A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  Epilogue

  Christmas 1878

  For much of the 1870s Queen Victoria and her second daughter Princess Alice had been increasingly alienated from each other. Much of the breakdown in their relationship had to do with Alice’s disapproval of her mother’s retreat from duty and, by the same token, Victoria’s dislike of her daughter’s criticism and interference. Alice, in her view, could be tactless and unkind; she had become ‘sharp and grand and wanting to have everything her own way’.1 She was also rather too forward-thinking for Victoria’s liking, affronted as she was by Alice’s ‘indelicate’ interest in women’s gynaecological matters and her passion for nursing. The truth of it was that so much enforced intimacy with her mother during Albert’s last illness, and the six terrible months of grief she spent with Victoria until her marriage the following year, had left Princess Alice with a much deeper critical understanding of their mother than any of her other siblings, except perhaps Louise.

  As a young girl Princess Alice had been shy, sweet-natured and compliant. She had shared many personality traits with her father, having the same thoughtful, studious nature. Prince Albert had always considered her to be the most beautiful of his children, although the severe features and sharp nose suggest a rather ethereal, mournful beauty and the last photographs of her convey a lingering sense of disappointment with life. She always seemed physically frail, particularly after an attack of scarlet fever in 1855, and her health (like her father’s) began to deteriorate at an early age. Once married and removed from her mother’s domineering presence, Alice rapidly proved to be less compliant than she had been of old, and more than capable of standing up to Victoria’s endless demands that the members of her family should subordinate themselves to what suited her. On visits to England Alice began to question Victoria’s dictatorial manner and, at times, resist it.

  Her marriage to Louis had begun happily enough in 1862, but a perennial shortage of money had imposed considerable constraints on the way Princess Alice ran her household and she was constantly having to make economies (as well as regularly appealing to her mother for financial help). Darmstadt, situated in the hills of the Odenwald near the River Rhine, was something of a social and cultural backwater. Alice was a devoted wife and mother and unquestioningly loyal, but she was not content to be consigned to a life that consisted solely of having babies to populate the minor principalities of Europe. Like her father, she wished to be of service to her adopted people and, also like him, set herself high standards of duty. At times she would appear overwhelmed by her sense of noblesse oblige, of the onerous responsibilities of her supposed position of privilege. ‘Life was made for work and not pleasure,’ she once remarked, and stoicism – if not an unhealthy propensity to martyrdom – became her enduring quality.2 As time passed there was no disguising her increasing disappointment in her husband’s emotional and intellectual shortcomings, which heightened her sense of loneliness and isolation. Louis, a born soldier, never shared Alice’s passionate interests in the arts, nor did he comprehend her wide-reaching social concerns. She loved him as best she could, but she was disappointed. And so she found other channels for her personal frustrations, between her seven pregnancies throwing herself into an enormous and ever more consuming workload of philanthropic work, hospital visiting and nursing, particularly during the wars of 1866 and 1870–1 into which Hesse was drawn.

  Princess Alice had always mourned her father with an intensity and pain that were as private as her mother’s were public, and spent much of her time – like her sister Vicky in Berlin – writing long, consoling letters focused on alleviating her mother’s grief rather than her own. On the anniversary of Albert’s death in 1872 it was still hard for her to find the right words: ‘From year to year they can but express the same: the grief at the loss of such a father, such a man, grows with me, and leaves a gap and a want that nothing on earth can ever fill up.’3 Alice’s personal sense of grief was made far worse by the tragic death of her three-year-old haemophiliac second son, Frittie (Wilhelm Friedrich), in 1873, after he fell out of a window. Quite simply, it broke her heart and also much of her spirit. She never recovered, succumbing more and more to stress, headaches and insomnia. Her life in Darmstadt became stultifying and her relationship with Louis ever more estranged. She was weary and depressed. It was not Louis’s fault, she told him, in a poignant and passionate letter written to him from Balmoral in October 1876:

  I am bitterly disappointed with myself when I look back, and see that in spite of great ambitions, good intentions, and real effort, my hopes have nevertheless been completely ship-wrecked…Rain – fine weather – things that have happened – that is all I ever have to tell you about – so utterly cut off is my real self, my innermost life, from yours…I have tried again and again to talk to you about more serious things, when I felt the need to do so – but we never meet each other – we have developed separately…and that is why I feel true companionship is an impossibility for us – because our thoughts will never meet.4

  By the following year, when Louis succeeded his uncle as Grand Duke Ludwig IV of Hesse and by Rhine, Alice was dreading having to take up the even more onerous responsibilities of Grand Duchess. And then another tragedy struck. In November 1878 her fifteen-year-old daughter Victoria fell ill with diphtheria. Within eight days four of her other children, Alix, May, Irene and Ernie – as well as her husband – all contracted it; the remaining unaffected child, Ella, was sent to stay with relatives.

  Alice nursed her family devotedly, day and night, but her five-year-old daughter May – her adored little May-flower ‘with her precious dimples and loving ways’ – died on 15 November.5 She bravely kept the news from her other sick children for as long as she could, dreading that her only son Ernie might die; it would kill her, she said, ‘to have to give him up too’.6 Against all the doctors’ warnings of the risk of infection, she could not however restrain herself from comforting Ernie with a kiss when he was told the terrible news of his sister’s death. And it was not long after she had seen May’s tiny little coffin covered with white flowers off to its funeral that Alice herself felt the first symptoms of the disease. The attack, coming on 7 December, was very severe.

  As soon as she heard the news at Windsor, Victoria repaired to ‘that sad blue room where darling Alice and I watched together 17 years ago, on this day’ and prayed.7 She sent Dr Jenner out to assist in Alice’s care, but by the 13th Alice could no longer swallow. A telegram came from Louis: ‘my prayers are exhausted,’ he said. With the spectre of those two terrible Decembers of 1861 and 1871 hovering over her, Victoria headed down the hill to the mausoleum to pray. She was met en route by a footman with a telegram warning that things were desperate. The diphtheria membrane had spread across Alice’s windpipe and she was having difficulty breathing. Later that day she rallied, but it was the same false hope as the hope they had had the day before Albert died. ‘I sat in my room writing, watching anxiously for every footstep, every door opening,’ Victoria recalled.8

  In Darmstadt on the 13th Alice read the two letters from her mother brought by Dr Jenner. Then she lay down: ‘Now I will go to sleep again,’ she said, but overnight her condition deteriorated. At half-past eight the following morning – 14th December 1878, the seventeenth anniversary of her father’s death – Princess Alice died, whispering the names of May and ‘dear papa’.9 She was thirty-five. It was John Brown who brought the telegram from Louis to Victoria as she sat down to breakfast that morning: ‘Poor Mama, poor me, my happiness gone, dear, dear Alice. God’s will be done.’10 Victoria took the news with extraordinary calm; all the old animosity between herself and Alice forgotten in an instant. Her dead daughter – ‘this dear, talented, distinguished, tender-hearted, noble minded, sweet child’ – had now joined Albert in the pantheon of her personal saints. Victoria was convinced that it was an act of divine intervention, that God had called Alice away to be with her father, and she took great comfort in its terrifying logic. It was ‘almost incr
edible and most mysterious’. Husband and daughter had both been ‘for ever united on this day of their birth into another better world’.11

  Queen Victoria ordered three weeks’ public mourning for Princess Alice. She prayed often in the Blue Room over the days that followed and commissioned her favourite sculptor Boehm to make an effigy of Alice to join Albert’s sarcophagus in the mausoleum.12 Another Christmas in black loomed, as the public, who had long held the Princess in high regard for her dedicated nursing of her father and brother, responded with the same kind of grief-stricken loyalty as in 1861 and 1871. Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse – ‘the model of family virtue, as a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother’ – was elevated to a state of beatitude that was never to be shared by any of her siblings.13 Once again the letters and telegrams of condolence streamed in to Windsor; Victoria meanwhile waited anxiously for letters from Louis giving her ‘every detail’ of Alice’s final hours and the funeral ceremony. ‘You must treasure her in your hearts as a Saint,’ she told Alice’s children and siblings: they should do as she herself had done for Albert and ‘mourn for their lost sister and mother, more and more, if not for a lifetime then for many years to come’.14

  Princess Alice’s funeral was held in Darmstadt on the afternoon of 18 December 1878; later that evening, in biting winter wind, her coffin was conveyed by torchlight to the Hesse family mausoleum at Rosenhöhe. Bertie and Leopold were there to watch as Alice’s coffin was placed alongside those of Frittie and May, draped with the Union Jack, for Alice had always said that she wanted ‘to go with the old English colours above me’.15 In England the rest of the royal family attended a private service in her memory at Windsor. Once again the muffled bells pealed out the solemn threnody of royal death, British churches were draped in black, and shopkeepers put up their shutters as the nation mourned its lost princess. It was, as Christmas approached, ‘a strange dreadful time’, a time of mourning instead of celebration, now made doubly melancholy by the tragedy of yet another death in the royal family on the same day.16 The presents the Queen gave to her servants that year were framed photographs of Alice. On 28 December her letter to the nation was published, thanking them for ‘the most touching sympathy shown to her by all classes of her loyal and faithful subjects’. It was, she said, ‘most soothing’ to see ‘how entirely her grief is shared by her people’.17

  The loss of Alice was, for Victoria, a terrible landmark: ‘the first break in my circle of children’.18 As bereaved mother, widow and Queen, her position was now unassailable; her sacred monopoly on grief transcended all criticism. But it was a heavy burden. On New Year’s Eve 1878 Victoria sat down, as she had so religiously done for forty-five years now, to write the daily entry in her journal. But how to describe ‘The last day of this terrible year’ as it sadly ebbed away? It had been punctuated by so much tragedy:

  the poor King of Italy, dying on Jan 8th, the Pope on the 23rd…the deaths of Ld Ailesbury and Ld Kinnaird…the awful loss of the ‘Eurydice’…the first attempt on the Emperor William’s life, the death of the poor Dss of Argyll of May 25th, the loss of the ‘Grosse Kurfürst’, the death of Lord Russell, the death of the King of Hanover on June 12th, and his funeral at Windsor on the 24th…the death of the poor young Queen of Spain, the illness and death of poor good Sir Thomas Biddulph, then the Affghan [sic] war, the awful illness at Darmstadt, dear little May’s death on Nov 16th, the alarming account of dearest Alice, on the 8th, & the dreadful ending to her illness on the 14th!19

  Through the long years of her widowhood and the loss of so many she had loved, Queen Victoria had steadfastly held to the mantra she had chosen for herself, from the words written by Tennyson to commemorate Prince Albert in the Preface to The Idylls of the King: ‘Break Not Oh Woman’s Heart But Still Endure’. The dead would always be a necessary part of her, extending their lingering shadow over the unravelling of her own final mortal days. But she had found the courage to go on. And she had indeed endured. Yes, she had come through.

  Appendix

  What Killed Prince Albert?

  Shortly after Prince Albert died, the registrar’s office in Windsor town was notified by the Prince of Wales and a death certificate was issued, stating that the Prince had died from typhoid fever of a duration of twenty-one days.1 Thus began 150 years of largely unchallenged thinking on the Prince Consort’s final illness. One cannot know now what political or other pressures may have obliged the royal doctors to come up with this definitive diagnosis in the face of their undoubted and openly expressed uncertainty during the last month of the Prince’s life. But the cause of death as given fell into line with their rather pat deduction that Albert’s illness could be traced back to that day at Sandhurst on 22 November when he had got soaking wet and caught a chill.

  The onset of the chill had, it was assumed, laid him open to infection by typhoid from contaminated drinking water or food – but not at Sandhurst for, feeling too unwell that day, the Prince ate and drank nothing while he was there. The logical conclusion to be reached was that he had contracted typhoid on his return to Windsor. By way of justification, in a front-page article on 28 December, the Examiner claimed that of late ‘Her Majesty herself has been covering her nose on the way to the castle through the bad smells of the town’, thanks to the supposed threat of ‘Windsor Fever’. But this and similar reports in the press to the effect that there had recently been two or three cases of typhoid in the castle were later shown to be erroneous, and were rebutted by assertions elsewhere that ‘the queen’s household have been lately in the enjoyment of good health’.2 Nevertheless the argument would not go away; some newspapers were quick to remind readers of an outbreak in 1858 in the town, which had carried off thirty-nine people, while others did the opposite and attempted to dampen claims that ‘typhus fever or some similar disorder is raging at Windsor’. The town was ‘in a very healthy condition’, claimed the Morning Star, and in a long article on 21 December the Medical Times and Gazette presented a detailed discussion of the sanitation at Windsor, pointing out that the castle’s drainage system was entirely independent of that in the town where the previous outbreak had occurred. Having conducted its own investigation, the paper asserted that it knew ‘of no place where a more complete or more carefully worked system is to be found’. The only conclusion it could come to was that ‘unless some dire and unsuspected source of danger should lurk in the royal apartments themselves – ample and well ventilated as they apparently are – the sewerage system of the castle must be acquitted of all share in the mischief, and the causes of the national calamity which we all deplore must be looked for elsewhere’.3

  In 1860s Britain it was decidedly unfashionable for a prince consort to die of typhoid fever, and palace officials were clearly anxious to counter any public anxiety that the Queen and her family were at risk of infection. Typhoid fever was a disease that in the main decimated the poor – those who lived in squalid, urban areas where there was rudimentary sanitation and shared public water pumps. It is caused by the water-borne bacterium Salmonella typhi and is clinically and bacteriologically quite distinct from typhus, an illness that can only be spread from person to person by lice, through close contact in overcrowded slums or barracks. Although the bacterial cause of typhoid was not understood in the 1860s, its clinical distinction from typhus had been recognised by Albert’s physician Dr Jenner a decade previously. In his 1850 study ‘On the Identity or Non-Identity of Typhus and Typhoid Fevers’, based on clinical and autopsy findings in sixty-six fatal cases, Jenner had applied the epithet ‘typhoid’, meaning ‘typhus-like’. The association with poverty might explain the reluctance of the royal doctors to define the illness as such to the Queen and her entourage. Either way, they appear to have hedged their bets with regard to their diagnosis. If the Prince had indeed contracted typhoid fever at Windsor, then it would be expected (as a water-borne disease) that others in the castle sharing the same water supply would also have succumbed. But there is no record of anyone ot
her than Prince Albert falling sick, and no evidence of him having come into contact with anyone suffering from the disease during the previous month.

  The course of typhoid fever is a very emphatic one, with three clear stages: the first week (known as the invasive stage) is one of high temperature, agonising headache and extreme prostration. Also characteristic are muscular feebleness and tremor of the limbs with a low delirium, often accompanied by the involuntary passing of faeces and urine, as well as the accumulation of sordes (foul-smelling matter) around the lips and gums. In the first week of his illness Prince Albert, despite being clearly unwell and complaining of aches and pains and a furred tongue, was up and about and not displaying any of these extreme symptoms. The second week of the disease is marked by rising fever, tenderness, swelling and sometimes a gurgling sound in the abdomen, as well as diarrhoea and an enlarged spleen. Again, the intermittent symptoms Prince Albert was displaying of fever, occasional diarrhoea and wakefulness, accompanied by constant moving about, do not fit this scenario. In the third week and final stage – the point at which, on 8 December, the Prince finally took to his bed and became fitfully delirious and feverish – he should in fact, according to the classic typhoid pattern, have been moving into a slow and gradual recovery from temperature and other symptoms. With typhoid, however, relapses were often common and death from complications such as intestinal haemorrhage or perforation, or simply sheer physical exhaustion leading to pneumonia, often carried off patients who might otherwise have recovered.4