A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy
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In North Yorkshire, as in other rural areas, many of the churches and schools were ‘put in regular mourning at the cost of the Inhabitants’ – and everywhere the poorest of the poor found some way of demonstrating their grief, even if only by wearing black armbands.33But while advertisements carrying the patronage of Prince Albert were quickly amended as a sign of respect, elsewhere the world of commerce was quick to recognise the money to be made from this unexpected run on black. At the heart of the clothing industry in Leeds, the first advertisements appeared within two days, on 17 December:
General Mourning – Death of the Prince Consort. C. Pegler & Co., 58 Briggate, Leeds, beg to call the attention of Ladies to their present large stock of black mourning silk and black glaces [silks] from Turin, which are of a very superior make, the whole of which are now offered at greatly reduced prices.
Rising to the competition, Messrs Hyam & Co. a few doors down Briggate announced that they were ‘prepared to supply mourning to any extent at five minutes’ notice, or made to measure in five hours’. The Leeds Mourning Warehouse joined in, offering ‘an immense stock of black alpacas, so much in demand by the French, of the best make’, whilst Mrs Hartley offered her stock of mourning millinery and any other accoutrements needed, down to black ribbons, gloves, veils, handkerchiefs, collars, cuffs and artificial flowers.34For men, black cravats and hatbands and even black shirt studs were now in huge demand. On Monday, at the opening of trade in the City of London, crowds of buyers had besieged wholesale dealers such as Morison’s, Leaf’s, Boyd’s and Ellis’s to buy in stock.35But a royal death, whilst filling the coffers of the trade in funeral goods and mourning, would have a significant impact on the general textile industry. It was therefore with some concern that William Synes, President of the Chamber of Commerce, had written on 16 December to the Lord Chamberlain expressing his concern that the period of public mourning for the Prince should, unlike that previously for the Duchess of Kent, be clearly stipulated in order to ‘avoid excessive injury to the trades of the country’. ‘Will you excuse me by suggesting,’ Synes added, ‘that on the present lamentable occasion not only the commencement but the termination of the mourning should be stated when the order is issued.’36
The deepest of mourning of course prevailed at Windsor; at midday on Sunday the public had been informed that, although overwhelmed with grief, the Queen was calm – her calmness having a strange kind of childlike simplicity about it that many remarked on. Some put it down simply to her ‘Christian fortitude’, but other ladies thought her ‘unnaturally quiet’ and feared for her sanity, as she sat in dumb despair, staring vacantly around her. In response to a consolatory remark offered to her she said, ‘I suppose I must not fret too much, for many poor women have to go through the same trials.’37But it was clear she was numb with shock and exhausted. Nevertheless, on the 17th she composed herself enough to mechanically sign some important papers brought for signature. She seemed to remember, thought Lord Clarendon, how much Prince Albert had ‘disapproved and warned her against such extravagant grief as she manifested at her mother’s death’ and appeared to be trying hard to remain calm. ‘If she can support herself in this frame of mind, it is all one can hope for,’ he added. Lady Normanby echoed this: the Prince’s last words to the Queen, so she had been told by Lady Ely, were that ‘she must not give way to her grief, she owed it to the nation, remember that!’38
On Monday, Victoria had struggled to write a few anguished lines to Vicky: she was, she told her, ‘crushed, bowed down’. But since that morning ‘a wonderful Heavenly Peace’ had come over her. ‘I feel I am living with him – as much as before – that He will yet guide and lead me – tho’ He can’t speak to me, while I can speak to Him.’ She was resigned that henceforth her life would be one of sorrow, of duty, of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. Two days later she had written again, telling Vicky that she had often prayed that she and Albert might die together or that he would survive her. All the joy had gone from her life now, all those happy times with Albert at Osborne, in the Highlands, those joyous family Christmases, their wedding anniversary – all belonged now to ‘a precious past which will for ever and ever be engraven on my dreary heart’. Oh how she missed him, how she longed so ‘to cling to and clasp a loving being’.39Close family members now began to rally round, but they were no substitute for her husband’s arms. Arriving by train at Windsor from Kew, the Queen’s aunt, the Duchess of Cambridge, was seen weeping bitterly on the concourse, the ‘signs of her distress having a visible effect on bystanders’ as she passed through. Up at the castle the strain of so much collective grief on the members of the royal household was terrible. ‘We have indeed to bring all our faith and trust to bear,’ wrote maid-of-honour Victoria Stuart-Wortley, for now ‘this sad silent House is full of wailing and misery…I don’t know when I shall get over it. The very fact of being no use is so dreadful.’40
In the nine days from Prince Albert’s death to his funeral on 23 December, a profusion of eulogies filled the newspapers, for it took time for the nation to come to terms with the extent of its loss. The calamity of the Prince’s death was like the ‘sudden extinction of a light’, wrote Delane in The Times, and ‘an interval must elapse before we can penetrate the darkness’. This was no ordinary death, evoking ‘conventional regret’, but one that had brought ‘real pain’ to the entire nation. ‘Wars and rumours of wars,’ wrote the London Review, ‘pass almost unheeded in the presence of this engrossing bereavement’, for many felt as though they had lost a member of their own family. Albert’s death was a personal blow that had touched everyone, and many ordinary people had been made ‘dangerously ill by the shock’.41In the words of the Illustrated London News: ‘Death stands within the walls of Windsor Palace – a Queen is widowed – Princes are orphans – and the Empire shrouded in mourning! Every family in the land is smitten with the awe and the sorrow which Death excites when he breaks into the domestic circle and snatches from it its chief pride and joy.’42
The eulogies for Prince Albert were in stark contrast to the many damning ones that had appeared on the deaths of George IV in 1830 and William IV in 1837. Previous kings, let alone prince consorts, had been nothing in comparison with him, according to the leader-writer of the Glasgow Herald, who described how the ‘gloomy Philip of Spain’, husband of Queen Mary, had been disliked, as too ‘the ‘reckless and unprincipled debauché’ Lord Darnley, husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. In comparison with the ‘dull-brained, wine-bibing’ Prince George of Denmark, consort of Queen Anne, Albert had been a paragon.43The last time the nation had gone into mourning for a prince consort had been on the death of Prince George in 1708, but he had been a social and political cipher in comparison. The floodgates were now opened to a torrent of praise of Albert: as a man of genius, a wise and benevolent patron of art, science and industry with the welfare of the nation at heart, who was noted for his sagacity and eloquence, his nobility of character, his modesty, lack of ostentation and – most importantly – his domestic virtue. ‘To the husband and father now lying dead at Windsor we owe the proof, new in our annals, that domestic life may be as pure, as free, as full of attachment, as pleasantly and rationally ordered, in a palace as in a country parsonage.’ And yet none had really known the Prince; and many had underappreciated him and even thought ill of him; as The Times accentuated, Albert had been admired, certainly, but it was admiration at a distance. A distinct air of retrospective guilt about the extent to which the Prince had been underrated permeated the press. The Guardian emphasised how he had had to overcome the stigma of ‘coming a foreigner, with foreign feelings and foreign sympathies’, yet despite this ‘so much good done, a most difficult part so wisely and honestly played, so many snares and stumbling-blocks escaped’, adding that ‘No one can say he has been an unimportant person in England.’
George Augustus Sala’s uncritical hyperbole in the Telegraph continued to have considerable popular appeal, with its talk of ‘the havoc of happiness, the
blasting of prospects, the dislocation of love’, and of Albert’s phantom now hovering over the glistening domes of his great project, the Crystal Palace of 1851. When it came to bathos no one could touch the Telegraph’s leader-writer: England’s queen was enduring her grief ‘undaunted and indomitable, like some proud oak in Windsor Forest, from which the clinging ivy has been ruthlessly torn away, but which still stands unscathed, and defies the storm…She is not less the Woman, but she is more than ever the Queen!’44
There was, however, one other important issue already preoccupying the press – and that was Bertie. The Times had already given him dressing-down in its editorial on the 18th. It devolved to the Prince of Wales, Delane declared, to rise to ‘all the solemnity of his position, and fit himself for the part to which he is destined’. For Bertie, the days of callow youth were over and he ‘ought now to show the faculties which will make a good king’. He must ‘make up his mind, if he wishes to gain the affection and esteem of the country’ and choose between two paths: those of ‘duty and pleasure’. But, even on his best behaviour, it was doubted that the Prince of Wales was capable of rising to the occasion. Lord Stanley thought him ‘good-tempered, and apparently likely to be popular’, but it was well known that he was ‘not gifted with much ability’, and his rebellious streak – a reaction to his repressed childhood – had left him prone to ‘undignified’ and immature outbreaks, ‘which may be precursors of worse excesses’. He could not begin to fill the void left by his father; the writer Matthew Arnold had no doubts: there was no one with ‘the Continental width of openness of mind of Prince Albert’. The worst fear was that, without Albert to guide her, the Queen would ‘fall into a state of mind in which it will be difficult to do business with her, and impossible to anticipate what she will approve or disapprove’. The worst was yet to come, in the opinion of Lady Lyttleton: all the ‘numberless, incessant wishes to “Ask the Prince”, to “Send for the Prince”, the never-failing joy, fresh every time, when he answered her call’. There was nevertheless ‘such a feeling of unselfish goodwill towards Her Majesty,’ wrote The Times, that the question of the Queen resuming public business immediately was out of the question. A degree of public forbearance would be required in the days to come, in the hope that her ‘courage and independence of character’ would equip her for resuming her duties. The Times was confident: ‘we have on the throne a Sovereign whose nerves have been braced rather than paralysed by the chill of adversity’. But the newspapermen did not know the Queen as Lady Lyttleton did. Albert’s death was, she had no doubt, a ‘heart wound’ that had torn her world apart.45
It was thus in considerable distress that Victoria prepared to leave Windsor for Osborne. Much to general consternation, she was not to remain there for the Prince Consort’s funeral. In fact there had never been any question of her presence at the actual ceremony, for funerals were still very much a male preserve, with women being considered far too weak to conceal their grief in public. In her traumatised state the Queen would have been incapable of enduring it; indeed, she wanted nothing said to her at all about the arrangements, leaving it all to Bertie and the Duke of Cambridge. She had, however, been extremely reluctant to leave Windsor itself until everything was over. It was the royal doctors who prevailed on her to leave, fearful that she and the children might be infected by the supposed typhoid germ that had killed Albert. Victoria had protested: ‘You are asking me to do what you would not expect from the humblest of my subjects.’46Alice too had remonstrated with them, but in the end Victoria had relented, having received a barrage of ‘telegraphic entreaties’ from her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, who insisted that she remove to Osborne.47The Queen’s ladies thought this cruel in the extreme, as too did Lord Clarendon. In his opinion the Queen would have been better off staying at the White House – a small, comfortable mansion on the Beaumont estate nearby – or at Cliveden with the Duchess of Sutherland. Osborne was the worst possible place for her to retreat to, for, as Clarendon pointed out, it was a place ‘where every object is so entirely associated with him’. Lady Geraldine Somerset (lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Cambridge) agreed – going there would be agony for the Queen, but then ‘every place she goes to must be a fresh dagger, each so identified with him’. Far worse, though, was the prospect of what the Queen would still have to endure: after twenty-two years of ‘unparalleled happiness,’ observed Lady Geraldine, ‘she may live 30, 40 of as unequalled sorrow.’48
It had been intended that the Queen should leave for Osborne on the Wednesday, 18 December, and much of her luggage had been sent on ahead, together with the servants, but at the last minute she had not been able to tear herself away from the comforting darkness inside the castle, dreading as she did ‘the sight of the glaring daylight’.49She told General Grey that all the time ‘she felt that He was still in the room near her. She could not feel that she had lost His support.’50
Earlier that day she made the first gesture in what would become forty years of dedicated memorialisation of her husband by choosing a site for his final resting place. She and Albert had long since agreed that they did not want to be interred in the traditional royal burial place: the dark and gloomy crypt of St George’s Chapel. And so in the morning Victoria drove down to Frogmore with Alice and found a spot, close to her mother’s mausoleum in the south-western end of the gardens there, where she intended to erect a much grander sepulchre for herself and her beloved Albert.
Before she left for Osborne there were other, much more personal and final farewells that she wished to make. She gave instructions that Alice, Helena, Louise and Beatrice should each cut off a lock of their hair for placing in Albert’s coffin before it was sealed, probably with some of her own, along with other tokens of special significance such as photographs of the children. (Locks of Albert’s hair were also taken for preservation in a variety of ways, mainly in mourning jewellery.) Most significantly, Victoria arranged for a particular photograph to be placed in her husband’s hands.51It was a reproduction of Albert’s favourite portrait of her, by Franz Winterhalter, that she had given him on his twenty-fourth birthday in 1843 and which hung in Albert’s morning room – a painting so intimate and so unlike all the official ones of herself as Queen, in which she was depicted with bare shoulders, her long, partially loose hair curving over her shoulder and down across her breast. It was an emphatic, parting reminder of herself as a sensual young woman: an evocation of the physical love that the Queen would now so miss about her husband, of the times ‘when in those blessed arms’ she had been clasped and held tight ‘in the sacred hours at night’.52She had gone into the King’s Room to see Albert twice on Sunday, but did not go again; she could not bear to, she told Vicky; she would rather keep in her mind ‘the impression given of life and health’ than that final vision of her husband’s face so marble, and grown so very thin. Words of great affection and consolation flowed back from Vicky: ‘None of us thought we could have survived this,’ she comforted ‘and yet we live, we love, we trust – and we hope still.’53
The following morning Victoria was still unable to steel herself to leave, and so at 10 a.m. Arthur and Beatrice were sent on ahead with the Leiningens.54Just before midday – the Duchess of Wellington would never forget the Queen’s terrible sobbing – Victoria was led out to the great staircase, where she burst into ‘a loud wailing cry and almost screamed “I can’t go”’. With the greatest of effort she was assisted down the stairs and out to her carriage by Bertie and Alice on either side, whispering words of encouragement as they supported her.55‘It was a terrible moment,’ recalled Augusta Bruce, who followed close behind. ‘She felt on leaving that all that could be taken from her of him, had been.’56In the strictest privacy and with no servants in attendance, Victoria left a deserted South-Western Railway terminus at Windsor by royal train, in the company of Alice, Helena, Louise and Prince Louis and some of her ladies, including Augusta Bruce and the Duchess of Athole. At Gosport on the Hampshire coast she boarded the roy
al yacht, the Fairy, for the Isle of Wight and a cold and sadly inhospitable Osborne. For the house, with its warm Italianate architecture, had always been the family’s summer home. Howard Elphinstone thought it ‘so unsuited at this time of year’; all the colour was leached out of its usually vibrant gardens, which the Prince had so lovingly overseen, leaving the bare trees and flowerbeds and the empty ornamental urns on the terrace open to the bleak, cold wind from the Solent. The ‘desolate look’ of the frail, childlike Queen in her widow’s cap was terrible: ‘I felt – what was there that I would not do for her!’ the Duchess of Athole recalled.57At midnight, Victoria was joined by Albert’s brother, Duke Ernst, who had been brought over from Antwerp on the royal yacht and had stopped off to commiserate before proceeding to Windsor for the funeral. He came in cold, drenched and seasick, to find his unhappy sister-in-law ‘bowed down with sorrow and utterly prostrate in the stillness of the night’. Soon that silence was broken by ‘the loud grief which deprived us both of words’.58
After so many days of an icy composure that had made her entourage fearful for her sanity, arrival at Osborne finally brought home to Victoria the full force of her utter desolation, and she at last gave terrible vent to her grief. ‘She cried for days,’ remembered Annie Macdonald. ‘It was heart-breaking to hear her.’59Osborne, that happy family home, had now for ever become a bitter place of mourning. All Victoria had left to cling to were the precious reminders of Albert that she kept constantly about her: his watch and chain, a golden cord with his keys and his quirky red pocket handkerchief, ‘at which they had so often laughed in good old days’.60