Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life

by Lucy Worsley

  It was hope that was misplaced. Some time between ten and eleven that night there was another change in Albert’s breathing. The doctors gave up trying to dose him with alcohol to raise his heartbeat. They’d resorted to using a sponge to dribble it between his lips, but he’d ‘cried out and resisted the brandy so much that they did not give it any more’.

  By this point, in the late evening, Victoria was in the Red Room next door, where she ‘sat down on the floor in utter despair’.68 But Alice was still at her post, and noticed a new rasping note in her father’s throat. ‘That is the death rattle,’ she whispered.69 It was essential to call Victoria back in. She was there at once. She ‘started up like a Lioness’, wrote one of her ladies, ‘rushed by every one, and bounded on the bed imploring him to speak and to give one kiss to his little wife’.70

  Then, as Victoria tells us,

  two or three long but perfectly gentle breaths were drawn, the hand clasping mine and (oh! It makes me sick to write it) all, all, was over … I stood up, kissed his dear heavenly forehead & called out in a bitter & agonising cry ‘Oh! my dear Darling!’ and then dropped on my knees in mute distracted despair, unable to utter a word or shed a tear!71

  ‘Oh yes,’ people heard her say. ‘This is death. I know it. I have seen this before.’

  Now other people have to take up her story. In the gloomy Blue Room everyone knelt down on the floor: the queen and her elder children, ‘the Leiningens, Phipps, Grey, Biddulph, Robert, the Dean, the Duchess, Miss Hildyard and I’, wrote Lady Augusta Bruce. They all watched ‘in agonised silence, the passing of that lofty and noble soul’.72 They had to experience the harrowing sight of Victoria falling upon Albert’s body and calling him ‘by every endearing name’.73 She was seen ‘throwing herself with both her arms extended on the corpse’. She ‘almost screamed Oh! Duchess! he is dead! he is dead! Oh! Albert! and gave way to a fearful but short paroxysm of agony.’74

  Victoria stayed there for some time, clasping Albert’s body, and refusing to let go. Finally, ‘it was thought better by the Dean and one of the Physicians to remove her by force’ and to take her next door.75 Her pharmacist had earlier provided four stoppered bottles of smelling salts.76 Victoria now lay on the Red Room’s sofa, and gathered her children round her, hugging them, and telling them ‘she would endeavour, if she lived, to live for them and her duty’.77 Even Bertie was pitifully contrite. ‘Mama I will be all I can to you,’ he said.78

  Then Victoria went to see her sleeping baby Beatrice. Her dresser, Annie Macdonald, a witness to so much of the queen’s private life, said later that ‘it was an awful time – an awful time. I shall never forget it. After the Prince was dead, the Queen ran through the ante-room where I was waiting. She seemed wild. She went straight up to the nursery and took Baby Beatrice out of bed … she cried for days. It was heart-breaking to hear her.’79 As she went along the passage, Victoria was heard calling ‘Oh! Albert, Albert! are you gone!’80

  Only very late at night did Victoria give her intimate staff permission to undress her. ‘Oh, what a sight it was,’ wrote one of them, ‘to gaze upon her hopeless, helpless face, and see those most appealing eyes lifted up.’81 Victoria herself later recalled how her maids, Sophie Weiss, Emilie Dittweiler and Mary Andrews, ‘strove kindly to soothe her’, while Lady Augusta Bruce helped her into bed.82 There she did at last have ‘two hours of good sound sleep – worn out, I suppose, with tears and anxiety’.83 From this night on, Victoria would still always sleep with Albert in the form of his clothes: ‘his dear red dressing-gown beside her and some of his clothes on the bed’.84

  Victoria’s former governess Laddle perceptively noticed that the queen’s grief would be worse because ‘she has no friend to turn to’. ‘The worst, far the worst,’ Laddle continued, ‘is yet to come – the numberless, incessant wishes to “Ask the Prince,” to “Send for the Prince”, the never-failing joy, fresh every time, when he answered her call … her greatest delight was in obeying him.’85 ‘She is worse off than ordinary persons,’ thought Lord Clarendon, because ‘she is isolated.’86

  She had clasped his cold body because she could not bear to let him go. And something else Victoria could not easily bear to relinquish was the hold Albert had had over his wife’s life.

  PART THREE

  The Widow of Windsor

  18

  ‘Sewer-poison’: Sandringham, 13 December 1871

  ‘This really has been the worst day of all,’ wrote Victoria.1 It was ten years later, ten terrible years, a whole lost decade of mourning and despair. Outside Sandringham House, the grounds were white and grey, and the weather was ‘miserable and depressing, sloppy, snowy, windy and rainy’.2 Inside, Dr William Jenner was once again attending a royal patient who appeared to be suffering from typhoid fever. It was 13 December, just one single day before the dreaded anniversary of Albert’s death, and now Victoria’s eldest son and heir Bertie seemed likely likewise to die. The coincidence of the dates, Victoria told her journal, ‘filled us & believe the whole country with anxious forebodings and the greatest alarm’.3

  The previous weeks had been awful, full of warnings that ‘at any moment dear Bertie might go off, so that I had better come at once’.4 Victoria had been summoned several times to Sandringham, the comfortable, modern house that Bertie, now a married man, had built for himself in the middle of a flattish, northern Norfolk estate with excellent shooting.

  Since her arrival two weeks ago, Victoria had spent long hours watching and waiting in her eldest son’s blue and white bedroom, ‘the candles burning, & most dreary, Poor dear Bertie was lying there breathing heavily’.5 His condition was now so critical that at one o’clock in the morning of 13 December his doctors issued a bulletin to waiting journalists and well-wishers saying there was no change from the four updates they’d issued the previous day.6 At 3 a.m. he was breathing between forty-four and fifty times a minute, his pulse ‘quick’ and ‘feeble’. At 4.30 he was heard ‘moaning’ and ‘muttering’. ‘The strength is failing,’ his doctors’ notes admit.7

  Relationships within the royal family had grown so strained that Bertie’s doctors thought the sight of his relatives might upset him. So when Victoria visited her son’s bedroom, she had to remain ‘sitting behind the screen’. She sat there, silently, listening for long hours to his painful, ragged breathing. It sounded like he ‘must choke at any moment’.8 Dr Jenner’s opinion was that ‘the breathing had all along been the one thing that caused anxiety’. For Victoria, it was more than distressing. She was reminded ‘so vividly and sadly of my dearest Albert’s illness!’9

  In this year of 1871 it wasn’t just the Prince of Wales who was in desperately poor health. So, too, was the monarchy itself. Earlier in the year an anonymous pamphlet called What Does She Do With It? had caused a sensation. The work, probably written by radical politician George Otto Trevelyan, accused the queen of squirreling away public money from the Civil List to build up a private fortune. This was indeed an accurate accusation – she’d by now saved half a million pounds – though Trevelyan overstated his figures. The previous month of November had actually seen Charles Dilke making a speech calling outright for the monarchy’s abolition.10

  The situation had come about because some people thought Victoria had grown incapable of doing her job. In the years following Albert’s death, she’d been paralysed, almost incoherent with grief. ‘But oh!’ she wrote to her Uncle Leopold, that Albert should be ‘cut off in the prime of life … CUT OFF at forty-two – when I had hoped with such instinctive certainty that God never would part us … is too awful, too cruel!’11 She had lost the confidence to appear in public, retreating behind the walls of Windsor to the disappointment, and the increasing disrespect, of her subjects.

  Lord Clarendon, for one, believed that without sensible Albert, Victoria was utterly lost. ‘No other woman,’ he wrote, ‘has the same public responsibility or the same motive for being absolutely guided by the superior mind of her husband.’12 Once again, ins
iders began to worry that she would fall prey to the Hanoverian family madness. Florence Nightingale heard that the widowed Victoria was wasting away physically, ‘half the size she was’, and was unable to see more than one person at a time for fear of going insane.13 Dr Jenner, who had by now replaced the kindly Dr Clark as the queen’s chief medic, did not mince his words. ‘A species of madness’ had come upon her, he claimed, and it was ‘hopeless to contend’ with it. Her withdrawal from public appearances was due to ‘nervousness’, he thought. Meanwhile Lord Halifax considered that there was considerable ‘evidence of insanity’.14

  Part of this was genuine concern and pity for the queen’s grief; part was the perceived threat of the royal family’s hereditary ‘madness’ coming out in a new generation. But these fears were greatly amplified by the fact that Victoria was approaching that time of life when Victorian women in general were believed to lose control of themselves: the menopause.

  One Victorian doctor thought that forty-two, the age at which Victoria lost Albert, was the precise moment the period of danger began. Forty-two, he thought, was a significant milestone on the road ‘from the cradle to the grave’. From forty-two, wrote another doctor, ‘climacteric mania’ would begin, with its accompanying ‘nervousness’, ‘improper explosions of temper’ and ‘frantic feeling of delirium and loss of self-control’.15 Around 1865 Victoria did experience ‘flushings’ and ‘distressing restlessness’.16 Menopausal women, contemporary doctors hinted, would become sex maniacs. It is true that Victoria found herself physically bereft, desperately missing the touch of another human. There were so few people who could place consolatory hands upon a queen. ‘I could go mad from the desire and longing,’ she wrote.17 Victoria had a life-sized carving of Albert’s hand in marble, taken from a cast of his dead hand upon the day he died.18 Perhaps she grasped it still.

  But her daughter Alice believed that Victoria’s greatest challenge was the lasting sense of subordination she still felt she owed to Albert. Victoria once admitted to Alice that ‘she was afraid of getting too well – as if it were a crime & that she feared to begin to like riding on her Scotch poney etc.’19 Now Bertie’s illness, and the unfinished business of his presumed responsibility for Albert’s death, threatened to make matters still worse.

  Victoria had never taken the trouble to visit her son’s home at Sandringham until 29 November, when reports of Bertie’s worsening condition had brought her to Norfolk. It was a four-hour train journey to the railway station only a mile and a half away from the house. Today Sandringham feels much more remote, as the station has closed and it’s necessary to drive there through a flat forest of fir, bracken and birch.

  Alice, the natural nurse whose ministrations had eased her father’s last days, had suggested that her mother should not be summoned. She had experience of the unhelpful drama and tension that Victoria could bring to a sickroom. Victoria came nevertheless, but when Bertie seemed to improve, she left. An urgent telegram from his doctors, announcing a relapse, brought her back on 8 December.20 ‘If he lives until Her Majesty comes I shall be satisfied,’ said Dr Jenner, giving up on his patient’s life.21 ‘She looked so small and miserable – poor poor thing,’ wrote Augusta Bruce, who saw Victoria arriving at the house through the snow.22

  Victoria was physically much smaller than she’d been even two years before. Earlier in 1871, she had suffered a serious illness, probably a swelling of the arm following a bee sting. Dr Jenner had brought in the shy but brilliant Professor Joseph Lister to drain the abscess and spray the wound with carbolic acid, a pioneering technique he had developed to prevent infection.23 A surviving mourning dress from 1862, the year following Albert’s death, reveals that even after nine children her waist was still a slender thirty-two inches. During her illness of 1871, an additional throat infection left Victoria unable to eat, and she lost two stones in weight after several days of being ‘fed like a baby’.24 In 1871, she must have, at fifty-three, once again been very slight. It’s sometimes believed that Victoria gained weight in an immediate emotional response to Albert’s death, but her well-known late-life rotundity in fact dates from much later.

  As she arrived at Sandringham House, Victoria was of course dressed in black. Any widow would have been expected to wear mourning for a full year after her husband’s death. But after that Victoria made the unusual decision never to wear colour again. ‘My dress is always the same,’ she explained to Vicky in Germany. Now Vicky was married, and safely distant across the sea, Victoria confided in her as if her daughter were an adult friend. And in one letter to Vicky, she claimed mourning as ‘the dress which I have adopted for ever, for mine’.25

  There were many good reasons why the Victorians embraced mourning. People wearing black were instantly identifiable as needing special consideration for their bereaved status. Then again, an increasingly consumerist society pressurised people into thinking that they constantly needed to buy new clothes for each new situation. And mourning clothes were themselves becoming easier and cheaper to make: the Courtauld firm of crêpe-makers achieved astonishing commercial success with a ‘secret’ industrial process for producing the crêpe that weighed down widows’ weeds.26

  Yet Victoria was extraordinary in her dedication to black. If wearing mourning was a demand for greater-than-usual understanding, it’s certainly true that she felt entitled to it for the rest of her life. Mourning was turned into a sort of disguise for her. It indicated that she was a victim, bereaved, which was a way of pre-empting criticism. And within the conventions of black, Victoria insisted that her clothes be cut in a way that she found comfortable and convenient: a bodice with only light boning, a skirt with capacious pockets. She no longer followed fashion; she had created a fashion all her own.

  Victoria’s black clothing also had terrific ‘brand value’ in creating a recognisable royal image. Although she rarely appeared in person, Victoria’s physical appearance was more widely known than ever before. In 1860, she and Albert had taken the decision to allow photographs of themselves to be published on cartes de visite, highly collectible little rectangles of illustrated cardboard. Within two years, between three and four million of these cards depicting the queen had been sold.27 The people who bought them understood that they were in possession of something more potent than a lithograph or an engraving. The effect, in terms of making the queen’s subjects feel they ‘knew’ her, has been compared by the Royal Collection’s photography curator to the sensational 1969 television documentary series, Royal Family.28 So even if Victoria had been bodily absent from public life for the last decade, in paper form she had been more present than ever.29

  Bertie was also a very popular subject for the purchasers of cartes de visite, especially the ones that showed him with his beautiful Danish wife, Alix. He had, in the end, been unable to avoid marrying her. During Victoria’s stay at Sandringham, Alix too was constantly in and out of his bedroom.

  The first medical update sent to Victoria after she woke up on the miserable morning of 13 December indicated that Bertie ‘seemed very weak’ and his ‘breathing very imperfect & feeble’. He’d had ‘no rest all night, from the constant delirium’. Victoria got up quickly, ‘taking a mouthful of breakfast before hurrying to Bertie’s room’. As usual, she sat on a sofa behind a screen so he couldn’t see her.30

  Bertie was beleaguered even before he’d fallen ill. The 1870s hadn’t begun well for him. This was a decade characterised beyond the palace walls by a roaring economy and swanky excess. Despite his marriage, Bertie was still running around with the womanising ‘swells’ who’d introduced him to Nellie. The previous year had seen him drawn into the scandalous divorce of Sir Charles Mordaunt, and he’d even been forced to appear in court as a witness. In the end, nothing could be proved against Bertie beside having written a few innocuous letters to Sir Charles’s estranged wife. (This poor woman, Harriet, spent most of the rest of her life in a lunatic asylum.) But while Bertie may have been innocent of adultery, he was certainly gui
lty of bad judgement. His behaviour did not play well with public opinion. ‘In rude and general terms,’ wrote Prime Minister William Gladstone, the monarchy’s image problem lay in the fact that ‘the Queen is invisible and the Prince of Wales is not respected.’31

  Earlier in his illness, Bertie had admitted in a lucid moment to his sister Alice that he’d ‘led a very difficult life, but it was too late now’ to reform.32 His disease – the dreaded typhoid once more, with its high fever and convulsions of the bowels – had begun at his friend Lord Londesborough’s new seaside villa in Scarborough, Yorkshire. Londesborough had packed his rather badly built house with upper-crust guests. The drains could not cope. The two cesspools in the basement overflowed at high tide. A later investigation discovered that a pipe linked one of the cesspools directly to the water closet provided for Bertie’s use. Members of the medical profession later concluded that ‘the sewer-poison’, as they called it, must have come creeping up that pipe and into Bertie’s bathroom.33 Doctors still held that you could ‘inhale’ infection by breathing in a bad smell, the so-called miasmatic theory of disease. In reality, Bertie must have drunk water containing bacteria. On 1 December, news had reached Sandringham that a fellow guest of Bertie’s at Scarborough had died. So too had a stable boy employed in the house. It was chilling news for the family of the heir to the throne.