For Charlie Viney
Peel cut down my income, Wellington refused me rank, the Royal Family cried out against the foreign interloper, the Whigs in office were inclined to concede me just as much space as I could stand upon. The Constitution is silent as to the Consort of the Queen…and yet there he was, not to be done without.
Prince Albert, letter to Baron Stockmar, 24 January 18541
He conquered my heart; so that I could not choose but to love him – there was an indescribable something about him – an elevation, an humility, a power and simplicity, a thorough genuineness of character, a style and tone in his whole manner, opinions…which made him to me my very ideal of a Christian Prince! What a Godfearing man he was! What a sense of duty he had.
Reverend Norman Macleod, 28 December 18612
For me, life came to an end on 14 December. My life was dependent on his, I had no thoughts except of him; my whole striving was to please him, to be less unworthy of him!
Queen Victoria, letter to King of Prussia, 4 February 18623
Contents
Preface & Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Prologue: Christmas 1860
Part One: Albert the Good
1: ‘The Treadmill of Never-Ending Business’
2: ‘The First Real Blow of Misfortune’
3: ‘Fearfully in Want of a True Friend’
4: ‘Our Most Precious Invalid’
5: ‘Day Turned into Night’
6: ‘Our Great National Calamity’
7: ‘Will They Do Him Justice Now?’
8: ‘How Will the Queen Bear It?’
Part Two: The Broken-Hearted Widow
9: ‘All Alone!’
10: ‘The Luxury of Woe’
11: ‘A Married Daughter I Must Have Living with Me’
12: ‘God Knows How I Want So Much to be Taken Care Of’
13: ‘The Queen Is Invisible’
14: ‘Heaven Has Sent Us This Dispensation to Save Us’
15: Albertopolis
Epilogue: Christmas 1878
Appendix: What Killed Prince Albert?
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Preface & Acknowledgements
Queen Victoria is one of the most written-about women in British – if not world – history. Her consort Prince Albert has also been the subject of several biographies, as well as studies of his contribution to the arts and British culture. This book is neither a biography of the Queen nor of Prince Albert. Instead it focuses on what is, I argue, a crucial period in her life, one that completely changed the course her reign took for the next forty years and had a profound impact on Britain: the lost ten years from Albert’s death at the end of 1861 to the beginning of her re-emergence from deep mourning in 1872.
Much has been written about Queen Victoria’s later years as the gloomy, humourless, reclusive widow at Windsor, but virtually no attempt has been made to explore the nature of her grief or to describe the circumstances leading up to Prince Albert’s death in December 1861 and its catastrophic impact on her. This book seeks to understand why the Queen reacted in the extreme way she did, by explaining her obsessive love for her husband and her total and utter reliance on him. The second half of the book considers Queen Victoria’s untiring memorialisation of her dead husband – in biography, art and architecture – at a time when criticism of her withdrawal from public life was mounting.
Prince Albert’s death, funeral and the public response to it have been paid surprisingly little attention to date; recent accounts tend to stop abruptly at his deathbed or fast-forward to the Queen’s life thereafter. This book sets out to describe the effect that death had both on Prince Albert’s contemporaries and on the nation at large. With this objective in mind, I have sought out unpublished, forgotten and neglected sources that comment on the Prince’s declining health, his death and funeral and the Queen’s reaction to it. In Britain we are blessed with a wealth of published letters, diaries and memoirs from the Victorian period, many of them by personalities who have long since been forgotten and consigned to obscurity, but which nevertheless contain valuable testimony on the impact of Prince Albert’s death. It has been a pleasure to rediscover these now-neglected Victorian letter-writers and diarists, who have enlightened and enlivened my research and impressed me with their wonderfully perceptive comments about the Queen, Prince Albert and the true nature of their relationship.
A key resource in the writing of this book has been the Royal Archives in the Round Tower at Windsor Castle. I am indebted to their registrar, Pamela Clark, and her staff for making a range of fascinating material available to me during my research there, and for the permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to quote from it, as well as use photographs and illustrations from the Royal Collection. My thanks also go to Sophie Gordon for her assistance in this latter respect.
From Germany, I was able to obtain copies of letters written at the time of Prince Albert’s death by the Crown Prince of Prussia and Princess Alice of Great Britain. I am indebted to Christine Klössel at the Arkhiv der Hessischen Hausstiftung, Schloss Fasanerie, Eichenzell, for providing me with transcripts for those of the Crown Prince; and to Professor Eckhart G. Franz at the Staatsarchiv Darmstadt for making available digital images of the original letters by Princess Alice. Quotations from these letters are included with the gracious permission of Prince Donatus von Hessen. I am greatly indebted to Hannah Veale for translating both sets of letters from German, and in particular for her enormous patience in deciphering Princess Alice’s difficult handwriting.
I would also like to thank a number of British archivists who provided valuable help and access to material: Alan Tadiello at Balliol College, Oxford, for the Queen’s letters to General Peel in the Morier Family Papers; Nick Mays, at The Times Archive, News International Archive, for those of John Delane and Lord Torrington; Caroline Picco at Cheshire Archives, for providing a photocopy of the ‘Descriptions of the Death of the Prince Consort, 1861’ by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, and for the permission of the present Lord Stanley to quote from it; the British Library, for permission to quote from the Duchess of Sutherland’s letters in the Gladstone Papers and from Queen Victoria’s ‘Album Consolativum’; Colin Harris at the Bodleian Library Special Collection, for making available to me the diaries of Katharine Clarendon, John Rashdall and Charles Pugh and the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford for permission to quote from them; Briony Hudson at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, for allowing me to access the account books of Peter Squire; Phil Tomaselli, for obtaining material for me from the Lord Chamberlain’s papers at the National Archives, Kew; Helen Burton at Keele University Library, for information on Sarah Hildyard; and Ian Shapiro at Argyll Etkin, for allowing me access to the MS diaries of Sir John Cowell in his collection, as well as providing other materials for my research.
Many other people offered invaluable support, advice and information along the way: Denise Hesselroth alerted me to the underrated diaries of Lady Lucy Cavendish; Paul Frecker provided information on Victorian cartes de visite and images for this book; Kevin Brady shared his research on Princess Alice and her family; Marianne Kouwenhoven in The Hague investigated sources in the archives of Queen Sophie of the Netherlands; Geoffrey Munn at Wartskis kindly showed me items of jewellery relating to the Queen, Prince Albert and John Brown from their private collection; fellow historians David Waller, Matthew Dennison and Hugo Vickers answered my queries and suggested sources. Nicholas Janni and Juliet Grayson suggested sources on death and bereavement, an
d my dear friend Linda Blair gave me her invaluable views on the same, read sections of the manuscript relating to the Queen’s grieving and offered insightful comments. Among royalty buffs, Sue Woolmans, Richard Thornton and members of the Royalty Weekend annual conference held at Ticehurst offered valuable support for, and interest in, this project. On a memorable research trip to Whitby to investigate the jet industry, Lynne and George provided a home-from-home at the No. 7 Guest House; Rachel Jones and Matt Hatch at Hamond’s Jewellers on Church Street responded generously to my passion for Whitby jet; Peter Hughes, custodian of the wonderfully idiosyncratic Whitby Museum, which has an extraordinary collection of jet jewellery and artefacts, offered valuable background information.
The arguments contained in the Appendix to this book – ‘What Killed Prince Albert’ – are my own, based on extensive research and much deliberation. I arrived at my conclusions thanks to the assistance of doctors Simon Travis (Consultant Gastroenterologist) and Chris Conlon (Consultant in Infectious Diseases), who read my draft and offered their comments and observations. Professors Ronald Chaplain (Consultant Oncologist) and Neil Mortensen (Consultant Colorectal Surgeon) also offered valuable advice, as did Dr Anne Hardy on the incidence of typhoid fever in the Victorian period. But, in the end, the conclusions are mine. I would welcome comments and feedback on this book, to my website www.helenrappaport.com
Finally, my thanks as always go to my family for their support in all my work, in particular to my brothers Peter and Christopher, and also to my friend and fellow writer Christina Zaba, for her generous and unstinting encouragement in all my literary endeavours. My agent Charlie Viney, to whom this book is dedicated, has been a wonderful friend and guide over the last six years and will I hope support my efforts on many more books to come. I count myself enormously fortunate in having wonderfully supportive and sympathetic commissioning editors and friends, in Caroline Gascoigne at Hutchinson in the UK and Charlie Spicer at St Martin’s Press in the USA.
Helen Rappaport
Oxford, August 2011
List of Illustrations
Albert by Camille Silvy (Photo by Camille Silvy/Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Albert engraving (From the author’s collection)
Thanksgiving dress (Photo by W. & D. Downey/Getty Images)
Augusta Stanley (Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster)
Princess Beatrice (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Grief-stricken Bertie (From the author’s collection)
Funeral engravings (two pictures) (From the author’s collection)
Frogmore under construction (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
William Jenner (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Henry Ponsonby (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)
Sir James Clark (From the author’s collection)
Alfred Tennyson (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
John Brown (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)
Victoria & Brown cartoon (From the author’s collection)
Tomahawk cartoon (From the author’s collection)
Jay’s Mourning Warehouse ©Amoret Tanner
Mourning dress ©Amoret Tanner
Concerned crowd © The Print Collector / Heritage-Images / Imagestate
Blackfriars © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans
Memorial in rain (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
Disraeli (Popperfoto / Getty Images)
Gladstone (Photo by John Jabez Edwin Mayall/Henry Guttmann/Getty Images)
Prince Albert by Robert Thorburn (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
Windsor Castle East Terrace (From the author’s collection)
The Grand Corridor of Windsor (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
The Blue Room (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
V&A Christmas (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Marochetti statue (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
Design for the interior decorations of the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore (From the author’s collection)
Prince Albert on his deathbed (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
Deathbed cut-out (From the author’s collection)
Bertie (Photo by John Jabez Edwin Mayall/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Princess Louise (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)
Princess Alice (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Commemorative pot lid (From the author’s collection)
A Nation Mourns (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Framed mourning card (V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum)
Whitby Jet Factory © Frank Meadow Sutcliffe / Sutcliffe Gallery
The Royal Albert Hall (Monkey Business/Rex Features)
Wolverhampton Memorial © Spectrum Colour Library / Heritage-Images / Imagestate
Albert Memorial (Latitudestock/Getty Images)
Wedding (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
Thanksgiving (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Prologue
Christmas 1860
It was the coldest Christmas for fifty years, so they said, a bitter winter having followed hard on the heels of a chilly and sunless summer. So cold was it that country people talked of the birds frozen on the trees and song thrushes dying in their thousands; so cold that the legs of waterfowl stuck hard to the ice on the surface of lakes and ponds. Londoners got the best of it – the ice on the Serpentine in Hyde Park was thirteen inches thick, providing welcome Christmastide recreation to the hundreds who skated there well into the night by torchlight. Indeed, such had been the unprecedented cold that year that there was talk of reviving the old seventeenth-century frost fair on the Thames.1
Out at Windsor, twenty-one miles west of London and south of the Great Western Railway junction at Slough, a heavy frost had descended across the bare chestnut trees of the park, above which Windsor Castle rose in all its magnificence. A great impregnable stone fortress of history and tradition, dating back to an original wooden structure built after the Norman Conquest, it was reached by climbing the hill from the King Henry VIII Gate down in the little town of Windsor below, and passing through the narrow archway of the Norman Gate that separates the Lower from the Upper Ward of the castle.
The week before Christmas the royal family had transferred from Buckingham Palace to their private apartments here in the Upper Ward for the festive season. In the 1840s the interior of the castle had been extensively remodelled to accommodate the rapidly growing royal family, and from their apartments on the first floor they could look out over the East Terrace, across the ornamental garden and fountain to the dry moat, and beyond it the open grassy swathes of Windsor Home Park. Outside, in the paved quadrangle, soldiers in bearskins perpetually on guard paced back and forth below their windows within sight of a bronze equestrian statue of Charles II.
A labyrinth of staircases and carpeted corridors greeted anyone venturing inside the apartments of the East Terrace, the interior shadowy on dark winter days until it was lit at four in the afternoon by huge lamps that were left to burn all night.2 The royal family’s rooms here – including the Oak Room, where they took informal meals, and a larger Dining Room and the White and Crimson Drawing Rooms for more formal events – were connected along a Grand Corridor, which stretched from Queen Victoria’s rooms in the King’s Tower at one end to the state rooms and the Prince of Wales’s Tower at the far end. The Grand Corridor itself was a place of recreation and association for members of the royal household as they went about their duties, its walls hung with paintings and its length interspersed with white marble busts on pedestals, bronzes, fine inlaid cabinets and choice pieces of furniture. At regular intervals between them huge doors decorated with gilding opened into the royal apartments and guest rooms beyond.3
Despite the attrac
tiveness of its interior, Queen Victoria had never found Windsor congenial, remarking that she hoped that ‘this fine, old dull place’ would never hold her bones. To return there from the more cosy, purpose-built family homes at Osborne and Balmoral that she and her husband so loved was always a wrench. ‘I have no feeling for Windsor,’ she once wrote, ‘I admire it, I think it a grand, splendid place – but without a particle of anything which causes me to love it.’4 Nevertheless, the royal couple had spent all their Christmases at Windsor since the birth of their first child, the Princess Royal, in November 1840 and, with Prince Albert’s encouragement, the royal apartments each Christmas gave pride of place to a host of Christmas trees.
Windsor Castle came into its own at this festive time of year. The silence along its Grand Corridor, where noise was muffled by the red carpets and huge damask curtains that hung at the tall, arched windows looking directly into the quadrangle, was broken by the happy sound of laughter and children’s voices. Games of hide-and-seek along the corridors and in the towers and staircases of the castle by the royal children ensured that it had a happy family atmosphere. Fires were kept blazing with beech logs in all the reception rooms – the Queen did not like the smell of coal, although her pathological intolerance of heat was such that she ordained that the rooms should be kept at a temperature of only sixty degrees and she had thermometers in ivory cases mounted on every chimneypiece in order to check that her directive was adhered to. Victoria liked the old way of things: she refused to concede to gas lighting, which had been introduced into the official state rooms at Windsor, insisting that her private apartments were lit only by candles. Such stubbornness might have been an inconvenience, but at Christmas time the softly flickering candlelight throughout the royal apartments lent a particularly romantic atmosphere to the surroundings.5
A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy Page 1
