A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  On Easter Sunday, 5 April 1863, Alice’s daughter Victoria was born ‘at poor, sad, old Windsor’ in the same bed in which Victoria herself had given birth to all her children and wearing the same shift her mother had worn. Victoria had sat up all night with Alice during her labour, even now approaching forty-three, wishing it could have been her giving one last child to Albert. The arrival of another grandchild and an improvement in her state of mind made her feel that she had at last made ‘great progress’ through all her burden of sorrow.16But the worm of jealousy kept gnawing at her – jealousy that her children one by one were entering into their own separate lives and she was no longer the centre of attention. With Alice now a mother, Victoria felt that only Baby (Beatrice) and Lenchen (Helena) still loved her ‘the most of any thing’. She knew that this was the natural progression of things, but nevertheless it was a bitter pill to swallow: she who had been ‘the dearest object of two beings [Albert and her mother] for so many years, is now daily learning to feel that she is only No. 3 or 4 in the real tender love of others’. She had to admit that she was sadly de trop in her married children’s lives and that she did not belong to anyone any more. Soon Alice would be returning to Hesse and Victoria dreaded it. It was no good; her querulous self-centeredness once more rose to the surface. ‘A married daughter I must have living with me, and must not be left constantly to look about for help,’ she insisted to Uncle Leopold. The daughter designated to fill Alice’s shoes and be sacrificed on the altar of her mother’s neediness was the docile and dowdy Lenchen. A husband would have to be found for her who would agree to the couple spending the greater part of the year with Victoria in England; she could not give up another of her girls to a foreign country ‘without sinking under the weight of my desolation’.17Nor was she willing for Helena to give her heart to one whom she, Victoria, deemed beneath her. After Albert’s death Helena had developed a crush on his German librarian, Carl Ruland, and on discovering this Victoria had sent the loyal Ruland packing, even though she had begged him on Albert’s deathbed: ‘do not leave me and my children’.18Lucy Cavendish thought Helena already had that sad look – as had Alice before her – of ‘one who has thought and done too much for her age and been a comforter’. She was ‘cruelly overworked’, the Queen having no notion of how her daughter’s mind and body were strained by her onerous duties and her mother’s endless dissatisfaction.19

  Within months of their wedding, Bertie and Alix too fell under Victoria’s critical eye: he for reverting to his old bad manners and hedonistic lifestyle, and she for looking thin and sallow and losing her ‘frâicheur’ – probably from too many late nights out socialising, in Victoria’s view. Bertie should take better care of his wife, yet again he was no equal to his father, whose ‘wise, motherly care’ of her, when he was ‘not yet 21’, had ‘exceeded everything’. Had Vicky noticed what a curiously small head Alix had? She had inherited her mother’s deafness, too. Victoria dreaded the physiological outcome: combined with Bertie’s ‘small empty brain’, their children, when they had them, might well prove ‘unintellectual’.20Affie was a continuing worry as well; now home from sea, having survived a bad bout of typhoid fever, he was spending too much time at Marlborough House. Victoria feared that under his brother’s influence he might once more ‘fall into sin from weakness’. Time therefore to ‘fix his affections securely’ and see him married off as well. Once more a succession of German princesses – of Altenburg, Oldenburg and Wied – was put under the microscope, as Victoria discussed their relative merits with Vicky in Prussia.21

  Although she continued to complain of feeling tired and overworked, the Queen had, throughout 1863, slowly begun to recover some of her equilibrium. But then, in July, a new death had knocked her back again – that of her ‘dearest, wisest, best and oldest friend’, Baron Stockmar.22That he was gone to ‘brighter regions’ where he would be in the company of Albert was at least a comfort and, like Albert, he must be commemorated. Did Vicky have ‘plenty of the beloved Baron’s photographs and also some of his precious hair?’ she enquired. If not, she could send some.23Births, marriages, deaths and memorials were now increasingly the focus and pattern of Victoria’s shrinking world and the morbid romanticism at the heart of her very existence. Even The Times noted that the Queen’s unceasing grief had become ‘a sort of religion’ with her.24After her fleeting appearance at Bertie’s wedding, the gentlemen of the press once more found their reporting on the Queen reduced to a daily catalogue of her brief walks and carriage drives. Her stay at Balmoral that autumn was particularly bleak in the face of the loss of Stockmar; as usual, the loyalty of the Scottish locals saved her from despair. ‘There is nothing like the Highlanders – no, nothing,’ she told Vicky.25But the loneliness of Balmoral was dreadful. She tried, and failed, to persuade a succession of relatives to come and keep her company, but they all made their excuses, leaving her with only Lady Augusta and Lady Jane Churchill for company, until the family gathered for the unveiling of a new memorial to Prince Albert.

  On 13 October 1863 the Queen travelled from Balmoral to Aberdeen to unveil a statue of Albert by Baron Marochetti. It would be her first public appearance since her husband’s death (the wedding in March having been by private invitation). But there were no bands or street decorations on this occasion and the public, who stood patiently waiting for two hours in the rain, were given strict instructions that there should be no cheering. Victoria was visibly agitated, but at least all her adult children had joined her – even Vicky was over from Prussia. But the day was filled with melancholy as she drove along the densely crowded, but respectfully silent streets, the dark, leaden sky unforgiving and the only bright point the profusion of flags on the ships docked along the quay, though even these hung limp and sodden in the drenching rain.26Victoria was anxious for it all to be over as quickly as possible and was clearly annoyed when – with the rain falling fast as she huddled under an umbrella held by Vicky – she had to endure a ten-minute-long prayer by the Principal of Aberdeen University prior to the unveiling. Even the spectators became restive, thinking the delay intolerable for their widowed Queen: ‘Cut it short,’ came a voice from the crowd. ‘Ay man, gie us the rest on the neest Sabbath,’ shouted another.27

  As 1863 drew to a close, members of the royal household were on the constant lookout for hopeful signs of a return to normal. December would mark the end of the traditional two-year period of mourning and everyone hoped that her appearance at Aberdeen might mark the beginning of the Queen’s return to public life. ‘Two years it must be said, are a long period to be consumed in unavailing regrets and in dwelling upon days which cannot be healed,’ observed The Times.28But for Victoria nothing had changed; her reaction to being on public display at Aberdeen had been no different from her other brief forays into the outside world: psychosomatic headaches, insomnia and stress preceded and followed every minor exertion and she continued to protest bitterly at being put upon. In response, Doctors Jenner and Clark stuck to the traditional line of petting her and pandering to her protestations, fearing her total mental collapse; thoughts of hereditary madness – she was, after all, the granddaughter of King George III – still lingered, in the absence of any real medical understanding of the Queen’s psychological state. Victoria herself put it down to ‘her hard, slavelike labour for the Country’. She felt persecuted, ‘like a poor hunted hare, like a child that has lost its mother’.29Any disruption to her familiar daily routine was an extreme provocation for her, and she was beside herself with rage and disappointment in November when her most loyal lady committed an unforgivable act of betrayal: ‘My dear Lady Augusta, at 41…has most unnecessarily, decided to marry!!’ she wrote to Uncle Leopold in high dudgeon. ‘I thought she never would leave me!’30Victoria’s own life might be in stasis, but the lives of others were not, and Lady Augusta, having long steeled herself, had finally plucked up the courage to grasp the happiness of marriage with Dr Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster. Victoria grudgingly gave her blessing,
with the proviso that Lady Augusta would nevertheless be ‘a great deal with me afterwards’; but for now Ladies Ely and Churchill would be the main butt of her increasingly volcanic personality.

  The Queen’s frequent explosions of temper and determined opinion prompted William Gladstone to think that he had detected signs of recovery and ‘the old voice of business in the Queen’ of late, and many of the newspapers were openly suggesting that she might even open Parliament the following year. ‘There is strong pressure from without from almost the highest in the land down to the smallest boy in the streets of London to get the Queen once more to come to London,’ Lord Torrington told General Grey:

  The public accept no one as a substitute and the danger is considerable if once that public cease to care or take an interest in seeing the Queen moving amongst them. It will not do for people to be accustomed to Her Majesty’s absence. Do away with the outward and visible sign and the ignorant mass believe Royalty is of no value. There is not a tradesman in London who does not believe he is damaged by the Queen not coming to London.31

  The suggestion that Victoria should open Parliament in 1864, however, received a brisk refusal. Her health simply was not up to it; it was all she could do just to keep up with the mountains of paperwork on her desk. How could she perform any of these public duties, ‘trembling and alone at Courts, and Parties and State occasions, without her Sole Guardian and Protector’?32Sir Charles Phipps and General Grey (with whom Phipps shared the still-unofficial role of Private Secretary to the Queen) were both beginning to detect worrying signs of avoidance in their reluctant monarch, and one of their closest supporters in this view was the Queen’s own daughter, Princess Alice. She had seen her mother that autumn on a private visit to Coburg, and had thought her very well. Victoria had got through a formal luncheon with the Emperor of Austria and eighteen other guests, talking animatedly and even running to the window to see him off. In a private moment Victoria had even admitted to Alice that she was ‘afraid of getting too well – as if it was a crime and that she feared to begin to like riding on her Scotch pony, etc.’ Behind the scenes, the royal entourage agreed that something must be done: ‘after the next anniversary, we must all try, gently, to get her to resume her old habits’.33

  Ironically, it was one of the most complex political crises of the 1860s that galvanised Victoria into a flurry of activity – be it only by letter and memorandum – for although she continued adamantly to refuse to take part in public ceremonial, she had by no means abandoned her vigorous interest in foreign affairs. It was an interest she had shared with Albert; this and her defence of her prerogatives as monarch had never dimmed. Indeed, when she had travelled to Coburg in August she had specifically instructed Gladstone that, in her absence, ‘no step is taken in foreign affairs without her previous sanction being obtained’.34For the Queen was well aware that a political crisis of long standing was coming to a head. It broke in November 1863 with the death of King Frederick VII of Denmark and the accession of Alix’s father, Christian IX. This had prompted renewed calls for the independence of the Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, with the former being incorporated into Denmark and the latter retaining separate status under Danish suzerainty. Rival claims to the territories by the Duke of Augustenburg were disputed by the Prussian Prime Minister, Bismarck, who, supported by the Austrians, sought the ceding of both territories to Prussia.

  The crisis forced a split in the deeply conflicted loyalties of Queen Victoria’s European family and feelings became very heated, so much so that she forbade all political discussion at table. Like Albert, Vicky and Fritz, she was pro-Prussian; Bertie and his wife, naturally enough, supported the Danes; and Victoria’s half-sister Feodora was firmly in the Augustenburg camp. Most of the British public sympathised with the underdog Denmark, abhorring Prussia, the aggressor. Ever the sabre-rattler Palmerston, now approaching eighty and fading fast, contemplated sending in British troops in defence of a beleaguered Denmark, but Britain had no stomach for war now, any more than it had in December 1861. Without the military support of France or Russia, it would have been madness to take on the Prussians.

  Victoria was appalled at the prospect of conflict, but also wished to protect her own family interests. ‘I have, since he left me, the courage of a lioness if I see danger,’ she told Vicky, ‘and I shall never mind giving my people my decided opinion and more than that!’35But she had to fight hard against her innermost prejudices: her ‘heart and sympathies were all German’, but she did not want to sanction ‘the infliction upon her subjects of all the horrors of war’; or, on the other hand, see any help given by her government to the Danes. Publicly, she knew she had to do as Albert had so carefully taught her – be seen to be impartial, sticking to an insistence on British neutrality, as he had so honourably done over the American crisis. But oh, how she rued the inconvenient fact that her daughter-in-law Alix had not been ‘a good German’.36

  Such a shameful thought was soon forgotten when, as the crisis deepened, a pregnant Alix went into premature labour – giving birth two months early to a sickly son, Albert Victor, on 8 January 1864. In February Prussian and Austrian troops invaded Schleswig, prompting Victoria to seek comfort and courage from Albert’s spirit by praying frequently in the Blue Room and at the mausoleum. She was pained by hostile comments in the press about her pro-German sympathies and was enraged when Lord Ellenborough criticised her in Parliament. Such accusations, she told Palmerston, ‘ought to be put into the fire’.37She also had to ask Lord Clarendon to caution Bertie on his ‘violent abuse of Prussia’; it was ‘fearfully dangerous for the Heir to her throne to take up one side violently’. The British public, however, were on Bertie’s side – anti-German feeling in Britain was ‘quite ungovernable’. But it made no difference: in June the Danes were defeated, and in October Holstein and the German-speaking territories of Schleswig were ceded to joint Prussian and Austrian control.38

  Victoria marked the end of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis by showing herself briefly to her public, taking a drive through Windsor Great Park in an open carriage, but only as far as the nearby railway station – a matter of a mile or so. Convinced that the newspaper criticism of her seclusion was unrepresentational of the view of the nation at large, she felt that this excursion and a couple of fleeting appearances at court that summer had ‘pleased people more than anything’. ‘If done occasionally in this way’, she was sure such appearances would ‘go farther to satisfy them than anything else’.39She was sadly deluded, for public sympathy was now clearly on the wane. The Queen’s continuing absence from central London prompted some practical jokers to tie large placards to the palace gateposts, announcing: ‘These commanding premises to be let or sold, in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business.’ The placards were immediately torn down and police duty outside the palace doubled, only for them to be posted again a few days later.40Some put it down to ‘Republican propaganda’, but gossip was further fuelled by an April Fool’s joke published mischievously by Delane in The Times on 1 April, intended once more to draw Victoria out. ‘Her Majesty’s loyal subjects will be very well pleased to hear,’ the paper announced, ‘that their Sovereign is about to break her protracted seclusion by holding courts for the diplomatic corps at Buckingham Palace.’ At long last the monarchy was about to ‘recover from its suspended animation’. An aggrieved Victoria, who read her press cuttings avidly, immediately wrote her own anonymous rebuttal, which was published in The Times on 6 April:

  An erroneous idea seems generally to prevail, and has latterly found frequent expression in the newspapers, that the Queen is about to resume the place in society which she occupied before her great affliction; that is, that she is about again to hold levees and drawing-rooms in person, and to appear as before at Court balls, concerts etc. This idea cannot be too explicitly contradicted.

  She would, she said, do her very best to fulfil her duty in matters of national interest, and give the support to society and trade that
was needed, but would not be put upon for the sake of expediency. At the core of Victoria’s objections was her continuing and consuming sense of being overwhelmed – not just with work, but at the prospect of once more taking up those public duties ‘of mere representation’ and spectacle, which she had never enjoyed, even when Albert was alive. Her ceremonial functions, she insisted, could be ‘equally well performed’ by other members of the family. ‘More the Queen cannot do; and more the kindness and good feeling of her people will surely not extract from her.’ The British people had indeed been most forbearing for three years now, but it was precisely in the realm of theatre and ceremonial – as Bertie’s wedding had all too clearly demonstrated – that the Queen was most missed and most needed. Her growing unpopularity was beginning to endanger the very fabric of constitutional monarchy, as Lord Cecil pointed out in the Saturday Review: ‘Seclusion is one of the few luxuries in which Royal personages may not indulge. The power which is derived from affection or from loyalty needs a life of uninterrupted publicity to sustain it.’41