With the electrical telegraph in its infancy, it took some weeks before responses started trickling in from the Antipodes. The Star of India, an emigrant ship from Liverpool, brought the news to Australia and from there it was passed to New Zealand. A poignant response from Maori chiefs eventually wended its way back to London via the Governor of New Zealand. ‘O Victoria, our Mother!’ it lamented:
We, your Maori children, are now sighing in sorrow together with you…who hast nourished us, your ignorant children of this island, even to this day! We have just heard the crash of the huge-headed forest tree, which has untimely fallen, ere it had attained its full growth of greatness…Yes, thou the pillar that didst support my palace has been borne to the skies. Oh, my beloved! You used to stand in the very prow of the war canoe, inciting all others to noble deeds. Where, oh physicians, was the power of your remedies? What, oh priests, availed your prayers? For I have lost my love, no more can he revisit this world.28
But it was one of Albert’s own children, Prince Alfred, who was the last in the royal family to be given the news of his father’s death, which finally reached him at sea off the coast of Mexico in early January, relayed to his governor, Major John Cowell, by a Spanish steamship, the Ceballor. But Affie did not arrive back in England until 16 February 1862.
From the moment Prince Albert’s death was announced, British manufacturing went into mass production of every conceivable kind of commemorative item: plaques and busts, plates, handkerchiefs, pot lids, jugs, book marks, even special mourning teasets, all feeding into the middle-class fashion for extravagant mourning. But this was nothing compared with the ambitious plans nursed by Victoria for ‘numberless’ memorials to her dear departed.29The process had already begun with the preservation of Prince Albert’s rooms at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral, as well as the King’s Room in which he had died. Nothing connected to Albert and his memory and their life together was to be overlooked, even down to the first bouquet he had ever given Victoria, and her bridal wreath, which – like Miss Havisham’s – was now slowly, inexorably turning to dust.30The cost of maintaining this meticulous status quo, and Victoria’s insistence on keeping on all of Albert’s personal retinue (albeit in reassigned roles), was placing additional strain on her overstretched finances. But Augusta Bruce understood precisely the impetus behind it: ‘It was idolatry, but I am sure that God allowed and pardons it.’31And the idols to Albert were many: in the months that followed, the Queen commissioned numerous busts and statuettes of him – in marble and in bronze – to be placed in her various homes as well as presented as gifts to her family and members of the household. A marble bust of Albert by William Theed, and garlanded with wreaths of immortelles, became the centrepiece of a series of photographs Victoria commissioned from William Bambridge of herself and her children taken at Windsor; several even more poignant ones of his mother and Alice were taken by the young Prince Alfred when he arrived home from sea.32With what some considered undue haste – given Victoria’s absolute retirement from society – mourning photographs of the Queen and her children were being marketed as cartes de visite for public consumption as early as March, providing an almost voyeuristic glimpse into her private grief. The London Review decried these perversely distasteful, intimate images and the role of the camera in spying on such ‘sacred feelings…to commercial account’.33But in fact Victoria wanted people to know how grief-stricken she was; she wanted them to understand the great gaping chasm in her life. By allowing the nation to see her grief she was keeping Albert alive in their memories too. Many of these photographs, showing even little Beatrice decked out in baby black mourning, were beautifully framed and distributed by Victoria to friends, family and politicians alike. Other photographs were set as miniatures into pieces of gold and enamelled jewellery, such as lockets, bracelets, rings and stick pins, by Garrard’s, the royal jewellers, for the Queen, her children and other favoured recipients.34A locket with Albert’s hair was sent to Leopold in Cannes with the instructions to wear it ‘attached to a string or chain round your neck’; Victoria also enclosed one of Papa’s pocket handkerchiefs, which he was instructed to ‘keep constantly with you’.35
As early as 4 January, Queen Victoria had a conversation with General Grey about her plans for a statue for Balmoral, and soon afterwards began looking at sketches by William Theed of Albert in highland dress.36In so doing she was immediately contravening one of her husband’s most explicit wishes, expressed in the wake of the excessive memorialisation of the Duke of Wellington in 1852: ‘If I should die before you, do not, I beg, raise even a single marble image to my name.’ He had resisted all suggestion that a statue of himself be placed in Hyde Park to celebrate the success of the Great Exhibition of 1851. ‘I would rather not be made the prominent feature of such a monument,’ he told Lord Granville, ‘as it would both disturb my quiet rides in Rotten Row to see my own face staring at me, and if (as is very likely) it became an artistic monstrosity, like most of our monuments, it would upset my equanimity to be permanently ridiculed and laughed at in effigy.’37Having professed that she would fulfil her husband’s wishes to the letter, Victoria nevertheless immediately set about spearheading a concerted nationwide memorialisation that would have appalled him. Lord Palmerston gave his full support for a statue of the Prince ‘of heroic size’ to be erected on a suitable site in London, and persuaded Parliament to agree to £50,000 towards the fund; anything less seemed paltry in Victoria’s eyes, for she herself envisioned a great obelisk. Vicky, whose own ideas closely mirrored those of her father, objected, finding the idea lacking in artistic taste. As too did Lord Clarendon; the Queen, he remarked wearily, ‘has no more notion of what is right and pure in art than she has of the Chinese grammar’.38Nevertheless the Duke of Argyll offered a 120-foot-long red granite stone weighing 600 tons from his Ross of Mull quarries. But the Lord Mayor, William Cubitt, doubted ‘whether the roads would not fall in under such a weight or whether wheels could be made strong enough’ to transport it.
Another plan, according to Lord Torrington, who was put in charge of inviting subscriptions to the fund, was melting down old cannons and ‘making a column 400 feet high’.39It was also suggested that Cleopatra’s Needle (languishing in Alexandria since being presented to the British in 1819 by Mohammad Ali, in gratitude for Nelson’s victory on the Nile) should be brought to England for this purpose. This idea too was rapidly abandoned, as a Prince Consort National Memorial Fund Committee was established under Cubitt and the triumvirate of Sir Charles Eastlake (President of the Royal Academy) and a reluctant Lord Clarendon and Lord Derby, both of whom felt ill equipped for the task to which they had been co-opted. The committee’s role would be to choose a design and fund-raise, through a network of sub-committees across Britain, for a lasting memorial to Albert, ‘commemorative of his many virtues, and expressive of the gratitude of the people’. The obvious location for such a monument was Hyde Park, somewhere near the site of the Great Exhibition and just up from the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. Henry Cole, with whom the Prince had worked closely on the development of the museum and the planning of the Great Exhibition, suggested a more ambitious project to be located in the area: a whole range of institutions covering science, art and literature – an Albert University, which would serve as ‘a palace of all learning, over whose gate his name should be written’.40
The Albert Memorial project was dogged by controversy from the outset, with the Morning Post firing a broadside at the committee, accusing them of favouritism over and above the wishes of the government. Lord Clarendon buckled at the onerous task foisted on him:
we shall be inundated with designs of the late Consort in the robes of The Garter upon some furious and non-descript animal that will be called a horse, and Albert Baths and Washhouses, and the good Prince inaugurating some drinking pump with the Q[ueen] and the royal children round him looking thirsty: etc. etc.41
With the same thought in mind, Charles Dickens had refused point-blank wh
en invited by Henry Cole to join the committee. Despite his loyalty to the Queen, he professed himself ‘much shocked by the rampant toadyism that has been given to the four winds on that subject’. He had no faith in such a memorial, he admitted: ‘With this heresy in my heart, how can I represent myself as one of the Orthodox?’42
Many local municipal bodies up and down the country also broke rank and ignored the national appeal, determined to make their own mark locally. Lord Torrington feared that the impact of the national memorial would therefore be dissipated, resulting in every town in England having ‘some miserable work of art, the production of a relation of the then mayor – aided possibly by some of the Corporation who are bricklayers, painters, and what not’. Such ‘local acts of folly’, in his view, would ruin the objectives of a grand and unifying national work, but nevertheless local authorities went ahead with their ‘little town jobs’ and raised statues to the Prince, not to mention renaming a plethora of streets, pubs, tenement buildings, bridges, parks and wharves in Albert’s memory.43
Meanwhile Victoria had already initiated her own personal architectural project: the royal mausoleum at Frogmore. In accordance with Albert’s wishes, she settled on a Romanesque design inspired by the mausoleum erected in Coburg for his father, Ernst I. It was to be built by the architect Albert Jenkins Humbert from a design by the German Ludwig Grüner, the two men having worked together on the Duchess of Kent’s mausoleum. It featured an octagonal copper dome over a cruciform base, and would be constructed in British granite and Portland stone with an interior decorated in the style of Albert’s favourite Renaissance painter, Raphael. From Berlin, Vicky liaised closely on the design and execution of the project, wishing ‘to contribute in some measure to beautifying it’.44A favourite sculptor of the Queen and Prince Albert, Baron Carlo Marochetti, came to Osborne in January to work on a model of Albert’s head from the Theed death-mask, which would form the basis of a marble effigy of the Prince wearing his robes of the Order of the Garter, to be placed in the mausoleum in due course (Victoria’s effigy was made simultaneously, so that she would not look older than the eternally beautiful Albert when her own time came).
Excavation of the site began on 27 January, and Victoria began pumping the first of £200,000 of her own money into the project, having seen off one of its more unlikely opponents in Gerald Wellesley, the Dean of Windsor. The Dean, along with other churchmen, had feared that the loss of Albert’s coffin from St George’s Chapel would undermine its traditional associations with royalty. There was more than enough room: he wanted the side-chapel (now the Albert Memorial Chapel) to serve not just as Albert’s memorial, but also as his mausoleum, and even sounded out the architect Gilbert Scott on ways of providing a private covered walkway to and from the chapel for the Queen. However, Victoria resisted, for nothing would deter her from erecting a purpose-built mausoleum for herself and Albert and, in order to spare her from criticism about its undesirability and ‘foreignness’, it was decided to release no details of the Frogmore project until it was completed.45Lord Clarendon was appalled that she had set upon such an insignificant location as ‘that morass at Frogmore which is constantly flooded’, and later heard that it would be necessary to heat the mausoleum all year round ‘to keep off decay’; Bertie had already announced that he had no intention of being buried in such a place.46
From early January 1862 the Queen began receiving private visits at Osborne from individual politicians such as Lord Clarendon, who despite being out of office was her most trusted friend in Parliament, ‘the only person who had quite understood her feelings and put himself in imagination exactly in her situation’.47Clarendon spent an exhausting day at the receiving end of her outpourings of grief, closely followed by those of Dr Clark, Princess Alice, King Leopold, Sir Charles Phipps and Bertie. For the time being, however, Victoria could only tolerate infrequent meetings with selected members of the Privy Council.48On 6 January she was nursed through her first such meeting by Arthur Helps, clerk of the Privy Council, whom she had already enlisted to edit a collection of Albert’s speeches. Sitting in a darkened room swathed in black, she conducted the meeting through an open connecting door. Her ministers in the next room were obliged to shout, for fear the Queen could not hear. The official business was quickly wrapped up in a couple of paragraphs, with Helps even reading out the word ‘approved’ on Victoria’s behalf.
She had been greatly relieved to be informed by Palmerston on 9 January that the Trent Affair had finally been resolved and that her husband’s eleventh-hour intervention had contributed to a peaceful settlement of the dispute. Her ministers were by now extremely anxious that she should take up her dispatch boxes once more and return to the long-standing protocol on which she and Albert had insisted – of reviewing and commenting on every official document before it was sent out. For the time being Phipps marked the important passages for her, and that was all she would read. But she felt utterly unequal to the task; her ‘reason’, she feared, would not hold up to it. Nor would it hold up to the prospect of a change of government that was in the air: ‘that would be what she could not stand’; it could well induce her to ‘throw everything up’, she warned Clarendon. The quickest way of killing her – ‘and most thankful to them she would be for that result’ – would be for Lord Derby, leader of the Opposition, to push for a general election. Nevertheless, it was the end of January before Victoria saw her Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, for the first time since Albert’s death. The old man was quite overwhelmed when he arrived at Osborne and could hardly speak for his tears, a fact that Victoria found unnerving when she thought of how she and Albert had so despised him in the past. But she also took comfort in it, for she liked to see others as grief-stricken as she was. ‘I would hardly have given Lord Palmerston credit for entering so entirely into my anxieties,’ she remarked, which is probably why she forgave him for overlooking the correct protocols of full mourning – by turning up in a brown overcoat, light-grey trousers, green gloves and blue shirt-studs.49Palmerston’s genuinely expressed concern, his solicitousness over her health and whether she was eating enough went some way to easing the inevitable meetings with her other ministers, as too did Benjamin Disraeli’s panegyric to the Prince when Parliament reconvened on 6 February. It prompted a grateful response from Victoria, struggling to come to terms with ‘the afflicting dispensation of Providence which bows me to the earth’.50By now she had been obliged to resume the minimum of official business, but felt totally overwhelmed: ‘so much to do, so many boxes, letters’; never before had she had to deal with so many responsibilities on a regular, daily basis.51
On 14 February, Victoria was greatly cheered by the arrival of the pregnant Vicky from Prussia. Yet despite her eldest daughter’s presence, she was reluctant, even then, to allow an exhausted Alice out of her sight. In the end she was prevailed on to agree that Alice should go and rest with close friends, the Belgian consul Sylvain Van De Weyer and his wife, at their home near Windsor for ten days. Confronted with her mother’s deep desolation and the helplessness of her siblings, Vicky thought they all seemed ‘like sheep without a shepherd’. Her mother was as much in love with Papa ‘as though she had married him yesterday’, she told Fritz in Berlin. Vicky struggled hard with her grief; her mother’s alone was more than she could contend with: ‘there is always the empty room, the empty bed, she always sleeps with Papa’s coat over her and his dear red dressing-gown beside her and some of his clothes in the bed’. As for Osborne, a home of which Vicky had till now had happy memories: ‘It is nothing but a great vault; everything is so different, the old life, the old customs have gone’.52Like everyone else, she was greatly alarmed at how difficult it was to manage her mother or contradict her in the slightest degree; but even more alarming was Victoria’s continuing, undisguised dislike for Bertie.
During his stay at Osborne, Uncle Leopold had done his best to try and reconcile mother and son, to no avail. Indeed, Victoria had openly admitted to Lord Hertford when he vis
ited that she could never forget that her eldest son ‘had been the chief cause of his father’s illness’; she never could see Bertie ‘without a shudder’, she told Vicky. As soon as Bertie entered the room, Victoria became visibly agitated; his presence irritated her and from now on he would effectively be banished except for brief holidays. Such intransigence was ‘a positive monomania with her’, in the view of Lord Clarendon.53Lord Hertford begged Victoria to take her son into her confidence and ‘give him something to do besides shooting and hunting – something that would make him feel himself of use to her and would improve his character’.54But Victoria would have none of it; there was no question of Bertie taking the place of his sainted father as her adviser, or of her giving him any useful employment in preparation for his own role one day as monarch. Palmerston presciently confided to Clarendon that he saw her ‘unconquerable aversion’ to her son and heir as a major problem ‘looming in the distance’.55She had already resolved to go ahead with Albert’s plans – shelved on his death – to send Bertie on a tour of Egypt and the Holy Land. He sailed from Osborne on 6 February; in his absence his mother would continue planning her son’s road to salvation: marriage to Alexandra of Denmark. She and Vicky vetted the Danish royal family, gossiping about the Princess’s various undesirable relatives and the financial embarrassment of her parents, Prince and Princess Christian, who had only a paltry £800 a year to live on. Nevertheless, as far as Victoria was concerned, Bertie was lucky to have Alexandra, though the prospect of a necessary meeting with the in-laws later in the year at Laeken in Belgium filled her with dread. Worse, though, was the prospect that Bertie, who still seemed utterly indifferent to his future bride, might change his mind. In this event, Victoria had a contingency plan: ‘Affie would be ready to take her at once’, for she was already sizing up possible other candidates for her second son too.56The complexities of royal marriage-brokering were one diversion from which even grief did not keep her.
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 19