text the words of Jeremiah IX:19: ‘A voice of lamentation is heard from Zion. How are we bereaved!’ And at his own privately built synagogue on his estate in Ramsgate, the philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore and his wife attended a special service where the reading desk was covered with black cloth, ‘the only symbol of mourning we ever had in our synagogue’. All in all, as one British Jew later reported to a friend in South Africa, there had been ‘not a dry eye in the synagogues’; prayers for Prince Albert had continued all day. ‘The people mourned for him as much as for Hezekiah; and, indeed, he deserved it a great deal better’ was his somewhat unorthodox conclusion.27
In all, seventy sermons preached on the Sunday and Monday would later be published in pamphlet form, their titles echoing the impact of Albert’s death on the national consciousness – ‘Britain’s Loss and Britain’s Duty’, ‘God’s Voice from Windsor Castle’, ‘Death is Entered into Our Palaces’, ‘The Smitten Nation’, ‘A Nation’s Lamentation over Fallen Greatness’, ‘A Prince’s Death, A Nation’s Grief’ – not to mention a plethora of poetry, good, bad and awful. Even the unremittingly satirical Punch magazine for once took a serious tone, rising to the occasion with its own moving offering ‘How Do Princes Die’, in which it reflected the universal feeling:
It was too soon to die.
Yet, might we count his years by triumphs won,
By wise, and bold, and Christian duties done,
It were no brief, eventless history…28
On the day after Albert died, when she had taken the Duchess of Sutherland into the King’s Room to see his body, the Queen had turned as they both looked down at Albert’s dead face and asked plaintively, ‘Will they do him justice now?’ By day’s end, 23 December 1861, there was no one in the country who could have doubted the extent to which the nation had indeed done justice to its late Prince. The day had been a great celebration, not just of the Prince, but of sober British moral values. Benjamin Disraeli had no hesitation in his own paean to the late Consort: ‘With Prince Albert we have buried our sovereign,’ he confided unequivocally to Count Vitzthum, Saxon envoy to the Court of St James’s. ‘This German prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings have ever shown.’ But as for the future: ‘What to-morrow will bring forth no man can tell. To-day we are sailing in the deepest gloom, with night and darkness all around us.’29
Alone in Coburg, too sick and frail to travel, Albert’s oldest and truest friend, Baron Christian Stockmar, was left to nurse his broken heart and the end of his life’s work. ‘An edifice, which for a great and noble purpose, has been reared with a devout sense of duty, by twenty years of laborious toil’ had, with his protégé’s death, ‘been shattered to its very foundations’. He had an ‘indisputable right’, he wrote to Bertie, to say that ‘in Him I have lost the very best of Sons’.30Stockmar would never recover from it; eighteen months later he too was dead, and the dream of a golden age of constitutional monarchy in Britain – and a united Germany – under Albert’s enlightened guidance, died with him.
Chapter Eight
‘How Will the Queen Bear It?’
In deep retreat on a bleak and cheerless Isle of Wight, Queen Victoria had sat watching the minutes tick by on the day of her husband’s funeral, and then, as the clock struck, she had picked up her pen and written to Vicky. ‘It is one o’clock and all, all is over!’ Alone in Berlin, Vicky had spent the day sitting with her beloved father’s photographs spread out on her knees, ‘devouring them with my eyes, kissing them and feeling as if my heart would break’. She would have given anything to be there, with her family. Over at Osborne her mother had not wished to have any reminders of that day’s solemnities. She made certain that she would not have to suffer within her earshot the agonising and very audible sound of the minute guns being fired by ships and batteries across the Solent. She therefore instructed Sir Charles Phipps to ask the Duke of Cambridge, as C-in-C of the Army, to see to it; ‘nor should any guns for practice or other duties be fired at Portsmouth, or within reach of being heard at Osborne’. She had, she said, already found the constant practice-firing from Portsmouth on the morning of 20 December greatly distressing and shuddered at the thought of being further reminded.1
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nbsp; Sir Charles Phipps, who had remained with the Queen at Osborne until leaving for the funeral early on the Monday morning, had dreaded how she would react that day, but, he told Lord Sydney, was convinced that ‘the coming here has been a very good measure’. Informing the Duke of Cambridge of the Queen’s instructions, he hoped her deep grief would ‘resume the same quiet, unexcited character’ once the funeral was over.2Thin she might be, and still suffering from disrupted sleep, but the initial fears they had had when the Queen’s pulse had dropped alarmingly had been unfounded and she was otherwise in good health. Her continuing state of calm, despite bouts of weeping, impressed everyone, as did her acceptance – Victoria claiming that she did not feel the same bitterness as she had when her mother had died. ‘I was so rebellious then,’ she admitted, ‘but now I see the mercy and love that are mixed with my misery.’3
When he arrived by royal yacht from Prussia en route to the funeral, her son-in-law Fritz remarked on Victoria’s composure and her ‘greatness of spirit in such terrible times of grief’. They spent much time in quiet conversation, during which she told him how she had already plucked up the courage to go into Albert’s rooms at Osborne. Fritz thought this highly therapeutic, urging her to ‘seek out all the places they shared in times of happiness at the first sign of pain’ in order to get herself ‘used to the loneliness’.4On her arrival at Osborne, Victoria had sent for the gardener who had worked so closely with Prince Albert and had asked him to walk round the garden every morning with her, as Albert had done, and never to be afraid of speaking to her of his late master, ‘as it was a solace to her to hear him spoken of.’ She took a turn in the gardens too with Fritz, and went over to the Swiss chalet that Albert had commissioned in 1854 as a playhouse for the children. Victoria longed so much to have Vicky there, for she, of all her children, ‘had her father’s mind’ and so would be able to ‘help me in all my great plans for a mausoleum…for statues, monuments, etc.’5