by Gillian Gill
In 1860 his unexpected brush with death came at a time when the prince consort was extremely tired and overworked, close to what we would now call a nervous breakdown. He felt as if he was careering down the road to death but could not find the nerve to jump off. That Albert was both depressed and overwrought was quite apparent to those around him in Coburg that fall. “God have mercy on us!” Stockmar said to Duke Ernest. “If anything serious should happen to him, he will die.” On his final day in Coburg, Albert and his brother took a walk. “At one of the most beautiful spots, Albert stood still and suddenly felt for his pocket handkerchief,” Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg remembered. “I went up to him and saw that the tears were trickling down his cheeks … he persisted in declaring that he was well aware that he had been here for the last time in his life.” The scene Duke Ernest paints is dramatic. We can imagine Albert weeping, saying he was sure he was going to die; Ernest, taken aback, sputtering the kind of banalities we still use for severely depressed people. Don’t be absurd. You are only forty years old. You have everything to live for. For pity’s sake, get a grip on yourself, brother.
To his wife too, Albert sometimes talked about death. He often told her “Ich hänge gar nicht am Leben; du hängst sehr daran [I really do not cling to life; you cling to it very hard] … I feel that I should make no struggle if I were ill—that I should give up at once.” Such remarks would make the Queen shudder, and then the prince would pull himself together.
The prince consort’s steep decline into ill health and depression can be charted from hundreds of extant paintings, drawings, and photographic images of him. The man aged astonishingly fast. It is as if youth and beauty were a costume he wore for ambition and then put away with relief once the Queen was won and the Saxe-Coburg dynasty in England was secured. The slim romantic hero of the early portraits, with his light mustache and intricately curled hair, soon gave way to the portly, balding, bristle-whiskered stockbroker of the daguerreotypes. Red leather hunting boots were retired in favor of stout shoes. Trousers and long frock coats replaced the body-hugging jackets and breeches. In the first known photographic image of the prince alone, a daguerreotype taken when he was twenty-two or twenty-three, he is already losing his hair, putting on weight, and looking melancholy. An 1855 photograph of Prince Albert at Osborne in his holiday clothes—short, cutaway coat, loud tweed trousers, checked waistcoat, and broad-brimmed hat—shows him strangely somber and preoccupied. At thirty-six years old, the man looks fifty.
Two astute female observers who were close to the royal couple peered behind the mask and suspected that all was not well with Prince Albert. Lady Lyttelton, the royal children’s governess, was startled to see the expression of melancholy that appeared on the prince’s face when he thought no one was watching him. Mary Bulteel Ponsonby Queen Victoria’s maid of honor and friend, was sure that Prince Albert was not a happy man.
Prince Albert aged so fast because he worked too hard and put far too much pressure on himself. His wife saw this but protested in vain. The prince’s labors at his desk were prodigious by any standards. During the Crimean War alone, his personal files amounted to forty bound volumes. Apart from the tiring state events he attended with his wife, the prince, as colonel to several regiments and chairman of a large number of charitable and arts organizations, also did a great deal of solo travel. Even for a man with a private train who could order a railway track cleared for his passage on any given day, these out-of-town engagements were an increasing drain. The ceremonial dinners, when the prince was obliged to respond to a string of long speeches and toasts, were both boring and stressful. Committed to reforming the English armed forces, Albert not infrequently found himself standing for hours in pouring rain on a parade ground or an artillery field. Chilled to the bone, he would develop a feverish cold, feel wretched for days, but continue with his crowded schedule. Albert was forever hurrying back to his wife late at night in foul weather, exhausted. His main relaxation was chasing stags.
By 1860, the demands on his time had ratcheted up so far that the prince consort had ceased to take pleasure in work. Insomnia troubled him more and more, and he found it impossible to relax. In May of that year, the royal family was as usual at Osborne, “in the enjoyment of the most glorious air, the most fragrant odours, the merriest choirs of birds, and the most luxuriant verdure,” as the prince reported to his daughter in Berlin. Osborne was the earthly paradise that Albert had created for his family, but he couldn’t just admit how desperately he needed to rest, soak up the sun, breathe in the scents from his beloved shrubs, and listen to the birds he could identify by call. “Were there not so many things that reminded one of the so-called world (that is to say, of miserable men) one might give oneself up wholly to the enjoyment of the real world,” he continued to Vicky. “There is no such good fortune, however, for poor me; and this being so, one’s feelings remain under the influence of the treadmill of never-ending business. The donkey at Carisbrook [harnessed to a treadmill], which you will remember, is my true counterpart. He, too, would rather munch thistles in the Castle Well; and small are the thanks he gets for his labour.”
Yet no one bound Albert to a life of unending toil. Unlike the Carisbrook donkey, he could have unstrapped himself from the treadmill and munched daisies to his heart’s content. Other kings and princes had no problem getting away and relaxing. Even Uncle Leopold took time for himself and felt no guilt over his pleasures. England benefited from the prince consort’s dedication and intelligence, but it did not need his hand perpetually on the wheel. There were ministers and a parliament to steer the ship of state, and, by and large, they did a decent job of it. Even Palmerston and Gladstone, men of legendary strength, energy, and efficiency, did not work all the time. They knew a great deal but did not find it necessary to be expert on everything from Schleswig-Holstein to sfumato.
But to stop work for more than a few days, to refuse more responsibilities, to delegate, above all to ask his wife to take on more of the duties that were in fact hers constitutionally, would have destroyed the prince’s sense of self. He was Atlas, bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders.
The prince spent much of his day writing down the ideas and facts that teemed in his brain, but he was not prone to self-analysis or self-doubt. He considered his wife slightly mad because she dwelled so much on her feelings and needed to “have things out.” He graded Victoria in written memoranda on what he saw as her advances in sociability and self-control, sure he was doing her a service. But, once Stockmar retired to Coburg for good, no one performed the same service for him. Albert loved his brother, Ernest, but could neither trust nor respect him. After the deaths of Anson and Peel, there was no friend in England to suggest to the prince that he might be destroying his health, happiness, and long-term usefulness in the pursuit of the chimera of indispensability Albert certainly felt able to confide in his wife, but she mirrored his exalted opinion of himself and was usually ignored when she ventured to disagree or demur.
Albert criticized Victoria for being vain, self-absorbed, antisocial, neurotic, and weak, yet, ironically, these were more his faults than hers. The Queen, as Lady Lyttelton once observed, had a vein of iron. She was small, but she was strong, producing nine children without, apparently, a miscarriage. She was healthy even when she was pregnant, and she recovered quickly from colds and attacks of what she called rheumatism as well as from the mumps, measles, and scarlet fever she caught from her children. Above all, Victoria’s sense of self was strongly grounded in reality despite the isolation she complained of so often. She was spoiled and headstrong, but she could listen, she could reach out, she could at times at least see herself as others saw her. She admitted her passionate nature and gave vent to her emotions. She knew she was not perfect and was quick to apologize and atone. She knew how to relax and delegate, rest and recover.
Convinced of his own perfections, injured by the world’s failure to recognize them, Prince Albert maintained a steely composure and was alw
ays unwell. He hid his hurt feelings under a smile that deceived no one and alienated many. He took refuge from emotion in an ever-accelerating workload. He had to feel master of his world. For a man whose health had always been precarious, this was double jeopardy.
AS AN ADULT, Albert was a tall and strong man, a dedicated and accomplished sportsman famous for dashing full tilt along the endless corridors at Windsor. To attract the young Queen Victoria, he had needed to be in superb physical shape. But the prince’s strength and vigor in 1839 had been acquired by a massive effort of will. As a child, he had often been ill with colics, coughs, and fevers, and therefore subjected to the debilitating medical procedures and pharmaceuticals of his time. He needed an unusual amount of sleep. Even as a late teenager, Albert was so easily tired that Stockmar wondered if he was up to the destiny his family planned for him.
Gastric problems troubled Albert all his life. Once he arrived in England, these were exacerbated by the local cuisine, though he soon began to gain weight. In England he also suffered chronically from what he called “catarrh,” “fever,” and “rheumatism.” The polluted air of London probably accounted for the chronic catarrh, or runny nose. The constant fevers and chills may have been due to a contaminated water supply, since the waste-disposal systems at both Windsor and Buckingham Palace were recognized by sanitation experts to be quite inadequate. Only in his personally designed new homes at Osborne and Balmoral, where the air was clean and the water pure, did the prince feel perfectly fit. As for the “rheumatism,” it also plagued Queen Victoria and their daughter Vicky at a very young age. Spending so many hours every day reading handwritten documents in poor light and writing with a quill pen was calculated to produce stiff joints and sore tendons.
After ten years of marriage, Prince Albert’s health got worse. By his own and his wife’s account, the prince’s labors over the Great Exhibition of 1851 left him close to collapse. From the end of 1854, when he was assailed in the press as a traitor, Albert remarked more and more often, especially in his letters to Stockmar, how very “fagged” and unwell he was feeling. He suffered appallingly from toothache and gum abscesses. At one point, he apologized to Prince William for not writing, saying that his arm and shoulder were so sore he could not hold a pen.
That his “kleines Fräuchen” was so much more resilient was a constant spur to the prince and an irritation. Victoria was both worried and annoyed by her husband’s unending stream of complaints about his health. Her diagnosis was that, like most men, he was a hypochondriac. The Queen had her own health fetishes, and they did not fit well with her husband’s ailments. Victoria insisted that her husband, and indeed all her family, open the windows and keep the rooms nice and cold. Fresh, cold air was her sovereign recipe for keeping well, and it certainly worked for her.
Albert never accustomed himself to the icy indoor conditions in the English royal homes. It is true that he had been trained as a child to suffer extreme cold without complaint, since riding for hours through a blizzard in a short jacket was Duke Ernest’s idea of manliness. But stoves kept the temperatures cozy inside German palaces. Eighteen years into his marriage, Prince Albert was rising at seven, donning a wig and a padded dressing gown, and shivering over the day’s documents. If he dared to have a small fire lit in his rooms, it had to be hastily extinguished as soon as his wife was up.
This matter of lighting fires was one of the silly knots that married people can get entangled in. Albert controlled all aspects of the royal household, and he was not slow to contradict his wife or give her orders. He could certainly have insisted on having a fire in his room. Instead he more or less obeyed his wife but felt free to complain to their daughter about her.
IF ALBERT HAD BEEN deeply depressed in October 1860, at Christmas that year he pulled himself together. The prince had wonderful memories of Christmases in his childhood, which his own father had stage-managed. For his wife, his children, and the entire household, he made Christmas into a fairy-tale event at Windsor Castle, with a huge tree glowing with candles, separate tables heaped up with presents for everyone, dancing, games, carols, and splendid feasts. The prince was the life and soul of the party as always, but the release in pressure lasted for days at most. In the New Year, as usual, one political crisis followed another, either at home or abroad, all requiring his constant attention, or so it seemed.
Family affairs also demanded more of the prince’s time than ever. Alice was now engaged to Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, and, to prepare her for her life in Germany, her father was trying to give her an hour of his time every night. Alice, like her older sister, was a talented and willing student, quite unlike her brother Bertie, and both father and daughter looked forward to their sessions. Unfortunately, the prince was often so busy that he had to cancel.
Leopold’s chronic ill health entered a critical phase. On one of his visits to London, Louis of Hesse came down with what the doctors diagnosed as measles. The illness was passed to the Queen and to eight-year-old Prince Leopold, who was ill for several weeks. Then, late in the fall, Leopold had a bad accident and a serious bleed. The Queen wrote to the Princess Royal in Germany how cross she was that the prince consort had insisted she attend a horticultural meeting with him, since Leopold had suffered one of his “bruises” and was very ill. “You say no one is perfect but Papa,” wrote Queen Victoria on October 1, 1861, “but he has his faults too. He is often very trying—in his hastiness and over-love of business.” On the advice of the doctors, the prince consort sent his ailing son off to the south of France for the winter, entrusting Leopold to an aging courtier, General Bowater. Within a day of arriving in Cannes, Bowater, aged seventy-four, was dead, leaving the child stranded in the care of servants and foreigners.
The problem with Leopold could not have come at a worse time, as Prince Albert was already coping with a full-scale domestic crisis. In March 1861, the Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mother, died. Her health had been poor for some years, but her death was nonetheless a shock. During her mother’s final illness, Victoria hovered by the bedside night and day, listening to the tick of her dead father’s watch. The duchess had always kept the watch by her, and it was the sound that had punctuated Victoria’s every night until her accession. The Queen was holding her mother’s hand when the duchess died. This was the first time Victoria had seen death at firsthand, and she was traumatized as well as bereft. Her husband led her gently away, in an agony of weeping.
Over the years of her marriage, the Queen had become increasingly fond of her mother. The duchess was always there in the background of her life, and she came to depend upon her more and more. With her mother as with no one else at court, the Queen could chat in confidence about her husband’s latest cold, problems with the children, scandals abroad. The duchess was very game for an old lady, and she still had fashion sense. For her May birthdays, the Queen could count on her mother to give her an especially becoming summer dress.
Victoria suffered a nervous breakdown after her mother died. As the prince consort reported grimly to his brother, the rumor that the Queen of England was going mad was circulating in the courts of Europe. Everywhere the Queen went, she missed the duchess’s familiar face and wept inconsolably. For some time, she would not come out of her rooms even for meals. She refused to engage in the business of state and found her children too irritating to bear. She was happiest making detailed plans for her mother’s tomb and going through her mother’s affairs. She read for the first time the letters her parents had exchanged in their brief marriage and discovered just how much she herself had been loved as a small child. She passionately regretted the ten years or so when she and her mother had been estranged.
The Queen’s twentieth-century English biographers found her grief weird and excessive, a prime example of the outdated sentimentality of the Victorian era. Today we are more inclined to believe that mothers and fathers must be mourned, since they cannot be replaced. We see that the death of even an unloving parent can occasion an
emotional crisis and a deep reevaluation of life. Today the Queen’s wrenching sorrow seems natural and right, since she and her mother had been so close for so long. Victoria was perhaps self-indulgent and extreme in her weeping, but her loss was great, and, in the end, she healed herself with tears.
The prince consort had also been very fond of the mother-in-law, who was also his aunt. The two had been friends and allies. She was one more lost link to his Coburg past. It was the first time he too had seen death at firsthand. But, unlike his wife, he had no time to dwell on his emotions. He had to comfort his shattered wife and try to get her back on her feet. He had to take up the administrative slack caused by Victoria’s breakdown. He had to settle his mother-in-law’s estate, since only two weeks before the duchess’s death, her old and trusted man of affairs Sir George Couper had died. People began to remark on how ill the prince consort looked. In his diary he wrote in June: “Am feverish, with pains in my limbs, and feel very miserable.” He kept going, but such bouts of illness recurred throughout the summer.
In August the Queen and the prince made a visit to Ireland, largely to visit their eldest son. By this point in his life, the Prince of Wales had been moved by his father from Oxford to Cambridge. Learning from his Oxford mistakes, the prince consort installed his son and entourage of governor, equerries, private tutors, and servants at Madingley Hall, some distance from the town. Albert went down to Cambridge as often as he could to check on his son and make sure that his instructions were being carried out.
