A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  The fact that the Queen had, inadvertently, set a fashion trend at the most unlikely and tragic time in her life was of little comfort at court. ‘The dreary painful effect of all this mass of black all round one,’ wrote Lady Geraldine Somerset, was ‘altogether too inexpressibly sad and dreadful’.15They all now dreaded the Queen’s return to Balmoral for the first time since Albert’s death, which came on 30 April 1862, earlier in the year than her usual visits. Victoria wanted to be as far away as possible from London when the Great London Exposition of 1862 opened on 1 May, because of all its painful reminders of Albert; her son-in-law Fritz came over from Berlin to act as her surrogate. But the pain she felt on entering her Highland home for the first time since her beloved husband’s death was acute. The ‘agonising sobs’ as she was assisted by Alice and Affie past the many everyday objects that reminded her of Albert: ‘The stags heads – the rooms – blessed, darling Papa’s room – then his coats – his caps – kilts – all, convulsed my poor shattered frame.’16Most of her time in Scotland was taken up with revisiting the places associated with her happy marriage and finding comfort in the homely sympathies of an old, recently widowed cottager on the estate. Victoria poured out pages of woe to Palmerston: her nerves were ‘more shaken even than before,’ she told him – he had only to look at her handwriting. No one knew or understood her bitter anguish and suffering. Her existence was pure ‘torture’.17As the months of her intense, deranged state of grief wore on, with Victoria pausing to remember every significant date, object, memory connected with Albert, to the exclusion of everything else, those unaffected by such profound levels of grief found it harder and harder to sympathise.

  But how could the vast majority of Victoria’s staff and ministers begin to show sympathy for the turmoil, the sheer disorientation of her very personal sense of loss? She was after all the Queen and head of state; and in a court grounded in formality and protocol, they could hardly give her a hug or hold her hand, or offer the kind of intimate consoling gestures seen in normal families. Queen Victoria’s regal authority, in all its terrifying loneliness, precluded that. It was therefore hard to commiserate, and all the Queen’s entourage could do was carefully watch what they said, as the Duke of Argyll noted when he visited: ‘one may easily say things which go against her, even when one least suspects it’. Holding a conversation with the Queen required considerable tact – and patience – for there was only ever one topic of conversation that interested her: Albert. The Duke tried hard to steer Victoria in conversation towards the ‘hills, birds, and waterfalls’ that he had seen at Balmoral. Such a change of tack would work for a few minutes, he later recalled, and even provoke a watery smile, but inevitably Victoria would turn the topic back to Albert: ‘the birds he had liked, the roads he had made, his speeches, etc., but all as if he were still with her’.18Meanwhile, her forty-third birthday came and went in May in ‘utter loneliness and desolation’. There was only one consolation – ‘dear Baby’ (Beatrice) – who was ‘the bright spot in this dead home’.19

  For all her stubborn insistence, others did not agree with Victoria’s perception of her own physical frailty. When Lord Derby visited her on 16 June he thought she looked much better. Victoria was extremely put out to hear people say this; she had been ‘much annoyed at a paragraph to that effect which appeared in The Times’ and had, reported Derby, ‘ordered it to be contradicted’.20She did not want to look or feel better and was convinced that she ate nothing and never slept; Lord Clarendon noted that she was even ‘anxious that all her hair should be grey’, as though by becoming so it would define her unending grief. Victoria had very good reason not to wish to recover, for when this happened she would be expected once more to take up her onerous ceremonial responsibilities as monarch – only this time alone, a thing she dreaded. This was not what she was used to: she wanted everyone else to shoulder her burden for her, to take care of her, as Albert had done. Her mind was set, as Phipps confided to Gladstone: ‘I hope and believe that Her Majesty’s health is not in that precarious state in which her Grief makes her almost wish it to be.’21For all her protestations and hypochondria, there were signs that Victoria’s exceptionally resilient constitution – the ‘vein of iron’ that Lady Lyttleton back in 1844 had observed as the hallmark of her tenacious character22– was fighting back, but on 20 June she resolutely refused to acknowledge her Silver Jubilee. ‘Beloved Albert had wished Fetes to take place in honour of it’, but no, it had ‘passed in complete silence’.23Her prolonged state of grief was making her unreasonable, irrational, impossible, in the view of those on the outside looking in. But Victoria was unable to help herself. She could not, however, ignore her daughter Alice’s impending marriage at Osborne in July. It would be a wretched business and she wished it were ‘years off’, she told Vicky. She already expected it to be a ‘dreadful, awful day’ for her, with her broken heart and shattered nerves. Matters were made worse when Louis’s aunt, Mathilde, Grand Duchess of Hesse, died shortly beforehand: ‘The Angel of Death still follows us,’ wrote Victoria, ‘so now Alice’s marriage will be even more gloomy.’24

  Louis of Hesse was not the best, top-drawer royal bridegroom Victoria and Albert had hoped for; like Bertie’s fiancée Alexandra, he was the product of a rather impoverished princely house that wasn’t quite up to scratch – and, of course, not a patch on beloved Fritz, Crown Prince of Prussia. A couple of weeks before the wedding Victoria went to inspect Alice’s trousseau. It was ‘nothing but black gowns’.25In her present ‘reduced state’ she would not have allowed the marriage for another year, had not Albert already planned it, and had done so on the understanding that Alice would spend half the year with her, making over to her daughter and Louis the use of Clarence House for the purpose. (Victoria was soon to be disappointed in her anticipation of having a married daughter to hand and a useful son-in-law around the house, for Louis’s modest income would not stretch to the expense of living in London.)

  As for Alice herself, just turned nineteen and still far from recovered from the stress of her father’s death and the ceaseless demands made on her by her mother, she had been close to breaking point. Lord Clarendon admired her tenacity: ‘there is not such another girl in a 1000,’ he told the Duchess of Manchester. Despite being ‘boxed up in a gilt cage all her life’, Alice, for all her youth, had ‘such sound principles, so great judgement and such knowledge of the world’; his only regret was that ‘she is going with a dull boy to a dull family in a dull country’. He had a presentiment that she would not be happy.26But Alice could at least look forward to seeing her dear brother Bertie, back from his tour of the Holy Land in time for the ceremony. Bertie’s return was not, however, a source of joy for Victoria. Before he arrived she sent a missive to Bertie’s governor, General Bruce, telling him to warn the Prince that on his return he should be careful not to indulge in his mother’s presence in ‘worldly, frivolous, gossiping kind of conversation’. The Prince must be prepared to face ‘in a proper spirit, the cureless melancholy of his poor home’.27

  The morning of 1 July 1862 broke dull and windy; Alice had spent the previous night sharing her mother’s room, listening to her toss and turn, not in anticipation of her daughter’s happiness, but of her own ordeal to come. The modestly sized dining room at Osborne had been specially rearranged for the ceremony and filled with flowers, with a temporary altar covered in purple velvet and gold and surrounded by a gilt railing. This had been placed under one of Winterhalter’s large canvases of the royal family in happier days, in which Albert took centre stage; there would be no avoiding his ghost at the wedding. Queen Victoria’s ladies were hugely relieved to be allowed two days’ respite from black – for 1 and 2 July – and wore half-mourning of grey or lilac for the ceremony; Alice too was allowed to get married in white. She looked delicate but lovely in her wedding dress, with its deep flounce of Honiton guipure lace and veil, both carrying a motif of rose, orange blossoms and myrtle, and the bottom of her skirt trimmed in artificial flowers of
the same. On her head she wore an unostentatious wreath of orange blossom and wax flowers, much as her mother had worn at her own wedding in 1840. Eight bridesmaids had originally been planned for, but in the circumstances were reduced to four: Alice’s sisters Helena, Louise and Beatrice and Louis’s sister Anna. That morning Victoria had pressed her own special gift into Alice’s hand – a prayer book similar to the one given to her by her mother on her wedding day.

  Only a small gathering of hand-picked guests attended the wedding and were obliged to stand throughout: Louis’s best man, Prince Henry of Hesse; the Cambridges; Louis’s parents, Prince and Princess Charles of Hesse; Duke Ernst of Saxe-Coburg, who gave Alice away; Feodora; and a few other French and – in the eyes of Victoria’s ladies – badly dressed Hessian relatives. The service was conducted by the Archbishop of York, standing in for an indisposed Archbishop of Canterbury. It was ‘a sad moment, to see her come in leaning on her uncle’s arm, instead of on His!’ thought Lady Geraldine Somerset, as the service began just after 1 p.m. Alice’s voice faltered during the ceremony, but she did not break down; it was the good Archbishop, himself recently widowed, who found it hard to hold back the tears. Victoria too retained the ‘most wonderful command over herself’ as she watched from the sidelines, seated in an armchair and protectively obscured from view by her four sons. The whole occasion had seemed to Lady Geraldine ‘inexpressibly mournful’.28Despite being proud of Alice’s ‘wonderful bearing’ throughout, the Queen had found it ‘more like a funeral than a wedding’.29

  Although a children’s party was held in nearby Ryde to celebrate Alice’s wedding that day, the local population saw no signs of the subdued celebrations going on at Osborne, and news reporters who headed there in search of a story came back empty-handed. The area had been as quiet as the grave; ‘it certainly was a strange and solemn sight for the few of the public who flitted about the Osborne Road,’ wrote the correspondent of the Daily News, for the surrounding park was deserted ‘beyond a few servants, in the deepest mourning, passing almost stealthily up and down the avenue’.30Most of the papers covered this disappointing news story in brief; only the republican-minded Reynolds’s Newspaper was bold enough to complain about the Queen’s ‘virtual abdication’ and her continuing ‘snug seclusion’ at Osborne and Balmoral and its impact on trade, especially in the West End of London. For the milliners, tailors, dressmakers, perfumers and jewellers of the West End, who profited from catering to court dinners, balls and presentations, were now suffering a severe reduction in trade. Instead, the country had yet another royal to support, Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, newly promoted by Victoria to His Royal Highness. Once more the nation was obliged to submit to ‘those bleedings for the benefit of starveling Germans’, while the Queen did nothing to revive severely depressed trade, with cotton famine – in the wake of the continuing war in America – now raging in Lancashire.31

  Queen Victoria did not join her guests for the wedding breakfast held in a pavilion specially erected on the lawn at Osborne, but lunched in private with the newly weds in the Horn Room, surrounded by furniture made from stags’ antlers purchased by Prince Albert. At 5 p.m. Alice left, complete with her black trousseau, for three days’ honeymoon not far away at St Clair, the home of General Harcourt near Ryde. On 8 July she sailed on the royal yacht for Antwerp and her new home in Darmstadt, with a long memorandum provided by Dr Clark at her concerned mother’s request, on how she should safeguard her frail health with lots of fresh air and cold baths. Victoria hoped her still-delicate daughter would not start a family too soon, but within the month Alice was pregnant.

  At the end of July the Queen was only too anxious to escape once more to the quiet and stillness of Balmoral. A chink of respite for the younger children was allowed, when the artist William Leighton was asked to come and give them painting lessons, but he was shocked by the many great changes since his first visit:

  the joyous bustle in the morning when the Prince went out; the highland ponies and the dogs; the ghillies and the pipers. Then the coming home – the Queen and her ladies going out to meet them, and the merry time afterwards; the torch-light sword-dances on the green and the servants ball closing the day. Now all is gone with him who was the life and soul of it all.32

  It was such a huge void to fill, and Victoria’s every waking thought whilst in the Highlands was of Albert and his continuing memorialisation. At 11 a. m. on a bright, sunny 21 August, with the air soft with summer and the surrounding hills pink with heather, Victoria followed by her ‘six orphans’ was taken by pony carriage – led by her ghillie, John Brown – up the rugged hillside to the top of Craig Lowrigan, where a thirty-five-foot-high pyramid of granite dedicated to Albert was under construction.33Here the family placed stones in the forty-foot-wide foundations, which would have their initials carved on them alongside a plaque: ‘To the beloved memory of Albert the great and good Prince Consort. Raised by his broken-hearted Widow, Victoria R., 21 August, 1862.’34Four days later, on Albert’s birthday, the whole family once more toiled up to the Craig for another mournful ceremony. Unable to join them, Alice wrote from her new home in Darmstadt, offering loving words of consolation and encouragement to her mother:

  Try and gather in the few bright things you have remaining, and cherish them: for though faint, yet they are types of that infinite joy still to come. I am sure, dear mamma, the more you try to appreciate and to find the good in that which God in His love has left you, the more worthy you will daily become of that which is in store. That earthly happiness you had is, indeed, gone for ever, but you must not think that every ray of it has left you.35

  But it had left her. Could they not all see that it had? Like all the other words of comfort offered that year, Alice’s did little to dent her mother’s crippling, all-consuming grief. In September came yet another ‘terribly trying ordeal’ to be got through: the dreaded journey to Laeken, Uncle Leopold’s palace near Brussels, where Victoria was to negotiate Bertie’s formal engagement to Princess Alexandra with her parents. When she arrived, her nerves once again failed her and she declined to join the official luncheon, finally steeling herself to meet the party later that afternoon in an excruciatingly awkward and subdued exchange of pleasantries. Bertie, who was not present at the meeting, later formally proposed to Alexandra, though no public announcement was made till his twenty-first birthday on 9 November. Much to her surprise, Victoria was greatly taken by the gentle and unaffected Alexandra, to whom she touchingly presented a sprig of white heather sent from Balmoral by Bertie, but she made no bones about what lay in store for her: Alexandra would be welcomed, on her imminent visit to England (for initiation by Victoria into her duties as a member of the family), into a ‘home of Sorrow’.36Back in London, Lord Clarendon sent the Queen his congratulations, though found it ‘rather difficult to steer clear of the idea that the marriage could be any alleviation of her grief’, for the Queen would countenance no such suggestions.37True to form, a few days later she was writing to Palmerston insisting that ‘To the poor Queen this event can no longer cause pleasure, for pleasure is for ever gone from her heart!’38But at least she would, with this wedding, be acquiring a daughter-in-law, rather than losing a daughter; she only hoped that Bertie would be worthy of his lovely wife.

  Whilst on the Continent, Victoria had travelled to Baden to see her half-sister, spending much of her time trying to persuade Feodora to live half the year with her in England as a glorified lady companion. But much as she loved her sister, Feodora politely declined, declaring that she did not wish to give up her independence at her advanced age. Privately she found Victoria’s inexhaustible grief burdensome. They visited Albert’s childhood home at Coburg together, where, amidst the expected anguish, Victoria also wallowed in recollections of happier times. Hearing Albert’s native tongue and being in a place where the ‘very air seems to breathe of her precious one’ was a great comfort, she told Howard Elphinstone. Both were ‘soothing and sweet in their very sadness to her bruised spirit
and her aching, bleeding heart’.39

  Back at Windsor she took almost daily walks to the mausoleum to inspect the building works. The dome was already in place and work on the interior had begun. She had already seen and approved Baron Marochetti’s effigy of Albert, pronouncing it ‘full…of peace, blessedness and beauty’.40Her thoughts increasingly dwelt on the anniversary to come, but meanwhile she had the diversion of Princess Alexandra’s visit in November. ‘This jewel!’ she declared, was ‘one of those sweet creatures who seem to come from the skies to help and bless poor mortals and lighten for a time their path!’ Everyone could see how ‘quite devotedly in love’ Alix (as they all called her) was with Bertie, thought Augusta Bruce. She was being ‘unutterably sweet’ with the Queen, winning her over with her piety, gentleness and sympathy.41Her ‘bright joyous presence has done much to rouse the poor dear Queen, who seems doatingly fond of her, and has her a great deal with her,’ remarked a relieved Princess Mary Adelaide. The Queen was ‘able to smile and even laugh cheerfully at times, and talks readily and with interest on every subject’. Well, for a little while at least; soon enough Victoria’s conversation would revert to ‘the sad, sad past’.42It was far too soon to hope for a fair-weather change to her deeply depressed state. As time moved remorselessly towards that first ‘dreadful anniversary’, Victoria went several times a day into the Blue Room (as the King’s Room was now called, for the colour of its decoration) to pray, reiterating to Vicky that her misery was now a ‘necessity’. She could not exist without it: ‘yes, I long for my suffering almost – as it is blinded with him!’ She would never adjust to ‘that dreadful, weary, chilling, unnatural life of a widow’.43Fearful that the strain might provoke another mental and physical collapse, the pregnant Alice travelled over from Hesse to be with her, but once again Vicky could not join them.