A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  At ten o’clock on 14 December 1862 the royal family gathered in the Blue Room for a special service conducted by Dr Stanley, comprised of the Burial Service, hymns and prayers, and readings from Chapters 14 and 16 of St John on resurrection and reunion in the hereafter: ‘A little while, and ye shall not see Me; and again, a little while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father.’ Victoria knelt by Albert’s bed, gazing at his white marble bust, with its fine profile and naked shoulders surrounded by flowers and palm leaves, which had been laid down there reverentially, replacing the living man a year since consigned to his coffin. But it was not a gloomy event. ‘The room was full of flowers, and the sun shining in so brightly,’ Victoria recalled. She told Dr Stanley that ‘it seemed like a birthday’, to which he answered reassuringly, ‘It is a birthday in a new world.’44Two more services were conducted that day – at midday and 9.30 p.m. – inaugurating a sacred annual ritual that, like all others connected with Albert’s life and death, would be followed to the letter till the day Victoria herself died.

  Three days later the family made their way in the pouring rain down to Frogmore for the consecration of the mausoleum conducted by Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. The choir of St George’s Chapel in their white surplices stood lining the steps as they entered. The sight, the Bishop recalled, was ‘one of the most touching scenes I ever saw, to see our Queen and the file of fatherless children walk in and kneel down in those solemn prayers’.45Inside, a temporary wooden sarcophagus had been erected: it would be another six years before Marochetti’s splendid double sarcophagus, to take both Albert’s and eventually the Queen’s coffins, was constructed from a single, enormous, flawless slab of Scottish granite. Meanwhile Albert’s marble effigy had been placed in position and, one by one, the members of the royal family and household placed wreaths around it. During the service, verses from St John (19:41) were read: ‘There was a garden, and in the garden a sepulchre’, which everyone found most ‘wonderfully appropriate’ and moving. The process of investing Albert and his tomb with Christlike significance was completed the following morning at 7 a.m., when his coffin was quietly transferred from the crypt of St George’s Chapel. Victoria did not attend, but was comforted that the sacred ritual of the ‘translation’ of Albert’s remains was complete.46Henceforth he would always be near her, in their own private sepulchre in the garden. Later that day she was much comforted by the presentation of a sumptuously bound Lausanne Bible from ‘loyal English Widows’, the cost of which had been raised by a subscription set up by the Duchess of Sutherland. Eighty women who had lost their husbands in the Hartley Colliery disaster in January generously donated to it. Victoria was deeply touched and, in a personal letter of thanks for the loyalty and devotion of her ‘kind sister widows’ and the nation in general, talked of how her one consolation was ‘the constant sense of his unseen presence and the Blessed thought of that Eternal Union hereafter which will make the bitter anguish of the present appear as nought’.47Her heartfelt communion with other widows and her perception, by them, as a role model was an important saving grace during these dark years of retreat.

  As December drew to a close, Victoria was relieved that ‘One dreary, lonely year has been passed, which I had hoped never to live to the end of.’ But now, ‘with a weakened, shattered frame I have to begin the weary work again’.48The widows of England might grieve with her, but elsewhere in her kingdom sympathy for the Queen’s unending grief was beginning to wane. ‘Another year of royal mourning, another year of Queenly wo!’ commented the leader in the Era for 28 December. ‘A year and a week have come and gone, and we are sorry to learn that our prospects are not brightening, as we had trusted they would. We learn with sincere regret that her majesty will remain in mourning for another year.’ Whilst the entire royal household and government might be tiptoeing around the Queen’s extreme sensitivity on this point, the editor of the Era reminded his monarch that, for the good of the country, it was important she now resume her public life as sovereign and the ‘mother of her people’. There were strong practical reasons for this: ‘the manufacturers and artisans of England claim a public duty from her, as Sovereign, in return for the discharge of theirs, as taxpayers’. The Queen’s retreat, and its effect on trade, was causing economic hardship to ‘many, many thousands of struggling, hard working men’. The Prince of Wales was soon to be married, and Parliament would be asked to rubber-stamp an annual income of £100,000 a year to support himself, his wife and their household. Her Majesty therefore had ‘an excellent opportunity to come into the sunshine again, brighten the gloom of the past, and inaugurate a brilliant series of London seasons!’

  The Era – like Reynolds’s Newspaper earlier in the year – was as yet a rare voice of dissent; speaking for the rest of a still largely sympathetic nation, the Belfast News-letter, without realising it, more accurately captured the Queen’s present state of mind. Hers was ‘a grief which cannot forget itself, and what is more, no longer desires to do so’.49All hopes of the Queen returning once more to the bosom of her people were still a very long way off.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘A Married Daughter I Must Have Living with Me’

  In the spring of 1863 the British public resolutely shook off its gloom and enjoyed a few days of unprecedented national rejoicing. Its monarch might still be in self-imposed retirement, but a new and enchanting personality was about to shine a ray of light on the beleaguered royal family. On Thursday 7 March Princess Alexandra of Denmark arrived at Gravesend. Bertie was there to meet her and together they made their way across Kent by train, past cheering crowds and flags flying from every haystack and cowshed. Enormous numbers gathered in London for a glimpse of the Princess and something of the royal pageantry of old. The Corporation of London had spared no expense in anticipation of this precious respite from continuing royal despondency: £40,000 had been allotted for massed bands, decorated triumphal arches of evergreens and orange blossom, bunting and illuminations along the route. The windows and balconies of private houses too were festooned with flags, and some residents rented out their windows and balconies for large sums of money. The press took a vigorous interest in the story, whipping up public excitement at the prospect of seeing Bertie and his beautiful fiancée’s royal progress. This ensured that their journey across London was witnessed by huge crowds, strung out across seven miles of streets, from the rather prosaic rail terminus on the Old Kent Road to Paddington, via London Bridge, Pall Mall, Piccadilly and Hyde Park. The crush was appalling, the journey interminably slow, the carriages laid on for the procession somewhat shoddy and, in the opinion of John Delane of The Times, ‘unworthy of the occasion’.1But through it all Alexandra smiled warmly and bowed graciously ‘as all those thousands of souls rose at her, as it were, in one blaze of triumphant irrepressible enthusiasm; surging round the carriage, waving hats and kerchiefs, leaping up here and there and again to catch sight of her; and crying Hurrah’.2Darkness had fallen by the time the couple arrived at Windsor station, where they were again enthusiastically greeted by patient crowds frozen from standing for long hours in the driving rain.

  Victoria’s greeting inside the castle had been warm and affectionate, but her self-absorption was such that she could not disguise how low and depressed she felt at what was to come, and she did not join the couple for dinner. Indeed, with undisguised bitterness she expressed her ‘surprise’ that the public had given such a warm ovation to the future wife of the Prince of Wales, ‘when none was offered to the husband of the Queen’ in his lifetime.3She had wanted the Prince of Wales’s wedding to take place on her own wedding day of 10 February, but everyone had feared a repetition of Alice’s funereal ceremony and she had been persuaded to postpone it to March. She overrode objections to it taking place in Lent, as she was determined to be rid of all her guests before Alice gave birth to her first baby – at Windsor, as she, Victoria, had ordained. Much to general disappointment, the Queen had resisted any suggestion of a grand state cere
mony at Westminster Abbey, thus depriving the majority of her people of any glimpse of the proceedings. The wedding would take place under strict control at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where her privacy would be paramount and where she could not be made the object of unseemly curiosity.

  In the fifteen months since Albert’s death time had at least mellowed Victoria’s attitude to her wayward son. She had to admit that there had been a distinct improvement in Bertie’s looks and manner since his engagement to Alexandra, although he would always suffer by comparison with his absent married sisters Vicky and Alice. Bertie, for his part, was trying hard to be affectionate and ‘do what is right’, but Victoria still found his idleness and inattentiveness ‘trying’, as too his joie de vivre; his noisiness gave her bad headaches. She had been particularly anxious that he should be suitably ‘Germanised’ in time for his marriage, for she had been alarmed to discover that he wrote to his fiancée in English rather than his sainted father’s native tongue: ‘the German element is the one I wish to be cherished and kept up in our beloved home,’ she told Vicky. To lose it would be a betrayal of Albert; it never occurred to her that to keep it would feed into already hostile feelings about the excessive favouritism of things German by the British monarchy.4

  Before his death, and in anticipation of Bertie’s marriage, Prince Albert had secured a 7,000-acre country estate for him at Sandringham in Norfolk for £220,000, paid for by the profits from the Duchy of Cornwall that Albert had so carefully managed during Bertie’s minority. When in London, Bertie and Alexandra would reside at Marlborough House, but despite the couple’s anticipated high profile, Victoria continued to veto any suggestions that Bertie take a greater role in public life, such as involvement in the learned and scientific societies that Albert had taken up, or attending the House of Lords. The problem, as Victoria well knew, was that Bertie was an incorrigible gossip and his indiscretion meant he could not be trusted with sensitive state papers. Ever mistrustful of him, she gave instructions for a close watch to be kept on the comings and goings at Marlborough House and on the calibre of people being invited there.

  Having been instrumental in finding Bertie a wife, his sister Vicky was hugely excited at the wedding to come, which she would be attending with Fritz and their eldest son Wilhelm. Victoria was only too glad to delegate to her eldest daughter the task of receiving the many guests at the necessary official Drawing Rooms prior to the wedding, but nevertheless chided her: ‘Dear child! Your ecstasy at the whole thing is to me sometimes very incomprehensible.’ Neither Vicky nor anyone else would believe her when she insisted that she had to have quiet: ‘I must constantly dine alone, and any merriment or discussion are quite unbearable.’5Besides, she already had enough to deal with, worrying about Alice’s imminent confinement; and about Affie, who had committed a sexual transgression while away in Malta, prompting fears that he would turn out as much of a reprobate as his brother. It was all such a burden for her, not just as Queen, but as a lone woman with ‘no near male relation of sufficient age and experience’ to whom she could turn for advice. Who was there, Victoria asked General Peel, to ‘help her with her sons’ and ‘keep them in the path of duty’?6

  For the wedding on 10 March the Queen allowed one major concession: the guests could wear colours, although her own ladies, like her children, should be in the half-mourning colours of grey, lilac or mauve. She was choosy about who she invited – certainly not the immoral Frederick VII of Denmark or most of Alix’s mother’s questionable Danish relatives; nor too most of her own Hanoverian cousins. But even with such exclusions, the guest list was large, with 900 people in their best finery crammed into St George’s Chapel. Many of the male VIPs were obliged to leave their wives at home, and others fought jealously for invitations to be there. It was a spectacular gathering: diplomats and distinguished Cabinet ministers, Knights of the Garter in their sumptuous robes, tiers of ‘gorgeous Duchesses’ in their bright colours and flashing tiaras, not to mention the glorious sight of ‘beefeaters and gold-encrusted trumpeters and heralds in their tabards’. Ladies of fashion grasped this rare opportunity to vie with each other over the splendour of their jewels, Lady Westmorland’s diamonds having the edge over Lady Abercorn’s sapphires, in the view of Henry Greville, though he thought the beautiful young Lady Spencer, wearing Marie Antoinette’s lace, was way and above the best dressed that day.7

  Yet it was not the fashionable ladies, but their absent monarch, whom everyone really wanted to see. In her stiff, heavy crape and wearing Albert’s badge and star of the Garter on its blue ribbon and a diamond brooch with his miniature, Victoria made her way to the chapel away from prying eyes via a covered walkway. She took her place in Catherine of Aragon’s closet, specially draped with heavy purple velvet and gold, high up in the south-eastern corner near the organ loft, with Lady Churchill, Lady Lyttleton and the Duchess of Sutherland hovering in the background. All attempts to defuse morbid curiosity failed, as everyone craned their necks trying as discreetly as possible to catch a glimpse of this great figure of imperial grief. When Benjamin Disraeli raised his eyeglass to take a closer look, he was greeted with an icy stare.

  Princess Alexandra, however, could not be eclipsed: her radiant beauty that day was breathtaking, as she entered pale and childlike in her dress of Spitalfields satin, covered with a skirt of Honiton lace garlanded with leaves and orange blossoms. Eight bridesmaids in lace and tulle decorated with rosebuds followed, carrying her long silver-moiré train. Bertie too looked the picture of nobility in his scarlet and gold of a general in the Guards, over which he wore the dark-blue robes of the Garter; Princess Mary Adelaide thought he demonstrated ‘more depth of manner than ever before’ that day, and his sisters Alice and Vicky wept with pride at the sight of him. The whole event had been a ‘fine affair’, in Disraeli’s estimation: ‘A perfect pageant with that sufficient foundation of sentiment, which elevates a mere show.’8

  But it was Victoria’s haunted black figure watching the gathered guests from on high that everyone talked about afterwards. Whether by accident or design, the wedding had inevitably drawn attention to the widow as much as the bride, reigniting public sympathy for the bereaved Queen alone on her glorious pinnacle of solitude. Victoria had expected to find it all a ‘fearful ordeal’ and at times quivered with anxiety.9She had, however, borne up very well for most of the time, though certain key moments had brought back painful memories: the flourish of the trumpets reminded her of her own wedding day, and when she heard the glorious voice of the Swedish opera star Jenny Lind singing a chorale written by Albert she cast her eyes up to heaven. ‘See, she is worshipping him in spirit!’ remarked one of the deans of the Chapel Royal. Her face, to all those who caught sight of it that day, ‘spoke all that was within’.10

  Immediately after she had witnessed the signing of the register and embraced Bertie and Alix, Victoria fled, avoiding the assembled thirty-eight royals at the private wedding reception, or the crush of the general guests in St George’s Hall, but dining alone with Beatrice.11There was only one place she wanted to be: at the mausoleum, communing with Albert. She kept the keys to it about her at all times, so that she could go down and let herself in to what had by now become an essential extension of home. The night before the wedding she had taken Bertie and Alix there to pray and receive Albert’s blessing, and immediately after lunch on the 10th she returned once more. That evening she poured out her anguish in her journal. The wedding had been a day of pure ‘suffering’ for her without Albert, and she had only got through it ‘by a violent effort’. She had consented to sit for her photograph with the happy couple, but resolutely refused to look to camera, instead gazing up in adoration at Albert’s marble bust. After all was over, a despondency once more descended, made worse by an uncontrollable envy of her children’s happiness: ‘Here I sit lonely and desolate, who so need love and tenderness, while our two daughters have each their loving husbands and Bertie has taken his lovely, pure, sweet bride to Osborne.’12

/>   As the overdressed members of the aristocracy engaged in an undignified scrum to find places on the special train back out of Windsor, a range of celebrations and parties took place that evening across London and elsewhere in Britain. At long last the nation was out enjoying itself: two and a half million people flooded the streets of London, ‘dense enough to hide every stone of the streets from one who had seen it above’.13The night was cold and raw, and the crowds jamming central London to see the wedding illuminations at London Bridge, Nelson’s Monument and the fountains in Trafalgar Square were ‘frightful’; the monumental traffic jam of wagons, vans and omnibuses blocked the streets for hours. Privy Council member Frederick Pollock found himself trapped on Pall Mall, where he was jammed up against the lamp post in the middle of the road, unable to move. At Northumberland House near Charing Cross he witnessed ‘a surging vortex of struggling humanity’ unlike anything he had seen since the Queen’s wedding day.14On Bedford Street the Archbishop of York’s wife had her crinoline set on fire when their carriage became caught in the crush and some boys tossed a firework inside. All this mayhem, just to see ‘a few gas stars and Prince’s feathers’, grumbled Henry Greville.15‘It wasn’t worth the hours of jam and wedge,’ agreed maid-of-honour Lady Lucy Cavendish. But it was proof, if ever it were needed, of how much the British people hungered for a renewal of the ceremonial of old. On the 11th sales of The Times containing an account of the wedding rocketed from its usual 65,000 to 112,000. Crowds turned out again in June for the public unveiling of the memorial to the Great Exhibition, featuring Albert’s statue, at the Horticultural Society’s Gardens. But it was the Princess of Wales who took centre stage. The monarch was nowhere to be seen.