A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  For Victoria, the death of her half-sister was ‘the third great sorrow of her life’ – along with the loss of Albert and her mother.9Reminders of Feodora took their place amidst the busts, statues, mourning jewellery, photographs, memorial cards and all the other memento mori that Queen Victoria gathered round her in one great mausoleum at Windsor dedicated to her many dear and departed. The security offered by all the paraphernalia of this ‘obsolescent world’ was infinitely preferable, always, to the ‘anxiety of reality’.10For her the celebration of death was a kind of ‘melancholy entertainment’ – a piece of theatre that other pious widows aspired to emulate – and the more mournful, the better. If a ceremony was a tad cheerful the Queen ‘always treated [it] with the utmost indifference’, recalled lady-in-waiting Marie Mallet.11Many felt, as Mallet did, that Victoria’s excessively lugubrious manner was perhaps a reflection of ‘the dim shade of inherited melancholy from George III’.12She certainly made a great deal later in her reign of the funerary rites for her devoted John Brown in 1883, her haemophiliac son Leopold when he died in 1884, her grandson Eddy, Duke of Clarence in 1892, and Beatrice’s husband, Prince Henry of Battenberg, in 1896. But she took a close interest too in the far more modest obsequies for lesser members of her household. In 1891, when one of the servants who had accompanied her on her holiday to Grasse in the south of France died, she gave instructions on the laying-out of the corpse, which were followed to the letter. Marie Mallet found it very curious ‘to see how the Queen takes the keenest interest in death and all its horrors’. ‘Our whole talk,’ she wrote home, ‘has been of coffins and winding sheets.’13Nor did Victoria’s interest in the rituals of death stop at human beings; she went to equal lengths when her favourite dogs died, ensuring they were buried with great ceremony and that monuments were erected over their graves.14

  Queen Victoria’s long intimacy with death at least had one transformative effect: it opened up her naturally consoling heart and made of her, in her old age, a great ‘arbiter of grief’.15Always, and at every turn, she drew strength and comfort from commiserating with others in their bereavement, and many very personal and touching letters of condolence flowed from her pen. She of course continued to mourn the terrible void in her life left after Albert’s death; forty years on from it she still missed his ‘sheltering arm and wise help’.16Tennyson’s great poem In Memoriam remained her touchstone, lines such as ‘Ah dear, but come thou back to me’ immortalising the longings of so many other widows and joining Victoria with them in ‘one great rhythmic sigh of hopeless love’.17

  With time and the deaths of so many she loved, public sympathy grew for the ageing queen. The British people respected her capacity for unending sorrow; there was something majestic, almost mystical about it. Victoria celebrated the mythic power of death like a pagan queen in tune with rituals beyond the understanding of ordinary mortals. And there were concessions in return: the remorseless black of her official image by degrees softened in its severity as the Queen took to relieving its monotony for official functions with white lace and diamonds, pearls and even her small diamond crown rather than her widow’s bonnet. Eventually her long-familiar image in black had come to represent not just the monarchy and, by association, the age, but also Victoria’s most-admired qualities of solidity, respectability and dignity as benevolent, matriarchal widow. By the end of her reign she had become an inspiration to middle-class women everywhere; women such as writer H. G. Wells’s mother, who for forty years had followed ‘her acts and utterances, her goings forth and her lyings in, her great sorrow and her other bereavements with a passionate loyalty’. For ordinary women such as her, Queen Victoria was their ‘compensatory personality’ – an ‘imaginative consolation for all the restrictions and hardships that her sex, her diminutive size, her motherhood and all the endless difficulties of life, imposed upon her’.18

  In a triumphant subversion of the traditional image of the monarch in splendid robes of state at the heart of great ceremonial set-pieces, by the century’s end Queen Victoria dominated the national consciousness as its antithesis – in all her bourgeois ordinariness – as revered widow and ‘Mother of the People’, and (on an international scale) as Grandmama of Europe. It was an extraordinary alchemy, unique to Queen Victoria as monarch. For by the end of her reign there was no one to rival her in her wisdom, her years of experience and her grasp of statesmanship and international affairs. ‘She was the grandmother of us all,’ as one Eton schoolboy fondly remembered her:

  She was our fond old lady, guiding the land, the nation, the world almost, with her venerable influence, but also sharing and living in our lives and fortunes, those of the simpler sort especially, and all without pomp or display, though with a dignity so massive, till the glitter of other courts, the brilliance of other times appeared meretricious and tawdry beside the homeliness that she loved…She belonged to us all, and none in the world beside ourselves had a queen and a grandmother to compare with her.19

  The role of grandmother to her extended European family in Scandinavia, Germany and Russia had brought Queen Victoria many preoccupations as she spent her old age planning, negotiating and frequently meddling in her family’s dynastic marriages, in the process maintaining a prodigious, opinionated and lively correspondence with them all. Although never particularly fond of children she was in the end greatly consoled by her grandchildren, particularly the children of Beatrice and her husband Prince Henry of Battenberg, who lived with her for much of the time. The proliferation of photographs, paintings and magazine articles about them all – with the comings and goings of their many christenings, weddings and funerals – satisfied public demand and kept the royal family in the public eye even when the monarch herself was still out of sight.

  Queen Victoria had always viewed her bereavement as an inviolate ‘sacred sorrow’ and admitted to Vicky that ‘those paroxysms of despair and yearning and longing and of daily, nightly longing to die…for the first three years never left me’.20But as she recovered from her debilitating grief – the grief ‘that saps the mind’, as Tennyson had called it – nothing would dim her determination to continue the public commemoration of Albert’s memory and her own personal financial investment in it.21For the remainder of the century Albert’s legacy proliferated in many more statues: some twenty-five in all, the one in Dublin narrowly missing destruction in a Fenian attempt to blow it up. Innumerable posthumous portraits, often based on cartes de visite of Albert, were commissioned for official bodies such as the Royal Society of Arts and municipal buildings across the United Kingdom, many of them paid for through public subscription. Stained-glass windows in churches were particularly popular, inspired by the one in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, which had been constructed just in time for Bertie’s wedding in 1863. Close by, the smaller Albert Memorial Chapel was remodelled by Gilbert Scott on the shell of the disused Wolsey Chapel and financed by Victoria, well in excess of the original estimate of £15,000. It opened to the public in December 1875, featuring yet another elaborate, Gothic cenotaph with a medieval-style recumbent effigy of Prince Albert in armour by the sculptor Henri de Triqueti.

  By August 1871 the interior decorations of the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore had been completed, using marble from Belgium and Portugal for the walls, altar and inlaid floor. But the beauty of the interior was only seen by the royal family and their entourage, and has been opened to general view only on a very occasional basis.22Its most frequent visitor for the forty years until her death was Victoria herself. Having her own set of keys, she would often go there to think and pray and contemplate Albert’s effigy in times of trouble, national emergency and even moments of gratitude, such as Bertie’s recovery from typhoid. In summer she often took picnics outside under the shade of a cedar tree. There was nothing morbid about it; it was her way of feeling close, of never forgetting. Above the entrance to the mausoleum she had had inscribed the words ‘Farewell best beloved, here at last I shall rest with thee, with thee in Christ I shall rise a
gain’, but it was not until 4 February 1901 that she finally joined Albert there.

  In the meantime, she had enough years and will left in her to oversee the expansion of the enduring national focus of Prince Albert’s life and contribution to British art, architecture, science and culture. This was the complex of educational buildings popularly known as Albertopolis that sprang up in South Kensington in the last third of the century. The term had first been coined around the time of the Great Exhibition to refer to the land purchased with its profits – a site stretching from the northern to southern ends of what is now Exhibition Road. At one point Victoria had nursed ambitions to have all the great national collections of art and science collected here from across London, in one defining Albertian repository dominating the architectural landscape of late-Victorian London.23By 1866 the word ‘Albertopolis’ was in regular (though often irreverent) use; but it was many years before the entire complex was finished. The Victoria and Albert Museum was extended piecemeal until the mid-1880s, but the main frontage – for which Victoria laid the foundation stone in 1899 – was not completed till 1909. Albertopolis reached its full incarnation with the addition of the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal College of Art, the Royal College of Music and the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. But the emotive focal point would always be the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, which gave a sense of unity and identity to this ambitious Victorian exercise in Wagnerian grandeur.24With her popularity still on a high after the assassination attempt of February, on 1 July 1872 Victoria travelled to Hyde Park to inspect the completed memorial prior to it being opened to the public, after years of being surrounded by hoarding. However, only the outer shrine was complete – the central statue of Albert by Foley had been delayed by the sculptor’s long illness and then death in 1874. It was not put in place until November 1875 and finally unveiled, after it had been gilded, on 8 March 1876.

  The architect – the newly knighted Sir Gilbert Scott – had designed the Albert Memorial, he said, ‘con amore’, though the process had been ‘long and painful’. He was proud of the ‘exquisite phantasy’ of its shrine-like character, but knew that he would have to bear the brunt of criticism of a work ‘of a character peculiar, as I fancy, to this country’.25French diplomat Charles Gavard thought that the late Prince (a man who was very much ‘comme il faut’) would have been ‘greatly embarrassed’ by this ‘temple, kiosque, pagoda’ being erected to his memory. ‘It is enough to make Wellington jealous – he has only two statues,’ he quipped.26On a visit to London in 1872 the American writer Mark Twain took a drive round Hyde Park and was struck by what he recalled as ‘the brightest, freshest, loveliest bit of gigantic jewelry in all this battered and blackened old city’; Napoleon Bonaparte’s tomb at Les Invalides in Paris paled in comparison. Twain had nothing but praise for the memorial’s attention to detail and its artistry; but, having no idea at the time to whom the monument was dedicated (the statue of Albert not yet being in place), he assumed it was a memorial to Shakespeare. But no, it turned out to be a tribute ‘to a most excellent foreign gentleman who was a happy type of the Good & the Kind, the Well-Meaning, the Mediochre, the Commonplace’. But who was Prince Albert now to the nation? A man who ‘did no more for his country than five hundred tradesmen did in his own time, whose works are forgotten’. The monument was magnificent, but Twain was discomforted by the fact that it did not celebrate someone of the status of Shakespeare – but ‘maybe he does not need it as much as the other’.27

  By the time the memorial was fully open, fifteen years after Albert’s death, its emotional impact had dissipated; for all its imposing magnificence, the Albert Memorial never won popular public approval. Viewed as a ‘hideous Germanised eyesore’, it fell into such neglect in the late twentieth century that there was talk of demolishing it. Several eccentric schemes were mooted for protecting it from further decay, including enclosing it in a massive glass box. Fortunately the Victorian Society came to its rescue in 1987 and launched a concerted campaign that finally, after numerous crises over funding, saw it restored to all its magnificence (to the tune of £11 million) and reopened in time for the millennium in October 2000, to a firework display spelling out ‘Albert Saved’.28

  The written legacy of Prince Albert’s life and work also continued, in tandem with the architectural one, at the Queen’s behest and against the odds of fading public interest. At the end of 1874 the first volume of Theodore Martin’s epic Life of the Prince Consort was published, but it would not be completed till volume five in 1880, by which time it already seemed passé in subject, sentiment and content. The dogged Martin was knighted for his labours that year, but, despite its heroic attention to detail, his Life was not a work of independent thought, but – much like Grey’s Early Life before it – set in stone the Queen’s prescribed view of her husband as plaster saint. It presented a portrait, wrote Lytton Strachey, of an ‘impeccable waxwork’ rather than a more rounded one of the real man. Nor did it go down well with some reviewers, due to the extent to which it revealed Victoria and Albert’s close involvement in foreign affairs, to the point of interference. The real Prince Albert, whom Martin’s book and all the other written memorials to him in their slavish hagiography had failed ever to capture – ‘the real creature, so full of energy and stress and torment, so mysterious and so unhappy, and so fallible, and so very human’ – had completely disappeared.29By the 1880s public resistance was growing to any further representations of a prince who had been dead for more than twenty years and whom few had ever seen, let alone understood in his lifetime. People wanted their living queen among them, not interminable marble and bronze memorials to her dead, and increasingly remote, consort.

  It took many difficult years of crucifying self-doubt for Queen Victoria to overcome the sense of sexual inferiority that had become ingrained during her marriage to Prince Albert. Her grief had been deeply disempowering for the best part of ten years, but the supreme irony is that Albert’s death was, perversely, the making of her as Queen, releasing her in the end from the perception of her own shortcomings as the dutiful ‘little wife’. Despite all Albert’s reassurances, Victoria had never been quite reconciled to what she considered the unseemliness of being a female monarch – consumed by official business at the expense of domestic and wifely duty. Albert, along with Melbourne and Peel, had taught her her trade as monarch and, had he lived, she would gladly, willingly, have given up her throne to him. Left without him, however, she had never for one moment – despite all her hysterical threats to abdicate – wanted to give up her sovereign power. That was the one thing she had always relished. Together, she and Albert had summoned an inglorious British monarchy from the dead during the years of their marriage, revolutionising the old Regency order and setting new moral standards. But had Albert lived, history would have been quite different; Victoria would have retreated further and further into the background, ceding much of the day-to-day control of affairs of state to her husband. It was Albert’s voice that had rung out ever louder across the pages of her official memoranda during the 1850s as he increased his power base, seeking to aggrandise the prerogatives of the Crown over the position of the Cabinet.30Albert’s burgeoning power had created apprehension even then among Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting Lady Ely and Lady Churchill, both of whom felt that his virtual control of government business as uncrowned king would have led to political and constitutional difficulties resulting in ‘direct conflict between the Throne and the People’.31

  In the end, boosted by the assumption of her new title of Empress of India and her unrivalled supremacy over her royal relatives in Europe as ‘the doyenne of sovereigns’, Queen Victoria grew into the familiar, imposing image that has come down to us of ‘Victoria Regina et Imperatrix’.32The British monarchy retained its firm hold upon the affections of the middle classes, who could relate to Victoria and her ‘comfortable’ motherliness and, through her, ‘felt related in some degree
to something that [was] socially great’ – their very own royal family. It is a sentiment that has survived into the reign of her great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II, a monarch whose unerring sense of duty bears all the hallmarks of the tradition set by Prince Albert. But whether it will survive beyond her is doubtful.33

  In retrospect, the years 1840–61 of Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert might be more accurately described as Albertian in tone, a fact of which, in deference to her late husband, Victoria wholly approved.34For during the second half of the 1870s there came a sea change; people finally began referring to themselves as ‘Victorians’, endorsing what Victoria had herself said, after Albert’s death in 1861, that it was ‘the beginning of a new reign’.35By the 1880s Prince Albert’s memory had so rapidly faded in rural areas, with no visible reminders of him, that villagers only knew that ‘he had been the Queen’s husband, though, oddly enough not the King, and that he had been so good that nobody had liked him in his lifetime, excepting the Queen, who “fairly doted”’.36The real man – so elusive to the British public in his lifetime, yet elevated by his grieving widow as a mythical, Arthurian figure – had by then been reduced to a cipher, languishing in the imposing shadow of his resurgent widow. Yes, hers had been a magnificent obsession and Victoria had stayed true to it, exhaustively commemorating her late husband in the way she saw fit. But the true Victorian age – of pageantry, pride and empire – was never his. It was entirely Victoria’s. And it was yet to come.