45. Fulford, Darling Child, p. 20.
46. Tisdall, Unpredictable Queen, p. 113.
47. Kuhn, Henry and Mary Ponsonby, p. 155; Magnus, Gladstone, p. 211.
48. RA VIC/ADDC18, Lady Macclesfield letter: 29 November 1871.
49. Lant, Insubstantial Pageant, p. 29.
50. Weintraub, Victoria, p. 400.
51. Battiscombe, Queen Alexandra, p. 120.
52. For details of the fraught discussions with Gladstone over the arrangements, see Kuhn, Democratic Royalism, pp. 39–47.
53. Kuhn, ‘Ceremony and Politics’, pp. 153–4; Lant, Insubstantial Pageant, pp. 28–9.
54. Windsor & Bolitho, p. 151.
55. For discussion of the Thanksgiving Service, see e.g. The Times, Daily News, Daily Telegraph, 28 February 1872. It was also exhaustively reported in the popular weeklies, notably the Illustrated London News, which produced some thirty engravings depicting the celebrations over four issues between 24 February and 16 March. A useful summary of the press response is ‘Epitome of Opinion in the Morning Journals’, in Pall Mall Gazette for 28 February. See also, Lant, Insubstantial Pageant, pp. 26–33; Kuhn, ‘Ceremony and Politics’.
56. Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, vol. 2, p. 127.
57. Cullen, Empress Brown, pp. 159–61; Reid, Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid, p. 190; Morris, ‘Illustrated Press’, p. 120. The limited number of police on duty that day were totally unable to marshal the vast crowds surging forward to catch sight of the Queen, particularly at Ludgate Hill and Temple Bar – at which latter three people were suffocated to death in the crush. Reynolds’s claimed that six people in all were killed that day and a hundred seriously hurt, with 227 being hospitalised. See issue for 3 March 1872: ‘Tuesday’s Tomfoolery’ and ‘Accidents at the Thanksgiving’.
58. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 216.
59. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 3 March 1872.
60. Gavard, A Diplomat in London, pp. 96–7.
61. Ibid., p. 97; Hudson, Munby, p. 305.
62. Hudson, Munby, p. 305; Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, vol. 2, p. 127.
63. Buckle, II: 195.
64. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 216.
65. Reid, Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid, p. 190; Hudson, Munby, p. 305.
66. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 25 February 1872.
67. Fulford, Darling Child, p. 31.
68. The Times, 28 February 1872.
69. Ibid.; Lloyd’s Weekly and Reynolds’s Newspaper, 3 March 1872.
70. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 227.
71. Ibid.; Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, vol. 2, p. 128.
72. The Times, 20 March 1872.
73. Bailey, Diary of Lady Frederick Cavendish, vol. 2, p. 129; Cullen, Empress Brown, p. 156.
Chapter 15: Albertopolis
1. Williams, Contentious Crown, pp. 49–50: National Reformer, 21 January and 25 February 1872.
2. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 228.
3. Ibid., pp. 228–9.
4. Tisdall, Queen Victoria’s Private Life, p. 105.
5. See e.g. Williams, Contentious Crown, p. 209.
6. Parkes, Recovery from Bereavement, contains a fascinating case study of the Queen’s grief. See especially pp. 129–31, 134–5, 138–42.
7. Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto IX, in Ricks, Poems of Tennyson, vol. 2, p. 328.
8. Hibbert, Letters and Journals, p. 229.
9. Ibid.
10. Parkes, Recovery from Bereavement, p. 153.
11. Mallet, Life With Queen Victoria, p. 52.
12. Ibid., p. 122.
13. Ibid., p. 44.
14. See ‘The Widow at Windsor’, in Rappaport, Queen Victoria, pp. 407–11.
15. Craik, Fifty Golden Years, p. 45.
16. ‘Letter from the Queen to Her People’ on the occasion of her Jubilee, 24 June 1887, published in Lloyd’s Weekly News, 26 June 1887.
17. Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto XC, in Ricks, Poems of Tennyson, vol. 2, p. 408; A. S. Byatt, ‘The Congugial Angel’, in Angels and Insects, London: Vintage, 1995, p. 177.
18. H. G. Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866), vol. 1, London: Victor Gollancz, 1934, p. 46.
19. Percy Lubbock, Shades of Eton, London: Jonathan Cape, 1929, pp. 122–3.
20. Fulford, Your Dear Letter, p. 121
21. Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto CVI, in Ricks, Poems of Tennyson, vol. 2, p. 427.
22. The Royal Mausoleum, open to the public once a year on the nearest Wednesday to Queen Victoria’s birthday of 24 May, is now, sadly, closed indefinitely to the public, due to structural problems.
23. Weintraub, Victoria, p. 324.
24. For a detailed description of the many later memorials to Albert, see Darby & Smith, Cult of the Prince Consort. See also entries on Albert Memorial; Frogmore; Royal Albert Hall; Victoria and Albert Museum in Rappaport, Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion
25. Stanford, Recollections of Sir Gilbert Scott, pp. 263, 264, 267.
26. Gavard, Diplomat in London, pp. 36–7.
27. ‘Mark Twain’s 1872 English Journal’, in Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith, eds, Mark Twain’s Letters, 1872–1873, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
28. E. Beresford Chancellor, Life in Regency and Early Victorian Times, London: Batsford, 1926, p. 46. For a full account of the restoration project, see Chris Brooks, The Albert Memorial: The Prince Consort National Memorial, Its History, Contexts and Conservation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
29. Strachey, Queen Victoria, pp. 187–8.
30. See Williams, Contentious Crown, pp. 126–7. Criticism of the extent of Stockmar’s influence over Albert and the levels of the Prince’s interference in government foreign policy during the Crimean War was prompted by revelations in the third volume of Martin’s biography. See ‘The Crown and the Cabinet: Five Letters on the Biography of the Prince Consort’, published pseudonymously in The Times by Henry Dunckley as ‘Verax’ in 1878.
31. Warwick, Afterthoughts, pp. 3–4.
32. Aronson, Grandmama of Europe, p. 12. Victoria assumed the Latin title after 1876.
33. Henry James, Portraits of Places, Boston: James Osgood & Co., 1883, p. 310–11.
34. Williams, Contentious Crown, p. 210.
35. Grey, Early Years of the Prince Consort, p. 322.
36. Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 295.
Epilogue: Christmas 1878
1. Noel, Princess Alice, p. 120.
2. Bennett, Queen Victoria’s Children, p. 63.
3. Alice, Princess of Great Britain, p. 125.
4. Noel, Princess Alice, pp. 224–5.
5. Alice, Princess of Great Britain, p. 37. An account of the illness of Princess Alice and her children, written by her close friend Miss McBean, is on pp. 32–44.
6. Ibid., p, 41.
7. RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1878: 12 December.
8. Buckle, III: 653–4.
9. Alice, Princess of Great Britain, p. 44.
10. RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1878: 14 December.
11. Ibid.
12. The exquisite effigy of a recumbent Alice clasping her dead daughter May was executed in white marble by Boehm and was placed near her father’s sarcophagus in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore, in time for the first anniversary of Alice’s death in 1879.
13. The Times, 17 December 1878.
14. Richard Hough, Advice to a Grand-Daughter: Letters from Queen Victoria to Princess Victoria of Hesse, London: Heinemann, 1975, p. 10
15. Epton, Victoria and Her Daughters, p. 155.
16. RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1878: 19 December.
17. The Times, 28 December 1878.
18. Buckle, Life of Disraeli, vol. I, p. 341. Two more of Victoria’s children died during her lifetime: Leopold in 1884 and Affie in 1900. Vicky outlived her mother only by seven months, dying of cancer in August 1901. A further tragic family
death from diphtheria followed soon after Alice’s, in April 1879, when Vicky’s fourth son, Waldemar, died of the disease. The birth, in 1896, of Prince Albert, the future George VI, on the same day – 14 December – would add to the talismanic significance of the date for the royal family. Five months after Alice’s death Queen Victoria took it into her head to try to marry Princess Beatrice off to Alice’s widower, Louis, so that she could mother her dead sister’s children, for the most part in England. She even persuaded Disraeli to try and get the law changed, permitting marriage with a sister-in-law, but it was thrown out by the House of Lords. See Mary Lutyens, ed., Lady Lytton’s Court Diary, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961, p. 47.
19. RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1878: 31 December. Victor Emmanuel II of Italy died on 9 January 1878; Pope Pius IX died on 7 February 1878. HMS Eurydice, a British training frigate, sank in a storm off the Isle of Wight on 24 March 1878; her crew of 376 drowned. In 1878 two assassination attempts were made in quick succession against Emperor Wilhelm of Prussia: on 11 May and 2 June. The German armoured frigate Grosse Kurfürst was damaged in a collision and sunk off Folkestone during manoeuvres on 31 May 1878; 284 of her crew drowned. George V of Hanover – the only son of the Queen’s cousin, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland – died on 12 June 1878. María de las Mercedes d’Orléans, Queen Consort of Spain, died on 26 June 1878, of tuberculosis aged eighteen. The Second Anglo-Afghan War broke out in September 1878 and lasted till 1880.
Appendix: What Killed Prince Albert?
1. Fulford, Prince Consort, p. 270.
2. Walford, Life of the Prince Consort, p. 106
3. Morning Chronicle, 19 December; Medical Times and Gazette, 21 December, pp. 640–2.
4. For medical thinking on typhoid in the Victorian period, see: Alexander Duane, ed., A Dictionary of Medicine and the Allied Sciences, 3rd edn, New York: Leah Brothers, 1900, pp. 610–11; and Dr Montague Murray, ed., Quain’s Dictionary of Medicine, rev. edn, London: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1902, pp. 1764–7. Anne Hardy, The Epidemic Streets: Infectious Disease and the Rise of Preventive Medicine, 1856–1900, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, has useful background on the incidence of typhoid fever in the 1860s.
5. Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria, p. 424.
6. Murray, ed., Quain’s Dictionary of Medicine, p. 1766.
7. Morning Chronicle, 20 December 1861.
8. The Lancet, 28 December 1861 and 11 January 1862.
9. Irish Temperance Journal, 1863, vol. 1, pp. 57–8; British Journal of Homoeopathy, 1862, vol. 20, pp. 174–5.
10. For Stockmar’s communication with the royal pharmacist Peter Squire, see Dr G. C. Williamson, Memoirs in Miniature: A Volume of Random Reminiscences, London: Grayson & Grayson, 1933, pp. 253–4; Weintraub, Uncrowned King, pp. 426, 456. Thanks to the recommendation of Dr James Clark, Squire & Son had been appointed royal chemists on the Queen’s accession in 1837. Squire’s prescription and account book containing details of his supplies to the royal family for 1861–9 is in the archive of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. It lists both regular monthly supplies and additional, variable orders, but unfortunately does not specify for whom particular medicines were intended. After Albert’s death a large consignment of twenty bottles of smelling salts was sent by Squire’s on 17 December, no doubt to deal with the flood of exhausted feelings among the ladies of the royal household at the Prince’s death.
11. Longford, ‘Queen Victoria’s Doctors’, p. 83.
12. Villiers, Vanished Victorian, p. 311; Cowley, Paris Embassy p. 229.
13. Longford, ‘Queen Victoria’s Doctors’, pp. 85–6.
14. Arkhiv der Hessischen Hausstiftung: Briefe 7.1/1-BA 3: letters from Crown Prince Frederick, 19 and 20 December 1961.
15. In the medical press the following articles appeared concurring on the diagnosis of typhoid: Kevin Anderson, ‘Death of a Prince Consort’, Medical Journal of Australia, 9 November 1968, pp. 865–7. A. G. W. Whitfield, in his ‘The Last Illness of the Prince Consort’, Journal of the Royal College of Physicians, vol. 12, no. 1, 1977, pp. 96–102, offers a loose argument for typhoid, but with no compelling evidence. Michael Robbins in ‘The Missing Doctor: An “If” of Victorian Medical History’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol. 90, March 1997, pp. 163–5, argues that had Albert’s talented new physician Dr William Baly not been killed in an accident in January 1861, the course of the Prince’s treatment – demanding complete bed rest and the removal of all stress, including the demands of the Trent affair – might have been different. For an interesting overview of Queen Victoria’s relationship with Dr Clark, see Longford, ‘Queen Victoria’s Doctors’.
16. See Bennett, King without a Crown, pp. 371, 381–2.
17. Weintraub, Victoria, pp. 295–301, and Weintraub, Uncrowned King, pp. 435, 456.
18. The Lancet, 21 December 1861; Medical Times and Gazette, 11 January 1862. The French source for the latter article would appear to be L’Union médicale, 7 January 1862, vol. 13, no. 2, p 17.
19. J. W. Paulley, ‘The Death of Albert Prince Consort: The case against typhoid fever’, Quarterly Journal of Medicine, vol. 86, 1993, pp. 837–41.
20. See Sotnik, The Coburg Conspiracy, London: Ephesus Publishing, 2008, Ch. 18, ‘Albert’s Paternity’.
21. Charles N. Bernstein, Sunny Singh, Lesley A. Graff, John R. Walker, Mary S. Cheang. ‘A prospective population-based study of triggers of flares of IBD’, Gastroenterology, 2009; 136 suppl 1: A1106.
22. After Albert’s death Victoria found a comment in his diary in which he said he had not slept for 14–16 days, as she later told Lord Clarendon – see Clarendon Papers, Bodleian Library Special Collections, Ms Eng. e. 2123, 5 February 1862.
23. Charlot, Victoria, the Young Queen, p. 421.
24. For further discussion of Crohn’s, see: S. P. L. Travis and N. Mortensen, ‘Anorectal and Colonic Crohn’s Disease’, in J.-C. Givel, N. C. Mortensen and B. Roche, eds, Anorectal and Colonic Diseases: A Practical Guide to Their Management (3rd edn), London: Springer, 2010, pp. 501–12.
25. Both the temperance and the homoeopathic medicine movements took a particular interest in the circumstances of the Prince’s death, which provided them with an occasion for critiques of conventional allopathic methods. The Water-Cure Journal of 1865 (vols 39–40, p. 140) boldly stated that ‘Alcoholic medication killed the Prince Consort’.
26. Letter to the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, 9 April 1857, in James, Albert, p. 254.
Index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Abercorn, Lady
Aberdeen
Aberdeen, Lord
Aboyne
Act of Settlement (1701)
Adams, Charles Frances
Adelaide, Queen
Affie see Alfred (Affie), Prince
Afghan War
Ailesbury, Lord
Albert, Prince
early life
first meeting with V
V falls in love with
feelings about his future life in England
departure from his homeland
debate about his cost to the nation
marries V
early years of married life
changing role of
domestic life
and his children’s upbringing
personality
wide-ranging interests
heavy workload
and Great Exhibition
perception of his role
and foreign affairs
elevated to title of Prince Consort
health problems
sense of isolation
growing melancholy and pessimism
anxiety about Bertie
visit to Coburg
at Christmas 1860
New Year’s Eve
and Duchess of Kent’s death
reaction to death of his father
at Duchess of Kent’s funeral
concerned about V’s grief
acts as Duchess of Kent’s executor
fulfils official duties while V is in mourning
visits Ireland
travels to Balmoral
holiday at Balmoral
attitude to death
concerns about Leopold
affected by deaths of Pedro and Ferdinand in Portugal
shocked by Bertie’s scandalous behaviour
visit to Sandhurst
spends the day shooting
goes to Madingley Hall to talk with Bertie
final illness
death
causes of death
V’s reaction to death of
news of death becomes public
response of his children to death of
messages of condolence
body laid out
V tries to preserve look and memory of
public response to death of
mourning for
newspaper coverage
V does not remain at Windsor for funeral of
V chooses site of mausoleum for
items placed in coffin of
funeral arrangements
sales of engravings and cartes de visite of
funeral
public grief shown on day of his funeral
Tennyson asked to write something in memory of
Christmas following the death of
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 41