A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  Albert’s apparent incorruptibility was infuriating, for he did not seem to be susceptible to the corrosive lifestyle of the typical courtier. He was abstemious, ate frugally and stuck to the German habit of dining early, never stopping to lounge around over the port and cigars; nor did he frequent the London clubs or cultivate any English friends. Instead, he went to bed early and walked every day with his wife and children, like any bourgeois paterfamilias. Even the way he rode to hounds was criticised: ‘he did not fly his fences in true Leicestershire style,’ carped the fox-hunting aristocracy who so despised him, and who hated him even more for regularly stealing the best prizes with his cattle at agricultural shows.27Everything about Albert was so proper; he was altogether ‘too good’. The dullness and sanctimoniousness of the ‘bourgeois court’ over which he and Victoria ruled soon became legendary – both at home and abroad.

  The prudish, antisocial streak in Albert’s nature thus often made him appear more pedant than paragon, a man so formal and so circumspect that his real character was rarely divined by others. His reserve set up barriers to those who might otherwise have admired him, and people tended to respond to his personality as one of two extremes – as Queen Victoria’s saintly ‘Albert the Good’, or as the much-disliked foreign interloper, ‘Albert der King’. Steeling himself to this barrage of hostility, Albert meanwhile forged ahead with his wide-ranging interests in science, industry, education and the arts. He received a great fillip in October 1847 when – against considerable and undignified opposition – he was elected Chancellor of Cambridge University, in which capacity he would encourage a rapid and dramatic liberalising of its academic courses. In the visual arts he and Victoria collected paintings by Cranach, Dürer, Memling and Van Eyck, which would later greatly enhance the national collections; as patron of the Royal Photographic Society, Prince Albert was a passionate supporter of the genre and, with the Queen, amassed an unrivalled collection of early photographic work. In his reorganisation of the incomparable print collections at Windsor and his cataloguing of the royal collection of drawings by Raphael, Holbein and Leonardo da Vinci, the Prince left a lasting memorial to his own considerable scholarship as an art historian. In music, through his patronage of the Royal Philharmonic Society, Albert championed the work of his compatriots Wagner, Mendelssohn and Schumann.

  Prince Albert’s passionate interest in art and architecture had brought an invitation to join the Royal Commission of Arts, set up in 1841 to supervise the interior decorations of the new Houses of Parliament, inspiring him later to take a hand – in his spare time from all his many other pursuits – in supervising the design and construction of the royal family’s new homes, at Osborne in the 1840s and Balmoral in the 1850s. As time went on he found himself increasingly in demand to give lectures on art, science, business and philanthropy, to attend exhibitions and play a high profile in the cultural life of the country. He sat on numerous humanitarian committees, such as the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Labouring Classes. Duty and yet more duty was piled on him; as a connoisseur, humanitarian and polymath, Albert found it impossible to say no. But by 1848, during the year of revolutions in Europe – when it took him all day just to get through all the French, German and English newspapers – he was complaining to his stepmother in Coburg that he could not remember being ‘kept in the stocks’ of work as he was now.28His workload intensified at an alarming rate thereafter, culminating in the drain on his energies demanded by his visionary approach to the promotion of British excellence at the Great Exhibition, which he masterminded, as chair of the Royal Society of Arts, from 1849 until its opening in 1851. Similar, smaller exhibitions had taken place before in England, in northern cities such as Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield during the 1830s and 1840s, but Albert’s plan was far more ambitious. His objective had been nothing less than ‘to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived…and a new starting-point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions’.29

  The Exhibition proved to be the apogee of Prince Albert’s civilising and cultural aspirations for his adopted country; it was also a triumphant celebration not just of British, but of international arts and industry. Throughout the planning Albert played the role, effectively, of a government minister and refused to be deterred by the many difficulties and disappointments he had to deal with along the way. Confirmation of his achievement – despite the continued sneering and sniping of the beau monde who still despised him – was only too visible when 34,000 people gathered at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park on opening day, 1 May 1851. Victoria swelled with wifely pride: it was the happiest and proudest day of her life. The exhibition was entirely ‘the triumph of my beloved Albert’, she had no doubt of that. And for once the press grudgingly agreed; even the unbridled antagonism of Punch magazine at last abated.30

  But it was a triumph achieved at the expense of Albert’s always precarious physical well-being. Shortly before the Great Exhibition, in a written exchange with the Duke of Wellington over whether or not Albert should become Commander in Chief of the Army (which he wisely declined), the Prince defined the indispensable role that he felt he was now fulfilling at the right hand of the Queen. It was a role that had required him to ‘entirely sink his own individual existence in that of his wife’ so as to:

  continuously and anxiously watch every part of the public business, in order to be able to advise and assist her at any moment in any of the multifarious and difficult questions or duties brought before her, sometimes international, sometimes political, or social, or personal.

  Quite clearly, Albert believed that his wife, and more importantly the monarchy, could not function smoothly without his own now-essential input. With considerable self-satisfaction he enumerated his many roles, as ‘the natural head of her family, superintendent of her household, manager of her private affairs, sole confidential adviser in politics, only assistant in her communications with officers of Government’, besides which he was ‘the husband of the Queen, the tutor of the royal children, the private secretary of the sovereign, and her permanent minister’.31As for Victoria, her emotional dependency on her husband was now total: ‘You cannot think…how completely dérouleé I am and feel when he is away, or how I count the numerous children are as nothing to me when he is away!’ she told her uncle, King Leopold, in 1857.32

  During the 1850s the prince’s impressive job description was further enhanced by his ambitions to break down British insularity with regard to foreign affairs. ‘His foreign correspondence alone, which the public here knew nothing of,’ remarked Albert’s friend, the geologist Sir Charles Lyell, ‘would have been thought sufficient occupation for one who had nothing else to do.’ In everything, the ‘quantity of work he got through, in spite of innumerable interruptions, was immense’.33It was during the Fifties that Albert increasingly brought his years of political study into play, as his insights deepened. He fired off endless memoranda to ministers, as well as offering advice on every possible subject to his wife, so much so that Victoria noted in her journal, ‘He always lets me get the credit for his excellent ideas, which pains me.’34Albert’s grasp of foreign policy finally found an outlet with the outbreak of war against Russia in 1854. But in time of war Prince Albert was an all-too-obvious target for British xenophobia. Government ministers and the press resented his perceived intrusion and during the war reverted to old habits, once more whipping up hostility towards Albert as a foreigner and calling his political allegiances into question. The gutter-press spread rumours that he might be a Russian spy, and he was hissed at on his way to the state opening of Parliament with the Queen in 1854. Rumours reached an absurd level when it was suggested that the Prince was to be arrested for high treason and sent to the Tower. But Albert endured the abuse and, as the war went on, boldly called into question its mismanagement, repeatedly urging the organisation of British mili
tia forces to be sent as reinforcements to the exhausted and beleaguered British army in the Crimea. He wrote endless memoranda on every aspect of the military campaign – a body of work amounting to fifty folio volumes of documents – yet the only publicly acknowledged contribution that he was allowed to make during this time of national crisis was the design of the newly instituted Victoria Cross. However, by the end of the war he had gained one grudging admirer. Albert’s old adversary, Lord Palmerston, who had been returned to power as Prime Minister during the war in January 1855, had by its end been forced to concede the Prince’s value to the nation in promoting British prestige and interests in the royal courts of Europe, as well as his beneficial effect on the Queen and her conduct of royal business.

  Through it all, his loyal wife remained Prince Albert’s loudest and most vocal advocate, prompting one of her most spirited responses to criticism of his influence over her. ‘A woman must have a support and an adviser,’ she insisted to Lord Aberdeen, ‘and who can this properly be but her husband, whose duty it is to watch over her interests, private and public?’ Were it not for Albert, Victoria was adamant that her health and strength ‘would long since have sunk under the multifarious duties of her position as Queen, and the mother of a large family’.35By the mid-Fifties she had firmly decided that ‘we women are not meant for governing’ and was increasingly happy to leave the job to Albert.36With this in mind, she had him elevated to the title of Prince Consort by royal decree in 1857 – the closest he would ever come to being named King.

  Victoria might have become more and more content to play the role of wife rather than Queen, but by the end of the Crimean War in 1856 Prince Albert’s untiring service to the monarchy and Britain had begun to take an alarming toll on his health. His constant sublimation of his own needs to his wife’s far more volatile emotional ones had worn him down: always putting her first, advising, reassuring, consoling, shielding her from trouble and anxiety at every turn and being the crucial stabilising force that had enabled Victoria to fulfil her duties as Queen. Had she noticed it, her husband was already showing visible signs of chronic fatigue. He had, for most of his life, been plagued by ill health. A sickly child, he had suffered attacks of croup, anaemia and nosebleeds and had always tired easily, even to the extent of falling asleep at table. He had a slow metabolism and a low pulse rate, which made him prone to attacks of fainting and dizziness; since the age of fifteen he had suffered from rheumatic pain and, intermittently, from what was loosely referred to as a ‘weak digestion’ that brought on visitations by what Albert called ‘his old enemy’ – frequent, unspecified gastric attacks accompanied by spasms of intense pain, fever and shivering.37Stress clearly aggravated his condition; even Victoria noticed that whenever her husband was upset or anxious it would ‘affect his poor dear stomach’.38Albert’s own response to bouts of gastric illness was rigorous: he purged himself with hot water and applied his own ‘fasting cure’ – ‘so as to rob my stomach of the shadow of a pretext for behaving ill’, so he claimed.39What was clearly developing into a chronic condition appears never to have been subjected to any kind of rigorous examination or diagnosis by his doctors, medical science at that time defining a whole range of stomach complaints as ‘gastric attacks’ and having no means of differentiating between them.

  As a compulsive obsessive and workaholic, the stress of the many speeches Albert had to give and the public functions he had to attend often brought on bouts of vomiting and migraines, which in turn affected his sleep. In the view of royal physician Sir James Clark, anxiety – ‘the great waster of life’ – was dulling his senses and wearing the Prince out.40In addition Albert hated the damp of the English climate and succumbed with alarming regularity in the autumn to feverish chills. His wife, however, who remained rudely robust for most of her life, never made any concessions to her frailer husband’s need to ward off the cold. He was left to suffer in the underheated rooms in the royal palaces, permeated by gusts of cold air from the perpetually open windows that Victoria demanded, his only recourse being to enclose himself in thick long johns at night and wear a wig at breakfast to keep his balding head warm.

  Yet still he laboured on, rising every morning at seven to do an hour’s work in his study before breakfast; filling every day with a close reading of all the newspapers and the writing of endless letters – including a prodigious correspondence with his contemporaries on the Continent. In addition there were detailed memoranda to government ministers, as well as his extensive committee work; in every single thing he did he tried to ‘do what was right by the Queen and the country’.41He walked fast and worked fast, often eating at speed as he did so, and rushed at ‘double-quick pace’ from one meeting to the next. He hated having to stop and his pace was remorseless: incessantly travelling up and down the country, making speeches, opening bridges and hospitals, laying foundation stones and appearing as patron or chair at the many scientific, cultural and academic organisations that he supported. The only respite from his self-imposed and onerous duties and so much nervous hurry came during family holidays at Balmoral and Osborne. Here Prince Albert would lose himself in his great love of the outdoors – hunting, shooting, fishing and overseeing the model farms he had created on the royal estates. But even recreation was given strict time limits and such holidays never restored his health and his spirits for very long. Work had become the all-consuming surrogate for a more normal, sociable life at court – a lifestyle he disdained and where he had never felt at ease. Prince Albert’s unceasing pursuit of his many noble visions was sucking him dry. He had never got over his homesickness for Coburg, and his sense of isolation and disappointment had grown, as his mental and physical energies had dissolved. He had worked hard to make people admire him through his many services to the state, but getting them to like him in his own right (and not merely as an adjunct of the royal family) was a battle he had so far not won. He despaired at public indifference to his work and how little he was understood or appreciated in England: ‘Man is a beast of burden,’ he remarked gloomily in November 1856, ‘and he is only happy if he has to drag his burden and if he has little free will. My experience teaches me every day to understand the truth of this, more and more.’42

  Albert’s growing sense of loneliness was exacerbated in 1849 by the sudden death of his secretary, George Anson, a loyal friend as well as servant, who had from the mid-1840s been extremely concerned at his master’s punishing workload. By the late 1850s, with the departure of his adored daughter Vicky, who married the Crown Prince of Prussia in 1858, much of Albert’s vital spark had irretrievably faded; he became increasingly stern and humourless, retreating into himself more and more. Without real friends or close intellectual peers, or his own entourage at court, or a supportive political faction in Parliament, his only consolation was his work. And much as he loved his wife, Albert’s attachment to her was increasingly driven by the principles of reason and duty and doing the right thing. Victoria was fundamentally his ‘gutes Weibchen’ – the good and loyal little wife – and mother of his children. She gave him her all, but for a man as restless as Albert it was never enough; she was not, and never could be, his soul’s mistress. And for Victoria it was agony; there was nothing she could do to hold back the tide of melancholia and pessimism that was engulfing her husband. As Albert’s chief acolyte, she could fulminate loud and often to their children about how their father was without equal – ‘so great, so good, so faultless’ – but his wife’s admiration and praise were no palliative for ‘the dragon of his dissatisfaction’ that was now starting to consume him.43Nor could Victoria’s obsessive love disguise the growing tension between them, brought on by Albert’s impossible workload, which she increasingly resented for allowing them less and less time together.

  In December 1858 came the first serious warning signs of the collapse of the Prince Consort’s health, when yet another regular attack of gastric illness, supposedly the result of ‘over-fatigue’, laid him low in the weeks before Christma
s. But although he confided to his diary his growing sense of utter weariness and despondency, those about him were not aware how deep his sense of exhaustion ran. For the truth was that Albert, Prince Consort was not only being progressively ‘torn to pieces with business of every kind’, he was physically broken and spiritually despairing.44

  Chapter Two

  ‘The First Real Blow of Misfortune’

  By the beginning of 1859 Albert, Prince Consort – the romantic Thuringian prince of 1840 – was sallow, balding and putting on weight. He was approaching forty, but already ageing fast as his reserves of strength evaporated and his virility waned. Fearful of confronting her husband’s much deeper malaise, Queen Victoria put it down to overwork. Work always made Albert so irritable and ‘very trying’, in her view, but even she was becoming alarmed at how ill and ‘fagged’ he looked.1For now, quite apart from all his many public commitments, there were family problems preying on his mind. Ever a martyr to self-induced stress, Albert had a new and escalating anxiety, in his own and Victoria’s worries about the future of the dynasty under their eldest son, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.