As at Windsor, so it was at Osborne: in March 1862, Lord Clarendon, during a visit to Osborne, found it 'difficult to believe' that the Prince would not, at any moment, walk into his room where the Queen received him, since 'everything was set out on his table and the pen and his blotting-book, his handkerchief on the sofa, his watch going, fresh flowers in the glass'.8
Numerous monuments were erected to his memory: a marble effigy, supported by the wings of four bronze angels, was placed in St George's Chapel, Windsor, in King Henry VIII's tombhouse which was lined with marble, roofed in copper and renamed the Albert Memorial Chapel. A huge statue by Joseph Durham was erected in the Royal Horticultural Gardens in South Kensington where, to the Queen's annoyance, her husband had spent so much time in the last months of his life; and an equestrian bronze by Charles Bacon was unveiled at Holborn Circus.[xxxix] Commemorative stones were laid at Balmoral and in Windsor Park. The first of several municipal tributes, an equestrian statue by Thomas Thornycroft, was unveiled at Wolverhampton in 1866; and Lord Clarendon apprehended the appearance not only of many other statues of 'the late Consort in robes of The Garter upon some curious and non-descript animal that will be called a horse', but also of numerous 'Albert Baths & Washhouses'. The Queen would not object to such memorials, Clarendon added, since she had 'no more notion of what is right and pure in art than she [had] of the Chinese grammar'.9
A committee was appointed to discuss a national memorial in London and the Queen chose George Gilbert Scott's Gothic design for what was unveiled ten years later in July 1872 as the Albert Memorial. By then the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences had already been declared open by the Prince of Wales at Kensington Gore. In the grounds of Frogmore, near the Duchess of Kent's mausoleum, a plot of land was chosen for a far more elaborate royal mausoleum in which Prince Albert was to be buried and she herself would join him when the time came. Inspired by Hawksmoor's mausoleum at Castle Howard which she had seen during her visit to Yorkshire in 1850, by the Gothic mausoleum at Claremont built in memory of Princess Charlotte, and by the family mausoleum at Coburg, which she described in 1860 as being 'beautiful and so cheerful', the Frogmore mausoleum, an Italian Romanesque building with an interior ornamented in the style of Raphael, whom Prince Albert considered the greatest artist of all time, was to cost some £200,000.[xl]10 Completed almost a year to the day after the Prince's death, it was designed by his artistic adviser, Professor Ludwig Gruner, and the architect, A. J. Humbert. It was consecrated by Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, who considered the sight of the grieving Queen and the file of her fatherless children as one of the most touching he had ever witnessed in his life. The next day the Prince's coffin was brought here from St George's Chapel and, later, an effigy of the Prince by Carlo Marochetti was laid above the sarcophagus, a huge block of grey Aberdeen granite.
The Queen was only forty-two but she expected and hoped that soon, perhaps within a year, her own body would be brought here to rest beside her husband's. She was 'naturally much occupied with leaving this world'.
People at court marvelled at her apparent self-possession in the early days of her widowhood, her submission to the divine will. It was as though she were doing all she could to follow the Prince's advice, 'to take things as God sent them', to remember that her 'great task in life' was 'to control [her] feelings'. Sir Charles Phipps reported to Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the night of the Prince's death, 'The Queen, though in an agony of grief, is perfectly collected, and shows a self control that is quite extraordinary.' The next day Phipps wrote again to say that 'except in the paroxysms of grief she was 'perfectly composed': she was 'determined to do Her duty to the Country'.11 And so she did for a time, conscientiously signing papers within three days of the Prince's death. 'Alas,' Phipps added, 'she has not realized her loss - and when the full consciousness comes upon her - I tremble ... What will happen - where can She look for that support and assistance upon which She has leaned in the greatest and least questions of her life?'
When the full consciousness did come to her, her misery and desolation were painful to witness. She went into 'every detail of the illness', Lord Clarendon said, 'his appearance after death, etc. etc.', which threw her into fresh 'paroxysms of grief'.12
'How am I alive after witnessing what I have done?' she asked the Crown Princess. 'Oh! I who prayed daily that we might die together & I never survive Him! I who felt when in those blessed Arms clasped & held tight in the sacred Hours at night - when the world seemed only to be ourselves - that nothing could part us! I felt so vy secure - I always repeated: "And God will protect us", though trembling always for his safety ... It cannot be possible ... Oh! God! Oh! God ... I don't know what I feel. '13 Her own death would be the 'greatest blessing', since 'pleasure, joy - all is for ever gone'.
'The poor O[ueen] does not seem to improve,' Lord Clarendon told the Duchess of Manchester in the middle of March 1862, 'her only relief in thinking of her desolate future is the conviction that She shall & must die soon. She is worse off than ordinary persons with relations & friends who in time bring changes & comfort - but she is isolated. '14
She contemplated suicide, but, so she wrote to her daughter in Germany, 'a Voice told me for His sake - no, still endure.' The Princess herself was in an agony of grief. 'Why has the earth not swallowed me up?' she asked. 'He was too great, too perfect for Earth that adored Father whom I worshipped with more than a daughter's affection. '15 Night after night she dreamed of him and in one dream she 'took his dear hand and kissed it so long and so often and cried over it and did not like to let it go'.16
Three months after her father's death, in March 1862, she was granted permission to visit her mother in England. 'Mama is dreadfully sad,' she told her husband. 'She cries a lot; then there is always the empty room, the empty bed, she always sleeps with Papa's coat over her and his dear red dressing-gown beside her and some of his clothes in the bed! ... [She is] as much in love with Papa as though she had married him yesterday ... She feels the same as your little Frauchen... and is always consumed with longing for her husband. '17
'Truly the Prince was my entire self,' her mother wrote, 'my very life and soul ... I only lived through him My heavenly Angel! Surely there can never have been such a union, such trust and understanding between two people ... I try to feel and think I am living on with him, and that his pure and perfect spirit is leading and inspiring me ... There is no one left to hold me in their arms and press me to their heart ... Oh! how I admired Papa! How in love I was with him! How everything about him was beautiful and precious in my eyes. Oh! how I miss all, all! Oh! Oh! the bitterness of this. '18
In her misery it distressed her to see the happiness others enjoyed in their marriages and, with characteristic honesty, she admitted it. She was less glad' than she ought to have been to 'see people happy - so odd and wrong! I can't bear to look at a man and his wife walking together.' She could not even now bring herself to show enjoyment of the plays the younger children staged for her. She watched them attentively, reviewing them in her journals; but she explained to Elphinstone that 'if she appeared listless and did not applaud, it was only because the recollections of the happy past when the beloved Prince arranged everything ... weighed her down and it was ALL she could do to sit thro' it.'[xli]
When she left for Balmoral her suffering was worse. She was constantly expecting to hear his footsteps, his voice. 'Oh, darling child,' she wrote to the Crown Princess, 'the agonizing sobs ... the stags' heads - the rooms - blessed, darling Papa's room - then his coats - his caps - kilts - all, all convulsed my poor shattered frame. '19 The next year she told Queen Augusta that the 'wild, grim, solitary mountains' comforted her. 'The mountains, the woods, the rocks' seemed to 'talk of him'. She wanted to do nothing but 'sit and weep and live only with Him in spirit and take no interest in the things of this earth'. Her misery was becoming 'a necessity'; she 'could not exist without it'.20
The Royal Household began to fear she was going
mad. 'The poor Queen,' they would say to each other in nervous concern, while she herself was wont to tap her forehead with the tips of her chubby white fingers as though concerned for her sanity. She confessed to Lord Clarendon that more than once she thought she was indeed going mad. 'My reason, my reason,' she would say. Clarendon himself told Lord Stanley that Prince Albert had once said to him that it was his 'business to watch that mind' of the Queen's 'every hour and every minute - to watch as a cat watches at a mousehole'.21
The Queen was often seen to glance at a bust of the Prince before signing an official document; and, it was said, she would sometimes ask softly if he approved of it. 'She believes that his eye is now constantly upon her,' Clarendon commented, 'that he watches over every action of hers & that, in fact, She never ceases to be in communication with his spirit!'22 The Prince had done so much for her in the past, guided her in every way, that she did not know how she could survive without him; and, in her misery, anxiety and irritability, she blamed his fatalistic resignation, his gloomy acceptance of his destiny, for his own death. 'He would die,' she told Lord Derby in her grief. 'He seemed not to care to live.' 'Then she used the words, "He died from want of what they call pluck." ' 23 As if in reproach at his abandonment of her, she called herself 'a deserted child'.24
Her physical health, so robust in the recent past, suffered grievously in her psychoneurotic state. She felt so listless she could not bring herself to take any exercise, yet she lost weight. She complained of violent nervous headaches; her pulse raced and, almost for the first time in years, she felt the cold. Her memory was failing, she complained; she was 'wasting away'; she was 'a wreck'. Her complete prostration, she told King Leopold, was caused by overwork, over-anxiety and the weight of responsibility and 'constant SORROW and craving for the ONE absorbing object' of her love. She tried to comfort herself by recalling the happiness of the years of her marriage; and she remembered, too, with wry affection, his faults and foibles, his reluctance to abandon conversation with men for the company of ladies in the drawing room, his habit of eating too fast, his practice of falling asleep before she came to bed, his disinclination to talk to her when he was busy reading the newspapers. 'Dear Darling,' she commented, 'I fear I tried him sadly.'
Chapter 38
SEANCES AND SERVICES
'I like the man but not the Bishop.'
The Queen wrapped herself in her grief and longed for the day when her spirit would meet Prince Albert's in a future life after death. She dismissed ill-conceived attempts to comfort her as impatiently as she dismissed the words of a clergyman, who said that she must now consider herself a bride of Christ, as so much 'twaddle': the man 'must have known that he was talking nonsense'. Occasionally, so she told Randall Davidson, the Dean of Windsor, she was assailed by doubts as to whether or not there was, indeed, an afterlife; but these thoughts did not trouble her for long: she spoke more often of her faith in an 'eternal reunion hereafter'; and, in this later life, she was to be rather concerned to reflect what her husband might have to say to her. 'Do you know, my dear,' she was to tell one of her granddaughters, 'I sometimes feel that when I die I shall be just a little nervous about meeting Grandpapa for I have taken to doing a good many things that he would not quite approve of.'
'I feel now to be so acquainted with death,' she wrote to the Princess Royal soon after her mother died, '& to be much nearer that unseen world. '1 She felt sure that her husband was watching her and that she was in communion with his spirit, though she did not know what other spirits she might encounter and did not care for the thought of meeting some of them. She was said to have objected to the idea of King David being presented to her because of his disgraceful treatment of Uriah the Hittite; and when one of her ladies remarked that they would soon all meet in Abraham's bosom she haughtily replied that she herself would 'not meet Abraham'.2 In the afterlife in which the Queen would encounter those 'dear ones waiting', there was no hell and no Devil - belief in these was 'unutterably horrible and revolting'. She was, however, tempted to believe in the occult, in second sight, psychic phenomena, the power of magnetism - she had tried table-turning one evening at Osborne where the table had spun about most convincingly, and she even conducted seances with such members of the household who could be persuaded to take part in them. She also, like Napoleon III, was much struck by coincidences and was superstitious about luck. May was an unlucky month; marriages should not take place in May; and 14 December, the day upon which Prince Albert died, was always for her a day approached with apprehension. The birth of one of her great-grandsons, the future King George VI, on that day consequently caused the family much concern; and the child's grandfather, the Prince of Wales, announced the news of the birth with a kind of apology. His mother was, indeed, 'rather distressed that this happy event should have taken place on a darkly sad anniversary for us';3 but she was mollified on being invited to become godmother to the 'dear little Boy born the day when his beloved great grandfather entered on a new and greater life', and she was additionally pleased to be told he was to be named Albert ('a byeword for all that is great & good'). She gave him a bust of Prince Albert as a christening present.4
So far as Christian worship was concerned, the Queen was quite down-to-earth. She was pleased when the Franciscan monks at Cimiez said they would pray for her; but for the rites of their Church - 'strange observances repugnant to all the simplicity of our Saviour's teaching' -she had no taste or inclination, although she did once go to a Roman Catholic service in Switzerland and found it an agreeable experience. Nor could she 'bear to hear the violent abuse of the Catholic religion which is so painful and so cruel towards the many innocent and good Roman Catholics'. She did, however, think that the 'atrocious Catholic clergy' at King Leopold's funeral were 'nasty Beggars'.5
She was inclined to reserve her censure for Mr Gladstone's friends, the Tractarians of the Oxford Movement who rejected the Protestant element in Anglicanism in favour of its pre-Reformation Catholic tradition and who aimed at restoring the High-Church ideals of the seventeenth century. Tractarians, she believed, were 'R. Catholics at heart and very insincere as to their professions of attachment' to the Anglican Church. She disliked evangelicals, too, once remarking to Disraeli that 'the extreme Evangelical School' did 'the Established Church as much harm as the High Church'. She considered their tirade against theatres and dancing and their strict Sabbatarianism particularly distasteful. 'I am not at all an admirer or approver of our very dull Sundays,' she once remarked to the Princess Royal, 'for I think the absence of innocent amusements for the poor people a misfortune and an encouragement of vice.' She strongly supported the opening of art galleries and museums on a Sunday and when it was proposed to prohibit by law bands playing in parks on that day she protested to the Prime Minister about the 'incomprehensible blindness' of the proposer of such a ridiculous measure. Going to church on a Sunday was, however, a duty not to be neglected. 'Let me add one word wh. as your Godmother as well as your Grandmother I may,' she once concluded a letter to Princess Victoria of Hesse. 'It is not to neglect going to Church or to read some good & serious religious work, not materialistic & controversial ones - for they are very bad for everyone -but especially for young people.'6
Episcopalians came in for the same sort of strictures as Sabbatarians. 'You know,' she remarked one day to Gladstone, 'I am not much of an episcopalian.' 'No, Ma'am,' he replied mournfully, 'I know that well.' Indeed, the Queen went so far as to say that she did not like bishops. She made the remark to Lady Lytton after she had attended a reception for a large number of them, 'a very ugly party', at Lambeth Palace. 'But your Majesty likes some bishops,' Lady Lytton protested, 'for instance, the Bishop of Winchester [Randall Davidson, a clever, persuasive man, "singularly pleasing in both appearance and manner", in the Queen's opinion, who had left the Deanery at Windsor to become Bishop of Rochester before being translated to Winchester] and the Bishop of Ripon [William Boyd Carpenter].' 'Yes,' conceded the Queen, 'I like the man but not the
Bishop.'7
Indeed, she thought it as well to write to Davidson when he went to Rochester, having previously written very crossly to the Prime Minister for not having done what she had asked him to do and appointed him Bishop of Winchester: 'The Queen must honestly confess that she has never found people promoted to the Episcopate remain what they were before. She hopes and thinks that will not be the case with the Dean.'
If she did not much care for bishops and was a tireless critic of church dignitaries generally, the Queen, with a few notable exceptions, did not much take to many humbler Anglican clergymen either. She once remarked of a man, a 'really most talented person' and 'good looking besides' who was appointed tutor to her youngest son, that the 'only objection' she had to him was that he was a clergyman;8 and on another occasion she wondered 'why the clergy should go fussing about the poor or servants... The servants are very good people. Why can't they be left alone?'*[xlii]9
Her journal contains many references to 'terribly long services' and tediously long sermons of which she grew increasingly intolerant in her old age. The Duke of Portland recorded that A. V. Baillie, later to be Dean of Windsor, but then a young curate, once asked Sir Henry Ponsonby for his advice about a sermon he was to preach in the Queen's presence. 'It doesn't much matter what you say,' Ponsonby told him, 'because her Majesty is too deaf to hear; but on no account let it last for more than five minutes.'10
All in all she felt more at home in a Scottish kirk - 'the real and true stronghold of Protestantism' - than in any other place of worship. 'I have always,' she once declared to a deputation from the Church of Scotland, 'been devoted to Scotland and to the Church.' 'I am nearly a Dissenter,' she confessed, 'or rather more a Presbyterian.' She found the simplicity of the services at Crathie and the quiet devotion of the congregation there most moving; and she caused some consternation among the members of her household by declaring that she intended to take communion at Crathie and expected them, as well as the servants at Balmoral, to do the same. When her youngest son objected she was furious. 'Let me now more strongly and emphatically point out to you, that it is your sacred duty to take the sacrament with me,' she told him ... 'I have never known any one refuse to take the Sacrament with a Parent - and especially the Head of the Country - if asked to do so.'11
QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History Page 33
