A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  By the time of the evening service the pulpits and lecterns of many churches were already draped in black crape. Across London the blinds of private houses had been drawn down, the brass plates on doors were surrounded with black, and mirrors and lamps indoors also covered. Omnibus drivers tied scraps of crape to their whips; in the countryside even beehives were draped in crape, as part of the age-old superstition of telling the bees of a death in the family. Many tradesmen either entirely or partially closed their businesses; steamers on the river stood idle, their flags at half-mast, as too did those of foreign vessels moored in London’s docks. The royal standard was flying at half-mast everywhere across the capital, from the Victoria Tower of the Houses of Parliament to the Tower of London in the City.

  But everywhere, in a spontaneous, haunting unison, it was the bells that spoke volumes for Britain’s loss. Across the water meadows at Cambridge, where Prince Albert had been Chancellor of the university, the news had arrived at ten-forty that morning and spread with great rapidity, prompting the immediate announcement of the curtailment of all ‘festivities incidental to the season’. The muffled peals of bells rang out all day – from Edinburgh in the north to Portsmouth in the south and across the major industrial cities of Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leeds, Huddersfield and Darlington. A similar response was recorded in Bristol, where the news had ‘a most depressing effect upon all classes of citizens’ as they pondered the flag at half-mast on the top of the cathedral. The burghers of Liverpool likewise spoke of a feeling of universal sorrow and regret in a town where ‘his Royal Highness on several occasions endeared himself to all classes of the community by his affability and eloquence’; here, even American ships in port had lowered their flags. In Portsmouth in particular there was much grief among the army, navy and general public. On board Nelson’s old flagship, the Victory, the royal ensign of England and that of the late Prince were hoisted at half-mast, as too ‘above the town gates, the dock gate, the gun wharf, Southsea Castle…the fort, the ramparts, and all Government departments, as well as above the Sailors’ Home’. In Southampton the ‘whole of the mail packets and shipping plus various consulates and public institutions’ all did likewise.8

  Many people sat down in their homes that day confiding their thoughts to their diaries and writing letters to family and friends remarking on the mournful events at Windsor. The Prince’s death would inevitably ‘involve great changes’, wrote the scholar Friedrich Max Müller to his mother, ‘the queen can hardly bear the whole burden alone’, and now she had no one who could help her in the unique way that the Prince had.9At Windsor, librarian Carl Ruland wrote to his family that Albert’s death was ‘a disaster for the entire family, for England, for the whole of Europe’. Working so closely with him, he had come to appreciate the depths of the Prince’s character, for had Prince Albert not treated him ‘as his own son’? Sir Moses Montefiore, a prominent leader of the Jewish community, had no doubts of its effect on them: ‘we have lost a great and good prince’, and also a friend, for the Prince had been ‘most liberal as regards religious freedom to all’. In many cases, much as they mourned the loss of the Prince, the primary concern was its effect on the Queen; Charles Dickens predicted to his friend W. H. Wills, ‘I have a misgiving that they hardly understand what the public general sympathy with the Queen will be.’10

  The atmosphere of grief in Windsor town that grey Sunday morning was particularly acute – everywhere, even the poorest cottage, had its curtains drawn. Up at the castle ‘an awful state of consternation and despair’ reigned.11Within the royal apartments the Queen had now been joined, at her request, by her former Mistress of the Robes, the Duchess of Sutherland, who had herself been widowed earlier that year and who had driven over from her home at Cliveden to share in the Queen’s grief. As the Duchess had entered the Queen’s sitting room, Victoria had stretched out her arms to her. ‘You know how I loved him!’ she said, so plaintively, and took her in to see the Prince’s body.12‘I feared the shock for her,’ the Duchess later told her close friend, William Gladstone, for it was the first time Victoria had been back into the King’s Room since the previous night when Albert had died. But she seemed extraordinarily composed, walked up to the bedside and reached out to Albert’s body, which was laid out on the bed (though the doctors had forbidden her to touch it, for fear of infection). She raised her eyes, as though in a strange kind of trance, the Duchess recalled, ‘and spoke every word of endearment as if he had lived’. Was he not beautiful, she said to the Duchess, who herself was greatly moved by the fine, spiritual look on Albert’s face. ‘Never could I have believed Death’s finger could be so light,’ she told Gladstone. The features were as delicately wrought as marble; it was only the paleness that betrayed the mark of death.

  As Victoria described the events of the previous days to the Duchess, she confided that her sole comfort was the Prince’s repeated reassurance that he had had no dread of death; she fondly recalled the words of ‘infinite affection’ that had passed between them during those last days, but as she did so, the Duchess also noted a creeping air of desperation in the Queen’s voice. ‘How could it be, what was it – what was she to do?’ – she who had ‘spoken every thought’ to her husband and had always been reassured by him so that she ‘had neither anxiety or worry’.13He was everything to her. How was she to manage without him? The level of the Queen’s grief seemed ‘so intense, so all-absorbing’ to the Queen’s cousin, Princess Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck, when she visited that afternoon. She recalled walking up the hundred stone steps to the castle, which, ‘with all its blinds drawn looked dreary and dismal indeed’. In the Grand Corridor she had come upon the forlorn figures of Alice, Helena, Louise and Arthur, who ‘all broke down in sight of me, though they strove to regain composure, and to remain as calm as possible for their widowed mother’s sake’.14

  The Queen’s life would, she told Princess Mary Adelaide, ‘henceforth be but a blank’, though the Princess hoped that ‘perhaps as months roll by the Children may in a measure fill it up’. But the brutal truth, as she saw it, was that the Queen’s children were no substitute for their father and never would be: ‘at the heart’s core there must and will ever be an aching void’.15With Victoria clearly incapable of receiving consolation, yet alone giving it to her distraught children, how were they to cope with their own bereavement? ‘Why did God not take me?’ Louise had sobbed at her father’s deathbed, sentiments echoed in a letter from her sister Vicky asking, ‘Why has earth not swallowed me up?’ Lord Clarendon had no doubt of the impact of his death on Albert’s favourite child: ‘I am afraid it will be the misery of her life not to have seen her father before he died,’ he told the Duchess of Manchester.16As for Princess Alice, everyone marvelled at her dignity and composure: ‘Could you but see that darling’s face!’ wrote one lady-in-waiting. ‘Her great tearless eyes with their expression of resolutely subdued misery! No one knew what she was before, though I marvelled that they did not.’17Far away in Cannes, the most plaintive cry of all came from young Prince Leopold, who alone in his desolation, when told of his father’s death, wept that he must go to his mother: ‘My mother will bring him back again. Oh! I want my mother!’ he had cried.18

  For the moment, pending an onrush in the press the next morning, the only official words of condolence tentatively offered to the Queen were those of Lord Palmerston. Still laid up in agony with gout, and taking the Prince’s death as a profound personal loss, he was unable to go to Windsor in person, but wrote that the Queen had ‘sustained one of the greatest of human misfortunes’. But there was ‘not one among the many millions who have the Happiness of being your Majesty’s subjects, whose heart will not bleed in sympathy with Your Majesty’s sorrow’. Nevertheless, as Prime Minister, there was one thing uppermost in his mind – distraught though he was – and this was the hope that the Queen’s ‘strength of mind and a sense of Duties’ would help see her through.19In the meantime, from early on Sunday, members of the diploma
tic corps as well as nobility and gentry had begun flocking to Buckingham Palace to enquire after Victoria’s health and sign the book of condolences in a darkened and candlelit audience chamber. Emperor Napoleon III of France and his wife Eugénie, having already dispatched a senior emissary to London with letters of condolence, ordered three weeks of court mourning and sent frequent telegraphs from Paris, as also did the Emperor of Austria, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and the King and Crown Prince of Prussia, where the court had immediately gone into mourning for a month. The event was announced across the Parisian newspapers ‘in terms of unaffected regret’ and nothing else was talked of; the flag at the Tuileries was at half-mast and British inhabitants of the city had immediately donned their black.20Meanwhile, in London, Charles Frances Adams, the new American ambassador, sent his condolences, recording in his diary sentiments similar to those already privately expressed by Florence Nightingale: ‘The English will value him better now he is gone.’21

  Traumatised though Victoria was by Albert’s death, one thing was of immediate and overriding importance to her: to preserve the look and memory of him as he had been before he was taken from her for ever, down to the glass from which he had taken his last dose of medicine, which was left by his bedside.22Overnight, the body had been moved to the other bed in the King’s Room and devotedly laid out by Albert’s valet Löhlein, assisted by Macdonald. When Bertie took Princess Mary Adelaide in to take one last look ‘at those handsome features’, she had been touched by the wreath of white flowers at Albert’s head, and single blooms placed on his breast and scattered across the coverlet; some of them sent as a gift by Prince Leopold from Cannes before he had known his father had died.23The room was full of people, the Princess recalled, including the artist Edward Henry Corbauld, who had come, at the Queen’s request, to make a sketch of Albert on his deathbed. This would later be kept locked in a special case and circulated only within the family. The sculptor William Theed the Younger was also summoned to Windsor to take a cast of the prince’s hands and a death-mask, reporting later that the Prince’s face had been peaceful, bar the ‘lines of suffering about the mouth’.24Although the Queen could not bear later to look at the mask, it was a sacred relic to be treasured. But she kept the marble hands near her bedside and would often clasp at them in the lonely moments of desperation that came during the night. The royal photographer, William Bambridge, was also called in that day to photograph Albert’s private apartments as well as the King’s Room, so that they could be cleaned, preserved and every object in them replaced exactly as they had been at the moment when he died – and remain so in perpetuity ‘as a beautiful living Monument’.

  To the Queen’s mind, Albert was still very much with her in spirit, and their separation was only a physical, outward one. This emphasis on a living commemoration of her dead husband was fundamental to her future view of things. She resolved to fill the room with beautiful things: a bust of Albert, exquisite china, allegorical pictures – and fresh flowers. She wanted no morbid Sterbezimmer: the gloomy death-chamber preserved as a dusty sepulchre, so favoured by some of her German relatives, which was allowed to slowly decay and fade into dust untouched. Instead she wanted to preserve the King’s Room as though her husband had just left it and would come in again at any time – his clothes and fresh linen laid out for him, hot water, towels and soap provided for his morning shave. Other, more mundane reminders were all left in their precise position too: in Albert’s morning room, the reference books and directories, army lists, navy lists, clergy lists that he had regularly consulted; a small French book by the Abbé Ségur on the ‘difficulties of religion’; and beyond, in his dressing room, Erskine May’s book on parliamentary practice and Professor Max Müller’s presentation copy to the Prince of his Lectures on the Science of Language.25But perhaps the most heartbreaking and intimate reminder of all was to be the hand-coloured copy of Bambridge’s deathbed photograph of Albert, the chiselled features so fine in profile, with a small wreath of immortelles above it, which the Queen would hang above his side of their bed, in their homes at Windsor, Balmoral and Osborne.26

  On Monday morning, 16 December, many public bodies and metropolitan vestries across the country gathered to pass resolutions expressing their profound sorrow at the Prince’s death. In the City of London a Court of Common Council met at the Guildhall under the Lord Mayor to compose a loyal address of condolence, as other similar messages began to arrive at Windsor from the dignitaries of major provincial cities and towns. Along the great commercial thoroughfares of London – Cheapside, and Fleet Street in the city, the Strand, the Haymarket, Pall Mall, Piccadilly, Oxford Street in the West End, the majority of the shops ‘had two or three shutters up’.27Theatres, concert halls and music halls all announced the cancellation of performances. The law courts, museums and art galleries were also closed, and even those places of public amusement not under the control of the Lord Chamberlain voluntarily shut their doors. Many cultural events were postponed, even those of the much-revered Charles Dickens, who was obliged, much to his annoyance, to cancel a lucrative series of six public readings in Liverpool and Chester for which thousands of tickets had been sold. Albert’s death had also immediately thrown a veil of gloom over the forthcoming London Season: ‘Farewell to drawing-rooms, balls, concerts, splendid soirées,’ rued the exiled French politician Louis Blanc.28Within a day or so the stock market noted a considerable slump in trade and drops in the value of consols and railways stocks.

  With so many public places closed, a distraught stream of people hungry for news flocked to the news-stands and public reading rooms. They were not disappointed in what they found. The tone set by all of the press on Monday 16 December was uniform in its portentousness: a great calamity of biblical proportions had befallen the nation. John Delane of The Times gave saturation coverage in that day’s edition ensuring that its circulation broke all previous records, rising to 89,000 copies. His words were stark and uncompromising: death had snatched from the nation ‘the very centre of our social system, the pillar of our State’ and it would be some time before the loss of the man and his services to the country could be estimated. The British people were unified in their grief, the classic adage that death was a great leveller being repeated by many papers, such as the Morning Chronicle, which observed that ‘a bereavement such as this melts away the distinction of class’. With the country faced with such an ‘incalculable affliction’, the Prince Consort’s death invited some of the best of contemporary obituary-writing, as well as some of the worst hyperbole: ‘The eclipse of death is this day upon every home in England. More than that: a shadow has been cast over the world,’ intoned the leader in the Morning Post. Most of the papers drew attention in particular to the destruction of the royal family as an idyllic domestic unit: ‘Death has entered the highest, and what might but a few hours ago have been called the happiest, household in the land,’ declared the Scotsman. The Prince had been ‘the very stay and prop of the House which is identified with our dearest affections…The Home which all England recognised as the sweetest and holiest in the land is bereaved and desolate,’ agreed the Morning Post; ‘the serene unbroken happiness of a long reign had now been clouded by the deepest sorrow,’ echoed the Daily News.29

  Outstripping them all with his characteristic purple prose came George Augustus Sala of the Daily Telegraph:

  It has pleased Almighty God to take unto himself the Consort of our beloved Queen. No pompous announcements in gazettes extraordinary – no sounding proclamations of his style and titles…no laborious enumeration of dignities telling us that he who now lies a cold corse [sic] in Windsor Tower was a Duke of Saxony and a Prince of Saxe Coburg and Gotha…none of the sonorous symbols of earthly state and grandeur, can abate one jot from the awful impressiveness, the ghastly puissance of those few naked words which tell us that Prince Albert is dead…Death has taken from us the most important man in the country.30

  With such universality of grief and so many people automat
ically donning some form of mourning for the Prince, there would seem to be no need for official directives. Nevertheless, on 16 December the ‘Orders for Court and General Mourning’ were published in the London Gazette Extraordinary: ‘The ladies attending Court to wear black woollen stuffs, trimmed with crape, plain linen, black shoes and gloves, and crape fans. The gentlemen attending Court to wear black cloth, plain linen, crape hatbands, and black swords and buckles.’ More specific instructions followed for the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Marines. All army officers when in uniform should wear black crape ‘over the ornamental part of the cap or hat, over the sword knot, and over the left arm, with black gloves, and a black crape scarf over the sash’. Military drums were to be covered with black, and black crape was ‘to be hung from the head of the colour-staff of the infantry, and from the standard-staff of cavalry’. Beyond that, among the population at large, ‘it is expected that all persons do forthwith put themselves into decent mourning’.31The middle classes needed no prompting and were already besieging the drapers and milliners’ shops in order to order mourning outfits for themselves and their children; at the popular silk mercer’s Lewis & Allonby on Regent Street ‘people could not give their orders for crying’. But to do so was not without financial strain for many: the Chancery clerk Charles Pugh, with a wife and five daughters to support on a modest income, worried at the cost to low wage earners such as himself of putting their large families into mourning.32