A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy
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61. Walsh, Religious Life and Influence of Queen Victoria, p. 113.
62. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 12 December.
63. Benson & Esher: III 472–3.
64. Connell, Regina vs Palmerston, p. 316; RA VIC/MAIN/M/R/1/58/19: 11 December.
65. Martin, V: 437.
66. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 12 December.
67. Ibid.: 13 December, though the entry was actually written by the Queen on the 24th.
68. Windsor & Bolitho, p. 241.
69. Longford, Victoria RI, p. 299; Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 156.
70. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 13 December.
71. Windsor & Bolitho, pp. 241–2.
72. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 13 December.
73. Ibid., the remainder of this entry was written by the Queen on 27 March 1862; Windsor & Bolitho, pp. 241–2.
74. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 13 December.
75. Connell, Regina v. Palmerston, pp. 316–17.
76. News International Archive, Delane Correspondence: TT/ED/JTD/10/131.
77. Leeds Mercury, 14 December.
78. The Times, 13 December; Walford, Life of the Prince Consort, p. 88; Daily News, 9 December; Newcastle Courant, 13 December.
79. Vicinus and Nergaard, Ever Yours, p. 232.
80. The Times, 14 December.
81. Downer, Queen’s Knight, pp. 121–2.
82. ‘Descriptions of the death of the Prince Consort, 1861’.
Chapter 5: ‘Day Turned into Night’
Title: written by Queen Victoria beneath a photograph of herself, Bertie, Helena and Vicky taken on 28 March 1862; Gernsheim & Gernsheim, Queen Victoria, p. 16.
1. Sala, Life and Adventures, vol. I, p. 373.
2. North Wales Chronicle, 14 December; The Times, 14 December.
3. Glasgow Herald, 14 December.
4. The Times, 14 December.
5. Dasent, Delane, vol. II, p. 38.
6. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 14 December. This entry, not written by the Queen until February 1872, is preceded by this explanation: ‘I have never had the courage to attempt to describe this dreadful day – but I will now at the distance of ten years…with the terrible facts imprinted on my mind as clearly as tho’ they had occurred yesterday, and with the help of notes scrawled down at the time, try to describe it.’
7. Palmerston Papers, Broadlands Archive, quoted in Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, p. 428.
8. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 14 December.
9. RA VIC/Add A/36/5: Henry Ponsonby to his mother, 14 December.
10. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 14 December.
11. Ibid.
12. Staatsarchiv Darmstadt: Briefe von Alice D24 Nr. 25/3–4 & 26/1: 14 December, letter of Prince of Wales.
13. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 14 December.
14. The children’s governess, Sarah Hildyard, was another of the Queen’s most loyal servants, joining her in 1849. Known to Victoria as ‘Tilla’, she was forced to retire through ill health in 1867. Victoria found it a terrible wrench to lose her: ‘I need not tell you how impossible it is to speak to you of your leaving us and indeed I will not call it by that name. It must be no real parting after 18 years…You have been a treasure to us.’ Hildyard died in 1889. An album of photographs of the royal family collected by Sarah Hildyard can be found in the Raymond Richards Collection (M78), at Keele University Library, Special Collections. For extracts from Queen Victoria’s letters written to Tilla, see The Age (Melbourne), 24 May 1956.
15. Ibid.
16. RA VIC/ADDC6, Lady Geraldine Somerset diaries: 14 December.
17. Villiers, Vanished Victorian, p. 309.
18. For the official bulletins issued from Windsor during 13 and 14 December, see Walford, Life of the Prince Consort, pp. 89–96.
19. Medical Times and Gazette, 14 December.
20. Pakula, Uncommon Woman, p. 159.
21. Walford, Life of the Prince Consort, p. 76.
22. Weintraub, Uncrowned King, p. 43.
23. Martin, V: 440.
24. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 14 December; Walsh, Religious Life, p. 113.
25. Martin, V: 441.
26. Downer, Queen’s Knight, pp. 122–3.
27. Aston, Duke of Connaught, p. 46; Downer, Queen’s Knight, p. 123.
28. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 14 December.
29. RA VIC/Add MS/4/25/819, diary of Howard Elphinstone: 14 December 1861.
30. Noel, Princess Alice, p. 78.
31. Windsor & Bolitho, p. 246.
32. Bodleian Library, Special Collections: MS.Eng.misc.d.472, Charles Pugh diary: 14 December 1861.
33. Martin, V: 441.
34. RA VIC/ADDU/416, account of Lady Winchester: 25 December 1861; RA VIC/ADDC6, Lady Geraldine Somerset diaries: 15 December 1861.
35. Windsor and Bolitho, p. 245; Noel, Princess Alice, p. 77.
36. RA VIC/ADDU/4, account of Lady Winchester: 25 December 1861.
37. Windsor & Bolitho, p. 245.
38. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 14 December. A famous painting of the scene was later executed by William Walton, ‘The Last Moments of HRH The Prince Consort’, which slightly conflicts with some of the descriptions of where people were positioned in the room.
39. Battiscombe, ‘Gerald Wellesley’, p. 128; RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142; ‘Descriptions of the death of the Prince Consort, 1861’.
40. The earliest source for this much-repeated, and possibly apocryphal, story of the shriek is Augustus Hare, The Story of My Life, vol. 2, London: George Allen, 1900.
41. RA VIC/ADDA8/377, letter from Miss Ella Taylor: 7 January 1872, p. 3.
42. Kuhn, Henry and Mary Ponsonby, p. 82.
43. RA VIC/ADDA25/819, diary of Howard Elphinstone: 14 December 1861.
44. ‘Descriptions of the death of the Prince Consort, 1861’.
45. Stanley, Twenty Years at Court, pp. 388–9; Windsor & Bolitho, p. 246; Tisdall, Private Life, p. 50; Duff, Shy Princess, p. 10; RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 14 December.
46. RA VIC/MAIN/Z/142: 14 December. Martin’s account, V: 438–41, of the deathbed from the Queen’s journals has some slight variations, because it was taken from her journal before its later editing by Princess Beatrice. See n. 19 chapter 4 above.
47. RA VIC/ADDA8/377, letter from Miss Ella Taylor: 7 January 1872, p. 3.
48. RA VIC/ADDA25/819, diary of Howard Elphinstone: 14 December 1861; Downer, The Queen’s Knight, p. 125.
49. Thomas Catling, My Life’s Pilgrimage, London: John Murray, 1911, pp. 75–6.
50. Strafford, ed., Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville, vol. 3, p. 417.
51. Sheppard, George Duke of Cambridge: A Memoir, p. 222.
52. Wilson, Life and Times of Queen Victoria, vol. 2, p. 98.
53. Connell, Regina v. Palmerston, pp. 317–18.
54. Sala, Life and Adventures, vol. I, p. 374.
Chapter 6: ‘Our Great National Calamity’
Title: British Mothers’ Journal and Domestic Magazine, 1 January 1862.
1. Walford, Life of the Prince Consort, p. 125.
2. Philip Hedgeland, ‘National Grief and Some of its Uses’ (sermon), Penzance, 1861, p. 3.
3. Morning Star, 16 December.
4. Hudson, Munby, p. 111; Pound, Albert, p. 350.
5. RA VIC/R2/112, letter of Adam Sedwick to Sir Charles Phipps: 10 February 1862.
6. Leeds Intelligencer, 21 December 1861.
7. Walford, Life of the Prince Consort, pp. 142–7; Wolffe, Great Deaths, p. 83.
8. Walford, Life of the Prince Consort, pp. 134–9; The Times, 16 December.
9. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller, London: Chatto & Windus, 1974, p. 255.
10. Chomet, Helena, p. 17; House and Storey, Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 9, p. 540.
11. Sheppard, George, Duke of Cambridge, vol. 1, p. 223.
12. ‘Descriptions of the death of the Prince Consort, 1861’.
13. BL Add. MS 44325, Gladstone Papers, vol. CCXL, letters from the Duchess of Sutherland: ff.
266–73, 19 December 1861.
14. Cooke, Princess Mary Adelaide, vol. I, pp. 377.
15. RA VIC/ADDA8/376 p. 4 and RA VIC/ADDU/396/2, letter of Princess Mary Adelaide of Teck: 16 and 19 December 1861.
16. Maxwell, Life and Letters of the 4th Earl of Clarendon, p. 253.
17. RA VIC/ADDU/396, undated letter, c. 17 December, from the Hon. Victoria Stuart Wortley.
18. Windsor & Bolitho, p. 246; Fulford, Dearest Child, p. 375; Smith, Life of Her Majesty, p. 356.
19. RA VIC/R 1/51: 15 December 1861.
20. Walford, Life of the Prince Consort, pp. 152, 155.
21. Martin Duberman, Charles Francis Adams, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968, p. 286.
22. Hibbert, Court at Windsor, p. 212.
23. Cooke, Princess Mary Adelaide, vol. I, p. 378.
24. C. E. Smith, Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, vol. 2, London: John Murray, 1895, p. 164.
25. ‘Descriptions of the death of the Prince Consort, 1861’; Protheroe, Dean Stanley, p. 307.
26. Whittle, Victoria and Albert, p. 116; Dimond and Taylor, Crown and Camera, p. 23; Darby and Smith, Cult of the Prince Consort, pp. 4, 6; Fulford, Dearest Mama, pp. 27, 31.
27. Walford, Life of the Prince Consort, p. 130.
28. Louis Blanc, Letters on England, vol. 1, London: Sampson Low, 1866, p. 226.
29. The Times, Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, Scotsman, Daily News, 16 December 1861.
30. Daily Telegraph, 16 December 1861.
31. London Gazette Extraordinary, 16, 17 and 18 December 1861.
32. Chappell & Pollard, Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 671; diary of Charles Pugh, Bodleian Library, MS.Eng.misc.d 472.
33. RA VIC/R2/112, letter of Adam Sedgwick to Sir Charles Phipps: 10 February 1862.
34. Leeds Mercury, 17 December, 1861.
35. Illustrated London News, 28 December 1861.
36. PRO LC 1-90-005, 16 December 1861.
37. Wilson, Life and Times of Queen Victoria, p. 99; Walford, Life of the Prince Consort, p. 105.
38. Maxwell, Life and Letters of the 4th Earl of Clarendon, p. 253; Baroness Bloomfield, ed., Extracts of Letters from Maria, Marchioness of Normanby, London: Simson & Co., 1892, p. 424.
39. RA VIC/ADDU/32: 16 December 1861; Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 23.
40. Daily Telegraph, 17 December; RA VIC/ADDU/396/1: undated letter, probably 17 December 1861.
41. The Times, 17 and 18 December; London Review, 21 December; Journal of John Rashdall, 22 December, Bodleian Library MS.Eng.misc.e 359.
42. Illustrated London News, 21 December 1861, p. 616.
43. Glasgow Herald, 17 December.
44. The Times, Guardian and Telegraph, 17 and 18 December. For a résumé of major press coverage, see Walford, Life of the Prince Consort, pp. 157–83. An extensive body of newspaper cuttings can also be found in RA VIC/MAIN/M/64 and 66. Many press notices and magazine articles, as well as selected sermons and poetry, were collected by William Thomas Kime and published in a handsome large-format edition with embossed gold covers, as Albert the Good: A Nation’s Tribute of Affection to the Memory of a Truly Virtuous Prince, London: J. F. Shaw & Co., 1862.
45. Vincent, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, p. 180. Cecil Y. Lang, ed., Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. 2, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996, p. 111; Wyndham, Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, pp. 422, 423.
46. ‘Descriptions of the death of the Prince Consort, 1861’.
47. Ibid.
48. Maxwell, Life and Letters of the 4th Earl of Clarendon, p. 255; RA VIC/ADDC6, Lady Geraldine Somerset diaries: 15 and 16 December 1861.
49. Weibe, Benjamin Disraeli Letters, vol. 8, p. 156, letter to Lady Londonderry, 19 December 1861.
50. Wake, Princess Louise, p. 45.
51. Dennison, Princess Beatrice, p. 26; Arkhiv der Hessischen Hausstiftung, Briefe 7.1/1-BA 3; letter of 19 December 1861.
52. Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 23.
53. Ibid., pp. 24, 25.
54. Wake, Princess Louise, p. 45.
55. ‘Descriptions of the death of the Prince Consort, 1861’.
56. Ibid; Longford, Victoria RI, p. 308.
57. Longford, Victoria RI, p. 308.
58. Jerrold, The Widowhood of Queen Victoria, p. 11.
59. Downer, Queen’s Knight, p. 40; Tisdall, Queen Victoria’s Private Life, p. 50.
60. Corti, English Empress, p. 77.
61. Benson & Esher, III: 473–4.
62. Smith & Howitt, Cassells’ Illustrated History of England, p. 589.
63. Daily Telegraph, 19 December 1861.
64. Cowley, Paris Embassy, p. 228.
65. Observer, 16 December 1861.
66. Lyn MacDonald, ed., Florence Nightingale’s Theology, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2002, p. 365.
Chapter 7: ‘Will They Do Him Justice Now?’
1. See Kate Williams, Becoming Queen, London: Hutchinson, 2008, pp. 116–23, and Schor, Bearing the Dead, ch. 6, ‘A Nation’s Sorrows’, for an account of the mourning for Princess Charlotte. For royal funeral conventions, see Curl, Victorian Celebration of Death, pp. 224–5.
2. Lady’s Newspaper, 21 December 1861.
3. The will is as quoted in Corti, English Empress, p. 77. In it Albert nominated Victoria as executrix and provided for the distribution of the extensive property he had acquired in the UK, but it was never lodged at the wills registry at Somerset House and probate was therefore never formally granted. The full details of its contents were never revealed, for the Queen refused to allow it to be published, prompting later rumbling accusations of Albert’s avariciousness in his acquisition of wealth as consort.
4. See the Appendix to this book, ‘What Killed Prince Albert?’
5. The practice of embalming royal corpses had been discontinued by the time of Albert’s death, hence the prompt sealing-down of the coffin on the evening of the 16th. See RA LC/LCO/CER/MEMO/Private Memoranda Ceremonials/93: Funeral of HRH the Prince Consort, Windsor, December 23rd 1861 – Lord Chamberlain’s Account. For the coffins, see Walford, Life of the Prince Consort, pp. 112–13.
6. PRO LC 1-90-007, 17 December 1861. Drugget was a thick felted fabric of wool and/or cotton used as a floor covering.
7. Morning Post, 21 December 1861. Banting had also made the state coffin for the Duke of Wellington in 1852. The firm of Thomas and William Banting was one of the most prosperous London undertakers. William (1796–1878), who succeeded his father, died a very rich man with an estate valued at around £70,000 (equivalent to £3.3 million today), and is also notable as the originator of probably the first Atkins-type high-protein diet, which he devised to combat his own increasingly uncomfortable obesity. Published in 1863 as ‘A Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public’, it highlighted the dangers of excess sugar and fat in the diet and ran into four editions by 1869. Banting donated the profits to charity. The firm held the Royal Warrant for funerals until 1928; his sons organised Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901.
8. See Wolffe, Great Deaths, pp. 17–20, 194, 202–3.
9. RA LC/LCO/CER/MEMO/Private Memoranda Ceremonials/95: Funeral of HRH the Prince Consort, Windsor, December 23rd 1861 – Lord Chamberlain’s Account.
10. The accounts of the Prince’s funeral were extensive, with many papers running syndications of those in The Times and the Daily Telegraph of 24 December, which are the most detailed and graphic. Sala’s highly colourful, Gothic account for the Telegraph can also be found as Appendix II to Duff, Albert and Victoria, pp. 270–84.
11. Argyll, Autobiography and Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 184; Hardman, Mid-Victorian Pepys, p. 69.
12. Information from Paul Frecker. See also Photographic News, 28 February 1862, pp 104, 108.
13. Hudson, Munby, p. 111.
14. Cooke, Memoir of Princess Mary Adelaide, p. 379; Smith & Howitt, Cassells’ Illustrated History of England, p. 589.
15. Downer, Queen’s Knight, p. 127.
16. Elve
y, Sir George Elvey, p. 183. Croft’s settings of the burial service were composed for the funeral of Queen Anne in 1714; both these chants or ‘sentences’ formed part of the funeral service for Princess Diana at Westminster Abbey in 1997.
17. RA LC/LCO/CER/MEMO/Private Memoranda Ceremonials/93: Funeral of HRH the Prince Consort, Windsor, December 23rd 1861 – Lord Chamberlain’s Account.
18. Jerrold, Widowhood of Queen Victoria, p. 11; Elvey, Sir George Elvey, pp. 183–4; The Times, 24 December.
19. The Times, 24 December; Dasent, Delane, p. 40.
20. Duff, Hessian Tapestry, p. 73.
21. Dasent, Delane, p. 40; Playfair, Memoirs, p. 190; Ashwell, Life of the Right Rev Samuel Wilberforce, vol. 3, p. 44; Prothero, Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, p. 61.
22. Darby, Cult of the Prince Consort, p. 1; Hardman, Mid-Victorian Pepys, p. 70; Bell’s Life in London, 29 December 1861.
23. O’Brien, Correspondence of Lord Overstone, vol. II, p. 980.
24. Wolffe, Great Deaths, pp. 84, 97–8.
25. RA VIC/MAIN/R/2/22.
26. RA VIC/MAIN/R/2/15; Wolffe, Great Deaths, p. 195.
27. Jewish Chronicle, 27 December; Loewe, Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, p. 13; John Purves, ed., Letters from the Cape, London: Oxford University Press, 1921, p. 68.
28. Punch, 21 December 1861.
29. Lee, Queen Victoria, vol. 2, p. 320; Wiebe, Benjamin Disraeli Letters, p. 164.
30. Stockmar, Memoirs of Baron Stockmar, vol. 1, p. xviii; RA VIC/MAIN/M/64/28: letter of 9 January 1862. The existing German Confederation, created at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, consisted of thirty-eight states. They were finally unified under Bismarck, ten years after Albert’s death, in 1871.
Chapter 8: ‘How Will the Queen Bear It?’
1. Fulford, Dearest Mama, pp. 26, 28; Sheppard, George Duke of Cambridge, p. 223.
2. RA VIC/MAIN/R/1/181, Phipps to Lord Sydney: 22 December 1861; Sheppard, George Duke of Cambridge, vol. 1, p. 224.
3. RA VIC/MAIN/R/1/193: 23 December 1861 – letter written by Madame Hocédé.
4. Arkhiv der Hessischen Hausstiftung, Briefe 7.1/1-BA 3; letter of 19 December 1861.
5. RA VIC/ADDA8/377, letter from Miss Ella Taylor, 7 January 1862, p. 5; Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 27.
6. Noel, Princess Alice, p. 77; Arkhiv der Hessischen Hausstiftung, Briefe 7.1/1-BA 3: 20 December; RA VIC/MAIN/M/64/6: 22 December 1861.