On New Year’s Eve, looking out over the River Thames as the clocks struck midnight, the diarist Arthur Munby recalled events of the past two weeks. The whole nation had seemed ‘sublimed by a noble sorrow and a noble anxiety, into a purity and oneness that I never remember to have seen before…England, knit together as one man by grief and indignation, has poured out its heart…in a passion of sympathy and love and veneration for the Queen, for which mere loyalty is a cold name indeed.’ But for how long would that loyalty last, with a queen now in the deepest retreat from her public?
For Victoria, the days of her life at Osborne passed as one, in utter darkness and stark despair. And it was only now, as people gathered to lament the year that mercifully was over and raise a hopeful glass to a better one to come, that the full horror of the Queen’s solitude began to sink in. For, despite being surrounded by loyal family and retainers, Queen Victoria had in reality ‘none to cast herself upon and weep out her Soul’. Recalling a story he had once heard about the islanders of Honolulu, the country parson Robert Hawker noted in his diary that in the Pacific they called a king ‘by a word which signified The Lonely One’. This was because ‘their lofty place is shared by none and they are therefore solitary above their people’. Sympathy, he added, ‘can only be complete among those who are equal’, and who was the Queen’s equal now that Albert had gone?29‘Oh! Who is so lonely as she,’ echoed the Daily News, as one thought gained currency over and above all the many expressions of shock and grief and apprehension that had filled the press for the sixteen days since Albert’s death. It lingered in every heart and on everyone’s lips. In the days to come, they all asked, ‘How will the Queen bear it?’30
Part Two
The Broken-Hearted Widow
Chapter Nine
‘All Alone!’
‘What a sad new Year, what a cloud more impenetrable than ever has settled upon it,’ wrote Lady Augusta Bruce to her family on 8 January 1862 as she contemplated the cheerless landscape at Osborne with the winter sea roaring in the distance. ‘I can not tell you what it is to be here, to watch day by day the progress of this agony, and to see rising up one by one all the trials and difficulties that such a terrible visitation brings with it.’ Osborne was still full of relatives who had arrived for Albert’s funeral, yet for all of them New Year’s Day had been, according to Lady Bruce, an intensely bleak one: ‘The whole house seems like Pompeii, the life suddenly extinguished.’
For Queen Victoria, the New Year – like Christmas – brought only aching memories of what had gone before. ‘This day last year found us so perfectly happy and now!!! Last year music woke us, little gifts, new year’s wishes, brought in by [my] maid, and then given to dearest Albert. The children waiting with their gifts in the next room.’1All was so terribly, irrevocably changed; the clock of Victoria’s happy life had stopped on 14 December 1861. Like Dickens’s Miss Havisham, she had no desire to move forward but only to remain in stasis, locked into that terrible moment of loss, in perpetuity. She confidently expected to die soon, and made her will and arranged guardians for her children. Meanwhile, in anticipation of that longed-for day, she sank into a state of lethargy and gloom, enshrouding herself in the veil of widowhood as the sunshine of her marriage faded into the interminable monochrome of her new ‘sad and solitary life’.2Day after day the great, inconsolable bouts of Victoria’s weeping could be heard along the corridors of Osborne.
She had, at first, resolved differently: she would not give way to despair. Shortly after Albert had died, she had gathered her children round her and told them, ‘Your father never blamed me but once and that was for my grief about my mother – that it was selfish…I will not do so now,’ she promised them, ‘I will have affliction, but not gloom.’3She had tried hard to remember those words of advice that Albert had given her after they left Balmoral the previous October – to be less occupied with herself and her own feelings. She had copied his letter carefully into the ‘Album Consolativum’ that she now kept as a compendium of personal consolation. Here Albert’s wise counsel was joined by copious extracts from Tennyson’s In Memoriam – its content so closely mirroring her own feelings on loss:
Far off thou art, but ever nigh;
I have thee still, and I rejoice;
I prosper, circled with thy voice;
I shall not lose thee tho’ I die.
(Canto CXXX)4
There were verses too by Goethe and Schiller, extracts from letters, and sermons and hymns – even by notable Roman Catholics such as John Henry Newman and Cardinal Manning. All were carefully copied mainly by her daughters or ladies-in-waiting in the neatest of handwriting, interspersed with a few in Victoria’s own inimitable scrawl with significant words heavily underlined. The small gold-tooled, morocco-leather album with its gilt clasp went everywhere with her; by June it had already been filled.5
The courage needed to face up to her lonely task as monarch had, meanwhile, totally deserted her; her relationship with Albert had been crucial to her own sense of self and the way she lived her life, and without him she was rudderless. Indeed, her whole life had been one long pattern of reliance on others: during her childhood she had become used to incessant surveillance, imposed by her mother. She had never had to stand and act alone until the first months of her reign, after which she had quickly let go of her early promise as an active queen, to accept the guidance of a powerful man – her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Then Albert had come along and, as she was sidelined by pregnancy after pregnancy, he had assumed many of the onerous responsibilities of state on her behalf. However, it went against the grain for Victoria not to fulfil her role conscientiously, as he had so assiduously trained her, but alone as she now was, she was so mistrustful of her own judgement that it was much easier simply to give way to grief and do nothing. Every act, every decision seemed so daunting without Albert. All she could do was filter things through the prism of what he would have said, or done, or wanted. Carl Ruland noted the dramatic change in the once-wilful queen: ‘she used to say “I never will do it,” and now it is “How shall I be able to do it?”’6Having lived her life in a unique position of power as a woman – enacting, initiating, granting permission and, when she chose, withholding it – Victoria was presented by Albert’s death for the first time with something totally outside her control. She felt angry, worthless, inadequate and guilty too: that perhaps in her own self-obsession she had omitted to take her husband’s failing health seriously enough and might even, somehow, have done something to prevent it. Unending grief was therefore not just an escape from responsibilities she did not wish to shoulder alone, but also a necessary form of harsh self-punishment.
‘There is no one to call me Victoria now,’ she had wept, though this is the popularly quoted version of a far more wrenching form of the loss of intimacy, as she expressed it to her German-speaking relatives: ‘I have no one now in the world to call me “du”,’ she had told Princess Mary Adelaide.7The terrifying loneliness of her position was brought home to her even more at night when she missed Albert’s presence the most. She was still young (only forty-three), still a sexual being full of longing: ‘What a dreadful going to bed! What a contrast to that tender lover’s love. All alone!’8The great waves of debilitating grief were relentless; how she envied her daughter Vicky, who had a husband ‘on whose bosom you can pillow your head when all seems dark’.9
For the rest, Victoria remained calm and quiet and largely uncomplaining. No exhortations to find comfort in her children moved her. ‘The children of lovers are orphans,’ observed the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, and in Victoria’s case it was only too apparent that her love for Albert had transcended her love for all her children, who remained the ‘poor half’ of her life.10Albert had thought it ‘a pity’, he told her in 1856, that she found no consolation in their company, and Victoria did not deny it. She was quite candid when Lord Hertford arrived for a private visit: ‘she had never taken pleasure in the society of her children as most mo
thers did,’ she admitted to him, ‘but always preferred being alone with him [Albert].’ It was Albert who ‘gave all the gaiety and life to the house’. It made her so angry to hear people talk of ‘her management of the children, of her attention to business, and her doing this and doing that when they ought to have known it was all him, that he was the life and soul of the family and indeed of all her counsels’.11
Feeling as she did, Victoria made it much harder for her children to come to terms, in their own way, with the loss of their father. Rather than comforting them in their grief, she punished them, expecting them to share in the levels of her own conspicuous, unrelenting mourning. In so doing she cast a blight over their lives for many years to come. No one – in the family or entourage – was to be allowed any respite: she sent out an ‘injunction’ making clear the impossibility of her ever again joining in the ‘frivolities of court’.12Personal pleasure, light-heartedness and laughter in her presence were absolutely frowned on, as too was all but the most necessary social contact. Anything more frayed her nerves. She who had so loved dancing as a young woman would never again attend a ball or give one. The private theatricals and fancy-dress parties that the children had so enjoyed during their father’s lifetime were forbidden, and none of the family would be allowed to appear at the opening ceremony of the 1862 Great London Exhibition, despite their father’s close involvement in its planning. The only exception made was for four-year-old Beatrice, whose disarming candour and innocent good humour were impossible to repress. ‘Cousin Mary, am I too merry,’ the little girl whispered guiltily to Princess Mary Adelaide when she visited in January. Poor Beatrice, ‘prattling’ amidst all ‘the sad grave faces’ as Mary noted, had heard her siblings wishing they could die and go to be with Papa. ‘I don’t wish to die,’ Beatrice told her, ‘I want to live, and want Mama to take care of me.’13‘I always hope her little innocent cheerfulness may be one of the first things to rouse the poor Queen,’ wrote the Duchess of Wellington, but far from it: with time, even the irrepressible Beatrice succumbed to the overwhelming atmosphere of gloom at home, becoming strangely solemn and introverted.14
Weak and exhausted she may have been, but in a perverse way Victoria’s thin, pale appearance made her look younger, more vulnerable, as though recovering from a severe illness. Indeed, she rather liked it when people told her how thin she had grown – it was comforting confirmation of the visible depths of her grief and her feminine frailty. Her sister Feodora and Princess Alice tried repeatedly to persuade her to engage in the gentlest of occupational therapy, some light reading or perhaps browsing the newspapers; she might even like to dictate her reminiscences. But nothing could rouse Victoria from her lethargy. She was suffering what no doubt today would be diagnosed as clinical depression. It left her incapable of doing anything more than reading the odd letter, taking short walks in the garden and talking – endlessly, obsessively – of Albert, as though by constant mention of his name she was keeping him alive, maintaining a seamless continuity between his death and her life, the only difference being that he was now invisible and she had yet to reach the end of her own mortal journey.15Soon there would be no avoiding a return to Windsor and to affairs of state and she dreaded the pressures already being put on her: ‘The things of this life are of no interest to the Queen,’ she told Lord John Russell wanly, but the excuse – for all the ready sympathy offered her – would not wash with ministers anxious for her to resume her official duties.16
For most of those first weeks of grinding melancholy at Osborne the Queen kept almost totally to the company of Alice, Feodora, her most trusted lady-in-waiting Augusta Bruce and her head-dresser, Marianne Skerrett. Augusta Bruce’s growing power as right-hand woman did not go unnoticed, and was not without occasional jealous comment. When Vicky arrived in February she noted that Augusta Bruce had more influence over her mother than anyone else, ‘simply because she said “Yes, Ma’am” to everything and that if she said “No, Ma’am” a few times the Queen would cease to think her the paragon of cleverness she now did’.17Augusta Bruce had been a lady-in-waiting for fifteen years; after Albert died she was offered a highly privileged, permanent place with the Queen (as opposed to the normal three-month periods on and off duty). Many of the Queen’s other (unmarried) ladies during that first year never saw her from one day to the next and found their imposed idleness enervating. For, aside from Bruce and Skerrett, Victoria now demonstrated a decided preference for the company of widows such as the Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Ely and Lady Barrington, and, when she visited from Germany, her devoted friend Countess Blücher.18
But it was not just the well-born ladies-in-waiting and of the bedchamber who became the Queen’s confidantes, for her dresser Marianne Skerrett played a key role. She was a tiny, thin creature, shorter even than the Queen (under five feet) and ‘comically plain’, but a good linguist and fiercely intelligent. Appointed in 1837 when Victoria came to the throne, Skerrett, a woman ‘of the greatest discretion and straightforwardness’, became one of Victoria’s most intimate and protective friends and played an increasingly important role, performing various personal and administrative tasks for her, as well as reading to her.19When Skerrett retired, Annie Macdonald (the widow of a footman), who had been Prince Albert’s general cleaner, was promoted to wardrobe-maid and largely took over Skerrett’s role. All of these women would increasingly be called upon – often unreasonably so – to fill the void of the Queen’s loneliness, kowtowing to her often bullying demands during the first difficult ten years of her retreat. They formed a human barrier, used by Victoria to protect herself from what she saw as the unkind onslaughts of demanding ministers, and carried messages back and forth to male members of her entourage when she did not feel up to dealing with them.20Lady Ely rather enjoyed showing off her trusted position of important go-between – often on highly sensitive political matters – and delighted in whispering confidences in the Queen’s ear in front of the other ladies. In general, though, self-effacement was an unwritten prerequisite of the job, as too was all thought of personal aspirations such as marriage. None of the ladies-in-waiting were supposed to keep diaries when on duty, but of course several did; with life at court so deadening and restricted, it was one of the few pursuits left to them.21The Duchess of Athole, with her vigorous common sense, was perhaps the most resilient and least awestruck of the Queen’s ladies, understanding the utter folly of trying to contradict Victoria’s wishes and learning how to cleverly manage her intractability. The Queen would have her way and they had all better spare themselves the pain of trying to contradict it. Victoria in return recognised the Duchess’s unique value and refused to allow her to retire.22
While the well-rehearsed commiserations of her ladies were all too readily available, Victoria found greater comfort in the honest words of ordinary people, who had sent endless ‘expressions of universal admiration and appreciation of beloved Albert’ since the day he died. ‘Even the poor people in small villages, who don’t know me, are shedding tears for me, as if it were their own private sorrow,’ she noted in her journal.23When, in mid-January, there was a terrible disaster at the Hartley Colliery in Northumberland, in which 205 men and boys trapped below ground had suffocated and died, a distraught Victoria was quick to share in the sorrow of their wives and mothers, sending £200 to the disaster fund with her ‘tenderest sympathies’ and telling them that ‘her own misery only makes her feel the more for them’.24On 11 January the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, presented her with some of the many hundreds of addresses of condolence received from municipalities and other bodies across the country. There were in addition dozens of letters received at Windsor from heads of state – from the Emperor of Mexico to the Sultan of Turkey – all with their stereotypical expressions of grief and consolation, inscribed in immaculate copperplate handwriting. But none of them had the directness and honesty of the letter from the American President, received from Washington in February. ‘The offer of condolence in such cases is a custo
mary ceremony, which has its good uses,’ he wrote, ‘though it is conventional and may sometimes be even insincere.’ Despite the recent political crisis, the bond of friendship between Britain and the USA ran deep and the American people deplored the Prince’s death, sympathising in the Queen’s ‘irreparable bereavement with an unaffected sorrow’. Certain that ‘the Divine Hand that has wounded, is the only one that can heal’, he therefore commended Victoria and her family to God’s mercies, concluding, with utter sincerity, ‘I remain Your Good Friend, Abraham Lincoln’.25
It was the end of January before news reached South Africa via the paddle steamer Jin Kie, en route to China from Plymouth. It ‘created great consternation here’, wrote Lady Duff Gordon. Flags in the harbour were immediately lowered to half-mast and forty-two minute guns at the British fortress at Cape Town were fired as a mark of respect that evening. General mourning for the Prince in the Cape was called for the 1 February, and Lady Gordon noted that deep mourning was ‘more general than in an average village of the same size at home’ in England.26She also noted in particular the response of many Malays in the Cape, who ‘hope the people will take much care of her, now she is alone’, their feelings being ‘all about her’ – the Queen – rather than the dead man. In Penang in the Straits Settlement, British official Orfeur Cavenagh remembered the Prince’s death casting ‘a great gloom across the station’; all the residents of standing met to prepare a joint message of condolence to the Queen, reiterating their ‘loyal attachment and sincere affection’ for her in her affliction. On the island of Madagascar, which had come under British influence, King Radama ordered his court to go into mourning for Prince Albert for twenty-one days, as well as the firing of twenty-one cannons at Antananarivo and Tamtave.27
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 18