A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  ‘The country knows nothing of the Queen’s peculiar desolation,’ sympathised Lucy Cavendish; it were better they prayed for her than goaded her. Within the safe four walls of her study Victoria felt she was as hard-working and conscientious as she had ever been, but the problem was that the public could not see this; her labours were ‘as secret and invisible as those of the queen-bee in the central darkness of the hive’.42As a palliative, the Lord Chamberlain’s office announced that three Drawing Rooms hosted by Princess Alexandra would be held during the London Season and three levees by the Prince of Wales. In addition, two state concerts and two state balls would be held at Buckingham Palace and, after a three-year lapse, Victoria ordered that her forty-fifth birthday – 24 May – be celebrated that year ‘with trooping of the colours and general festivities, which had been suspended since the death of the Prince Consort’.43

  But as spring turned to summer, discontent rumbled on and rumours continued to circulate: the Queen was ill, or mad; she would never live in London again, and – according to all the French papers – was about to abdicate, an event that had been anticipated on the Continent almost from the day of Victoria’s widowing. Lord Howden agreed, confiding to Lord Clarendon that ‘for her own interest, happiness and reputation’, the Queen should have abdicated on Bertie’s coming-of-age. ‘She would then have left a great name and great regret.’44Instead, there was now much dissatisfaction among London tradesmen, as well as ‘among that class to whom an invitation to a palace ball is a mark of their social position’.45Victoria was mortified by the gossip, but it did nothing to undermine her resolve or diminish her consuming self-absorption. Indeed, she appeared ‘less inclined to appear than ever and more inclined to have her own way’, according to Lord Torrington. The contradictions were boundless; claiming with one breath to have the business of the country at heart, time and time again Victoria forbade a topic of conversation which was ‘precisely that on which it is most important that she should be informed’.46The problem, as Torrington explained to Delane, was that ‘Every one appears more or less afraid to speak or advise the Queen’, so much so that she now had a habit of sending word prior to any meeting with ministers on what she would and would not discuss, ‘lest it should make her nervous’. If those about her had a little more courage, ‘things might mend’.47But no one did.

  The continuing failure of anyone to face up to the Queen’s intractable personality was also creating diplomatic problems. She flatly refused to entertain visiting royalty or reciprocate hospitality given to her family abroad. The King of Sweden was obliged to stay at the Swedish legation on a recent visit to London, and during that of Prince Humbert of Italy in September 1864 the aged Lord Palmerston had had to traipse up from his home, Brockett Hall in Hertfordshire, ‘to give him a dinner’. Later, when Prince Humbert visited Windsor, he had to be entertained with a modest lunch at the White Hart Inn rather than at the castle. Even when Alix’s parents arrived for their daughter’s wedding in March, they had been accommodated not at Windsor Castle, as would have been expected, but at the local Palace Hotel. Despite their conspicuous impoverishment they had, however, entertained Bertie and Alix lavishly when they visited Denmark later that year.

  The Queen’s neglect was verging on the rude as well as the mean, and was even more shameful when the Civil List could more than afford it.48Delane agreed, and published another pointed reminder in The Times of 2 November: the monarch’s ‘melancholy bereavement’ might excuse her absence to visiting foreign dignitaries, ‘but the presence of the Sovereign, although the highest ornament and the most attractive part of the nation’s hospitality, is not absolutely indispensable to its exercise’. The Prince and Princess of Wales should, he argued, be given the task of entertaining foreign dignitaries in the Queen’s continuing absence. They had already proved to be an enormous success at the heart of the London Season and, with her grace and beauty, Alexandra was becoming a trendsetter in fashion, providing the best boost to trade in the absence of her mother-in-law. At a Drawing Room in May she had turned even the wearing of black into high fashion, appearing in full mourning for her maternal grandmother who had recently died, resplendent in a black silk train and skirt elaborately trimmed with jet beading, as well as a headdress and tiara of jet and black feathers. Going on this description, wrote the Whitby Gazette, ‘the manufacturers of our town need not despair of the jet trade’.49

  Before 1864 was out, as the country faced yet another year of the Queen’s retreat, John Delane renewed his attack in The Times. ‘In all bereavements there is a time when the days of mourning should be looked upon as past’, he began:

  It is impossible for a recluse to occupy the British Throne without a gradual weakening of that authority which the Sovereign has been accustomed to exert. The regulation of a household may be in the power of such a ruler, but the real sway of an Empire will be impossible.

  For the sake of the Crown as well as of the public we would, therefore, beseech Her Majesty to return to the personal exercise of her exalted functions…and not postpone them longer to the indulgence of an unavailing grief.50

  Inevitably Delane’s editorial, measured though it was, provoked much controversy, with papers such as the monarchist Morning Post accusing The Times of disloyalty and rising to the monarch’s defence: ‘In seclusion or in society, Queen Victoria will reign in the hearts of her subjects.’51The Observer on the 18th agreed that the attack was unwarranted: only the sufferer could best judge when the time has come to give up mourning. Victoria thought The Times article ‘vulgar and heartless’. Finding herself cornered, she resorted to her most effective and provocative weapon – emotional blackmail. Overwork had killed Albert; did they want it to kill her too? She was worn out with ‘constant proposals as to what she is to do and not to do’. Privately, however, even her cousin the Duke of Cambridge had written to her begging her to come out of retirement and ‘save her country’.52

  The case for the Queen’s continued seclusion was becoming increasingly difficult to argue, for her appearance now contradicted her repeated protestations of physical weakness. The logic shared by many was that she looked well and was therefore up to the job. Torrington ‘never saw her in better health, spirits or looks’ that summer. Yet such had been the rising levels of Victoria’s perceived tetchiness that by the end of the year Jenner and Clark suggested a new form of therapy that might soothe the Queen’s nerves and revive her interest in the outside world. If she were to go out for pony rides at Osborne, as she did at Balmoral, rather than just sitting in her carriage, it might do her a world of good. With the connivance of Phipps, and Princess Alice, who was eager to see her mother resume her public life, it was recommended that Victoria’s Scottish ghillie, John Brown – so indefatigable in his attention and care of her, in Victoria’s own view – should be brought down from Balmoral with her favourite pony, Lochnagar, for the winter. The monarchy in Britain was approaching crisis: ‘Two years and a half have sufficed to destroy the popularity which Albert took twenty years to build up,’ observed Lord Derby.53In that short space of time the Queen had disregarded every single lesson that her husband had taught her about her essential state duties in preserving the integrity of the throne.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘God Knows How I Want So Much to be Taken Care Of’

  In January 1865, three years on from Prince Albert’s death, the only visible evidence the nation had of its widowed queen’s existence was vicariously, through the continuing memorialisation of her dead husband across the country – a process inherently more about Victoria’s obsessive grief than her husband’s increasingly elusive memory. For some, like Charles Dickens, the continuing cult of the Prince Consort was oppressive. ‘If you should meet with an inaccessible cave anywhere to which a hermit could retire from the memory of Prince Albert and testimonials to the same,’ he told his friend John Leech, ‘pray let me know of it. We have nothing solitary and deep enough in this part of England.’1

  The relent
less dead march of Albert continued to echo across Britain throughout the 1860s, as the public, in deference to their grieving queen, loyally raised statue after statue on the urban landscape. After Victoria had unveiled the seated monument at Aberdeen, a succession of standing figures of the Prince, usually in his Garter robes or military dress, were unveiled in Perth, Dublin, Tenby, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Salford, Oxford (an uncharacteristic pose in informal dress for the Natural History Museum) and at Madingley – with Albert in his robes as Chancellor of Cambridge University. Although the consensus was to present the late prince as a man of learning, a few equestrian statues also appeared: at Liverpool, Glasgow and Holborn Circus in London.

  Elsewhere in Britain, Prince Albert’s name was being commemorated in the form of clock towers – at Hastings, Manchester and Belfast – while new buildings in his memory sprang up everywhere: the Albert Memorial College in Suffolk, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum at Exeter and the Albert Institute in Dundee. In central Manchester a large square named after the Prince was several years under construction on a derelict site that had been specially cleared for the purpose, its focus to be a seated statue under a medieval-style canopy similar to the one of Albert already commissioned in London, but finished long before it, in 1865. Plans in London were also under way, under the architect Captain Francis Fowke, to build a concert hall, an idea that the Prince had first mooted with Henry Cole at the time of the Great Exhibition, but which, after Albert’s death, had been sidelined in favour of work on the national memorial in Hyde Park. The latter project was proving extremely protracted and costly. In 1864, after seven leading architects had been invited to submit designs, Gilbert Scott had been awarded the commission. His Gothic design was not favoured by the artistic establishment, who saw it as rather a safe and unchallenging variation on the traditional Eleanor Cross, and snobbery abounded in the professional press. ‘Mr Scott’s design is scarcely worthy of his reputation, and we should deem its adoption a discredit to the present state of knowledge of the principles of Gothic architecture,’ sneered the Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal.2Queen Victoria, however, had executive power over the final decision; Albert had been a great supporter of Scott’s work and the Gothic Revival, and what Albert liked the country got.

  Work began on the Albert Memorial in the spring of 1864, when the site in Hyde Park was fenced off. But the money required was considerable – estimated at £110,000 – with £60,000 already raised by public subscription. In 1863 Disraeli and Palmerston persuaded a reluctant Parliament to come up with the balance. Grateful that in Disraeli she had found a soulmate who would endlessly gratify her adoration of Albert’s ‘spotless and unequalled character’, Victoria sent her effusive thanks for his support together with a signed copy of Albert’s collected speeches bound in white morocco.3Once the Queen had set her seal on Scott’s design (though her critical powers stretched only so far as to deem it ‘handsome’) there was no toleration of further argument. By 1866 the Art Journal was agreeing with Disraeli that the memorial was ‘worthy of its object’ and that it resembled the character of the Prince Consort ‘in the beauty and the harmony of its proportion’. It was, the editor concluded, ‘the type of a sublime life, the testimony of a grateful people’. The satirical press disagreed, pointing out – presciently as it turned out – that such an ornate monument would soon succumb to the dirt and pollution of the London atmosphere and need ‘periodical pumpings with a fire engine’ to keep it clean.4

  Scott’s design was based on the style of ornate, canopied shrines found on the Continent in cities such as medieval Nuremberg and Renaissance Milan, taking inspiration too from the monument to Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh and Scott’s own design for the Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford’s St Giles – both erected in the 1840s. The centrepiece was to be a gilded fifteen-foot seated figure of the Prince, wearing his robes of the Garter and holding the catalogue of the 1851 Great Exhibition, the objective being to promote the Prince as a patron of the arts, science and industry. Carlo Marochetti was commissioned to execute the statue in bronze, which would be placed under the canopy on a raised platform thirty feet above the ground. The canopy itself was to be decorated with mosaics and raised on granite marble columns, surrounded by carved angels. Below this central podium, and enclosing it on four sides, would be a frieze of sculptures in white Sicilian marble, with statues at each corner representing agriculture, manufactures, commerce and engineering. At ground level, at the foot of a series of marble steps, four further statuary groups would be placed at each outer corner, representing the continents of the British Empire: Europe, Asia, Africa and America. Marochetti’s initial plaster model of the statue was, however, twice rejected by Scott, and when Marochetti died suddenly in Paris in December 1867 before completing his third version, the commission for the statue was passed to another favourite royal sculptor, John Foley. This, and other delays, as well as logistical problems and fierce arguments over escalating costs, meant that the whole project would take more than a decade to be completed.

  In the meantime, in the summer of 1865, the entire royal family and more than a dozen near-relatives gathered in Coburg for the unveiling of a statue to Albert that was, of all of the many representations of him, perhaps the most personal, erected as it was so near to his birthplace and unveiled on Albert’s birthday, 26 August. Victoria complained of having to endure the full glare of publicity during what was a particularly theatrical ceremony, and ensured that she arrived back in England unobserved, avoiding the public reception being prepared for her at Woolwich when she landed. Tickets had already been issued when she sent instructions that she wished for ‘the greatest privacy’ – a fact that rankled with the many dockyard workers and officials denied any sight of her. Her ‘dismal debarkation’ back home in England on 8 September was thus in marked contrast to all the pomp and ceremony indulged in at Coburg, where everyone agreed that she had, surprisingly, looked the picture of good health.5

  To compensate her public for this disappointment, Victoria agreed to a rare public appearance the following year to unveil a statue of Albert on horseback at Wolverhampton, in the heart of the Black Country; 100,000 people turned out to see her, but the Queen’s very name sounded ‘strange and odd’ to a mining community so far from the capital and whose denizens slaved for the most part in the darkness amidst its black slag-heaps. Victoria remained for the short time she was there a distant figure huddled in black, almost lost in the bleak industrial landscape.6As she drove back along a three-mile route through the poorest part of the town she was gratified to see flags and decorations celebrating her visit on even ‘the most wretched-looking slums’. The people were half-starved and in tatters, she noted, but how comforting was the warmth with which they greeted ‘their poor widowed Queen’. In reporting the visit, the normally uncontroversial Ladies’ Companion could not contain its sense of cynicism: the good people of Wolverhampton had been ‘mad with pleasure’ at the all-too-rare sight of Her Majesty ‘in propria persona’, but what was the point, it asked, of ‘yet another statue to Albert the Good’? A better example had been set by the widow of the explorer Sir John Franklin – lost at sea while charting the North-West Passage in the Canadian Arctic. The bold and intrepid Lady Jane had ‘not allowed her bereavement to drive her into retirement but rather to mix with human-kind to her own benefit and theirs’.7Far away on the Indian subcontinent the press was stirring, with the Calcutta-based newspaper the Friend of India remarking of the Queen’s tedious inauguration of endless statues to Albert that her grief was ‘overdone’ and that, as sovereign, she had ‘higher duties to perform’: if Albert were alive, the paper had no doubt that ‘he would have been among the foremost to discourage the redundancy of such displays’.8

  In the meantime, all attempts at coaxing the Queen out of retirement other than to commemorate Albert (and no matter how subtle) were still being met with total obduracy. Nothing could supplant him as her first and greatest preoccupation: not her religious faith, not her
children, not even her duty to her country. Duty had been the motivating force in Albert’s life, but with Victoria it was different. She wanted more; she wanted love. Without it – without Albert – all she had to cling to was her great and enduring grief. But as her family and court watched in dismay, the damage of such pathological mourning to her normal functioning as monarch was becoming ever more apparent. Her recovery was not, as one might normally expect, contingent on the passage of time, as a simple matter of ‘getting over it’. What was needed was a crucial and necessary shift in dependency, from her dead husband to a living substitute: a strong and protective male, who would look after her as Albert had done. This role now fell to the most unlikely of candidates – the blunt and down-to-earth John Brown, who after his arrival at Windsor at the end of 1864 had slowly begun to break down the incapacitating pattern of the Queen’s grief at a time when every other option had failed.

  The second of nine sons in a family of eleven children, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Brown had been an ostler at Balmoral when it was leased by Sir Robert Gordon prior to the estate being purchased by Victoria and Albert. It was Prince Albert who first spotted Brown’s usefulness, and promoted him to the role of ghillie to the royal family in the autumn of 1849. In 1851 Brown found favour with the Queen when he began leading her out on her pony during her annual holiday at Balmoral. By 1858 Prince Albert had appointed him the Queen’s ‘particular ghillie’ in Scotland, as one of several favoured Highland attendants, from which position he rapidly gained the ascendant by proving himself indispensable when accompanying Victoria and Albert on their incognito ‘expeditions’ in and around the Highlands during 1860 and 1861. Brown’s roles were several: groom, ostler, footman, page, and even maid – for the terms of his employment included cleaning Victoria’s boots and brushing her skirts and cloaks. He also performed the role of self-appointed bodyguard whenever the Queen drove out. In the autumn of 1863, returning as darkness fell from an excursion to Altnagiuthasach, Victoria, Helena and Alice had narrowly escaped serious injury when their carriage, thanks to the ineptitude of its aged and drunken coachman, had overturned on the road. Brown, who was thrown in the fall and clearly hurt, had immediately insisted on attending to them, wrapping them in blankets in the shelter of the overturned carriage and standing guard till help arrived. Such manly protectiveness went straight to Victoria’s needy heart.