‘Sir Charles Dilke has given the Queen notice to quit,’ proclaimed the Pall Mall Gazette; and indeed his rhetoric was highly provocative.22But, when it came down to it, Dilke proved to be a man of words rather than action, prone to wild and unsubstantiated claims about Victoria’s supposed squirelling-away of money from the privy purse. His stance was symptomatic of a groundswell of opinion that was inherently anti-monarchist rather than truly republican. But it lacked any real political – let alone genuinely socialist – backbone. The Times was quick to retaliate. On 9 November its editorial accused Dilke of ‘recklessness bordering on criminality’. Victoria was incensed; press criticism of her had been cruel and heartless. Behind Gladstone’s back, and oblivious to the extent to which her Prime Minister had doggedly defended her, she complained that he had not done enough to protect her against Dilke’s treasonable onslaught, ungraciously telling Vicky that he was ‘so wonderfully unsympathetic’. Yet at heart Gladstone held his Queen in awe. His instinct was to ignore Dilke (the loyalist reaction to the Queen’s illness would take care of that) while voicing to his colleagues his continuing fears for the monarchy and his deep-seated distaste for the ‘vehemence and tenacity’ with which the Queen resisted the fulfilment of her sovereign duties.23
Dilke’s attack was, in any event, rapidly laid aside when the Queen received a telegram at Balmoral on 21 November informing her that Bertie had fallen ill with typhoid fever at Sandringham. He had probably picked up the infection from contaminated drinking water during a recent pheasant-shoot at the estate of Lord Londesborough at Scarborough, where the lodge house in which he stayed was overcrowded and its drainage primitive.24The prognosis was enough to send shock waves of apprehension through the entire royal household. Victoria immediately dispatched Dr Jenner to Sandringham, and on the 24th the public were informed of the prince’s illness, with the reassuring proviso that ‘There are no unfavourable symptoms’. But they had all heard that line before – when Prince Albert had fallen ill exactly ten years previously.
Princess Alice was on a visit to Sandringham at the time Bertie fell ill and immediately did her best to take over the role of sick-nurse. Having nursed Louis through a mild attack of the disease in 1870, as well as organising field hospitals in Hesse during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, she felt qualified to monopolise things, much to the annoyance of Alix, who had already proved herself more than competent at the task. Alice was ably assisted by two professional nurses, as well as Bertie’s valet and a new and rising practitioner, Dr William Gull, who was Bertie’s personal physician. Victoria arrived on 29 November to be met by Alix, ‘looking thin and anxious with tears in her eyes’. When the Queen entered the sick-room the reminders of 1861 were many and vivid, and even more ominous when Jenner told her that ‘it was a far more violent attack than my beloved Husband’s’.25The following day Bertie’s temperature was 105 degrees and his lungs were congested (bronchitis was setting in). But on the 1 December he rallied, enough for Victoria to feel it was safe to return to Windsor, after which she headed straight for Albert’s mausoleum to pray. But hopes were not raised for long. On the 7th Bertie suffered a relapse and on the morning of the 8th Victoria received a telegram from Jenner: ‘The Prince passed a very unquiet night. Not so well. Temperature risen to 104. Respirations more rapid. Dr Gull and I are both very anxious.’ She hurried back to Sandringham with Louise, arriving late in the icy chill and snow, looking ‘small and miserable’ according to Augusta Stanley.26The press too were by now flocking to nearby Wolferton station, and from there to Sandringham on every gig and fly that could be hired, to camp out at the gates. Royal illness – particularly when knocking at death’s door – was a great circulation-booster, as they all knew. Very soon word was out that the Prince had succumbed to the full force of the fever and had sunk into a terrifying, raging delirium.
No sooner had she arrived than Victoria took control of the household from under the nose of its mistress Alix and commandeered what little space remained for herself, her entourage and the rest of Bertie’s siblings as they arrived. Alice and Alix’s young children were all packed off to Windsor for their own safety. The atmosphere inside the newly built but overcrowded house, with its windows shut fast against the cold and snow outside, rapidly became noisy and quarrelsome as the various members of the family vied for space; others tiptoed round in sheer terror at being in such close proximity to the Queen, as ‘dread and gloom’ prevailed.27The Duke of Cambridge in particular was dubious about the sanitary arrangements, fearing the spread of typhoid germs among them, and went round the house inspecting it for bad smells.
Hour after hour Victoria watched over her son in the dark and claustrophobic room. ‘It was too dreadful to see the poor Queen sitting in the bedroom behind a screen listening to his ravings,’ recalled Prince Leopold later. ‘I can’t tell you what a deep impression it made on me.’28For once she was completely taken out of herself; mindful only of Bertie. The Queen’s innate good qualities – her ‘best self’, as Lady Augusta Stanley called them – rose to the surface as, against the odds of her own recent debilitating illness, she drew on the great store of physical and emotional strength that she always had in reserve, when she chose to enlist it.29She was far from optimistic about the outcome, yet remained a paragon of calmness, patience and solicitude, listening to Bertie’s stentorian breathing as he tossed and turned and raved. His outbursts of singing, whistling and talking – in several languages – were sometimes so embarrassing and compromising that his wife had to be kept out of the room.
Sunday 10 December was designated a day of national prayer, as the family and household gathered round, anticipating with dread the unthinkable: a repetition of the deathbed of Prince Albert ten years previously. Bulletins were being issued twice a day and posted at public places like the Mansion House and Charing Cross for all to see. Across Britain’s places of worship the nation was once more united in a ‘common anxiety’. On Monday the 11th the doctors called Victoria from her bed at 5.30 a.m. The patient had had a severe spasm, closely followed by another. Jenner warned her that ‘at any moment dear Bertie might go off’.30She hurried to his bedside as the rest of the household congregated outside the door in their dressing gowns. ‘The awfulness of this morning, I shall never, never forget as long as I live,’ wrote the Duke of Cambridge in his diary. Even outside the door everyone could hear Bertie’s loud and incessant delirious ramblings. ‘All looked bewildered and overcome with grief,’ the Duke recalled, ‘but the doctors behaved nobly, no flinching, no loss of courage, only intense anxiety.’31All day an exhausted Victoria, Alice and Alix kept vigil, as Bertie’s life hung by a thread; by 7 p.m. that evening the doctors were not expecting him to survive the night.
Letters and telegrams meanwhile poured into Sandringham, many from the public with recommendations for homespun remedies for typhoid, some ‘of the most mad kind’.32Words of comfort and support also came from ministers, including a heavy-hearted Gladstone, who found it difficult to find words adequate enough that would not ‘mock the sorrow of this moment’. Even the chastened members of London’s republican clubs sent a joint message expressing their sorrow at the Prince’s illness and their hope that his life might be spared.33Reporter Henry James Jennings of the Birmingham Mail remembered how he sat huddled in his cold and draughty office for three or four days on end: ‘we were there, editor, compositors and machine men, from eight in the morning until twelve or one at night, ready to bring out at short notice an edition recording any important change’.34On the morning of the 12th, as he went to his work at the Ecclesiastical Commissioners’ Office, Arthur Munby noticed how everyone felt as ‘one family’ at this time of crisis:
Another day of public anxiety – shown more strongly in London than I ever remember. People asking for telegrams, listening for the passing bell; chance words heard in the street or elsewhere, showing that most men were thinking of the Prince. Home Office telegrams posted in our hall, as usual; at the Cheshire Cheese, the latest news
written up in the dining parlour, in the Strand and Fleet Street, little details from the sickroom hastily brushed in with ink on large flysheets, which were stuck on shutters of newspaper offices; and crowds pressing to read them.35
Victoria was greatly comforted: ‘The feeling shown by the whole nation is quite marvellous and most touching and striking,’ she noted in her journal; it proved to her ‘how really sound and truly loyal the people are’. For thirty-six hours the delirium consumed Bertie. On the 13th ‘the worst day of all’ as Victoria recalled, she was allowed to dispense with the screen and sit on the sofa within sight of her son as he battled for life. ‘Alice and I said to one another in tears, “There can be no hope”’; all she could do as his temperature rose and he tossed and turned, clutching at the bedclothes and gasping between each incoherent word, was hold Bertie’s hand and stroke his arm. In a brief moment of clarity he suddenly noticed her sitting there. ‘It is so kind of you to come,’ he whispered.36
Beyond the wintry flatlands of Sandringham the nation was gripped by ‘an epidemic of typhoid loyalty’ as Reynolds’s Newspaper later described it, berating the fashionable journals for the ‘mean, toadying, craven spirit of so-called loyalty’ that covered their pages. Typhoid fever, as it rightly pointed out, was an endemic disease of the poor that brought grief and suffering wherever it struck: ‘The Life of John Smith in Whitechapel, or of John Jones in the “Black Country”, is exactly the same to a family as the life of the Prince of Wales.’37But nothing could dispel the collective sense of foreboding as the nation contemplated the significance of the date – 14 December – to come and the prospect of another funereal Christmas. The leader-writers were sharpening their pens and finalising their obituaries. George Augustus Sala at the Daily Telegraph geared himself up for a repeat performance of his 1861 panegyrics: ‘All England may be said to have gathered at the little Norfolk cottage,’ he gushed, ‘in a thousand nameless households…hearts close together, and hands linked with hands…against the dreaded approach of death.’38Jay’s were on standby for the stampede, having judiciously inserted an advertisement in The Times on the 13th announcing that its staff were at the ready to serve anyone, anywhere, ‘in the event of immediate mourning being required’; over at St Paul’s the bell-ringers were primed for action. With a longer run-in for its weekly deadline, Punch instructed illustrator John Tenniel to prepare two alternative cartoons: one entitled ‘Suspense’, depicting Britannia standing vigil outside Bertie’s door; the other, ‘In Memoriam’, with her weeping in despair.39
Alone among newspapermen Wemyss Reid, editor of the Leeds Mercury, having received no telegram announcing the Prince’s death by midnight, decided to go to press the following morning, the 14th, with an article assuming he would still be alive: ‘in every other newspaper office the conviction that he was at the very point of death was so strong that no preparation had been made for his possible survival’.40His paper and The Times were the only ones to do so that day, most of the others having had to stall on printing the black-bordered obituaries they had prepared. As the ‘dreadful anniversary’ of Albert’s death approached, a strange kind of fatalism gripped the royal family as they sat and watched through the evening, everyone filled with a superstitious dread that history might repeat itself. Mercifully, things improved late that evening. ‘Instead of this date dawning upon another deathbed, which I had felt almost certain of, it brought cheering news,’ recalled Victoria. Overnight Bertie’s temperature began to drop; he slept quietly for several hours and his breathing eased. With all the royal family gathered at Sandringham, for once – and only once – there would be no commemoration that day of Albert’s death in the Blue Room and the mausoleum at Windsor.41
Having issued six bulletins on the Prince’s condition during the 13th, the doctors were very cautious about any immediate announcement of recovery. But with crowds huddled all day in the cold outside the newspaper offices and Marlborough House waiting for news, a bulletin was finally released at 1 a.m. on the 14th announcing that the prince was ‘less restless’. Bertie’s recovery from here on would be a slow and difficult one, with a worrying relapse on 27 December, but eventually he was on the mend. It was nothing short of a gift from providence to a beleaguered monarchy in a time of desperate need. ‘What a sell for Dilke this illness has been!’ wrote Lord Henry Lennox to Disraeli. ‘The Republicans say their chances are up,’ a relieved Duke of Cambridge told his mother. ‘Heaven has sent us this dispensation to save us.’42Predictably the papers gushed with a tide of sentimental rhetoric honouring God’s mercy in sparing Bertie and praising the fortitude of his mother and the devoted nursing of his virtuous sister Alice. Victoria, whose relationship with Alice was always difficult, was rather put out: ‘beloved Alix I can never praise enough…so true, so discreet, so kind to all’; in Victoria’s estimation, for all her frail constitution her daughter-in-law had more than equalled Alice in her sick-bed devotion.43
Despite Bertie’s recovery, Christmas that year was a subdued one for the royal family. Victoria returned to Windsor on the 19th and spent the holiday there instead of at Osborne – for the first time since that last Christmas with Albert in 1860. But there was no tree and few festivities. ‘It was, if not a sad, yet at any rate a very serious Christmas to us all,’ she told the Duke of Cambridge, ‘from the recent week of terrible anxiety and also for the consciousness that dear Bertie is still in an anxious state. His recovery is so slow, and there are such fluctuations from day to day, that I must own I do not feel easy about him.’44She professed herself humbled by the experience: ‘It was a great lesson to us all – to see the highest surrounded by every luxury which human mortal can wish for – lying low and as helpless and miserable as the poorest peasant.’45On 26 December The Times published her letter of thanks to the nation:
The universal feeling shown by her people during those painful, terrible days, and the sympathy evinced by them with herself and her beloved daughter, the Princess of Wales, as well as the general joy at the improvement of the Prince of Wales’s state, have made a deep and lasting impression on her heart, which can never be effaced. It was indeed nothing new to her, for the Queen had met with the same sympathy, when just ten years ago, a similar illness removed from her side the mainstay of her life, the best, wisest and kindest of husbands.
Over in republican France, where the worst excesses of the Paris Commune had raised the ugly spectre of 1789 and soured the successful overturn of the monarchy, the response to the political turnaround in Britain was one of incredulity. England had supposedly been on the brink of becoming a republic, yet the last few days of the Prince’s illness had been a lesson to all. As one Parisian journal observed, instead of mocking their royal family, the people had prayed, showing that they ‘have the courage, the good sense not to disown either their history, their Government, or their God’. The British were still a free people and the French had much to learn from them about the ‘powerful bonds of union’ that a country relies upon in times of trouble. ‘When shall we learn to pray altogether for anyone?’ it asked.46
Gladstone had no doubt that Bertie’s six-week near-fatal illness had provided the monarchy with a ‘last opportunity’ to capitalise on a renewal of public loyalty. ‘We have arrived at a great crisis of Royalty,’ he said, and he was determined to overcome it. The Queen had ‘laid up in early years an immense fund of loyalty, but she is now living on her capital,’ he told Ponsonby, who agreed that ‘royal matters’ had become stuck in a ‘deep and nasty rut’.47Word meanwhile had come from Sandringham that some kind of service of thanksgiving might be in order, and Gladstone gave it his full support. Such a ceremony would set the seal on the important strengthening of the bonds between monarch and people that had occurred during the Prince’s illness, as well as putting a hopefully reformed Bertie back on track…For the Prince of Wales had confided to his nurse when he first fell ill that ‘if he got better he should lead a very different life to what he had hitherto done’.48
Plan
s were put in place early in 1872 for a royal progress across London, followed by a service at St Paul’s Cathedral, with Gladstone providing the Queen with supporting ammunition – a list of precedents, including the celebrations there for the recovery from illness of George III in 1789. Victoria immediately shrank at the prospect of being the centre of a display of ‘ostentatious pomp’.49She objected to St Paul’s as a venue: ‘a most dreary, dingy, melancholy and undevotional church’; Westminster Abbey was smaller and a lot nearer to Buckingham Palace.50Uppermost in her mind was of course the physical strain on herself, not to mention Bertie, of a long and fatiguing service, but in the end Alix persuaded her. While the Princess of Wales agreed that her husband’s illness had been a very personal experience and that she, like the Queen, did not want what was fundamentally a religious act being made a vehicle for a grand public show, the nation – having taken such a ‘public share in our anxiety’ – had shown such solidarity ‘that it may perhaps feel that it has a kind of claim to join with us now in a public and universal thanksgiving’.51
Victoria had to concede, but her old, familiar obstructiveness ensured that nothing went smoothly. Fraught discussions with Gladstone followed over her various ‘peculiar fancies’, as he saw them: the length of the service (which she wanted shortened to half an hour); the carriages to be used (she vetoed a full state procession); the route (which was lengthened to appease public demand); and the number of tickets to be issued for the ceremony (under pressure from The Times this was increased from 8,000 to just under 12,000). When it came to the question of who was to pay for it all, Gladstone knew that the government must foot the bill or Victoria would pounce on this as a reason to resist.52In the end a series of compromises were made to ensure Victoria’s participation, with the Queen refusing to kowtow to the list of precedents presented to her, but agreeing only out of personal recognition that some kind of ‘show’ was required as a thank-you to the nation.53‘I have no doubt that he is “gauche”,’ thought Lady Augusta Stanley on hearing the news that Gladstone had prevailed, ‘but I must say I honor him for pressing her duty on her – And Oh! That she should at this moment resent it!’54And there were compensations for Victoria for this act of veiled capitulation: in return she was able to duck out of opening Parliament the same month.
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 30