A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  But at least from 18 December Victoria’s devoted relatives had begun arriving to offer moral support, ferried over from the Continent by a succession of royal yachts, most importantly her widowed half-sister Feodora from Baden. One person, though, was still absent and much missed – Victoria’s uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians. Back in 1817 Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, as he then was, had witnessed the dying agonies of his first wife, Princess Charlotte, and had taken centre stage during the days of public grief and mourning that had followed her tragic death. But now, faced with a horrifying repetition of events of forty-four years ago, as well as having lost a second wife (to tuberculosis) in 1850, he proved unequal to the task of supporting his widowed niece and did not arrive at Osborne until 27 December. (Others would claim that Leopold’s motives were entirely selfish and that he had not wanted to go to Windsor for fear of infection.)

  With her mother clearly unable to resume official business, Princess Alice had found the strength to take on the necessary day-to-day management of the household and deal with ministers and urgent letter-writing – all of it conducted on inch-thick black-bordered paper, with the help of Victoria’s private secretaries, Phipps and Grey. But her heart, she told Louis, was ‘quite broken’ and her grief ‘almost more than I can bear’. With so much attention directed towards the Queen, some had failed to notice how shockingly frail Alice had become. When he arrived in England for the funeral, Louis had been disturbed to see her so changed – thin, pale, exhausted and overwrought. Fritz thought likewise: Alice was hardly sleeping, he wrote to Vicky on the 20th, she spent most nights in her mother’s room. ‘We’re working to make sure that she doesn’t do this too often, otherwise she will annihilate herself by her love of self-sacrifice.’ Nevertheless Alice was consumed by a sense of duty to her mother and that she should remain with her to fill the gap left by Albert. She could not be persuaded even to take a break outside in the fresh air, noted Fritz, ‘so much so that she, with strict admonishment, needs to be reminded not to overdo it’. Burdened by all her additional responsibilities, Alice admitted the great change in herself to Bertie: ‘I feel years older since that dreadful time.’6Her wedding to Louis would, of course, have to be postponed.

  One of Alice’s most important tasks as the year drew to a close had been to send a message via Phipps to the Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson, requesting that he write something in memory of her father. Tennyson, who had met Prince Albert in May 1856, hated being asked to write to order, but the royal couple were among his most dedicated admirers and he could not refuse. Being unwell at the time, he protested that he did not at present feel able to do Albert justice and hoped, in due course, to be ‘enabled to speak of him as he himself would have wished to be spoken of’. He therefore suggested that, rather than come up with something completely new, he should write a prefatory dedication to the Prince Consort, to be added to the new edition of his epic Arthurian romance in verse The Idylls of the King, which was due out the following year.7It was a work that Victoria and Albert had both been ‘in raptures about’ when they had first read it. For the time being, the Queen would continue to take comfort in his In Memoriam, which she and Albert had also greatly loved, a copy of which Tennyson had signed for Albert in May 1860. She felt ‘much soothed’ by it: ‘only those who have suffered as I do, can understand these beautiful poems’.8

  In the midst of her crippling grief the Queen was, meanwhile, very clear about one thing: she was determined to retain absolute control of matters of state. (‘She has the habit of power and once taken it is hardly possible to live without it,’ as Queen Sophie of the Netherlands shrewdly remarked to one of the ladies at court.)9With this in mind, Victoria told Fritz that she had made it known that all enquiries should be directed to her ‘which would normally have gone to papa’, and that nothing should be addressed to Bertie. ‘Oh that boy,’ she complained to Vicky, ‘much as I pity I never can or shall look at him without a shudder’.10Others, in private, agreed that Bertie was a lost cause. There was, for writer and journalist Harriet Martineau, ‘no hope in that wretched boy!’ His ‘natural goodness and docility’ had given way to ‘impenetrable levity’; Bertie had been fatally corrupted at the Curragh and at Cambridge, and ‘there is nothing more to hope’. Even Lord Stanley gossiped that among Bertie’s own entourage he was thought immature and childish and that they seldom addressed him ‘when serious subjects were discussed’.11

  The failings of her errant oldest son were uppermost in Victoria’s mind when she wrote to Uncle Leopold on Christmas Eve, her sharp, angular hand scratching at and underlining the paper in an intensity of feeling that made plain her intentions for the future – intentions that would brook no interference, even from benevolent uncles:

  I am also anxious to repeat one thing, and that one is my firm resolve, my irrevocable decision, viz. that his wishes – his plans – about everything, his views about every thing are to be my law! And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished…I live on with him, for him; in fact, I am only outwardly separated from him, and only for a time.12

  Albert died in the belief, above all others, that he had trained his wife to do her duty. And in the dazed and disjointed days of grief that followed, Victoria kept repeating it like a mantra: yes, ‘they need not be afraid, I will do my duty’. But she had yet to prove that she could, or would, do so, and meanwhile life for the royal household was in a state of stasis: ‘the utter consternation of everyone – the standstill everything has come to – the spring and centre of each being gone, is more apparent every moment,’ maid-of-honour Mary Bulteel admitted in a letter to her mother. ‘I cannot conceive what she will do, for if her will were ever so strong, she cannot have the power or capacity to do his work.’13

  As Christmas Eve 1861 drew in, everyone at Osborne, as well as in the royal family at large, was in a depressed state. ‘We have not the heart to keep Christmas in the usual manner,’ wrote Princess Mary Adelaide. ‘The tree is at all events for the present to be dispensed with.’14For Victoria the festive season that had once been such a joy was irrevocably changed: ‘Think of Christmas Eve and all!!!’ she wrote to Vicky. ‘It shall never be spent at Windsor again – for he left us in those rooms.’ That same day, Vicky in Berlin also turned her thoughts to happier times:

  This is Xmas Eve! I should not know it sitting all alone – with none but my own sad thoughts for companions, but the noise in the streets, the merry bustle, forces the dismal contrast upon me…the bells are ringing – to me they seem tolling for the dear departed one! All the world is sad and dark and empty – mourning is the only thing that gives me satisfaction.

  Christmas, Vicky concluded, ‘never will be happy again’.15

  Osborne that year was, inevitably, a ‘house of mourning’. Everyone was looking thin and wan and exhausted, and even Christmas presents took on a very different character: the household all received tokens of remembrance of Albert – black-bordered photographs for the men, and for the ladies lockets with Albert’s portrait. Fritz had already been sent back to Berlin with locks of Albert’s hair and other mementoes for Vicky. Casting his mind back to the happy Christmas he had witnessed at Windsor the previous year, Lord Torrington could not help but make comparisons in a letter to Delane. ‘I need hardly say we are very dull here,’ he began, though personally he was not downhearted. ‘All things considered it is not so bad as I expected. People must eat & drink & in spite of grief, we sometimes laugh.’ But for the exhausted Phipps, Christmas dawned no brighter. ‘What a Christmas Day we have to pass here!’ he told the diplomat Lord Cowley. ‘You can hardly form an idea of the desolation of this house.’16

  Back on the mainland, the British nation at large was doing its best to overcome its still-profound grief at the Prince Consort’s death, but the prevalence of people in mourning on all the streets and in all the shops continued to cast its gloom. In Manchester ‘No one wishes each other “a merry Xmas” this year,’ observed the writer Elizabeth Gaskell
, whilst at the American legation in London, Benjamin Moran was resigned that ‘Xmas bids fair to be as funereal as the grave’.17A despondent press reiterated what was in everyone’s minds. ‘What a sad and solemn Christmas falls so unexpectedly upon us! What a dismal close of the year!’ ran the editorial in the Morning Post. ‘These few sad days of Christmas must be consecrated to grief,’ lamented the Daily Telegraph. Everywhere families were gathering around their hearths, where they would normally have raised a Christmas glass to the Queen, ‘with an affectionate thought of her Consort, her children, our Princess in Prussia, our Prince coming of age, the young sailor, the sisters to be married, and the rest of the cherished family’. But now, ‘The home which all England recognised as the sweetest and holiest in the land is bereaved and desolate,’ observed the press, prompting many to remember ‘those who are absent from the family gathering, and to forecast the further severing of family ties, which fate may have in store for us’. Recalling past Christmases at the close of this difficult year, George Augustus Sala in the Telegraph thought that 1861 would ‘always to be associated with its numerals. When the hale among us are gray, and the gray are in their peaceful graves, it will be said: “At that Christmas the people buried the noble Consort of the Queen, and waited over their festal cheer to know if America would be at war with them or peace!”’18

  Yet despite the continuing political crisis, war, mercifully, had not come. The American Civil War raged on – and with it the blockade of the southern ports, which was bringing short-time to the Lancashire cotton mills and an impending economic crisis at home. But life had to go on. And so, after the necessary respectful pause for the obsequies for Prince Albert, newspapers published the lists of theatrical entertainments on offer, as once again the pantomime season came around. Families could forget the mournful atmosphere at large with a trip to ‘Little Miss Muffet and Little Boy Blue’ or ‘Whittington and his Cat’, or take the train to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and thrill to the heart-in-mouth spectacle of the French tightrope-walker Monsieur Blondin. Churches that had been festooned in mourning for Albert’s funeral removed it – for Christmas at least – and brought in the holly and the ivy to try and cheer things up. In parishes everywhere, church dignitaries and charities handed out coal, food, warm clothing and other comforts to deserving families. Continuing a tradition started by the late Duchess of Kent, the poor in Kensington were given gifts of bread, meat, coals and blankets, and ‘a good Christmas dinner’ was provided by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to poor families in Kew. Appeals to Christian charity were also made to ensure that in Britain’s 490 workhouses more than 14,000 inmates enjoyed a decent Christmas dinner of roast beef, potatoes, plum pudding and a pint of porter.19

  Across the Atlantic, news of the Prince Consort’s death had arrived in New York and Washington on Christmas Eve. The Times correspondent William Howard Russell, who had pioneered war reporting during the Crimean War and was now covering the American Civil War, remembered how the telegram when it came had ‘cast the deepest gloom over all our little English circle. Prince Albert dead! At first no one believed it.’ Their Christmas too would be a subdued one: ‘the preparations which we had made for a little festivity to welcome in Christmas morning were chilled by the news, and the eve was not of the joyous character which Englishmen delight to give it, for the sorrow which fell on all hearts in England had spanned the Atlantic, and bade us mourn in common with the country at home.’20

  In New York harbour the premier vessel of the Cunard line, the Persia, as well as other English steamers had lowered their flags to half-mast. The British Vice-Consul, Sir Edward Archibald, immediately convened a meeting of British residents in order to arrange a commemorative event, as too did residents in Nova Scotia and elsewhere in Canada. The New York Times, whilst of the opinion that the death of Prince Albert was ‘without political significance’, published the apprehensions of its London correspondent about its effect on Britain’s ‘nation of shopkeepers’. ‘Christmas is just at hand, and the shops were hoping to make a little money for the first time this year. But now the death of the Prince, coming as it does, in the midst of the American difficulty, has reduced them to despair,’ it reported, adding that ‘The proprietors of the mourning establishments may be happy behind their bales of crape, but everyone else will lament.’ Yet even here, in America, in the midst of a political crisis, the protocols of mourning were observed, with one Union lady complaining that at an official dinner in Washington the ‘affectation of court mourning’ for the Queen’s loss was utterly absurd. ‘It is too sad to see such extravagance and folly in the White House,’ she wrote, ‘with the country bankrupt and a civil war raging!’21

  The state of agonising suspense over the ‘American Difficulty’ lasted to the very end of the year, as ships, guns and troops continued to sail for Canada from British docks. In Washington, Russell noted a rampantly bellicose attitude all around; ‘press people, soldiers, sailors, ministers, senators, Congress-men, people in the street’ were all agreed about the two arrested Southern commissioners: ‘“Give them up? Never! We’ll die first.”’ The following day, therefore, he was greatly surprised to hear that Secretary of State William Seward – Abraham Lincoln’s adviser on foreign policy – had capitulated to compromise. He had agreed to release the two men, after the President had argued during a heated cabinet meeting on Christmas Day that the North must at all costs pursue a policy of ‘one war at a time’.22A climbdown by Seward in response to the British note drafted by Prince Albert was contrived that would not alienate American public opinion and was presented to the British minister to the United States, Lord Lyons, that day. News was telegraphed to Palmerston in England that Mason and Slidell were to be released, but the Prime Minister decided to suppress its announcement until after he knew for certain that this had indeed happened. The two men eventually sailed for Southampton on 14 January 1862. There would therefore be no crumb of comfort for the British nation that Christmas.23

  But as one international crisis came to an end, another and very different domestic one loomed. With the Queen determined that her life was at an end ‘in a worldly point of view’, Sir Charles Phipps by now had very clear intimations of a catastrophe to come. The royal household was cast adrift, affairs of state abandoned, the Queen beyond consolation. He initiated a flurry of memos to government ministers about the ongoing and now even more crucial role of Private Secretary to the Queen – a role that Albert had long unofficially fulfilled. ‘It must be evident to the world that there are many things which the Queen may, & indeed must, do through others,’ Grey told Lord Glanville, as a clear rivalry developed between himself – as Albert’s Private Secretary of twelve years – and Sir Charles Phipps.24It was essential that the Queen had someone confidential to take custody of her papers. Gossiping away to Delane, as was his wont, Torrington confided that Phipps and Grey ‘although they keep up appearances are at war’. There was no unanimity of advice being offered the Queen and he expected that ‘there will be trouble before long’. Everywhere people were whispering in corners, giving their own personal view of how and by whom the Prince’s former roles should be taken over; ‘but there is no head in the palace,’ continued Torrington and he heard a different story from everyone.25

  The true extent of the Queen’s voracious, unquenchable mourning, as everyone now could see, was only just beginning to unravel. ‘They cannot tell what I have lost,’ she kept insisting, levelling the barrage of her grief at her devoted and uncomplaining half-sister Feodora, Princess Alice and Augusta Bruce – four women in black, who sat silently over meals together, day in, day out, all words of consolation long since exhausted. It was clear to Phipps that the Queen was incapable of thinking straight about anything: ‘Her grief gnaws to the very core of her heart into the very depth of her soul!’ True, Victoria did what she was asked by her doctors in order to sustain her health, but she was obsessed with one thought: to die, to ‘join what was the sun shine of her existence, the light o
f her life’.26At the end of the year she gave instructions to the Lord Chamberlain that the public mourning for the Prince Consort should be ‘for the longest term in modern times’; members of the royal household would not be allowed to appear in public out of mourning for a year.27Royal watchers in the press were becoming apprehensive, with the London correspondent of the New York Times already predicting that the Queen’s seclusion would be ‘as absolute as is possible’. ‘My own belief,’ he added, ‘is that the glory of her reign is departed.’ ‘I have no hope that she will keep up her reputation now,’ echoed Harriet Martineau – a regular, anonymous correspondent of the Daily News – ‘Her temper is not cured; & of course we all fear for her brain…those who know what his trials were must have more depressing fears.’28