by Gillian Gill
But the Prince of Wales was fast approaching his twentieth birthday, and in a year he would have control over his personal fortune and his income under the civil list. Then he would be free to lead his life as he chose. To keep him in such tight leading strings seemed ill advised even to stern General Bruce, Bertie’s governor. An old military man who believed exposure to army life would be beneficial to the young man, Bruce persuaded Prince Albert to allow Bertie to spend the long vacation at the Curragh, a military camp in Killarney The price Albert had exacted for this indulgence was high. Bertie would have to show real good will in his studies and pass his exams. In Ireland, where he would be brevetted colonel without a regiment, he would be expected in ten weeks to acquire information and skills that career officers took years to master. He would once again have a separate household, not live with the other officers.
Leaping so many high hurdles would be a remarkable feat for anyone, and the Prince of Wales was an ordinary young man. He had been set up for failure, and, given his parents’ visit, the failure was horribly public. For a young man of great pride who had always hated even to be “chaffed” about his faults, the summer in Ireland was a cruel disappointment. Bertie saw himself as a soldier. As a boy, he had idolized the Duke of Wellington and read about the Napoleonic campaigns with passionate interest. Now he found it impossible even to get the men through a drill competently. The Queen commended the superior officers who in their reports on Bertie’s progress had refused to show preference to the heir to the throne. It was not a happy trip for parents or child.
In the fall, minus Vicky, Bertie, and Leopold—but plus Louis, now officially engaged to Alice—the royal family was again at Balmoral. The Queen began to revive. Remembering how their first “Great Expedition” in the Highlands had delighted his wife, the prince organized three more. These expeditions were challenging pony treks in the mountains, and two of them again involved incognito overnight stays at country inns. The Queen loved being outside all day on her darling Inchrory or some other pony, with Brown leading her over all the difficult places. She was cheerful when the rain came down and scrambled quickly up when she took a tumble walking on slick rock. She gloried in the scenery and tried to memorize the Gaelic name of every peak spread before her. She loved meeting strange innkeepers who were at first deceived by her assumed identity. Inevitably, to the Queen’s great hilarity, someone in the party would slip up and say “Your Majesty,” and the next morning a hurriedly assembled pipe band would salute their sovereign lady at breakfast. Victoria had the most fun ever, she wrote, and was ready at last to put aside her mourning.
Back at Windsor, the royal family celebrated the Prince of Wales’s twentieth birthday on November 9, but their joy was short lived. News came from Lisbon that King Pedro V of Portugal, twenty-five, and his brother and heir, Prince Ferdinand, had died of typhoid. The Court of St. James’s always went into deep mourning for a dead monarch, but this time the royal family’s mood matched the black of their dress. The two young men were the eldest sons of Victoria and Albert’s first cousin, Ferdinand Coburg-Kohary On his occasional meetings with his English relatives, Pedro managed to impress the prince consort as a golden young man. To Albert, Pedro seemed to be all that he wanted in a son and heir, all that Bertie was not. “The death of poor, good Pedro … has shaken me in an extraordinary way,” Albert wrote to King William of Prussia, “for I loved and valued him greatly, and had great hopes that his influence might contribute towards setting on its legs a State and a nation which has fallen low.” Queen Victoria confided to her diary: “My Albert loved [Pedro] like a son.” The prince consort was unable to sleep, felt horribly cold, and was racked with pain.
ONLY ONE DAY after the tragic news came from Lisbon, Prince Albert learned what others had known for some time: His son the Prince of Wales had become involved with an actress while in Ireland. A letter from Stock-mar broke the news, and for two days Albert gathered confirmatory details and brooded. On November 13, reluctantly, without giving her any of the “disgusting details,” Albert informed his wife of what he had learned. She was suitably horrified, exclaiming that she would hardly be able to look at her son without a shudder in future. Apparently, on the Prince of Wales’s last night at the Curragh camp, there was a great party, and some of his fellow officers, as a kind of joke, smuggled a young actress named Nellie Clifden into his quarters. When the prince returned to England, Nellie came to his Windsor residence.
His son Bertie had yielded to his lower nature. This was what the prince had long feared and struggled to prevent, and it shook him to the core. Must virtuous youths like Pedro die while sinful youths like Bertie lived on? If this was the lesson of life, it challenged everything Albert had lived for. Barely able to control his pen much less his thoughts, the prince consort wrote his son a long, intensely emotional letter. The news of the Clifden affair had caused him, he said, “the greatest pain I have yet felt in this life.”
Albert wrote that Bertie had not only lost his innocence but put the monarchy at risk. Prince Albert had heard that Miss Clifden was already known in the music halls of London as the Princess of Wales, and he conjured up a nightmare scenario in which the actress would drag the royal family through the mud. She would produce a child and claim it belonged to the Prince of Wales. “If you were to try and deny it, she can drag you into a Court of Law to force you to own it & there with you (the Prince of Wales) in the witness box, she will be able to give before a greedy Multitude disgusting details of your profligacy for the sake of convincing the Jury yourself cross-examined by a railing indecent attorney and hooted and yelled at by a Lawless Mob!! Oh horrible prospect, which this person has in her power, any day to realize, and to break your poor parents’ hearts.” The prince consort was sure that once the Clifden affair was known in Copenhagen, the marriage to Princess Alexandra would be off. He told his son, falsely, that he had not told the Queen what he knew.
The prince consort was casting his son Bertie as his wife’s aunt Queen Caroline, obliged to defend herself before the House of Lords on a charge of adultery and gross misconduct, and Nellie Clifden as Pauline Panam, who blackmailed his father, the Duke of Coburg, by publishing the story of her seduction at age fourteen and the illegitimate son she had borne. In fact, the amiable Miss Clifden, after giving the Prince of Wales some pleasure and comfort he was in great need of, went back to her music hall and her other gentlemen, one hopes a little richer.
As for Copenhagen, the prince consort’s fears were exaggerated. The dying king of Denmark was the most notorious old royal reprobate in Europe. His heir Prince Christian, Alexandra’s father, though personally decent, had certainly heard worse than the Clifden story. The odd dalliance with an experienced woman was generally seen by the European upper crust as a good apprenticeship for marriage. Prince Christian and his large family, waiting for the king to die, led an almost middle-class existence on an officer’s pay. Pure or not, the Prince of Wales was, with the possible exception of the tsarevitch, the greatest catch in Europe.
Bertie, as his parents admitted when they were not angry or disappointed with him, was an extremely affectionate young man. His father’s letter drove him to tears of remorse, and he wrote swearing never to sin again. He begged to be allowed to marry as soon as possible. He was deeply grateful that dearest Mama had been told nothing.
Albert could find no comfort or reassurance in his son’s letter. On November 22 he felt horribly ill but was determined to go down to Cambridge to talk to Bertie and have things out. First, however, he was scheduled to inspect the buildings at the new Staff College and Military Academy at Sand-hurst, a project that he had nurtured from its inception. It was a cold day with drenching rain, and the prince consort returned to Windsor wet to the skin. All the same, the next day he ordered a special train and set out for Madingley Hall, on the outskirts of Cambridge. Intent on a wholly private conversation, the prince and his son walked for some hours. It was pouring rain, and at one point Bertie lost his way. Ret
urning to the house, the prince consort refused a bed for the night and set out at once for Windsor to tell his anxious wife what had occurred. Victoria declared that since Bertie was so very sorry and promised to be better in the future, she would forget all she had been told.
The prince consort had returned to Windsor much easier in his mind. But his insomnia continued, and he lost all appetite. Feeling desperately unwell, he continued to do his work and attend mealtimes as usual. On November 29, at the Queen’s review of the Eton Volunteers, it was noticed that the prince consort looked frozen, though he was wearing a fur-lined coat. He was suffering from typhoid fever, probably contracted soon after his return to Windsor from Balmoral at the end of October.
In the developed world today, typhoid is happily not part of most people’s experience. To understand what the prince consort went through in November and December 1861, we need to understand the disease and what it does to people. Typhoid develops over several weeks, slower than cholera, though faster than tuberculosis. One contracts typhoid by ingesting food or water contaminated by the feces of an infected person. A person with active Salmonella typhi in his or her system can have immunity and be symptom free. This was the case with the famous Typhoid Mary of New York in the 1880s. However, as Albert himself would prove, even a person sick with typhoid can spend some weeks walking around feeling terrible but doing his job. If that job involves food preparation, the consequences can be serious for others.
Salmonella typhi enters the gut, moves into the lymph nodes, the liver, and the spleen, where it multiplies and then disseminates into the bloodstream. Typhoid has been called the nervous fever, and early symptoms may include irritability, headache, cough, gastroenteritis, sweating, restlessness, constipation, diarrhea, insomnia, and extreme malaise. The prince consort reported many of these symptoms well before his visit to Cambridge on November 22. If the body’s immune system fails to meet the challenge of the infection, bacteria flood the body, increasing the pain and distress, causing hallucinations and delirium. Death occurs when the abdominal wall is breached, causing peritonitis, or when the bacteria penetrate the brain or the heart.
Albert once told his wife that if he fell ill, he would put up no struggle. He sold himself short. Given the facts of the disease as we know them today, it is a tribute to Albert’s stamina and strength of will that on November 29 he was still walking around a parade ground in late fall.
More remarkably, before yielding ground to his illness, the prince consort did one more service to his adopted country. He kept Great Britain out of the American Civil War.
When the War Between the States broke out in the spring of 1861, cotton, not slavery, was on the minds of British politicians and merchants. Official British sympathies were with the South. Southern cotton kept the Lancashire mills working and was a major prop of the British economy. The British government also nourished an old resentment against the Northern states who had initiated the American War of Independence against Britain in the late eighteenth century. When an American warship intercepted the Trent, a British transatlantic mail vessel, and abducted two envoys of the Confederacy and their wives, the Palmerston government, which had been apprised that the attack was to take place, erupted in fury. A note was drafted to be sent to the government of President Abraham Lincoln, threatening war if an abject apology were not forthcoming immediately and the captured persons released.
The prince consort read the Palmerston note and saw that the nation was about to go to war with a distant and friendly power over a minor diplomatic incident. Shivering with fever, barely able to hold a pen, he redrafted the note, softening the terms, giving the Lincoln administration a way to back down without losing face. Palmerston, admitting his own haste and poor judgment, sent off the prince’s version. The American government in the North, far from anxious to be waging war on two fronts, agreed to the fiction that the captain of the Northern warship had acted without instructions from Washington. An apology was proffered, the Southerners were released.
This was the prince consort’s greatest diplomatic act and his last.
EVEN UNTREATED, TYPHOID is fatal in only 10 percent to 30 percent of cases. Before the discovery of antibiotics, three to four weeks would pass between the initial infection and death, and a strong immune system had time to rally. In the 1860s, when Prince Albert fell ill, many people, in far worse circumstances and with far worse care, pulled through fevers like typhoid every day. Queen Victoria believed that she had survived typhoid when she was sixteen. Since in 1861 she was eating and drinking much the same as her husband, her immunity to the disease indicates that she was right. The Prince of Wales would also survive typhoid, in 1872. Unfortunately, when the typhoid bacillus entered the prince consort’s bloodstream, his immune system was already severely weakened.
Albert had the misfortune to live in Great Britain when infectious diseases were at historical highs. Though he was a fervent advocate for clean water and good drainage as the birthright of all British citizens, he did not live to see the great public works programs that radically lowered the death rate. He lived decades before Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch identified various disease-causing microorganisms. Only in the twentieth century would drugs be developed to cure certain infectious diseases, including typhoid. That the prince was fastidiously clean as well as a committed sanitarian, that he took fresh air and exercise whenever he could, ate and drank abstemiously, and installed state-of-the-art drains, water closets, baths, and showers in the private residences he designed at Osborne and Balmoral, was one of the ironies of his life.
By December 1, the prince consort was in great distress. His temperature was erratic, he sweated profusely but was terribly cold, he had no appetite, could keep no food down, and had not slept in weeks. No longer able to concentrate on work, he still insisted on getting dressed and wandered aimlessly about the palace. The prince’s wife, daughters, and staff read books to him, but he took little pleasure. On December 2, envoys from Portugal came and gave the prince a wrenching account of the deaths of his young cousins and the outbreak of typhoid in the royal palace in Lisbon. Albert told his equerries that it was as well he had no fever, he would certainly not recover.
What he meant by having no fever was that his doctors had not yet made a diagnosis of fever. One of the doctors in attendance was William Jenner, reputed to be the greatest expert in England on what we would now call infectious diseases. Jenner had seen many cases of typhoid and surely guessed what was wrong with the prince. But, aware of the intense anxiety both the Queen and the prince felt at the mere mention of the word typhoid, the doctors still talked in terms of influenza or a bad feverish chill. These possible diagnoses were not wholly implausible. Among the first presenting symptoms for typhoid are chills, joint aches, digestive problems, and insomnia. As Clark and Jenner knew very well, the prince had been complaining of one or more of these symptoms increasingly for years and chronically throughout 1861. Already feeling horribly ill, the prince had exacerbated his problems by insisting on going out and getting chilled to the bone on two successive days.
Sir James Clark, who was still the senior royal doctor, knew the Queen and the prince very well. He decided that it was crucial that the patient’s fears about “low fevers” should not be encouraged. Clark had no clinical information on the effects of depression on the immune system, but he had seen enough patients to know that some people turned their faces to the wall from sheer sorrow, while others, gravely ill, managed to cling to life. To encourage the patient, and to keep up the spirits of the patient’s wife who was constantly with him, Clark held back from making any premature diagnosis.
Repeatedly reassured by the physicians she trusted, the Queen, while reporting her husband’s symptoms with her customary clarity and detail, assured her correspondents, notably her daughter in Berlin, her uncle in Brussels, and Stockmar in Coburg, that the prince consort would soon be back on his feet. At first she was dismissive about her husband’s health problems and inclined to
blame the patient, as we see from her letters to King Leopold. November 26: “Albert is a little rheumatic [sic], which is a plague, but … he is much better this winter than he was the preceding years.” December 4: Albert’s rheumatism “has become an influenza … he has difficulty eating and sleeping, and is confined to his room … but today a lot better.” The situation is “very disagreeable, as you know he is always so depressed when anything is the matter with him.” December 9: “Every day … is bringing us nearer the end of this tiresome illness, which is much what I had at Ramsgate [in 1835] only that I was much worse, and not at first well attended to.”
On December 6, Dr. Jenner decided that Clark’s psychological strategy must be abandoned. Jenner had, reportedly, observed on the prince’s torso the rash of flat, pink spots that is often an early symptom of typhoid. He told the Queen that her husband was suffering from a fever but assured her that there was still every hope. At this point, the doctors insisted that the prince should not dress but should keep in bed. They advised the Queen, who had also gotten no sleep for many nights and was obviously exhausted, to move into a separate bedroom. On December 8, the prince consort became delirious and failed to recognize his wife. His irritability increased, but he also showed moments of deep tenderness toward members of his family. He continued to move restlessly between bed and couch, and from room to room. At his request, the Blue Room at the castle was set up as a sickroom, and the Queen had a cot next door. Both George IV and William IV had died in the Blue Room.
The prince consort’s doctors had the full confidence of the Queen but not of the prime minister. Through a secret correspondence with Sir Charles Phipps, the prince’s private secretary, Lord Palmerston was kept constantly up to date on events in the sickroom. From the first, he feared the worst and was desolate. Palmerston and the prince had long jousted for power, but Palmerston was above all a patriot. He knew how much the country owed to the prince’s intelligence, information, and selfless commitment to public service. Palmerston had also known the Queen since she was a girl of eighteen. He loved her very much, and he knew how deeply her husband’s death would affect her.
