A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  Both of them worried for Bertie, the Prince of Wales. Vicky, their eldest, so sweet and so sensible, had gone to the Prussian court as the Crown Princess, at just 17, amidst much unhelpful wailing on the part of her mother that she was sending her ‘lamb’ to be ‘sacrificed’ on some Teutonic marriage bed. Albert, too, missed her badly. Her departure threw her eldest brother’s chronic inability to conform to his parents’ expectations into even sharper relief. ‘Bertie’s propensity is indescribable laziness,’ his father fumed. ‘I never in my life met such a thorough and cunning lazybones.’ Away from the suffocation of the court Bertie was, in fact, a cheerful, open-faced young man who was not quite as allergic to his duties as his father thought. He did not disgrace himself academically at Christ Church, Oxford, and a tour of Canada was an out-and-out personal triumph. A spell at the Irish military camp at the Curragh, however, was less of a success. For there, as everywhere else, there was no getting away from the fact that Bertie liked his pleasures, especially when they came voluptuously corseted. It was the notoriety of his philandering that seemed, to his father and mother, calculated to wound their own publicly promoted sense of the decencies of domestic morality. His irresponsibility threatened to undo all their hard-won achievement in making the British monarchy respectable again.

  Plans to marry Bertie to Princess Alexandra of Denmark were accelerated. Alix’s ravishing beauty of face and figure, as well as her genuine sweetness of character, would surely be enough to satisfy the Prince’s yen for lechery within the marriage bed. But even as the negotiations with the Danish court were under way, late in 1861, Albert and Victoria learned that Bertie was having an affair with a notorious ‘actress’. Horrified by this latest act of almost treasonable sabotage, they wrote brutally candid letters to the prince warning him of the wanton self-destruction that this latest dalliance could bring – disease, pregnancy, blackmail, the republicanism of the boudoir and the bordello! At the same time, Albert was in the throes of dealing with a diplomatic crisis when Captain Charles Wilkes of the USS San Jacinto stopped the British mail steamer Trent and removed Confederate agents, in violation of the laws of neutrality during the American Civil War. Palmerston’s Whig government, sympathetic to the South, was prepared to take the issue to the very edge of belligerence against Lincoln’s government in Washington. Albert was doing everything he could, constitutionally, to soften that response and avoid another futile war.

  In late November the Prince, already ‘feeling out of sorts’ from a ‘chill’ caught during a recent visit to Sandhurst, went to see Bertie near Cambridge and read him the riot act. The weather was that of a classic East Anglian Michaelmas, with driving rain and slicing winds. On his return to Windsor, Albert’s chill worsened and refused to abate. He had once mused morbidly, when planting a sapling at Osborne, that he would not survive to see it mature. Now, to the acute distress of Victoria, he seemed to be measuring himself for his shroud: ‘I am sure if I had a fatal illness, I should give up at once, I should not struggle for life. I have no tenacity of life.’ His physician, Dr James Clark, was the same man whose diagnosis and treatment of the children had driven Albert to raging despair many years before. Now Clark disposed of his critic by failing to realize that what the Prince Consort was actually suffering from was typhoid fever. By the time Palmerston-Pilgerstein had managed to summon a different doctor, it was too late.

  Albert wandered in and out of clarity and from room to room in Windsor Castle, finally settling down in the Blue Room and not moving. Princess Alice played some hymns from an adjoining chamber. The queen came to read him Sir Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak (1823). The copy survives in the Royal Library, the flyleaf inscribed in Victoria’s hand, ‘this book read up to the mark here during his last illness and within three days of its terrible termination’. The relevant paragraph here reads, incredibly, ‘He heard the sound of voices but they ceased to convey any impression to his understanding and within a few minutes he was faster asleep than he had ever been in the whole … of his life.’

  Was this truly coincidence? Or had the point she had reached in her reading of Scott’s novel been chosen by Victoria as a literary valediction – especially since it describes, in fact, not a death at all but a deep healing slumber? For a moment on the afternoon of 14 December, Albert stirred, seemingly better, began to arrange his hair as if he were about to dress for dinner, and murmured, ‘Es ist nichts, kleines Frauchen (It’s nothing, little wife).’ Victoria left the bedside for a moment or two. When she came back he was gone, and out from that plump little face there came a howl of unutterable misery.

  The sovereign of the greatest empire on earth had been vanquished by the one power against whom there was no defence. She spent so many hours collapsed in great, ragged, half-choking spells of sobbing that her secretaries and ministers thought she would go mad. ‘You are right dear child,’ the queen wrote to her almost equally distracted eldest daughter, ‘I do not wish to feel better … the relief of tears is great and though since last Wednesday I have had no very violent outburst – they come again and again every day and are soothing to the bruised heart and soul.’ When she came to visit in 1862, Vicky saw her mother crying herself to sleep with Albert’s coat thrown over her, hugging his red dressing gown. ‘What a dreadful going to bed,’ Victoria had written in her diary. ‘What a contrast to that tender lover’s love! All alone!’

  If Victoria did ever seriously contemplate suicide, duty and memory held it at bay. ‘If I live on’, she confided to the diary, ‘it is henceforth for our poor fatherless children – for my unhappy country which has lost all in losing him and in doing only what I know and feel he would wish for he is now near me – his spirit will guide and inspire me.’ As it turned out, this was an understatement. Denying death the cruel victory of separation, sustaining the illusion of the prince’s proximity, became a compulsion. Victoria spent £200,000, the same cost as the whole of Osborne, on the elaborate Italianate mausoleum at Frogmore for their tombs (which also accommodated her mother, the Duchess of Kent, who had died earlier that year) by Carlo Marochetti and the extraordinary statue by William Theed III of the two of them in Anglo-Saxon dress – the costume that defined the union of the Saxe-Coburg dynasty with what lingering historical mythology believed to be the ancient English constitution. But cold marble was not allowed to declare finis. Everything in Victoria’s world – other than the widow’s black and white cap that she would wear for the rest of her life – was designed to maintain the fantasy of Albert’s continued presence, turning court life into one long séance. The Blue Room in which he died was preserved not as a German death-chamber, a Sterbezimmer, but exactly and for ever as it was when he was still alive. Should the upholstery wear out, it had to be replaced with its precise replica. Every day, hot water, blade and shaving soap were laid out along with fresh clothes. His other clothes remained untouched except those on which, in her distraction, Victoria insisted on sleeping. Even when she became somewhat more composed, she continued to take his nightshirt to bed along with a plaster cast of his hand. On Albert’s side of the bed was a large photograph of the prince and a sprig of evergreen, symbolizing in the Germanic Christian tradition not just immortality but resurrection.

  Widowhood became the queen’s full-time job. What was left of Victoria’s life (and, as it turned out, there was a lot) would be committed to the supreme vocation of perpetuating Albert’s memory amongst her under-appreciative subjects. If there must be merriment, it had better not be in her presence, not even during the weddings of Bertie to Alix and of Alice to Prince Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt – both of which seemed to the guests more like funerals, and were obviously torture for Victoria. At Alice’s nuptials she confessed to her journal that ‘I say “God bless her” though a dagger is plunged in my bleeding desolate heart when I hear from her that she is “proud and happy” to be Louis’s wife.’ The only tolerable literature consisted of requiem poems like the Poet Laureate Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850). A new
edition was dedicated of course to the late Prince. Victoria herself resolved to create a memorial bookshelf, commissioning an anthology of Albert’s speeches; a biography of his early life; and another five-volume biography of the complete career and works. Memorial stones went up everywhere. Granite cairns were put up along the Highland trails where Albert had stalked deer, the most imposing bearing the inscription ‘Albert the Great and Good, raised by his broken-hearted widow’. Statues were erected in 25 cities of Britain and the empire. Victoria left her seclusion in November 1866 to travel to Wolverhampton to unveil yet another, alighting from the train with ‘sinking heart and trembling knees’ to the noise of military bands and cheering, flag-waving crowds. The queen was so moved by the occasion that she called for a sword to knight the Lord Mayor, who was momentarily terrified that he was about to be beheaded. An epidemic of civic monuments broke out, to the point where Charles Dickens wrote to a friend in 1864 that ‘If you should meet with an inaccessible cave anywhere to which a hermit could retire from the memory of Prince Albert and testimonials to same, pray let me know of it. We have nothing solitary or deep enough in this part of England.’

  Other signs of restiveness began to register. A fund was launched to build a memorial hall at Kensington, as close as possible to the site of Albert’s triumph, the Great Exhibition, with yet another monumental statue facing it. But only £60,000 was subscribed of the £120,000 needed, leaving the memorial committee no option but to commission the statue alone in Kensington Gardens. Sir George Gilbert Scott’s Gothic Revival design was to make the massively enthroned figure of the prince, sculpted by Marochetti, the centrepiece of a shrine, with Albert as the gilded relic in a pinnacled ciborium or reliquary, set above a monumental base unhappily compared by its critics to a giant cruet or sugar sifter. The canopied shrine was flanked by the four colossal greater Christian Virtues. Another four statues personified the moral virtues, and eight bronzes the Arts and Sciences whose qualities he had personified and patronized. At the base were emblems of the Four Continents to which the blessings of the Albertian empire had flowed, and above them was a 200-foot frieze featuring 170 of the geniuses of European civilization, so that Albert would keep company with fellow-immortals such as Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, Hogarth and Mozart. As the biographer Lytton Strachey perceptively remarked in Queen Victoria (1921), this massive embalming of the sainted prince did some disservice to the complicated, open-minded and unquestionably gifted man who had acted, in effect, as the first presidential figure of modern British society.

  But for Victoria he had become not the entrepreneur of modern knowledge so much as the Perfect Christian Chevalier. Devotion to His Way of Doing Things bade her rise every morning, punctually at 7.30, then tunnel her way through state papers and dispatches (as He had done). When a prime minister like Lord Derby or Lord John Russell presumed to suggest an end to the official period of mourning, or even that the queen might perhaps consider resuming her constitutional duty to open parliament, Victoria responded with a mixture of self-pity and outrage that anyone could be so heartless as to inflict further stab-wounds on ‘a poor weak woman shattered by grief and anxiety’. After a decent interval, Victoria’s total disappearance from the public eye began to provoke irreverent comment in the press and to nourish the most sustained British flirtation with republicanism since the Civil War of the 17th century. It was especially serious during the passage of the Reform Bills of 1866 and 1867, when radicalism had its head of wind, and the Tory leader Benjamin Disraeli, in particular, needed the solidity of the monarchy to assuage fears that he was going down a road whose outcome no one could predict. In 1866, despite protesting to the prime minister Lord Russell her abhorrence of being subjected to a spectacle whereby people could witness ‘a poor broken-hearted widow, nervous and shrinking, dragged from deep mourning’, Victoria did finally consent to open parliament, but so grudgingly that the occasion probably alienated more of her subjects than it won over. As a condition of her appearance the queen had stipulated no state coach, no procession, no robes and especially no speech from the throne. Instead, the Lord Chancellor read the address while Victoria sat in deep gloom in her widow’s cap and mourning black. She was not eager to repeat even this gesture. The next June, when Victoria again failed to open parliament, a famous cartoon appeared in the satirical journal The Tomahawk, showing a throne draped by an enormous shroud bearing the legend: ‘Where is Britannia?’ Earlier, someone had put a satirical poster against the railings of Buckingham Palace announcing: ‘These commanding premises … to be let or sold in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business.’

  Any attempts to persuade Victoria to emerge from this politically damaging seclusion bounced off the immovable guardianship of the one man whom the queen seemed to be able to lean on in her unrelenting grief: the Balmoral ghillie John Brown. The fact that he had been Albert’s personal favourite naturally recommended him to Victoria, for whom he became an indispensable and ubiquitous presence, and to whom she allowed liberties unthinkable in her secretaries, children or ministers. To their horror and embarrassment Brown would address her as ‘wummun’, comment on her dress, tell her what was the best plan for the day and always protect her against the importunate demands of the rest of the world. In return she created the special position of ‘Her Majesty’s Servant’. Brown organized her daily pony-trap rides and the Scottish dances at Balmoral, and was not always sober when he did so.

  It would take the near fatal illness of the Prince of Wales in 1871, combined with another narrow escape from assassination (Brown personally caught the culprit), to shock Victoria out of this deep, self-willed isolation. When Disraeli proposed a day of national thanksgiving for Bertie’s recovery, complete with a service in St Paul’s Cathedral (not least because the republican movement was at its height), Victoria relented. She was rewarded with huge crowds. In the same year, the completed Albert Memorial was finally unveiled in Kensington Gardens. (A joint-stock company would later build the Royal Albert Hall.) Three years later, in 1874, Disraeli finally managed to give Victoria a renewed sense of her own independent authority with the passing of the Royal Titles Bill that made her Queen–Empress of India.

  But as far as the queen herself was concerned, she never swerved from the vow she had taken after Albert’s death that ‘his wishes, his plans, his views about everything are to be my law’. This, indeed, was what she supposed was the right and proper duty of widows, just as during the life of a marriage the whole duty of wives was to dissolve their own wills into that of the domestic household. Widows like Margaret Oliphant, who of necessity turned to popular novel-writing (she published a hundred of them before she died), were objects of pity rather than admiration. For how could a commercial career ever be thought compatible with the ordained role of women to preserve the sanctity of the home from the beastly masculine jungle of the capitalist marketplace? This, at any rate, was the message delivered by the holy trinity of works dedicated to the destiny of womanhood, and all published at the time of Victoria’s bereavement: Coventry Patmore’s long verse effusion ‘The Angel in the House’ (1854); Ruskin’s ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’, one of the two lectures delivered in Manchester in 1865, and subsequently published as Sesame and Lilies; and not least Mrs Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861). All three were extraordinary best-sellers. Sesame and Lilies sold 160,000 in its first edition, not least because it became a standard fixture on prizegiving days at girls’ schools, but it was overshadowed by Mrs Beeton’s book, which sold two million copies before 1870. None of these books, however, portrayed domestic women in a state of perpetual submission. Ruskin especially was at pains to reject the ‘foolish error’ that woman was only ‘the shadow and attendant image of her lord’. In fact the popularity of these works owed a lot to the delivery of messages that credited women with a great deal of power – and power of a more concrete kind than that attributable to romantic seduction.

  Coventry Patmore and Mrs Beeton were the comp
lementary book-ends of the cult of hearth and home, the poet lyricizing the transcendent mystery of wifeliness, the Book of Household Management providing over 1000 pages of instruction on how the ‘shrine’ was actually to be kept spotless. If one was a kind of liturgy for the high priestesses of the home, the other was an exhaustive manual for domestic command and control. The very first paragraph of Isabella Beeton’s truly astonishing book says it all: ‘As with the commander of an army or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house.’ Ruskin’s stance was more complicated. As his title implied, his essay–lecture added to the metaphors of priestess and general that of the ‘queen’. Her sovereignty was not just a matter of making sure the pillows were plumped and the roast cooked on time. To her fell the exalted responsibility of protecting society against the corrosions of acquisitive capitalism. The illiberalism of the home was its defence against the vulgar battering ram of the marketplace; the guarantee that inside the front door, at least, values other than those of competitive individualism would prevail – those of a ‘Place of Peace, the shelter not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division’.