by Gillian Gill
Acting on strong emotion, Palmerston wrote on December 11, begging the Queen to get some new medical opinions. Victoria was dreadfully upset. It was being suggested not only that the prince was in danger but that he was receiving inadequate care. She replied that the prince consort was extremely irritated by the constant attentions even of doctors he had long known. This was true. The only doctor Albert really trusted was Stockmar, and in his delirium he asked for his old friend. But, determined to show that she was not refusing advice, merely protecting the beloved patient, Victoria permitted two doctors to come but not to stay or be a worry. Sir Henry Holland, an aged society doctor, came but had nothing new to offer. Dr. Thomas Watson, an excellent young clinician, on the other hand, soon won the Queen’s approval.
On December 11, the doctors felt that the public needed to know something, so daily bulletins on the prince’s state of health were begun. They were short and vague and unalarming. No one outside the government and the court understood the gravity of the situation. But the Queen rightly saw that the bulletins were another sign that things were not going well, and she began to despair and to reach out for the comfort and support of friends. She sent for her former lady-in-waiting Lady Augusta Bruce and for Dr. Gerald Wellesley the dean of Windsor, her favorite man of the cloth. On December 12, Victoria failed for the first time to record the events of the day in her diary. As for the prince, he knew what was coming. Asked by her father if she had written to her older sister in Berlin, Princess Alice replied that she had told Vicky that he was very ill. “You did wrong,” he commented. “You should have told her I am dying. Yes. I am dying.”
The prince consort’s doctors watched over him night and day, spared no thought or effort, and, given the medical limitations of the day, gave him exemplary care. This was especially true of old Sir James Clark. The unfortunate prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, Camille Cavour, who also contracted typhoid in 1861, was allegedly bled to death by his doctors, but the prince consort’s doctors did not resort to “heroic” medicine. Palliative care was the best the medical profession of the time had to offer, and this was the approach taken by Clark’s team. The prince was given opium and ether to ease his pain and allow him some hours of sleep. He was encouraged, uselessly but harmlessly, to eat simple foods like soup and brown bread. When he seemed close to slipping away, he was revived with brandy. Albert’s doctors spoke of allowing the disease to take its course and of having seen many patients recover. This was all accurate and sound.
Perhaps it would have helped if the prince had collapsed and taken to his bed in mid-November, instead of keeping up the hollow ritual of normal life. Perhaps it would have helped if he had been nursed in a warm, quiet, controlled environment instead of wandering from room to room and bed to bed, while his wife spread Eau de Cologne on his sheets and a gaggle of family members, equerries, doctors, and servants looked on. But probably not. Restlessness is a classic symptom of typhoid, and to be tied to a bed would have been cruel. The prince consort had never been alone in a room by himself. The solitude of a modern hospital room would have been torture for him.
Unlike poor typhoid patients in the fever hospitals of his time, the prince was kept warm, well nourished, and scrupulously clean. His shirts and bed linen were changed often. Above all, he was surrounded by love and care and consideration. The visits of his little daughter Beatrice may have cheered him up, even in delirium. Hearing Alice play his favorite chorale in the next room at his request could not stop the torment, but it was a memory of happiness, and an expression of love.
The dying prince’s lack of privacy has troubled some biographers. At the time of his death, the onlookers in the Blue Room included his wife, his daughters Alice, Helena, and Louise, his son Bertie, the Queen’s nephew Charles Leiningen and his wife, Albert’s private secretary Sir Charles Phipps, his German valet Rudolph Löhlein (the successor to Isaac Cart), the dean of Windsor, and presumably one or more doctors. The princesses’ governess Miss Hildyard, Lady Augusta Bruce, and her brother General Bruce, the Prince of Wales’s governor, huddled in the doorway. But surely it is better to die at home, in the room you have chosen, with people you love all around you.
Alice, the prince’s oldest daughter at home, was his best nurse. Her strength and courage never failed. One report has it that she was ready to do things for her father that were considered improper in a woman and a princess—presumably she helped change his linen after diarrhea or vomiting. It was to Alice that the prince confided that he knew he was dying. It was Alice who had the foresight to telegraph her brother Bertie at Cambridge to come, their father was very ill. It was Alice, kneeling at the head of the bed after all the weary days of waiting, who recognized the death rattle; Alice who instantly ran out to get her mother, who had briefly moved next door to give vent to her grief.
Queen Victoria had clung to the belief that her husband was suffering only from influenza. She had refused to summon the Prince of Wales, angry with her son but also fearful that his arrival would set the patient back. She felt impatient at times. She had survived typhoid. Why could Albert not do the same? Could it be true what he said, that he did not cling to life? What could that mean when she and the nation needed him so desperately? What did it say about their marriage?
But for the last two weeks, she hardly left his side, and, though she knew she was no nurse, she did what she could. She was, she thought, courageous. Albert had so often blamed her for her lack of emotional control and her selfishness, but now, when it mattered, she did not weep or show despair. She tried to anticipate his wishes and do just what he wanted. She spoke to him in his native German and translated his words for others. She was courteous and considerate to the doctors. She saw all that Alice did and was impressed and grateful.
When the prince slapped her hand in irritation, she made excuses for him. When he complained that she was refusing to stay with him, she did not say that the doctors had ordered her to leave so that he could rest. When he walked unannounced into her dressing room one evening like a ghost, she was terrified, then took his hand and led him back to bed. When he became alarmed by his reflection in the big mirror and hallucinated that he was in a room at the old palace of Holyrood, she had the mirror lowered and the cot moved. When he was in delirium and failed to recognize her, she did not break down. Coming in to see him in the dawn glow on December 14, she was once again overwhelmed by his beauty. How terribly she loved him. What could life mean without him? When he looked on her with love that awful morning, she begged him for a kiss.
Exhausted by sleepless nights, weary of moving around the palace after her poor wandering tortured love, going through the dispatch boxes by day to do the essential business because she knew he would have wanted her to, Queen Victoria did not give up hope for a long time. But at last, on the night of December 14, she gave way. She fled into the next room and sat down on the floor for a moment in “mute despair.” Then, at Alice’s urgent summons, she ran back in and took the beloved hand. Already it was cold as stone. Albert took a few calm breaths. Then there was silence. “Oh, this is death!” Victoria cried, “I know it. I have seen it before.”
Mourning a Prince
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HE DEATH OF THE PRINCE CONSORT CAME AS A SHOCK TO THE NATION. When the bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral rang ominously out over nighttime London, and the telegraph wires began to sing, everyone outside Windsor Castle and the cabinet was taken unawares, if not exactly surprised.
Sudden death was a frequent visitor to Victorian families, and not just the underfed and overworked poor. The new sanitarians like Edwin Chad-wick documented how all classes suffered from air black with soot and water brown with sewage. The new statisticians like William Farr graphically recorded the spikes in mortality that occurred when epidemic cholera was added to endemic tuberculosis. The new serial novelists like Charles Dickens developed a wide palate of colorful death scenes.
The combination of high mortality and rising prosperity created a culture of d
eath and an innovative funerary industry. Keen businessmen were quickly at the elbow of the weeping widow or the guilty heir, ready to lay on a funeral that would impress the neighbors. They could rapidly conjure up a huge, shining black hearse drawn by jet-black horses, their tall black plumes dancing, slowly trotting through the streets, escorted by hired mourners in black suits, black top hats, and black ribbons. A tiny, blond, black-clad boy, quite unrelated to the deceased, was the funeral parlor’s coup de grâce.
Thus when the nation heard of the death of the prince consort, it was primed to throw itself into an orgy of mourning. No expense was spared, no effort was enough. On the days immediately following the death, the streets of London were empty, with shops boarded up. All over the country, people and buildings were wreathed in black, shops sold out of black fabrics, and textile mills were mobbed with orders. For weeks and months, clergymen gratified their sobbing congregations with sermons on the classic themes of memento mori: dust to dust; vanity, vanity, all is vanity; death the great leveler; and so on and so forth. Eulogies to the lost prince gushed forth from cabinet ministers and members of parliament, from bishops in the pulpit, from newspaper men in black-bordered editorials, from poets eager to capitalize on the publishing successes of Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts” and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s book-length In Memoriam.
Dissatisfied by such ephemeral tributes to its Queen’s dead consort, cities and towns and civic institutions rushed to inscribe them in stone for the long-term edification of the populace. Major cities like Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin, Aberdeen, and Liverpool launched vigorous subscription campaigns and then vied with one another in the Gothic extravagance of their Albert Memorials. Little towns like Tenby Denham, and Abingdon were not to be outdone in their commemorative zeal. Artists cheerfully set to the task of chiseling iconic Albert statues—standing in Perth, sitting in Aberdeen, on horseback in Wolverhampton, in Garter robes at Framingham College, in chancellor’s robes at Cambridge, in frock coat at Oxford, on top of a pillar in Abingdon, under a canopy in Manchester, exposed to the pigeons in Dublin, or nestled in a museum in Bombay. Albert libraries, infirmaries, clock towers, and drinking fountains sprang up like mushrooms. Even today it is hard to find a town in England without an Albert Street or— rather ironically, given the prince’s dislike of hard liquor—an Albert pub.
These ubiquitous public tributes continued for more than a decade, but they were an expression of guilt rather than sorrow. With the prince consort safely out of the way, the British nation was ready at last to celebrate his superior abilities, pure morals, and hard work. He was a pattern of the virtues that nineteenth-century English society professed to cherish, and to the end of the century, erring youths (his eldest son notable among them) were urged to model themselves after him.
But during his lifetime, Prince Albert had not been loved or even much admired by people outside his family, as those close to the Crown sadly acknowledged. The prince had only one close friend in the royal household, his secretary George Anson, and Anson died in 1851. In his frequent public appearances, Albert was received with more politeness than warmth, and he cut no ice with the English aristocracy. According to royal biographer David Duff, the Earl of Oxford exclaimed, on hearing of the prince’s death: “That at least is one foreigner safely out of the way.” Lady Dorothy Nevill’s husband put on a pair of light-check trousers, which he had been keeping specially for the occasion. Duff goes on: “As Lord Lennox remarked to Sir Henry Cole in October 1862, ‘Truth to tell, the “Swells,” as a class, did not much care for the P.’” Queen Victoria herself summed it all up when she took her old friend the Duchess of Sutherland into the Blue Room for a last look at the dead prince and murmured, “Will they do him justice now?”
It was unfair of the British to refuse to take the prince consort to their hearts, especially since his wife enjoyed such immense popularity. Logically, the Queen’s husband deserved much of the credit for his wife’s success. But if the nation was willing to praise Victoria’s female submission, it steadfastly refused to take the female role and worship him as she did. To see their Queen in the arms of a German never sat well with the English. England liked the fact that the prince had given the Queen four healthy sons, solving the succession problem. It liked the cozy domesticity that now prevailed at Windsor and Osborne. It liked a court where sexual promiscuity, financial impropriety, gambling, heavy drinking, and coarse language were not permitted. But in their Queen’s consort, they were looking for a grand seigneur, not a professor; a stud, not a statesman; a sportsman, not a saint.
And the very idea that the Queen, in her official capacity, was a mere tool in the hands of her German husband, that he, not cabinet ministers, dictated state policy and conducted state business, was political dynamite. A king consort might be acceptable to the Portuguese, but it was anathema to the English.
The English political and social establishment—that tiny minority of the population that saw the royal family regularly—nursed a more nuanced and discrete form of the general animosity toward the prince, which, of course, it helped to shape. Over two decades, top politicians like Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Lord Clarendon, Lord Derby, Lord Granville, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Disraeli had been impressed by the prince. Given that even recent kings had found it necessary to rely on the services of trusted private secretaries, it was good to have an intelligent, able, and diligent man at the Queen’s shoulder. That the business of the Crown should be run by a man was, in the eyes of Victorian misogyny, self-evidently necessary.
But cabinet ministers and members of parliament, whether Tory or Whig, were aware that the prince had political goals that did not coincide with their own. It was no secret that the prince was aiming to rule in fact as well as name, to rule as William of Orange had ruled in mid-seventeenth-century England and William Hohenstollern still did in nineteenth-century Prussia. Prince Albert was not just a superior private secretary and a dedicated bureaucrat. He was a wily politician, an ambitious statesman, and a power-hungry diplomat. In the Queen’s name, acting on her behalf, the prince was systematically undermining the sacred if unwritten constitutional principle of a cabinet of ministers invested by parliament with the responsibility for executive government. For the tiny political establishment of Great Britain, the prince consort’s combination of ambition and energy represented a grave threat—to the nation, to the monarchy as they had defined it, to the Queen they loved, and to themselves.
When they had gotten over the shock and sadness, when the mourning had been properly stage-managed, Prime Minister Palmerston and his brethren on both sides of the aisle in parliament breathed a secret sigh of relief. Providence had intervened. An intractable problem was solved deus ex machina. The beauty of British government was that no man, least of all a prince consort, was indispensable. Ministers knew that managing the Queen would be tricky, but they would cope.
For Benjamin Disraeli, the rising power in the Tory Party, the prince consort’s death was an opportunity to be seized with both hands. In his published work and parliamentary speeches, Disraeli advanced mystic ideas on monarchy, but he knew that his ministerial advancement was threatened because of the deep antipathy the prince consort felt for him. Thus, when Albert died, Disraeli treated the House of Commons to a brilliant funerary oration well calculated to win the Queen’s attention. In a private conversation with the Prussian minister in London, Disraeli was characteristically effusive and double-edged in his praise of the prince: “With Prince Albert we have buried our sovereign. This German Prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings has ever shown … If he had outlived some of our ‘old stagers’ [here Disraeli surely had the elderly Palmerston in mind], he would have given us the blessings of absolute government.”
It may be doubted how far the ambitious middle-class intellectual Disraeli actually endorsed absolutist government on the Prussian model. But he assumed that his remarks would be reported straight back to B
erlin and were likely to find favor with Albert’s favorite and adoring daughter, now Crown Princess of Prussia, and thus with the Queen. Benjamin Disraeli subsequently rose to be Earl of Beaconsfield and one of the greatest prime ministers in English history. Though he gave up none of the powers that had accrued to his office, he also reprised Lord Melbourne’s role and became one of the Queen’s closest friends. Had Albert lived, England would not have had its first and only prime minister of Jewish origins.
If statesmen and politicians saw the death of the prince consort as something of a divine favor to a worthy country, even courtiers close to Victoria felt in their hearts that, perhaps, their beloved Queen, however bereft, was safer on her throne with her husband dead. This was the view expressed privately and late in life by the liberal Mary Ponsonby who was not loath to imagine Great Britain as a republic. Jane Ely and Jane Churchill, ladies-in-waiting to the Queen for many years, were both Tories, but they were of the same opinion as Mary Ponsonby. All three ladies noticed that the prince consort, for all his manifest virtues, had driven the Crown on a collision course with English political leaders who happened to be their own close relatives and friends. Though of course this could never be said to Her Majesty, the prince’s notion of England’s good was not, in the end, England’s own.
And so, across the nation, in all classes, when Albert died, the mourning was as superficial as it was long, loud, and lavish. The nation wept for its Queen but not with her.
